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Post by Deleted on Nov 12, 2020 2:56:36 GMT -5
In recent years I have been trying to get through my video game backlog and it is important for me to see the games to completion. However, for me this was not always the case. When I was younger I would play the games repeatedly without much thought to seeing them to the end. Even with my change in approach to now wanting to finish them, there are some that I just have not been able to see to the end, despite multiple attempts. I would like to know of any games which have given you all the same problem, and why? Of course the reasons don't have to be negative, the game could be too hard, too long or it could just be circumstantial. I'm also interested in hearing what made you want to try multiple times? There would have to be something about the game that makes you keep trying I would think.
I have quite a lot of examples but I will start with just two:
Kingdom Hearts - There is something very appealing about the Kingdom Hearts series in that just the idea of visiting all these classic Disney worlds makes me feel a lot of nostalgia, so of course I would really want to play and enjoy this. I think I must have started 5 times over but I have a few hurdles to overcome early on. I find for me, whilst of course the gameplay is not nearly as refined as it needs to be, the bigger problem is the specific worlds visited in the early game are simply not the ones I have particular nostalgia for. I somehow never saw Alice in Wonderland as a child, and don't hold a great love for it in adulthood, so fighting through the awkward jumps and confusing mission design is, therefore, not rewarding. Similarly Hercules and Tarzan I never watched either, but those came out in my teenage years. Nevertheless that is 3 worlds in succession that do nothing to pull me in, and most times I have not made it past them. The game is still in my backlog though and I hope to see it through to the end one day.
Skies of Arcadia - This game I really love so much about it. The sky pirate theme, the upbeat vibe, wonderful music compositions and memorable boss and ship encounters. There's a couple of things that push me away in this game:- - The colour system I find pretty confusing. So we have different colours to level up to use against the correct colour type of enemies, but what I never grasped was how to tell the enemy colours. Using the wrong colour is of course less effective and leads to battles taking a long time but also I find the colour system has a negative impact on my next point. - It is too slow to level up. And colours makes it seemingly take longer. I have never otherwise experienced a game where grinding literally felt like the game had grinded to a complete halt. - The encounter rate is too high. When I mention this keep in mind I am playing Legends on Gamecube, I don't want to know how bad it was before they reduced it from the Dreamcast version. The issue is mostly a problem when in my ship. Often I struggle to get my bearings right away, and this is made all too difficult when every few seconds I get an enemy encounter. Really it is a shame that the game hasn't had another release that tweaked these issues further still. I'm not sure I will ever see this one through in its current state.
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Post by retr0gamer on Nov 12, 2020 4:23:18 GMT -5
Tactics Ogre is the big one for me. It's just too long and at the moment handheld gaming doesn't suit me. I tried setting up emulators to play it on my PC but PSP emulation is very shoddy and the best emulators have major issues with Tactics Ogre.
So for Kingdom Hearts, it ain't worth it.
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Post by dsparil on Nov 12, 2020 8:32:26 GMT -5
Anvil of Dawn - It is fun for a single character real-time dungeon crawler, but it's too long. I give it a spin every once in a while and get a little further each time, but I think I've run out of patience entirely with it by now. The HLTB time isn't even that high at 22 hours, but that still feels like way too much.
Daggerfall - I think at some point I did finish it, but it's a lot more fun to noodle around than to really play because of all the bugs. Hopefully the Daggerfall Unity project can clean it up enough. It's a game that really needs a remake, and I 100% do not trust Bethesda to not mess it up entirely if they did it themselves.
The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy - This is a bit of a cheat since I only first tried playing it a few days ago, but I stopped and started something like six times between the NES and Genesis versions before giving up entirely. It's in a weird position of being the seventh in the series but the first NES game so it's both two or three times bigger and rougher to play compared to the later NES remakes. The Genesis version cleans it up a bit, but it also increases the number of collectable stars from 100 to 250 and moves a bunch of items around so the experiences are less transferable between each other than they could be.
Final Fantasy Tactics - I don't know what it is about it, but I just cannot get into it. I really dislike the random encounters on the map for one thing, and it feels too slow.
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Post by spanky on Nov 12, 2020 11:14:31 GMT -5
I beat Kingdom Hearts when it first came years ago on a rental. The pressure of having to beat a game within a few days is a good motivator. I probably would have half the games in my backlog that I currently do if I had to give them back at some point. The game is dull as dishwater though and I don't get the hype.
More on topic...I've put a pretty good dent into Phantasy Star IV multiple times as it's been on lots of collections. But I don't think I've ever come close to finishing it.
Not an individual game per se, but I always get excited when a new Mario RPG game (Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series) comes out. I buy them, play them then just completely lose interest about halfway through.
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Post by Snake on Nov 12, 2020 14:10:53 GMT -5
Shining in the Darkness - Bucketlist game for me to finish. I've started about 5 times already. But then I'll get side tracked by another game (or life. I've been tied up with work and women these past few months...) I started a fresh game last year, but I lost my sense of progress. And it's a dungeon crawler. With lots of random battles. I already forgot which section of the dungeon I need to focus on. But I plan to continue... at some point.
Earth Light. Super Famicom strategy game, akin to Nectaris, Famicom Wars, Dragon Force, etc. By like the 7th or 8th map, I lose patience with strategizing. But I do want to finish it at some point.
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Nov 12, 2020 14:24:56 GMT -5
Couldn't get into either Spelunky or Rogue Legacy. Overly random difficulty combined with not being able to retry the same instance of the world and various trial & error mechanics that you didn't have breathing room to experiment with just pissed me off.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 12, 2020 14:46:56 GMT -5
Seems RPGs and Strategy games are mostly the order of the day with this thread so far. Makes sense due to the length being a big commitment. Also I agree that some of these games are really slow. I had that problem with Front Mission 3 which I have also dropped a bunch of times. Other than that seems a really nice game, but everything needed to be much snappier in some of these PS1-PS2 era strategy games. I think you guys might be right on Kingdom Hearts, but I think I will give it one more shot before I take it off the backlog. It just bothers me that I never stuck with it since given the amount of times I've played I would have beaten it for sure. spanky - some of the Mario RPG's are way too long. Especially the Mario & Luigi games started to become very padded, and they have a habit of talking too much. I've given up on a couple of them myself at times. Not Phantasy Star IV though. Because it's awesome. ommadawnyawn2 - yeah every roguelike I've tried get's dropped after 5-10 hours and realising I'm not progressing. I'd like to see a system where you can save a certain amount of layouts and retry them so you have something to learn from and compare your own performance against. Shining in the Darkness - Bucketlist game for me to finish. I've started about 5 times already. But then I'll get side tracked by another game (or life. I've been tied up with work and women these past few months ...) I started a fresh game last year, but I lost my sense of progress. And it's a dungeon crawler. With lots of random battles. I already forgot which section of the dungeon I need to focus on. But I plan to continue... at some point. Earth Light. Super Famicom strategy game, akin to Nectaris, Famicom Wars, Dragon Force, etc. By like the 7th or 8th map, I lose patience with strategizing. But I do want to finish it at some point. I found Shining in the Darkness pretty hard to keep track of and have put it down over the years but never gotten past the early game really.
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Post by blackdrazon on Nov 12, 2020 17:00:47 GMT -5
Shining in the Darkness for me, too. I think the issue is that asks so much of you with the mapping and whatnot, so if you leave off for so much as a week it feels like it's been too long, but its also in every Sega bundle ever created (citation needed) so it's always right there in front of you, reminding you to play it again.
Can't seem to convince myself to clear Skyward Sword even years later. While I have beaten Spirit Tracks, it took me years to do that, too, it just wasn't a good period for me and Zelda.
Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light, the prototype for Bravely Default, is my personal nemesis. It's just not interesting, and loves putting arbitrary restrictions on you to make things even less interesting. Last time I left off because it was stuck in minigame hell (which normally doesn't bother me, but this game appparently can't even appeal to me with entirely unique sections of gameplay), and now I've left off because my entire party are house cats (yes) with serious combat restrictions, in a game where you barely control combat to begin with. If I didn't have blogging obligations I'd have happily forgotten it years ago.
On the subject of RPGs and Strategy games dominating this list, I think part of it is a technicality, too. Sure, they're bigger and more involved and that's all the more reason to abandon them, but here's how I see it. This post isn't exactly a list of all games I've started, stopped and then restarted, you know? I've cropped games that I never played that much, and I've also cropped games that I haven't completed but did play enough to say I got a good value out of them. The smaller the game, the more likely it is to fall into one of those two categories. Have I beaten Super Mario Bros despite hundreds of plays? I have not. But I have gotten to World 8 through warp and like... World 5 or so without, and that's pretty decent, no complaints. On top of everything else, longer games just have a wider target area for this sort of thing.
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Post by spanky on Nov 12, 2020 19:18:36 GMT -5
Shining in the Darkness for me, too. I think the issue is that asks so much of you with the mapping and whatnot, so if you leave off for so much as a week it feels like it's been too long, but its also in every Sega bundle ever created (citation needed) so it's always right there in front of you, reminding you to play it again. Can't seem to convince myself to clear Skyward Sword even years later. While I have beaten Spirit Tracks, it took me years to do that, too, it just wasn't a good period for me and Zelda. Shining in the Darkness is another one for me - mainly because like Phantasy Star IV, it's on all those Genesis compilations. I think I get halfway through the first dungeon and just give up. First person dungeon crawler RPGs are just a genre that doesn't click with me. I've only played Skyward Sword once and I got to the final boss and I gave up. The game was just such a miserable slog for me that I didn't even care by that point. It's where the Zelda formula really started to wear thin for me. Thank goodness BotW came by and breathed some life into the series.
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Post by dsparil on Nov 12, 2020 20:07:45 GMT -5
Shining in the Darkness is just a dull game I think. Level 8 is the furtherest I've ever managed to get. The enemies graphics are nice at least.
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Post by windfisch on Nov 12, 2020 20:54:52 GMT -5
Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance (GBA) - I must have tried at least 3 or 4 times to get into this. It always started okay enough. But the further I got, the more the atmosphere depressed me and the more the dimension-gimmick and all the various "key"-items confused me.
Zelda Majora's Mask (GC) - I really want to like it, since weird Zelda is usually the best Zelda. But so far it has never really clicked with me. I remember the beginning in particular striking me as obtuse. And I found the whole day-cycle-real-time-element rather stressful, especially since saving one's progress is so finicky. One day I will get into it, though, one day...
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Nov 13, 2020 5:52:29 GMT -5
I think it's mostly RPGs, and I've mostly dropped them twice. Pretty much always because RPGs go on for a long time, and I don't like returning to old saves. I also don't like playing like half of a game, forgetting about it, and then restarting soon after. I'd rather wait a bit longer before starting a new playthrough. Fire Emblem Awakening, Mario & Luigi Bowser's Inside Story and Dragon Quest IX are all games that I've played twice, for quite long, and all made it to the final boss before forgetting about them. Dragon Quest III and Breath of the Wild are games I have beaten, but not until my 3rd playthrough and tons of time spent on them. I think the one that really qualifies for this thread is Kirby: Amazing Mirror. I must've started that game half a dozen times on the 3DS, each time only completing like half of it. Couldn't get into either Spelunky or Rogue Legacy. Overly random difficulty combined with not being able to retry the same instance of the world and various trial & error mechanics that you didn't have breathing room to experiment with just pissed me off. I haven't played Rogue Legacy, but being able to redo the same seed in Spelunky would completely defeat the point. Even for practice purposes, because you're supposed to get better in the decision making process of what to go after, and when to use your resources as much, even more, I'd argue, than improving your pure platforming skills. Also, while the game is hard for sure, the difficulty isn't that random. What items/shops you find is really the only main source of variation. Enemies all behave very predictably, and level generation never comes up with something completely insane. It's really all up to the player how difficult it is, since most stages can be played by ignoring practically every enemy, with the main difficulty coming from going off the beaten path. And oftentimes I die because I just got too greedy. I kind of had some difficulty with Spelunky 2 at first, but once I started taking less risks and played less greedy, I managed to make it to further worlds consistently, which in turn gave me the experience needed to play more risky in the earlier stages. I can see how Spelunky isn't for everyone, but I think as far as roguelikes go, it's about as consistent and fair as it can be.
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Post by Woody Alien on Nov 13, 2020 7:05:31 GMT -5
Couldn't get into either Spelunky or Rogue Legacy. Overly random difficulty combined with not being able to retry the same instance of the world and various trial & error mechanics that you didn't have breathing room to experiment with just pissed me off. Ditto for Spelunky, as much as I liked it I found it way too difficult but maybe it's just me who sucks at roguelikes. As for Rogue Legacy, I completed it once but never felt the need to do more runs after the first one or revisit it. I'm adding La-Mulana 2, I wasn't even halfway through it and dropped it, wanted to revisit it but always find it too stressful and intimidating. To be fair it was also partly my fault, since I was one of the Kickstarter backers because I wanted to support Nigoro. On the other hand however, the game came out more than 3 years after the 2015 deadline, so when I finally received it I didn't give a crap about it anymore...
wasn't there a topic like this already?
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Post by dsparil on Nov 13, 2020 8:08:41 GMT -5
I don't there actually was one.
I feel the same way about the first one, and it's why I haven't gotten the second. It's also way too long. I'm not sure if I believe the HLTB time of 30 hours for the remake, but the 15 listed for the original version still feels way too long. Not that they're directly comparable, but the Igarashi Castlevanias are between 5 to 10 hours (and mostly towards 5) which is a better length. I must have start La-Mulana four or five times since the original fan translation, and I don't think I've ever gotten more than 5 hours into it.
For a "rogue-lite" game, Dead Cells. Part of it is that the level generation creates some absolute nonsense sometimes, but most of it was from the whole game being feeling too reliant on good equipment drops. I made it pretty far one time, died at a boss, and then never got that far ever again because I never got anything close to that good again. I try it again every once in a while, but usually get too frustrated to go on. I didn't think it was that great overall (and doesn't have permadeath), but one of the things that Chasm did well was in having the rooms themselves purposefully designed with only the interconnections and I think which ones you got randomized.
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Post by retr0gamer on Nov 13, 2020 8:19:58 GMT -5
I beat rogue legacy and have to say it's not really worth it. The first area is interesting but as you get further it gets easier and I ended up steam rolling area 3 and 4 with no issues. Spelunky is way better.
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