Final Fantasy / Scrappy Mechanic

In this frustratingly popular series, Final Fantasy has gone through lots of mechanics to reinvigorate the RPG genre from Active Time Battles to minigames. However, not all of them land and some end up being reviled.

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In General

In the NES version of FFI and FFII, your party members do not switch targets if the enemy they'd targeted dies before they attack—if your entire party targets an enemy and the first attacker kills it, the other three waste their turns. This does not apply to the computer, however, as it seems to select enemies' targets at the time of their actions going off, making it entirely possible for an enemy to attack a party member on the turn they're revived. FFIII allowed normal attacks to switch targets (but not magic), while FFIV made all attacks retarget.
FFI through FFVI all unfortunately share the same annoying NPCs who wander aimlessly around towns or castles and can block you. Such characters basically wander back and forth or in random directions about a small area, and you have no means of pushing them out of your way or passing through them (though later games tried to address this by having these characters speed up when you pushed against them which does help somewhat). All too often you'll get blocked in an alley and unable to move until said character decides to finally move left, or forced to follow a slowly moving character down a tight alley (the line of townsfolk in Zozo, for example).
The Pixel Remasters of FFI through VI on smart phones includes a point-and-click option, where the player can click on a square, NPC, or chest and have their characters automatically travel to that position. However, this type of movement cannot be used to have your characters travel through hidden passages on the map, forcing the player to switch back and forth between manual movement when encountering these hidden areas.

Final Fantasy I

A minor, but annoying, gameplay quirk is that any party members who end a battle inflicted with a status ailment that persists outside of battle get shuffled to the back of your party lineup. This would be nothing more than an aesthetic annoyance at worst, but Final Fantasy I also uses your party order to determine which party members are most likely to be targeted by enemies. (The ratio is 4:2:1:1, from first slot to last.) You'd best remember to swap your poisoned Warrior back up to the top slot, lest any Squishy Wizards in your party be left to fend for themselves in the crosshares.
In the NES version only, it was impossible to use SOFT potions (aka Gold Needles) in battle to remove petrification, the only way to remove petrification in battle was to have a White Mage cast SOFT (Stona). A White Mage got petrified? Tough luck, you can only heal them after battle.
In pre-Pixel Remaster versions at least, due to how status immunities work (they give immunity to the element that abilities usually use to inflict said status) enemies that inflict status effects when attacking will still inflict them even if the target is immune. Normally not that problematic, except when facing Cockatrices (Petrification) or Mindflayers (Instant Death), where the fact that immunities don't protect transcends annoyance into scrappiness.
The fact that after the midpoint of the game sorcerer enemies can both paralyze the entire party, AND their normal attack has a chance to instakill any character. Even without being ambushed, it is entirely possible to have a Total Party Kill without even having a chance to run. Made even worse by the fact that the ProRing, the item that claims to protect against instant death, only works against instant death SPELLS, not instant death attacks. These enemies were so hated for their RNG chance to kill even a max-level party with no possible response, that no normal enemy encounter like them ever appeared in any Final Fantasy game again.
The Sleep spell has some very weird mechanics underlying it, which change from version to version. In the original, enemies can wake up from sleep the same turn it's inflicted, but cannot act on the turn they wake up. In most of the remakes, if an enemy falls asleep, they must remain asleep for at least one turn, but they can act the turn they wake up. Pixel Remaster goes with the former, and does all of its checks for if enemies wake up at the end of the round instead of on the spot - which means that if you cast Sleep on the enemies, and the character who cast the spell went last in the round, you've effectively wasted their turn.

Final Fantasy II

The "Leveling" system in general. You do not gain traditional EXP from killing monsters. Instead, characters level skills based upon use. Therefore, you must use each individual magic in order to increase its level. HP works in a similar fashion— you gain more by being hit. This is even worse in the earlier versions, as a number of stats have a 1 in 5 chance of going down whenever an "opposing" stat goes up. Training up a character's Intelligence to make them a better Black Mage? Hope you're not too attached to that Stamina stat. Most egregiously the game lies about how you raise Agility - the game says it grows by running from battles, but if you do that you won't get a single point of Agility (or anything else for that matter, since battles you run from don't trigger stat changes). Agility actually grows from having high Evasion - which means characters indulging in Dual Wielding will inexplicably have much less Agility than those that use a shield. The remakes went so far out of their way to fix most of these that by Dawn of Souls, the stat reduction was axed and the pacing of stat-ups and skill learning became effectively regularized throughout the game's progression. This is near-entirely the reason why most fans will never recommend the Famicom original version of II, and for some the PS1 version either.
The fact that in pre-Dawn of Souls versions of the game most weapons and heavy armor lower the character's magic accuracy, combined with the fact that the game doesn't tell the player about the penalty. And while daggers and staves get away with minor penalties (-5% except for staves that are actually maces, for which its -20%), anything heavier than that suffers badly (spears -40%, swords and axes -50%, and bows -70%). This was removed in GBA version and then brought back in Pixel Remaster. Related is the fact that heavy armor reduces evasion (in all versions), but that at least can be countered with a good shield, and the game does tell you about it (though only if you look at the character's status screen).
The NES version files your key items in your hugely limited inventory. There's no storage system of any kind, so you can't get rid of these items once they've served their purpose—they do nothing but clog your inventory for the rest of the game. It's to the point that expert players will skip picking up the airship pass from the office in the mines in favor of using exploits to cheese their way past the Beef Gate instead, because the inventory slot is more valuable.
Trap rooms. Instead of simply having in dungeon traps, the game has it where the doorway to the next level of a dungeon is found from usually several doors, all but one being "fake" rooms that lead to small rooms where the encounter rate jumps significantly, meaning every step you take results in a battle. This is already frustrating, but the game forces you almost to the center of the room, meaning it can take four to five fights to even escape. Combined with how brutally difficult FFII is, it means a player can lose progress not because they made a mistake, but because the game is punishing them for something out of their control.
- In addition to this, many dungeon floors feature a bunch of doors at the end, one of which leads further into the dungeon, and the rest of which lead to trap rooms. There is no way of telling the correct door apart from the others.
The constant switching of the fourth party member turns the game into a far more frustrating experience due to how each character has different stats and specializations when you get them. It makes each time you gain a new one, or regain a previously playable one, time consuming because you need to make sure they have stats comparable to the three heroes.
Until a patch that was released in August of 2022, Status Effects were applied on normal enemy physical attacks in Pixel Remaster. In all previous versions, enemies only inflict status effects with normal attacks occasionally, so it's possible to deal with even nastier effects, since the chance for enemies to hit the entire party with it are low. Not so much in Pixel Remaster where, for whatever reason, enemies had near 100% chance to inflict whatever it is they inflicted. The result was that enemies that can paralyse/confuse you can very easily locked you into an inescapable Cycle of Hurting, while a simple group of Cockatrices resulted in a single-turn Total Party Kill simply because your evasion isn't high enough to dodge all hits. This essentially turned high defense/low evasion armors into Schmuck Bait, since attacks that did 0 damage still inflicted status effects. This fortunately was fixed, remedying an unintended feature.
Related to above is the fact that Esuna and Basuna need to be leveled before they can remove much of anything. In particular, Esuna needs to be level 6 before it can remove Petrification on a single character, and even higher if you want it to heal the status in multitarget, which you really want when encountering enemies that can petrify you with normal attacks.

Final Fantasy III

In the NES version, you have to spend "capacity points" in order to switch jobs, which are obtained as rewards from winning battles. The problem is that the capacity point gain from regular enemies is minuscule (something like 1 or 2 per battle, while the least expensive job change costs 8), which means constant job changes will cause you to run out quickly, and from then you're stuck with what you changed into last. The Pixel Remaster axed capacity points altogether, bringing job changing more in-line with Final Fantasy V.
The adjustment period when changing jobs in the 3D version, which replaces the capacity point system, is no better. It varies in length; as low as two for transitions between jobs of similar specialty, but up to ten if you're switching from a magic-oriented to a physical-oriented job, during which time the character has lowered stats. Combined with the fact that jobs have levels independent of character levels, it rather encourages players to lock into a handful of preferred jobs rather than sink time into experimentation.
The fact that in the NES version "Defend" and "Escape" are regular commands that are subject to "no more than 4 commands" limit. This means that certain (mostly magical) jobs are incapable of defending, while some (like Scholar or Bard) are incapable of fleeing the battle should the situation turn sour. The 3D version changes this so that every job can defend or flee.
In the NES version, attempting to flee with anyone but a Thief will cause that character's defense stat to drop all the way down to zero, meaning that if you have every member of your party try to flee while facing four or more enemies, it can very easily result in a Total Party Kill. The 3D version and the Pixel Remaster got rid of this mechanic, mercifully.
The pseudo-random turn order mechanic is widely disliked. For example, in the 3D remake, an enemy can easily get the slip on you and leave most of your party members dead before you can even retaliate. For example, if it's a Chimera Mage and it leads off with two Lightning attacks, your party is as good as dead.

Final Fantasy IV and The After Years

In the original SNES version, the inventory has a limited number of slots. All of your healing items, equipment and key items are in one place. And if that place gets filled up? Too bad. This makes inventory management a pain, as one has to repeatedly throw items away to make room for new ones, or head back to the Fat Chocobo over and over. 3D versions fixed this; Key Items are usually in their own tab, and the inventory is unlimited.
Outside of battle, healing magic only restores a set amount of HP, meaning multiple usages of Curaga or Curaja are needed to completely restore the party's HP. Later versions change the HP-amount to be dependent on the caster's Spirit attribute. This may be a deliberate choice, so as to make healing magic less efficient outside of battle.
After reaching Level 70^note, attribute bonuses are random when a character gains a level. You can get a decent amount of stats increased upon leveling up, maybe only one or two points in a specific stat, or even decrease stats. Fortunately, the DS version changed this to be based on the game's Augment Ability system, but good luck figuring that thing out without having a handy guide.
The Augment system introduced in the 3D remake is supposed to broaden your gameplay options, allowing you to use certain quality-of-life augments or straight up inherit other character's abilities when they disappear from your party for story reasons. The problem is that giving a character certain specific augments before they leave will result in new, potentialy better augments that can completely change how your team strategies work - and there's not only absolutely no indicator of who to give what, but on a first time playthrough you do not have enough augments to pass on; picking wrongly early on will waste the opportunity to get certain augments later, and you can't give multiple either if you want certain later ones. The mechanic is supposed to encourage experimentation and replayability, and you don't lose augments permanently on New Game Plus, but this is considered one of the weirdest and most annoying changes in the remake.
The process to obtain the best armor in the game (or, in the 3D version, continue one of the game's most amusing added sidequests) combines all the most loathed mechanics in the game - you need to get a Pink Tail, a 1/64 rare drop from the equally rare Flan Princess, found in the very last dungeon of the game. And you're never given the means to defend more than one or two of your party members from the all-party Berserk spell Flan Princesses cast as soon as you encounter them. The only way to speed up the grind is... with another 1/64 rare drop. Even the most ardent fans of FFIV's (otherwise rock-solid) battle mechanics find this quest too tedious to bother with.
3D versions have very annoying way of handling random drops. Instead of the game selecting for each enemy defeated in a battle their proper random drop, the game selects, for whatever reason, one enemy per battle, and only selects drop for that one which you will get. This is already annoying, as you can't get more than one item per battle and you're basically penalized for fighting more enemies at once, but if makes quests for super-rare items such as Pink Tails much worse because the number of enemies does not increase chance of drop, making them even more tedious to get.
Fleeing from battle will sometimes cause you to drop a random amount of money. Hope you leveled up enough that you don't need to run, because it'll cost you if you want to get out of a battle you can't win. This doesn't happen if you use Edge's Smoke Bomb ability, but considering how hard it is to keep MP high in this game, that just means you're trading one precious resource for another.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

The Moon Phase System. When the moon is at a certain phase, it alters a character's stats. If your main party consists of a certain warrior class, you'll be finding yourself wasting Tents until you get the moon phase you need. If that weren't enough, it changes on its own if enough time passes since the last shift, even without having your characters sleep.

Final Fantasy V

Rare steals. First, the chance of a rare steal is less than 4% (5/128, to be exact), which means you're forced to use Steal repeatedly while the enemy is trying to kill you. What's more, bosses can have rare steals, too. Didn't get it while you were fighting the boss? Too bad, that item is now gone forever. And you can only steal one item per enemy, so if you got the common steal, you'll have to restart the battle. The one bright spot is the Reset spell, which allows you to start the fight from the beginning if you miss out on the rare steal.
Rare drops are just as bad. Couple the above less-than-4% chance of obtaining it with Permanently Missable Content. Now apply this to post-battle drops, which you only have one chance to get. If you don't get it, you have to restart to your last save point and try again.
In the SNES version, you can only dash if one of your characters has the Sprint ability equipped. This requires some grinding of the Thief class (only a little, to be fair), and is a punishing loss in a game where you only have one changeable ability slot per character (unless they're a Freelancer, when they have... two) and four characters at any given time. Somewhat mitigated by Freelancers gaining all passive abilities from mastered classes, meaning if you master the thief class you'll automatically be able to Sprint even without the ability equipped, but this still means you need to commit to mastering the Thief (which takes a while) and keep said character as a Freelancer or Mimic.
The spell limitations on the battle screen. Even if a character has fully mastered one (or all) of the various mage classes, you still need to have that specific command on their menu list to use spells of that type. In theory this makes sense, but in practice, since you can easily swap an ability for the command for just long enough to use said spell, it's one acceptable break from reality that could have been done just to save having to shuffle commands and having your equipment changed just to cast a spell. Made worse by blue magic, which cannot be cast at all from the status screen. This stings especially hard since White Wind, the best healing spell in the game^note can only be cast inside combat.
Whenever you want to change a skill, the game forces you to change your equipment, generally putting on the optimal gear after the change takes effect. It makes sense when changing weapon or armor skills that most classes naturally cannot equip outside of Freelancers, but when it's not weapon- or armor-related, it gets extremely tedious knowing that you'll be forced to change your equipment every time. What makes this worse is that unlike later games, equipment with drawbacks such as the Bone Mail (makes the user undead, which means healing spells damage and cannot be revived in battle once their HP reaches 0), Thornlet (gives the HP leak status to the user), Excalipoor (always deals 1 point of damage to the target despite being listed with one of the highest base attack values in the game), and the Cursed Ring (gives the user Doom/Count status) are not excluded from the optimize mechanic, but are considered better equipment than gear that has lower stats but no drawbacks. This means if you don't want to equip them, you either have to get rid of equipment with some of, if not the highest stat values in the game, or always be prepared to manually swap it with different equipment afterwards.

Final Fantasy VI

Some of the special abilities of several characters are known to be this:
- Gau's Rage ability is quite possibly the most frustrating character-specific mechanic in the entire Final Fantasy series, as using Rages effectively is Guide Dang It! incarnate. It's frustrating to get access to, frustrating to expand, and frustrating to use. But his Rages can be powerful when used correctly, and a few builds in certain situations can make Gau into a force to be reckoned with. There's a Broken Base surrounding Gau for this reason — Gau can be brutal in the right hands, meaning it's unclear if he's a high-tier or low-tier party member. But making Gau the most effective fighter that he can be is almost universally agreed to be a huge headache.
  - Acquiring Rages means fighting on the Veldt, where you can encounter almost every enemy you've met thus far, including some boss enemies, as Random Encounters. Having Gau "Leap" at the enemy ends the battle, and then you need to continuing fighting on the Veldt until Gau randomly reappears and rejoins, now knowing the Rages of the enemies when he first used Leap and when he returned. This means a lot of fighting enemies from across the game over and over until one appears whose Rage you want to learn, then fighting more enemies until Gau returns. To add insult to injury, while you'll earn money and Magic Points on the Veldt, you don't earn XP, so you don't even get to do some Level Grinding.
  - Using the Rages runs into another set of annoyances. Gau becomes uncontrollable when he uses a Rage until the battle ends or he is KO'd. Every turn, he randomly attacks or uses a unique command. What each Rage does is never explained in-game, so you need a guide or to start keeping track yourself. There's also no rhyme or reason to which Rage does what — the Stray Cat, an unremarkable normal enemy, uses a powerful physical attack. But the Intangir, a very powerful Behemoth palette swap, instantly KO's Gau to heal a party member. Even if you do know what abilities each enemy will give, Gau will only use Attack and his unique skill every turn for the rest of the battle, and there's no way to snap him out of it besides knocking him out. Need him to do something else, like an emergency heal or Phoenix Down? Tough luck.
  - Finally, you don't have much access to the Veldt. Unless you go out of your way after leaving Narshe to return there (via a long walk across the Overworld and through previous dungeons), you won't get access again until you get the airship, which you lose after the next storyline dungeon until the end of the World of Balance. And then in the World of Ruin, its non-linear nature means you'll have to keep revisiting the Veldt to learn new Rages for Gau, going back into the boredom of finding specific enemies for him to Rage. By the time there's anything worth learning on the World of Ruin's Veldt, you've likely defeated over a hundred different enemies, so finding a specific enemy to Leap onto may take literal days of searching. Plus, all your other party members are powerhouses who can hit the damage cap with spells or their unique skills by the time you can grind for Rages on the Veldt, and they don't need to enter a Berserk state to do it. Multiple other characters are not only just as powerful, but far more predictable.
- Mog is only slightly better with his Dances then Gau is with his Rages. Like Gau, Mog enters a Berserk state when his Dance works, and he has a chance to use one of four attacks every turn. While each Dance skillset has enough versatility that they're still useful (several include a party-healing ability, a One-Hit KO move, and/or a powerful group-hitting attack), it's still random which one Mog will use each turn. It's not uncommon to see Mog using a healing ability on a party at full HP, or trying to use a Gravity-based attack on a boss (which are usually immune to such things) while he's dancing. And most of the boss enemies have unique terrains that prevent the Dance command from working anyway, so you can't use it even if you wanted to. Finally, it's a coin flip if the Dance will even work when it's used on any terrain that you're not already on (such as doing a grassland dance while fighting in a cave). It can be very annoying to try to use Dance, only for Mog to stumble and waste his turns over and over. The only reason Mog isn't a Low-Tier Letdown like Gau is because Mog can still attack and cast magic like almost everyone else outside of his dances, and Mog's stats boast surprisingly high Defense and Magic Defense in spite of lackluster offensive stats.
- Relm's Sketch ability mimics a monster's ability, which could be helpful if only most monsters didn't have her use an elemental attack they absorb or are immune to. But that happens way too often. It also hits the wrong side of the Health/Damage Asymmetry, in that it uses the monster's stats to determine damage, not Relm's, and since monsters tend to have low Strength and Magic, Sketched attacks will do pitiful damage. Not to mention if used wrong in the SNES version, Sketch can break the universe due to how badly it was programmed.
- Cyan's Bushido techniques are some of the best and strongest in the game and make him a really good party member (for strength, at least). Except that one needs to let the bar charge up to the level of technique one wants to use and the player cannot do anything while charging, making the entire party a sitting duck, even if one uses Haste. This was remedied in the iOS and Steam versions, as well as the Pixel Remaster, where you pick a technique and the bar charges on its own while you're free to attack with your other party members, making Bushido much more viable.
- Shadow randomly leaving the party. The first time in Sabin's side story is workable: Shadow won't leave unless it's between the Imperial Camp and the Phantom Train; once you're on the train, he'll stick around until you reach Barren Falls (at which point he leaves no matter what). However, nothing excuses the second trip. He joins up in Kohlingen, charging you three thousand gil to join. And from there up until you meet Ramuh, Shadow has a chance to leave after any battle. Imagine walking all the way from Kohlingen to Zozo, and as you enter town, you get into a battle after which Shadow leaves. Your choices then are to trek all the way back to Narshe to get a fourth party member then come all the way back, or traverse one of the hardest areas of the game with a party of only three people. And if you have the insane idea to recruit Shadow after Zozo and before the Opera House, he leaves during the performance, trapping you with three people all the way through the trip to Vector, another one of the hardest areas of the game. Shadow himself is a fairly solid party member, but in the early-game he's hardly worth the headache he puts you through.invoked
Having to give up a Relic slot on one character for the Sprint Shoes that allow you to move at a non-glacial pace on the map. At least you have double the amount of available slots compared to Final Fantasy V. The Playstation release just gave you the ability to sprint by holding a button, but since this rendered the Sprint Shoes The Artifact, making the shoes redundant at best and completely useless at worst, it was reverted in later remakes. The Pixel Remaster decides to marry both the Sprint Shoes and sprint ability, allowing you to go extremely (though uncontrollably) fast.
The escape mechanic, so much so that often it's not a viable option. It's surprisingly difficult to escape from most battles, as it tends to take quite a while of holding the run buttons while the enemies pick at you one by one and the damage adds up. Also, your party members escape from battle individually and leave others behind still in combat. It's easy for all your party but one to escape, leaving them to be ganged up on and quickly killed. It's also pretty useless to avoid easy fights that you don't want to spend your time on, because it's usually quicker just to kill all of the enemies than wait around for all of your characters to run away which will also just leave you underpowered later on anyway.
Buying anything from the Auction House in Jidoor. It's not that it's hard, no; getting the item you want is as simple as selecting to bid on it each time you're prompted until the host sells it to you. The frustration comes from the fact that only one randomly-selected item is put up for auction at a time, and you're not told which one until you've already committed to the lengthy, unskippable auction sequence. To add insult to injury, the pool of potential auction items also contain a few gag items you can't actually win, because a Spoiled Brat will always get his father to buy it for him for more than maximum amount of gil you can carry. Sure, it's annoying to be stuck sitting through an auction for an item you don't want but that could theoretically be of use to you, but it almost feels actively insulting that the game throws in "dummy" auctions that do nothing but waste your time. Whatever charm the exchange between the rich father and his spoiled son may have held the first time you see it will likely be long gone by the fifth. Oh yeah, and two of the game's Espers (plus a third in the GBA version onward) can only be obtained through the auction house. Good luck!
The linking of stat increases to having the right Espers equipped. Other games in the series had stats increase naturally on leveling up, but in this game the character has to be training on the right Esper to make sure they are receiving the correct stat increase. This ends up requiring so much manipulation of the subscreen menu that in a game that should take 30-40 hours, probably at least an hour of it will be constantly returning to this menu to check how close characters are to the next level, and moving around Espers between characters to receive the correct stat. It doesn't help that two of the four primary stats are near worthless due to bugs, and the HP or MP bonuses upon level up are so trivial as to be near meaningless. Combined with the fact that you ALSO need to move Espers around to train different spells on each character, and the game is a lot more fiddly than it needs to be. Additionally, any level gained for a character who doesn't have the Esper with the stat boost you want equipped at the time is a missed opportunity that you will not get back.
Equipment and Espers being stuck on whoever's got them equipped. Got an Esper you want to shuffle around, but it's equipped on someone who's not in the party? Tough luck. There's at least NPCs on the airships to let you unequip them from people who aren't in the party, but such a thing really shouldn't have been necessary. The mobile versions at least allow the player to equip already equipped Espers, while Pixel Remaster version remedies this by having the player shuffle such items around.
Winning fights in the Colosseum is a matter of trying your luck against the A.I. Roulette. Every fight in the Colosseum is a one-on-one fight between one party member of your choice and a monster. These fights would be over half as quickly if you could control your character, but you can't. Whichever character you pick also gets controlled by the computer, while you do nothing but sit there and watch. Expect to see characters cast Poisona and Remedy on themselves despite having good status, try to heal themselves at full health, and cast the lowest-level spells on an enemy that has long since passed the threshold for such a thing working. On top of that, some Artificial Stupidity is on display as well — Terra will enter into Trance and then just stand there, Mog might try to dance even though it will never work, and Sabin might use the Spiraler/Soul Spiral Blitz technique and instantly die, costing you whatever item you bet through no fault of your own. The Colosseum is the one place where Umaro, normally a Low-Tier Letdown, is considered viable, simply because Umaro can at least be trusted to act consistently.
The means of obtaining the Bahamut Magicite is an exercise in frustration. You have to defeat an enemy called Deathgaze, which will drop Bahamut when you win. But Deathgaze can only be found at a random coordinate on the map, with no way to track where he is. Imagine if the chase for Ultima Weapon in Final Fantasy VII was done when Ultima Weapon was invisible and appeared at a different spot every time, and you'll get an idea of why hunting for Deathgaze is such a pain. It's possible to go through the entire game without ever encountering Deathgaze simply because you never knew he was there. And even if you do manage to find him, it isn't enough to merely fight Deathgaze and win, as Deathgaze will escape after being attacked a few times. This means hunting for Deathgaze all over again, chipping away at his health until he's defeated. Thankfully, his health gauge doesn't replenish over time, so it's just a matter of whittling him down. Even so, it can take several hours to get Bahamut this way, owing to needing to Pixel Hunt with your airship. The Switch and PS4 versions of the Pixel Remaster solve this issue by making Deathgaze's current location appear as a ball of darkness on the map; he'll still move after each fight, but you're no longer flying around blindly hoping to bump into him.

Compilation of Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VII

The original Japanese version only allows you to manage the Materia of characters currently in your party, except at a couple of story points (e.g. before Cloud's duel with Rufus). This makes party member management into the world's dullest Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle where you can't even remember who's holding what, especially in the passages of the game where Can't Drop the Hero means you only get one flexible party slot. Since you can only swap party members at Save Points or on the Overworld, you'll also have to backtrack if you accidentally give someone on the bench a spell you need. As a result, the English version and the Final Fantasy VII International Updated Re-release add an extra menu, Exchange, that allows you see all available characters and what Materia they have equipped, and swap it around freely, even if you're nowhere near a Save Point. Cloud even lampshades this tweak in his tutorial narration, acknowledging the popular demand that led to the menu's addition and advising the player to keep it secret from those playing the vanilla game.
Summons are cool-looking, but their MP cost is far too high to compensate for what they actually do. Most of them are just strong elemental magic but three times as expensive and taking fifteen times as long to cast. Only four of the Summons in the game have much utility — Choco/Mog might cause Stop, Hades inflicts all kinds of status effects, Phoenix revives the entire party, and Knights of the Round is far-and-away the most powerful move in the game. And of those four, Phoenix is only useful in conjunction with the Final Attack Support Materia. And what with all these summons causing a massive hit to your maximum HP, it's usually not worth the trouble.
You cannot skip the Final Boss's Supernova animation. It's two minutes of waiting for a Percent Damage Attack.
The bare amounts of AP you get in the game when it comes to mastering Materia can make it a grind or limit what you can do with characters. It's no problem with magic materia, but command, summon and support materia have obnoxious amounts required to master even late game. It really stinks with support materia as you can't easily customize your characters to fulfill specific roles in battle.
After the side quest in Wutai where Yuffie steals all of the team's Materia, upon getting it all back, the player will discover it's all been jumbled up across all characters. Thanks a lot Yuffie...

Crisis Core

The impossible to dodge cutscene attacks that bosses are fond of using, especially in Hard mode. The most flagrant Hard Mode example being in mission 5-1-2 (a fight with Bahamut) where Megaflare (the cutscene attack) will kill you in one hit if you take the mission shortly after gaining access to it, in spite of the game calling its difficulty "Normal". Yes, a mission that's impossible without specifically preparing for the inevitable one hit kill by an undodgable attack is just normal....
- Even worse in the fight with the Superboss, Minerva. Yes, it's meant to be tough. But do you think an undodgeable cinematic attack that has a good chance of dealing 99999 damage AND removes your Raise status is a little broken?
The DMW system randomizes when Zack levels up, when his Materia levels up (as well as which ones level up, and how much), when he can perform Limit Breaks, and randomly heals him or gives him temporary stat buffs. While leveling up isn't entirely random^note, the ability to level up Materia and execute Limit Breaks relying on random chance is ridiculous.
All encounters are on fixed places, even if you cannot SEE them. This means you can accidentally re-enter a "conflict" as soon as you have "resolved" another, simply because you took one step in the wrong direction. It is possible to avoid MOST fixed encounters by hugging the correct ledge/wall, but some are unavoidable, especially during "open world" maps. After hours playing the game you will likely cringe every single time you hear "Activating Combat Mode!"

Final Fantasy VII Remake

In most boss battles, there are cinematic pauses that take place when the boss reaches a certain hit point threshold that transition to a new stage of the battle. The only problem is that more often than not the boss could have just become staggered and the party made use of several action gauges, spells, and/or limit breaks to take advantage, but as soon as the hit point threshold is reached, the boss temporarily becomes invulnerable to further damage until the next stage begins, and all the actions the party is in the middle of taking are squandered.
To some extent, the ban on item usage in hard mode. It increases difficulty for a certainty, but when starting on a New Game Plus, it results in an entire inventory of useless items.

Final Fantasy VIII

The Junction System has the steepest learning curve of any equipment system in a Final Fantasy title. The drab visual design of the menus does not help. What's more, enemies in the game scale in level to your characters, so it's arguable the Junction system only exists in the first place as a justification for the enemy scaling so you can technically always be stronger than the enemy. Of course, once you realize that it's also easy to realize the two systems feed into each other with no adequate reason for such a clunky and complicated system, all just so the game can justify two bad game mechanics.
The Draw System is easily exploitable, and grinding for spells is slow and painful. There's a Magic Booster system in the 2013 PC release that gives you 100 of most low and mid-level spells, but while many fans either like it or think it takes away from the challenge, others believe that its addition proves that the Draw System was poorly designed to begin with.
- Also, drawing magic, but never actually using it in combat and junctioning every spell to your stats, as monsters scale up to your level. Since the characters' levels are effectively meaningless, one can easily turn Random Encounters off, grind Triple Triad and convert any won card into spells, leading to the game being made too easy because of disc one nukes.
Triple Triad has a few rules which are disliked for various reasons. Since rules change and spread depending on where in the world you play, many players find themselves pulling their hair out dealing with scrappy rules catching on, or else going to great lengths to stop rules from spreading at all.
- There's the Random rule, which automatically selects 5 random cards for your hand, instead of allowing you to select cards manually. The problem can be mitigated considerably by Card Modding or throwing away any weak cards that come into your hand, but it's still irritating, especially if you're trying to complete the Queen of Cards sidequest (which requires you to lose specific unique cards to her).
- The Same and Plus rules increase the complexity of the game greatly, and can allow either player to turn their opponent's overwhelming advantage into a crushing defeat at the last second. Then again, there are people who love these rules for those exact reasons.
The Final Boss selects your party for you at random. Not even Squall is immune from this. And given how easy it is to swap Junctions from character to character, you probably don't have six characters' worth of spells stocked up, much less proper GF coverage. (You can prepare for this, of course, but... well.) It's possible to change your layout by killing your own members and waiting until they're "absorbed into time" and replaced with someone you want to use, but if that happens to your favorite party members, they're gone forever.
It only takes exactly 1000 EXP to level up in this game across all levels, making getting to level 100 with a character much quicker than any other FF game. However, the enemies level up as much as you do. For the poor, uneducated players who grinded to level 100 early on that learned this the hard way...
- Speaking of leveling to 100, there is the fact that characters can reach level 100 in the first place, where almost every other game in the series caps at 99. This can be a problem with a handful of end-game enemies that have Level 5 Death at their disposal, and with no further means of changing their level, the player in any battle involving them has until the count of one to kill them off, run away, or be subject to a total party kill. One silver lining is that Level 5 Death does not ignore instant death immunity, but it still means the player has to keep one Status Defense slot for Death, and it means the player cannot use Death for Status Attack (for a One-Hit Kill on normal attacks) instead.

Final Fantasy IX

The Trance system is disliked because of how uncontrollable the transformation is. It can take several hours of fighting in-game to charge up Trance, you immediately enter Trance when the meter gets full, and the gauge depletes when the battle ends. It's not a matter of if Trance will be wasted during a palythrough, it's how often it will be wasted. That's also not getting into how unbalanced the Trance abilities are between various characters; Quina just gets to use Eat on enemies with higher health and Steiner gets an attack power buff, while Eiko and Vivi get Dualcast, and Zidane becomes a god of destruction.
Quina's "Eat" ability. It instantly kills the enemy and possibly earns Quina a new ability, however it will only work if the enemy is at 1/8 of its health, a rather small window (1/4 if in Trance, but see above for how reliable that is). Oftentimes whittling down the enemy's health will result in accidentally killing it. It doesn't help that a lot of the powers can be collected from enemies when you first meet Quina, meaning you don't yet have Scan to determine how much health they have left, only figuring out when he/she says "I no can eat until it's weaker!". Luckily, a Blue Magic skill Quina learns (Matra Magic) is a HP to One move, but it comes with its own problems, as its accuracy, while not bad enough to make it unusable, doesn't guarantee a hit, and it means Quina (a party member that, by default, is as fast as Steiner) needs extra turns to attempt to hit Matra Magic, and once it hits, one more to Eat the enemy.
The card game, Tetra Master, qualifies too. Particularly because first time one plays the game is during the very beginning of the game and there's a half hour long tutorial with unlimited consequence free practice games available, and since the game doesn't come up much during the actual plot, they aren't expecting to have to win a couple of games to progress the storyline. Moreover, playing it the way it looks like it ought to be played (stronger cards beat weaker ones) doesn't help you much, because there's some kind of random element to it, to the point where even FAQ writers haven't been able to fully figure out how the mechanics work. Back when PlayOnline.com still existed, at least it revealed that strength of the cards is based off their Hexidecimal Code values. However, despite that, there is an RNG factor in the game that has such a range to it that the stats could border on meaningless. The one time you're forced to play it to progress the plot is the only time in the entire game where being good at it gets you anything besides more useless cards. Finally, the only Tetra Master card that does anything outside the minigame (which allows you to rename your party members if you show it to a specific NPC) can be found without ever playing it.
There are several segments in the game where you either do not have a healer (any time the game does not let you use Dagger, Quina and Eiko), said healer not having the ability to heal yet (Quina until halfway across Cleyra unless you somehow manage to beat an enemy several times your level), said healer being crippled due to the storyline (Dagger for half of Disk 3) or simply being in an area where magic just plain doesn't work (Oeilvert). Anytime that happens, you have to heal or revive using other means, specifically items (which, while decent early, lose effectiveness pretty quickly and, in case of Phoenix Downs in particular, only recover single-digit HP) or rare healing abilities on other characters (of which Zidane's Sacrifice kills him, Freya's Reis' Wind only grants Regen and, and Amarant's Chakra is fairly weak and only targets a single person unless he is in Trance).
The fact that being killed does not negate the Zombie status. It prevents the character from being revived, until it is removed and Remedy does not work on it, so if you forgot to bring along the appropriate item (Magic Tag) you're out of luck.
On a related note, using a Phoenix Down to revive gives that character *single-digit HP*. Hope you're quick enough to get a heal off.
Stop does not wear off with time, making it one of few games in the series where a party afflicted with Stop faces the Game Over screen. There is also a worse version of the Poison status called Venom, which combines the slow HP drain of Poison with the effect of Stop and adds a slow-MP-drain on top of that.
- Additionally, the version of Stop that is available for players to use is also essentially an instant-death spell when it's affecting a solo enemy, and winning a battle in this manner will give no experience or gil (though AP will still be awarded).
The Overly Long Fighting Animations can be quite tedious, as well as the long camera pan around the battlefield at the beginning of every random encounter. Worse, they interfere with the attack queue, leading to multiple scenarios where you'd press a command, but the opponent gets to move because they were queued during the previous attack animation without you knowing, and your attack only goes off long after you initiated the command. This is particularly frustrating with the Heat status effect, which would qualify itself since it kills you for taking any action at all, but the unintuitive attack queue means many players have wiped out after an enemy inflicted Heat in between waiting for their characters to act.
During the mid-point of the game, Dagger will frequently fail to perform actions, instead presenting you with a "Can't concentrate" message. When Garnet goes through a broken phase ^note, she becomes useless in battle. She completely loses her ability to go into Trance and has a random chance of skipping her turn, because she is incapable of focusing. It also doesn't help that the other white mage of the party has gone missing. Fortunately, you can still use Garnet's magic outside of battles. While justified based on story-related reasons, from a gameplay standpoint this renders one of the stronger mages in your party (the primary summoner at that) effectively useless.
The stealing mechanic can drive players up the wall, they're widely hated due to how luck based it can be. Most enemies carry up to 4 items to steal, ranging from common to rare and bosses, naturally, tend to hold the better items. Even with add-on abilities that increase the success rate of stealing, it still doesn't help a lot. Almost every boss has several items and the more rare ones are harder to steal. Rare items have a 16/256 success rate in being stolen and very rare items just have a 1/256 odds. ^note While the majority of the items from bosses can either be found/bought/synthesized later on, you will pull your hair out trying to get the best items early so that your characters can have stronger stats and/or learn abilities sooner. All the above is made even worse during the Hopeless Boss Fight against Beatrix since she'll automatically end the battle after a few minutes passes or if her HP is depleted, which means you lose out on any items you didn't get to steal from her. The Hilgigars is infamous among players for having its Fairy Flute being nearly impossible to steal (it has a 1/256 chance of success).

Final Fantasy X and X- 2

Final Fantasy X

There are a handful of reasons why the Catcher Chocobo is widely despised by those who've played this game. The first are the finicky controls of the Chocobo itself. When trying to turn with it using the D-Pad or Analog Stick, it does so in a fixed direction, which is outright terrible when sharp and precise turns are often needed for collecting the balloons and avoiding the oncoming birds along the course. The second reason is that the course is invisibly walled, and the Chocobo veers sharply when it tries to go out of bounds from the course. This can mean missing a balloon or inadvertently ploughing into a bird you were otherwise trying to avoid. Last but not least is the random nature of how both the balloons and birds spawn; if you're unlucky, the race will begin with most of the balloons lined up in the Trainer's path, and you'll often end up scrambling for them further into the course, specifically when the birds start to fly in.
The tutorial for Blitzball has led to many a poor first impression on an otherwise solid minigame. Instead of being put in a practice match with detailed explanations of the various mechanics and showing them in action, the player is thrust into a menu of categories that have to be selected individually. What makes this worse is the placement of the tutorial, as there is a 30-minute stretch of gameplay and cutscenes between the tutorial and the mandatory Blitzball match against the far superior Luca Goers, meaning there's a good chance the player will have forgotten how the minigame works in that span of time.
Lulu's Overdrive mechanic requiring fast rotating of the right analog stick. Any player of the original Mario Party knows that this results in blistered palms and broken controllers. And yes, this is unchanged in the PS3/PS4 version. In the PC version it is changed, just not for the better - the player has to rapidly alternate between left-right buttons, and for whatever reason it's twice as difficult. And the payoff for doing the Overdrive is not even all that useful, since the spells are powered down.
Unskippable Cutscenes. As amazing as the cutscenes are, the fact that the series is infamous for throwing bosses at the player, with no saving in-between, makes this a horrible combination. So be prepared to not only fight the same boss again, but also to watch the very long cutscene leading up to the battle. And this issue was not fixed in the HD Remaster, despite it being one of the biggest complaints of the game. When the game was finally featured at Games Done Quick 2022, the run was completed on HD Remaster PC using a mod that allows cutscenes to be skipped. According to the runners, this mod allowed them to save five and a half hours, reducing the run itself to a mere 3 hours and 54 minutes.
Bribe has an accuracy rate. It's possible in game to bribe a monster with a set amount of money and the bribe simply doesn't take. The amount of gil you pay is stored for subsequent attempts against the same fiend, meaning you can keep bribing for 1 gil until it accepts it. However, a bribe is guaranteed by paying 25 times the fiend's maximum Hit Points, but there is no in-game indication of this whatsoever. Many enemies carry valuable items that are otherwise difficult or impossible to acquire, but even then, Bribing takes an exorbitant amount of time and gil.
Making Kimarhi's Blue Magic his Overdrive has effectively rendered him one of the worst Blue Mages in the entire series as it diminishes the rate you can use it by an almost unreasonable degree, especially if you only have the Stoic Overdrive charge. It is also pretty hard to get around the fact that he just does not have that many Blue Magic spells he can use, and of those, half are of dubious utility in the mid to late game. Stone Breath, Fire Breath, Aqua Breath and Mighty Guard can be easily replicated by items and normal spells with far superior effects, and even Nova isn't all that spectacular when put up against multi-hitting Overdrives like Wakka's Attack Reels and Tidus' Blitz Ace. Compare this to Quina from Final Fantasy IX who has several pages of Blue Magic that can be learned and is cast from their MP, making it usable in every battle from start to finish.
The Escape command has a random chance of not working properly, leaving your party members to ignore the command before returning back to the fight. During normal gameplay, the chances are that you won't even realise this is even a thing let alone have it impact your game as the flee command is obtained early on and is always freely available as it does not use MP. During a no sphere grid run however where you are going to be using the escape command a lot come the mid-game, and this can easily bring forth a game over. Your only hope is that you have the relevant proof or evade and counter ability customised into your armour to survive the attack long enough to try again.
The International, PAL, and HD versions of the game have Dark Aeons, which are ridiculously powerful and require a lot of prep and grinding to stand a chance against them. Unfortunately, some of them block off areas needed to complete sidequests that would not be an issue at any point in previous versions of the game — most infamously, all of Besaid Village is blocked off by Dark Valefor, and though he is the weakest of the Dark Aeons, he is still a Superboss whose stats well exceed that of even the strongest mandatory bosses.

Final Fantasy X-2

There is a number of Scrappy Mechanics involving the Publicity Campaign sidequest in Calm Lands. The objective is to accumulate by 400 PR points for the company of your choice. This can be done in two ways: spending cash on minigames or making a pitch to random people by hitting square. The second option does not work for everyone and on top of that you have to select correct pitch for them to get maximum points, bringing on a plenty of Guide Dang It!. Thankfully correct pitches are always the same so if you do have a guide open, it's doable, though it's a still waste of time by virtue of running to correct person. However, even if you do everything perfectly you won't get enough points from that, so you're obliged to play mini-games where you either have to blow all your cash (though there is a trick that allows you to get infinite money with a bit of patience) or pray RNG is kind to you. The minigames themselves are full of strange quirks as well: Sky Slots for example will randomly skip the last selected fiend even if they time the press right, and sometimes even if you selected it the fiend after will attack the one you selected and take its place, often causing you to lose.
In the original version, Overly Long Fighting Animation applies to Dressphere changes during combat. If one wants to activate abilities on certain Garment Grids, they have to repeatedly change Dresspheres, watching the animations every time, which gets old really fast. International version (and, by extention HD Remaster) adds the option to shorten, or outright remove the animations.
Lady Luck's Reels abilities are generally quite powerful... provided you don't mess up. In must games, messing up the Slot-like abilities merely wastes the user's turn. Here? It hits the entire party with Dud, dropping a washtub on them for a whopping 75% of their current HP.
The jumping mechanic introduced into this game does not work properly. This wouldn't be so bad if A) the price for failure wasn't a two second scene of Yuna floundering whilst waving her arms about and B) the Via Infinito hadn't increased the amount of jumps in this game up to the mid-hundreds. This mechanic can get you killed too, a failed jump right next to a Mega Tonberry will see you plummeting straight into his arms with death most likely soon following.
A couple of issues pertaining to 100% Completion for the story:
- This game introduces the option to skip cutscenes, something that many FFX players sorely wished for. Unfortunately, watching these cutscenes counts for story completion, and to hit 100% you need to watch every single cutscene in its entirety; skipping a cutscene makes you forfeit the percentage you would've gotten from it, even if it's not your first time playing and you're doing a "100% in one playthrough" run or fighting a boss that gave you trouble and which has a lengthy cutscene beforehand for the whatever-th time.
- Another kicker is that at one point in the story, you are asked to choose whether to return a plot-critical item to the Youth League or New Yevon. Returning it to New Yevon will lock you out of 100% for the rest of a first playthrough, something the game does not tell you at all. Fortunately, a New Game Plus lets you pick up completion percentage that you missed, but anything you already got percentage for will not add more.

Final Fantasy XI

The "Level Down" mechanic, wherein when a player dies, they lose EXP; if they lose too much, they will actually level down. The reason this is so hated is because in most endgame missions a player is almost expected to die, sometimes multiple times, in order to complete it. Worst, the mechanic only makes sense from an MMO Fake Difficulty stand-point, in that it makes sure a player can never be truly "done" with leveling up a character, thus forcing players to play more just to make up the level(s) they've lost.
Player Versus Player, for several reasons:
- Many matches of PvP turn into 1v1 matches, even though the game is based almost entirely on party play, turning most team matches into insane free-for-alls.
- Many job combinations are horribly ill-suited for solo play in the first place. A Bard/anything will likely be turned into paste in one-on-one.
- Swapping equipment has harsh penalties, and while it's to prevent players being untargetable, the game is almost bursting with players that swap equipment all the damn time in order to perform perfectly.
- Very few players even have a large interest in PvP, and most of those people are on one server.
- And due to the lack of interest in PvP, the classes are largely unbalanced. Paladins have a large inherent advantage against melees (especially PLD/RDM) and a skilled Red Mage can beat pretty much any class.

Final Fantasy XII

AI party members hold still when charging spells, thus if you try to move through an area while gambits for your party members to cast spells are active, they'll get spread out behind you and have to run to catch up. Characters can move while charging spells, they only need to hold still once they actually cast the spell, but the AI still stays put.
The Chops sidequest in Archades. For some reason pieces of wood are considered a status symbol in Archades, and people tend to pass around chops as thanks for aid, so you have to do enough good deeds to earn enough chops to take the air cab, which will refuse to take you anywhere without chops. Thus you have to run back and forth talking to people, relaying specific messages to specific people, getting chops in thanks. With a guide it can still take half an hour, and without a guide it'll probably take double that time, since it's often counter-intuitive to figure out which messages have to be relayed to whom.^note Fortunately, the Zodiac versions reduced the required number to 3 (down from 9).
The way treasure containers work is infamously terrible. First, there's a random chance for a container to spawn or not. Then there's a chance for the container to contain gil or an item. Then the game looks at one of two potential items to be in the container. The result is that every treasure container has one of three potential treasures, if it spawns at all, and the Diamond Armlet accessory changes those contents entirely. Oh, and just because the developers hate you: some containers contain the "good" items in their normal loot pools, while the Diamond Armlets don't, so wearing it all the time to ensure good stuff will cheat you out of rare items. The Zodiac version thankfully simplifies this; containers either contain gil or an item, and the Diamond Armlet changes the item inside to randomly be a Knot of Rust or a Meteorite (or in a few end-game locations, some other item). The Zodiac version also gives certain treasure chests a 100% chance of its contents, usually an ability or equipment pieces, so wearing the Diamond Armlet won't cause you to miss out.
The Bazaar. As the Guide Dang It! entry on the main page explains, it is impossible to figure out without a guide how to unlock the various items there, or where you can get the loot items that can unlock them.
Effect Capacity. Every action save for normal attacks and some enemy-exclusive Technicks has a hidden value of 1, 2, 4, or 8 Effect Capacity. Effect Capacity basically determines how many actions can be used at once: if enough actions are being taken that the Capacity hits 8, no other actions with Capacity can be performed. While this was a necessary limitation to ease strain on the PS2's hardware by not letting too many special attacks animate at once, the developers rather obviously used it to introduce some Fake Difficulty too, as several spells and items with simple animations have high Capacities. In the late game thanks to this mechanic, get used to seeing party members charge spells, and then sit there doing nothing for several seconds while they wait for someone else's spell to finish casting. It also makes enemies with Level 3 spells deceptively difficult, as most Tier 3 spells have 4 capacity and Darkga and Graviga have 8. Finally, normal attacks don't have Effect Capacity, so in a battle with multiple enemies, one of them casting Darkga can prevent your healer from casting any healing spells while the rest of the enemy mob keeps attacking normally on top of Darkga's damage. The removal of this mechanic in the PS4 version was met with much rejoicing among players.
Summoning and using espers sounds totally badass until you see the annoying limitations they have that prevent them from being fun to use. Espers are under AI control, cannot be controlled manually, and they have their own set of gambits that cannot be adjusted. Their Limit Break is activated usually when their timer is nearly finished or if their HP gets low, but some espers have incredibly obtuse and convoluted ways of activating their special moves such as requiring both the summoner and the esper to have less than 20% of their max HP or having the summoner being afflicted with petrification. Naturally, you are never told how to find these triggers. Espers also retain their elemental weaknesses and will crumble like paper if a strong enemy exploits it. If either the summoner or the esper's HP hits zero, the esper is dismissed and you've effectively wasted a mist charge. The international and HD remaster versions of the game allows espers to be controlled by the player and their special attacks can be executed at any time, but their gambits are still set in stone.
Traps, a mechanic in this game where certain areas will have invisible traps that when you step on them will cause an effect, such as full-party Blind, Sap, Silence, Confusion, drains all your MP, rejuvenates all nearby enemies, or cause a massive explosion that will likely send your health into the red if it doesn't outright wipe your party. Traps also reset if you leave an area and come back, and the only way to avoid triggering them is by using an accessory slot on a special item to make you immune to traps, or to constantly have Float active. You can see them with the Libra status effect, but moving around traps can be tedious, especially in places with lots of traps and/or when you're trying to flee through a map to get through quickly.
Palings. A lot of high level bosses have a mechanic where they will put up a paling when their health reaches a certain threshold, making them completely immune to all damage for a fixed length of time. Even if you're over leveled, this can make for several bosses that take a lot longer to defeat than they should simply because they can become arbitrarily invincible.

Final Fantasy XIII Trilogy

Final Fantasy XIII

The fact that Transformation Is a Free Action is not observed by the characters in-battle. The first time your party switches Paradigms in a fight, the camera zooms in on each of them and they strike a pose while the enemy is still fighting. Better make sure to switch to healing before you desperately need it (or better yet, switch once immediately at the fight just to get it over with, if you think it'll take awhile)- after that, it doesn't happen again, for that battle anyway. If you are thrown airborne, the camera will also not change.
The characters will often try to turn on the spot to align themselves before they perform their actions towards their characters, which can lead to an ally dying before the healer can start casting a Cure spell, or an enemy's Stagger Meter fully draining because the character failed to attack immediately.
Each character has its own casting or attacking animation, and all of them are variable by the speed of their animations. Because time is essentially the most important factor in battle, slow characters like Sazh or Vanille can take too much time gesticulating on the spot before casting their spell, which makes them vulnerable to being interrupted by an enemy attack.
The AI script for defensive options is poorly optimized. When playing with synergists, they'll only cast one spell on you at a time, and they'll run the list rather than stick to what's most effective for the fight at hand. Medics will tend to spam cure magic when poisoned instead of using Esuna, then curing the lost amounts, and they will also prioritize healing living characters over Raising dead ones. The game's difficulty when you need an AI to handle the defensive roles can lead to Fake Difficulty because of it.
Due to the player having no direct control over the party's movements, the characters tend to either stray too far from the enemy when using melee abilities, huddle too close to their allies, or worse the Sentinel working to lure enemy attacks, and inadvertently get caught within the enemy's area-of-effect attacks.
Similarly the AI handling the buffing (synergist) and debuffing (Saboteur) roles will cast until their full selection of buffs/debuffs are cast, then sit around and do nothing. What it should do is start recasting already cast spells to refersh their duration. This greatly limits the ability of either role in the hands of an AI:
- For synergists this means that you will have to deal with your buffs wearing off multiple times during a boss fight. While simply annoying for offensive buffs it's downright deadly for defensive buffs, as being hit with a bosses hardest ability during the period that your defensive buffs are down can lead to an instant game over, meaining an AI synergist is basically signing up for Luck-Based Mission for any boss fight.
- Saboteur spells build up the break gauge, and thus a Saboteur could replace a commander as the role that builds break in your team if you lack enough paradigm roles to fit a commander in one. However, this strategy can only be used if you control the Saboteur since the AI Saboteur will wait around not casting anything after it's applied it's full range of debuffs, which allows the break gauge to drop back to 0 since the Saboteur isn't maintaining it any longer.
One of the worst mechanics in the game, even for those who like the game, is, for the first time ever in the series, the entire party loses if the leader gets KOed. So if any battle has all the enemies decide to focus on your main character, make sure to keep them at full HP or retry the battle, or at least pray to God that the party member focused on isn't the leader.
The Quake spell is the only offensive spell in the game that requires a consumable gauge (the TP gauge), which is better saved for things like Libra or summoning Eidolons. But Quake is the only way to deal Earth-elemental damage in the entire game, outside of summons. Fortunately, most enemies are not weak to Earth to begin with, but the ones that are, are often Demonic Spiders. And making use of (elemental) weaknesses makes up a big part of the staggering mechanic, which lets the party deal tons of damage. Fortunately, the sequel removes the Earth element entirely.
Customization earns quite some flak for three reasons. First, money is exceptionally hard to obtain, as battles do not drop Gil and the best drops to sell are usually held by really strong monsters, making Weapon customization difficult to do as it requires a lot of money. Second, its system of balancing EXP Multiplier and points is rather convoluted. Third, nothing in the game hints at the target time for battles being lowered the higher upgraded your weapon is. So the player can inadvertently shoot themselves in the foot by making great weapons, but not finishing battles soon enough to get 5 Stars, which results in better upgrade material being dropped.

Final Fantasy XIII-2

While it fixes a lot of the previous game's mechanics in the battle system, the added monster catching aspect is sometimes one itself. It's basically a Luck-Based Mission on whether the player gets a Monster Crystal from fighting a monster. Sometimes, the Random Number God is kind and lets you get a crystal after one or two fights, other times it will force you to fight the same enemy at least a dozen times.
The casino's slot-machine is based on actual luck, much like it would be in real life. No matter what you do, nothing really influences the chance of getting 777 and a nice pay-off - except for the machine's 'mood' - meaning the player could spend hours upon hours of dropping coins into the thing just to get a big enough pay-out to get the Lucky Coin fragment. And using the Auto-Play option for the slot-machine doesn't help much, either. Tie a rubber-band to it, go away for a few hours and check to see if you got lucky.
Inability to outrun enemies in Academia 400 AF, since enemies never despawn unless the player enters a safe zone. While it certainly shows how oppressive the area is, the fact that you still can't outrun enemies even after finishing the story there causes massive annoyance if you have to re-enter Academia for any reason.
The "Hands of Time" Temporal Rift puzzles. Do you suck at math? Yes? We have a minigame for you! Some of them have a time limit that will generate a new puzzle if it expires. And there are no fixed solutions, since the puzzles are generated, though this is mitigated by the fact that many solver applets are available. Of course, that doesn't improve the mechanic itself; it just makes it less annoying for those who don't like it. Also, there's a silver lining in that no Hands of Time puzzles turn up in the main story, so they're totally optional if you aren't going for 100% completion.
Academia 500 AF, the final dungeon of the game, caused many gamers to bite their controllers in frustration. A massive maze comprised of floating platforms where you have to rotate certain platforms to make sure you go the right way. Oh and did I mention the Proto Behemoths lurking around the place? Have fun!
Getting a complete bestiary - which means getting every rare spawing enemy (even with a Fragment Skill that increases their chance of spawning they still spawn very infrequently), along with resetting and running Academia 500 AF several times to get to that one platform that has a one-time spawn with enemies unique to it (and it's random which of the two spawns you get). It's even worse if you try to tame every tamable enemy.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

The whole game is a Timed Mission, with a hard limit of thirteen in-game days, and the clock never stops ticking. Take too long and you get an underwhelming Game Over. If you don't enjoy the high-stakes urgency, then you will hate being rushed when there is a world begging to be explored, as well as saved. There is a way to halt the clock for a few minutes, but you have to spend EP to to so.
Synthesizing and upgrading Abilities. The higher an Ability's level is, the more damage it does, so one would want to increase their strength, especially against Chocobo-Eaters and Earth-Eaters. Downside: synthesizing means you need to have multiple of the same Ability to merge them, raising their points enough so that it's ready to be leveled up. So the player needs to grind monsters for the same Ability over and over, with/without save-scumming, to get enough multiples to merge. The worst offender is Elementaga, the highest tier of the four-elemental spell, which is only dropped by the Final Boss... on Hard Mode. Thankfully, there is a Last One accessory that doubles all item drop rates at the cost of gaining 0 gil for that battle, but save-scumming may still be required.
The spawning of the Rare Forge, a traveling NPC, who sells some of the best garbs in the game. He spawns randomly each hour, in any of the four locales - with five spawn points per locale - and he cannot spawn in the locale the player's currently at. Looking for this guy on purpose will waste the limited time the game gives, so one can only hope to honestly just stumble over him at one point. And it's not uncommon to go an entire playthrough without ever knowing he exists.
The combination of the facts that enemy drops change as the game progresses, together with the fact that there are limited amount of enemies (with two exceptions). It can make synthesizing certain abilities to high level a pretty huge pain, if you kill off the needed enemy type early into the game.
The constant time limit. Every (in game) day at 6:00 you have to return to the arc (the hub). Even if you're in the middle of doing something, you WILL return to the arc. Maybe that's what the game's title refers to? And bonus points for Hope's constant talking, specifically reminding you that you have to return to the arc soon.
There's no levelling up or Crystarium in this game; you instead gain random stat boosts for completing side quests only. The only way to increase your stats is to do tons and tons of Side Quests which devolve into Fetch Quests and hunting for 20 Bear Asses over and over again. One let's player noted that this system combined with the time system demands that the player somehow grind while avoiding grinding. Compounding this, as Yahtzee pointed out, is that with the worlds so big and massive and the fetch quests having almost no way to find them out aside from talking to EVERY single person to find out, that precious time gets wasted to do a quest that Lightning may not be strong enough to complete.
Two regarding the final day - first is that there is a shop selling three very expensive garbs, that can also only be purchased here, and the shop disappears if you go any further into the final dungeon. Want to get all three garbs, and don't have enough money (and chances are, you won't)? It's Money Grinding time, using one enemy who actually does spawn in infinite numbers. The second is that there are several enemies who only appear in the final dungeon, with one of them only starting to appear near the very end of it - if the player wants to kill every single Last One for "Last One Standing" sidequest, they will have to mindlessly run around and grind enemies until said enemies run out.

Final Fantasy XIV

See here.

Final Fantasy XV

The Wait Mode, which makes the battles a lot easier and more strategic, is off by default and buried under an option which, in earlier FFs, made the game less fun. And if you turn it ON, you have to constantly move in order for the battle to go on, since Wait Mode activates when you stand still. Even worse, Libra is tied to Wait Mode, and cannot be used if it's not on.
The summoning system. Each of the summons has a specific set of conditions under which they will appear, none of which are mentioned to you at any point, but which generally involve one or more of your party being dead or in critical condition. And getting summons to appear is not as simple as holding L2 as the game prompts you to, as you have to do so for 5-10 seconds without getting hit (while Noctis is the only person standing, thus the target for the enemies and incapable of doing more than limping along while in critical condition). And even if you do all that, there's still no guarantee that any given summon will appear.
Depending on the control scheme selected, doing actions is set to the X or Circle button, which can make it a pain to pick things up or interact with the environment when you keep jumping or warping by accident.
The Regalia Type-F. For starters, you don't get it until after you've beaten the main story, so there's a good chance that you could Fast Travel to the places you need to go anyway. Unlike the other Airships, it takes damage and will cause a Game Over if you crash it. Many players crash it immediately right after they get it into a street light. It's difficult to land it without damaging it, and you can only land it on the road. The only upside is that it has infinite fuel, but considering how cheap fuel is, it's not much of an upside. Most infuriatingly, the airship also has something of an invisible border to where it can fly and it'll automatically re-direct itself back into its boundaries depending on where you are. Many a takeoff has been ruined by the airship instantly darting to the left or right as it lifts off, directly into a street light or a wall. On top of all that your customization options are more limited by the fact that the airship doesn't support full-body decals. With the later introduction of the Regalia Type-D, which carries over everything the Vanilla Regalia can equip (including obtainable bonus parts to cut fuel consumption down to near or literally nothing) and can go off-road like Chocobos to cut down on travel exponentially (while running down any wildlife in your way), the airship ends up looking like little more than a novelty.
The lack of hitstun on enemies can be really irritating thanks to the autoattack system. Rather than have enemies react to your blows and be unable to recover from them while you're comboing them, a lot of mid-to-lategame enemies will simply power through your attacks with no reaction to them. This can make your slower attacks feel obsolete, and make a lot of the bossfights feel tedious due to a lack of reaction from the bosses to your warps and other attacks. Oh, and naturally, that hitstun resistance does not apply to the player character or his party members - enemies can easily break your combos or stunlock you all day long, even if they are level 5 and your party is level 90.
- Noctis's own animation lock issues exacerbate this: attack an enemy and he'll automatically get into attack range for the specified input before going through the animation, during which you're not able to cancel out by any means typically. When your attacks are overly flashy and drawn out, however, this makes Noctis completely vulnerable to any attack. This means in mob fights of enemies, he'll be stunlocked from every other angle and be unable to hit anything beyond scratch damage because he can't even get a major attack off. Fight an enemy or boss with massive hitstun resistance, and it's all but assured they'll knock him on his ass if you try to do a combo. Notably, playing as his teammates partially breaks the game because they're less stuck in their attack animations.
When the party engages the enemy, it triggers a 'battle zone', a red-outlined area visible on the map (but not the actual world) where if you run outside of this line, you can escape the battle. Part of the issue is, this area is not fixed to the enemy, but instead fixed to the general area that the enemy spawns in. Sometimes, especially with bigger enemies fought in the late-game, such as the Malbodoom or Phalaris, the enemy itself can cross this line due to how quickly and wildly they can attack, which effectively forces the battle to end even if your party is still on top of it. Worst, if this does happen, the enemy immediately regains all its health, and you have to kite the enemy back to the middle to the spawn point and start the entire fight over again.
In accordance with the more Action-RPG oriented battle system Magic in this game in an area effect...unfortunately neither Noctis nor your AI controlled allies are completely immune to said effect (they won't take damage, but everything else will affect them just the same), making Magic awkward and difficult to use.

Final Fantasy XVI

Hard Mode being locked behind New Game Plus was seen as a very questionable design choice for a good chunk of players, as it essentially forces players who want an actual challenge to play the game over again. (Compare this to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, released in the same year as XVI — while it also gated Hard Mode behind New Game Plus, it offered "Dynamic Difficulty", which scales monsters to the player's level regardless of location or quest, making it a compromise between the two difficulties.) Games like Devil May Cry can get away with this due to being relatively short and built on being replayable - this game, a 30+ hours story driven and fairly linear RPG, is very much not.
The scoring system used in the arcade mode heavily weighs the use of Eikonic abilities over anything else, and scales up linearly, unlike Devil May Cry's dynamic scoring that famously rewards precise and steady gameplay. It doesn't matter if you're playing well, avoiding item usage or taking damage, as long as you're consistently landing your Eikonic abilities, your score will skyrocket. This has the knock-on effect of discouraging masterful play in some instances, as you being too efficient won't afford you enough time to inflate your score up to an S.
Unlike in games like XII and XV, the Mark targets for Hunts can appear any time, regardless if you've viewed the Hunt board to learn about them. This means that, while traveling in the field, you can suddenly run into Marks without any warning and no opportunity to change your ability set-up if it's unsuited for a boss battle. This is made even more frustrating by the facts that many Marks will appear in areas you're required to trek through as part of quests, ensuring you'll come across them, and if they kill you, you'll have to respawn from the nearest Obelisk, which may be a fair distance away.
Bahamut's Eikonic Ability runs counter to the game's fast-paced and aggressive style. The way it works is that when you press the O button, Clive enters a state where he begins charging up Megaflare. In this state, Clive cannot jump, attack (unless you remembered to cast the Satellite spell right beforehand, a skill you probably don't even have equipped), use items, or much of anything other than dodging. Megaflare charges extremely slowly but if you pull off a perfect dodge, it charges a full level instantly, but this leaves you at the mercy of the AI. It's not uncommon to float gently in front of enemies as they stare you down without attacking. Compared to the other Eikons, especially Odin's Eikonic Ability which is pretty much the same thing but it lets you attack and rewards aggressive gameplay, Bahamut's ability stands out for being unwieldy and situational.

Final Fantasy Tactics series

Final Fantasy Tactics

Rapha and Marach's innate skill would assign them a random number of hits to random squares within the 5-square-cross targeting zone you give them. The Random Number God being the Jerkass he is, actually hitting anything with this ability is less likely than winning the lottery. As a result, the Hydra monster class is better at their jobs than they are, both because it's easier to restrict their targetting area because their equivalent skills have no vertical tolerance while Rapha and Marach have the default 3, and because the monster's skill has higher minimum and maximum hitcounts than theirs.
The fact that support spells can miss is near-universally disliked. Especially since their accuracy can be less than an offensive spell, which doesn't make a lot of sense unless characters are trying to dodge Haste. It does, however, make some sense as a spell's effectiveness is based on the target's Faith stat.
Speaking of the Faith stat, the fact that it's a double-edged sword (as opposed to Bravery, which you can never have too much of unless you're item-hunting) can be irritating. Basically, high-Faith units both deal and take more damage with magic, which quickly goes negative-sum against multiple enemies who can dish out more magic than they can in the same amount of time. Raising a unit's natural Faith over 95 also risks them leaving your party (either to seek loftier goals in life or because your leader has become The Heretic in-story). Zero-faith units on the other hand are immune to magic... including purely-beneficial magic which can save them if they're a few turns away from dying.
That many of the Chapter 4 sidequests require you have certain characters in your party to be able to access them or else they'll be Permanently Missable Content. The worst of this is that the chain of sidequests to unlock all of the optional bonus characters in Chapter 4 require you having Mustadio, a unit you got way back in Chapter 2 with a crappy special job, while your party in the Playstation version had a very strict 16 unit limit that you'll probably already be having problems with before you even get him. So if you're one of the many players that got rid of Mustadio at any point before you can access those Chapter 4 sidequests to make room in your party, then too bad, you can't get ANY of those bonus characters.
That the Playstation version actually has a party limit of 20 units, but four of the slots are exclusively reserved for Guest units, while you never have more than two Guests at once at any point of the game, making two of those slots being Guest-exclusive completely pointless. Additionally Guests didn't even need to be in your party at all, they could have just showed up in their relevant story battles, and they can't be used in random encounter battles anyway, making it farther pointless to have them being in your party at all. Unfortunately despite the prominence of the game's modding scene, modders have not figured out a way to make the four Guest-exclusive slots usable without any bugs.
Another issue with Guests is in story battles where there are more than one involved, the amount of units you can bring into the battle is reduced, while often you would much rather use your own unit over having that extra AI-controlled Guest "helping" you (for example the infamous Dorter City Slums at the beginning of the game may not have been so bad if you didn't have Algus/Argath taking up one of your slots). The worst of this is in two battles where you have a Guest unit that is already dead and can't be revived restricting your battle slots, and in one battle where an enemy Guest is inexplicably restricting your slots.
Special characters not being able to do propositions, which is especially a problem in the Playstation version when there's enough special characters to completely fill your aforementioned 16 character party limit. So besides eliminating a way for those units to get JP without getting any EXP to help stay ahead of the Level Scaling random encounters (or to just get JP in a purely prerequisite job without having them go into battle with that job), this means if you intend to get everyone you will have to at least ditch a few of those special characters for generics to be able to keep doing propositions.
The Zodiac compatibility mechanic; each character is assigned one of the twelve Zodiac signs, and with units of certain other Zodiac signs they'll have "good" or "bad" compatibility, as well as a "best" (with opposite sex units) and "worst" (with same sex units) compatibility with one sign. With "good" compatibility attacks will deal more damage and status moves + recovery/buffing moves will have better accuracy, even moreso with "best" compatibility, and then vice versa for "bad" and "worst" compatibility. The problem is besides being a complicated mess to actually keep track of, the effect of compatibility is quite extreme (a 25% boost/drop for good/bad compatibility, and a 50% boost/drop for best/worst compatibility) and so you can find your units seemingly randomly getting hit much harder than they should be or find your unit unable to reliably inflict a status on a threatening enemy unit because of good/bad compatibility, as well as find your healer/supporter unable to properly heal/status buff one of your units because they happen to have bad/worst compatibility with each other. You can mostly ignore this mechanic and just adapt mid-battle when issues related to Zodiac compatibility arise, but it can screw you over at times, make some crucial boss fights harder because your party happened to have unindeal Zodiac signs for it, and can cripple your intended healer/support unit if you didn't carefully manage Zodiac compatibility within your party ahead of time.
Oddly enough for a tactical-RPG, the party placement portion before battles in this game is almost completely ineffective, as the player is simply given a blank grid of random squares to place their party members. Where is this on the map? Where are the enemies in relation to your position here? These are the questions that other games would answer in a better way since you usually would be able to see the rest of the map as you place your units as opposed to the complete lack of information here.
While bows give a great amount of range and power, the Archer job is hardly worth spending time in to learn their action ability, Charge, which has them stall for some time to increase their attack power. Charge targets a square, not the unit standing there, so if the unit occupying the space moves, the charged attack will find only air. Each level of charge increases the attack boost...by greatly increasing the amount of charging time, meaning that unless an enemy is halted on that specific square for a significant amount of time, you're not getting any use out of this skill.
Like Charge, most offensive spells have a charge time which makes them similarly (and literally) hit-or-miss. While spells can be targeted at a unit instead of a tile, the AI has a devious tendency to send targeted units straight towards your army so that your own units get caught in the blast radius. And no, you can't cancel a spell in the middle of casting to prevent this, at least not without harming the caster. This ironically makes single-tile spells like Holy and Ultima more useful than herd-hitting spells because they don't have the risk of collateral damage, even though this artillery-like property is the main reason why spells have a charge up time in the first place.
The Dragoon's Jump ability. While the ability itself is VERY useful and can be gauged with a minor trick (don't target anyone whose CT currently sits at 50 or above) as to its success, learning the individual skills that increase its range are useless wastes of JP. In fact, the only necessity is to save up enough JP to get the furthest and highest jump distances, making every other individual boost meaningless
Meliadoul in the PS1 version. Her abilities are awesome and ranged versions of Knight skills. There are two problems with this. For one, Orlandeau already knows them - and more. Two, they only work if there is a piece of equipment to break (Meaning no using them on Lucavi, even if most of your opponents are humans). This meant that Meliadoul was only really useful for giving her the Javelin II and attacking. For this reason the PSP version rescued her from the scrappy heap by letting them be used on monsters.
Using the "Optimise Equipment" button will often put things such as Axes or purses on units, simply because the game will determine them to be the most powerful weapon the character can use. Additionally, it prioritises attack and defence.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

The law system can really piss people off. Minor infractions will earn a unit a yellow card, which resets their JP to zero, and major infractions (e.g. killing a monster with an Ice spell if Ice, Black Magic, and/or Dmg2 Animal are illegal) sees them red carded and hauled off to jail. Though canny players can turn it to their advantage sometimes (notably, waiting for Charm to be illegal makes the second Totema fight a complete joke), the presence of enemies with red-card immunity puts a sour taste in everyone's collective mouth.
- One especially brutal side-effect of this is that if Marche is jailed as a result of a major infraction, likely an accident as a result of the player forgetting the current laws, it results in an immediate Game Over.
  - This one wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that if Marche is yellow-carded, he can serve a sentence to get it removed by allowing himself to be jailed, which halts clan activity for a while (about a week or so). This can turn into a nasty surprise for players who are familiar with this fact and expected it to be the case if he is jailed during battle.
- Another effect is that at the end of missions, the player is given a tally of each yellow and red card earned during the battle and some sort of penalty as a result. Yellow cards aren't so bad, but red cards earned often result in very steep penalties. These can range from the offending unit gaining absolutely no AP from the battle, a massive fine, permanent stat downs, or even some of your rare equipment being confiscated. It can be heartbreaking to finish a difficult battle made all the more difficult by the harsh laws, only to either gain nothing from it, being made weaker, or see your rare equipment being taken and lost forever. And sure enough, these kinds of penalties occur for EVERY card you collect from violations, so you better pay careful attention in every battle....
One law specifically forbids you from damaging monsters. Obviously, this is a significant advantage to the computer side, since many missions pit you against groups that consist entirely of monsters, which makes the battle impossible to win if you don't have an Antilaw that can negate it.
Some laws forbid certain weapons. Lack of weapon variety and translation issues combine to make it nearly-impossible to tell if the particular variety of sword you want to attack with happens to be legal at the moment.
Mission Items. A number of them seem to have stat bonuses or special effects such as increase an element's power when taken into battle...in theory, as chances are, you probably won't notice too much of a noticeable effect compared to simply ignoring it and playing without mission items. There are several items that are especially valuable, however, such as the one that grant doubled AP for everyone involved in a mission, the Ally Finders that offer better recruits seeking to join your party (assuming you have the available space for them), or especially the special items that will unlock secret characters seeking to join your team, but beyond these few, mission items don't really play as much of a role as you'd think.
On a similar note to the above, the way the missions are handled in general is rough on players, as there are seemingly arbitrary rules governing what missions appear at what time. Quite often, a player will see missions they CANNOT take, typically due to not having a requisite mission item, well before the quest that grants said mission item becomes available over half the game later. Sometimes even then, due to the unwritten rules that have missions shuffle around constantly, the player may even gain said mission item only for the mission they needed it for to simply disappear out of the pub's list. Needless to say, the mission shuffling is aggravating to say the least.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2

Laws, again.
- Specifically certain laws that you may end up violating by an unavoidable accident. Namely, "no damage above X, no hitting enemies more than 1 square away, or no critical hits" which you will end up breaking if you accidentally score a Critical Hit because you'll deal more damage than you expected to, will knock the opponent away counting the attack as damaging multiple squares away, or break the law for the Critical itself. Or the No Knockbacks law. Or the No Solitude law, if that was the only character next to you. Fortunately, the penalty is generally less severe depending on how you look at it (instead of characters potentially being arrested, removing them from the battle and forcing you to pay bail to get them out), you are simply restricted from reviving downed units for the rest of the battle. That way, if you do break the law, you can just go all out and ignore the laws for the rest of the fight.
- Many battles have enemies that are scripted to have one or two turns right at the beginning of the battle. Brightmoon Tor has enemies that cast Haste on themselves, doubling the number. One battle combines this with an Escort Mission to create one of the most insulting luck-based missions in video game history.
- The fact that your units begin with 0 MP. On the plus side, this makes Damage>MP much less useful, since you don't have to deplete all the enemies' MP to hurt them. On the minus side, this means that unlike most games, your spellcasters will have to wait or use an MP-restoring item to use their best spells.

Others

Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light
- The battle system lets you control what action your characters take, but not which target it will be done to. Do you want to gang up on a Cowpel with physical and magical attacks? Sorry, you can't. Physical attacks always go for the left-most and magic the right-most enemy. Want your White Mage to heal your half-dead tank? They will only heal the one with the least HP, even if said character has barely a scratch on them. Want to cure that petrified party member with Esuna/Remedy? Nope, let's heal someone who is poisoned, and can act.
- The Crown upgrade system. The only way to learn new abilities is by upgrading the crowns with gems, which are only dropped by monsters. Every Level 2 upgrade requires an Amethyst (which you only have a limited supply in the first half of the game) and Level 3 upgrades requires a Diamond (which cannot be found until the last third of the game). And if you upgrade a crown, only the character that did so will benefit from it.
- The limited inventory from older games returns here. And to make it even worse, the characters inventory is separate (which means you have less inventory space when your party is separated), consumables do not stack, any equipment that is actually worn stays in the inventory and takes up space, you also have to carry magic tomes in the inventory, which also take up space, and so on. The only good thing is that gems and key items don't reside in the inventory.
- The fact that enemies do not drop money, which means you have to choose between using gems to level up Crowns or selling them for cash.
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius
- Dispelling one's party is a frustrating task due to requiring you to target a party member in order to do it. Not only does the game not tell you that you can do that in the first place, but you can't just pick a target and cast Dispel. Instead, you must cast another spell then target yourself between animations, meaning that you need a party member with Dualcast to even try dispelling yourself. Then depending on the sensitivity of one's touchscreen this is anywhere between easy to flat out impossible because of lag. Most people opt to attack themselves with an attack that also has a dispel effect rather than deal with the nuisance.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
- The bonus system was basically how the player knew what they had to do to obtain the most points in a given level. Lot of issues with it.
  - A: The bonuses can be anything. They can be something simple as "Kill monsters" or they could be hell on earth such as "Don't use magic". Woe be unto you if you're in a area that requires Gravity or Holy magic only to get the latter.
  - B: The only way to see the bonus was the GBA-Link cable. While it can be easily moot in a multiplayer setting, it makes no sense for single players to be stuck with the restriction. If you don't have the extra hardware; you can't see your bonuses for the level at all, which badly screws the player over.
  - C: Sometimes, having too many points in a given set can be just as bad as having too few, as certain artifacts won't show up if you're over the amount of points necessary to obtain the artifact.
- Mog being the bucket Moogle isn't a problem unless you have to visit the hotter areas in which he'll tire faster than usual (even if you shave him), forcing you to balance the bucket duties along with the really nasty enemies of the area. It doesn't take long for Mog to recover (5 seconds at most by most accounts), but then you wonder why they bothered letting it tire out in the first place, as it's a real pace-breaker.
- For some reason in the remastered version's multiplayer, only the host player will get credit for completing the area. It forces players into replaying the same area up to four times with different players hosting in order to get the credit for completing it and being able to proceed.

Scrappy Mechanic / Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

Final Fantasy VII

Crisis Core

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X-2

Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Final Fantasy Tactics A2

Others

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