Games you expected to like but didn't/liked but not as much as you thought you would

[Reality]

Evil Genius: After Dungeon Keeper, I had basically run out of games in the  hybird "RTS/godsim w indirect control" genre as  my childhood cereal box game : Majesty:Fantasy Kingdom Sim. Evil Genius was pretty much the only other thing left in the genre. And then I played it.....

Loonyland 2 and Kid Mystic: I'm usually willing to take a bullet for Mike Hommel, but these games actually disapoint me compared to the other game's on the Dr. L engine. Loonyland 2 suffers from the MMO RPG design, since the Madcap mode just leads into mindless grinding with the Eau de Monster potion (especially if you further want to do the true arena). Kid Mystic stays arcadey through it's main game, but the challenge and puzzle modes have the same problem with less variety - purchassing masses and masses of stats with money gotten through mob combat instead of at least boss-refights. The Arcade-Only fixed stat design of Loonyland1 and Dr. L blows these games out of the water in the long run.

Gain Ground: The game that actually made me shell out for the second Sega Genesis compilation - I'm always looking for a smash tv or gauntlent expy. The other games made it worth it in the end, but Gain Ground itself was largely untouched because the hitboxes annoy me. 

Chrono Cross: The sequel to Chrono Trigger, when RPGs were at their most important to me. I stll like it well enough as an average game despite it's problems.

Borderlands 2: I had had no Diablo or MMORPG type experience prior. I thought BL2 would be a gentle entry point as a hybird game, as one of my favorite internet personalities talks about the "big" MMORPGs a lot. I played 190 hours, and found the game pretty annoying. I had been suckered into it.

Battleblock theater: This game really made me consider the problem of excess movement options, since the "double jump puzzles" ended up feeling pretty samey too me after a while. Beat on Insane mode, never bothereed with the community made maps.  

Gucamalee: I found it unsatisfying as both a beat-em-up and a platformer, and the Hard mode didn't redeem it for me the way it seems to have done for other people. I also played the entirety of hard mode with the chupacbra costume for the most glass-cannon- type of experience. 

Skies of Arcadia: I like this game, but  it just happened to be the one that retroactively poisoned all the JRPGs before it (for me personally). It's well known that SoA is an easier RPG, but it was the first one I ever played systematically with planned out amount of on-level healing in each between dungeon town, etc. Of course for late game even that is unncesarry for trivializing the game because of the broken healer, but everything up to the water dungeon was enough to wake me up and realize that I was ALREADY breaking/power gaming JRPGs on a general basis rather than a game specific basis. 

SMTIV: A game I consousilly seeked out after a series of JRPGs that I considered too easy... as you might know, SMTIV has two hard bosses at the beggining, and then you get to steamroll everything until Pluto and the law/chaos specific end bosses and death superbosses. SMTIV does feature strong REGULAR encounters to make up for the on-average, weak bosses (the opposite design of SMTIV Final). Unfortunately, the game's uneven curve was not what I needed, since I had intentionally been looking up for a hard game, so during the playthrough I dismissed minotaur/medusa as a fluke and by the time the game did get hard again, JRPGs had already completed the plunge to their current position among my scale of video game genres. 

Nosgoth: The Legacy of Kain/Soul Reaver series is mostly driven by it's story (Soul Reaver/Soul Reaver 2 are okay action/puzzle hybirds, but the blood omen games and the final game don't really have any gameplay worth the time) Square Enix bought the property and released Team Fortress 2. Honestly, The game was okay with the kind of asyymetic balance that (Left4Dead2) Multiplayer had, but lacked the focus and fun-factor of the Valve game - because the game was oriented around kills and not objectives, it couldn't rise above team-deathmatch standards. While the Vampire movement was fun, it was also too strong to aim against without the various stun/knockdown abilities, but then the game just goes the other way and instead of too many people wanting Vampire you had too many wanting Human. The Devs did put out artwork pages and some (out of game) lore, but it didn't fully satisfy people, and the game's problems contnued to be an issue throughout it's life until it's servers were finally taken down. It was never a terrible game, but at the end of the day, most people supported it in hope of a new Legacy of Kain game later rather than for Nosgoth itself, and the other half of the fans (team based shooter/L4D2 people) knew that it was inherently not all that well put together and were playing it simultanesouly with better team shooters as a novelty to begin with. 

[Jotari]

4 minutes ago, Reality said:

Chrono Cross: The sequel to Chrono Trigger, when RPGs were at their most important to me. I stll like it well enough as an average game despite it's problems.

Oh yeah, this one hit hard for me. I knew a lot of people didn't like it, but I assumed that was just because it was different to Chrono Trigger, but it legitimately has a lot of problems. Particularly how ridiculously esoteric and contrived the plot is. The gameplay is good, particularly during boss fights, but the way leveling works and how easy it is to auto heal at the end of battles meant that most standard encounters involved mashing A to just mindlessly attack as much as possible until the fight is over. The Fire Emblem sized cast also didn't really help matters much. It works in this series where you can field a dozen units at once, but when you can only experiment with two at a time (because Serge is always locked), it doesn't really work.

[Reality]

5 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Oh yeah, this one hit hard for me. I knew a lot of people didn't like it, but I assumed that was just because it was different to Chrono Trigger, but it legitimately has a lot of problems. Particularly how ridiculously esoteric and contrived the plot is. The gameplay is good, particularly during boss fights, but the way leveling works and how easy it is to auto heal at the end of battles meant that most standard encounters involved mashing A to just mindlessly attack as much as possible until the fight is over. The Fire Emblem sized cast also didn't really help matters much. It works in this series where you can field a dozen units at once, but when you can only experiment with two at a time (because Serge is always locked), it doesn't really work.

I think it's hurt due to half gameplay and half story reasons.

I like the concept of the element grid and the field system, and especially the turn color magic. 

I don't like how non-summon magic attacks become largely irrelavnt. I don't like the excess amounts of healing. 

Vigora and to a lesser extent Eagleye are the best "magics" in the game, since they help to fuel the fierce attack spam (3 staminia attacK). 

The star system instead of tradtional experience had an okay theory behind it but - It kind of hurts the game both casually and for completeionist - Casually it gurantees that you are always on-level (although other than for Dario/Miguel it feels more like overleveled) and for completetionist it means that non-active party members are really hard to get to their maximum stat caps. 

Story is - going halfway into being a CT sequel was worse than doing none at all obvuosly, the ghost children, Porre, arguably Shala come off great, but Magus and Robo, and the use of the Planet as a charather, are especially wrecked, all on top of  the general incompativiilty of a "swashbuckling" game with a "melanchollic" game cause problems.

The story on it's own merits holds up okay until you fight Mother Brain and then... *implied robot vs dinosaur war, time loop,  schlala-belahtassar collabration, 7th dragon etc*

But it's quite nice before it goes off the deep end, with the old Dragoon core's subplots, Miguel, and Kid at the orphanage being highlights.

The  large cast is a problem, not just because large casts are inherently bad, but also because a lot them don't really have reasons to be invested in the story. At least in Suikoden many of the minor people are affected by the war, but CC goes all out with joke charathers. Having 3 plant-based and 4 baby charathers alone is probbably a JRPG record. Other times charathers blend together (The Draggoon squad all recruited at once). Charathers like Leena and Magus have start-and-stop problems where (probbably development time) shows you what they were going to be, but in the final game they do almost nothing. The better charathers work during their non-shared parts, although except in cases like Kid and Norris, this tends to be limited strictly to their recruitment quests and their ultimate weapon quests. 

It's definately a likable game, but yeah, it's problems extend even to people who play it first instead of Chrono Trigger.

[Tuvy]

11 hours ago, Slumber said:

Zelda: Twilight Princess. This was basically ground zero for me. This was the first game that made me go "Wait, games in franchises/genres I like can be... bad?" It might just be because I was 15 and was thus just getting more critical of things, but I really hated my experience with this game. Not only did this game make me wary of Zelda going forward, it pretty much instantly killed the Wii for me, as the motion controls were so aggravating and immersion-breaking that the Wiimote was just DoA for me. Decent dungeons, but boring overworld, boring art style, and absolutely atrocious one-button combat with Wolf Link. I dreaded any time the game's core gimmick popped up, which was a bad, bad sign.

 

10 hours ago, Ertrick36 said:

Personally, the thing that usually leaves an impression on me is the characters.  I like the NPC casts of a lot of Zelda games.  But TP's cast... some were alright and had some moments, but as a whole I barely remember most characters who weren't directly involved in cutscenes/story, and even then I'm forgetting some faces/names.  It's why MM is one of my absolute favorites; there's this great focus on helping individual characters with their problems that I really like.

And I used to think the artstyle of TP was the best in the series, but lately I've found that I like all the other artstyles better.  Even Wind Waker's, which I used to dislike because it was so toony and I was at that age of thinking that cartoons were super lame and only for little kids.

YOU TWO SHUT YOUR GODDAMN MOUTHS

Sorry about that

I guess its just a matter of opinion, but Twilight Princess is and will always be my favorite game of all time. I might see it through rose tinted glasses, as it was the first I have played, but I remember almost all the characters. (I guess it helps that I've played through it about 10 time) I love the music and the art style and the only complaint I have is how EASY it is, but thats where it ends. The water temple was nowhere near as bad as Ocarina of Time and Majoras mask, and I felt that the story was really well done. The combats much more compelling than Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wilds, and I feel that Link himself shows way more character than Majoras mask and Ocarina of times link. I feel that Skyward sword and Wind Waker may have more interesting links, but Twilight princess has my personal favorite designed one.

The first game that comes to mind when I think about it would probably be Breath of the Wild. I feel like it just doesn't FEEL like a Zelda game. Is it a good game? Absolutely. Its an amazing game. But the bosses are weak and Zelda is so ANNOYING. Sure she has more of a character than Twilight Princess's Zelda, but Camilla has more of a distinct personality than most of the Thracia 776 characters, and does that really make her a better character? Overall I think BOTW is a great game, but its just NOT a Zelda game.

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, Reality said:

I think it's hurt due to half gameplay and half story reasons.

I like the concept of the element grid and the field system, and especially the turn color magic. 

I don't like how non-summon magic attacks become largely irrelavnt. I don't like the excess amounts of healing. 

Vigora and to a lesser extent Eagleye are the best "magics" in the game, since they help to fuel the fierce attack spam (3 staminia attacK). 

The star system instead of tradtional experience had an okay theory behind it but - It kind of hurts the game both casually and for completeionist - Casually it gurantees that you are always on-level (although other than for Dario/Miguel it feels more like overleveled) and for completetionist it means that non-active party members are really hard to get to their maximum stat caps. 

Story is - going halfway into being a CT sequel was worse than doing none at all obvuosly, the ghost children, Porre, arguably Shala come off great, but Magus and Robo, and the use of the Planet as a charather, are especially wrecked, all on top of  the general incompativiilty of a "swashbuckling" game with a "melanchollic" game cause problems.

The story on it's own merits holds up okay until you fight Mother Brain and then... *implied robot vs dinosaur war, time loop,  schlala-belahtassar collabration, 7th dragon etc*

But it's quite nice before it goes off the deep end, with the old Dragoon core's subplots, Miguel, and Kid at the orphanage being highlights.

The  large cast is a problem, not just because large casts are inherently bad, but also because a lot them don't really have reasons to be invested in the story. At least in Suikoden many of the minor people are affected by the war, but CC goes all out with joke charathers. Having 3 plant-based and 4 baby charathers alone is probbably a JRPG record. Other times charathers blend together (The Draggoon squad all recruited at once). Charathers like Leena and Magus have start-and-stop problems where (probbably development time) shows you what they were going to be, but in the final game they do almost nothing. The better charathers work during their non-shared parts, although except in cases like Kid and Norris, this tends to be limited strictly to their recruitment quests and their ultimate weapon quests. 

It's definately a likable game, but yeah, it's problems extend even to people who play it first instead of Chrono Trigger.

I felt I could only get invested in the story once it became the bizarre dinosaur robot war with a time travelling city. For much of the game I felt the reason for being anywhere was incredibly poorly justified due to the player party having basically no identity or clear motivations. Because Serge is both a silent protagonist and the large cast meant none of them were really significant in any way. It resulted in the party having no solid response or opinion on any of the stuff that was happening. Leaving it as just some figure telling me to go to a certain place for a reason I didn't really care about (and despite the world map being so small, I frequently had difficulty trying to figure where anything was, which I guess was a testament to how little I was immersed). It could just be the way I played the though (namely always being an unrelenting dick to Kid at any opportunity), as they seemed to want to have multiple different optional routes and dungeons you can take, yet still resulted in the same destination, which can result in getting there being really contrived and unclear.

Regarding the characters, it also didn't help that most of them vanish from your party half way through the game. I initially thought this was good as I expected to re-recruit them again, but nope, they just ceased to exist until a certain point in the story where they all unceremoniously rejoin you. Made them feel more like Pokemon than actual people.

[Armagon]

1 hour ago, Tuvy said:

Overall I think BOTW is a great game, but its just NOT a Zelda game.

You know, this is the one type of criticism i never understood. And i'm not specifically talking about Zelda here. Just in general. Like, take Paper Mario. "Color Splash is a good game, just not a good Paper Mario game" is something i hear a lot and this type of criticism sounds really elitist, if i may be honest. Like, i don't see how a game can be good but, just because it's part of a certain series, it's not at the same time.

I don't mean to attack your opinion here, this is simply more of an observation i've made regarding this type of criticism as i've seen it several times and it's not exclusive to a particular series.

10 hours ago, Jotari said:

I could see how the gameplay could be fun for some people, but for me it just seemed too samey and the difficulty in healing really irked me.

Was healing that important in X? I'm asking because i haven't played. In both Xenoblade 1 and 2, healing is unimportant unless your fighting one of the higher-level Uniques or Superbosses. Otherwise, Xenoblade is pretty much always a case of "the best defense is a good offense" kind of game. But X is the most different out of the three (in both good ways and bad) so i want to know if the importance of healing is the same.

11 hours ago, Tear said:

Tales of Zestiria was a game I was looking for but disappointed me.

1. the game itself is horribly unbalanced.  it forces you to be armatisied. It's technically impossible to beat the elite Monsters when you're not armatizied unless the Team is like +10 levles higher than the monster. They hit like trucks and it becomes even nastier when their HP reach a certain % area to use their Special attack which can easily oneshot everyone (even being armatisied).

So is the final boss extremely difficult then? Because i have a friend who has it and she got stuck on the final boss. After several attempts, she decided to take a break. That was last year. She still hasn't beaten game.....she's actually made no attempt to. Something about, "beating the final boss is luck based" or something like that.

Edited May 29, 2018 by Armagon

[Rapier]

17 hours ago, Armagon said:

Tales of Phantasia and Abyss: While i like the characters of both of these games (not the plots though since they are cookie-cutter), i find the gameplay to be lackluster. In both games, i kinda just hold right or left and mash the attack button as fast as i can and there's no consequence to it. Benefit of the doubt, i'm still in the early parts of both games.

That was my beef with Tales of games until I played Tales of Innocence and got a taste of the "newer" gameplay. Since then I really got into its gameplay (I need to finish Dawn of the New World and begin Vestiria and Berseria). For all they announced about a manual gameplay, it was mostly about pressing the attack buttom, seeing your character run toward an enemy and hit it with their weapon, but then Symphonia gave me what I wanted, exactly as I expected it.

So, uh

Conception 2 - Children of somethingsomething: The artstyle is good. That's all there is to it, unfortunately.

Mighty No. 9: Wasted potential.

Fire Emblem 11: It's the only Fire Emblem I straight don't like because FE1 hasn't aged well and the polishing they did for the game didn't compensate it for me.

Megaman Battle Network: Amazing setting, world, and I like the NET Navi designs, but the gameplay feels like a slog to me and there are far too many random encounters.

Story of Seasons: As much as I love Harvest Moon, I dislike how the series took a more simplistic (setting-wise, character-wise and gameplay-wise), childish tone.

Hearts of Iron 3: Very cool WW2 game with plenty of AU possibilities. Too bad it is incomprehensible (Hearts of Iron 4 is much better, though).

Edited May 29, 2018 by Rapier

[MisterIceTeaPeach]

41 minutes ago, Armagon said:

So is the final boss extremely difficult then? Because i have a friend who has it and she got stuck on the final boss. After several attempts, she decided to take a break. That was last year. She still hasn't beaten game.....she's actually made no attempt to. Something about, "beating the final boss is luck based" or something like that.

Spoiler

Idr everything exactly, but in one phase you have to block a superattack a few times - which pretty much kills you instantly - by doing enough damage in a short time period (by a mystic arte in armatisation).

If you can't use a mystic arte, you'll get into trouble.

It was not entirely hard, but I had to figure out what to do there.

I needed two attempts to beat it.

 

Edited May 29, 2018 by Tear

[DragonFlames]

I have quite a few of these in recent memory, unfortunately.

Super Smash Bros. 4 3DS
The game just felt... empty, somehow. Like, it was fun, but there was not much to it in terms of single player content (I don't have a lot of friends, so single player modes are pretty much my go to), especially when compared to Brawl and even Melee. I don't know. I liked it, but not as much as I thought I would.

Fire Emblem Fates
Do I even NEED to go into why at this point? I think the horse has been beaten to the point of it not even being a material thing anymore.

Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker's Memory
A side story to one of the best Digimon games ever made? Yes, please!
When I heard that Hacker's Memory was releasing in the west, I was stoked to play it. Then I got it and... well, my enjoyment with it went on a roller coaster to Deathville, to put it bluntly. I don't HATE this game, but I think the original Cyber Sleuth is far superior in terms of characters and story. Sure, there are more Digimon to discover (some of which have become instant favourites of mine *swoons over Slayerdramon*), but for those looking for a great story, you're better off looking elsewhere. The story isn't bad, not at all. It deals with some heavy stuff that even puts Digimon Tamers to shame, but some plot points just felt... wasted. Without getting into too many spoilers: The main villain the game was advertised with comes right the hell out of nowhere and goes just as fast without any explanation as to where it came from, why it was there etc. It's not even the final boss of the game.

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology
An RPG by Atlus. Usually a sign of good things to come, right? WRONG! I mean, the game is still good, but the problems come in when you are like me and try to do everything in a single playthrough. Sometimes, you get little to no clue as to what to do to fulfill or even receive certain sidequests, IMPORTANT sidequests that you need to do to get the best ending. Adding to that is a combat system that is decent at best and boring as all get-out at worst.
At least the story is interesting and all the characters are engaging and fun in their own right, so it does have these two points going for it, which is nice.

Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey - Redux -
Having almost finished the game, I can say this: the story is great, the gameplay is usual SMT fun, but the dungeon design has to be some of the worst I've ever seen. Trap doors, floors that move you automatically and warp tiles. All my least favourite dungeon elements rolled into one frustrating package. Adding to that are corridors that are pitch-black dark until you get certain upgrades (most of which you only get AFTER you already spent hours getting frustrated).
I'm also still not sure what to think about the whole military thing the game has going on. I'm not a fan of any military to begin with, so the beginning hours were more on the -eh- side for me. But once you reach the first boss, it gets REALLY good.
Still enjoy this game, though, even though I thought I would enjoy it more than I do.

Tales of Graces f
Where do I begin with this one? It's the first and only Tales game I've played that I couldn't bring myself to finish. I don't know, I'm just not enjoying it as much as I did other Tales games. The combat is sort of clunky when compared to for example Hearts R or even Zestiria, which takes inspiration from Graces. The characters, while okay, aren't exactly memorable (with one or two exceptions of course) and the story isn't as engaging as other titles as well. Which is a damn shame, since I expected to love this game and ended up being severely disappointed.

Edited May 29, 2018 by DragonFlames

[Interdimensional Observer]

1 hour ago, Armagon said:

Was healing that important in X? I'm asking because i haven't played. In both Xenoblade 1 and 2, healing is unimportant unless your fighting one of the higher-level Uniques or Superbosses. Otherwise, Xenoblade is pretty much always a case of "the best defense is a good offense" kind of game. But X is the most different out of the three (in both good ways and bad) so i want to know if the importance of healing is the same.

Well there are Soul Voices to rely on, plus the minimal healing of Smooth Recovery and Repair, otherwise it drives home what XC first attempted: making healing skills totally unnecessary and severely restricting you on them to do this. Maybe it went too far by including absolutely no Sharla equivalent at all. Skells lack any means of healing the non-appendages too, or next to it.

For postgame, if you need defense, you run Ghostwalker for Decoys (which negate a certain number of hits), Astral Protection with proper Augments equipped to bring the Attribute Resistances relevant to what you're fighting to 100% (so 1 damage per hit), or a Spike-providing Aura with the proper Attribute Reflect Augments to activate those Reflects (100% activation) during the Aura's duration. Or you can just try to stack so much damage you don't need defense.

 

1 hour ago, Armagon said:

You know, this is the one type of criticism i never understood. And i'm not specifically talking about Zelda here. Just in general. Like, take Paper Mario. "Color Splash is a good game, just not a good Paper Mario game" is something i hear a lot and this type of criticism sounds really elitist, if i may be honest. Like, i don't see how a game can be good but, just because it's part of a certain series, it's not at the same time.

 

People have certain expectations about what a series will be. People expect Paper Mario to be like the original or TTYD, a world filled with OC characters and species using basically the same kind of gameplay. The shift of Sticker Star and Color Splash away from vertical progression (levelups) towards more item-based horizontal progression and the generification of NPCs to just Toads makes SS and CS feel not like the original PM duo, which are being considered the original, still true and immutable, essence of PM.

Another question to ask is whether someone would still play a game regardless of it had the brand name on it. Would you still play CS if it was called simply Color Splash without the "Paper Mario" on it, and all Mario series references replaced by OC IP stuff? Would you still play Kirby's Epic Yarn had Kirby, who originally wasn't in the game, been removed. Probably not as readily without name brand recognition all must admit, but the question still has merit. On the other hand, would someone play Dirge of Cerberus if it wasn't an FFVII game? I would imagine few to answer yes, indicative that they play for the FFVII and not the actual gameplay itself, the opposite of CS.

 

3 hours ago, Reality said:

I like the concept of the element grid and the field system, and especially the turn color magic. 

And yet you can't just shift the stuff from one character to another, have to manually replace every element every time you change who you want in your roster. Quite annoying.

Also annoying- you can't tell when an enemy will ever attack you, they just pop in and do.

 

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

I felt I could only get invested in the story once it became the bizarre dinosaur robot war with a time travelling city. For much of the game I felt the reason for being anywhere was incredibly poorly justified due to the player party having basically no identity or clear motivations. Because Serge is both a silent protagonist and the large cast meant none of them were really significant in any way. It resulted in the party having no solid response or opinion on any of the stuff that was happening. Leaving it as just some figure telling me to go to a certain place for a reason I didn't really care about (and despite the world map being so small, I frequently had difficulty trying to figure where anything was, which I guess was a testament to how little I was immersed). It could just be the way I played the though (namely always being an unrelenting dick to Kid at any opportunity), as they seemed to want to have multiple different optional routes and dungeons you can take, yet still resulted in the same destination, which can result in getting there being really contrived and unclear.

The characters in CT aren't much better in the development department, but they are far fewer and hence the group has some cohesion, some development, and you can develop a sense of fondness for them. And way more double and triple techs make the party feel in gameplay more integrated.

As for the plot, I did spoil it for myself in advance never thinking I would play the game. I will say I disliked the scenes shown during the credits of someone cosplaying as Kid in Japan, weird, did not connect at all, despite that being the whole point of it. The basic ideas of the big plot are okayish, just executed like with a sticky marshmallow guillotine.

 

7 hours ago, Slumber said:

"Oh, maybe Rikku is talking some sense here and there. Oh God I think this means I have to actively listen to this voice."

Rikku was fine in X. X-2 made her appearance and personality garbage though. Why on Spira did they think a Charlie's Angels-themed sequel was a good idea again? Salvation lay, if at all in gameplay sans MINIGAMES! alone here.

 

13 minutes ago, DragonFlames said:

Tales of Graces f
Where do I begin with this one? It's the first and only Tales game I've played that I couldn't bring myself to finish. I don't know, I'm just not enjoying it as much as I did other Tales games. The combat is sort of clunky when compared to for example Hearts R or even Zestiria, which takes inspiration from Graces. The characters, while okay, aren't exactly memorable (with one or two exceptions of course) and the story isn't as engaging as other titles as well. Which is a damn shame, since I expected to love this game and ended up being severely disappointed.

The plot in the child arc was a little dragged out, but okay. The main plot worked with promise until Baronan Civil War ended, then it took a subtle nosedive. The premise of showing how people have changed many years later was good, just horribly underexploited. 

[Tamanoir]

31 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Rikku was fine in X. X-2 made her appearance and personality garbage though. Why on Spira did they think a Charlie's Angels-themed sequel was a good idea again? Salvation lay, if at all in gameplay sans MINIGAMES! alone here.

X-2 was honestly a bad idea from the start, to be honest. FFX didn't need a sequel at all.

Now I love that they admited it's a clear cash grab, and decided to have fun with it.

[Etrurian emperor]

Crusader Kings II

I always thought the Total War game could be a little bit bare bones when it came to their campaign. Its a lot of fun commanding huge armies and managing large empires but I wanted more. I wanted a fantastic politics system, have a larger amount of generals to manage and generally see the empire management aspect expended upon. Crusader Kings II had all of that and more.....so much more I immediately shut the game down when I realized there were far more options to ever keep track of. I repeatedly tried sitting down with the game only to get intimidated and boot up something simpler really quickly. 

Shadow Dragon

Its more Fire Emblem and the game that would finally show us the epic adventure of Marth. Except that adventure hardly got very epic when everyone turned out to be a mute. 

FF13

Final Fantasy never had as high opinion of me as I had of the series. Always not getting ported to Europe or becoming exclusive to the consoles I didn't own. Well FF13 finally did away with all that nonsense. Its just a shame it turned into a corridor fest with gibberish for a story and a combat system that failed to impress. Barthandulus was pretty cool though. 

[Jotari]

7 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Rikku was fine in X. X-2 made her appearance and personality garbage though. Why on Spira did they think a Charlie's Angels-themed sequel was a good idea again? Salvation lay, if at all in gameplay sans MINIGAMES! alone here.

X-2's gameplay was actually really good imo.

[Interdimensional Observer]

7 minutes ago, Jotari said:

X-2's gameplay was actually really good imo.

Hence the "gameplay sans minigames" part. I do think the combat was good, certainly the most "active" ATB I've seen (I haven't played anything past X though), actually requiring you to juggle things kinda hectically at times- which is why I did end up setting it to Wait, since it was a little too fast in the beginning.

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Hence the "gameplay sans minigames" part. I do think the combat was good, certainly the most "active" ATB I've seen (I haven't played anything past X though), actually requiring you to juggle things kinda hectically at times- which is why I did end up setting it to Wait, since it was a little too fast in the beginning.

Oh. I thought you meant they should have stayed true to Final Fantasy X's gameplay.

[LuxSpes]

SMT Devil Survirvor :I bought the games since it was a tactical RPG and I thought I'd like coming from FE. However, the dark tones of the game kind of grinded me down with time and gradually made me lose interest in continuing the game. I don't remember which plot point it was exactly, but I remember feeling completely depressed after a certain point in the game and looking through synopsis online made it seems like I'd have to go through a lot more depressing bits before reaching something resembling a hopeful ending. Might say more about my mindset at the time than anything about the game though.

I must also mention Xenoblade 2. I do like the game, but the original XC is my Top 3 and XC2 falls way short of it in many aspects for me. The world felt smaller and less varied or unique than XC1 despite XC2 having the upper hand when it came to hardware power. The story felt extremely short and lackluster compared to XC1 and I never developed the same affection for XC2's cast as I have with the one in XC1, which is probably in part due to the character designs just not working for me. The only place where the game met my expectations was with its soundtrack. I don't have the same feelings toward XCX since it did its own thing by shifting the primary focus from the main story to the exploration of the world and the side-quests. Overall, I still like the game quite a bit and I'll probably jump right back into it once the story DLC is released, but I won't look back to it with the same fondness I have for the original XC.

8 hours ago, Armagon said:

You know, this is the one type of criticism i never understood. And i'm not specifically talking about Zelda here. Just in general. Like, take Paper Mario. "Color Splash is a good game, just not a good Paper Mario game" is something i hear a lot and this type of criticism sounds really elitist, if i may be honest. Like, i don't see how a game can be good but, just because it's part of a certain series, it's not at the same time.

I don't mean to attack your opinion here, this is simply more of an observation i've made regarding this type of criticism as i've seen it several times and it's not exclusive to a particular series.

I often only see this criticism after a game series makes a major change to its core gameplay and I take it as a way to voice out grievances with the new direction. I don't think it's elitist because if the FE15 and all the FE games that came after it were fantasy dating sims with some SRPG gameplay thrown in to pad out the gameplay,  I do think it would be understandable and not elitist if some people said "FE15 is a good game, but it's not a good FE game". Granted, I think a better to voice it would be "FE15 is a good dating sim, but a terrible SRPG, which is why I liked FE in the first place."

So in Paper Mario's case, I think it's people disliking how the most recent games threw out leveling/badge/companions for sticker/card collecting, varied NPCs for a rainbow of Toads and stories that tried something new with Mario for typical Mario stories. Breath of the Wild is in a similar boat since it did away with long, varied and labyrinthine dungeons for short, simple and similar experiences like the shrine and divine beasts or completely scrapped how progression was tied to unlocking items. I can personally empathize with  @Tuvy since while I think Breath of the Wild is an amazing game, it didn't really scratch my Zelda itch for the reason I outlined above.

In a way "this game is a not a good series 'x' game" is the opposing criticism to "games in this series are too formulaic" since the first criticism comes from people who want games in a series to stick to particular set of "gameplay rules" while the second one comes from people who want change in the series. 

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

Etrian Odyssey V left a weird impression to me. Reading how everyone describes the game in amazing details REALLY made me excited but somewhere down the line i just realized im not good enough to appreciate what the game actually did and its frustating that every bossfight is cheesed by my incompetence. 

Their barebones content also doesnt help .. well barebones in my perspective. 5 stratum 4 bonus boss and 1 superboss feels kinds barebones compared to 3 i guess. Granted the fact that i praised their class viability and obsessed enough to play 3 runs of it should say about how big my expectations are to the game

 

 

Oh yeah Fire Emblem Echoes sov full. Stop.

Ive played all KagaFE. I enjoyed all but FE4 slog period. FE1 is a game i admit shit but enjoyed regardless

Echoes ended up giving the same impression as Heroes if Heroes isnt completely broken making it fun to mess with doing ridiculous shit. Fuck 3 range attacks. Fuck Echoes Bow. Fuck the generally dull gameplay where your squishy unit literally dies in 3 hit. 3 HIT. How is that squishy? Nuibaba abode is as much of a cancer as fighting Thracia 776 boss with physical attacks except it lasts an entire chapter. 

Im shit at comprehending story so all in gonna say is Voice acting is awesome and Clive carried the game

And all of this is packed in a AMAZING magic system, a very clever forging mechanic, a world map that blows Awakening off the water, some blatant copy paste of FE1 story that made me giggle, and a solid idea of double protagonist

Shadow of Valentia is bar none the dullest, biggest piece of shit i have ever seen in the series and the fact that it did so many small things right offends me to no end. 

[Retyl]

.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Retyl

[Slumber]

4 hours ago, Jotari said:

X-2's gameplay was actually really good imo.

I hate how imbalanced it is, and how much high speed breaks the game. It could have been really cool, but Alchemist renders all healers obsolete and Dark Knight renders just about all damage dealers obsolete, barring some insanely niche strats. You can mostly just power through the game no problem with Alchemists and Dark Knights, and there's really nothing to discourage you doing this.

And speed... the ATB flatout breaks at high speeds, and later in the game, speedier enemies will be able to fill their ATB and queue up attacks multiple times AFTER you already get an action queued up. It can lead to game overs that are 100% out of your control, as there are enemies who can do this who have access to instant kill moves or status moves like petrify. It makes the game infuriating at times.

FFX-2 also might have the worst final dungeon of all time. I like it even less than X, and as Motomu Toriyama's first solo-project with 0 oversight from people who know better, it's outright offensive. I really should have seen FFXIII coming, considering it was Toriyama's next solo project.

Edited May 30, 2018 by Slumber

[Jotari]

20 minutes ago, Slumber said:

I hate how imbalanced it is, and how much high speed breaks the game. It could have been really cool, but Alchemist renders all healers obsolete and Dark Knight renders just about all damage dealers obsolete, barring some insanely niche strats. You can mostly just power through the game no problem with Alchemists and Dark Knights, and there's really nothing to discourage you doing this.

And speed... the ATB flatout breaks at high speeds, and later in the game, speedier enemies will be able to fill their ATB and queue up attacks multiple times AFTER you already get an action queued up. It can lead to game overs that are 100% out of your control, as there are enemies who can do this who have access to instant kill moves or status moves like petrify. It makes the game infuriating at times.

FFX-2 also might have the worst final dungeon of all time. I like it even less than X, and as Motomu Toriyama's first solo-project with 0 oversight from people who know better, it's outright offensive. I really should have seen FFXIII coming, considering it was Toriyama's next solo project.

This is not entirely untrue, but I find that the gameplay is still really fun. I useually prefer more difficult games, but I find this is a game that's helped rather than hindered by its easy difficulty. The game gives you a lot of strategies to do things, it has stuff like Cat Nip Trigger Happy (which is basically a cheat code it's so broken) but generally everything is viable. It's just plain fun to experiment with and when you get a new Dressphere it's genuinely exciting to see what you can do with it. If you're pure efficiency player, Alchemist will beat out any other healer, but unless you're fighting pretty specific bosses (or Via Infiniti), a casual player won't need it. Youre free to message with all the other options the game gives you.

[Sasori]

Xenoblade Chronicles X is a game I really wanted to like. The setting wasn't the one I wanted, but its still Xenoblade so I bought it, gave it a chance and stopped after 20/30 hours.

I found the game annoyingly designed with party switching being both not encouraged and a massive pain to do. You had to use Lin and Elma and you would like it! It did't help that Lin's comedy routine with Tatsu got annoying real fast.

I stopped during the mission where Tatsu was being a moron. Just getting to the infected area was a huge pain with me constantly dying and the checkpoints being far apart. Once there I got oneshotted by an enemy after which I decided to give up.

[Rapier]

On 29/05/2018 at 4:39 PM, Etrurian emperor said:

Crusader Kings II

I always thought the Total War game could be a little bit bare bones when it came to their campaign. Its a lot of fun commanding huge armies and managing large empires but I wanted more. I wanted a fantastic politics system, have a larger amount of generals to manage and generally see the empire management aspect expended upon. Crusader Kings II had all of that and more.....so much more I immediately shut the game down when I realized there were far more options to ever keep track of. I repeatedly tried sitting down with the game only to get intimidated and boot up something simpler really quickly.

Have you tried reading this LP and attempting a run as Munster/Ireland? Everyone who picked CK2 up struggled with it in the start, it has one of the worst learning curves possible (as does Europa Universalis 4 and Victoria 2), but after reading that LP and attempting a playthrough in Ireland you'll pick things up in a steady pace.

 

Oh,  yeah, I forgot one game to my list:

Persona 3: Everyone and their grandmothers kept telling me how Persona was cool and all, so I decided to give Persona 3 a try. It's not a bad game, it has an interesting premise, but it's gameplay simply bored me. I plan on reading a LP of it to see if I can endure it better that way, but as far as gameplay goes I found it uninteresting. I haven't progressed enough to know the characters, so that might have been it too.

[Jotari]

4 hours ago, Rapier said:

Have you tried reading this LP and attempting a run as Munster/Ireland? Everyone who picked CK2 up struggled with it in the start, it has one of the worst learning curves possible (as does Europa Universalis 4 and Victoria 2), but after reading that LP and attempting a playthrough in Ireland you'll pick things up in a steady pace.

 

Oh,  yeah, I forgot one game to my list:

Persona 3: Everyone and their grandmothers kept telling me how Persona was cool and all, so I decided to give Persona 3 a try. It's not a bad game, it has an interesting premise, but it's gameplay simply bored me. I plan on reading a LP of it to see if I can endure it better that way, but as far as gameplay goes I found it uninteresting. I haven't progressed enough to know the characters, so that might have been it too.

Ireland, the training ground for colonialism, in video games, and real life!

[Slumber]

Oh, here's another biggie:

Resident Evil 6. As somebody who didn't mind RE5(I think it does certain things better than RE4, even), and anticipated RE6 with a mindset of "Well, they could make a fun action game and I'd still probably be fine with it!", and then they said stuff like "We're trying to capture the survival horror aspects that the series was founded on, on top of also keeping the fun action stuff of RE4 and 5. And we're bringing back zombies." and I was like "Hell yeah this is gonna be great." 

Then they said "We're trying to get the Call of Duty crowd", and that was the first red flag, but I ignored it because I'm a huge RE fan and everything else they were saying sounded good. 

... Holy shit, what a mess of a game. I was still in denial about halfway through Leon's campaign, but by the end, I hated the game. I managed to bring myself to do Chris' and Jake's campaigns, but needless to say, neither improved my opinion of the game. I actually think Leon's is the worst, but it's almost the fact that Leon's campaign is so bad that makes it so aggravating. 

[SoulWeaver]

On 5/29/2018 at 11:12 AM, Rapier said:

Megaman Battle Network: Amazing setting, world, and I like the NET Navi designs, but the gameplay feels like a slog to me and there are far too many random encounters.

I'd say the battles would have been fine if you had to load Chips in real-time while still dodging foes, as opposed to everything hitting the Pause Button when you want to do something besides spam the B Button. My brother and I tried a playthrough using the Gamecube's GBA Player where we hooked up two controllers. During all battles, one of us was in charge of moving Megaman, only being allowed to use the joystick, while the other was in charge of attacking, only being allowed to use the A, B, and Shoulder Buttons. It made even the random encounters surprisingly enjoyable because we both ended up shouting at Megaman because neither of us were in sync with each other - one of us would frequently try to dodge an attack right when the other would try to take a shot with a Cannon or something. On your own, though, yeah, it can get to be a slog. Also yes, screw the random encounter rate, I just wanna fight Ω Navis, get these random Viruses out of my face.

On 5/29/2018 at 11:12 AM, Rapier said:

Conception 2 - Children of somethingsomething: The artstyle is good. That's all there is to it, unfortunately.

There's potential in the game that you can see if you look in the right places, like Feene's friend Raul, who could easily have been more involved in the game if it weren't for the relatively-arbitrary limitation that nobody in the world can enter a Labyrinth and still fight competently(even though 16-year-old Torri held her own in a Labyrinth for a fair amount of time considering she was basically using their equivalent of Meth as a power source, though that may have been due to her portable gatling gun) save the Protag(who can go die in a hole btw) and ONE Heroine...oh, and freaking nine kids, as opposed to, I dunno, a second Heroine. As it is, Raul does literally nothing except tell Feene(because the rest of us had figured it out long ago) that she was in love. Chlotz also could have been more than just Chlotz if they'd been willing to put in more time and effort. Really, if the game had been more focused on being an actual game and less on providing plenty of fanservice(though I'm certainly not complaining about all the Fuuko swimsuit shots, not to mention the shot when you run in to kill the bug for her...), it could have been a really solid game, especially since this is Atlus and Spike Chunsoft we're talking about - if they'd put in real effort, they could have kept the ridiculously generic plot and dating segments and it still would have been killer. As it is, while I ended up liking the game anyways due to the Heroines, it felt like it was suppressed as opposed to letting its full potential out for some reason and so it changed my life's goal to become 'buy the rights to the Heroines and make a game with them that actually rocks so they don't get lost to obscurity'.