I'll add another vote for QTEs. Just awful.

Also, I can't suffer forced backtracking: the famed Symphony of the Night is probably the worst perpetrator, with the reverse castle. It's just artificial game lenghntening with no fun involved most of the times.

I'm not a big fan of checkpoints either, but it really depends from the game.

Also, I find absurd that often merchants have nothing of interest, you just find what you need with ease by looting. Like in Baldur's Gate and all derivative games, simply kill a Dwarf thug and put his perfectly fitting full plate armor on your towering Half-Orc.
Piranha Bytes are almost the only developers that get this right: armor must be tailored on your character and custom made. Also, it has to be extremely expensive, so you'll put those money you hoarded on something, unlike in most RPGs where you just accumulate them to no actual end.

Last but not least: crappily designed wepon durability. Kingdom Come Deliverance=done well, Legend of Zelda breath of the Wild=done extremely badly.

QTE for me as well. Another thing is Games based on in game timer where you have to either complete the whole game (KQ4) Or 1/3 or 1/2 of the game in a certain amount of time (Quest For Glory 2 is the earliest example that I can think of that does this. The Atelier series by Gust is another example of this (Yeah I know there is a game or 2 in this series that didn't have this formula.

Having puzzles to figure out and solve to progress in JRPGS.

Looking at Persona 5 and Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE.

While I understood why Persona 4 had puzzles where you had to figure out something to open up the dungeon because it was part of the mystery solving aspect of the game and the dungeons were pretty straightforward.

But Some of the dungeons in Persona 5 you had to do some puzzles to progress with the game. I think the most annoying puzzle would be the gambling that you need to to in order to progress. If I wanted to do that I would play an adventure game like Police Quest.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions had mini puzzles and obstacles that you need to figure out in the dungeons leading up to this one dungeon later in the game where you have to jot down a numbered codes and remember what the code was to get through the dungeon or you had to start over.

Come on now they are JRPGS not adventure games.

Yes, like the original Half-Life — remember the giant baby with super magic shooty powers?
There were a couple of others, though, in the sequels (the giant prawn in the waste disposal?). I will say that I genuinely felt the vertigo when I was climbing the cliff in Half-Life, and the bridge in the sequel. Which is weird considering it's a monitor.
Edit: hypertext bracket (again).

The Harebrained Schemers are guilty of this; I have lost count of the number of times I have had a 99% chance to hit (I assume that's what the number is indicating, though it CLEARLY isn't), and missing three and four times in a row.


Additionally, I sometimes wait a half-hour (or more) to find the level I want to play in Shadowrun games (old laptop, searching many saved games for the character / level I want); even my patience is not infinite. (This is particularly badly done in Hong Kong, where a level REQUIRES high-definition textures to work (and there is no forewarning), the level just hangs about halfway through the laoding screen.

And what's up with the screwy loading percentages that jump from 17% to complete, or — worse — speed to 98% and then take seven times as long to load the last "two percent".