the rpg genre has some serious flaws, which i am willing to overlook only in the case of three games (planescape: torment and fallout 1&2): part five

Chrono Trigger: I got stuck fighting Magus. Apparently I didn't get to the exciting part of the game. What I like about Japanese RPGs is the totally unintuitive way they approach puzzles. Bad translation doesn't help, but they just expect you to do things and don't tell you what they are. I like adventure games. I like puzzles. It's just that if you've got a non-linear world, you need to give your puzzle a few parameters like, say, a general idea of what you need to do to proceed.

Chrono Cross: I liked the part where it didn't have an ending unless you beat the game in a stupid, arbitrary way! To its credit, this was the only non-Pokemon Japanese RPG I've beaten. But that was mostly for Young.

Pokemon: The entire game comes down to "can I use a super-effective attack against his guy?" Also it basically forces you to level-grind, which is a pretty shitty way to pad out your game.

Freedom Force: I only really play this for the cutscenes. Boss battles pretty much come down to making the one hurt member of your team run around until he heals while the other guys use the same attacks as often as they can.

Icewind Dale I and II: It's better than Baldur's Gate, but, still, same shitty combat engine. Also I hope you like fighting the entire army by yourself, because you have to do that at least five times per game. But the army's polite and will let you chill out a few days in their base while you heal between encounters, so it's not so bad. It's the most hardcore RPG I've played, because if you don't have exactly the right party certain monsters will just mop the floor with you. In the second game at least you can multiclass everyone into Fighter for the extra HP. But there's a guy that's immune to basically all magic and anything less than +5 weapons. I gave up then because I only had one +5 sword.