Squaresoft, busting my balls by proxy...

So, I've just gotta rant. Why do DS RPG developers seem to love wasting my time?

Case in point - Children of Mana. The combat in CoM is pretty smooth, in the "gauntlet" vein - you wander around levels jamming buttons to whack things till candy comes out (literally). Simple and fun and polished.

But outside of that, it's one menu after another.

You finish a dungeon and want to sell something? OK, then:
* walk through the village to the market
* sit through an unnecessary 1-second fade transition
* go up the stairs to the vendor and hit the A button.
* Vendor asks "How can I help you?"
* Hit A again.
* Unnecessary 1-second fade transition
* Choose between "Shop" and "Chat".
* Unnecessary 1-second fade
* Choose "sell an item"
* half-second menu animation
* There's no "sell everything" button, of course, so let's say you want to sell 4 swords you just picked up. You use the stylus because the button navigation sucks. You press on arrow buttons to select "4" swords to sell, and click Sell, Get a confirmation, click OK, and you are done selling the swords.
* When done, you hit "B" a few times to get out. The vendor gives you an obligatory "Thanks, come again!" statement, which you have to acknowledge with an A keypress ("B" doesn't work). Followed by yet *another* obligatory fade transition before you are plopped back in the market.

So some of this stuff, I totally understand. I don't mind walking through the town to a vendor - it's part of the game world. But for god's sake, developers - don't put fade transitions in menus that your players will see like 300 times over the course of playing the game, and don't force your players to sit through canned salutations on every single interaction.

In my day, RPGs would throw up menus faster than you could hit keys - it was understood that menus were what stood between players and the gameplay, and the quicker you could get them out of the way, the better. I don't know when this changed, but I'm sure it's all somehow Square's fault. I mean, when you make a series of wildly successful games where 70% of your time is spent navigating menus and watching canned battle animations, it's not surprising when the rest of the industry follows suit.