For most of my life I have been obsessed with leveling random groups of heroes from 1 all the way to 99 like doing so would make me good at interacting with people.  Something happened recently; I noticed that I have less and less desire to do this.  What happened?  What changed?  I know that the point that I noticed it happened, the point when I broke, it was during a play through of Star Ocean 4; even though that game is everything that is wrong with RPGs it isn't what caused me to hate them. 

So what is?

Square/Enix now sucks:

It is kind of hard to feel good about a genre when the people that made you love it are now terrible at it, also rich, so terribly rich.  Every single game that they produce is like a small note to the public saying "I would rather be doing movies or writing a book then this shit game."  This wouldn't be so apparent if every mechanic of the game, from the battle system to the mini game, didn't feel like a quickly, and poorly, thrown together device to carrying the player to the next overly worded, poorly written, and three hour long cut scene.

Atlus gets really difficult, very quickly, very late in the game:

Atlus makes great video games.  It is too bad that every single one of them becomes impossibly difficult towards the end. Persona 4 is a great example of a game that goes terribly wrong, terribly quickly.  Not that the games amazing quality is in question, just that at one point during the game random enemies start becoming more difficult than the mid-bosses that you just faced.  That shouldn't be a problem though, there is a save point a just a minute away... oh, you got ambushed... and now they are only attacking the main character... and he is dead so it is game over... It just seems a little strange that a game is designed at the perfect height to both give you amusement and punch you in the sack. Heh, midgets.

"Bonus" Dungeons:

One should never complain when you get something completely free.  One probably shouldn't complain when that free pack-in is bigger, and more complex then the item that was bought.  This was true until the content started to be meaningless time sinks into games that weren't even that good.  Eternal Sonata was a game that didn't need to be made, let alone have a 40 hour extra dungeon thrown in to spice things up.  Even when done correctly, Disgaea 3, it seems like everyone has a tendency to go overboard by a couple 100 hours with it.  Sure the bonus dungeons and add-on content in Disgaea 3 makes the 10 year old in me throw a fit of rage that I am not playing it, but in the same breath he is in my video game closest rolling around the floor and screaming for joy at the scope of my video game collection.

No, you screwed up, start the game over "content":

Games with multiple endings always used to seem like a great idea, when I was 10 and couldn't afford another video game until a birthday or Christmas and that just kind of felt like a cheap way to pretend I had another game.  Now they just kind of seem like content that I will never see through any means besides YouTube.  Strangely this feels like 30 different kinds of cheating, probably that whinny 10 year old again. The only real answer, sadly, is to play through a game with a guide in hand telling me what to do next for the most efficient play through to the best ending.  This also feels like it would have been a better investment in my time just to find a play through of the game and to watch it while I was doing something meaningful, or invent a time machine and use it to dodge work and family while I play games... which is sad that is the first place I go with a time machine.

Save files:

Save files have been the bane of the gamer since they first came out.  At first they were stuck to that one cart and could never be removed (so lending it to a friend was always a concern and danger), later it was on a card that could easily be lost or stolen by that same terrible friend, now they are stuck on Xbox 360 that fails all the time.  Say you have a product replacement plan through, I don't know, Best Buy.  Say your system fails.  Guess what, they are probably going to take your Hard drive.  You know those three RPG's that you are playing through?  All gone.  Now think about your computer.  Think about it crashing.  All you want is for it to start working again, you don't think about backing up your video game save files because you just want to get it to turn on again.  So you format the entire damned thing. And that is how I lost both of my save files of Fallout 3, and thus refuse to play it again.