Final Fantasy IV on GBA!

[A Black Falcon]

That's not quite true. When you can see them, you can try to avoid them. When you can't, all you get are those stupid "less random battle" potions, at best, and they are far from satisfying. Essentially, random battles are a reaction to hardware restrictions of the early 1980s that haven't been needed since about 1985 but hang around for whatever stupid reason...

Oh yes, and an obvious corollary is that it is MUCH, MUCH better when the enemies don't constantly spawn -- so that as long as you're in an area when you kill the enemies they are dead. Have them respawn when you leave for a new one or whatever, but not while I'm there... really, that's the big problem with random battles. That you have to fight them when travelling over ground you have covered twenty times on the overworld map, and when criscrossing that same stupid dungeon for the fifteenth time trying to figure out that tough puzzle (seriously, I'd never have finished Lunar Legend if not for the autoattack option...), etc... I can cope (if irritatedly) when it's on a linear path, but add much confusion -- something all RPGs do, and frequently -- and it just gets to be a major pain. It's poor, sloppy game design that should not have to happen to modern games. It doesn't make the games automatically bad, and game quality is something that certainly works on a case-by-case basis, but it instantly greatly increases the annoyance factor... and that counts for a lot.

For instance, Tales of Symphonia. If that game had had standard random battles, it'd have been harder to take until you get the fliers... being able to reduce the number of random battles you fight while backtracking by dodging enemies helped me not get quite as annoyed at the game for constantly sending me halfway around the world for some stupid quest, and if I'd had to fight random battles the whole way... yeah, it'd have been pretty annoying.