I’m torn about them. On the one hand they free up the combat design to be as wildly different from the exploration as it wants. Which can result in really creative stuff. Favorite examples are Undertale, MegaMan Battle Network series, and Tales series.
But on the other they interrupt the flow of exploration, the music, you forget where you were by the end of combat and they can be very annoying if they happen to be common or just as you’re about to leave an area. The consolation prize of growing stronger with every battle only helps so much.
I think there’s better patterns RPGs can use for them.
A lot of games now just put them wandering the world, and touching/attacking them prompts combat. Then, the game needs to invent various motivations for you to actually want to attack the enemy.
In a lot of games, they’re just genuinely in the way through tight corridors to a destination. A better approach can be to associate some kind of minor quest reward to directly pursuing the enemies.
But, then you get the problem that a lot of RPGs just have no interesting decisions to make in combat. And, participating in combat can lead to a slow wearing down of the party’s mana points, or the game’s equivalent. In many games, you only want to use the basic cure spell and auto-attack because you’ll survive fewer fights without mana rationing. It becomes counter-intuitive and less fun.
Some games resolve this well. Cosmic Star Heroine for instance, a short indie JRPG, heals you after every fight, and each combat is uniquely scripted in for pacing much like Chrono Triggwr.
I liked the Earthbound way of random encounters.
I personally don’t mind them, but I personally think the best kinds of random encounters are ones like pokemon randomizers where you step in the grass in a modded gen 3 game with every single pokemon in existence in it and it randomly pulls from the list of 1000+ mons in order to give you a feeling of true randomness in team building. Especially since you aren’t able to predict which creatures you will get.
Having a random table containing only a few different encounters isn’t anywhere near as fun and exciting as randomly having gods spawn as your enemy as a beginner in a randomized game followed by the weakest creatures in the game a moment later.
I don’t hate them, and actually think they improve dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey.
But for other games I think they slow down the pacing too much, especially when you want to get back to an older area, as you are going to fight lower level enemies and there’s usually an unavoidable scene transition which takes time.
Old Mother/Earthbound games would just let you insta-win battles if you were way stronger than the area you happened to be in. Made backtracking much smoother.
