I’ve been on a turn-based role-playing game kick of late, if not an especially consistent one. Depending on the day, and which console is closest at hand at any given moment, I’ve currently got full saves running in both Octopath Traveler II and the Switch 2 Bravely Default remaster, while also poking at a number of less-polished, but still interesting, indie offerings. (Notably, the demo of Quartet, Something Classic Games LLC’s visually lush, narratively interesting new throwback to the earlier days of the genre.) And all of this semi-meditative menu-tapping and rat-smashing has solidified in me a long-held belief about this genre, which I’ve devoted literally hundreds of hours of my mortal life to playing: Designers, you have got to speed your shit up. Like, all of it.
Some have tried, bless their hearts. The new Bravely Default retains that game’s original devotion to making grinding move more quickly, allowing players to click combat up to four-times speed. And Octopath allows its fights to move at a welcome double-time march. But even here, if I’m being honest, I chafe: The battles are usually brisk enough, sure, but you still have to fight a ton of them in order to level your characters up and unlock new abilities. And that’s to say nothing of what’s happening outside of combat, where I lose my mind at slow-moving lines of dialogue and stilted sequences of characters moving around, as both games seem offended by the idea that, at every moment of my video game-playing life, I want the ability to hit a button to cut off the current line and jump abruptly to the next one. Yes, I know you worked hard on the cutscene. Yes, I know it took a long time to record all this dialogue. I promise to really appreciate the first two seconds of every line, as I speedread my way toward my next dopamine hit.
Because here’s the thing about most turn-based RPGs: They’re working to build something interesting out of what are, fundamentally, boring parts. That most especially applies to their combat, which typically gets less engaging the closer to the actual nuts-and-bolts of doing it you get. It’s interesting, yes, to mess with a character’s skills and equipment to prepare them for a big fight. It’s really interesting to design a whole-ass character build, and then let it come to fruition. It’s even interesting to plan out the basic give-and-take of healing and damage required to keep your characters upright in the heat of a battle. But none of these things can alleviate the basic dull act of tapping through a menu, or the process of executing the same basic plan for the hundredth or, god help you, the thousandth time during a single game. Solving fights in an RPG can be thrilling, as you find efficiencies, plan strategies, and minimize how much a battle costs you. Executing that solution typically grinds the human brain down into a dull gray paste.
This especially struck me during the 90 or so minutes I spent with the Quartet demo, roughly a quarter of which, it feels like, was spent watching enemies slowly execute their same four or so attack animations on my dudes. I want to like Quartet: It’s the product of a small, dedicated team, and its story is genuinely shocking in how hard it’s willing to delve into territory where fantasy narratives typically fear to tread. (The demo focuses on one of its titular four main characters, an army sergeant who starts to figure out that being on the side of an invading military force that keeps rounding up people it doesn’t like and putting them on trains might make them, well, The Baddies.) To its credit, the game pulls one of the various “let’s make turn-based RPG combat more interesting” tricks that designers have been toying with for decades at this point, eliminating random battles and instead setting specific encounters on its maps. But they’re still the same specific encounters, which means that, once you’ve figured out the most efficient way to handle “one snake, one bat, one evil wizard,” it’s still a matter of feeding several minutes of your existence into each one just to scrape out a meager bit of progress. (It doesn’t help that the game skips over big chunks of the possible strategic layer it could be tapping into by giving the player no way—as far as I could tell from the demo—to customize characters or influence how they fight.)
I play RPGs for a couple of reasons, and most especially because they tend to conceal interesting choices within heavy layers of fluff. (Neither Bravely Default nor Octopath II go as far as I’d like into character customization systems, for instance, but I still appreciate the freedom they give me to screw with my party compositions.) But my threshold for boredom has only gotten lower as the years have gone on, and the repetitive nature of the genre seems to be irritatingly resistant to taking out (or at least allowing me to skip) all the goddamn boring bits. (It’s 2025, so enjoy your obligatory reference here to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: the game doesn’t completely alleviate these problems, but does make combat more thrilling by building a whole game around learning how to dodge and parry lethally powerful enemy attacks.) There are fun parts of all these games, and I desperately want to get my hands on them: Want to play with character classes and skill trees and other cool toys; want to duke it out with boss fights that legitimately push both my characters, and my brain, to their limits. But it’s not for nothing that the most satisfying RPG experience I’ve had this whole year has been playing 2024’s Skald: Against The Black Priory, a game with easily accessible cheats that let you just win a fight whenever it’s starting to get tedious. It’s 2025, designers. Let me skip the attack animation after the first time I’ve seen it. Let me speed through the dialogue, even if it means I miss something. Your game has good shit in it! Stop burying it in the chaff.
