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Time management is one of those skills that people are either amazing or terrible at. It's one of those skills that really has no in between, it's just people have incredibly productive days and days where nothing whatsoever gets accomplished. Sometimes you play an RPG and feel like you've accomplished a lot, and sometimes you play an RPG where you spent four hours grinding just to level or gain a new skill.
The recent Persona games are an exercise in time management. Persona 3 requires one to juggle between going to class, hanging out with friends, clearing floors in Tartarus, and preparing for the next Full Moon mission. In Persona 4 most of daytime stuff remained the same, only instead of a month you had a limited amount of time before the fog would sweep Inaba, and now you could take on part-time jobs during the evenings to supplement your income. It is very easy in Persona to wear yourself thin if you don't manage your time very well. Potentially higher-ranked personas and special items are easy to miss without using a FAQ, especially if this is your first playthrough. While I played both games for the most part without a FAQ, I can declare that playing Persona 4 wore me so thin that I had barely completed most of the social links, whereas when I played Persona 3 I was able to complete more than half.
Games like Persona, although they force time management upon you, provide a sense of urgency that is difficult to replicate, and adds a lot to the game's setting and story. I love games where a sense of urgency is constantly flowing, because it does add a level of challenge for those who think they have everything completely under control. In games like Persona 3 and 4 time is critical, and paying attention to it is vital, or missing out on key events where player choices really matter is very simple.
Atelier Annie is not related to Persona, but it does something similar. In Atelier Annie the game tells the player that renovating Sera Island into a tourist trap must be done within three years. While the game seems fairly simple to navigate, time management is what racks up the difficulty. Whether taking on too many requests concurrently or not properly gauging the amount of time needed to gather and synthesize items, Annie is a game where time can easily go against you if you aren't watching days accordingly.
So dear readers, have you ever encountered an RPG that messed with your sense of time management?
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