The company/staff? Franchise? graphics? gameplay? story? Characters? Which is it?
Oh yes, I care oh so much about who made my games. I must know who created the little green pixel in the bottom left hand corner of the final area of the game.
Good story, cool characters and soild gameplay. Excellent music doesn’t hurt, either. 
My my, arent we punchy.
I think the most important element of an RPG is it’s ability to not attract people like you into the genre who will inevitably wander onto RPG forums and post topics that have been done a trillion times before already.
Aside from that, I like RPGs that don’t have long, horribly tedius dungeons that are just exausting to go through. Like underground mazes with only a small circle of light around your character, with random encounters not disabled. Fun fun.
Sad. I would’ve thought a fellow dream theater fan would be more hospitable.
No matter what, certain threads are bound to repeat themselves. Another “n00b” or even established member is gonna post it again. Such is life on a BB. Deal with it.
hades has more pms than i do
I like Dream Theater. You’re not Dream Theater.
And I haven’t had to deal with it from many of the other newbies in the past 5 years, so your argument is kinda sorta flawed.
Stop flaming the guy hades. Hes new. He can ask whatever he wants. If you dont like the thread, dont post in it.
Meh, whatever.
Thats because you were banned for a good long time. So you didnt have to “deal” with anything.
But yeah Hades has a point hidden somewhere in his posts, see if you can find it 
Battle system!
This is why I dislike most Final Fantasy games (or at least, never rate them really really high in my personal RPG list) - every single one of them have the menu battling system. While this is okay for Tactics games, it’s terrible, <i>absolutely terrible</i> for a normal RPG. I don’t want to tell my character to do something by selecting words on a menu, I want it to convert into a sort of fighting game where I control the character directly. That’s what makes RPGs fun for me.
But music is important too. Can’t have a good RPG without a nice varied soundtrack.
Orian, don’t troll. Hades, you don’t have to ‘deal’ with anything, cos no one FORCES you to read a thread, and no one FORCES you to post after you read it. It’s not gonna have a dramatic impact on your life, so don’t go saying you’re really ‘dealing’ with anything 
Cless, games like that are also really easy. I’ve never met a person who thought ToD, ToD2, or SO2 was particularly hard. They are all just kinda mashing games.
I find button-mashing both much more challenging and entertaining than choosing a correct combinations of rigidly defined actions from a list of commands.
SO2 had some hard parts if you were not excessively leveled, but yeah you gotta point. Alot of mainstream RPG players dont have the talent to decently play fighting games. Hell alot of people probably had trouble with Sabin’s Blitz moves.
Cless, you’ve obviously never played 7th Saga then
Oh shit good point SG. I had totally forgotten about GOD FORSAKENLY HARD 7th Saga. That game is such a bitch, and if you level then so do your evil enemies, and sometimes your partners just randomly turn on you, either A murdering you and taking your shit, or B leaving you sorely beaten but barely alive, when ANOTHER potential partner kicks you in the teeth.
I like an RPG that is innovative in the points it tries to advocate. An RPG that tries to center around fighting (say, most action-RPGs) but has a sub-par battle system will simply be not that good. If the main point of the game is uninteresting, how can you be interested in the little points?
If there’s no real innovation, I go for gameplay. The story might be really fucking great, but if it’s a repeat of Xenogears’ second disk I’m setting the game on fire.
Yeah I have, but that’s still menu battling
Edit: AND! There’s a Hard mode for both Tales of Destiny II AND Tales of Phantasia.
It’s still strong hard.