Love-hate games?

[Busterman64]

I still think the Megaman ZX Advent dub was the worst I've ever heard. Fortunately, there isn't much dialogue, and the european version has none. Hooray!

Speaking about the Megaman series, yeah, I've never managed to like Battle Network. I tried playing all the games, but the gameplay always bores me. For some reason, I do like Megaman Legends, even if I recognize that it's a really weak game on every aspect.

You know what's funny? I seem to be somewhat the opposite with the Megaman series. I love Battle Network(minus BN4, it's the equivalent of Megaman X6. BN1 was the first game and had some glaring issues that the other games fixed), Starforce(which is somewhat more underrated than BN), and Legends(still need to play 2 and Misadventures of Tron) a lot. However, the the main series(Megaman and Megaman X), I...just never been that interested in it. Don't get me wrong, it's seems fun when I'm watching others play it, but I never have enough interest to play them(...but that may have a little to do with me growing up on 3D platformers like Spyro 3 and...I kinda suck at 2D platformers...well...some anyway).

The exception to that is Megaman Zero. I just find that much more interesting (despite it being kinda hard, but that's more so of the earlier games). I've even beaten Zero 1, 3, and 4 (I stopped 3/4 of the way through 2 for some reason...even if it was fun). While yes, it was a few years ago and I was using an emulator (with save states), but I would still play the Zero series faster than the two main series' games.

Speaking of that, I should probably play through the games again (savestate free) and see how my opinions of it stand up now.

Edit: So to make a long story short, I seem to like Megaman more for what he isn't mainly known for and I don't like him as much for what he is know for (video game wise)! Strange, isn't it? ;3

Edited March 21, 2016 by Busterman64

[Rapier]

I just find it curious that you can like the Zero series while you're not interested on the X and ZX series, since they're really similar. Other than that, I can see why you prefer BN and Starforce. Their gameplay just didn't attract me, but I like their ideas and stories.

[Busterman64]

I just find it curious that you can like the Zero series while you're not interested on the X and ZX series, since they're really similar. Other than that, I can see why you prefer BN and Starforce. Their gameplay just didn't attract me, but I like their ideas and stories.

I never played ZX, I've only watched it(and it does seem fun). I'll give it a shot and see how much I like it when I play it (maybe during the summer)!

Edit: Also, Battle Network was my introduction to Megaman as a whole, so there is a bit of bias.

I can understand why you may not like it(because it does take a bit before you get enough chips that suit your battle style and are...well...good),but I'm happy you can kinda appreciate (hopefully that's the best word for it) the ideas they go for.

(Also, it's hard to imagine Bass with thinking of BN's Bass because......he's threatening as heck...and I like that!)

Edited March 22, 2016 by Busterman64

[Samias]

The original Rune Factory was so damn buggy. Marrying Melody literally broke the hotspring and you could never take a bath again. Sharron could be wooed in like 5 minutes with rubies and other gemstones. And when you did marry her, all her lines were just so damn depressing, along the lines of "why am I here?" Also, farming was pretty much worthless for making money when you could just mine diamonds and have the biggest house and all the monster barns within the first month. There was just so many ways to break the game over your knee and the power spike between enemies and bosses was enormous. Later games smoothed out the difficulty curve and fixed some broken aspects. As such, there is no reason for me to ever go back to the first game. It had its charms but Rune Factory 3 and 4 blow it out of the water.

Speaking of Harvest Moon, A Wonderful Life has some good ideas such as the concept of aging and death, and continuation of the family as a gameplay mechanic rather than the wife and child becoming afterthoughts, but each segment of the game lasts soooooo long. To get to the very end is an exercise in patience as the gameplay moves too fast to get a lot accomplished in one day, but long enough that making it to year 10 takes a lot of time. There's also pretty much nothing to break up the gameplay and the new animals for the barn and coop are pretty bad. The only goat you can get is useless after a year compared to the cows you can replenish, and the ducks are similarly useless compared to chickens. I start to lose my mind around the end of year 3 trying to get through this game.

Edited March 22, 2016 by Samias

[TheAstraWolf]

Star Fox (Snes). It hasn't aged well, way too poligonal and the lack of Z Targeting makes hitting enemies a bit of a hassle. But it is still so much fun to play. I find myslef coming back time and time again to play it because it has a very loveable charm to it on those polygonal graphics. I still prefer 64 3D overall but the original Star Fox despite it's flaws is still too much fun.

[Tamanoir]

Demon Gaze. The good : The OST is so damn good. One of the best OST I ever heard. A large part of my love honnestly comes from here.

It's also a chalenging but interresting Dungeon RPGs experience (by.. Experience.)., but it has some glaring flaws.

First, the story is Fanservice-y to death (Yeah, Dungeon Travelers 2 is one of my favourite games. But Demon Gaze tries to also be a serious, dark, story and it ends up making it bad at both.) , and the gameplay have some really bullshit parts :

-the endless battles. Ennemies often surpass you in numbers, and tehy change row really often, or summon other allies. Including the True Final Battle (that I never did, because there's a Boss Rush, and Revive Item are freaking rare.). There's also this kinda for the final battle, wich is slightly randomized (the Final Boss call Shadow Versions of previous Boss, and depending of which ones it calls, you can have a really painfull battle, or an absolute hellish nightmare.)

- Every time you come back from a dungeon, you must pay a rant. You also don't have immediate access to a full party.

At first it's quite painfull, creating flalse difficulty, and later it's just annoying.)

There's also OreShika. Actually the main reason I don't entirely like this game is that... the final boss is far too hard.

It may seems like a minor complaint, but grinding is quite hard given the main concept (your family is cursed to live only up to two years and you can only date divinities (which means you can date a Shark dude or all kind of cat girls...). It has lot of micromanaging (since you also take care of your city's developpement), but i'm fine with it. The aesthetic nd music are really inspired by japanese culture, and it's a real pleasure.

I don't want to destroy this game entirely, because it's really great to play through (even if it's deammnding.), and if you have a Vita, you really should try it. (and there's also a translation in other languages than english.That's rare enough to be notified.)

But the sheer difficulty of the final battle stopped me too fully enjoy it to the end... That's sad.

[BrightBow]

I still think the Megaman ZX Advent dub was the worst I've ever heard. Fortunately, there isn't much dialogue, and the european version has none. Hooray!

Well, that's not entirely true. The voices in the cutscenes as well as the various voice grunts during gameplay are from the English dub.

I suppose the original ZX would be a good contender for this topic. Like, it plays just as well as the X and Zero series. Both the game feel and the levels are great as ever. But man, did they screw up everything else.

First of all, this game must have one of the most useless map system in video game history. It only tells you in which area you are and which areas are adjutant to it. It doesn't actually tell you in which direction you have to go in order to reach your destination. You might leave the screen to the right just to find out that you just entered an area that the map says is located left from the area you just came from. And the map is not displayed in realtime on the touchscreen. You always have to enter the menu in order to take a look.

Then the game doesn't tell you were the actual levels are. Sure, it tells you what the area is named but as long as you haven't already discovered that are, this information is not all that helpful. Now this wouldn't be too bad if you didn't need to activate a mission first in order to enter a level. What's the problem with that? Well, for one thing you can only do it at a save point. So if you explore the world and find a level entrance, you have to backtrack to the next save point (which is far more annoying then it needs to be due to the above mentioned map system) and then get back to the main entrance. And you can only activate one mission at a time, so there is little sense to activate a mission unless you have already found the entrance. Not only that but if you cancel an accepted mission, the game will actually put you back to the save point where you accepted the mission and reset any other progress that you made in the meantime

And the same system is used for side quests too. So yeah, you literally can't do anything when you just so happen to be in the right area. You always have to backtrack to a save point first. Oh and if you do a sidequest, at then end you still have to backtrack to the next save point in order for the quest to count as completed and to get your reward. Yeah, that lady whose cat I brought back couldn't give me my reward in person. It had to be sent per mail or whatever.

Fortunately Advent fixed all of that. Still, I'm not sure why anyone would think that any of these design decisions were a good idea in the first place. There is absolutely no practical reason to always have to run to a save point. It's just padding. But it's not just boring padding, it's frustrating padding because the awful map system makes you constantly run in the wrong direction.

Don't even get me started on the actual side quests themselves. Two of them are literally "do the same thing six times". As in "always go to the same Area I, always pick up the same item at the same location and always go back to your quest giver, then always go back to the next save point." Then go back to the quest giver, then back to the save point to activate the mission and to the same dance five more times.

The other one is the exact same thing, requiring you to keep sending letters between two people. Each back and each forth counts as a separate mission.

Also, the game's save system has an utterly baffling oversight: The game does not memorize which savefile you are playing at. If you try to save, the file that is selected by default will always be the first one. So every single time you save, you always have to manually select the right save slot. You're first savefile is probably going to be on the first slot, so you will probably make a habit of saving by activating a savepoint and simply pressing A. Then you might start a new game on the second slot and will probably overwrite your old save file by accident.

I've literally never seen this outside of a PC game. In Zero, the game would simply memorize the save slot that you loaded or saved to, just like every other non-PC game does this. So how come ZX would suddenly start to screw this up?

So yeah, the levels, bosses and the gameplay are just as great as in the X and Zero series... it's just that unlike in those series, levels are separated by tons of frustrating garbage. Worst implementation of Metroidvania mechanics ever.

Edited March 22, 2016 by BrightBow

[Kieran Knightley]

The Rhythm Heaven series, particularly RH:F as that's the only one I've attempted to fully perfect. My feelings for it are similar to my feelings for Fire Emblem in that it feels like an abusive relationship.

[Alastor15243]

I still think the Megaman ZX Advent dub was the worst I've ever heard. Fortunately, there isn't much dialogue, and the european version has none. Hooray!

Speaking about the Megaman series, yeah, I've never managed to like Battle Network. I tried playing all the games, but the gameplay always bores me. For some reason, I do like Megaman Legends, even if I recognize that it's a really weak game on every aspect.

Really? I Played that game, and I don't remember the dub being THAT awful. Seriously, it cannot be compared to Chaos Wars. It wasn't a masterpiece, but for the most part the characters sounded like actual human beings unless my memory is terrible.

Edited March 23, 2016 by Alastor15243

[henrymidfields]

Pokémon BW 1 and 2.

Pros:

- Good storyline that discusses some of the issues of opinions under a democratic society - y'know, like the US.

- The fact that GF decided to give overseas regions a try. If it wasn't for this, then XY (being my favourite besides GSC) would probably not have happened.

- The fact that it's one of the few games that actually brings closure to characters besides the main ones.

Cons:

- The experience scaling and the lack of old Pokémon to rely on as an emergency in BW1. Both (although more the former) makes the game's difficulty feel cheap-ass. It also doesn't have the in-universe justification once you get to post-ending, and also in BW2.

- ...Why the hell did Nintendo decide to pull the plug on the DS Wi-Fi?! I expected Nintendo (who owns Pokémon along with GF, and it's a flagship franchise too) to keep supporting the DS for another few to several years even after the move to 3DS - considering it's good ongoing support in previous generations. Trying to get through the main game in Black 1 and finish the Unova Pokedex against an actual time limit was so frustrating! Now that was a really big "F*** you, Nintendo!" moment.

[Michelaar]

The sims for me. It kinda gets old, but I can't stop playing it over and over.

[Alastor15243]

Oh dear, I just remembered another one: Radiant Historia. I really wanted to love that game. I bought it on recommendation from HCBailly, and there was so much I wanted to love, but holy shit was it a struggle to have fun with that game.

I absolutely love "Time Traveler Versus The Apocalypse" games like Chrono trigger and Majora's Mask, so Radiant Historia's plot immediately resonated with me, and I loved the concept of the branching timeline adventure where you have to go through two main timelines in order to save the world.

However...

First off, I was really disappointed with how little they did with the "wrong" timeline. They made it explicitly clear right off the bat that only one timeline would result in the world not being reduced to dust. The player accepted that right out of the gate. So the fact that they didn't go all out in having the "wrong" timeline gradually go completely, apocalyptically to shit was a huge wasted opportunity in my opinion.

Another thing was that the branching timeline and the various sidequests and offshoots with narrow windows of opportunity to find secrets wound up being confusing as fuck to me, basically like having tons of nearly identical copies of the same map that you had to search if you want to get the best ending, as well as the fact that the game has a nasty habit of sneaking easter eggs into high-intensity sections of the plot where the player wouldn't think to not just keep moving.

But what really bothered me was several absolutely awful design choices with regards to the gameplay.

The game has no minimap, and that's a pain in the ass because of how large indoor dungeon areas can be and how annoying certain levels are to navigate.

The combat system... I may be spoiled due to playing it after its release, but seriously, I could not enjoy Radiant Historia's combat system because I was constantly made acutely aware of just how much better Bravely Default pulled off the same general concept of saving and linking turns. It doesn't take your ability to restore your options into account. In Bravely default, if you currently lack the MP to cast a spell, it still lets you select that spell as your action, it'll just not let you do it once you get there if you still don't have enough MP. This is extremely useful because it allows you to have a previous action restore your MP and then you can spam magic. Not in Radiant Historia. In Radiant Historia, the combat screen only considers the current state of everything since the last enemy attacked when planning your action chain sequences. if you don't have enough magic to cast spells, an enemy has to act some time after you restore your magic in order to cast those spells again. And if you want to place traps with Aht, you have to place them in places that aren't occupied at the START of the turn. it doesn't matter if they won't be occupied by the time you place them, the game won't let you do it. I also found it annoying that when you get a status ailment like stone or sleep, unless you have a buffer of two healthy rounds before the turns of the petrified or sleeping person so you can cure them and then put an enemy turn between the curer and the cured, then the game will automatically skip their actions despite your plans to cure them.

And then there's the game's atrocious policy regarding party members. If you don't have access to a party member at the current moment in the timeline, they gain no XP whatsoever. This means that Rosch, who for most of the game is locked to only one of the two main timelines, is PERPETUALLY vastly underleveled for no good reason, and the level of your other party members varies massively.

I really wanted to love that game, but the elements I loved really only allowed me to tolerate it.

Edited March 24, 2016 by Alastor15243

[Zera]

Wow, you're the first person I've met who isn't like "Radiant Historia is the best DS RPG Evar." I could be horribly wrong, but I think you might like Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. It has a similar RPG / Spatial gameplay concept.

[Azure Sen]

Xenosaga Episode II. Oh how I want to love you, Xenosaga Episode II. You're part of one of my favorite video game series of all time. I get to see more of your series' great characters, many of whom still hold special places in my heart. You gave us playable Jin Uzuki, and Jin Uzuki is a space samurai! There are some things about you I really do like.

BUT...

Your gameplay is awful. The stock system was unnecessary and just resulted in wasting turns. Nobody but KOS-MOS had unique skills, so everyone pretty much played the same. The Double Techs were just a waste of time.

Your script is a trainwreck. Namco sacked the entire writing team from Episode I, and it shows. Things would recover for Episode III, but just barely.

Your voice acting is atrocious. Almost all of the VAs were sacked as well, and the replacements are generally either worse and were replaced with the originals for Episode III (Shion, KOS-MOS) or gave better performances in that game (chaos, Jin). Even the characters whose VAs stayed consistent generally gave lackluster performances.

And worst of all, you killed the original planned six-game series and left us with a ton of questions unanswered and a ton of awesome stuff missed out on.

[Skell_]

Valhalla Knights on the PSP is my ultimate love-hate game. Its whole gimmick is that you can customize your own character, class builds, stats, etc. You'd then go into a long linear dungeon until you defeat a generic villain. The combat was solid and warranted my attention for the most part. The atmosphere was pretty good and the music was meh. However, its an extremely flawed game and to me felt almost player hostile. It was grindy, tedious, broken at times and laughable at other.

The first boss in the game was the most difficult in my opinion since it had a high damage attack that covered the whole battlefield and pretty much one-shot priests, mages, and thieves, and barely left the warriors alive. I only beat him because I was over leveled. (Max strength) The final boss basically kills one dude with a spell and then can't get another attack in. Pathetic.

Then there's the pointless quick save feature. Basically, you can only save at the inn, however, you can create a quick save and come back to it whenever. However, its gone after you load it. The problem is that I can just make another quick save. Its just... pointless. The game also has a convenient 30 item limit that you fill up fast with potions you won't use and armor that does nothing.

The dungeon is also one long linear path from a prison, to the treetops, to a castle, to a robot city, to a samurai city, to a temple, to hell, and finally back to the castle. The best part is, that you have to travel through everything every time you want to get to a further part of the dungeon. However, there are teleportation circles... that only get you to the castle or back to the prison if you're past said castle. Fun.

I know I've bashed this game a lot, however, its one of the few RPGs I've actually completed. I finished it, damn it and I was proud to have. It was satisfying to know that I beat it.It felt like I actually conquered it, became a master of it. It felt good man.

Oh, I almost forgot the story because it only comes up once every 5-15 hours until you get overleveled and then it goes by so quickly you forgot about it immediately.

[MisterIceTeaPeach]

Persona 4

If it was my first Persona game I'd admire it.

But after playing 3 it was a disappointment.

Of course the battle system is improved as a few other game mechanics, but the story, dungeons and the "true" final boss felt so empty to me.

I don't even like the soundtrack.

Also the playable characters were less interesting than the ones in 3. (except for Kanji)

[The DanMan]

I still think the Megaman ZX Advent dub was the worst I've ever heard. Fortunately, there isn't much dialogue, and the european version has none. Hooray!

It's bad, certainly, but not as atrociously awful as some earlier examples. A select few characters are actually bearable to listen to. Though to think that Gunvolt originally had an English dub planned... .

Kingdom Hearts 3D is the biggest mixed bag. For everything good in that game there is something bad right around the corner. I love the command deck, obtaining abilities is god awful, imagine if Pokemon Amie was required in order to learn new moves. While not the best in the series, the combat is fun and the new additions are pretty cool, but then there are the many bullshit terrible bosses. The presentation is superb in most all aspects, the story it's presenting is one of the worst in the series.

Kingdom Hearts does dreams and time travel. There is no happy ending to that premise.

I still don't know how I feel about this game.

I feel like I'm the only person alive who was okay with the Dream Eater execution... maybe because I quickly realized that I didn't need to do much in the way of petting and that they earned link points through normal gameplay.

I never found any of the bosses that bad; if you charge in with your keyblade mashing the attack button a la 2, you're going to get wrecked. I like how there was more of a focus on finding openings and using the command deck, rather than "their guard is down sostartbuttonmashing". My biggest problem is that Riku gets Dark Roll, which can basically break the game in two.

And I'm one of those rare people who understands and enjoys Kingdom Hearts' writing yet perfectly understands those who don't.

Anyway, as far as games that I love-hate, Skyrim tops things.

The soundtrack is great- the fights that accompany it aren't.

The world is massive- and the game sure likes freezing at the worst moment possible.

There are a bunch of uniqe NPCs- and most of them are exposition bots.

There's a buttload of lore- and a boring story in the actual game.

The Thieves Guild looks awesome- too bad that the actual main quests have nothing to do with thieving.

I could go on, but you probably get my point.

[secondworld]

I feel like I'm the only person alive who was okay with the Dream Eater execution... maybe because I quickly realized that I didn't need to do much in the way of petting and that they earned link points through normal gameplay.

I never found any of the bosses that bad; if you charge in with your keyblade mashing the attack button a la 2, you're going to get wrecked. I like how there was more of a focus on finding openings and using the command deck, rather than "their guard is down sostartbuttonmashing". My biggest problem is that Riku gets Dark Roll, which can basically break the game in two.

And I'm one of those rare people who understands and enjoys Kingdom Hearts' writing yet perfectly understands those who don't.

You don't get much from fighting enemies, so it's either wasting time grinding enemies or wasting time on a stupid mini-game. Both are poor ways of learning new abilities and there isn't any why reason why they couldn't just do what they did in BBS and have the mini-games be solely for leveling Dream Eaters.

It isn't about difficulty, a lot of the bosses(most Dream Eater ones really) are flawed by design, Holey Moley and Spellican being the most egregious examples.

Oh I understand the story, it's just not a good a story(there were some stuff I liked, but).

[The DanMan]

You don't get much from fighting enemies, so it's either wasting time grinding enemies or wasting time on a stupid mini-game. Both are poor ways of learning new abilities and there isn't any why reason why they couldn't just do what they did in BBS and have the mini-games be solely for leveling Dream Eaters.

It isn't about difficulty, a lot of the bosses(most Dream Eater ones really) are flawed by design, Holey Moley and Spellican being the most egregious examples.

Oh I understand the story, it's just not a good a story(there were some stuff I liked, but).

It seems like it's just me, but I never found much wrong with Spellican- after the initial chase, it's a straightforward fight. And outside of Holey Moley occasionaly teleporting to a completely different part of the area, I never had many problems with him.

The Dream Eater execution wasn't flawless, certainly- I just seem to have much less of a problem with it than most people.

[Lyn]

Pokemon Gen V- I don't really like the graphics and some of the new Pokemon, but I liked the seasons and the region was alright.

[Lann La Mirah]

The whole Tales of... series has been a love/hate affair for me.

The battle systems themselves are usually enjoyable (and the whole reason I still bother with the games), but sometimes I wish the game offered different characters rather than the ones we get. For example, Tales of Abyss had a good battle system for the time, but I thought the mage was unimpressive, and the main character was too slow for me to ever want to use. The characters have always been super hit or miss for me--and the "miss" characters usually ruin the whole experience for me. Maybe because that character is usually the hero or heroine. Or both. The stories have been consistently "meh" as well--the ideas and the worlds range from kinda cool to really cool, but the execution has always been lackluster. I thought almost every Tales game could have had a great story, but somehow they just end up bland and uninteresting.

[Pixelman]

Abadox for the NES

The game will chew you up and spit you out and make you want to commit sudoku in pure rage; if you lose a life, you might as well just reset the goddamn game

yet it's also one of the most unique shooters I've ever played, and easily my favorite sidescrolling-shooting game of all time

Edited April 20, 2016 by Pixelman

[Reality]

Custom Robo: Battle Revolution (Arena and the n64 games have similar problems, though)

This is really fast paced and fun to play in multiplayer. It's fun to customize the robots, and then dodge shots with the aerial dashes and go for knockdowns. Not really as dignified as Virtual On if you have xbox live or a sega saturn, but more arcadish than MechWarrior. Sadly, it's unbalanced as all hell, even with the illegal parts off.

The story itself, I found funny, but it can't be replayed. If you do, the sheer length of the script and the slow text scrolling becomes apparent. In a nutshell, when you finally find the person you spend half the game looking for towards the end of the story, the exposition dump is so long that the game autosaves 5 times in the middle of it. Truly ridiculous.

Pokemon

For me Pokémon means smogon. I haven't played Pokémon the RPG since GBA ruby and sapphire. They are definitely quality games for time wasting. (I'd prefer puyo puyo fever or smash tv though). It offers much more as a social game though. I don't really have to explain why 3 generations of the smogon meta, brushing with elitism, internalizing it in myself, getting suspect voting priveleges by laddering, tournaments, etc... Obviously that has its ups and downs.

LoonyLand 2 and Dr. Lunatic Supreme with Cheese

Obviously no one's heard of Mike Hommel, indie developer. These two games are hardly recognizable as indie games. Both have a simply mind boggling amount of content, and lots of humor. Of course if I'm truthful, Dr. Lunatic is kind of just a gauntlent/twin stick shooter, except instead of fast action, it has puzzles... and Loonyland, which I'm only going to describe as Garfield meets Diablo, has the problem of all singleplayer diablo games. You can just feel in your bones that it should be an essentially MP experience. They are also still priced as If 20 years and the invention of bundles, drm, game managers, etc never happened. For all the problems, I regret nothing, and after all it's actually full of heart on top of being a weird look back in time when indie developers thought of themselves as third party developers.

[Stargirl]

Sims 4 is the buggiest game I've played in my entire life. Something usually glitches, requiring me to save and restart. Other times the game would just crash randomly. Despite this I have invested a ridiculous amount of time into it. I love how it looks compared to older Sims games and since it was my first official Sims game I got really into creating backgrounds and life courses for my sims.

Edited April 19, 2016 by Hashuni Mei

[Etrurian emperor]

I really love the world, characters and humor in the Disgaea games but the gameplay really isn't for me. Its far to grindy for my taste.