Games you wanted to love that you just couldn't? - Or even wound up hating

[Mix Me a Molotov!]

Fallouts 1 & 2. I’m so sorry, fans.

Borderlands. Any of them.

Tomb Raider 4. Now I loved the preceding titles even if 3 made me punch the ceiling in frustration, but I could just never get into it no matter how much I tried.

Resident Evil 7. Call me a squeamish fag, but I fail to see the appeal of torture porn, and that’s all this game seemed to be for the protagonist up to the ‘meal’ scene, at which point I just stopped playing.

 

[Lurkio]

Dragon Age Inquisition.

I loved Dragon Age Origins and even played through Dragon Age 2, even though it couldn't compare to origins (hey, at least it was easy, dumb fun and fairly quick to beat for an RPG).

But I just can't get through Dragon Age Inquisition despite trying twice. The RPG mechanic's have been dumbed down to the point of the game barely being an RPG anymore. The story kisses my character's ass way to much, at least Origins made me earn my army and follows, half the time it feels like Inquisition just gives me my followers. Half of the side conflicts in the story are forced, come out of nowhere, and/or are have an un-climatic resolutions. The companions also have taken a down-grade, I liked all my Companions in Origins, all but one or two in DA2, but maybe half of them in Inquisition. Also the artistic design is kinda, well, ugly. It says a lot when a game released half a decade early looks better then the one that fairly high-end graphic's of the time.

So, yeah, Inquisition didn't really hook me in. I remember the Tumblr crowd really getting into the franchise sometime between DA2's release and DA:I's production and I think it shows. It can be subtle, but the game does occasionally give a vibe of trying to appeal to that type of audience, which really took a lot of the bite out of the game.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Diablo II. It just wasn't fun to play after the first arc. Just felt repetitive even though thematically and aesthetically i liked it.

 

[Kier]

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. I don't know what it is, but the three hours I've given it so far, the ( good)worldbuilding has been in service of really nothing substantial at all. The characters are all slice-of-life anime stereotypes, nothing of any true consequence has happened, and the battle system is just a slog. I hear it gets better in the later chapters, but I just don't know if I can push myself forward to hit that point. At least the music I've heard so far is good.

Some cool things do end up happening but it takes a bit too long to get there. I had to play it in a few diffrent sessions of playing it for a bit for a week and then stopping, but in the end I enjoyed it. Think of first chapter and seccond chapter as one oversized game split in 2, and 3rd chapter as a sequel. 2C's end is something pretty great but in the end it may not be worth it.

 

[jell0]

Prototype. Game was hyped af but kinda fell on it's face. Basically a non-marvel spiderman game ft. Carnage. Story was good, but the game play became very repetitive as well as the surrounding environment. In fact, I had the same problem with The Divisions setting aswell. (ALL OF NYC IS A FUCKING GRID)

 

[JamFlowMan]

Really, really tried to get into Witcher 3. I really did. Tried it once, no dice. Installed it again months later and got further this time, that Bloody Baron sidequest i found very well written and pumped me up for what was yet to come, but i just couldnt get the interface, the mechanics... Might've been me not having the patience to learn them, might've been that i'm a dumbass, but i gave up shortly after that Ciri flashback where you fight a werewolf, i think.

Story wasn't exactly compelling me, either. Liked Geralt enough, but didn't get far enough to get invested in Yennefer or Ciri, found the bloody baron guy more intriguing in his short run lol

Still want to like it, in a way. I can see why people love it, but i guess it's just not for me.

Had the exact same experience. Played it once until meeting the Baron, quit. Started over awhile later and pushed a ittle further then dropped it again. Tried a third time and gave up again. Finally the fourth time I forced myself to not quit and for some reason everything clicked and I now love the game.

If you only got to the werewolf fight and found the Baron compelling there is a lot more his quest isn't close to done yet. I think seeing that quest all the way through was what helped me see what the game was really going for. Not saying you should force yourself to do the same or you'd have the same outcome it was just interesting to find someone else who mirrored what I went through.

 

[SnackFairy]

Some cool things do end up happening but it takes a bit too long to get there. I had to play it in a few diffrent sessions of playing it for a bit for a week and then stopping, but in the end I enjoyed it. Think of first chapter and seccond chapter as one oversized game split in 2, and 3rd chapter as a sequel. 2C's end is something pretty great but in the end it may not be worth it.

I've heard and seen some really interesting stuff about the later games, but my first impressions of the first game makes it difficult to drum up any interest. Maybe if I'm bored one day I'll try giving it another go.

 

[Dollar Store Sentai]

For me it was XCOM 2. It seemed like it was everything I wanted: updated graphics, fully customizable troops, no more frustrations with the air game, it was great. Then I started playing it. Nearly every mission had a timer, even if there was no reason for one. Instead of air game you had resource plate spinning. The Spark DLC mission was fun, but the sparks themselves were meh at best.

WotC fixed a good bit of the mission problems, but it just doesn't feel as replayable as the first Xcom was. I'm really hoping Xcom 3 is that perfect blend of the first two games.

 

[Grey Donovan]

God of War and From Software games

 

[Some Badger]

I wanted to like Fire Emblem Fates, I really did. From what I saw in the trailers back in 2014, the UI was improved from Awakening, the music was banger and the Hoshidan classes got me hyped for the idea of an East Asian setting in a Fire Emblem game.

I only played Conquest, and while I agree with the fandom at large that the map design is among the best in the series and it has good replay value, I can't look past the unbalanced gameplay (ninjas are supremely broken and most characters without royal blood are unusable once you reach the mid-game), the shoehorned child character mechanics, sparse worldbuilding, and most especially the dogshit story.

I was trying to convince myself I was having fun too, but even some of the best maps were bullshit IMO, especially the two-part Endgame, which in turn gave way to an extremely dissatisfying ending.


And just so I don't doublepost, Pokémon Shield, Octopath Traveler and FF2 are runner-ups. I haven't finished the latter two games and I find myself less and less compelled to do so the longer I put them off.

 

[Canoodler]

God of War 2018. I love the previous God of War games, but the most recent one I just felt cold and indifferent toward it.

 

[A shitty ass clover]

Bioshock.

The last part of the entire game sucks miles of dick, YEAH LEMME TAKE YOUR MAX HP BECAUSE PSYCHOLOGY LOL

 

[Jeff Boomhauer]

Mario Kart DS. Not a bad game by any means, but I've heard from numerous people that "It's the best Mario Kart game!"

I just didn't care for it. Aside from the cool karts (like Dry Bones' little tank) and the novelty of playing as R.O.B. in yet another game, it's not one that particularly stands out to me as being better or worse than most other Mario Kart games.

I think the biggest problem is that I didn't play it until I was like 23. If I had played it when it came out, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more.

 

[Stasi]

Fire Emblem Fates

FE Fates was such an embarrassing steaming pile of shit it soured me on the whole franchise.

I played every English release up to that point, dabbled with some of the fan translations and got both copies of Fates on release. I have not played the Switch game and have no desire to. This is how bad fates was. It killed the whole franchise for me.

 

[Wintersun]

FE Fates was such an embarrassing steaming pile of shit it soured me on the whole franchise.

I played every English release up to that point, dabbled with some of the fan translations and got both copies of Fates on release. I have not played the Switch game and have no desire to. This is how bad fates was. It killed the whole franchise for me.

As someone who got introduced to the franchise with Path of Radiance, then never touching it until Awakening years later as an adult, it sort of touched on me that Fire Emblem was a pretty good franchise and I should check it out. Got a ton of isos from some friends to emulate every old game, played the shit out of Awakening until there was nothing left of it, and finally I see Fire Emblem Fates...

And I immediately lost any love I had for the entire series. It was so bad, my online buddies and I would start singing the Great Waves theme terribly when we were losing in matches of Siege or Crucible or whatever, since they mostly all had the same experience as I did.

 

[mrs thickness]

The negative responses to Fates have always interested me, as someone who was about to give up on the series after Awakening. I fucking love Fates (read: Conquest) and will still fire up a new save on lunatic every once in a while. That being said, I also have never given a single shit about the story, characters, lore, or dialogue in any Fire Emblem game, so Fates gets a lot of points just by virtue of being completely retarded in a way that's really funny and memorable in comparison to the rest of the series.

Anyway, I don't like Nier Automata. The characters are boring and melodramatic, the action is shallow, repetitive, and is completely broken by the half-assed RPG mechanics, the hacking warioware minigame sucks big shit, and the game is very up it's own ass. I don't believe for a second that it would have the acclaim it does if people were less capable of cooming to the character designs.

 

[DoNotReadTheFinePrint]

The Ratchet and Clank remake.

I was very excited to play the first game with better gameplay and graphics but, oh well...
At first I was weirded out by the direction they took and how they changed Ratchet into a goody two-shoes, which he definitely wasn't in the original. Those were some early warning signs but I chose to ignore them. After all, the game play felt nice and fluid and I had a lot of fun once I was on Novalis.
Novalis was a pretty faithful recreation of the original, until I looked for the hidden cave you needed the aqua-pack to access in the original, since Clank (somehow) already got it. When I just found a wall where the cave used to be, I felt like I literally hit my head against it.
The next thing that disappointed me were the character animations. How the hell were they able to do good facial animations in the PS2 title but made all characters in the remake into lifeless robots? Hell, whenever the movie scenes played this discrepancy became so apparent that I wanted all character interactions in-game to end as fast as possible.
But the moment the remake broke me, was when I realized how many planets they cut and that Orxon was among them. In the original I love that you are forced to play Clank at first, although the controls are clunky. Not to speak about the atmosphere and the soundtrack. Also on topic of the soundtrack... Man, was I disappointed that they didn't use the original in the remake and used this bland orchestral soundtrack.
And don't get me started on the way they treated Drek. While he was never on the deep end of characterization he was enjoyable for the evil cooperate CEO he was. But it seems they wanted to make Nefarious the big bad and inserted him into the story, which killed all the enjoyment this character brought me in the other games.
It's save to say that this was the first time I was so disappointed in a game, that I felt really, really hurt once I finished it and I haven't touched it since. The only good things I can say about it are that the game-play felt good and the graphics were nice but a good game needs more than that, espcially if it's a motherfucking remake.

tl;dr The game felt like Ratchet and Clank - The Fanfiction written by Captain Quark, which is how I treat it since he's also the (annoying) narrator of the whole thing.

 

[Some Badger]

FE Fates was such an embarrassing steaming pile of shit it soured me on the whole franchise.

I played every English release up to that point, dabbled with some of the fan translations and got both copies of Fates on release. I have not played the Switch game and have no desire to. This is how bad fates was. It killed the whole franchise for me.

I probably would have stopped paying attention to FE altogether if it weren't for the fact that they announced a remake for Gaiden a year after Fates' release. Fates' overall narrative was so bad that it made Echoes' adequately coherent plot the best FE storyline for like, half a year for me. The lack of shitcore waifu culture surrounding it has rendered it among my favorite of the post Awakening games.

As someone who got introduced to the franchise with Path of Radiance, then never touching it until Awakening years later as an adult, it sort of touched on me that Fire Emblem was a pretty good franchise and I should check it out. Got a ton of isos from some friends to emulate every old game, played the shit out of Awakening until there was nothing left of it, and finally I see Fire Emblem Fates...

We started the series with the same game, which as far as FE plots go sets the bar pretty high, even if the graphics haven't aged well at all. The Tellius games at large set my expectations a mite too high with regards to the plot and gameplay of an FE game, to the point that everything about Awakening deeply disappointed me and the fanfare around it confused me for years, even though I was thankful that my favorite franchise as a teenager was allowed to continue existing because of it.

The negative responses to Fates have always interested me, as someone who was about to give up on the series after Awakening. I fucking love Fates (read: Conquest) and will still fire up a new save on lunatic every once in a while. That being said, I also have never given a single shit about the story, characters, lore, or dialogue in any Fire Emblem game, so Fates gets a lot of points just by virtue of being completely retarded in a way that's really funny and memorable in comparison to the rest of the series.

I admit that playing Fire Emblem for the story is a continuous disappointment because it's always pretty mediocre, but that's the reason why Fates' story is so, so bad by comparison. It's so objectively terrible that not even a fan rewrite mod was able to fix it. But I suppose when you've gone through more than 1-2 playthroughs you're probably skipping all the dialogue anyway.

 

[qazzzz]

Skyrim, I can see how people would enjoy it but overall it’s not a game for me. Middle Ages settings aren’t that fun imo

 

[Rakdos92]

Skyrim, I can see how people would enjoy it but overall it’s not a game for me. Middle Ages settings aren’t that fun imo

Classic middle age games at that. Morrowind had a decent thing going with its alien areas, something both Oblivion and Skyrim are dearly lacking.