Random Consequences In Game

As my final single player Xbox games in my game backlog, I'm finishing up Infinite Undiscovery.  I only paid $10 for this, so I'm not too miffed that it starts out as a very generic JRPG and the game only gets more frustrating as it goes on.  One odd game design decision that's bugging me the most is a very strange choice to punish players for trying to play the game.  The game is an action RPG with large areas filled with wild monsters to fight.  Fighting those monsters makes your characters stronger.  Most of your characters' abilities are powered by the moon.  At a certain point in the game, the moon starts raining lunar rays on the world while you're exploring.  Exposure to this lunar rain makes your characters more powerful until they have too much power to control and turn into monsters.  You have a few ways to combat this, so it wouldn't be so bad except for one thing: the lunar rain occurs at random times for random intervals.

So it may be that you can fight monsters for awhile before having to run from the lunar rain.  Or it may never stop raining because a random chance has decreed it.  Unfortunately, if you find yourself underpowered in a section, the only way to get better is to fight monsters.  So there's a random chance that doing what you need to will be impossible without having to lose and fight your own teammates.  This bizarre problem that has repeatedly made me just run blindly through areas is made worse by the fact that you can't seem to tell your teammates to run blindly like you do.  You can set them to a non-aggressive mode where they won't attack, but at they'll inevitably get hit a few times when running past monsters and will then stop to heal themselves, only to end up getting killed because they decided to stop.

So, I guess the takeaway from this is if you're going to have some (potentially) interesting pressure put on the player, make sure it doesn't conflict with the main gameplay element of the game making them not want to play the main gameplay element (and thus the game itself).  Or at least make sure that their method of avoiding that main gameplay element doesn't have annoying detriments of its own.