And now for something completely different.
Over the decades that I have been playing video games my taste and attitude towards certain techniques and tropes commonly used in many games has changed quite a lot, especially compared to 20+ years ago.
One quite significant such change is that during the last 10 or so years I have grown to absolutely hate games that have an extreme amount of cutscenes. The larger the ratio of cutscenes compared to actual gameplay, the more aggravating it is. Likewise the more that cutscenes interrupt your gameplay essentially without warning (and the more often this happens), the more annoying it is.
While this is in no way exclusive to Japanese RPG games, it's most prevalent in them. In fact, it almost feels like an entire "genre" of JRPG games where there's so much emphasis on the story that gameplay almost feels like just a secondary ancillary feature. And this "genre" seems to nowadays encompass the majority of JRPGs. In the worst cases it's quite literally so that the entire game is just one giant cutscene that gets occasionally interrupted by short segments of gameplay. It can be so incredibly bad that, without exaggeration, almost half of the typical entire playthrough time consists of nothing but cutscenes (especially if you don't explore much in the playable segments). There are often situations in these games where, when a lengthy cutscene ends, you literally play less than 10 seconds before yet another lengthy cutscene starts. You can literally have segments in the game where you have like 5 minutes of cutscenes vs 10 seconds of actual gameplay, and that's not an exaggeration.
It's extremely common in this "cutscene-heavy genre" of JRPG that levels tend to be extremely linear, consisting of very narrow paths, where pretty much your only option for gameplay is to advance along the narrow path towards the inevitable next cutscene, possibly fighting random enemies along the way if you are lucky.
During the last 10+ years there have been way too many such JRPGs that I have simply stopped playing, out of sheer boredom and frustration. Sometimes even games that would have otherwise been quite OK (one particular recent example being Tales of Arise, which is not even nearly the worst JRPGs I have ever played, but which constant gameplay-interrupting lengthy cutscenes finally frustrated me enough that I stopped playing the game, as the interactive portions weren't interesting enough to compensate.)
But do you know what has started aggravating me in later years even more than endless cutscenes?
Games that have an endless stream of tutorial textboxes (usually, obviously, in the beginning parts of the game, but in the worst cases pretty much all throughout).
And I mean really endless. Textbox after textbox after textbox... I have played some games that are so incredibly egregious about this that there are literally over ten consecutive tutorial textboxes at the start of the game, before letting you continue playing... only to start popping up even more textboxes, and then even more, and then even more of them. It can be so bad that in the span of just the first few minutes of gameplay there can be over 20 tutorial textboxes, and that's not an exaggeration.
And more often than not they are literally just textboxes. In other words, popups with just text in them. Not even a single picture.
While this is in no way exclusive to Japanese RPG games, there nevertheless seems to be yet another "subgenre" of them that's plagued with an endless stream of tutorial textboxes. (Very typically this "subgenre" also consists of games with very primitive graphics, like PlayStation 2 quality graphics, no wide open overworld, and most if not all gameplay consisting of just running around "dungeons" with extremely narrow pathways fighting enemies.)
Some western video games are also guilty of this, although on average the sheer number of textboxes seems less. But they can still be quite aggravating.
The people making these games seem to have never got the memo that a) players do not want to be reading text in order to play the game, and b) it has been a guiding principle of GUI design for many decades that if you feel the need to explain something with text, it's probably a sign that the thing is badly designed and would benefit from a redesign. And while this is a GUI design principle, it very much applies to video games as well.
This is very bad design in that it's information overload. The player cannot possibly remember all that text in one go. Gameplay mechanics need to be experienced and learned by playing (rather than them being explained), one by one. The player needs actual hands-on experience on them. Flooding the player with an extensive info dump does absolutely no good. Nobody can remember all that just be reading it.
And do you know what's the most aggravating thing with all these tutorial textboxes (which both the JRPGs and the western games are often guilty of)? Quite often the vast, vast majority of what they are explaining is extremely trivial and self-evident, and wouldn't need to be explained. You don't need to explain, for example, how to navigate a menu because everybody already knows that (heck, especially in consoles you cannot even install nor start the game if you didn't know how to navigate menus and select options in them). Yet these games for some reason feel the need to explain every single self-evident trivial thing in full detail, as if the player were a complete moron who doesn't know how a simple user interface works.
It almost feels like someone with zero knowledge of how to make games and programs user-friendly spent a good while programming support for tutorial textboxes, and then took full advantage of this fancy feature to add tons and tons of tutorials, as many as he could think of, with complete disregard to whether they even make any sense because of being so trivial.
I have become so annoyed at those endless streams of tutorial textboxes in later years that when they are presented to me, at about the fourth or fifth textbox I just stop reading and dismiss all of them as quickly as possible.
If the game becomes too difficult to play because I didn't read some particular piece of text explaining how to do something, and the game is so badly designed that it cannot be figured out with gameplay alone, then in general I just give up and stop playing the game. After all, how good can a game be when the developers didn't even bother making the gameplay intuitive and easy to learn-by-doing, without things having to be explained with text?
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