What games disappointed you when you finally got and played them?

[Fabulously Olivier]

On 8/2/2020 at 4:27 AM, Julian Teehee said:

It's caused by the armatization.

The enemies have doubled stats because they take this into account. If you fight a same leveled elite monster as your party is without armatization, you have no chance. They will oneshot you.

I made the experiment fighting the first elite monster with a same level team without armatization. I could do it....... at cost of a half dozen of group elixirs (all the ones I transferred from my completed run).

I hate armatization because of this.

The cast wasn't great, but I also could say this about other Tales games like Graces or Symphonia 2 (at least in person of the protagonist).

I agree. Though the examples you gave also happened to be the Tales games with the worst reputations alongside Zestiria. Symphonia 2 was a complete joke.

 

Graces had a mostly bad cast, but I must admit to liking Hubert. He falls into that Jade/Richter archetype that I tend to like.

[SSbardock84]

Fire Emblem: Fates is probably the biggest one I could think of. Given how good Awakening was, I had never been so excited for a video game. Extremely disappointed with it. Ever since I have lost excitement for video games. I try not to set expectations up anymore that way I'm not let down.

[DarkSage861]

Any Fire Emblem game 🙂

[Dai]

Pokémon Sword and Shield. Even after the rollercoaster of nonsense, I still held a shred of hope it might be at least decent. Bu it was just...too much. I found it genuinely underwhelming and flawed.

Lords of Shadow 2, namely for the world and a bit of the story. I also didn’t enjoy that you were expected to still sneak around the uber soldiers and couldn’t fight them squarely at the end of the game.

[Slyfox]

On 8/3/2020 at 6:46 AM, MagicCanonBalls said:

Elder scroll 4 Oblivion. When they say this game is great open world exploration game, I didn't realized it meant no map and no any sort of quest marking at all, quit within an hour. Dont even wanna go anywhere near skyrim.

Oblivion has a map, accessible from the inventory screen. So I'm not quite sure what you are getting at. Oblivion also has quest markers, unless you mean markers for quests you haven't found. Just talk to people, explore. Few quests are easy to miss.

Pretty much staples of gaming that haven't gone away.

[Maof06]

Fire Emblem - Path of Radiance: The game is not bad by any means, but I finished it recently and I can say that I am disappointed. I went to play thinking that I would get a better story than Genealogy (which is nothing less than a masterpiece), since it is widely considered as such, and I got the standard Fire Emblem story with more worldbuilding. In the end, I became more emotionally involved in the story of Sacred Stones for example. I guess it's my fault for expecting too much, and now I'm not looking forward to playing Radiant Dawn. I'm thinking I'll be disappointed too. The fact that I bought a Wii to play the Tellius games doesn't help.

[Stylus]

The most disappointing game I've played recently was Tales of Xillia.

I was a huge Tales fan ever since I played Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube. I went out of my way to play every Tales game I could get my hands on, even a spin-off game on the PSP (would not recommend that one!). I didn't own an Xbox, and the Tales of Symphonia 'sequel' was somewhat disappointing, so there ended up being a huge drought of Tales games to play after Abyss. When Namco decided against localizing Tales of Graces, I was devastated. I remember doodling the main character and watching combo videos from the game waiting for it's localization announcement that never came. At that point, I sort of gave up on the series.

A handful of years later, they re-released and localized the game on PS3, and I picked it up, although what excitement I had for the game had faded. I few months ago, about 8 years after the re-release and over a decade since it's initial release, I decided to play through the game to see what I had missed. I was quite surprised with the game, and it's description did not match the game whatsoever. What was described as a light-hearted title, I found it to be dark, compelling, and full of emotion. About half the game was filler schlock, and it's clear they cut corners in both story and dungeon design in order to stretch a 15-20 hour game into a 40 hour one, but there was no denying that the high's were exceptionally high. As a side note, I consider the "Lineage and Legacies" after-story mandatory, as otherwise the ending is quite lackluster.

In short, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Tales of Graces, and immediately aimed to play another entry I had missed out on, Tales of Xillia. Now mind you, I've only played about 90 minutes of Tales of Xillia. However, what I have played has been rather dull. Whereas the characters in Tales of Graces felt sincere and heartfelt, the characters in Tales of Xillia so far have been either card-board cutouts, or lewd card-board cutouts. Without getting into spoilers, someone is brutally murdered in front of the main character's eyes. The murderer happens to be female, and also happens to not be wearing much more than lingerie for an outfit. The camera makes very very sure that you are aware of this, and whatever epic standoff was supposed to happen between the protagonists and her either didn't happen or wasn't visible, and the camera was wedged firmly between her legs for the majority of her screen time.

Ignoring the 'plot,' the gameplay felt like a huge step back from Tales of Graces, reverting back to the old formula rather than innovating or expanding upon the system Tales of Graces had used. In Tales of Graces, it was a thrilling moment both story-wise and gameplay-wise when Asbel casts his first B-Arte, and a whole new layer is added on top of the combat. No such moment has arisen from Tales of Xillia, and I doubt such a moment exists in the game. I may revisit the game, I've certainly played my fair share of great games with terrible openings. But it's also fair to say that I found the game's opening extremely lackluster, especially hot off the heels of Tales of Graces.

[lightcosmo]

7 hours ago, Stylus said:

Ignoring the 'plot,' the gameplay felt like a huge step back from Tales of Graces, reverting back to the old formula rather than innovating or expanding upon the system Tales of Graces had used. In Tales of Graces, it was a thrilling moment both story-wise and gameplay-wise when Asbel casts his first B-Arte, and a whole new layer is added on top of the combat. No such moment has arisen from Tales of Xillia, and I doubt such a moment exists in the game. I may revisit the game, I've certainly played my fair share of great games with terrible openings. But it's also fair to say that I found the game's opening extremely lackluster, especially hot off the heels of Tales of Graces.

I'd personally say the combat is really fun, but I like Vesperia's style, and it's pretty much the same thing albeit with some small changes to it.

Sorry to hear you don't enjoy it, as I would say it's one of the much better Tales of games. ( well, from what I've played, at least.

[Stylus]

I've heard it was one of the better Tales games. I may end up giving it another go at some point when I'm less burnt out.

[Benice]

Path of Radiance- Much like what Maof said, it's hyped up to have the best story, best cast and be the best or second best game in the series, but it really was not a good game for me. The gameplay is super slow and easy, even on hard, and the fact that they shoehorn in as many enemies as possible doesn't help. Titania trivializes any challenges there would be, and plot's not that far ahead of every other game. It probably wouldn't have bothered me so much if it weren't hyped up so often.

(Plus there's the fact that they ripped Kaga off but that's another story...)

[lenticular]

Way too many games to list all of them, so I'll keep it to two recent (and probably controversial) ones.

The Legenda of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This was he reason I bought a Switch, given how much everyone loves it, and oh, how I hate this game. I found it slow, boring and empty. The weapon durability system did not work for me at all because it removed all sense of progression. Finding a new item wasn't exciting when I knew it was going to go away again soon, which removed a big part of the motivation to explore. The cooking system was a clunky, uninuitive mess. Having out-of-combat running be tied to a stamina gauge was so horrible a decision that I could rant exclusively on that topic for paragraphs. I could forgive the lack of story or the lack of dungeons, but not having either brought the game down. The whole "sheikah slate" thing was a terrible idea which was obviously designed for the Wii U gamepad (which was, itself, a terrible idea) so was doubly out of place on the Switch. The whole thing played like a really terrible walking simulator: the whole emphasis was on wandering around, exploring, and finding interesting places, except that the world was way too big for that, meaning that the density of interesting places was way too low.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Conclusive proof, if it were needed, that bigger does not mean better. This game would have been so much better if it had been smaller. Having a bunch of characters who I don't care about and in some cases have never even heard of us dilutes the core premise of a bunch of all-stars from different games going up against each other. Mario vs Sonic? That's great. Link vs Samus? Sign me up! Wolf vs Palutena? Um... who? Why am I supposed to care? Get rid of half the roster and leave me only with characters I care about. And then there's World of Light, which was a hot mess. For one, it has the same "I have never heard of this character" problem, except far worse. Just throwing more and more characters in to say that they're there and for the sake of "representation" does absolutely nothing if they aren't placed in enough context for me to be able to appreciate them. There is also a complete lack of any sort of a difficulty curve in World of Light, with levels of all difficulties thrown all over the map. You don't start out easy, get better, and then start having progressively more and more difficult challenges. You just have more and more of the same thing thrown at you again and again and it gets tedious. So, that's the single player, but how about the online multiplayer? Oh. You need to pay extra for that? But people are saying it's laggy and kinda broken? Yeah, don't think I'm going to bother with that, then.

[vanguard333]

On 9/2/2020 at 7:44 PM, Benice said:

(Plus there's the fact that they ripped Kaga off but that's another story...)

Wait; what?! What do you mean by that?

[lightcosmo]

On 9/2/2020 at 5:58 PM, Stylus said:

I've heard it was one of the better Tales games. I may end up giving it another go at some point when I'm less burnt out.

Sorry, I respect your opinion of course, but I cant help but try to defend a series I enjoy so much!

I dont mean to try and sway your opinion at all, forgive me if it sounded that way at all!

[Benice]

On 9/4/2020 at 3:33 PM, vanguard333 said:

Wait; what?! What do you mean by that?

You know the "According to Kaga's notes" semi-meme? It is true, Kaga had lots of notes. LOTS of them-If he hadn't left IntSys, the next game he made would have been related to Jugdral, (IIRC, well before the events of FE4 and 5) l and therefore Archanaea. Instead, he changed Judgral to the very unique Jugud in his own Studio's game, TearRing Saga, which got sued for essentially being an FE game with a different name. He then made a Sequel to TRS, set thousands of years after the first, which was titled Berwick Saga. I'd suppose that he'd have had notes for these games, which leads me to this next part. (Also, Berwick Saga released only one month after Path of Radiance, which is almost nothing in game development time.)

A common mercenary, whose father is a legend and has a legendary sword, is vanquished by a foe from their father's past, who also possesses the twin of the mercenary's father's sword. That mercenary travels across the land, hoping to exact vengeance on their nemesis. Twice, they are defeated, but they journey alongside the heir to a fallen kingdom. Along the way, the mercenary forms close bonds with those around them, and realize that friends are what carry you through adversity. Eventually get to use a sacred weapon that pierce's their foes' immunity to normal weapons and exact revenge.

I'm talking about Ike, the Black knight, Ragnell and Alondite, right? Nope. Faye, Chaos, Vitra and Varja. Faye, even in character, is basically Kaga did it first Ike.

I was mostly joking when I said Tellius was a Kaga ripoff, as the games do have different themes and different methods of storytelling, but I do think it's interesting that Ike is so similar to a side character from Berwick. (There's other comparisons and stuff that I could make, but I'm too tired to talk about 'em right now.)

Edited September 9, 2020 by Benice

[BrightBow]

Playing TearRing Saga and Berwick Saga, you can often see things that IS blatantly copied without actually understanding them. Both in terms of story and game mechanics.

For example, FE7's Nergal is clearly a copy of TearRing Saga's Gwenchaos. Except in Nergal's case that whole "my wife was a dragon" thing is just a random piece of trivia that has nothing to do with the character's goals and motivations, while in Gwenchaos' case it's absolutely central to both.

In some rare cases they actually did better, though. I most certainly prefer Sanaki Kirsch Althina over Sanakia Fille Bronte. That whole Apostle of the Church of Veria thing sadly doesn't amount to a whole lot.

Edited September 5, 2020 by BrightBow

[Lord_Brand]

Star Fox Command. Of course I was dubious from the moment I read about Fox and Krystal breaking up, but playing the game itself only made me hate the story more. The gameplay was alright, different ships with different weapons and shields are a cool concept for the series, but the drama overshadowed everything else and kept me from enjoying the game. Once I got all the endings, I stopped playing and haven't touched it since.

Star Fox Zero by comparison was a breath of fresh air. I was disappointed that Krystal was left out, and Venom was massively underwhelming compared to SF64, but after Command left me with a bad taste in my mouth and left the fandom as a whole waiting ten years for a sequel, I was grateful to have anything.

[Strullemia]

Fire Emblem Fates, Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2.

Dragon Age 2 hurt the most. I love Dragon Age Origins and seeing the changes really dissappointed me but I’ve come to like the game after Dragon Age Inquisition. Not that Inquisition was bad but it made me like things about Dragon Age 2.

[lenticular]

5 hours ago, Strullemia said:

Fire Emblem Fates, Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2.

Out of curiosity, what was it that disappointed you about Mass Effect 3? Was it just the ending (which I personally didn't mind but I know a lot of people hated), or were there other parts that you found disappointing too?

[Aegius_NaTL]

Far Cry 3 was free on Uplay recently - I'd always heard it was the best FC game, so I figured I'd try it.

I'm about 10 hours in and while it is reasonably fun, I'm not finding it to be that amazing. I don't really feel compelled to continue. The combat is just OK, the crafting is sort of haphazardly thrown in, and the story is a bit more basic than I expected. There are redeeming qualities, but I'm just not seeing the amazing game that everyone says it is.

Re: ME3. I find that a lot of people dislike the ending and then (sort of unfairly) extrapolate their disappointment onto the entire game. Personally, ME3 is my favorite game of the franchise, despite the ending.

[Maof06]

On 9/14/2020 at 1:15 PM, Strullemia said:

Fire Emblem Fates, Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2.

Dragon Age 2 hurt the most. I love Dragon Age Origins and seeing the changes really dissappointed me but I’ve come to like the game after Dragon Age Inquisition. Not that Inquisition was bad but it made me like things about Dragon Age 2.

Dragon Age 2's storyline is one of the most ambitious that I have seen in gaming. It's a shame that EA had to rush it.

[Strullemia]

On 9/14/2020 at 11:56 PM, lenticular said:

Out of curiosity, what was it that disappointed you about Mass Effect 3? Was it just the ending (which I personally didn't mind but I know a lot of people hated), or were there other parts that you found disappointing too?

Aside from the ending there’s a few other things:

- Needing multiplayer to raise your galactic readiness

- Javik being one day dlc

- Aside from Tuchanka and Rannoch the story didn’t really live up to my expectations

- I wasn’t really a fan of the kid. I didn’t mind them giving Shephard PTSD but I didn’t like how they handled it.

- Most choices and consequences from previous games were somewhat ignored or barely had any consequences

-I’ve already mentioned the story but I also think that some characters were bad like Kai Leng. As far as I know he’s supposed to be a renegade Shepard in the books, in the gale he’s a saturday cartoon villain. Come to think of it, I also felt really meh about cerberus.

11 hours ago, Maof06 said:

Dragon Age 2's storyline is one of the most ambitious that I have seen in gaming. It's a shame that EA had to rush it.

That’s true. Dragon Age 2 is kind of a mess but given a lot more time it really could’ve been something special just like Dragon Age Origins.

[Original Johan Liebert]

- Most choices and consequences from previous games were somewhat ignored or barely had any consequences

Hahaha...ha...ha...playing ME3 without a save from 1 and 2...Wrex dead...saving Krogan only to see their leader lie about Mordin helping to cure the genophage...not knowing if I could have done more for the Qurian/Geth conflict if I had loaded my file (looks like it doesn't actually allow you to make a difference beyond either side you support being stronger)...Kaiden dead (I liked and felt really bad for Ashley in ME 2 and 3 though) 

Looking through the choices, I guess they matter less than I might have imagined, but when I played without any carrying over I had a general ignorance of what chances I lost and so there was more of a feeling of missing a lot of opportunities for things to have turned out better.

I think Kai-Leng was just added to team up with the Illusive Man and create a reference to Malazan: Book of the Fallen. In that book series, there's a legendary military group called the Bridgeburners who end up as a war asset available to you during ME3 (I mean, not directly, but...). I think that Kai-Leng and the Illusive Man are meant to lightly reference Shadowthrone and Cotillion, two gods from that series (partners in crime, a mastermind of illusions and a stealthy assassin), although Kai Leng is very much a lesser partner to the Illusive Man than Cotillion is to Shadowthrone, and the Illusive Man is much more human than Shadowthrone is.

[Dragoncat]

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. Expected a whole game like the dungeons in Zelda. Got a puzzle game with lackluster combat that's few and far between.

[Benice]

Gotta say, Three Houses. It's not BAD, but if I were to look up "put on a pedestal," I'd find pictures of Three Houses. To quote myself in a rant from a different thread:

Quote

I heard some very promising things about Three Houses' difficulty, including that Three Houses has the best difficulty curve of any FE, since it starts of easier then gets quite hard around chapter 7. (Which admittedly, I haven't yet reached, but I was already pressing X to doubt at this point, since from what else I'd heard of Three Houses, the difficulty curve was unlikely to be good because a difficulty curve requires difficulty.)

 

...And I was also told that Three Houses is one of the harder FE games and that it was harder than Thracia, only actually really fair. And it had me, you know? I thought I had been proven wrong! I really thought it would be a super enjoyable and challenging experience! I game over'd three times in chapter 1! (Mostly due to stupidity, but it punished me for goofing around and not actually placing my weaker units in places where they were safe, and again, I was told that the game's difficulty picked up, and naive as I was three days ago, I thought that Three Houses wouldn't be so popular if it weren't fun.) But then...Map design retired. Or died. I guess. I don't know if it's just me, but the maps are much bigger and emptier than FE6's maps-and those are generally large. Like, in the one in the red canyon, I swear I spent about eight turns just moving across the canyon with my hearty group of 4-movement students.

 

And then I broke the game by accident. I went out of my way to incapacitate multiple units, but the game still snapped right in half. It was really fun to try taking out the Death knight without, "Best character tactical nuke waifu very fun to use Lysithea" as I really did need to think out my moves. I really did like that, and it was super satisfying to solving the problem and overcoming the challenge! And then Fighter!Lysithea being able to ORKO the boss brought me back to the fact that the enemies were weak sauce. (On that note, dissolving the game isn't really that fun IMO-sometimes, it's very satisfying just to ruin everything with one high-firepower unit, but just trivializing the game isn't. It's awesome just to annihilate everything with Enid and Pallas Leia because you really have to bust your butt to do it, and once you get the payoff, it's phenomenal.)

 

So, for me, I have enjoyed some of it, and it's certainly a decent and enjoyable game, yet it's still super disappointing compared to what people say it is. My meme units, (Mage Raphael and Warrior/Fighter Lysithea) actually being good and discovering what each unit can do is really fun, but breaking the game by accident isn't. I tried to make the game hard for myself by ruining a really good unit and focusing on a terrible one. Much like Path of Radiance, it's just so...Overrated, y'know? The cast and plot are good, but not THAT good, and the gameplay isn't anywhere near what people say it is-I haven't yet actually had to Turnwheel for any mistakes I made, and you know me. Mistakes are my specialty in terms of FE! (I did have to turnwheel for the Hilda thing*, as well as rigging hits for Lysithea in the earlygame because I was too tired to bother moving anyone decent over there.)

 

Also, enemy gambits really, really suck and simply are annoying rather than difficult-I hope they are modified or removed for future entries. I think that one of the biggest problems with FE16 is that it wants to be a player-phase game, but it does it with enemy quality that is danged near 0. I think that this game would have REALLY benefitted from having a Jagen in a class with high movement for the early maps who could deal with those infernal gambits, who are basically "lmao no countering for you, get annoyed" since they weren't dangerous and it's really hard to Player phase when everybody has the same movement as the enemy. I'd rather see them have high enemy quality or give them offense-boosting skills, such as death blow or darting blow so there's actually a reason to take 'em out on player phase...

 

Thank you for listening to my TED rant, please leave a tip.

*The Hilda thing was when you defeat Miklan and it moves all of your units in front of him. This happened in the middle of enemy phase, and it placed my wounded Hilda into the range of the archer. DED.

As a tl;dr, Three houses is a good game but a terrible FE.

Edited September 22, 2020 by Benice

[Slyfox]

On 9/21/2020 at 8:37 PM, Benice said:

Gotta say, Three Houses. It's not BAD, but if I were to look up "put on a pedestal," I'd find pictures of Three Houses. To quote myself in a rant from a different thread:

*The Hilda thing was when you defeat Miklan and it moves all of your units in front of him. This happened in the middle of enemy phase, and it placed my wounded Hilda into the range of the archer. DED.

As a tl;dr, Three houses is a good game but a terrible FE.

If this game had the map design from Conquest, and cut the monastery in half, I could overlook all other flaws it has.

Still, it's my favorite Fire Emblem, if only for the characters and story.