I'm not sure how applicable my latest gripe is to this thread since it's not with a main series game, but...
I've been playing a lot of Explorers of Sky lately, and I can't help but think that a lot of the Orbs are really underpowered. A lot of them seem balanced around them having multiple uses, but that doesn't actually work because Orbs are single-use items. The One-Shot Orb, for example, OHKOs the foe directly in front of you... if it works at all, since it has the same success rate as using a regular OHKO move. And if it misses, you've just wasted it. I believe that if the Orb had a 100% success rate, it would actually be balanced, and here's why:
- It affects exactly one enemy, which is a drop in the bucket in Mystery Dungeon.
- Orbs are unusable during boss battles, so it wouldn't result in cheesing them.
- Once again, it's a single-use item, and a fairly uncommon one at that.
The Itemizer Orb is more or less the same, though with the added benefit of turning the defeated foe into an item.
A lot of other Orbs suffer the same drawback of being single-use and easy to waste; the Trapbust and See-trap orbs destroy and reveal all traps in the room you're in respectively; however, if there are no traps in the first place, they are wasted. Giving them a floor-wide effect instead would make them worth carrying around. Other Orbs suffer from different drawbacks: some are clones of or outclassed by moves (Rebound, Rocky, Mug, Lob); others are simple upgrades of other Orbs (Warp/Spurn, Petrify/Foe-Hold, Fill-in/Drought, Quick/All-Mach); and with some like Longtoss it's difficult to imagine a situation where you'd ever actually need to use them. Luckily, there are the few like Escape, Cleanse, Rollcall, and the various room enemy disruption ones that are very much worth using.