Oooh UX design is a pretty cool topic.
There's some bigger picture stuff that I think sometimes gets removed for the sake of increasing the game's difficulty, like:
- Giving the player access to TMs to personally customize their team
- Variety of Pokemon available, and what's available has favorable type match ups against opponents
- Allowing backtracking so the player can get items/pokemon they might have missed
- Allowing rematches with trainers so the amount of money in the game isn't finite
But something small that I think is interesting UX is doubling up on cues to keep the player informed on what's going on. Stuff like, when you pick up an item, it not only displays a text box say "Got an item! Put in in the bag!" but also plays a little sound, and that makes it feel like a small win, no matter what the item might be. Another sound cue, one that I think gets missed in fan games, is the encounter theme that plays when a trainer spots you. So you get the visual aspect of the trainer noticing you, but it also plays music while you read their "Fight me!" text. It might sound unnecessary when I describe it, but think of for example walking up to an NPC in a building that's been taken over by Team Rocket, and the fight music starts playing when you talk to them. Instead of being confused when you're thrown into battle with what you thought was a harmless person, that musical cue makes it exciting and tells you to get hyped!
Even the same type of cue can be doubled on itself, like two visual ones. An example would be in Fable, we had apricorns in the overworld to show hidden items. To make extra sure they attracted the player's attention enough to be picked up, we also added an animated sparkling effect. This can also be easilly done in text as well, if an NPC says something like, "Bring me three oran berries and I'll let you pass." then that's a pretty straightforward way of telling the player what needs to be done, right? It can get better though, by making the important things more eye catching like, "Bring me 3
Oran Berries and I'll let you pass." which makes the number clearer, and both highlights and capitalizes the important item. It might seem redundant, but honestly that second text is letting me know it's important, while that first example looks like any old flavor text that an NPC might just say.
