2 picks for me: Stardew Valley, most boring shit ever, I don’t see the appeal, seriously how the hell did that thing sold 20 million copies?
And Witcher 3, I own that game since 2019 and I regret buying it, funny thing is that I’ve finished Dragon Age 1 and 2, which are kinda same genre but I actually enjoyed those games. I guess the old BioWare sauce carried those games unlike Witcher where there’s nothing to enjoy in its massive pointless world.
Animal Crossing. I have friends who became obsessed with that game. They wouldn’t stop pestering me about how much I would love it, and how I should start playing so we could trade turnips or some shit. Anyways, I bought it. What a weird thing to be obsessed with. It was boring, childish, and pointless. But it was hugely popular for a period of time.
I bought it for the same reasons and also hated it. It just felt empty and boring. I then had to bite my tongue so hard when those friends would start gushing about their latest Animal Crossing thing.
Fucking chore simulator. My roommates couldn’t be assed to do their actual chores, but every morning during covid they’d get up and make sure their fucking farms had whatever the shit they needed.
I’ve just never gotten into Pokemon. The games just feel like 99% grinding. I’m sure that’s an incredibly unpopular opinion, but I still find them unspeakably dull.
If you look at the first game from a historic perspective
The first game basically was an open world RPG with 151 unique characters with each their strengths and weaknesses, and their own attacks, and all could be customised. Running on a handheld that previously could only play Tetris.
It was a freaking coding masterpiece.
But I agree the gameplay loop hasn’t upgraded the way it should. It didn’t evolve with the medium and stuck too much to its roots.
Although the grinding in the newer games has been minimised. You can play through the games without grinding once.
I admit I haven’t played a recent Pokemon game because of my previous experiences, but I’m open to checking a new one out at some point if the grinding has been reduced. Thanks.
It’s weird, because Pokémon didn’t invent turn-based RPG’s, nor did they even invent the pocket monster genre because Dragon Warrior Monster arguably had a better game than Pokémon out around the same time - with more monsters, breeding, and a better storyline.
But Red/Blue and Gold/Silver were great games of their time. Very basic, but great, mostly because of the world built around them. If you didn’t appreciate Pokémon, it’s probably easy to see why you’d find it dull.
I don’t even mind some turn-based RPGs. I mentioned Wasteland in another comment, which I loved. Wasteland was basically remade as Fallout 1. Fallout 1, 2 and the Wasteland games which now have their own sequels are all turn-based RPGs, but they give you so many more options than Pokemon and they are also about team building since you don’t play as a single character.
I guess Pokemon was just not the game for me. 🤷♂️
Worth mentioning, regarding Dragon Quest, the monster teaming up with the player was added in DQ5, back in 1992, something that was arguably first introduced in Megami Tensei 2 (1990). Dragon Quest Monster was released only in 1998, after the first pokemon games.
What set pokemon apart from them was the amount of pokemon you could get. That Game Freak managed to cram another 100 in Gold/Silver, a night/day cycle, berries, friendship, breeding and the entire original Kanto region in a gameboy color cart is a small miracle
They came from a different era. If you didn’t grow up taking long road trips with a Gameboy pocket/color for your only distraction then you probably don’t get the nostalgia rush that most pmon fans do.
I was born in 1977. I had a Gameboy. I just never cared for Pokemon.
I played Red/Blue as a kid. Enjoyed the crap out of them. And then never played any of the later games ever. I think if I tried now I’d feel the same as you.
A significant number of pokemon fans had to make do with emulating the original gameboy games on the family computer. I know I did
Exactly right. We spent hours and hours in a Ford van playing Pokemon red/yellow/blue in the 90s 😂
KotoR and Mass Effect. They both just feel so stilted.
I won’t allow mass effect slander. Don’t give a fuck about star wars, you can trash it
Tell me why you love it, I’d love to be able to give it a second chance.
I just love being Shepard. He’s always can say the right thing, being cool, corny, gets the girl (this is something I’ll never get), being an asshole with little consequences, beats the galactic menace… Is so much fun as a shooter too. Plus the universe is very rich an complex if you want to explore it, I don’t, except for the mandatory stuff plus the important side missions. Yet I managed to get all the achievements.
Animal Crossing.
I find Smash Bros uniquely frustrating and obtuse.
Buttons go smash.
It’s not like I totally didn’t enjoy it, but Red Dead Redemption 2. The game was good in many ways, and I totally get why it’s so we’ll loved, but I just have nothing with the setting. I don’t like cowboys, I don’t like playing as an asshole who makes bad decision after bad decision, and I also don’t like a setting where women are basically property. Just not really my vibe. I just came from Cyberpunk 2077 and the contrast was quite big, even though Cyberpunk is supposed to be more dystopian
FIFA. Every man and boy in England loves FIFA, except me. I find it totally boring and pointless.
The game is popular but isn’t universally beloved, even the fans hate it, but they got the monopoly in football games
The entire Final Fantasy franchise, with the exception of Dissidia. I just don’t like that style of game play where you have to stop in the middle of fighting, pick what you wanna do, then watch them do it. I’m also not a fan of Pokémon for the same similar reason.
I never really got into the Pokémon games. Don’t find turn-based combat very fun. I mean, I guess turn-based is easy and relaxing for when you just want to put your game down and take breaks.
BioShock Infinite. The gunplay is very basic and it’s world doesn’t make sense.
Like:
- How can Elizabeth be a up beat Disney princess like character? If she lived in her tower and being experimented on for all her life.
- Why Columbia need slaves? When it haves robots and have control of quantum mechanics.
spoiler
Killing Booker will not stop Comstock being made. Because an Booker who didn’t go though with the river baptism still can become Comstock. You need to kill one of Lutece twin’s parents. So they never be born. Due to them helping Comstock make Columbia in the first place.
I just do not like Fallout 3 and 4. I played the hell out of 1 and 2 back in the day, but Bethesda really changed things up. The writing in particular suffered.
Right there with ya. Oh, I tried so hard. Walking and junk collection simulators in a depressing, ugly setting. The humorous bits are way too infrequent to make up for the litany of misery.
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Any of the soulsborne games.
If your game is advertised as being “extremely difficult”, it just means it is lacking tons of quality of life features and goes out of its way to punish the player by making them repeat the same slog over and over. It is quite easy to make a difficult game, much harder to make a fun game.
Just imagine how much better and shorter Dark Souls would have been with a marker telling you where to go, instead of you fumbling around going through the same areas because you have no idea where to go next. It artificially lengthens the game.
But the worst part about those types of games is the community. They go insane when you even propose an easy or story mode. As if the the difficulty is the only redeeming quality those games have.
I don’t have to “git gud”, I can just close the game and never play it again while I enjoy actual good games.
I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.
Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.
For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.
Eh, just wasn’t made for you. Not everyone needs to listen to death metal either.
Look I think there are valid complaints to be made about the Dark Souls franchise, but criticizing them for not giving you waypoints says more about you than it does the games themselves. The lack of any sort of hand holding was by far the most interesting thing for me when I first played Dark Souls and is the thing that got me hooked. The tension in exploring a new area, having no idea what to expect and being so scared you’re going to die is a wonderful feeling, especially when you overcome it and survive to the next bonfire.
You’re making me want to write a boomeresque comment about how kids want video games to hold their hands. Don’t you have a sense of adventure? Is exploration and mystery not interesting to you?
I can just close the game and never play it again
True and healthy!
while I enjoy actual good games.
blatant copium
The games usually have an easier mode that is still not easy. In DS 3 playing the Knight and using the shield heavily works pretty well and make a lot of bosses trivial.
But yeah, it’s not for everyone, grinding timings and level information can be really frustrating so if the satisfaction of beating a level is not enough there’d be no point.
The real easy mode in Souls is to have you and three friends get burner accounts, then get anticheat-banned on purpose so you can co-op the entire game with low risk of getting griefed by some jerkoff PvP player, as the ‘banned people’ ghetto server is a ghost town. Played through the entire Souls trilogy like that during the 2020 lockdown, and had the time of my life. Never really felt “hard” because we could gang up on enemies. It did help that one of my mates was a veritable Dark Souls encyclopedia, and would give us pointers and strategies while also telling us about the lore. Great time.Lol, k
Most of the Soulsborne games. The only one I’ve been able to enjoy is Sekiro.
In most Soulsborne games, it seems like difficulty is artificial simply because your character is so damned clunky. I enjoyed Sekiro specifically because the character was snappy and didn’t feel like they were running through waist-deep water. If I lost a fight in Sekiro, it was never because I was animation locked or because my character was too slow; It’s because I was too slow.
It took me a long time to warm to them.
The more armour you wear in the main Souls game, the slower and clunkier you are. It’s kind of a gotcha, in that you instinctively think more armour will help, and it does the exact opposite because you get hit more often. There’s a lot of shit that isn’t really explained at all. Some people like that, but the Wiki is there if you don’t.
Parrying was all but impossible for me, I just went with sword and shield for most of it, switching to the massive zweihander for the DLC.
Dark Souls 2 is the worst of them, I’d skip that if you ever try again. Way too many enemies in every area.
Lol, the two games you listed are some of my most played games of all time, especially in the last few months.
Isn’t that the point of the post?
Yes, but there are lots of universally beloved video games. I was saying that two they chose happened to be the specific two that I’d played the most recently.
