Games Ruined By One Thing

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Mojo Thief said:
Mafia: City of Lost Haven. The fucking racing mission where if you make even a single mistake, you'll have to restart. Plus, the cars handle like cars from the '30s (i.e. they brake and turn for shit) and other racers will periodically crash and careen right into your path just to be dicks. Oh, and the race in the 2020 remake is no easier, it just looks prettier. I think it took me like 15 tries to beat it on Hard, which is about 14 more times than it took me to beat any other mission in the game.
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In the original back in the day there was a way to glitch through a shortcut. Dunno if that was ever patched, I think I only ever had the release version. Very not fun mission.

I played the remake on normal and I guess the difficulties are bit wack, as the race on normal was so easy I did spin out of the track and still managed to catch up to the pack and win, on the first try. That was after dreading this mission the whole game. Hard must be for the connoisseurs of the orignal wanting to experience the rage again.
 
Remembered another one, but I expect to get some hate for this one....

Radiant Historia 3ds version. The battle sysyem is very engaging for bosses, but against mooks they are a tremendous resource drain, mp recovery is rare and even then random encounters will fuck your shit if not careful. Money is on the low end and so having high end equipment for the point is a pain. This gets easier once the funky randomizer dungeon thing is available, but I still found combat tedious.

So I think to myself, "fuck it, I'll just drop it to easy and plow through since the story is supposed to be worth it", but once you lower to easy, it suddenly becomes insultingly simple were randoms explode in the map on contact and you can't bump it back up.

So I ended up basically just dropping it. It's in my "give anotjer go" listbut something tells me it will wait a long time.
 
Final Fantasy 3 is notorious for a incredible difficulty spike toward the end of the game. After going through the entirety of the final dungeon, the boss is a giant stat check, so if you didn't grind enough it's an instant wipe out at the start of the fight. Bear in mind, grinding is not a requirement at any point in the game prior. Assuming you beat him, there's another dungeon afterwards and four more bosses you must do prior to the final one. The final boss spams the same attack over and over and if you didn't grind enough, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the first dungeon and do it all again. The Remake gets an extra bit of hate because they had the chance to fix this and chose not to. In fact, in the remake you can dupe items and heal fully with Megalixirs every turn and STILL lose because the HP damage is so high.
 
Bridge to Nowhere said:
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance's law system. Imagine having to check the laws every single time you get into a fight, because they constantly change, and make sure you don't break any of them. It's entirely possible to get laws that completely fuck you over ("No damaging monsters" in a fight with monsters, "No Attack command" early in the game when your non-mages don't have anything else, etc.), violating them gets you yellow cards that take pieces of equipment or some of the battle rewards, and you can also get red cards that banish one of your units from the battlefield for the rest of the fight and force you to go get them back from prison, unless it's the main character, in which case it's game over and back to your last save. If you think you can cleverly use this against the enemy, think again: all the enemies you'd actually want to send to prison have protection that prevent them from getting anything except yellow cards, which don't affect enemies since they only do stuff when the fight ends. No, you can't ever get this protection.

This is a major reason why I never bothered to finish this game. You can get cards that add or remove laws, but that's a whole other system that requires you progress in the game and trade for all the cards you actually want, and they're consumables as well.
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Another thing about the law system is that since you never know what the penalty is until after a battle, you'll sometimes end up getting the worst penalty which is a permanent lowering of one of your stats, something you should NEVER accept, so you just have to shut the game off and redo the battle.

The laws cycle through a list as you move around the map and you can get favorable ones by moving around until you get some you like, and then starting a battle. At one point someone actually mentions that certain enemies wear a ribbon that exempts them from laws. You can see this ribbon next to their name in battle, but of course this is an item you can never win, buy, steal, etc.

I never got Cid because that requires you to beat every mission. Some endgame ones require special secret items you can only get by trading with other players. This mechanic isn't required for anything else in the entire game, and FFTA isn't a game anyone else had, so I was permanently stuck with about 5 missions that were completely impossible to do, and never unlocked Cid.
 
ShitLurker said:
Final Fantasy Tactics letting you save mid missions without a way out. Anybody that played it knows about this pearl, but basically you are locked into a one on one duel with Ramza and a pretty strong holy knight. I went with a simple "he's a knight!" Setup and got my shit kicked in. Ended up having to start the game again since I didn't have a back up save. This time Ramza was a humble priest that knew Holy which is one of the premier nukes in the game and proceeded to oneshot that cunt. Then he decided to learn math and between him and his wingman black mage that also happened to be a math enjoyer, I bent the game in half. But that moment I'm sure was an instant drop for a lot of people.
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Dude ... Just break his weapon with knight skill.
 
Pathfinder: Kingmaker seemed like it would be my idea of a great oldschool RPG.

The motherfucking time limit on practically everything ruined it for me.

I get why the time limit is there. Too many games just have the villain sitting on their ass twiddling their thumbs waiting for the hero to show up. You have a sense of urgency here, and that would work very well in the tabletop version of the game, not so much when you have a giant world to explore, tons of side quests/content and you can't feel like you can take your time and enjoy yourself without rushing through it as fast as possible to avoid a game over for taking too long. I like to take my time when playing RPGs, explore everywhere, do all the side stuff, and you can't with this game. The time limit sucks and ruins it for people like me. Wrath of the Righteous was much better, it had time limits as well, but nowhere near as harsh and punishing as Kingmaker, worst that could happen is you fail a side quest or get a worse outcome, your entire game doesn't end, and you're not timed on every single thing happening.
 
Red Dead Redemption II makes me feel like an insane person. Everyone besides me endlessly spergs about how incredible the story and characters are and how rich the dialogue is.

Every attempt I make I quit because of how excruciatingly long and boring every fucking conversation is. My longest attempt is about fifteen hours in and 80% of the dialogue is still "git up on here Arthur!" Or various grunts and burps.

I actually quite like story focused games and RPGs, TW3 is one of my favorite games of all time but I don't understand the love for this one I really don't.
 
The Great Citracett said:
I never got Cid because that requires you to beat every mission. Some endgame ones require special secret items you can only get by trading with other players. This mechanic isn't required for anything else in the entire game, and FFTA isn't a game anyone else had, so I was permanently stuck with about 5 missions that were completely impossible to do, and never unlocked Cid.
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i got cid and i never used any trading feature because i didn't know anyone else with the game so it must have been possible without it. it's been so long since i played it that i can't remember how

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i pulled out my old gba just to make sure i wasn't crazy
cid.jpg
 
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Dwight Frye said:
Pathfinder: Kingmaker seemed like it would be my idea of a great oldschool RPG.

The motherfucking time limit on practically everything ruined it for me.

I get why the time limit is there. Too many games just have the villain sitting on their ass twiddling their thumbs waiting for the hero to show up. You have a sense of urgency here, and that would work very well in the tabletop version of the game, not so much when you have a giant world to explore, tons of side quests/content and you can't feel like you can take your time and enjoy yourself without rushing through it as fast as possible to avoid a game over for taking too long. I like to take my time when playing RPGs, explore everywhere, do all the side stuff, and you can't with this game. The time limit sucks and ruins it for people like me. Wrath of the Righteous was much better, it had time limits as well, but nowhere near as harsh and punishing as Kingmaker, worst that could happen is you fail a side quest or get a worse outcome, your entire game doesn't end, and you're not timed on every single thing happening.
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Doesn't Kingmaker have like a million modifiers you can tweak for just about every aspect of the game?
I imagine that there are a few that pertain to timers but I cold be wrong.
 
Mortin Shart said:
Dude ... Just break his weapon with knight skill.
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This was looong ago, so don't even remember what I had, but I don't doubt I was retarded enough to not have weapon break nor enough jp to purchase it. I also remember taking 2 stasis swords and just being dead.
 
Secreta Secretorum said:
Doesn't Kingmaker have like a million modifiers you can tweak for just about every aspect of the game?
I imagine that there are a few that pertain to timers but I cold be wrong.
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It does, but the time limit is such an integral part of the game its finnicky to work with. You can mitigate the worst of it by lowering the game's difficulty, but that just makes it pathetically easy with zero challenge.

I've installed a couple mods that fix the worst of it without having to put the difficulty on pussy mode, so it is playable, but the game just left a bad taste in my mouth and it feels like a chore coming back to it.
 
Most of the Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi’s Island games, and the absurd amount of collectibles. It’s one thing to have Breath of the Wild’s 900 korok seeds because the game clearly doesn’t expect you to get all or even half of them, but I don’t want the result screen of every level to say “you’re playing the game wrong because you didn’t search every inch of the level to get 100% of each of the three different kinds of collectibles.”

And this is more of a personal preference, but I don’t like permadeath in any strategy game/RPG where I’m just gonna reset every time someone dies. If I wanted to permanently lose an hour of progress due to bad RNG, I’d play a roguelike.
 
The Great Citracett said:
I never got Cid because that requires you to beat every mission. Some endgame ones require special secret items you can only get by trading with other players. This mechanic isn't required for anything else in the entire game, and FFTA isn't a game anyone else had, so I was permanently stuck with about 5 missions that were completely impossible to do, and never unlocked Cid.
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Requiring multiplayer to unlock a few things is always a huge hassle in old games like that, and I know the Game Boy and DS lines had a number of them. Pokemon Trading Card Game, I think there are like two cards you can only get from Card Popping. What's card popping? Well, Game Boy Color (not original GB, not Advance) had an infrared port on the top. It looks like this:
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You point it at another person's GBC, who is also running Pokemon TCG and is ready to card pop, and then you both get a random card. It's not guaranteed that it'll be one of the two exclusive to card popping, and worst of all, you can only do it once per save file. Did you card pop with your one friend who also has the game, and you didn't get the exclusive card? Too bad, start a new save and go through the painfully long forced tutorial before you're able to try again.

Another funny thing is, the game got a rerelease on 3DS Virtual Console, and the 3DS just happened to be the next Nintendo handheld to also have an infrared port! And... they completely removed support for Card Pop, making those last two cards inaccessible forevermore.

I think the Mega Man Battle Network games also had some battlechips that could only be won from multiplayer battles. If it was portable and focused on collecting, it probably had some multiplayer-only crap required to unlock a few things.
 
Dwight Frye said:
It does, but the time limit is such an integral part of the game its finnicky to work with. You can mitigate the worst of it by lowering the game's difficulty, but that just makes it pathetically easy with zero challenge.

I've installed a couple mods that fix the worst of it without having to put the difficulty on pussy mode, so it is playable, but the game just left a bad taste in my mouth and it feels like a chore coming back to it.
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Fair enough I also prefer well tuned difficulty levels over a modular system you can accidentally make piss easy because you don't know how a slider is going to impact a bunch of shit down the road.
 
Pizza Tower is a recent game that's best described as an unapologetic Warioland 4 clone that focuses on execution to an extreme degree. One of its mechanics is that you can run up vertical walls if you hit them at high speed, which is trivial everywhere since you move about as fast as Sonic with invincibility all the time.

The game-ruining thing is that the wall run sometimes doesn't trigger and you just stop dead instead of wall climbing. It's not a big thing if you're playing casually but if you're going for high ranks missing a wall run is going to mean 4 to 5 seconds of downtime, enough for your combo to drop. Levels are 6-7 minutes long at the minimum so having this happen 3/4ths through an otherwise perfect stage is frustrating as hell.

E: Another one, Orcs Must Die 2. It's a third-person shooter tower defense game with network multiplayer. Beyond the campaign there's Endless mode where 'completing' a map just means surviving to some wave number way higher than normal, I think 30 or so compared to the average 12 waves on a map. The problem is that OMD's netcode is absolutely fucking awful and has zero way to recover from a desync - it just boots you back to the main menu with 'Connection lost', which critically bypasses the 'end of map' game over screen - even if you managed to beat wave 30 it's not getting counted if you desync. As the wave number increases you're dealing with exponentially more units and a higher and higher chance of a desync too, so the only way to actually 'clear' maps is to luck out and get to exactly wave 31 and then forfeit to get the game over screen before the game desyncs. It's not even just Steam networking either since you can play over a LAN, and I've seen the desync in a game involving three powerful computers directly hooked to a gigabit switch.
 
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Two Dollars said:
And this is more of a personal preference, but I don’t like permadeath in any strategy game/RPG where I’m just gonna reset every time someone dies. If I wanted to permanently lose an hour of progress due to bad RNG, I’d play a roguelike.
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This reminds me of when Fire Emblem was about to become mainstream (Fates I think?) and everyone and their dog was saying "don't play casual mode, play permadeath for the true experience!", only for those same people to reload a save every time a character dropped. It's like those people that insist Xcom should only be played Ironman, but use alt-tab and save copying tricks to get around it.
 
Judge Dredd said:
This reminds me of when Fire Emblem was about to become mainstream (Fates I think?) and everyone and their dog was saying "don't play casual mode, play permadeath for the true experience!", only for those same people to reload a save every time a character dropped. It's like those people that insist Xcom should only be played Ironman, but use alt-tab and save copying tricks to get around it.
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That’s exactly what I was thinking of, except for Awakening; I played casual, but just made an effort to not abuse deaths except for some extremely difficult post-game missions.
 
Shroom King said:
Any RPG or strategy game that has a hard limit on how many characters you can use in a battle. What is the point of having a dozen characters if you can only use 5 at a time?
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This is how I feel about Chrono Cross. There's over forty party members, but you can only use three at a time, one of which must be the MC unless you're playing New Game+. It really doesn't help that most of the party members have either niche uses or are just flat out bad.
 
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