In the Devil May Cry series, there’s a feature in the game that makes it so enemies that aren’t visible on screen can’t attack. This helps to prevent issues where you get hit by something you couldn’t have possibly reacted to, particularly in the “Heaven or Hell” and “Hell and Hell” difficulties where you die in one hit. It’s not perfect and has some issues, for example enemies sometimes start an attack right before they go off screen, but it helps cut down on it a ton.

Now that I’ve played DMC, I’ve started to sorely miss it in other action games. In particular, I’m playing Kingdom Hearts 2 on Critical for the first time, and on that difficulty, there are a decent amount of attacks in the early game that can kill you even if you’re at or near full HP. It’s rough, especially because Kingdom Hearts isn’t as responsive as DMC. The block button has a really long start up animation and there are more animations that completely lock you in with no way to cancel them, for instance. So every time I die to an offscreen enemy, I can’t help but feel I’d have a much better time should it have had a system like this.

What are some other features that you wish were more common in games?