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Anti Frustration Features / Role-Playing Games

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  • Baldur's Gate
    • In the original game, opening the inventory screen didn't pause the action. Thus, if you tried to swap anything during a fight, you had to be really quick before hostiles could kill your characters. Furthermore, you couldn't refill your potions or arrows without opening the inventory, which was further frustrating. The sequel fixed this by pausing the game when the inventory was opened. The sequel also raised the number of ammo per stack from 20 shots to 80 shots, removing the need to open it as often. However, as a counterbalance, armor could no longer be changed during combat.
    • The journal in the first game was a chaotic collection of notes (some repeated) about hearsays, encounters, quests and major plot events. The sequel reorganized it by separating major plot events from side quests in different sections, aggregating related-notes in the same entry, and marking completed quests.
    • In the first game, characters kicked from the party would simply stay in place, even in the middle of nothingness, and there was no way to track them. In the sequel, you're given a dialogue where you can choose to let them stay in the party, let them wait in place, or rendezvous at a known location (like an important inn).
    • Many items left on the ground are teleported with the characters when major transitions automatically occur and you can't backtrack (like after the first battle in the expansion Throne of Bhaal).
    • Plot-relevant items and some other things will be transferred from any character leaving the party to the main character. Particularly useful when said character is leaving forever. However, it doesn't work with all non-plot relevant items and many equipped weapons can be lost.
      • There is still an occasional problem: if your inventory is already full, some of the items might be dropped to the ground. In certain instances this might happen while transitioning through areas during a cutscene, which would be annoying because you now have to backtrack to where the items fell (and if you were in an unaccessible location, they are gone for good).
    • The Enhanced Editions added some other quality of life improvements. The original games obviously didn't allow you to equip a shield and a two-handed weapon (like bows) at the same time. But if you wanted to equip a shield in the off hand, you had to pause, access the inventory, remove any two-handed weapons from the first-hand slots even if you were equipping a one-handed weapon at the moment, then equip a shield. This was rather tedious. In the EE, you can place a shield in the off hand, but it won't be used (nor will it be shown) while equipping two-handed weapons. If you swap to a one-handed weapon from the quick slots, the shield will be automatically equipped as if you did the passages above, just without micromanaging. This also frees a slot in the backpack that would be otherwise occupied by an unused shield.
    • Before the EE, in order to play a custom party you had to start a multiplayer game, assign all character slots to yourself, create the desired characters (or import them), save the game and then move the file into the single player savegame folder (unless you were ok with starting a new multiplayer session every time you wanted to load a game). Now you can directly create your own custom party and even pregenerate characters.
    • The dice roll at character creation now allows you to store a result and recall it later if you are unsatisfied by subsequent rolls.
  • Baldur's Gate III:
    • The game does make some compromises with the 5e ruleset for the sake of enjoyability and convenience:
      • If a party member has a spell or ability that could modify a dice roll (e.g.: the Status Buff "Guidance") or Dialogue Tree option (e.g.: the spell "Detect Thoughts"), the game generally offers the option to use it as part of the roll or conversation, even if the ability would ordinarily need to have been activated in advance.
      • PC drow and duergar don't have the Sunlight Sensitivity trait from the tabletop game, which forces drow/duergar players to make attack rolls and Perception checks at a disadvantage when they or their target are under direct sunlight. Given how the game is predominantly set in daylight with no option to change the time of day, keeping that trait in would've given drow players a potentially crippling disadvantage in the game. The lack of sunlight sensitivity is called out in-game a few times as a consequence of the tadpoles. Some NPCs retain this weakness, which can be exploited by things like the daylight spell, while NPCs with tadpoles also lack this trait.
      • Similarly, Astarion's vampire weaknesses are handwaved away with the tadpole, because a character who cannot stand in sunlight, cross running water, or enter houses uninvited would be nigh-unplayable.
      • The game overhauled the ranger class, which was widely considered in the tabletop game to be the weakest class in 5th Edition (at least until the optional class features from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything came along). Most notably, the Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer class features have been reworked to make them more usable in general rather than being limited to certain creature types (for the former) or environments (for the latter).
      • The optional Karmic Dice system zigzags this. On the one hand, it streamlines dice rolls so that combat and skill checks are less stringent, allowing you to cut through enemies and resolve tricky negotiations more easily. On the flipside, this applies to the enemies as well, which can result in things going pear-shaped for you even if you utilize your knowledge of the 5th Edition to better prepare.
      • You have a regenerating resource called Inspiration that is gained from seeing or completing events that fit into a character's background. Inspiration can be spent to reroll botched skill check roles, so you have a bit more leeway on harder rolls or unlucky rolls. Unlike the tabletop, you can save up inspiration multiple times.
      • Scrolls can be used by anyone, regardless of their class, spellcasting ability, level or spell list. Even non-casters can use scrolls, they just don't get to add any attribute bonus to the attack roll or save DC.
      • Per 5th Edition tabletop rules, virtually any magic item you can equip will require "attunement", and (unless you have a generous DM) you can only attune to three magic items at a time, with very few options to increase the limit. This isn't a problem in this game; like previous editions, the only limit is the number of slots for equipment.
      • Ritual spells in 5e take a significant chunk of time (often 10 minutes or more), as the fiction of these spells is that you have to complete an elaborate procedure to cast them. In this game, ritual spells are spells you can cast as often as you like without spending any spell slots, provided you're outside of combat.
      • Classes that prepare spells may change them freely outside of combat, meaning a player doesn't have to spend their limited supplies to long rest just to tweak their list.
      • Offhand attacks simply cost a bonus action and don't require attacking with the main hand at all. This is especially useful for rogues with the Thief subclass, whose Fast Hands feature gives them an extra bonus action each turn.
      • The Pact of the Blade subclass for warlocks gives the user features that required several invocations specific to it on the tabletop in order make better use of it, primarily giving the Blade warlock their pact weapon features at level 3, and the ability to use Charisma in place of their original attacking stat. This gives warlocks more freedom to experiment instead of being forced to use several of their limited invocation choices in order to actually compete with other weapon-based classes, which was the one downside of the Blade Pact warlock without later things like the Hexblade.
      • In the tabletop, many spells require material components to perform, some of which has a monetary value attached; for instance, any spells relating to reviving the dead require a diamond of a highly specific value. The game ignores this and treats every spell as only requiring verbal components, which while making silence-based status effects more potent still greatly reduces potential problems preventing spellcasting. (Spells that don't require verbal components are instead just noted to be unaffected by silence in the spell description)
      • Abilities like the rogue's Sneak Attack and the barbarian's Reckless Attack can be set as reaction that can be activated instead of being something needing to be worried about like on the tabletop. For example, if a barbarian attacks and misses, you can use their reaction to make it a Reckless Attack instead of clicking Reckless Attack at the start of their turn. Sneak Attack especially benefits from this, since it means a player doesn't need to stress too much over if they actually get to use it or not.
    • The blessing of Selûne/Pixie's Blessing in Act 2 automatically applies itself to your party members if you swap them out at camp, cutting out the need to get the buff re-applied.
    • In the third act of the game, Orin will abduct one of your companions. There is a limited selection of possible abduction targets, in order of character priority: Lae'zel, Gale, then Mutually Exclusive Party Members Halsin/Minthara. Orin will prioritize whichever of these characters has the lowest approval rating for the player (how thoughtful of her). If you are romantically involved with any of them, however, the game will not let them be abducted; nor can they be abducted if they are in your current party when the kidnapping event is triggered. In the event that Lae'zel, Gale, and Halsin/Minthara are all in your party or dead, the game will default to having Orin kidnap Yenna, a camp follower. This is done to prevent Orin from snatching up any party members that are integral to the party composition or that the player has grown attached to interacting with.
    • Like Divinity: Original Sin II, you have an Arbitrary Head Count Limit of four party members. Unlike DOS 2, however, you do not lose access to the remaining recruitable companions after a certain point, as you can always keep them in reserve at your camp right from the outset. Instead, the likelihood of whether or not a companion joins or sticks with you is decided by your Relationship Values with them, as well as the morality of your actions throughout the game.
    • A great many areas can only be accessed through the manually used jump ability. You only need to trigger the jump with one character for the rest of the party to follow suit automatically (provided they can jump far enough and won't take Fall Damage in the process), sparing the player a ton of micromanagement. How successfully this was implemented is debatable though... one party member refusing to jump a small gap with the rest of the party unless manually selected, only for the rest of the party to jump back across as soon as the player selects the straggler, is one of the most infamous cases of the game's Artificial Stupidity.
    • Very early in the game, you face off against some intellect devourers. Typically this happens shortly after you've properly recruited Shadowheart into the party, but if you're playing her as your Origin Player Character, you will have to face them alone. Consequently, the intellect devourers are both fewer in number and lower on health in this case.
    • The max level is capped out at 12 despite 5e letting you go all the way to 20. This was because levels 13 and onward include a massive bump in destructive power and damage output, and balancing encounters and the like with that in mind would have dramatically increased the developers' workload.
    • Your characters start with scrolls of revivify available, which greatly increases your survivability before Withers shows up or when you're low on money. Unlike the tabletop version of the spell, which can only revive a creature which has died within the past minute, you can cast the spell after any length of time, but only on party members, and you must have access to their body... unless the body has fallen into a chasm and is completely irretrievable, in which case a mote of light appears at the edge and you can cast the spell on that.
    • Withers is available in the Overgrown Ruins early on, reviving party members at a low price if you run out of scrolls or the body is unavailable (if you ran away from a tough battle to avoid a TPK, for instance).
    • If you messed up on building your character or want to try a different class you can pay Withers to re-spec.
    • If characters happen to roll close to each other in Initiative and are grouped together, the game allows the player to have their party act at once over waiting for the next turn, allowing characters to coordinate better and making larger fights faster and generally easier.
    • At the start of Act 3 the party is attacked in their camp when they go to bed. The long rests before and after this encounter do not consume camp supplies, but both fully restore the party's health and spell slots anyways.
    • The Ansur questline is heavily tied with that of both Wyll and Duke Ulder Ravengard, as you're supposed to rescue Duke Ravengard from Gortash before he informs you of Ansur's location. However, Mizora will try to leverage the duke's safety to get Wyll to form an eternal pact with her, making the rescue that much harder if you want to free Wyll. Therefore, if Wyll breaks the pact, some of the duke's loyalists will accost you instead, and you can get the location of Ansur from them if you succeed in talking them down, allowing you to complete the questline without having to rescue the duke or antagonize Gortash.
    • If a party member picks up a key, any other party member can use it without having to trade. For example, if Karlach picks up a door key and then Gale tries to open the corresponding door, a message will pop up saying that they used "magic pockets", saving the player from trawling through individual inventories.
    • Likewise, if any party member has a shovel, another can use it to dig a chest out of a mound of earth.
  • In all but the last two battles of the first entry of The Banner Saga Trilogy, losing battles still continues the storyline without a Game Over.
  • In the Baten Kaitos games, dying to a boss will allow you to modify your decks and start the boss fight over from the beginning, as opposed to kicking you to the title screen like normal deaths do. You'll be thankful for it; bosses in these games are hard and tend to have long-winded Exposition Breaks before the fight.
    • In Origins, the guardian spirit (that is, you, the player) has this power. The guardian spirit can manipulate the draws you get from your deck according to your needs. If you are setting up a combo, the spirit's effect helps you draw magnus to complete that combo. If a party member is at low health, the effect makes drawing healing magnus much more likely. The better the relationship Sagi has with his spirit, the more this effect kicks in.
    • Also in Origins, the final dungeon has 4 block puzzles where you must fly through several blocks without running into any wall or otherwise stopping as you go from one safe spot to the next. Failing results in you being sent to the start. Fail too much, and your party will add their power to yours, greatly increasing the amount of time you can fly in the area.
  • Beastieball: It is possible to activate the option to instantly win any match by just the press of a singular button, ensuring that skill level is not a limiting factor in finishing the game.
  • Bloodborne
    • Picking up more items after you've reached the inventory limit for them sends excess items to your storage chest in the Hunter's Dream, letting you build up a stockpile of supplies.
    • If you also have blood vials and quicksilver bullets in your storage chest in the Hunter's Dream, after dying (or transporting to the Hunter's Dream), you replenish your on-hand supply of your vials and bullets back in your inventory, just as long as you have such items in your storage.
    • If you just lost a huge chunk of health, blood vials will restore more of your life bar.
    • All of your equipment now scales to your stats. Attire/armor has a percentage based defense instead of a flat static rating, while attack items like Throwing Knives and Molotov Cocktails now have stat scaling to make them viable throughout the game.
    • With the Old Hunters Update, almost every boss now has NPC summons nearby to alleviate playing alone. Prior, only two bosses had NPC helpers, if you knew where to look.
  • Bravely Default:
    • In the Updated Re-release — the only version the rest of the world got — you have Sleep Points, which stop time in any battle at any time, and perform as many actions as you have Sleep Points. Using this feature allows you to surpass the damage/healing cap of 9999.
    • You can also change the difficulty and encounter rate whenever you want.
    • You can speed the game up, if the animations get too repetitive or slow for you. Summon animations are skipped entirely. Another addition to the Updated Re-release let's it go up to 4x the speed, which also makes it easier to make the most out of Special Move buffs. You can also pause the animation, making it easier to time Bravely Second, or take a screenshot through miiverse.
    • No worries about having to go through a dungeon when you die from a boss again, or having to go all the way back to stock up. Before every single boss is The Adventurer, who is a glorified savepoint, a shop (sells the wares from Norende) and a helpful reminder of what's coming up. He even pops up where it wouldn't make sense, i.e. places that the party would have been the first to get to. The only time this isn't the case is right before the Optional Boss in the Bonus Dungeon, where the Optional Boss is him. If you die then, you don't get a Game Over. You're just exited out of the battle with only 1HP.
  • Breath of Fire IV has a sequence where you’re fighting Nut monsters (who have ridiculously high physical evasion) with a solo Ryu party. Just in case you missed out on Burn during the earlier part of the game (which is locked at this point) enemies in a nearby dungeon will use the learnable Eddy spell, so Ryu has a non-physical attack option.
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm has intermittent Picross puzzles that can be freely and easily skipped if the player finds them too difficult.
  • In Child of Light, you can run away from any battle in the game (including all the bosses), recover health and mana for free in the overworld via wishing plants and Igniculus, change the difficulty level whenever you want, and all your party members receive experience from battle regardless of whether they participated.
  • In Chrono Cross, you can run away from literally any fight in the game. If you're losing to a boss, you can escape, and while some of them will just draw you back into the fight, it'll at least reset your elements and give you a chance to heal.
  • Chrono Trigger
    • The first time you head to the prehistoric era, Crono has to beat Ayla in a drinking contest to get the Dreamstone to forge the Masamune. You win the contest by rapidly pressing a button faster than the AI can keep up. If you haven't beaten Ayla after four tries, Ayla says she's full and forfeits to Crono so the story can continue.
    • Just after getting Frog and going to storm Magus' Castle, Frog will ask if you're using magic (even if you didn't use it in battle), with the game throwing down a none-too-subtle hint that you should bring Frog to Spekkio to have Frog learn his own magic. Since the dungeon ahead requires exploiting elemental weaknesses, and Frog is a required member of your party until you clear it, you're going to need him to know those spells.
    • Both times you fight Ozzie, he's a Puzzle Boss. Just attacking him normally does almost no damage, and he hits with a strong counterattack each time. You have to hit a switch behind him to end the battles. If you still haven't figured it out after a while, the switch becomes the only thing you can target.
  • Conception 2: Children Of The Seven Stars does a lot of little things: Insta-wins against weaker enemies that give full Experience and Money, full team equipment optimization, a full-heal option at the top of the Skills menu, unlimited time, retaining gained Exp. on a game over, etc.
    • If you're wondering why several of these relate to the whole party, a full team in Conception 2 is a whopping 'eleven individuals, each with their own HP and equipment.
  • CrossCode
    • The "Assist" menu allows players who might find the game too hard to lower the damage received, reduce the frequency of enemy attacks, and slow down most puzzles, all without any penalty or cut content.
    • When a CP has been invested into a branching Circuit path, you can freely swap between the two paths out of battle at no cost. Circuit Overrides are also handed out during the game, which can be spent in Rookie Harbor to completely reset a circuit tree. Finally, patch 1.2.0 gave a player the option to reset all of their circuit trees at once for a few credits.
    • After beating the game, you can go back in time to the very beginning of Chapter 10, but keeping the levels and items you obtained. If you do so, you'll be able to skip the final raid, the entirety of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, and even the Final Boss. This makes the good ending much less frustrating to achieve if you didn't get it the first time.
    • The game autosaves halfway through the fight against the final boss, and he has multiple forms. This means you won't have to fight the first part of the battle again if you went all the way through to the final part and lost.
  • Custom Robo lets you give your opponent an HP handicap if you lost to them repeatedly. If that's not enough, losing even more lets you give them even higher handicaps, up to taking away 75% of their health from the get-go.
    • In the GCN game this overlaps with Easy-Mode Mockery in the epilogue, as it lowers your score twice (you get penalties for losing and having to retry and for using a handicap, and beating the high score in each area unlocks some stuff).
  • While Darkest Dungeon is notable for lots of frustration, it does have a few of these features. Of course, it also has Stygian Mode, which is set to maximum frustration and also deletes your save if you lose too many heroes or take too long.
    • If you're unlucky enough to lose one or both your heroes in the tutorial, the game will hand you replacements (on top of the Vestal and Plague Doctor) when you get to the Hamlet so that you have a full party for your first proper expedition.
    • The Darkest Dungeon itself has a stable map and isn't randomly generated. This means that unlike most dungeons, where any engagement is a roll of the dice, you can come up with a plan for getting through the dungeon that avoids most of the worst enemies. You won't experience any nighttime ambushes either, so you can devote your Camping Respite to buffing and healing in preparation for a tough fight.
    • While heroes who have completed a Darkest Dungeon mission will refuse to return, they won't take up any roster space, so you have the capacity to train up a new team for the next one without dismissing your champions.
    • With the Crimson Court DLC, there's a repeatable blood-farming mission in the Court itself, a full cure when you defeat a boss, and a Sanitarium option that can cure the Crimson Curse when all bosses are defeated, to prevent your roster being devastated every few weeks due to a lack of The Blood for vampirism-afflicted heroes.
    • Playing in Radiant Mode lets you recruit higher-level heroes off the stagecoach, send higher-level parties out to engagements for when you need some quick levelling for one person, and makes upgrades cheaper to reduce grind.
    • If you don't agree with certain difficulty features, you can always toggle them in the options menu while in town.
  • Deltarune
    • One of Spades King's attacks has him latch his spade tongue to the dodge window and make spikes protrude from its inside walls, followed by him pulling it around the screen. The spikes pop out the instant his tongue sticks to the window, but there's a grace period where they won't damage your SOUL if you were unfortunate enough to move it towards the edges without knowing what the attack was.
    • The game notices if you're playing through a second time after completing the game. You can skip the entire opening scene in Hometown by going back to bed, warping you to the Dark World instantly.
    • In the original release of Chapter 1, if you made it to the first room of the Dark World in under eight minutes, there would be a special item there called the Wrist Protector. Obtaining it allowed you to skip past all cutscene text quickly by holding down a buttons. The Wrist Protector also didn't take up any inventory space. In the Chapter 1 and 2 Demo, this was removed and you can now skip through cutscene dialogue regardless of how quickly you got into the Dark World.
    • The first time you get a Game Over, you get a few screens of dialogue. It's changed to a simple "want to continue?" yes/no question every time you die after that until you quit the game. You can also skip the game over screen entirely by repeatedly pressing certain buttons after dying.
    • Chapter 2 introduces a Mercy Meter since most of the enemies now take more than one ACT to become spareable, and it's just more useful to have a way to track your progress with them. Additionally, attempting to spare them when it isn't full will raise the level slightly so your turn isn't completely wasted. Most of the boss enemies are also automatically spared once it reaches 100% so you don't have to go through one more turn of their attacks.
  • The original Deus Ex. A laser sensor blocking a section of the hallway in an underground tunnel: You could lockpick the hatch to the canal that bypasses it or... oh, hey, is that an EMP grenade in the sewage pipe? An army of military drones patrolling an airport cargo yard: You could just elegantly sneak past them or... oh, hey, is that a multi-shot guided missile launcher on the guard tower table? Long stretches of water: you're guaranteed to find rebreathers nearby. This made some of the more specialized nanopowers pretty useless, since you could always count on the designers to cut you some slack and provide helpful gear—to the point of being patronizing.
  • Since Ally Kills in the Disgaea series can lock you out of certain endings, making a Prinny explode by throwing them doesn't count as one.
  • Dislyte:
    • Multi-Battles have several options that stop auto battles in case an Esper hits their max level or when a defeat occurs to avoid spending more stamina.
    • Losing battles that require stamina will always end up with getting 90% stamina back. Stamina is depleted as shown when a battle is successful.
  • Disney Heroes: Battle Mode
    • If you fail a Friendship Mission, all resources you spent to do it, be they badge bits; hero chips (later missions); or diamonds (which you can use in lieu of missing badge bits), will be refunded, so you don't lose anything except time.
    • Each time you lose/retreat from a reinfected stage, the enemy levels will drop by one to keep you from being stuck.
    • If you're defeated on a campaign stage, it'll cost only a sixth of the energy a successful run would.
  • Divinity: Original Sin II has a lot of quality-of-life improvements from the previous installment. Among these:
    • Combining some skills into one another, so that a ranged fighter who is good with crossbows doesn't suddenly lag behind because they couldn't get any upgrades.
    • Much more generosity with movement clicks. You have much less AP than in Divinity: Original Sin, but fortunately you don't have to waste most of your AP moving. Even if it's a small click moving yourself a few pixels over, it does not drain your AP.
    • Carrying over the "Backstab range" from the Enhanced Edition.
  • Dragon Age: Origins has an example in in Orzammar, which is widely seen as one of the toughest sections of the game. Since you will be attacked in the street, even in what would be a safe area in any other of the game's cities, the game autosaves every time you come out a doorway, so on the off chance you get wiped, you won't lose too much progress.
  • In Earthbound 1994, if a party member leaves the group but was holding a key item in their inventory that will be needed before the party member returns, Tracy will call Ness and mention the item was placed into Escargo Express storage. And calling the Escargo Express phone number after her first call leads Tracy to specifically ask if the player is calling to obtain the certain item, meaning the player will not find themselves stuck at certain points or run the risk of calling, but forgetting what they wanted to get.
  • Mother 3 vastly improved upon the Game Over and death mechanic of the previous game, where dying sent you back to a checkpoint with no PP and your entire party except for Ness unconscious. Unsurprisingly it was often an absolute nightmare to restore yourself since only hospitals or certain rare items could revive characters and you had to fight your way to one with next to no resources, meaning it was sometimes even possible to get stuck in a no win scenario. Fun times. Now a game over just reloads your last save (and you get to keep the experience points you gained), and an unconscious character can simply be revived by anything that heals your whole party (hot springs, the couch in Osohe Castle, etc).
  • Elden Ring:
    • Most of the improvements from Bloodborne and Dark Souls III remain part of the genre: excess items sent to storage, for example, or merchants dropping a bauble that adds their inventory to one in the hub area. It's even restored one from Dark Souls, with levelling now available at any site of grace instead of just the hub area.
    • Do you have no sense of in-game direction and keep getting hopelessly lost in that great big open world? That's what the Guidance of Grace is for. Certain Sites of Grace will leave a trail of golden sparkles pointing in the vague direction of plot-important locations, allowing you to progress the game without getting too hopelessly lost. Similarly, if you're confused about what to do next, the Finger Readers scattered around the map will give you hints.
    • There's a map now, which tracks all sites of grace (including the directional indicators for ones that have them) and allows you to fast travel to the one you want based on actual location, rather than having to remember which one you want from a menu - although you can bring up a menu if you're having trouble finding the specific one you're looking for. Fast travel also works from almost anywhere, instead of being grace-to-grace like the bonfire-specific warps in Dark Souls games. You can also put markers on the map to indicate things like dungeon bosses you weren't up to so you can come back to them later without needing to remember where they were, or imp statues you didn't have enough keys for when you found them. An update a couple of months after the game came out added trackers for NPCs you've seen and talked to, to make it easier to find that specific character whose quest you're working on.
    • Moving around the world is easier because now stamina is only consumed in combat, so Torrent and the player character can sprint indefinitely as long as you don't get into any fights.
    • Resupplying your flasks is easier than in earlier games; instead of the essentially random resupply from Dark Souls III or hoping for consumable drops like in Bloodborne, clearing out specific mobs in the overworld will get you a refill and many areas have scarabs who you can kill for more.
    • Nearly every boss fight permits you to use Spirit Ashes, allowing you to summon an ally who won't increase the boss's stats. This allows, for example, dedicated melee fighters to bring archer or spellcaster backup or ranged characters to call in a bruiser to tank for them, instead of needing to hope that just the right other player is around. If you do want to summon in another player instead, Furlcalling Finger Remedies are easy to get and can be crafted using Erdleaf Flowers, which can be found growing wild across a decent chunk of the map, including one location where four spawn within ten feet of a site of grace to allow easy farming.
    • NPCs who provide important services are usually found in areas where attacking is disabled, so you can't accidentally lock yourself out of things like Renalla's stat reallocation, Roderika or Hewg's upgrades, or Tanith's teleport to Rykard's arena.
    • If you found being constantly invaded frustrating in earlier From Software games, Elden Ring has an answer: you're only ever invaded by other players when you summon in a player as an ally, meaning you're guaranteed to have a numbers advantage (although some areas do have auto-invasions by NPCs that happen when you're alone), and there are no groups that insist on invading repeatedly in specific areas the way, say, the Bell Keepers did. If you did enjoy baiting other players, you can kill the NPC invader in the Roundtable Hold to gain an item called a Taunter's Tongue; using this and a Furlcalling Finger Remedy will open you up to being invaded even without summoned support.
    • Weapon durability is no longer a factor, having apparently been deemed superfluous after how rarely it came up in Dark Souls III.
    • Any crafting item that doesn't respawn after resting at a Grace, along with many useful but limited consumables (such as St. Trina's Arrows), are dropped by at least one enemy (albeit occasionally a really annoying enemy, such as farming Basilisks for Aeonian Butterflies), assuring that they can always be farmed if you use up all the pre-placed items. Additionally, skulls can spawn with a small rune item inside them and can be seen glowing if this is the case, providing a steady, if slow, supply of runes.
    • Most bosses are either right next to a site of grace or have a stake of Marika nearby, allowing you to respawn right next to them instead of needing to do the traditional Soulsborne Sprint past all the enemies to get to the boss.
    • The boss rooms in most dungeons spawn an interactable object that teleports you back to the entrance once you win, meaning you don't need to backtrack through the entire dungeon.
    • Many of the dungeons that hold new summonable Ashes of War are hard to spot, with an unobtrusive closed door in a cliff face somewhere, but there are statues that can be activated to point the way.
    • If you're pursuing Gurranq's questline, the first thing he gives you is an item that will quiver when you enter a dungeon to tell you it contains deathroot, meaning that instead of having to go through every dungeon you encounter to find the stuff, you can just stick your head in the door and it'll tell you if it's worth bothering with. Additionally, once he goes berserk, he'll calm down either when you deal enough damage to him or after killing you several times.
    • There are more golden seeds and stonesword keys than you need, so you don't have to obsess over finding them all. There aren't more Sacred Tears than you need, but they do tend to be in churches and most buildings are visible on the map.
    • If you have the Latenna the Albinauric summon, and as such one half of the Haligtree medallion, she'll usually speak up when you enter the Mountaintops of the Giants to tell you that you're getting close to the other half, so that all the time between finding her in Liurnia (very early game) and the point where you can reach her goal in the Consecrated Snowfield (Brutal Bonus Level) doesn't cause you to forget what you were supposed to be doing.
    • Two of the NPCs that can teach you spells from scrolls, Sorceress Sellen (teaches sorceries) and Brother Corhyn (teaches incantations) have questlines that involve moving around multiple times and occasionally being made unavailable. Luckily, the third NPC that can accept scrolls is Miriel, Pastor of Vows. He never leaves the Church of Vows, he's extremely hard to kill and will forgive you if you do attack him, can teach both sorceries and incantations, and in a non-mechanical but welcome addition, is nowhere near as judgmental as Corhyn about heretical texts, seeing them simply as an opportunity to learn.
    • Patch 1.07 added an NPC, Magnus the Beast Claw, who can be invaded through the Writheblood Ruins, thus allowing offline players to complete the part of Varre's quest that requires you to invade people. Now, if only there were some in-game hint about his existence...
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • After the tedious Escort Missions and instances of accidentally killing quest-important characters in Morrowind, the series introduced the "Essential" tag for plot-important NPCs in Oblivion. "Essential" characters can only be knocked out, not killed, and will spring back up after a few seconds. Similarly, Quest Items are clearly marked as such and cannot be removed from your inventory until their associated quest is completed to prevent that quest from being unwinnable.
    • Skyrim:
      • You have a limited inventory—it is loosely based on the amount of stuff your character could feasibly carry, divided into units—so your character starts with a capacity of 300 units, and gold ingots "weigh" one unit, a heavy armor helmet weighs maybe five units, so on and so forth. Every item in the game you can put into your inventory has a weight—including bees, flowers, and butterfly wings (thus making Skyrim a place where steel ingots and five butterflies weigh the same). There are only five exceptions to the weight rule: lockpicks, of which you'll burn five or more per high-level lock, easy. Arrows are also weightless, so being a bad shot isn't so painful. Thirdly keys, which can't be dropped but can be stored in chests, corpses, and other containers. Fourthly notes, maps and other single paper objects are weightless as well though books do have weight. And lastly, the game's currency is also weightless. Thank Divines.
      • Most quest items also weigh nothing despite having a weight value (particularly helpful as quest items cannot be dropped), although some quest items can lead to problems. If you pick up a common item that's also used in a current quest, you can't drop any of them until the quest item is removed by the game (for example, returning the item to its owner). It is quite possible to end up with 200 heavy Giant Toes in your inventory with no way to get rid of any of them short of using the console and little hint as to how to remove their quest item status.
      • Whenever you're hit with an arrow, there's a chance that the arrow will be added to your inventory rather than being destroyed. While this is present in multiple games, weightless arrows is unique to Skyrim. In older games, you could potentially find yourself becoming over-encumbered and unable to move after getting shot by an archer; in Skyrim, getting shot by an archer just leads to you wondering why you're carrying iron arrows now.
      • Nearly every dungeon area is designed as a loop with a Door to Before (be it an actual barred door, a Gravity Barrier, or whatever) to allow a quick exit after the dungeon is cleared.
  • Everhood:
    • If you aren't able to defeat the Spirit of Light before the song ends (or face it before you get your arm back, it will warp away but can be found in the movie theater to be faced again.
    • All of the differences in New Game Plus come after getting Red's arm back, which also happens to be soon after the save points start recommending using more than one save slot "in case something happens.”
  • Epic Battle Fantasy:
    • When the third game introduced an overworld map, it did so in a way that lets the player go through battles by their own pace. There are no Random Encounters and only a small handful of "ambushes" in the entire series: every regular foe is out in the open on the map, does not chase after the player, and needs to be interacted with to start a fight. Any enemies blocking the main path are permanently removed after their defeat, avoiding the need to refight them, while optional enemies to the side respawn over time, allowing for grinding.
    • Running away can be used in almost every fight (including the final bosses, aside from the Devourer after it deletes Earth) and has no penalty, allowing to leave and strategize without needing to die and reload first.
    • 5 introduces a system where enemies can be captured, and it has a few features that makes capturing all possible foes easier and averting Permanently Missable Content:
      • The Grand Gallery contains one of every type of regular capturable enemy in the game grouped by family, albeit most of them being gated off behind certain achievement numbers. If a player did not catch a certain enemy or used it as part of Forging a weapon, they can simply go to the Gallery and look for the enemy in the same family.
      • All optional challenges refresh themselves after being completed. The Arcades, Battle Arena (which has one unique enemy per party member), Data Bunker simulations, the Glitch fight, the Snowflake fight, and the Evil Players can be refought infinitely for capture attempts, meaning none of them are permanently missable. The main bosses and their stronger counterparts do not respawn from where they were fought, but they can be captured in the Temple of Trials Boss Rushes, which can be done indefinitely.
    • In 5, the party member battles are the only fights that cannot be refought at all, but beating them will unlock their Bestiary entries even if they are not scanned, so their entries cannot be permanently missed.
  • Gacha World: Everytime you lose in the Bullet Hell minigame, you get 5 more max HP until it caps out at 100 HP.
  • Genshin Impact:
    • Domains will display the level of its enemies before you enter them.
    • Getting caught by a guard while trying to steal the Holy Lyre will remove that guard on the next attempt.
    • In "Wild Escape", running out of time will start you off with 5 extra seconds on the next run. This only seems to affect this timer, as other timed levels are unaffected.
  • Golden Sun series:
    • Golden Sun: Multiple:
      • In rooms where you have to solve a puzzle to proceed, random encounters are turned off so you can take your time in solving the puzzle without being interrupted. It also doubles as a way to recover your PP by walking around uninterrupted. This feature would be kept in the sequels.
      • A lot of thought was put into the game's reliance on Psynergy for puzzles to keep them fun instead of frustrating. One area that requires the spell Force (learned by equipping an item) to move an obstacle will be bypassed by a cutscene where the player gets frustrated that they have no Psynergy to get passed and just kicks it instead, and even though Mia's base class knows the spell Frost there's still an equippable item to bestow it as well so you won't have to constantly cycle her Djinn around if you're using a class that lacks it (the spell is frequently used in puzzles). You also casually replenish PP over time as you walk around the world map and dungeons: probably not enough to make much difference for combat and recovery, but you'll always have enough to cast Move or Mind Read, or if you're desperate to get out, Issac's Retreat spell.
      • The existence of the Frost Gem (which bestows Frost) also makes the glitch-powered Mia-Free Run possible, saving you from rendering the game Unintentionally Unwinnable as it's the only spell she knows that is actually mandatory to beat the game. One wonders if said glitch was discovered during development and the devs decided to roll with it.
      • At the end of the Mercury Lighthouse you face a brutal fire-elemental Wake-Up Call Boss where near constant healing will be mandatory for survival. Thankfully Mia, your ice and water elemental party member with the solid healing spell Ply recovers 4 PP per turn from the Lighthouse's power: more than enough to spam all her spells without fear of running out. She even lampshades this after the fight when she reflects on the power boost it gave her:
        Mia: It's true... I could use my power without ever depleting it.
      • Certain "rare" items can be re-purchased from shopkeepers after selling them, like one-of-a-kind weaponry, Lucky Medals, and Tolbi Tickets. As the medals and tickets don't come into play until much later in the game and inventory space is limited, this allows you to sell them and free up your inventory, then simply buy them back when you reach the point in the game you can actually use them. It's also a handy source of money which is rare in the earlier parts of the game but plentiful in the end.
      • Because it's possible to save anywhere, there is the possibility of getting one's self stuck in a dungeon or area. To alleviate this, you can hold L, Start, and Select while loading your save to start from the last Sanctum you visited instead of the exact location where you saved your game.
    • Golden Sun: The Lost Age has Felix with the Cure ability so you can heal your party. However, it won't be fully adequate in later battles where you'll have to heal multiple people at once and the character who can use multi-target water healing abilities doesn't join your party until much later. To compensate, Jenna's default class can learn multi-target healing abilities to let you get by until you obtain your dedicated healer.
    • In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, you won't get your dedicated healer character until quite a bit later in the game. Your wind adept party member can learn multi-target healing spells early on to help you get by until the dedicated healer joins you.
  • The Great Gaias: The game keeps track of which Celestium Shards are missable and allows the player to buy missed shards in Thedorado.
  • GreedFall: After finishing most quests, if you need to travel a far distance to return to someone (usually the quest-giver), the game will give you the option to teleport directly to them.
  • The Haunted Ruins: Starting at one floor above the deepest floor you've seen instead of having to go down all the floors again, when you reenter the dungeon.
  • Hero Of The Kingdom 3 eliminates much of the backtracking from the two previous games by giving you a camp screen which can be accessed in any area. You can not only rest in it but, provided you have the skill, make your own weapons and potions and also cook the food which you need to rest. Another handy feature is that the map allows you to buy and sell items by clicking on the icon representing any of the vendors you've discovered so far.
  • Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory Re;Birth3: V Generation:
    • You no longer have to scout dungeons and hope that the alteration your aiming for gets triggered. Instead, you collect plans and research them, after which you can simply toggle the alteration of your choice on and off.
    • Plans require certain items, but you can simply select an item to get the information on where it's found. It even lists the versions of the dungeon it is found and the way you can collect it (e.g. defeating enemies and/or opening item containers).
  • In Kinder, if the player ended up using all of Shunsuke's money, but hasn't bought the Rust Remover from the vending machine yet, the item will be available for free when it becomes needed to progress.
  • Klonoa Heroes: Densetsu no Star Medal:
    • Underwater and space levels have the heroes wearing a suit with rather heavy and slippery physics, but gold and experience crystals will always be drawn to them so it won't be an issue to collect them before they vanish.
    • When Guntz comes back in World 5, he's upgraded to be just behind the power curve and there's new equipment for him on the local shop so that clearing his unique stage won't be too difficult. It is also a level without keys hidden by enemies, so the player can just avoid all hostiles anyway.
    • You can save progress between floors. And after leaving a floor through either the entrance or the exit, any unlocked gates will remain open on subsequent visits. It's very convenient if you happen to die in the middle of a long stage.
    • There's a set of diving suit floors with lava hazards everywhere that runs on a time limit. You can easily find an accessory that negates lava and spike damage in the previous stage which significantly breaks this challenge.
  • Knights of the Old Republic gives you the ability to switch party members almost anywhere, avoiding the need to return to your base.
  • The Legend of Dragoon revived all killed players after combat with one hit point. Given that only one of the seven characters can revive party members (and only after reaching level three as a dragoon) and players can only carry a total of 32 items in their inventory, this is pretty much required. Likewise, blocking not only halves all damage taken for one turn and prevents status effects, it also heals the party member for ten percent of their health.
    • Kongol joins the party last and is second to last to get his dragoon spirit, on top of earning very little spirit points from his additions. Thankfully, the same city he gets his spirit in has a place players can buy spirit potions which grant a hundred spirit points. With either some patience playing minigames or a decent amount of gold, they can stock up and spend a couple battles against weak enemies using said potions to quickly level Kongol's dragoon spirit up.
    • Meru gets her dragoon spirit at the end of disc 2, half a disc after Kongol and a full disc after everyone else. To combat how far behind she is, her dragoon spirit reaches level three in a third the time of anyone else's and early in disc 4 she gets a weapon that grants her double spirit points.
    • Almost every dungeon in the game has a merchant selling healing items to help offset the limited inventory size, allowing players to stock up before and/or after a tough boss.
  • The Legend of Heroes - Trails:
    • The series provides an option if a battle is lost to retry with decreased enemy stats for those who want to enjoy the story. The effect can be stacked multiple times per battle and enemies would only inflict minimal damage and have low defenses, though this doesn't apply to status ailments such as poison or petrification.
    • At one point in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Joshua and Estelle have to reach a church without being caught by guards. If caught, the number of guards patrolling will decrease.
    • Trails of Cold Steel: Enemies have differing vulnerabilities to different weapon types and elemental attacks. Bosses have standard vulnerability to everything, making the outcome of boss fights less dependant on who happens to be in the party, and what equipment you happen to have given them.
  • Liar Jeannie In Crucifix Kingdom:
    • The crafting system allows the player to break down consumables and equipment into their material ingredients. This can allow the player to recover rare materials and use them for something else, though that only works if the correct recipe was used with the rare material to begin with.
    • If you already tried fighting the secret boss before, later attempts allow you to skip the cutscene and go straight to the battle.
  • Live A Live:
    • The Distant Future chapter has the Item Creation mechanic, which allows the player to ask Doc Tobei to enhance certain components or equipment into better versions of themselves. However, he has a tendency to mess up at this and the item will not enhance. Contrary to the other chapter that contains Item Creation, though, Tobei screwing up with not mean the item is lost and it can be retried over and over, until he succeeds. Helpful, as getting certain equipment in that scenario can be difficult.
    • Any skills the player didn't obtain in the Present Day can be gotten via leveling Masaru up in the final chapter.
    • The kill counter in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter only goes up when humans are killed. Spirits don't count since they're dead already, and one area off to the side has a bunch of respawning spirits who can be fought for easy Level Grinding. Handy if you're going for a Pacifist Run but want to get your level up.
  • Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals:
    • knocked-out party members are revived whenever you reach a checkpoint, which means they'll be back on their feet if the Reset device is used. Since everyone (but Dekar) has unique abilities that can be required for solving puzzles, this prevents having to leave a dungeon and start over from the very beginning if you've run out of Miracles.
    • If you get a Game Over, you can choose to try again with the levels of everyone in your party boosted by five.
  • Machina of the Planet Tree -Planet Ruler-, unlike most RPGs, shows the percentage chance of fleeing a battle, meaning a player isn't likely to waste a turn trying and failing to run.
  • The version of Mary Skelter: Nightmares included within Mary Skelter 2 contains an expanded postgame to compensate for the sequel's lack of one. (This makes sense as Mary Skelter 2 ends on a Reset Button Ending that leads into the original.) Upon starting a new file, players are given the option of identifying the Big Bad. If the correct choice is made, the game boots to the second-to-final chapter with all of the items required to get the original True Ending on hand, saving players who already know the first game's main plot dozens of hours.
  • In Mass Effect 3, there are several weapons and upgrades that you can pick up during missions, as well as items required to complete minor Fetch Quests. If you miss the opportunities to get these items, then they become available to purchase on the Citadel, so they are not Permanently Missable or Unintentionally Unwinnable (with the exception of a few secret weapons).
    • Related to the above, you have a requisition officer on your ship who can get you the items from any shop you've visited at only 10% higher price. Of course in Mass Effect 3, all the shops are on the Citadel so it’s not that hard to visit them all anyway.
    • When the game was first released, the requirements for getting the best ending practically required players engage in the otherwise optional multiplayer segment, making the best ending out of reach for those who did not have access to multiplayer, or otherwise did not wish to engage in it. The Extended Cut DLC relaxes those requirements, reducing the necessary Effective Military Strength from 5000 to only 3100.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: In conversations, any repeatable question is darkened out after it's asked, so that the player doesn't accidentally ask an NPC something they already did. (Though sometimes the game sneakily has the question remain the same, but the NPCs answer will have changed.)
  • Monark, grindy and convoluted as some of its puzzles may be, has a lot of features intended to alleviate some of the stress and annoyance:
    • During the game's 4 branching paths in Act 2, finishing one automatically puts you back to the branching off point.
    • There is a "Fertile Ground" series of optional battlegrounds which act as a Peninsula of Power Leveling.
    • When trying to convince a character to let you into their exclusive story route, where the wrong answer will have them refuse, the game will put a check mark on successful dialog options, and you can always tyr again.
    • Thanks to the game’s leveling system involving buying skills to gain stats, there is an "auto-level" system so you don’t need to manually pick out skills to bring your latest recruit up to speed.
    • On a similar note, you can get most of the invested currency in a character, if you want to respec them or find you like another character’s skillset better.
  • New Horizons offers several features:
    • Due to guns being able to one-shot, neither the player nor his party members can be killed with them, and will instead be reduced to five HP. The death blow can only be delivered with melee attacks.
    • Because sea travel and ship combat is slow, time can be accelerated in different steps.
    • If a mast is lost during combat, provoking immobilization, then it will automatically get repaired once entering the world map, to prevent being stuck.
    • Pressing "G" (default) auto-equips the best gear available in inventory. No scroll through a potentially miles-long list.
  • Octopath Traveler:
    • When characters use a magic attack, the damage inflicted utilizes the weapon in the character's arsenal that gives the highest Elemental Attack bonus. For example, if a character uses magic while equipped with a sword, but their equipped staff gives a bigger bonus, the game will automatically defer to the staff's bonus rather than making the player juggle their weapons.
    • When selling items, all the Vendor Trash is automatically organized at the top for easy selling.
    • The cursor always starts on the last enemy targeted, so you don't need to cycle through them to get to the one you wanted to attack first.
    • When using healing items or the Apothecary's First Aid skill, the cursor automatically points at the party member with the lowest health. Similarly, the Thief's Share SP skill automatically points at the party member with the lowest SP.
    • Linde can randomly unleash either a Sword or Polearm-based attack when summoned by H'aanit. If your target has a confirmed weakness to one of those, Linde will automatically use the weapon type that the target is weak to without fail.
    • The final boss of Primrose's story will cause the turn order to become obscured when a certain amount of his health is depleted. You will not be able to see the order your party members go through, but thankfully this does not apply to the boss.
  • Odin Sphere features one of these for the story, which is not only pretty complex on its own, but features 5 different protagonists who have to be played one at a time, with the chronology constantly jumping back and forth with lots of minor Time Skips. The result is a massive Jigsaw Puzzle Plot that would be a nightmare to figure out how everything fits together, if it wasn't for the fact that the game also has a cutscene theater, with brief synopses for each cutscene, all sorted by character into a comprehensive timeline.
  • The Updated Re Release of Odin Sphere, Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir, updates many gameplay features in its "Refined" mode, which is the new default mode (although the original PS2 gameplay is available under "Classic Mode" for players who prefer), and streamlines many gameplay elements. These include (but are not limited to):
    • A faster-paced combat system that does not force players to ration their POW meter, which is now reserved for special attacks. As for Mercedes, whose gameplay still differs radically from the other protagonists: she no longer needs to wait until her POW meter is completely drained before recharging.
    • Alchemy no longer requires specific grades of Material to craft specific potions: a potion's grade now denotes its potency, and any potion can be crafted without needing to match a Material's grade, so long as you have the necessary ingredients.
    • A new character, Maury the Pooka Chef, can be found in rest areas in each stage. Instead of having to travel to the Pooka Village and spend Valentinian coins to eat cooked meals (although this is still an option), players can give ingredients and recipes to Maury to eat stat-boosting meals in the rest area. New recipes also provide substantial EXP bonuses the first few times they are used.
  • In Ōkamiden, ink doesn't regenerate over time, unlike the previous game. Instead, they gave you twice as much ink, an item to restore three full bottles (Spirit Ink, and it restores more at larger sizes), and put things that drop ink restoring pickups everywhere, some of which respawn, as well as making bosses drop said pickups. It's still possible to get into an Unwinnable situation, so they gave you a redo option on the pause menu, which returns you to a nearby place.
  • Omega Labyrinth Life features multiple convenience features for fans of dungeon crawlers, the Mystery Dungeon variety especially:
    • Though you lose all items and equipment upon death in a dungeon, before diving in you can pay for a GPS tracker to be attached to your most valuable equipment. You need only pay twice its value in Omega Power to get it back from the shop.
    • There is a dedicated button to move and attack diagonally. While it can be iffy if your character is in a T-intersection and can't attack through walls without a 2-tile reach weapon like the lance, it does make maneuvering easier.
    • While holding down two buttons, you can have the characters move at hyper-speed down a track, until they hit an intersection, an enemy, or a dead-end. This particularly helps as some connecting paths between rooms can get very, very long, and especially the smaller labyrinths within the labyrinth.
    • After the first few chapters, you unlock Fairy Mode, which gives you absurdly higher Omega Power per run than a regular crawl with the main characters, without having to worry about setting of traps or hunger, at the cost of being forced to use the fragile fairies Nem and Pai, who have to keep their distance and use their long-ranged attacks to survive most encounters. They also have access to room-clearing skills, should you find yourself surrounded by enemies.
    • Size Ups can be skipped, and unidentified items processed in batches for even more efficiency. Sets of items of the same unidentified title will cost the same as identifying one, regardless of enchantments or quality.
    • The lengthy Full Blooming minigame can be skipped for a respectable sum of experience points and some Essence.
  • Phantasy Star I gave players the ability to save anywhere, but also had instances where the game could be rendered Unintentionally Unwinnable, and if the player had the misfortune of saving after making a mistake that made the game unwinnable, they would be forced to start over from the beginning. To that end, Phantasy Star II replaced the ability to save anywhere with save points in cities and towns; while it would add more time to advance the game when loading a save, the player was less likely to put themself into an unwinnable situation. The ability to save anywhere would eventually be restored in Phantasy Star IV, which had far fewer ways to make the game unwinnable.
  • In Resonance of Fate, losing a battle gives you the choice of restoring your last save, restarting the battle over for a modest fee, or (where this trope kicks in) restarting the battle with a full Hero Gauge for ten times that fee. Ponying up that amount of money can smart, but when the alternative is running an entire dungeon again and hoping you don't lose as many bezels this time, you'll be happy the option is there.
  • Riviera: The Promised Land allowed you to retry a boss again and again, cutting out some of their HP until they reached 25% of their original life. A family of Palette Swap Bosses also blow you away if you anger them in the battle... And you can go back and engage them again after walking back to their screen, with the HP you whittled away from them never regenerating, and only your rank and reward suffering.
  • Fail a (fairly simple) multiple-lights puzzle enough times in Shadow Hearts: From The New World, and Johnny will simply kick in the doors it was locking.
  • Secret of Evermore:
    • The game allows you to skip the entire opening cutscene and Prolonged Prologue, thus skipping directly to the jungle and the start of the actual game, once you have played through it once and saved on a different file.
    • Later you must face The Great Pyramid, which is the first genuinely gruelling level as it's swarming with Bone Buzzards and requires you to split the party up as the dog can't climb stairs and instead needs to activate switches so the hero can progress. After climbing to the top and defeating Rimsala, rather than having to trickily navigate your way back down, the hero and the dog automatically leave the entire pyramid all the way back to the entrance in a fade to black. You also learn Escape from Horace's assistant upon returning with the Diamond Eye from the pyramid as well.
    • The Halls of Collosia require you to throw the heavy Bronze Spear at a switch to trigger a bridge so you can progress, but since you just got the thing not five minutes before from a Boss in Mook Clothing it'll still be at level 1. This one time, and this one time only, the game lets you throw a free fully-charged level 3 spear attack at the switch regardless of what level the thing is on so you don't have to spend the next three hours or so grinding lime slimes to level the thing up. That said, it is very easy to not realize this...
  • The various Shin Megami Tensei games have as a central mechanic the fact that you can fuse demons/Personas together to get new, more powerful demons. However, in Devil Survivor and the Golden version of Persona 4, you can look up fusion combinations for certain demons instead of working it out with a fusion chart and a guide. In both of these games, you can also choose inherited skills instead of leaving it up to the whims of the Random Number God.
    • In Shin Megami Tensei I and Shin Megami Tensei II, fusing a human with a demon (the humans recruited in demon talks, not the party members, although that happens too) results in a random demon. The Minister shows the player the resulting demon right before a fusion, so they can back out and try for a better demon as many times as needed.
    • In Devil Survivor, in the Golden Ending version of the second Kudlak/Kresnik battle, Kaido joins you as an NPC ally. However, you have to let Mari (also an NPC ally) deal the finishing blow to the boss, or he Comes Back Strong and kills her in an unavoidable cutscene later. If Kaido would deal the finishing blow, he instead beats him down to 1 HP, making it very easy for Mari to finish him off.
    • Devil Survivor 2 couples this with Developer's Foresight. Unless the player follows Daichi's route, one has to fight against Daichi and Io at one point. And Io has a One-Winged Angel form by channeling Lugh, which she will use partway through the battle, and the only way to unlock Lugh as a potential Fusion, is to defeat Io in this form. Fortunately, if the player or a party member accidentally ends up defeating Io before she channels Lugh, she gets back up and does so, anyway.
      • The game has Death Videos that foretell a person's death, but without telling them where or when it happens. If the player receives such a video and cannot unlock the event to save a party member's life in time (whether accidentally or on purpose), that party member is dead and unavailable for the rest of the playthrough. However, if one of those party members played a vital role in another party member's Fate Events, their role is replaced by a different party member, meaning the player is not locked out of completing surviving party members' Fate events.
    • Persona 3 Portable gave the player selectable difficulty levels, with a second one new to this version: There's still Easy for those familiar with the game who didn't want too much of a hassle, which gave you 10 items that revive your party and restore all your HP and SP upon death, and in addition to that, there's also Easier Than Easy Beginner, which gave you 30 of them.
      • Even without taking difficulty into consideration, Portable takes a load off the player in many ways, with the biggest two being that the player can now assign direct commands to the party, whereas before (and infamously), the party was strictly A.I-controlled, with the player's choice of tactics often unreliable, and in regards to the party's condition, they'd only get tired after a dungeon run (or if they were K.O'd within the dungeon and not revived on the spot), as opposed to having members get tired in the middle of a run. This basically adds to Tartarus guardian fights being much easier to deal with (their weaknesses cannot be analyzed) thanks to direct control, and you can do long Tartarus runs from the beginning of the game. Other examples of ease include the Police Station and the Antiques shop (both weapon and item shops) now being open at night, an area skipping menu during school/daytime segments (lifted from Persona 4), and skill cards, which can be replicated for free at Naganaki Shrine. All of these are perhaps why the Maniac difficulty was added to this game.
    • Persona 4 added a quick-move option to allow a player to skip between areas on the map, abandoned the reversing Social Links on a major level, and allowed a player to assume direct control over party members, all features lacking in the previous game. P4 also abandons the Tired/Sick physical conditions of P3, making it much easier.
    • Persona 4 Golden adds a whole lot more to the original P4's features, though weirdly it removes the save points originally present outside of each boss chamber in dungeons. (This isn't here to nerf the game significantly, since it's a minor inconvenience at most; a Goho-M item, which is easily buyable, and a bit of walking easily will take you to the last save point.)
      • The ability to "skip through" both animated cutscenes and dialogue sequences, particularly handy when starting a New Game Plus or facing Kunino-Sagiri.
      • On a game over, restarting will allow the player to resume play on the same dungeon floor they died upon, rather than at their last save point.
      • Rather than needing to try and "catch" persona cards during Shuffle Time, which requires a combination of perception, memory and reflexes, all of the useful cards are immediately displayed for the player and the player can then manually select which one they choose. As part of this, Shuffle Time also lost the Blank Cards (nothing, but chance of getting an Arcana Card in either the upright or reverse position) and X-cards (lose all items, experience and cash received from the fight) and regained the Minor Arcana Cardsnote  from Persona 3.
      • In a New Game Plus on Golden, you can select anytime what the difficulty is going to be like. As in going to Settings and manually change how much or little you get EXP, money, how badly you take damage, etc.
      • The aforementioned "fast travel" method now allows a player to immediately skip up or down a level once they have found the stairs in a dungeon, making it easier to get around.
    • Shin Megami Tensei IV has several features designed to ease new players in:
      • Unlike past games, you can now save anywhere so long as you can open up the Burroughs menu.
      • In the event that you haven't saved in a while and you fall in battle, Charon can revive you for a fee of either Macca or 3DS Play Coins. If you don't have enough of either, Charon himself has an AFF: He'll revive you anyway, and simply put you on a tab and charge you once you have enough Macca—just don't die again before you do, or it's Game Over as usual.
      • If you die a second time, the easier difficulty level "Fellow" is unlocked.
    • The 3DS re-release of Soul Hackers has the Hack menu, which is essentially a set of sanctioned cheats: You can lower the difficulty level (or increase it), lift the alignment requirement for recruiting demons, give yourself full Analyze data for every demon, and give yourself full map data for every area.
    • Persona 5:
      • The guard command is mapped to the same button that's used to back out of menus, so in case you accidentally mash the button too many times, the game asks for confirmation when you select the guard command so that you don't accidentally waste your turn guarding.
      • The game breaks up lengthy cutscene sequences with save points, allowing the player to take a break if they can't view it all in one sitting.
      • In previous games, you can only switch Personas once per turn, which means that if you switched to the wrong Persona by mistake, you were stuck with it. Now, you can switch Personas as much as you want until you use a skill, at which point the Persona is actually locked.
      • Persona 5 makes completing the Persona Compendium much more manageable without the need of a guide in multiple ways. Most importantly, Personas that the player has never fused before are marked as "New", whereas in the past if the player wasn't sure they'd fused said persona before they'd need to back out and search the compendium. Additionally changes to the fusion system allow the player to sort by result rather than brute forcing every possible combination or pay a fee to fuse Personas above their own level.
      • Once you reach the final dungeon, you can't go back to the real world. Since the players would have no other way to refill their SP once they run out of items, Lavenza can heal you at the entrance. The same is also true of the second-to-last dungeon (this time courtesy of Caroline), as the player is required to traverse the Depths of Mementos on December 24—and it's entirely possible they haven't fully progressed through the preceding areas of Mementos either.
    • Persona 5 Royal adds multiple features on top of the vanilla game to make for a much less frustrating experience in certain ways.
      • The player is given much more freedom on certain nights where originally they only had the option to go to sleep, which allows faster Social Stat increases or more chance to make consumables for dungeon crawling.
      • Dungeon crawling in Mementos can also become much more rewarding thanks to the ability to purchase boosts to money, experience, and items earned from battle in Mementos. The soundtrack of Mementos has also been changed from a short and often tedious loop to a more dynamic theme that various from section to section, much like Persona 3's Tartarus.
      • Guns were often considered Awesome, but Impractical in the vanilla game, running out of ammo extremely fast if the player used them, and only able to be reloaded by a consumable with rare ingredients require to craft it. Guns were mainly used for hitting the handful of enemies weak to it, trying for critical hits, or using the Gun Fu skills from the Tower confidant, and all but the last could be reliably substituted by Gun-type skills learned by certain Persona and Haru (the only trade-off being said skills cost HP). Royal changes guns to replenish their ammunition after every battle (explained in-universe by Morgana as the enemies' cognition leading them to expect the player has a fully loaded gun each new encounter), allowing the player to use them more frequently without penalty.
      • For a slightly more neurotic type of frustration, there is the DVD rental store, which in the original release had due dates that could be missed due to story events, although due to various reasons you never actually had to pay late fees. Royal has you pay a relatively small one-time fee for rentals with no due date and for free going forward.
    • Soul Hackers 2:
      • As with other games in the series that lack Random Encounters, display enemies in dungeons as glitchy blobs until you initialize combat with them. However, if you take on a sidequest that requires you to fight a specific type of enemy, a marker will appear on blobs that include that enemy. You can also unlock the ability to choose any enemy demon and mark them similarly.
      • Unlike the Persona series and Devil Survivor 2, in this game, dialogue choices clearly indicate the effect they will have on your Soul Levels.
      • Demon Negotiation now only requires a single payment to the demon, and is guaranteed to succeed, unlike previous games where you had to answer confusing questions to get the demon to initiate negotiations, and then make multiple payments, with that having a chance of failure even if you agreed to all demands.
  • Sands of Destruction has a segment called the Cave of Memories, in which you must visit the rooms containing Kyrie's memories of the adventure in reverse order that they happened. This can be problematic, as not every plot point is touched upon (particularly if you had to visit a certain city twice; only one visit is actually counted), and if you had put the game aside for a while, you may wonder Now, Where Was I Going Again? If you mess up, Kyrie will helpfully remind you what he did before and where you should go next.
  • South Park: The Fractured but Whole:
    • In the quest involving helping Gay Fish's mother get to heaven, you have to play a minigame that's basically Flappy Bird. Make three mistakes and it's game over. Each failure gives you more health to play with, though on the second try, you get five hits and on the third try, you get fifteen (at which point you have to go out of your way in order to lose).
    • If you can't figure out Mitch Conner's obvious riddles, The Coon will eventually just tell you where to go with a frustrated voice tone.
  • Spore Creatures:
    • The Burrow ability unlocks early in the campaign and sends the player right back to the last friendly nest they used; pressing the button again sends the player back to where they initially burrowed. This can be used to immediately try on new parts, or put on a part required to solve a puzzle without needing to resort to backtracking.
    • Several cheats in the Cheat Shop function as this, providing abilities such as maximizing the Sight stat, giving the player massive attack strength, total invincibility, and auto-playing the dance minigame. These can be particularly helpful when going for certain Badges.
  • Steven Universe:
    • Attack the Light: If the game notices that the player is having an exceptionally difficult time with the Timed Hits mechanic, it'll remind the player exactly how it's done and inform the player that the stars that appear on the screen only indicate when the player needs to tap the screen, not where; the player can actually tap anywhere on the screen.
    • Save the Light:
      • The limit for the game's currency from the first installment is removed, thus allowing you to carry as much money as you need from the beginning.
      • Attack availability is no longer dependent on how much HP you have, so you're free to use your stronger attacks at low health as long as you have enough Star Points.
    • Unleash the Light:
      • The game allows you to reposition your party members once per turn, unlike in the previous game, thus letting you maximize their attack range. It also has added benefits such as party members at the back being less likely to be attacked and certain moves having bonuses depending on the user's position on the field.
      • Instead of backtracking to Bismuth's Forge in the previous game, you can now have George craft upgrades using Chroma at any Warp Pad.
      • Instead of Chroma regenerating every hour in the previous game, they now do so whenever you leave and re-enter the stage containing them.
      • Since it's possible to form a team without Steven in Rose's Room, the Cheeseburger Backpack is accessible even without him. Right from the beginning, you can also use the Backpack even if Steven himself is stunned or defeated due to the Roguelike elements making it difficult to gather and use items in this game mode.
      • Steven's Ukulele Jams are now no longer interrupted if he uses another move while jamming.
  • Super Robot Wars:
    • The game has you retain all exp and money earned on gameovers while bringing you to the intermission screen with a few variations in parts depending on the game. One of which is a possible penality of missing out the SR Point/Battle Mastery for the level, with games without such things, you can retry all you want until you finally beat the level. It's also well-known some players intentionally abuse it to do some Level Grinding.
    • 2nd Original Generations has one level where you can literally max out your money and the level of Fighter Roar by destroying Jinrai clones. They will respawn as soon as all of them are scrapped.
  • Sword of Paladin: The first phase of the Final Boss, Anguis, gives the party a permanent debuff and gives the boss very strong regen, only to remove the debuff and nerf the regen in the later phases. If the player fights him again on a clear file, the first phase is automatically skipped, making it easier to reach the True Final Boss.
  • In TaskMaker, you can invoke a hidden spell to toggle certain options, such as the stepping sound your player makes when moving, the "ooph" sound for running into a wall, and the appearance of random monsters. You can also toggle whether or not the game automatically saves whenever you enter or exit a dungeon or town, which can be helpful for a quick revert if you die. The Tomb of the TaskMaker makes those options more easily accessible, and adds a further feature in that you can buy hint scrolls to help you if you're stuck on any task in the game's Fetch Quest.
  • TS!Underswap (a Fan Game for Undertale, which has its own entry below):
    • Just like in the original Undertale, falling through the floor enough times during the "Don't step on the leaves" puzzles will have the whole floor turn solid.
    • When you reach the end of the puzzle gauntlet, there will be a door that takes you back to the beginning of Ruined Home. Reaching the City of Old will make another door available as well. These serve as a way to revisit earlier areas without having to backtrack all the way through Ruined Home (especially since the bridge to the city gets broken).
    • The game actually bothers to tell you that you can slow down Chara's soul by holding X, making particularly dense bullet patterns easier to dodge. The fight with the Ruined Knights is meant to teach you this if you don't know it already.
  • Undertale:
    • The game will skip certain cutscenes you've seen before. For instance, you can skip Mettaton's opera scene if you've seen it at least once (Mettaton will note that you look bored and ask if you want to skip ahead). If you die while facing some bosses, the game will let you skip the first part of the boss battle in favor of going straight to the meat of the fight when you retry. This applies across all future playthroughs, too, so you don't have to see the cutscene if you already know what's coming.
    • The No Mercy run has a few things change for the sake of the player's convinience:
      • There's a route-exclusive save point that appears in the room before the battle with Undyne the Undying. You're probably going to need it.
      • The introduction sequence of Undyne the Undying is extremely long, but if you lose the fight and reload, it thankfully becomes much shorter (unless you quit the game, then do it again, in which case you'll get the full cutscene again the first time around).
      • On a non-NM run, an NPC gives you a cellphone upgrade that allows you to access your Dimensional Box at any time instead of at set points throughout the underground, and give you access to a second Dimensional Box. You won't get the upgrades on No Mercy; however, the Dimensional Box will appear at a few extra points in the late game to compensate.
    • The Temmie shopkeeper will give you the option to buy "Temmie Armor" if you pay for her college degree. The armor is prohibitively expensive, and Temmie openly admits it's a Game-Breaker. However, the price of the Temmie Armor will drop every time you die, so if you need it as a last resort, it's there.
    • The fight against Photoshop Flowey is brutally difficult at first, but there's several segments that serve as checkpoints once you clear them (and you also won't take damage from any hits during them) so that you can start from there if you die. Dying to the boss in the first stage has him taunting you before forcing the game to close itself, but the taunting is completely omitted if you die after one of the checkpoints and the game just shuts down right away.
    • If you lose to Papyrus, you survive with 1 HP and he locks you in his shed, which is easily escaped. If you fail to him three times, he gives you the option to skip the fight. (Fun fact: this is actually the route often taken by speedrunners!)
    • The "don't step on the leaves" puzzle in the Ruins will eventually turn the entire floor solid if you fall too many times.
    • If Papyrus's snow puzzle is too hard for you, you can talk to him repeatedly and he'll eventually reveal that you can just press a switch on a nearby tree to solve it. Interestingly, pressing the switch before talking to him and then stepping on the switch that marks the puzzle as "finished" will cause him to react as if you had solved it properly.
  • A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The Major Update increased the rate of random item drops, as well as making it possible to disable Random Encounters from the very beginning. One wonders how many players Rage Quit during the first forest, without these features. Additionally, from the very beginning, there have been ways to easily regenerate MP, without the need for a Save Point or Healing Spring.
  • Vagrant Story has some rather fiendish Block Puzzles in the late-game areas and the Bonus Dungeon. Fortunately, the game includes an item called Faerie Wing which, when used, boosts Ashley's running speed and jump height, allowing some of the puzzles to be made easier or bypassed entirely.
  • The World Ends with You has difficulty levels that unlock as the game progresses, and that you can switch between whenever you're out of battle. Great for if you're just trying to beat the game, but switching between different difficulty levels is also necessary to get some of those Rare Random Drops. Additionally, if you get a Game Over, you have the option to retry on Easy so you can complete the battles easily without the punishment of escaping (which results in a drop in Sync Rate if done consecutively) or going back to the title screen (which erases any unsaved progress). In Final Remix, the Game Over screen will also include an option to set different pins to attack with instead of forcing you to go back to the title screen and lose all your progress since your last save, in case you were caught off-guard by an actually difficult enemy while grinding.
    • Additionally, the alien encounters in Mingle mode are completely unrelated to actual wireless signal, making it always possible to gain Mingle PP even in the DS version.

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