Pretty Maps; Bad Design.

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

also include dumbass npc’s that corner you and wont move out of the way either because their movement is based on yours, or their random movements don’t, by the luck of the irish, get out of the corner too

I've been playing the original Breath Of Fire and I constantly ran into NPCs blocking my way early due to a combination of small towns and large amount of people wandering around aimlessly.

In my opinion, that wasn't necessarily the original design, but the limits by which maps could be made. Remember that most of these maps were or had to be condensed to fit on an 8-bit or 16 bit cartridge. Roads and walking spaces were truncated, some NPCs were removed, and some buildings were even taken out altogether to fit everything on a map. 

This required some clever changes. Take for instance the opening map of Final Fantasy III (6 in Japan) The town of Narshe for instance... is only about 30 tiles across by 40 tiles down. 



Yet, of course if it had been popluated by more NPCs, it could be easy to see how cluttered the town would be with the main road only being three tiles wide. However, as we all know, remember, and love, it told the story of the mysterious girl Terra and the Magitek armors well enough. Good placement of emeny/battle cutscenes, and told the story. 


I know it IS  frustrating when NPCs don't just move out of your way, but path-changing scripts like that... dang, I can't even think of the first 2d game to employ a side-step, and really didn't see it in 3d until like... Grand Theft Auto 4! (Sometimes they sidestep.... sometimes they pull out a gun... and othertimes they just wanna fight.)

That much is true. The issue in Breath of Fire is that the towns are small even by the standards of that time and feature a significant amount of chokepoints where most of the NPCs are. Take a look at this example:



This is the town of Romero visited earlier in the game. As you see, there are six villagers milling about in the extremely narrow entrance to the settlement. This can lead to some serious cluttering issues, specially with locals moving as slow as they do.