I’m in the “if I can’t avoid them, I’m not playing the game long” camp.

I don’t hate them, and they can be fun. But most of the games that do them make them impossible to bypass. Like others have already said, when you’re questing, they just derail the gameplay experience. There’s times that’s okay, but if a game has them often enough, it ends up making me hate the game and quit.

It’s why I don’t go back an replay the final fantasy stuff.

my favorites were in the fallout series, if you were good, bad guys came, if you were bad, good guys came. nice random fights in new places.

even in BOTW the ninjas showed up periodically

I think there’s better patterns RPGs can use for them.

A lot of games now just put them wandering the world, and touching/attacking them prompts combat. Then, the game needs to invent various motivations for you to actually want to attack the enemy.

In a lot of games, they’re just genuinely in the way through tight corridors to a destination. A better approach can be to associate some kind of minor quest reward to directly pursuing the enemies.

But, then you get the problem that a lot of RPGs just have no interesting decisions to make in combat. And, participating in combat can lead to a slow wearing down of the party’s mana points, or the game’s equivalent. In many games, you only want to use the basic cure spell and auto-attack because you’ll survive fewer fights without mana rationing. It becomes counter-intuitive and less fun.

Some games resolve this well. Cosmic Star Heroine for instance, a short indie JRPG, heals you after every fight, and each combat is uniquely scripted in for pacing much like Chrono Triggwr.

I’ve come around to really liking them. In short, they vastly improve dungeons in my opinion.

Most RPGs don’t manage to create interesting battles outside of boss fights. Heck, an increasing amount of RPGs fails to create any kind of challange. However, random encounter can add another layer to dungeons: resource management. You have to plan out how to tackle fights in order to get through the dungeons with your limited items/MP - do you sacrifice more HP or do you go for your strongest attacks? How much exploration can you get in? Do you need to be extra careful and plan for stronger rare encounters? Maybe even plan around lvl up healing.

Sadly, this layer is easily removed. Overworld encounters? Just dodge everything. Adjustable encounters? Grind just enough, go heal and disable encounters. Non-challanging fights? Just use basic attacks. Healing stations? No need to plan anymore. Ideally, the dungeons provides no healing at all - especially not before encountering the boss.

If you’re interested in a game with great dungeons, I’d recommend every single Etrian Odyssey.

I think that random encounters can be done well, but they’re often not done well.

I like that they can be a way to give feelings of attrition when travelling through long areas.

I personally don’t mind them, but I personally think the best kinds of random encounters are ones like pokemon randomizers where you step in the grass in a modded gen 3 game with every single pokemon in existence in it and it randomly pulls from the list of 1000+ mons in order to give you a feeling of true randomness in team building. Especially since you aren’t able to predict which creatures you will get.

Having a random table containing only a few different encounters isn’t anywhere near as fun and exciting as randomly having gods spawn as your enemy as a beginner in a randomized game followed by the weakest creatures in the game a moment later.

They’re not the worst thing ever, but I’m happy when a game finds another way to challenge the player that isn’t “throw an enemy encounter at the player every ten steps”.

Nowadays I particularly enjoy games where the encounter is fought on the map itself instead of having a transition screen and a separate map. Games like Sea of Stars, or Yakuza Kiwami for example. I find that removing the transition screen also removes much of the tedium I feel with enemy encounters in video games.

There’s nothing more annoying than chilling in ff 8 doing your own thing, then the loudest fucking music ever interrupts your fun time, ff 10 was awful about it too.

But other games it’s no problamo, I think the best way to do it is how the mother series went about it, with them being semi random and dodgable if you were good and didn’t want to do them.

I think, it works kind of well in games where you’re able to enslave/recruit the random encouters (Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and such), as it’s then a surprise what you’ll find, somewhat like a slot machine.
But the way the more recent entries work in these series, that you find out what creatures roam the world by exploring, that kind of works, too.

More generally, I don’t particularly like the problem that random encounters solve. Which is that you’ve got sections of gameplay where nothing happens, so you throw enemy encounters into there. That also goes for non-random encounters.

RPGs do this and I used to enjoy RPGs as a form of escapism. But now that I’m doing more stuff in real-life, I want it condensed down in roguelike form, or I’ll just play other genres…

Old Mother/Earthbound games would just let you insta-win battles if you were way stronger than the area you happened to be in. Made backtracking much smoother.

I don’t hate them, and actually think they improve dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey.

But for other games I think they slow down the pacing too much, especially when you want to get back to an older area, as you are going to fight lower level enemies and there’s usually an unavoidable scene transition which takes time.

Most of the time I don’t mind them, they only get annoying when the battles take longer to finish.

Wizardry 7 comes to my mind. My party has been resting for days, trying to recover hp and sp from the last random encounter. And now as I’m jumped and half obliterated again because not everyone in the party woke up immediately to being attacked, it’s time to rest for another week.

FF style? Hate 'em. I’m not a fan of the turn-based combat in those types of games either. Outside of boss fights/special enemies, you’re usually just spamming A to select the first option (attack) until you win. It gets hella old, hella fast and the random encounters happen every so many steps you take.

Fallout style, on the other hand, is awesome. More like Fallout 3 and beyond than 1 or 2 which are still a bit like FF in that you can’t see shit, you just walk the map and then FF battle music fade to black and pop into the encounter.

The Yakuza series does them well. They’re visible when wandering around, but they’ll also just appear at random all over the city walking down streets or chilling in alleys. You can’t always tell exactly what you’ll fight but you’ll know how to get around them if you don’t want to fight.

Of course I also like roguelikes. The entire game is a random encounter.

I liked the Earthbound way of random encounters.