I would like 99 of these, and 99 of those, and 99 tents to pitch at the hottie.

Originally Posted by Leknaat

That's what I thought was fun about Suikoden and Star Ocean. FOOD could replenish HP and such.

Doesn't beat Koudelka. You use WHISKEY to revive dead (okay, "K.O.ed") party members.

Since most RPGs give you a ridiculous surplus of money, usually some time before the halfway point, I usually just max out all my items. There's no point in buying potions when you've moved on to mega-potions, but somehow it just doesn't look right unless the quantity slot next to potions says "99" for the rest of the game.

There's a sad lack of games that give you any incentive at all to save up. There's always a point where the best weapons/armour are things you find or make rather than buy, and not much need for money after that except to stock up on curatives (which you usually don't need either if you have a decent healer). I can't think of any RPGs (none that I've played, anyway) where you could actually do something worthwhile with the 15 billion gil you have saved up from level grinding by the end of the game. Your characters' ultimate weapons generally aren't lying around Crazy Wally's Weapons Emporium with a big price tag. And if it's Morrowind, you could just steal the damn thing anyway.

One of the worst offenders for making money useless was Kingdom Hearts. For the first half of the game I was scrimping and saving every bit of munney (or was it munnies? or munny? I forget) just to keep my party in hi-potions and new weapons. Then, after the first time through Hollow Bastion, munney was suddenly useless. The only new weapons and items were ones you had to find through random drops or synthasize or whatever. Enemies started dropping potions so regularly that I didn't need to buy them any more, and I barely had to buy any to max them out when I decided to do so. And...that's it. Unless you're one of those people who actually enjoyed gummi ships and gave enough of a damn about them to bother building some, there's nothing else in the game to spend your cash on. I literally maxed out my party's funds long before the game ended. Hell, Sora had enough to retire on by the time I was finished.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by the quiet fox

Oh God, me too. I do the exact same thing, saving all the "rare" (or even uncommon) items for the penultimate or even final battle. I just can't use them if I think I'll need them more later.

With hard-to-come-by items like elixers and high-end weapons, it's better to be too conservative than too wasteful.

It's not an RPG, but my first play-through of Silent Hill 3 is still proof of that. For some reason I was under the impression that the fight on the carousel at the end of the amusement park was leading straight into the final boss battle, so I used up my best ammo and healing items accordingly. Only to finish the battle and discover that there was an entire (fairly LONG) final area of the game left to finish, for which I basically had no decent curatives and almost no ammo left. It's not fun to have to fight through hordes of the hardest monsters in the game with the katanna because you blew almost all your shotgun ammo and have to hoard what remains.

How ya doing, buddy?