>>57266783Millennial here ('89), I generally prefer random encounters, though I wish more RPGs had a grace period after each fight, a certain distance you have to move before RNG kicks in and starts rolling for your next fight.
I 100% prefer random encounters in Pokemon since it's fine 99.9% of the time, the only downside being caves since you're rolling for every single fucking tile in the entire place, and caves in most Pokemon games have shit for variety, like fighting literal thousands of Geodude and Zubat in gen 1. Plus random encounters means it's harder to bumrush the game in easy mode, running around only fighting Water types because your lead is an Electric type and one-shotting everything.
I guess I also hate that non-random encounters in newer RPGs just tricks you into running past any fight that feels "inconvenient", which can often lead players into skipping so many fights that they get underleveled quick, then you get the catch-22 of "fights are too long and you skip them because you're underleveled, you're underleveled because fights are too long because you skip them". I mean Pokemon's easy all the way through, but that last statement was more about JRPGs in general.
>>57266788This. It's also why so many people just watch streamers of games rather than playing them themselves, why buy a game and UGH, PLAY it for days, when you can just watch some funny streamer play and beat it in a heavily-cut 1 hour video?
The games industry wanted to pull in a "wider audience" and making games so casual that they ended up getting casuals that are SO casual that they have no interest in "playing" games, which pushed most "real gamers" to indie games or out of vidya entirely.
Now the vidya industry entirely relies on the luck of the draw, not knowing what the normalfags will give two fucks about at any given point, like how every popular game gets an AAA knockoff a few years later, often missing the fad entirely and flopping.
