Various stuffs about FF

[A Black Falcon]

who wants to buy my copy of ffiv advance from me? i bought it, played it for a bit, then remembered how much i hated random battles.

That's about what I'd say with the game, I think. :)

Yes, there are good RPGs with random battles. That doesn't mean that any of them wouldn't be better with visible ones; they all would.

I like Etrian Odyssey's method of having the harder, miniboss and boss type, monsters on screen while leaving the other encounters to be more random. Also, it gives you an indicator that changes color based on when a random battle is about to take place.

It's all pretty cool actually.

Agreed, and there's also the colored light thing in the corner of one of the screens (that changes color from blue to red, and once it's red you're about to have a random battle) so though you can't SEE the normal enemies, you can fairly precisely predict when you're about to fight them...

And it's also first person, with a main view draw distance of about three squares. Visible normal enemies wouldn't mean that much... (it would be cool if the FOEs were something more intimidating than a floating cloud thing, though... :))

Weren't random battles simply used to save processing power anyway? Having the enemies on-screen would have been pretty taxing on early computers.

No, it's because originally (the first RPGs, Western PC ones) dungeons were done in first person, and as I've said, in first person with a very short draw distance, there isn't much difference between visible enemies and non. The issue is that when Japanese RPGs took the model but went to top down, they didn't change the system... (look at the original Ultima in comparison -- the overworld is top-down and zoomed out (the world map), and your sprite and the enemies are visible. Once you enter a dungeon it's first person with a very short draw distance and random monsters.)