hot JRPG take
I'm so glad random encounters are mostly dead. I know this is actually an extremely lukewarm take (misled you with the title, to be honest I feel terrible about it) but it bears reiterating how nice it is to be at least partially responsible for the decision to get into a fight in these games.
I'm sure SMT3 is very good, but trying to play it immediately after SMTV was utterly unbearable. I've been playing Tales of Arise and it also takes the "dodgeable overworld entities" approach and it's just so fucking nice. To be able to sprint through areas. I've already been through. Without losing my train of thought.
I'm not enough of an aficionado on JRPGs to know how much the ratio of random/non-random encounters in them has changed over the years, but it feels very much like a throwback stylistic choice for a modern game to do it, rather than a pure genre expectation like it was 20 years ago.
Sure, exceptions have always existed - been a hot minute but I'm pretty sure Chrono Trigger has non-random encounters - but I can't describe how unpleasant I find walking down an empty corridor and having 3 battles that all trigger with some loud noise and a movie-maker transition. It's a trope worth killing imo.
Sometimes I'm just grateful for the arrow of time, yknow?