Horrible opinion and thread. Truly shameful. RTwP to me is the greatest for party based tactical RPGs and for party based action RPGs. Traditional TB can all too often become painfully slow and tedious as a single round of combat can take ages when accounting for your party size, enemy party size, various animations and especially movement and positioning. It's great when super fast paced like many JRPGs, but once you throw in character positioning and movement shit can go sideways fast. I really tried to like DOS 1/2 but they just tested my patience far too much. I don't need to spend 40 minutes to an hour on a non-boss fight simply because it takes 15 minutes just to go through a single round of combat.
RTwP also I think does a much better job of approximating how combat actually works and feels. Games are inherently artificial, there's no getting around that, but TB feels excessively so in many cases. While full on real time just is too chaotic and lacks the ability to really coordinate your fights in detail. RTwP can be extremely intense and requires a lot of thought about crowd control and positioning as every character is acting in tandem. You can't just take out problematic enemies before their turn comes up. You have to be prepared for anything at any time. It makes trash mobs actually important as they can swarm more vulnerable characters and tear them apart in seconds due to sheer numbers. It makes having frontline characters that can pull aggro and block choke points super important as well as tons of weird and interesting buffs and debuffs and crow control spells.
Older series and games most are probably more familiar with that relied on D&D rulesets were extremely flawed and not without issues because they were trying to use a TB combat system for a real time video game, but games that actually developed rulesets for video games and RTwP style combat are amazing experiences. Dragon Age is pretty basic, but Origins and DA2 had some great combat for beginners that allow for some really enjoyable party coordination and combos. Obsidian really knocked it out of the park though with Pillars, Tyranny, and then perfected it with Pillars 2. The combat in that game is superb and the pinnacle of RTwP for cRPGs. The progression of your party and myriad of ways you can develop and customize your characters is amazing. And it is beyond rewarding to see how you progress as a group to just steamrolling certain encounters, which is critical to the experience. Not every encounter needs to be a massive challenge, these are narrative driven games as well, and conveying your sense of martial progression is an important part of your character's development, as well as just a useful means of story telling in certain situations.
Some encounters are meant to be fast and RTwP truly allows for that with some fights lasting barely a minute with little to no pausing or direct commands needed. You and your party have reached a point where certain enemies just don't pose a real threat to you. Which then helps to highlight how truly difficult and tough other fights are where they can last 40 minutes and requires tons of pausing and micro managing. That's the beauty of RTwP when done right it's so incredibly flexible and can really provide a variety of combat experience in one game.
Then for more action oriented games stuff like Mass Effect and FF7R it is critical to party/squad based mechanics that make up the combat of those games in order for you and your team to effectively work together and coordinate attacks and abilities to really take enemies apart. The loss of that party control was a massive error on Andromeda's part which significantly harmed the combat experience. Again same things applies here. Some fights can just be straight up slaughters where you and your team just plow through enemies, but on tougher encounters and boss fights you have that option and ability to really be strategic with your actions and pull off super satisfying combos with your teammates.
