15 Popular Gameplay Mechanics That Haven’t Been Cloned Excessively

Earthbound – Automatic “YOU WIN!”

Anyone who has ever played a JRPG will tell you that random encounters are the devil. While they serve a gameplay purpose, eventually they begin to become a grind dragging the pace of the game down needlessly—and while some RPGs allow methods to avoid encounters, like Pokemon with Repel, that also means giving up any XP or benefits you might have earned from them along the way. Which is why Earthbound’s You Win mechanic was so great- essentially, once you outpowered a would-be random encounter by enough, the game just assumed that you would win that encounter anyway, and awarded you the XP and loot automatically, instead of making you sit through the trite busywork of fighting through an encounter you would have won no matter what. More JRPGs should take a leaf from Earthbound