9inchsamurai

This article was a waste of time to read.

JRPGs don't need fewer battles in order to be more exciting, they just need to make the battles more important. Having fewer battles might not even achieve this: it's all about balancing party strength vs. potential enemy groups. Final Fantasy 1 contains a good number of encounters that could potentially end your game - and they're just "normal" battles.

Following your comparison: in football the offensive and defensive sides have about the same "stats" hence the difference between a successful play and a failed play more or less boils down to the strategy each side picks. Whereas in most current JRPGs, the player's party is at least 3 times stronger than any given encounter.

Some exceptions to this rule exist, like (believe it or not) Pokemon. If Nintendo actually felt like creating a hard Pokemon game, the inherent battle system would be really well balanced because your Pokemon team would be about on the same level as an opponent's team, and most of the strategy in each battle would be about choosing the correct moves to counter what the opponent does (hey, kinda like my analogy above with football).