8 was so bad with randoms. You can go like 2 inches at a time between over world encounters. And they were so time consuming even when it only took 2 hits to kill everything - intro transition, battle animations, victory splash… so long!

I have no idea how I managed to sit through those back in the day. Sooooo tedious.

I like the tales series for how they did, mostly dodgeable, but combat could also be fully automated if you were bored. And there’s a lot of combat, so it gets boring. Needless to say I used auto combat a lot (not for bosses or unique enemies tho). I’d prefer if it didn’t do the battle transition, but I understand the function of it.