It's not convoluted in any capacity, well objectively it's the most complex customization system in any JRPG, if you disagree give me an example.
Even in the NSFW genre, there are way more over-complicated games like the Venus Blood games. But in the SFW side, there are a ton of indie RPGs that go way deep into RPG mechanics and lean on simplistic graphics, like Dwarf Fortress which is famous for it.
It's just that you yourself, for whatever reason, don't like complexity in customization options and call those "convoluted", it's a matter of taste.
No, this is just your bias speaking and preventing you from being logical and rational. I actually love complicated systems so long as they have a purpose and are built smartly. When light poking makes it all come crumbling down, or high levels of difficulty are simply so unbalanced that mechanics merely become tedious cheat codes, you're not doing anything special. Yours is also the minority opinion broadly speaking about things being too complicated. There's a reason why historically games (from board games to video games) have always been careful about being too complicated and convoluted, and why those things have long been considered negative.
I 1000% accept that there are people out there who like this kind of stuff (like you), but that sadly doesn't validate the opinion. There are tons of people who would agree to or do things that society widely condemns and through that condemnation refuses to weight their opinion fairly. That's just life.
You have people literally just a few posts above you laughing at how horrible this game's balance is. Because it is, lmao, and I'd struggle to have anyone who actually plays RPGs argue against that. It's not the dev's fault though, he's an indie pron dev with a teetering tower of the game. Anyone expecting this game to be balanced is silly, but that doesn't change the fact that it isn't.
And because it isn't, its mechanics become chaotic and have no synergy, and thus why it's convoluted. You can dismiss huge swathes of the game's "complexity" just because there's a far easier way to do X thing better with just one random character or something.
More than this, you literally have a party of 10 characters in the late game, making even combat itself very complex and variable.
This isn't the positive you think it is... and ironically more rarely means better anyway when it comes to meaningful design. Everything needs to have a purpose and place to feel valid. With 10 characters, the already absurd balancing debt just implodes to a muddled joke of a mess.
This is also why you don't see large party sizes in most RPGs. Paradox's dev isn't the one savant to get it right out of all devs to ever exist lol.
The balance issue is mostly status effects and in trying to recruit every possible girl, otherwise anyone can just set the difficulty to what they prefer.
No it isn't.
A lot of balancing issues come from the second part integrating the first, especially considering that the new systems weren't balanced for Part 1, this is why I recommend people to play Part 1 as a separate game with its old final patch, it's almost perfectly balanced.
I definitely see all 3 as separate game, but it's kinda ridiculous you're going be one of those "just wade through like 20-30 hours THEN it stops sucking sorta but then again in part 3 it blows up again but don't worry just forget everything about the first two parts and stop being a dumb-dumb and rebuild your team right the third time AND THEN it gets good and balanced again."
Don't be that guy, lol. Again,
to be 10000000% clear, I love this series and paradox in particular. I respect the ridiculous amount of work the dev has put into it, and can only imagine how many hours of his life that costs. I neither expect nor want a perfect game from such a small team and I still hold Paradox as one of the best NSFW games around.
But I'm also not going to go full fan(atical) and say things that simply aren't true. This game has a lot of mechanical issues and nonexistent balance. I'd never ever play this over a traditional RPG AS a traditional RPG nor would I ever put it alongside any decent ones.
If this wasn't a porn game and released with zero pron on Steam or whatever, it would be quickly forgotten by even the most diehard RPG fans.
Half the problem alone is that RPGM as an engine leaves a lot to be desired, and he's not exactly pushing it to its limits like many other indie games have.
Some popular JRPGs that are loved by the community, in comparison, like DQ 11, have a system aimed at little children, without any complexity, where you don't need to turn on your brain at any point. Maybe this is the type of JRPGs you prefer. There are even people who find BG 3 hard on Normal, so what do I know, lol.
You're again mistaking complexity for actual difficulty. Complexity CAN be hard because it usually forces more margin for error, i.e. pushing a long series of keystrokes.
Difficulty generally requires actual skill or thought instead.
The difference is in, say, a fighting game, a special move being hard to pull off because it has a lot of inputs versus being hard to pull off because it's a simple key press but requires very specific timing and has a huge vulnerability window you need to account for, meaning you need to know your options, your opponent's options, and actually accordingly fast enough.
I'll let your passive aggressive insult slide because I don't care, but I adore challenge and found BG3 easy even on the highest difficulty pre-early patches that made some of the actually challenging fights even easier.
These games are not all targeted at children, they're targeted at casual gamers, who ARE using their brains. Sorry not all of those peons are world-class geniuses like you. Like, geeze, I think most games are way too easy too but I don't think less of other people for liking it that way.
Regardless, Paradox definitely doesn't challenge you any more. It's just a lot of junk to juggle. Once you figure out the system, cut out all the useless crap, and build an A-Star team with abusive builds the game's difficulty becomes a joke.
Another thing to note is that a lot of people don't play RPGs to just close it and open a spreadsheet instead. A lot of gamers play for the immersion and story, which alone would place Paradox well below a mountain of other RPGs.
The tl;dr is that you're spending a whole lot of time kissing a mirror and don't realize the extreme bias you have here. It's a great game but not the be-all of RPGs.
It just seems you like unnecessary complexity (you can ignore 90% of that if you know what you're doing), which is fine. But you should at least realize that it's just your personal taste and nothing to do with whether or not Paradox is actually an RPG great broadly speaking.
It's just what you specifically think you want. That is all.