What universally beloved videogame you just can't enjoy?

the only sports games I ever enjoyed were snes NHL 98 and mario hoops

I'll go ahead and say this also includes all "Souls-like" games for me.

Combat seems clunky, buggy, and unnecessarily difficult. I don't have a ton of time to play games, so when I do, I want it to be relaxing.

I agree. On top of that, I get motion sick really easily, so I can play a lot of FPS games for about 15 minutes max.

I accidentally beat the Mantis Triplets far earlier than I needed to because I couldn't find the path into the ruined capital city I was meant to take.

Long route back to fighting the optional boss to enter a far too difficult zone for me. Only after beating them and discovering that that was not where I was meant to go did I backtrack and find the turning I'd missed to actually progress. (I rather liked Hollow Knight despite this, but you don't and that's fine. I just think it would be funny (, and a sign of poor map design if you made the same map reading error I did).)

What about Wind waker?

I have a specific opinion about the older mario games; they expected a much more narrow game literacy than new games do, so the people who played them already had a little bit of transferable ability from other games. Nowadays, not just are precise skills less required because the games are designed to be easier, but the player base is starting the games with less skill due to their previous game being totally different.

Picked up Satisfactory just a few days ago and I am pretty bored tbh. Does it get better?

Deep Rock Galactic has nailed the formula with seasons as ways of adding things with using them as FOMO. Missed skins and loot from previous seasons used to just get recycled into the RNG loot. Now they added a system to toggle and play missions as if you were a in a previous season and earn the old loot.

At first I liked it because it was good for people like me who like games but are really not good at them, but yeah, it's way overdone now.

It's weird because I always think of it as the Sands of Time combat system.

…ghost of Tsushima has the best and most satisfying combat system in recent memory.

The Perry was the most satisfying in any game (imo obviously).

Covid did wonders for that game. It came out right before the lockdown, and people suddenly had free time and a reason to escape to a happy place.

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 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.

fuck why did you have to remind of the double albedo thing. Which one survived?! He was missing the mark for a bit!! arggg....

I get the complaint, it feels like it could be so tactical and strategic but often you get fucked by bad luck. But that's kinda rogue likes for you I guess. Wonder if there was a way to design it differently.

I feel it suffers from a lot of the problems with RPGs of the time both culturally and mechanically. No one had a really good idea of where the genre could be taken. The story was fine though. I would suggest anyone getting into it to just read or watch summary and use the online tool for generating decisions/save.

I had a terrible time with DAO until I read one thing that helped improve the whole game:

‘Get Wynne’

Once you unlock her character you will actually be able to progress at a reasonable rate without incredible headache allowing you to enjoy more of the story.

Final Fantasy hasn't been like that for a long long time. They make ARPGs now. Check out gameplay from ffxvi or the vii remake, it's high paced action action.

See, I don't like FF games since they changed to action games and stopped being jrpgs.

Ditto. Dull as dishwater

As someone who both dislikes westerns and liked the first Red Dead Redemption, everything I've heard about RDR2 makes me think I would not like it at all.

It sounds like they took a great game and injected it with mindless busy-body gameplay mechanics. I've barely ever heard people talk about the story, which doesn't really help sell a game that's a sequel to a story focused game.

If someone hands me a controller I'll button mash away because I'm just here to hang out, but I don't really like the game either. Ditto Mario Cart

Buttons go smash.

Me too, until I found a random thing on the way, when a bandit attacked me only to give me a better sword then I was watching fish in a river spotting a weird shadow realising it wad a flying dragon which I managed to kill somehow near a town. Beaten up went up to the tavern where they told me about weird things happening in the castle nearby so I went to see WhatsUp and they were crying on about a weird claw part of my main quest, I was about to quit tired from all that when my character took it out and completed the quest as soon as it began.

Then I stole everything in the castle and couldn't run back to the store fast enough aaaaand... It was 500+ hours already

Me too . Also don't really enjoy most Bethesda games . I tried fallout 3 and found most of the combat was walking backwards and shooting the enemy a hundred times.

Eh, just wasn't made for you. Not everyone needs to listen to death metal either.

I can just close the game and never play it again

True and healthy!

while I enjoy actual good games.

blatant copium

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.

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?

Its not an accurate representation of a farm, just to make that clear. It's a very much romanticised little village - and there's plenty of indoors, if that's what you like. Eg, your house, which you can upgrade and decorate, the villagers houses and shops, the mines. That said, I wouldn't have described it as 'cozy', I would say more 'chill'.

It's not cozy for me because I suck at time management. I heard there's a mod that disables the penalty for getting home late though

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.

I also just dint have the time to get good at them. I get maybe 2-3 hours a week to game on average these days. I'm not going to dump a year into getting my ass kicked for a single game.

No rock and stone? sad granite noises

I played that for a while and I hated it too lol

What? X is all about the passive income and telling NPCs what to do. You play long enough to afford a cheap cargo runner as a second ship, put an AI pilot in it, and tell them to run trade routes in the background while you do whatever you find fun. Your income snowballs from there as you buy more and bigger ships and unlock better trading automation, then becomes ridiculous once you start building stations and producing entire supply chains yourself.

I say this as someone who also bounced off X4, because even with all that and time compression it still takes ages to get to the fun endgame stuff I actually enjoy.