Boats and Bridges: A Stupid Cliche

Recently I've been playing a lot of Eternal Sonata on the PS3 and there's a little RPG cliche that pisses me off a little more than I think it should.

As you can tell from the title, bridges and boats are quite possible the dumbest cliche in all of RPG history.  It's just a crap excuse for the developer of whatever game to throw some stupid crap enemy at you, split the party or bring the plot to a screeching halt.

Take Eternal Sonata for example

At one point in the game you fight this fat dude called Tuba on a big rickety bridge.  When you win the fight he doesn't just die like every other boss, he decides to suicide himself and smashes the bridge in half sending your party into the depths below.  This is a load of total bollocks because it's just a crap excuse to have your party split up and forces you to use some of the shittier characters for no good reason.

Eternal Sonata isn't the only game that does this but if you see a big ass bridge in an RPG, you can bet your ass some bullshit is going to follow.

However I can't think of so many games with bullshit bridges, but boats are on a whole different level of arse.  Final Fantasy X is a great example of everything wrong with boats in RPGs

This boat is EASILY one of the most boring sections of the whole damn game.  The plot to Final Fantasy X isn't exactly the best written thing on the face of the earth, but it comes to a screeching halt when you get on the S.S. Liki.  You run around and just listen to people chat about stupid shit for about 10 or 15 minutes and you get some crappy cutscene with Tidus trying to put the moves on Yuna and failing in his usual awkward way.

Then, for reasons, Sin (the big bad) just shows up and you have to fight him.  The boss fight isn't even remotely challenging and he can't even really attack you.  He just throws stupid little grasshoppers at you and you have to fend them off while Wakka kills the big fin with a beach ball.  What's even worse is that if you have some time to kill, you can really fuck the rest of the game by farming AP off the little grasshopper things (yes, I know they are called Sin Spawn, shut up)

But every RPG boat section is like this.  You do a bunch of shit on the boat that no one cares about and then you fight some kind of crap aquatic enemy like a giant squid or a big crab or some shit.  If no that, then a ghost ship turns up and you have to run around ANOTHER boring ass boat filled with stupid ghosts and other cliche undead nonsense.

Fuck boats
Fuck big ass bridges
Come up with some new terrible situation for a party to go through.