This topic is a bit of an oddball flavour. See, many games are thought to be mechanical masterpieces, having a great feel, UI, and more.

Not all games are that.

Let me example this:

Glover: Allowing you to visit the tutorial anytime, so the player isn't left completely out of sorts after a play lapse.

I don't blame you if you think Glover isn't a game worthy of a second playthough. The platforming is precarious at best, the game is a literal escort quest the entire time, and the OST sounds like this.

Wait, that last one is a good thing. Give me those lo-fi beats to study to, please. Point is, aside from having a nice OST, the one thing that Glover did right, was as I typed previously. Being able to engage the tutorial anytime would help games like Sekiro and other such games that may have a many month lapse between sessions.


So, what's your example of a game that did one or more things right that you think should be more commonplace?

Dragon Quest 9: A character who dies during a battle still gets XP at the end of it. (In fact, when I first beat the game, my main character was dead at the end. She gained enough XP to level up, but didn't actually level because you need to be alive to level (but would level up after any battle). The game revived her for the ending with 1 HP, so after reloading, my main character was alive, and with more XP than needed to level up.) (With that said, one thing that the game does very wrong is giving higher leveled characters a bigger share of the XP; this exacerbates level differences and makes leveling up a new class for a character not as fun as it should be.)

SaGa Frontier 2: Similar to Dragon Quest 9, being dead at the end of the battle doesn't prevent the character from getting stat increases.

Just remembered another one:

Baldur's Gate 2: Every single multi-class combination has some nice synergy, some advantage that a single class character doesn't get. Yes, even Cleric/Mage (put cleric spells in sequencers or contingency). Yes, even Cleric/Thief (Draw Upon Holy Might boosts Dexterity, improving many of the character's thief abilities).

Final Fantasy 5 and later: Quite often, when a character leaves your party, you get the character's equipment back. It's not always done consistently (in FF7, the character's weapon and armor aren't returned to you, though their accessory and equipped materia are), but it is still much better than the situation in FF2 and FF4 where the equipment on the character is lost forever. (Well, and one part in FF6 where leaving a certain dungeon before completing it results in a certain character taking their equipment and magicite with them, making them unavailable until you go back to that dungeon.)

Edit: Why the low rating? This is getting very frustrating.

While your reply wasn't quite in the spirit of my post (I was seeking otherwise low rated games that only had a single standout feature, I do understand these are features that should be in more games.

The not well thought of Master of Orion III has an excellent 3D map, which you can turn and twist to better see how the star systems are placed relative to each other. I understand that it was copied from elsewhere but MoO3 is the only one I personally have seen it in.

I loved how in Sleeping Dogs, when you found a secret or an item for a collection, it would show on the map where you found it, so when looking for the others, you wouldn't end up looking in the same spot. For someone like me who has a terrible memory, it's an absolute godsend and made getting 100% collecting much easier, haha.

I think Ascendancy was the first 4X game that did that.
(Also, I actually like MoO3)

It's worth noting that Baldur's Gate 2, a game I mention in my post, is a game I consider to not be that good.

Also, I mention Final Fantasy 7, which is another game I don't consider good.

SaGa Frontier 2 is a game I consider good, but other people do not.

Ascendancy (as neat as it was) wasn't the first to do this.
The first incarnation of Star Control had the rotating star group thing, but it only rotated around a single (vertical) axis. And it was always moving.
Took some getting used to.
Whether Star Control counts as 4x or not is left as an exercise for you own pondering.

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I'll go back to Master of Orion III for the thread, and say that as a game it had many flaws.
But the one thing that always stood out to me as brilliant both in concept and execution, was the terraforming.

Basing environmental changes on temperature and atmoshperic pressure rather than discrete classifications was good.
Having everyone in the game have different values of 'optimal' was great.
Visualising the whole thing as concetric rings on a graph was :chef_kiss:

I've never seen a game do anything like this before or since, and yet it's such a great system.
There's a possibility that Stars in Shadow might be going down a similar-ish road at some point, and that would be lovely.

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M.A.X.

A mediocre but mildly enjoyable turn-based strategy game, with a decent AI to play against.
Beset with issues, not least being a bit too spicy for the DOS/4GW memory extender to handle, causing crashes once the game gets lots of units online. (Hint: Use DOS/32A)

But inside this is a dual upgrade system that is absolutely great.
The two ways of upgrading your units are:

The quick way
Use a surveyor to locate gold deposits, and build a mining station to extract them.
Build a refinery to process the mined gold into bitcoins or w/ever (I don't know how spacemoney works).
Spend this money on upgrading a single stat on one unit type.
The bigger a difference the upgrade would make, the more expensive it is to buy. But as soon as you buy the upgrade it goes into effect and any new units of that type built will have the better stat.

The long way
Build a habitat structure, then research labs.
Set your research to a specific stat to upgrade, and wait for the turn timer to count down.
Each lab adds +1 research team which you can spread over multiple projects, or pile them all up for reduced timers.
When the research completes, every unit and structure you build from now on will have that upgrade.

In both cases, old units can be taken back to a depot to upgrade them to the new standard, while structures can be upgraded in place.
And all that's required for both is access to raw materials.
There's nothing stopping you from doing both at the same time either.

Quest 64 is generally disliked because it lacks features that were considered standard in RPGs at the time (no equipment, no shops or currency), and there's issues like getting turned around in dungeons as a result of random encounters. However, one thing I feel it did right is that it did not use cutscenes. JRPGs of the time would tend to get overloaded with cutscenes (just look at any of the PSX Final Fantasy games, all 3 of which have excessive cutscenes), yet Quest 64 lacks them, allowing one to actually play the game. (Well, once one walks out of the monastery, of course.)

I could also compare the overworld areas to those of Dragon Quest 8, a game that was well liked for its overworld. (Worth noting that I consider DQ8 to be one of the weaker games in its series, however.)

Crystalis (GBC):
* This particular version of the game messed up a lot of stuff, but there is one change that I would consider an improvement. You no longer need to be a minimum level to damage a boss. In fact, I've been able to beat the GBC version at level 14 or so, while it is impossible to beat the NES version without leveling up all the way to the cap of 16. (If you try, you'll reach a boss that you can't deal any damage to, and that boss must be defeated to reach the final area.)

Speaking of, Ascendancy is a game that nails alien design really well, but just about misses on everything else.