Second mini-rant!

Stunlocking. Have you’ve ever been stunlocked in a game and thought “Wow, I’m really glad that I can’t do anything right now, other than what my character’s HP go down?”. I bet you have not. Stunlocking is one of those things that should never be happening to the player. I think it’s perfectly fine for the player to be able to do it to the enemy (as long as the game’s actually balanced around you being able to do it, and as long as that enemy is not another player), but getting stunlocked in games is just frustrating.
With stunlocking I mean any situation where you’re losing (most of your) control of your character, and the enemy can repeatedly apply this effect to your character, with no realistic way of you preventing this or breaking out of this state. Imagine fighting an enemy wizard in an RPG, and the enemy wizard casts “freeze” on you. Freeze lasts for 3 seconds, and during this time you can’t do anything, other than possibly rotate on the spot. So you wait 3 seconds, and then the enemy wizard casts freeze again. You’re stuck again, without the ability to do anything. Now repeat this until your character is dead, or least where it’s lost a significant portion of its health. There’s no way to avoid this effect once it hit the first time, as you’re unable to move out of the way of any freeze projectiles in time. So sure, you could have avoided the first freeze effect, but none of the following ones.

Most developers are sensible enough to put in some way to avoid this in their games. You might get a few invulnerability frames, the game might not allow another freeze effect to be applied right away, enemy wizards might only be allowed to cast freeze once every 20 seconds, and it will never have more than 2 wizards in any given encounter, and so on. But then there are those that don’t. I was playing a bit of Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure (it’s not a great game… Imagine the PSP-era Ys (same developers) but far more clumsily made), and an enemy appeared. It hit me, and pushed me back, into another enemy, which in turn hit me and pushed me back into the first. Repeat. Yes, I was juggled between two enemies. This is the kind of thing you want to avoid happening in your games. Secret of Mana is even worse in this regard. If you’re hit your character can get knocked down. If you’re hit when knocked down your character can have another “knockdown” effect applied to it. Which results in your character being knocked down for a few seconds, then the animation for getting up plays, then as soon as that animation plays, another knockdown animation plays. So yes, the game stacks these effects, and will play them one after another. It’s the main reason why I don’t like Secret of Mana (the other reasons are: The screen only scrolls when you’re very close to the edge, making it so that you can very easily get surprised attacked by an enemy, the companion AI is awful and they get stuck in things, and you’re not allowed to go far from your companions. And then there’s how spells just stops the game. Oh and the inventory system is awful…. okay so I really dislike Secret of Mana, but this was not meant to be a mini-rant about how bad that game is!)
I don’t really see how one can defend the player getting stun-locked. If the goal was to add challenge, then there are far less frustrating and more interesting ways of doing that (heck, just up the damage the enemies deal. Dying fast in games is more fun than slowly watching your characters health drain without you being able to do anything about it). Yet I keep running into games where the player can get stun-locked (or fear-locked or whatever the game wants to call that particular status effect, they’re functionally more or less the same).

There are a couple of related issues to this, like when you’re stuck in a defensive loop, and can’t do anything other than heal yourself, or you’ll lose, but if you don’t do anything else, you can’t prevent the enemy from damaging you. This primarily happens in JRPGs, and to some degree in Wizardry clones (although the later usually have large enough parties and other ways of dealing with this issue).