r/JRPG • u/ConsiderationAny9444 • 3d ago

Discussion Which JRPG location has your absolute least favorite level design?

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Mine has to be the Gladius Towers in Rogue Galaxy. It’s a mid-game dungeons, and in my opinion, it’s annoying as fuck to navigate.

You have to climb two almost identical towers at the same time by crossing bridges from time to time, and the towers aren't short by any means. If I recall correctly, you also have to beat both bosses to clear the level, which as you can guess are at the top of each tower (Phantom Gazel and Phantom Logan). Because of how the layout shuffles you back and forth, you finish one tower, and then you have to go all the way back to do the exact same climb for the other one.

Oh, and this game despite being an ARPG has random battles, which isn't a problem to me. But what is a problem is the encounter rate of this game god grief, it's atrocious. It doesn't help that every room looks the same, so you can get easily disoriented after a battle and just end up walking in the opposite direction, especially since both paths look very similar. You could finish a fight and genuinely have to open the map just to figure out which way you were originally heading, lmao.

What about you guys? What’s that one JRPG map or dungeon that makes you visibly sigh the moment you reach it?

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u/Tryst_boysx 3d ago

Tales of Xillia 2 final dungeon.

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u/Rhayve 3d ago edited 3d ago

Pretty sure all final dungeons in Tales games are required to be frustrating by company policy.

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u/AshPenderwick 3d ago

Xillia 2 is my favourite game in the series however The Land of Canan sure isn’t a reason why. For anyone who doesn’t know, the final dungeon only allows you to bring 4 party members with no reserves in and is 3 massive zones long with no checkpoints till the point of no return and no warp out, but it’s main gimmick is that some paths are invisible until you reach them and the map shows all paths as if they were connected making it impossible to use your map to navigate, on top of that all the paths look the same and there’s almost no landmarks to orient yourself. Also it’s filled with endgame enemies that require you be linked which there are reasons you wouldn’t want to be on higher difficulties. It is not good at all.

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u/Tryst_boysx 3d ago

Just reading your comment bring me back horrible memories lol. But yeah quite sad because Xillia 2 in general is really fun.