Glad that people like you are the minority or we might get more abominations like P3Ps menu based bullshit.
I wish more people realized that having to run up to every single NPC every chapter and tap through some meaningless dialog in hopes it might have changed to give them a quest is terrible design.
There are some easy fixes:
1) Put exclamation points over all characters with new things to say.
2) Color code #1 to indicate characters have either dialog, rewards, or quests.
3) Remove all chests from NPC houses. Stop making me steal from the people being nice to me.
But ultimately all towns, even the ones you run around, are just glorified menus. It's just that you need to spend 10 or 20 seconds (or more) running from the 'armor store' to the 'weapon store' rather than simply hitting the down button once. There are fixed options (stores, quest givers, dialog/background flavor, etc) on a visual / movement based menu. Rather than hitting 'down' once to get to the next option, you're using an analog stick to run to it.
I realize this is a bit dismissive of the 'immersion' of running around town, but i'm just stating it because it's also important to recognize. Adding run time between options is just that. If some players achieve immersion though that, fantastic for them, but it's not hard to understand that others might just want to get to the point.
Likewise, I understand that some people like to chat with everyone in town. It would help, though, if more games had far superior dialog. In most games, it's just some brain dead text that echos your current quest:
ie, if your next goal is clearing a haunted house, you might talk to the lady by the well and get:
"Did you hear the house on the hill was haunted?"
click x
"So scary!"
click x
"I hope someone does something about it."
click x
I'm sure some games do it better than others. But many do it terribly, so it's also hopefully easy to understand why it could get annoying.
Ultimately, every time I hit a town in games like that, I sigh because I know I'm about to spend an hour exploring every nook and cranny, talking to everyone, and at the end of it I might have 2 health potions, 300 gold, and 2 quests to show for it.
However, this would really hurt the sense of the world for me. P4G felt more alive than P3P by far, even if that life made it far more tedious. I don't know what I actually want more. I also agree that the minigame of "talk to every villager, check every set of drawers" in RPGs is a load of shit, but I'm not really sure how you could get around that without killing how alive the world feels.
It would go far to do some of the things I suggested.
It's hard to fix. The more you make it 'lively' the more tedious it becomes -- for example, having villagers walk around and do their daily thing (go to work, go to bed, etc) the more you then have to do extra stuff just to talk to them. That is, it sounds cool on paper until you realize you now don't know where the people are and need to spend more time chasing them down. Iirc, dqviii had some of that that in a simple way -- people went to bed at night and everything closed. Cool, that adds immersion. But from a gameplay perspective, that just means whenever i need to talk to people i have to go run to an inn first and sleep till morning.
i don't really have a solution -- perhaps jrpgs could learn a bit from the open world games? That is, in an open world game you effectively know nothing matters unless you hit the next 'event icon'. npcs do their thing, but if they have a quest they're marked. You see people running around and living and existing. But all 'key information' will be given to you when you hit the next 'event' icon. I'm not saying it needs to be exactly like that, but perhaps something can be learned from it. I shouldn't need to go talk to the kid sitting in his bedroom 'just in case' he has something vital to say.
By making both available at the same time. You could freely move around in GUST's games, but they also leave a choice to open up a menu and instantly jump to your desired direction. You also don't need to rampage into people's house for loot since there is nothing.
The solution shouldn't always be "remove anything I don't like".
Quick travel is almost always nice. i don't necessarily agree with your second sentence though -- some game elements are boring/bland/bad. I wasn't saying 'remove it all', i was saying i wish more/all games did so. And I do. i don't need to hide behind that... it's silly to mince words when it's perfectly true that i wish I never had to search another villager's house for chests, ever.
I didn't think I wanted menu based towns until I tried them. I still appreciate PSX Final Fantasy towns but for the most part running around like a dumbass isn't enjoyable. Freedom Wars did it very well though, I wish all JRPGs did that. Free roam if you want, fast travel if you don't, and also current objective markers right on the fast travel so you can zip right to the story.
If there's two things almost every JRPG should have IMO, it's that system and the visual novel style pause/auto advance/rewind/skip dialog system. Also ideally the VN style "save ANYWHERE, even mid conversation" thing.
agreed with all of the above. FW got a lot of that right.