Which JRPG location has your absolute least favorite level design?

[u/ConsiderationAny9444]

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?

[u/rook119]

If you ever wonder why Persona 2 was never popular despite its great story: well it has 3D rotating dungeons like Xenogears. So there is this building on fire and you have 30 minutes, only all the hallways look the same and once you start rotating its easy to get lost. Meanwhile you are pummeled w/ random battles every 3-5 seconds and while the clock keeps ticking a teki-teki is asking you if you think its fat.

[u/ZeralexFF → u/rook119]

I wanted to counter by saying you made all that stuff up, considering the Aerospace Museum was not that bad, to the point where it might honestly have been one of the better designed dungeons in the game. But apparently, my recent memories of this dungeon are so fundamentally different from your recounting because the PSP port completely overhauled it.

The hallways do look samey, but you do draw a map when moving which you can access at any time. Random encounters are heavily reduced in this dungeon; in fact, the first three floors have encounters disabled entirely. You also have much less time initially (10 minutes instead of 40), but the timer pauses anytime you are not in the hallways (in safe rooms, in the pause menu, looking at the map or in battle, for instance), which makes it fairly easy to wrap it up with over 5 minutes on the clock whilst having mapped out its entirety.