One reasonable compromise between saving when you wish and limited saves at save points that worked can be found in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, but not the PAL version. In the American and Japanese version there were two kinds of save, a permanent save that can only be performed at set save points and costs one save token. The other is a temporary save that can be done anywhere and is deleted when you load it, enabling you to take a break but not to cheese your way out of mistakes. Sounds really good, and is a compromise that works.

Imagine the irritation when I rented the PAL version of the game only to find temporary saves had been taken out, leaving you with just permanent saves They were still mentioned in them manual but were not present in the game. Yes you could backtrack to earlier save points most of the time but since you had to use tokens to save (you started with 9 instead of 2 but extra tokens were rare) I would run out every quickly if I saved and quit every half hour like I wanted to. Besides why should the PAL gamers have to backtrack a lot and waste their time when everyone else can save and quit and then return immediately to the point they are at with no penalty? In the end I was spending 10 minutes walking back to where I left off, 12 minutes walking back to the save point and only 15 or so minutes playing the game. Needless to say while the game was good I didn't get very far in with a two day rental and I did not buy or rent it again.