the basic problem i have with jrpgs is typically the only interesting challenge is in boss battles but a large % of your time is usually spent on "regular enemy" battles that carry no risk/challenge or interest of any kind. in older jrpgs these battles were meant to gradually grind you down over the course of a dungeon (attrition) so the individual battles weren't a challenge but the dungeon overall could be a resource management challenge. but most newer (as in, like, the last 20 years) jrpgs tend to give out magic and items and such so freely there's no meaningful attrition. which is understandable as while attrition does work, it kind of has an inherently narrow appeal (slowly depleting resources and having to start the dungeon all over if you lose are just less accessibly entertaining than fast paced "can I heal in time" boss battles). but they still have the regular enemy battles which are pointless without attrition.
incidentally i thought the world ends with you (with its chain battles) and ff13 (with how it completely dispenses with MP etc. so it doesn't even pretend to have attrition, but instead the battle system is designed around the challenge being winning the battle *quickly*) were interesting stabs at finding a new approach/way out from this problem.
This is exactly why I took a break from Resonance of Fate. I may or may not go back to it, but if I do there'll be Twitch streams or Youtube or podcasts playing in the background.
The boss fights were actually interesting, but fighting regular fights just became tedious, as innovative as the battle system is, you do end up mindlessly executing the identical routine in every fight on the way to the boss and then back out of the dungeon again (pure padding). It was just tiring. But this has been my feeling on JRPGs for a long, long time. It works when the dungeons are as engaging as an average dungeon crawler's dungeon's are, with puzzles and good reasons to explore, but the regular battles in most JRPGs themselves just stop being interesting very quickly. Every bit of wasted time starts to frustrate at that point, like the battle screen transitions, and attack animations, drawn out spell effects, too frequent encounters, etc.
