Which games do you dislike, but the rest of the world loves them?
Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don't forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild -
Not a bad game per se, but I don't get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it's okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame...like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 -
Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won't get Dutch because it's a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I'm now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can't understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I'm really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion ๐
I hate all online competitive games. Yup, all of em. I can't relax! I can't learn at my own pace! I can't explore! The challenge is unknown! I don't want to get better than strangers, i don't care about them!
i like beating systems not people. Watching my BIL play CoD and that car soccer game, I've seen and heard some nasty shit. I guess it's not unusual that people get competitive (ive seen people lose their composure over drunken kickball, i get its not just online) but considering how toxic people can be i just don't get why people would invite that into their house.
Maybe im just not competitive. Yo, any ranked or generally competitive players, what makes you come back?
Soul like everything, but that's just me being too clumsy for any challenge. I do hope some people could stop complaining other games being too easy tho. Not every game needs to be Soul likes.
Doom Eternal. I donโt usually enjoy FPS games and Iโm not very good at them but I absolutely loved Doom (2016) as it took out most of the things I hate about FPS games. But in Eternal I just felt like I was constantly out of ammo, and there was too much focus on using specific weapons against specific weak points on enemies which I couldnโt get the hang of
I know people who like them exist given the sales. But not only do I not play or like sports games - no one that plays games in my social circle does either.
It's like the Venn diagram for people who play RPGs and those who play sports games is just two circles.
All of them, but especially V. I have tried a few times to play them but never get more than a few missions in before losing interest in the story. I think I have to like or identify with a protagonist to enjoy a game, and most GTA characters are pretty unlikable.
Elden Ring for me. The kids have all played the shit out of it and killed literally everything in the game. I hopped on for about two hours, wandered around aimlessly, died a few times, avoided everything to prevent dying, died a few more times and decided I never needed to do that again.
League of Legends. I don't understand the appeal at all. It's just ugly and not fun. I really tried to get into it too. An old group of friends I played games with all play it. For over a decade it's been practically the only game they play. They never seemed like they were having actual fun either but they keep coming back. I miss those guys โน๏ธ.
Skyrim never "clicked" for me. I remember hearing awesome things about it: a vast open world full of things to discover, the ability to create my own character and build it however I wanted, the option to influence the world around me with my choices......
In practice, I found myself in a very big but mostly empty world, full of copy-pasted uninspired dungeons with randomized loot, and no matter what character I chose to build, the combat system sucks and the AI never tries to do anything more than mindlessly walk towards you (and get stuck on the scenery). I was never able to immerse myself in the world because everything was so drab and insipid: generic characters living in generic cities talking about generic things with a very bad dub.
Choices never matter because the game insists on spoon-feeding you everything it has to offer. You can roleplay as a barbarian and still become the headmaster of Hogwarts; you can side with the romans or the vikings but the world doesn't change aside from the uniform of the guards patrolling the cities you visit; you can ignore the dragons roaming the land and they never do anything, because they are just random encounters in the world without any kind of personality or goal aside from turning up and being a minor annoyance to the player.
The modding community is great, but even after spending a few hours installing a dozen or so mods, I was never able to escape the jankiness of the original game: it was still Skyrim, just with a different coat of paint (and a few less bugs and horrible UI decisions).
Reading about the overall reception of Starfield, I felt like I was going crazy, because everything the people say about that game, I already felt about Skyrim fifteen years ago. On the one hand, I felt like my feelings were being legitimized; on the other hand, I still don't understand why people forgive Skyrim (and still play it to this day) but hate the new Bethesda game so much.
Every open world game has turned into the same โdo this x times to get y reward that has no relevance whatsoever to the gameโ
I miss the days of games on rails. I could sit down, enjoy a game and play it through to the end in 10-20 hours. Now it seems like every game is trying to milk 100+ hours of gameplay time out of even the most basic of stories and mechanics.
Outer Wilds. I think itโs a fine game with a pretty cool gimmick (time loop) and a neat story. The gameplay itself isnโt that fun. I think what ultimately ruined it for me was the online discourse about the game; every time it gets mentioned, hundreds of people flock to the comments to extol the philosophical storyline, and throw around hyperbolic descriptions like โlife-changingโ. Again, the story is pretty neat, but I was left underwhelmed after having been built up by fans of the game.
Absolutely agree on Red Dead Redemption 2. Another point considering it's an open world game it plays extremely linearly and sometimes in missions it tells you that you can't leave a certain area for no reason.
In general anything with crafting and/or excessive loot. I find it very boring and especially when a game is advertised as "survival" when in reality it is just a crafting game with no real threat.
With you on BotW. Love the dungeons, but in terms of the open world I never felt the oooh, the aaah, the escapism that everyone cooed about etc. Gliding was fun!
Maybe this is because I've never played a Zelda game before so I have no nostalgia attached to it?
Can't stand media that thrusts you into a zany, fantastical world where completely insane shit happens constantly, nothing makes sense, there's no consistency and you're supposed to somehow keep going through the fever dream of a setting for however many hours before you can piece together what's actually going on and become invested
Needless to say I bounced off Nier: Automata really hard
Zelda BotW and TotK. I just kind of get board cus the game is so wide but so shallow. I wish I could like it cus there is a ton to like.
Any souls like. They just seem very lazy and the combat is just silly to me.
Just about any competitive game honestly. Part of it is I suck at them but mainly the trash talking toxic communities. Plus honestly I'm not very competitive.
Pokemon. I can't wrap my head around the complexity and "meta" and the story doesn't real matter anymore. I did like my first Pokemon game but that's it.
Most Mario except Mario RPG. I played the heck out of SMB 1-3 but when that was all that was available. When games expanded so did my tastes I guess.
I wanted to like it, but the gun play was underwhelming and gameplay kind of boring.
Worst of all was the progression. Upgrades were tiered in ways that made 1 a clear best choice. Perks were uninteresting passives or actives with bizarre activation requirements. No way to upgrade flares or pickaxes. And Iโm not a guy that cares about cosmetics, so it just didnโt work for me.
Iโm happy for everyone else that got a GOAT experience though.
Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, any "Soulsborne" game really. I get why people like them, and I tried multiple times, but it just isn't working on me.
Ohhh i just got one that will be really controversial.
I'm not a big fan of Morrowind.
Yeah the world has a very alien style, and the lore is cool. But the actual world feels empty and boring to me. Like IMO the map is way too big for it's own good.
proprietary games that install rootkits(wrongly called anticheats) on the system. the corporations in charge have brainwashed masses into thinking that it's just a benign thing there to fend off "cheaters", conveniently brushing aside the fact that this is a massive and lucrative attack vector. it only helps bad actors(including three letter agencies).
and this is not a what-if scenario. every year you can find an incident where such a "solution" is exploited.
Edit: Also the multiplayer is god awful, why can't my friend and me just team up and play, instead you have to jump through all types of hoops to play together.
3D Grand Theft Auto games (GTA 3, 4, 5)
Some video essay (I can't recall which one) compared GTA's attitude to that of the protagonist of "Catcher in the Rye". Its comedy is very cynical, just pointing fingers at everything and saying "they are phony", "they suck, don't they" and "we are too cool to even admit we're cool". The tone always rubbed me the wrong way and felt like these white gangsta rappers - Vanilla Ice and the kind.
Rampant fanboyism does not help, either. I dared critisize GTA6 trailer somewhere (by saying "this is not for me, I will pass") to be downvoted to oblivion and I shit you not, receive threats in DMs.
No Man's Sky
When it came out, NMS was a broken, buggy mess of a game with inventory management as a central mechanic. Punch trees got replaced with laser plants, but it's basically the same loop of gather, combine, refine, build better tools. After a decade, NMS is a game chock-full of various content, with inventory management as a central mechanic. Not for me.
Souls-likes and Metroidvanias
I have plenty of rewarding challenges in my real live and consider myself lucky enough to have work that's fulfilling and gratifying. I don't seek validation in games - I seek relaxation and escapism. I play most games on easy and don't feel like proving my skills in the game is the right use of my time. I can appreciate skilled players - often watching speedruns, 100% attempts or professional tournaments, but when it comes to playing - I rather pick fun, easy, light entertainment. (Death Stranding is one of my all-time favorites)
on a flip note, a game that everyone seems to hate and I quite enjoy is
Forspoken
Sure, the dialog is cringe and there's way too much of the same barks repeating (I need to look through menus, I think they added some slider to adjust the rate if I recall), but the traversal is fun, I love the UI design (gold and purple), I think costumes are freaking fantastic and combat is easy enough (on easy) to happily zone out to and play an hour here or there.
I'm going to have to tar and feather and entire genre I'm afraid.
It's the weird intersection of visual novel and dating simulators.
They are truly horrible derivative fantasy, written by severely emotionally stunted incels with less sexual/world experience and writing skill than the average grade 7 student.
TLOU - Great story, don't get me wrong; probably some of the best writing in games for it's time. But the gameplay got super boring once every concept was introduced. The loop is just not satisfying, and exploration is more or less go check out the dead end before moving on, because the level design is so linear. This is more or less the same problem I have with most big AAA titles; they look great, have a good story, but are just so incredibly boring to play. You can tell the budget went entirely into graphics and voice acting, because the game itself feels more like an afterthought to those; it's just there because otherwise it would be a movie.
Lethal Company - The game itself is pretty shit and tedious. What makes it fun is not the game, but how voice chat sounds when someone is being chased or getting eaten. 100% a game made for Twitch streamers where more people will be entertained by watching others play than playing themselves.
Palworld - I was interested by "Pokemon with Guns" and then I found out it's more like Rust with Pokemon. I hate Rust and Ark all those kinds of survival PvP games. The genre itself has all the same weird jank, like everyone who has been copying the idea from DayZ or the like also copied every bug and bad idea, too; even the AAA made ones! They usually run like shit, are balanced like shit, and get so stale alone and are super frustrating in multiplayer unless you're playing with a large group of friends so you're not just being singled out for being all alone.
GTA:O - Specifically the online portion of GTA5 has made me never want to buy another GTA or rockstar game period. Not because the game play itself sucks, but rather because it's extremely fun but the game doesn't want you to have fun if you're also making money. I can spend hours and hours doing all the activities that don't earn you cash and have not one single issue other than maybe some other players trying to blow me up (especially if they are modding). But once that Mission Rep meter starts going up, hoo boy... The game starts breaking in all sorts of interesting but frustrating ways. Headshots stop killing in one hit, traffic starts behaving erratically and non-sensically (like straight sliding sideways at light speed to force a collision), triggers start breaking, the server decides to go down or get super laggy, etc. Since none of this happens in single player or while not doing activities that reward cash, and there is no other obvious function of the Mission Rep stat, I can't help but think these are actually features put into the game on purpose specifically to slow down grinding so people will buy Shark Cards. The same kinda shit happens in RDR2:O, too.
I had zero fun playing Breath of the Wild. I was just always looking for new weapons cause they always broke. After 10 hours I just wasnt into it at all so I never opened the game again.
I also have zero interest for CoD, Battlefield or GTA games.
The last of us was a boring shooter with unlikable characters who continually did things i wouldn't do so i couldn't invest myself in their story. The gameplay didn't save it.
The Witcher 3 is just... so god damn boring, it doesn't help that weapons break too easily, yet the oppurutunities to get gold are so few that you'll do several sidequests worth of monster genocide, sell EVERYTHING you own, and just barely afford to fix your weapons... It got so bad I had to hack my save to bypass the constant scrunging about for repairs... then I realized the story is so complicated that you NEED to play the other two games to understand what's going on
I went back and played Witcher 2, and found it to be vastly superior, far more fun, far more immersive, and just an all around better time
I have been warned never to touch Witcher 1
the Netflix series was pretty good, though I only saw the first season
Skyrim. I dislike most everything about this game. It's not a "bad" game as in it doesn't work and it's not exploitative, I just think it's quite average.
Combat is pathetically simple. There are some interesting support spells but by and large magic is either bolt spamming, beam spell, or you summon golems. Melee is even worse just having basic and strong attacks. This is exemplified by the meme that you can make your character however you want...as long as it's a stealth archer. But even then the Stealth Archer gameplay is pitiful. Archery has the same boring attacks as melee and stealth is just watching a little icon.
The story is garbage. Besides a few side quests, the main campaign is just awful.
The open world is pretty decent, but is waaaaay too small and jam-packed. Skyrim is supposed to be a remote nordic province. But Skyrim does a terrible job at having places feel remote and like wilderness. Every time you turn a corner in a mountain pass there's another cottage or bandit tower, etc. It feels like a theme park whose theme is nordic wilderness.
The progression is mostly boring. The skill tree is almost entirely passive bonuses. Do X% more damage, Attacks have a chance to do bleeding, increased range, etc. Very few skill trees have an effect on what you can do; just how well you do it.
Again, Skyrim isn't a terrible game. It's competent at what it does, but not good at it. The only caveat is that there weren't many open world RPGs before Skyrim that were as large or became as popular. Plenty of games who did every aspect of Skyrim better; but I struggle to find one that did them all at the same time. /rant
Pretty much any competitive online game. It's not that I don't like competing. I just feel bad for the others if I win and I feel bad for losing if I lose
I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.
The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.
Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn't do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.
Breathe of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are at the top of that list for me. The "old" style Zelda games are objectively better in terms of pacing and exploration. And I absolutely hate the weapon durability system in the better ones. I've read their reasoning behind it, but they're wrong. It sucks and makes the game more about hoarding the good weapons and avoiding combat whenever possible, which is boring as shit.
The universe is great but why would I feel bad about bandits not being able to be bandits anymore!? Still there is a lot of potential in that wild west universe.
GTA5. I loved the 4th one but not really liked the 5th one. I guess I canโt understand why you have to be a bad guy in these games and Iโm getting too old for that.
Assassinโs Creed after the second one. The plot lost me and I donโt think there is a plot anymore.
MGSV. I loved the first 4 MGS and hated that one as it had no good story..
I was really excited for "open world dark souls", but I feel like this turned out to be a bad combination. The difficulty is all over the place, so you fight enemies that are really strong (which is fine), but then other areas become completely trivial as a result.
And with how many bosses they put into the game, the quality of each individual fight suffered immensely imo. I think the bosses in previous games were just a lot better designed (on average, there are of course stinkers in Souls games and good ones in Elden Ring).
There's also a ton of gank bosses, which is just lazy. You could use the summons, of course, and it almost feels like a lot of the difficulty was designed around players having that extra strength, but at the same time, the enemy AI and movesets are designed around fighting a single person, so it breaks the combat.
All around, it was just a huge disappointment for me personally, and I uninstalled it right after I beat it, whereas I have hundreds of hours in DS3.
Zelda breath of the wild - it's one of the worst Zelda games I've ever played and I've played so many. There were so many bad decisions made with this game from weapons breaking to getting rid of traditional dungeons. It's a great open world game but a terrible Zelda game.
The Horizon series by Guerilla Games - These games are good for the most part, however they suffer from long stretches of boring open world where you have to fight robot dinosaurs with underpowered weapons. The whole point of the combat is to find weaknesses with the enemies and exploit/attack those weaknesses, but the game never at any point explicitly explains that concept or focuses on that concept. It expects you to just understand what to do. Not to mention the absolutely stupid grinding for mats to make new weapons and armor. Melee combat is terrible, the story for the most part is pretty good but man does it take forever to pick up, it overstays it's welcome. They are technical powerhouses but just so grindy and boring.
minecraft and games like minecraft. i just dont get whats supposed to be fun about them. i dont hate minecraft specifically its a well made game, but i dont find it and others like it fun at all
Almost anything first person. It makes me incredibly nauseous, which is really unfortunate because there are some really neat games that use the mechanic. I recently sold my copy of Echo Night since I couldn't play for more than around ten minutes at a time. I also couldn't complete the tutorial in Half-Life because it made me so nauseous that I had to spend almost the entire day in bed. Weirdly I'm perfectly fine with Metroid Prime.
Donโt get me wrong, the game has fantastic mechanics and great art direction.
HOWEVER. The game relied too much on its lack of hand-holding in order to be enticing but it came out just raw fuckin frustrating. You know whatโs cool? Finding new areas by exploration and not by being told itโs where youโre supposed to go. You know whatโs not cool? Being handed a list of names of places with no idea of what is in each of them and being expected to know where to go.
I got really frustrated with a boss and quit for a few weeks. I come back, kill the boss, and learn that thereโs no new door out of the boss arena. I open the fast travel list to find a long list of names of places I had been to but had no fucking idea which one I was supposed to explore next. That is the absolute worst design choice I have seen in a universally loved game. Fuck Bloodborne.
Yes, I will absolutely buy it when they decide to remaster it for PC.
Final Fantasy VII, honestly. And it's not like I haven't tried to like it but it's just not that good to me. I'm a long time FF fan and I have played all but XI, but VII misses me. The music is bomb, for sure, and I love a few of the characters.
It's also talked about SO much by so many in the gaming community and I'm really just tired of hearing about it. I wish Square gave this level of love and attention to some of their other FF titles.
GTA games are the epitome of shallowness, for me. The story is always so vague and not interesting, you never get attached to characters. Gameplay is a boring loop, but its strength has always been being some sort of theme park. But it's 2024 and "hop onto a game just to go fast on car and shoot a couple of civilians"
Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Like Pokรฉmon, nintendo developers know fans will buy new games regardless of how much new content there is to it. There is no legitimate reason for the game to be so close mechanically to its Gamecube entry, and I find it an insult to long time fans.
Don't Starve
I already can't stand Tim Burton's style, and I really can't get over the similarities to try to enjoy this game, even though one of my autistic special interests is open world survival crafting games.
Fallout 4
Seems like a perfectly fine FPS, very much not a Fallout game. Leans far too heavily on action and not enough on the RPG elements.
GTA 5
If GTA were a candy, GTA 5 would be a bucket of that candy. It's fine if you really really really like that candy, but if you're just not THAT obsessed with the candy, it can get a bit tiring. Having three people with different stories and event going on felt like I never spent enough time with one character to REALLY get into their development.
I'd rather see them innovate than just do MORE GTA
ditto rdr2 - its less a video game than it is a graphic novel read by a semi-literate slow talker
the entire dark souls series is also ruined by clunky controls. give me a Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Skyrim, etc . . . fps controls pls.
X4 fails because of its controls too. Imagine making a flight sim where you can't invert the Y axis, or an FPS where the shift key can't be bound to sprint.
Visual novels. I haven't tried many but as a fan of steins gate series, I didn't find the visual novel fun. Maybe because they were so outdated or because I already know the story but when I played it, I was thinking it would be more fun to just watch as media or watch someone else play while I have my lunch.
I honestly don't get what people love so much about that game, the combat is simple and kinda sloppy, boss and enemy variety is non-existent and traversal is a joke.
I get that the story is good but it's not so good that I can look past everything else, it even has a few big issues like the amount of times the game throws a dumb obstacle in your way to justify some fetch quest like the black mist.
BioShock Infinite. Mostly because I hated all of the characters, with the exception of the Luteces, and even they were on thin ice, mostly because of Rosalind. And Elizabeth as a NPC companion? I would prefer Ashley from Resident Evil 4 over Elizabeth any day. It didn't help that every time I tried to listen to a voxophone, she'd start talking about some bs, so I'd wait for her to finish and start the voxophone over, only to have her start talking again. When it happened 4 times with one vox, I had to take a break from the game. I just wanted to listen to the damn recording.
Gameplay is great though. I'll play the heck out of the Clash in the Clouds dlc. I get the fun action, and none of Booker and Elizabeth's constant whining.
I played the inspiration for years (Tenchu) and loved that so much, but Sekiro just feels hollow in comparison. I know it's not a stealth game, nor is it trying to be, but I can't help but feel like the cliffs and stuff are just "cheap" ways of making the game more difficult. Idk, maybe I'm just not ninja enough lol...
Speaking of stealth, Dishonored. I REALLY wanted to love this game. It's just not open enough for my taste. There's only usually one main walkway to the objective (I say walkway, but there are of course roofs and stuff you can teleport to - I'm just saying, I wish you could get on the actual roofs of buildings Assassin's Creed style or explore the city open-world style). Cool story, cool theme, but the gameplay falls through for me. I felt the same way about MGS4.
Also Red Dead Redemption was meh for me. Could have been better, could have been worse. Undead Nightmare was great though.
I've never been a fan of the direction the Fallout series took after Fallout 2. FO Tactics and BoS aside, Bethesda's handling of Fallout 3 and onwards really didn't resonate with me.
As someone who enjoyed the story and RPG aspects of the earlier games, the shift to fast-paced shooter mechanics was off-putting.
Back in the day, getting my ass handed to me in Quake III, Half-Life, and Unreal Tournament wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, just something to endure. Discovering turn-based combat where I could strategize and plan my moves, rather than relying on quick reflexes, made me actually enjoy gaming. The shift away from that gameplay style made the series lose its appeal for me.
Combat that feels closer to Dark Souls than Zelda? Odd.
I'll add in a genre rather than a game: Battle Royal games.
We used to play a variety of games. Halo, warcraft, Smite, League of Legends... Now I have no gaming friends left as they refuse to play anything other than Apex Legends or the latest greatest Call of Duty.
any 3d Zelda games. I didn't play OOT until I was in my late 20s and it was awful (specifically controls and camera). I tried watching people Speedrun it or do the randomizer, but the sound link makes when rolling (which most did most of the time) drove me crazy. BotW seemed like something I would like on paper, but Nintendo just had to work their new controls into some shrines and I found it frustrating. Also didn't like the breaking weapons. Link Between Worlds (็ฅๆงใฎใใฉใคใใฉใผในใ๏ผ) sits in a weird place. I mostly liked it, but hated the gimmicky 3d bits on the 3DS.
goldeneye for the same reasons - felt like a step backward and I had no nostalgia for it, playing it for the first time in my 30s.
anything with the N64 controller for the same reasons. It felt so unnatural and weird.
most roguelikes (but not all). Losing to random chance is annoying. Some randomness is of course fine
dark souls and the like. Watch boss. Die. Try again. Die. To me, that's boring. I'd rather have in-world ways of learning about the boss.
pokemon. I was already in high school, working part time, and doing a lot of school stuff (band/theatre/sports) and just never got into it. I tried Pokemon go and didn't care for it (but did like Dragon Quest Walk that came out later)
Final Fantasy 7 -- hated the camera and other similar things. Story and all was fine
Most 3rd person shooters (with the exception of Just Cause). I would line up the perfect shot in Sniper Elite only to shoot the few pixels of the corner of something I couldn't see because my character's dumb body was in the way
starfox. I was already playing better games like that on Amiga and other platforms, so it felt like a step back to me
I don't dislike it, it's brilliant, the epitome of SupergiantGames' beautiful craft, but I just can't play Hades, it released after I had already burnt out on Dead Cells, Curse of the Dead Gods, Grime, Enter the Gungeon, Blasphemous, Gunfire Reborn, and whatnot, I can't bring myself to play it because I had already explored the genre so many times...
Dark Souls 3 and only Dark Souls 3. I love Dark Souls 1 and 2, Elden Ring, Bloodborne is my favorite game, and Sekiro. But Dark Souls 3 is just so boring and unfun. Even the ingame world feels uninterested in this game, (because it kinda is over the whole age of fire thing.) Everything is gross and brown it just makes exploring kind of icky. DS1 had a good balance of gross and majestic locations and enemies. DS2 suffered from too few monsters and too many generic armored knights, and locations felt too clean and empty.
It feel like this game does not like you to diversify your build. Armor is basically cosmetic, and offers very slight damage protection. Poise sucks, and is basically removed, so making a tank build kind of sucks. Its so damn fast and doesn't give you a ton of options like Elden Ring does. DS3 is certainly the most actiony of the action rpgs, and idk, I'd like more rpg. I remember watching a video about how playing these games at level 1 is the intended and best way to play. I can kind of see that, I think that discredits a lot of the rpg elements in these games. I always saw permadeath runs as the more fun way to play, especially in DS2, that game was like designed to be run as an arcade game.
The game also feels like it rides on nostalgia pretty hard. Anor Londo? Thats here. Andre? He's here. Firelink Shrine? Thats here, too. Artorias? There's a whole cult trying to cosplay as him. I actually think DS2 handled this sort of thing better, it being so far it the future from DS1 that most characters and places from 1 are only legend or ancient history. I think it gave 2 a sense of discovery, even if DS2 certainly has much less coherent lore lol.
There are good things in this game. The dlc is fantastic. Certain areas look downright stunning, often helped by the muted color palette. A lot of the bosses are fun when you use the correct play style for them. Pontiff Sullivan or Champion Gundyr is my favorite boss on my most recent playthrough, but I haven't gotten to Gale, the Twin Princes or Midir yet.
GTA V - I disliked the characters, story was uninteresting, and gameplay felt like a downgrade from GTA IV; graphics were the main attraction there, and that's not enough for me
Borderlands - my fastest "nope, not for me" game I've played; I don't like loot in games, and that's basically the entire point of the game
Skyrim - found it very bland coming from Morrowind; side quests weren't as interesting, which is pretty much the entire reason I liked Morrowind
any competitive FPS (Apex Legends, COD, etc) - I play most games once the get the story, mechanics, etc
For games that are in genres that I'd actually play:
Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just... underwhelmed. I didn't really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.
I've since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me... but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don't really get it because I can't get over the hump.
The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don't like the combat, honestly. I've tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn't manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn't having fun.
Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is 'going backwards is hard' in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn't get the English PSP port... that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn't resonate with me as much as the other ones did... Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn't hit the same.
Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn't do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or 'walking sims' or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don't tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.
Hogwarts Legacy: To be fair it is a big Openworld but it doesn't catch me. The Story is kind of lame the voice sounds a little bit too Much like a crappy TTS. I tried to finish it but I always stop after like 30minutes played.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt I dislike that the Openworld is like a movie. You don't need to think where you want to go, you just follow the little dots on your minimap until your are there. Its so utterly boring. I love the souls franchise, you see an NPC, walk up to her talk to her and write the important things down on your Notepad. To be fair, Wircher 3 looks absolutely beautiful after the recent patch.
Edit:
I really really dislike Fortnite. Its highly overrated and it isn't even original.
Zelda: BOTW is a soulless Ubisoft game clone shamelessly inhabiting the dead shell of the Legend of Zelda franchise. It contains little to nothing that makes the Legend of Zelda games what they are. Gone are fascinating cities and towns, no colorful cast of characters, no real dungeons or temples, no progression system so the entire game is just 50 hours of the game exact same copy-pasted things over and over and over with no change in difficulty or approach. Itโs like the first Zelda game in history without a memorable score, in fact thereโs hardly any music in it at all. Theres no plot to speak of. It introduced some novel systems, and they deserve credit for that, but itโs just not a Legend of Zelda game at all.
RDR2 is a bland on-rails march from shooting gallery to shooting gallery, with an incredibly lifelike and immersive world thatโฆ doesnโt really give you anything to do. And what it does give you, thereโs no reason to do. The game revolves around your camp and allies but the camp hardly serves any purpose. You canโt customize it in any significant way, keeping everyone happy and supplied does very little besides reduce the amount of audible complaining. And the game shoves so much money in your hands from the word go, that you never have a reason to do any money making activities, and it upends the plot of the whole game โWe just need a bit more moneyโ Dutch says as I have $10,000 stashed in my saddlebags. Everyone seems to love Arthur as a character but heโs just such a bland, indecisive milquetoast guy who doesnโt hold his own opinion on anything. He doesnโt have any personality to speak of until the last third of the game, and then they expect you to have an emotional reaction to him by the end. John was hands down a better protagonist and itโs not close.
Unless Pokemon counts, I don't think I have ever enjoyed a JRPG. I have zero idea what people see in these except weebs getting horny over anime girls.
Dragon Quest XI - I am a huge fan of the 8-bit and 16-bit DQ games. But I just couldn't get into DQ11.The atrocious music probably didn't help.
Assassin's Creed Origins the gameplay started getting repetitive very quickly. Even though I liked the ancient Egyptian settings and the beautiful graphics, I couldn't follow the nonsensical plot.
Burnout Paradise - this game is unplayable. You have to either look at the mini-map the entire time, or memorize the map.
I don't actively dislike it, but for me RDR2 is also the main one. Apart from competitive shooters etc which aren't really my thing either. The thing is, I like the type of game that RDR2 is. But I just have nothing with the setting. I played it right after Cyberpunk, which I loved for multiple reasons. One major thing is that I controlled V, and thus could create my own story. In RDR 2 I was forced to play someone I have nothing in common with, who does exactly the things I wouldn't do, and who lives in a shitty time period where basically every woman basically has the same rights as cattle. That may not be inaccurate, but it just didn't vibe with me. I just got so frustrated with the main character talking shit to people who were right, or drinking a lot and getting into trouble in a very predictable way. Despite the beautiful and interesting world I just couldn't feel anything but frustration.
I do get why people like it though, I don't think it's a bad game. Its just not for me.
At their best, the originals were about a hyper-competent adventurer who always had a plan and was unapologetically confident. She was like Xena and Indiana Jones combined.
It was already a pretty tired cliche at the time to make a gritty origin story when the first game came out. We got an uncertain, untrained, and unprepared Lara with a whimpering attitude.
By the third game they tried to act on the feedback about this, but instead of something closer to the original, she became Rambo, covering herself in mud, hiding in the shadows, stealth killing hordes of enemy soldiers.
I think the Uncharted series did what Tomb Raider remake series should have done.
I can't think of a large open world game I liked. Skyrim, RDR2, the new Assassin's Creeds, Biomutant, Horizon Zero Dawn, GTA5. I feel like they sacrifice the story to fill a world with so many random side quests that it seems like I'll never be able to finish it. I miss games that I could complete in less than 25 hours of playtime.
I think Portal is the only one I'm fine with, probably because there's not as much action. First person puts me on edge and not in a way that I really appreciate. I also really like to be able to see the character in general.
To that end I also don't really like horror games, but I don't think that's as divisive an opinion.
Dave the Diver. I tried it but got it refunded. I'm certain if I had kept it, I would've regretted it. It's not relaxing or cozy, even early on. As someone sick who believed the "relaxing" hype, I was incredibly disappointed.
Afterwards, I even randomly saw a streamer just ragequit the game live because he couldn't stand more easy, slow puzzles. That just confirmed it for me.
I fucking HATE Souls-like games. I love fantasy and RPG games but FromSoft games are just hard for the sake of being hard.
I'm an adult with a life (kinda) - I don't have 600hrs to dedicate to defeating the fucking Taurus Demon. I even looked up HOW to kill it but apparently my controller usage wasn't good enough to move at speed even though I completed God of War 3 on the highest difficulty.
The fact I had to re-tread the same stupid fucking area before that to reach the fucking Taurus Cunt was to much.
I quit the game and vowed to never play another FromSoft game or anything that claimed to be a "Souls-like".
I stupidly listened to someone say Sekiro was a better game than Ghost of Tsushima (which I love). So I played it....
WTF?! The first group of enemies were all identical - no variations. There was also only TWO fucking moves I could perform. A wooden-looking block and a janky looking attack. An absolute fucking abortion of a game and I'm convinced the idiot who told me it was better than GoT had never played it.
Any of the Paper Mario or Super Mario RPG games. Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I've often felt that without the Mario name they would be considered mediocre.
Alongside this, basically every 3D Sonic game. I feel that Sonic has become a thing for furries, and that the 3D games just don't really seem to get what a Sonic game should be. Frontiers was somewhat decent in the open world aspect, but its constant reliance on the homing dash just highlights how buggy those games are.
I realize this is an overgeneralization I'm making.
every game made since the ps2 was officially retired. I don't hate them because they're hard and I'm just not getting the handle of gameplay. I hate them for specific reasons:
the reliance on online modes. games used to be a singular affair between the player and the game. since 2008 online modes have become increasingly necessary to a requirement. with online modes comes a need for a server dedicated to that game. so what happens when the company shuts that server down? you're sol. and piggybacking on that
games are released buggy out of the box. before a game wasn't published until it was done. now it's released on a target date and patches get released along the way. so if you happen to be in a position where you have the physical media but no internet you could have a broken game and not be able to do anything about it. I just think about that situation with the tony hawk game where the manus didn't ship the game on the disc and players had to download the entire game as an "update". and what's going to happen when that server shuts down?
games are moving to downloads instead of on physical media. I'm a full believer in you buy a game you own it. some game publisher just said recently that players shouldn't own their games anymore. gaming is going to move to a streaming model where you own a service (console/platform) and games will move on and off it when a licensing deal expires. sorry I don't want any part of that.
games made that don't require you to be online to have any kind of gameplay are becoming rare. I'm the game player that plays the game just to play the game and doesn't want to play against another human player online. my competitive juices don't flow that way. I'm perfectly fine playing against the game's ai.
Rouge likes. I just can't get into them. The only one I was able to sink any kind of time into was Hades. I actually enjoyed it a decent amount, but I find the gameplay loop for roguelikes just wears me out pretty quickly
Final Fantasy 7. I've tried to play it multiple times, but the game's story never pulled me in. And with how long of a trek it is between story moments and the slog of combat encounters I usually put the game down.
Ocarina of Time. It's one of the few Zelda games that I just didn't enjoy. I've had a lot more fun playing Twilight Princess and Wind Waker more than Ocarina. I'd play Adventure of Link more than Ocarina.
Skyrim. Mostly all the RPGs like that. Never understood the hype. I did try to like it, but it wasn't fun for me at all.
I want to go back to RDR2 but I'm not a fan of how slow moving the intro is and I don't want to do loads of bullshit before having fun.
For my answer.
Super Mario Bros Wonder... I'm playing through it now. It's a bit shit. They've definitely tried some stuff here which isn't bad but very little is landing for me. I don't like the new kingdom, I don't like the map experience or aesthetic and I dislike some of the level building.
When I played Mario Maker 2 I saw the reason behind the success for the franchise in that there was a secret sauce to how a level is made and it is apparently missing from a lot of these. On top of that the castle battles are fairly lackluster with no sign of Bowser.
I'll finish it but it's miles behind the previous entries, all of them I think
Undertale is a decent enough game, I guess, but whenever I think about it, I think about all the crazies that call themselves fans of it. It's exhausting just thinking about it.
For Honor got me interested, but it made a few very bad choices. Magnet hands and slow attacks meant that you could react to attacks, and never had to worry about whiffing. It's so dull to have basically no concept of interesting movement play in a game about fighting.
Dota and League of Legends. The moba format simply doesn't click with me. Them being hyper competitive doesn't help, and I'm someone who played plenty of UT2004 during my late teens
Zelda: Breath of the Wild -
Not a bad game per se, but I don't get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it's okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame...like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Maybe you are missing, or ignoring the context that this was like the big jump from conventional Zelda to... Well BOTW.
I don't consider myself a Zelda guy, but I have played several games, and I find BOTW a very good open world, yeah, it might feel empty, but at the same time it feels like you can do lots of things, kinda like making your own adventure, so I guess it needs commitment from the user side.
That aspect made me understand the context of the game and I have been having a lot of fun with it, if you see something you must likely can interact with it, or has a meaning.
This is very impressive for a Wii U/Switch game if you ask me, and also I feel like if I don't play BOTW before Tears of The Kingdom I would never go back to try it ๐คฃ (that is why I'm paying it).
My only real issue with it is that its soundtrack on the field is so dull, some people like it and say that it is to be ambient or subtle, but screw that, give me my epic tracks! I need something that moves my feet lol, there must be a reason why many RPGs (which are with us before open world games and provide a lengthy experience) have catchy tracks.
Legend of Dragoon. The game where a main character dies and is immediately replaced with an off brand of himself, and that includes a boss rush mid game that is unavoidable and punishes you for trying to use the game's signature mechanic.
Real time strategy games are not my cup of tea. Nothing against anyone who enjoys them, understand, but they're basically exercises in who can do the clicky clicky faster. Give me a turn-based game any day... where you actually have to out-think versus out-click your opponents.
Oh, and any game that pits console players against PC players. Yes, let's put the 'stock controllers only' console players up against the PC players with $8,675,309.00 of custom equipment and every cheat they can get away with. Sounds like a reasonable plan. Overwatch, I'm looking at you.
I don't care how good the story is, 13 Sentinels gameplay looking like a cheap sci-fi movie interface thing just takes me out of the experience, I also don't like tower defense style games and this is the only thing you will do in-between story beats. I was extremely letdown to get this after the first teasers instead of a mecha vs kaiju brawler.
Then some months later it comes out that localizers were also changing things too far, now I have another reason to not finish it.
Not sure if this even a beloved game, but Assassins Creed Unity.
The setting has so much potential but the story feels so slow and I find it boring, the controls took some frustrating time to get used to and Paris is just not a very visually compelling place to be at. I used to love AC2 but Unity... idk
The Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).
Some of the worst villains ever, and you're constantly getting blue balled. The series keeps introducing new characters, that don't matter, and just drag things out for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Zero and Azure are great though, until they connect back to the main story at the end.
I did finish one of the Uncharted series but they mostly go into interactive movies genre which I don't find that interesting. The same with LoU but lost interest and never finished. AC (maybe II) was just annoying, the blending, erratic climbing/jumping mechanics... RDR, I should give them a chance, but the wild west setup inherently doesn't do much for me. The same can be said about the "samurai style" games like Nioh, Sekiro etc. And I say that as a huge Souls games fan.
I love Japan. I love Samurai, and old times. Fired up the game and found out it has some dark souls mechanic bullshit, that makes it a grinder.
I am an adult. With very limited time for games. I have to have quick saves I can't be grinding shit. I simply don't have the time nor the desire waste time grinding.
Really sucks because the game looks gorgeous and I liked the start of the story...
Sonic games, I'm referring specifically to the first one and that era.
My friend and I rented a Genesis I believe it was, specifically to play this, we thought the graphics were awesome, the speed was amazing, the t3ch show off was cool, the game had novelty.
But really from a gameplay perspective, I simply do not understand what people like about it.
The whole thing was just run as fast as you can down this path, you have no idea what's coming up. There will be multiple opportunities to take different paths but you don't really have time to make a judgment call, so you flail at the controller and end up hitting a hazard. You start the level over and over and over again and you repeat it until you understand which way to go and then you complete the level.
Now you've run into every single gotcha and you figured out some optimal routes, now you can play it all without dying a lot.
I love Metroidvanias, 2D platformers, and generally even games that came before them that were similar in style but don't meet all the Metroidvanias criteria. But I really really kind of dislike pretty much all of the Mario games. There's a delay in the control scheme that makes timing difficult for me, and I can't seem to get over that. I actually gave away Mario Odyssey because I couldn't really play it well at all after about 10 hours. For me it's not intuitive despite my like for both 2d and 3d Metroidvanias style games.
Cuphead.The art is very beautiful, but I think the gameplay uses just plain repetition to achieve the difficulty, and I'm not a fan of doing the same thing again, again and again.
Top down, RTS, and point and click games. That includes XCOM, Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, etc. They just seem to be lacking immersion, I'd much rather play a 3rd person action game or an FPS
This is controversial for sure. But I dislike all kinds of games that focus on driving or racing or flying a plane. I don't know but driving a vehicle like you do in real life is kind of stupid for a game idea? I want to do things that I can't do IRL, like murdering a bunch of bad guys, or building a village, things like that. Also casting magic spells is better than shooting a gun, so I don't really get FPS games.
After growing up with Star Wars games like X-Wing/TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Shadows of the Empire... The whole choose your own adventure text game was a really lame step down.
So many people say it's the pinnacle of SW games and I just see it as a game that could have been made for Commador 64 that has has some cut scenes added over it.