- The story is a horrible mess, even if you understand it.
- 358/2 Days failed in nearly every aspect (with the possible exception of the character progression system).
- Birth By Sleep is a good game, but horribly padded.
- KH II is padded too, albeit to a far lesser degree.
- Early to mid KH II boss fights are far too easy in most cases.
- As far as the PS2 version goes, the game has trouble recognizing certain symbols you can draw, like the fire spell ('Inferno'?) and several of the drawings you have to make for the taylor in Sei-an City.
- Issun talks too much and is always pointing out the obvious in BRIGHT RED LETTERS. I feel like you're never really done with the training wheels.
- On a related note, the game isn't particularly challenging. Some of the tougher sections include the Demon Gate Challenges and racing Tobi, but other than that it's a walk in the park (fucking beautiful as the park may be) from both a combat and puzzle-solving perspective.
- I wish there was a third fight with Waka. The game builds him up early on with a couple of fights, and while he's a recurring character for the rest of the game, you never fight him again.
- The third part of the game (Kamui) isn't as good as the first two parts. While the second act is a huge step up from the first, the third feels comparatively smaller, with more repetitive dungeon crawling and less overworld to explore (which in turn isn't as picturesque as Kamiki or Ryioshima).
- A minor flaw I might as well point out: the game goes to great lengths so that you don't bork a 100% run, BUT there's a certain animal that needs feeding that you can miss irrevocably past a certain point, holding off that 100% run. Never happened to me, but I'm well aware of it and it seems like an uncharacteristic oversight from Clover Studio.
I walked into this thread ready to do Okami, but alas, I was ninja'd. You mentioned pretty much all my issues with Okami anyways (though might as well toss in that I wasn't keen on that final boss rush and recycling two bosses for repeating encounters). Regarding that last point, there's also an enemy that is only seen in one spawn point that is unreachable after completing that area. If you want to complete your bestiary (which is required for a trophy on the PS3 version), you'll be out of luck.
OT: Now then, I'll do Shadow of the Colossus (which was already done, but I got more).
1. The frame rate on the PS2 version isn't great. It runs a bit better on PS3, but I've known people who pitched a fit at the original.
2. The camera is often well-behaved, but it's not unusual for it to whip around, get stuck somewhere, phase into stuff, or zoom out to a set position that isn't favourable.
3. I hate the 12th colossus. There are a few others that bug me yet have neat things about them, but the battle with #12 is so long and dull, neat gimmick or not. He's sandwiched between 2 great battles too.
4. The PS3 version for some reason has Wander have more troubles getting his footing. A colossus could be standing perfectly still and suddenly Wander will slip. I know there was a lot of intensity with gripping and finding the perfect moment to attack, but the PS2 version wasn't like this at all.
5. Some of the time attacks are nigh impossible if you're doing it the "legit" path without exploiting the physics and doing tricks (for example, you can either climb up #3, or get thrown up by it's sword when it pulls it out of the ground, launching you straight to it's head). Makes for great videos (and they do look awesome [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYdvG4ubou8]) but you need to be absolutely pixel perfect to do them properly. And on PS3, the time attacks are even worse since Wander slips around all the time.
6. This happens when #14 stops in water in the PS3 version [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkO_aWNTa14] (never seen it happen on PS2). I was able to replicate it many times consistently (4 in the video alone), and there's something about these ponds that it doesn't like. Can really bugger up a time trial or kill your momentum. Not a huge dealbreaker of a glitch, but it is weird (and considering this is supposed to be a remaster, you shouldn't expect new glitches).
And nope, never had consistent problems with Agro's controls. Everything else is pretty minor or doesn't bug me that much.
Maybe I'll come back and do Jak 2 when I have the courage to face it. I love that game, but holy balls it's arguably the most flawed out of the original trilogy.
I love love LOVE Skyrim, but many of the quests, particularly the fetch quests, can be wearily predictable. Go to cave A, fight monster B, retrieve random item C, repeat. I'm not saying I wanted each cave to be utterly unique, I understand programmers have limits, but surely there were more ways to add a little variety?
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I sincerely hope there are more Deus Ex games, because while HR got a lot right there were some areas that obviously suffered from budget/time constraints.
- The environments feel static and underpopulated. The only cars you see are parked, most of the NPC's just stand idly about, and there aren't any kind of in-game events to liven things up.
- The take-downs, while amusing, seem kinda unnecessary. If they'd implemented a proper melee attack it'd improve the flow of game-play quite a lot, plus having the option between non-lethal fists and more damaging arm-blades might actually mean something.
- The character are pretty ugly, and it's not helped much by the stiff animation.
- The shotgun is useless. I know this is kinda a specific gripe, but seriously, it's useless. You can't even kill an unarmored enemy unless he's less than two paces away, and if they are armored then you may as well be shooting them with air.
Hearthstone. The RNG. Look, I get it, it's a card game so of course there is RNG (believing in the heart of the cards and all that), but it gets to a point where the RNG can either save your life, or it can result in your entire board being wiped and you getting horribly killed. In the face. Cards like the Mad and Madder Bomber are prime examples of this. This card can either take out your opponents board, or or it can clear your own, and it just gets frustrating sometimes, especially when it works completely in your opponent's favour and it secures them the win out of nowhere. You do learn to just take it on the chin and move on, but it is still frustrating, especially when you go on some crazy losing streaks just because you cannot draw a good hand.
Terraria
Love the game to death, and one time decided to try and make a character that relies purely on ranged or magic weapons and gear, and herein lies the flaw. The game is heavily skewed towards melee weapons/gear with all of them offering the best protection and attack, heck there are even some melee weapons that ARE ranged weapons like the True Excalibur/Nights Edge or Terrablade being able to fire energy swords that still deal melee damage. While magic and ranged weapons do less damage and you can run out of their respective resources (mana/ammo), sure its not that much of a crippler as enemies will drop mana stars and you can stock up of a LOT of ammo, but my main gripe is which the damage-defence design it has going. Ideally I'd have it like this:
If you've got a full melee armour set, you can do combos on enemies that can stun lock them or maximize damage output, you can also grapple onto bosses/enemies and like stab away at them (useful when facing levitating bosses/enemies), you're melee damage gets buffed obviously and you can charge up for more powerful hits, also you have the best defence. (also no melee weapons can shoot projectiles, they can summon them like the Headless Horesman's Sword or Starfury)
If you've got a full magic armour set, the magic weapon you have can now be used to buff yourself and it can have a super attack (that'll cost you a lot of mana) also you can buff teamates and mininos (this means that minion armour would be scrapped because it honestly doesn't even offer any decent defence and even with several minions you're not very combat reliable), as a magic user though you're squishy but you have a lot of damage output.
If you've got a full ranged armour set, you can duel wield any ranged weapon except bows (instead with bows you can now shoot three arrows at once as opposed to one at a time), you can also toss out throwable weapons (like grenades, shurikens and throwing knives) in larger numbers instead of one and you have the ability to dodge, you're biggest con being that you have to worry about ammo and your armour strength is somewhere between mage and melee.
I have other stuff I could criticize, mostly going about how the game kinda has this illusion of freedom in terms of character builds and resource usage but its at the same time not that diverse... well its pretty diverse but I felt there can be so much more.
Every quest you do that has a villain, when you go to confront them, they ALWAYS say 'Did you think I would be surprised to find you here?' or 'I knew you'd catch on sooner or later' or something like that.
It would be nice if the villains were more diverse, in that some caught on to you while others didn't, that sort of thing.
I would add to that the platforming, what little of it there is. The artstyle already makes judging distance very hard, but it also has invisible railings near some edges to prevent you from falling off, which can really get in the way of trying to time your jump closed to the edge.
OT: The Last of Us
- Strangling is too overpowered and has exactly zero risk compared to shiving, which costs a shiv/durabilty. Shivs are presented as the obvious faster and quieter stealth take-down, but strangling holds no down side at all except for it taking a bit longer and not being able to perform it on a Clicker, which can usually be avoided anyway. Shivs are weapons, yet their only real use are for opening shiv doors, which should be the optional use of risk/reward. So yeah, the Strangle/Shiv balance is completely out of whack.
- Once you hit the Fall the gameplay pacing takes a hit. The story takes over, and if you're into the story and characters by that point you probably won't notice, but that gradual sense of progression and travel, and watching the scenary drift by in-game is kinda lost.
- The flamethrower should've never been in the game.
- I wish Ellie was written more like a kid and less like a sass, but this one's a bit more subjective.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
- Anya's hair looks fucking atrocious in certain scenes. It just looks like a bunch of string wrapped around thin air, even on current-gen systems.
- The perks system works a bit counter intuitive. There are a good amount of perks that have universal appeal whether your playstyle is Stealth, Tactical, or Dual Wielding, like bigger gun clips. Yet these are shut away behind a specific playstyle you might not like. So instead of the perks accommodating your playstyle, you eventually accommodate the perks system with a playstyle you don't really enjoy just to get a bigger clip size or faster reload/weapon switch.
- Boss encounters just resort to you unloading your weapons and hope your health will last long enough to win.
Terraria
Love the game to death, and one time decided to try and make a character that relies purely on ranged or magic weapons and gear, and herein lies the flaw. The game is heavily skewed towards melee weapons/gear with all of them offering the best protection and attack, heck there are even some melee weapons that ARE ranged weapons like the True Excalibur/Nights Edge or Terrablade being able to fire energy swords that still deal melee damage. While magic and ranged weapons do less damage and you can run out of their respective resources (mana/ammo), sure its not that much of a crippler as enemies will drop mana stars and you can stock up of a LOT of ammo, but my main gripe is which the damage-defence design it has going. Ideally I'd have it like this:
If you've got a full melee armour set, you can do combos on enemies that can stun lock them or maximize damage output, you can also grapple onto bosses/enemies and like stab away at them (useful when facing levitating bosses/enemies), you're melee damage gets buffed obviously and you can charge up for more powerful hits, also you have the best defence. (also no melee weapons can shoot projectiles, they can summon them like the Headless Horesman's Sword or Starfury)
If you've got a full magic armour set, the magic weapon you have can now be used to buff yourself and it can have a super attack (that'll cost you a lot of mana) also you can buff teamates and mininos (this means that minion armour would be scrapped because it honestly doesn't even offer any decent defence and even with several minions you're not very combat reliable), as a magic user though you're squishy but you have a lot of damage output.
If you've got a full ranged armour set, you can duel wield any ranged weapon except bows (instead with bows you can now shoot three arrows at once as opposed to one at a time), you can also toss out throwable weapons (like grenades, shurikens and throwing knives) in larger numbers instead of one and you have the ability to dodge, you're biggest con being that you have to worry about ammo and your armour strength is somewhere between mage and melee.
I have other stuff I could criticize, mostly going about how the game kinda has this illusion of freedom in terms of character builds and resource usage but its at the same time not that diverse... well its pretty diverse but I felt there can be so much more.
Eternal Darkness: The spell-system should be more in-depth.
Also some of the environments are repetitive, my favourite ones are the more normal ones, like the mansion and the church.
Also it's kinda a sausage fest when it comes to playable characters. You got 12 playable characters and only two of them are women. I really do like the diversity in the characters, who are just unfortunate normal people who wander into these situations, but that's even more of a reason to include more women.
Man I could criticize games I like all day. Where to begin.
1. XCOM
Almost catastrophically bad difficulty pacing...peaks about 3-4 hours in and gently slides downhill after, to the point where the game is trivially easy in the later phases, even on high difficulty. Shallow strategy layer. Dubious/predictable AI. Woefully limited range of customization options, leading to a team of look and sound-alikes. Needed a random map generator in the worst possible way and never got one.
2. CIVILIZATION
Most games are decided in the opening hundred turns and then take days to play out, tediously bumping the "next turn" button as you inch towards inevitable victory. AI is rock stupid and easily nudged over on lower difficulties, and brazenly cheats on higher ones. There's an easily identifiable "critical path" of upgrades that apply to almost every victory type, resulting in every game blending together after a while.
3. ELDER SCROLLS/FALLOUT 3/NEW VEGAS
All these games suffer from similar diseases. Ugly textures, mannequin-like NPCs with stilted dialogue, bugs galore, a total lack of urgency or pacing in the narrative (most of which are irredeemably shoddy), and open worlds that react poorly or not at all to your activities. The play balancing tends to be horrendous as well, they're amongst the most shallow and ass-backwards RPG systems on the market.
4. BIOSHOCK INFINITE/LAST OF US/TO THE MOON/GONE HOME/THE WALKING DEAD/ETC.
Hey guys I know story is awesome but that doesn't mean you need to completely abandon quality game play.
5. WORLD OF WARCRAFT
You finally figured out difficulty tiering for raiding, how hard would it be to apply the same design principle to everything else? For god's sake guys, 99.9% piss-easy topped with a cherry of ludicrously hard makes for a rather jarring play experience.
6. DOTA2
It kills the part of you that once felt joy. There's also really no need for the game to be QUITE that counter-intuitive and fussy. Difficulty that comes from systems depth = good. Difficulty that comes from wrangling a shit-poor UI = bad.
7. SIMS
We're really starting to push the limits of "I enjoy it" with this pick, but I think the merits of The Sims were often underrated by the hardcore gaming community. Still, you stupid motherfuckers, what is this supposed to be, exactly? It barely functions as a sandbox because the AI is so perfunctory that everything needs to be laser guided by your omnipotent hand. The game play elements are vaporous and devoid of challenge or complexity. The immersion keeps getting chucked in the need to instance everything despite the game remaining visually static for about a decade now. I'm beginning to think Maxis is just incompetent. Will Wright is rolling over in his grave. Bed. Whatever.
Thief 2:
The climbing/mantling mechanics are extremely unreliable. It's hard not to save scum when I have no idea whether or not Garret will grab the ledge when I make my next leap.
Some of the guards tend to bug out. Really annoying when a guard ends up getting stuck in a narrow spot and spinning around like a human sentry bot on too much coffee. Thankfully, I have flash bombs for situations like those.
It you haven't played a level before, then you have no way of knowing what equipment you should purchase beforehand.
That darned bug in the courier mission where I cannot pick up the parcel dropped by the guard I'm tailing. Thank goodness for level skip cheats.
It definitely hasn't aged well visually.
If you're not playing on Expert then broad head arrows are overpowered.
Sometimes finding the objective is even harder than not getting spotted. On expert, it can lead to some pixel hunts.
Spec Ops: The Line
Why did the other two delta force characters keep following your orders? At some point they must have realised your character's obsession with Conrad was becoming too dangerous.
Mass Effect (the first one). I really like Mass Effect, it has an engaging story, with interesting and engaging characters, in one of the most detailed worlds I've seen in terms of lore (and I'm a huge sucker for lore). It does still have very noticeable issues, and it's pretty obvious that Bioware was rather unfamiliar with making third-person shooters at the time.
-Bad cover system. Most games keep it quite simple with their cover systems, you press a button to enter it and you press a button to leave it. But for some reason, with Mass Effect you have to mannually walk into or out of cover to automatically get in or out of cover, which leads to some unneccesarily awkward combat moments.
-Flawed combat. The weapons in ME lack any kind of real punch to them, it's hard to explain but when you fire them they just don't feel like they make much of an impact on whatever you have in your sights. Battles can also get frustrating since some of your enemies' strategy is simply running straight at your face with no regard for their own safety (not talking about Husks, they're fine) and shoot you full of holes before you can react. There are also times when there's just too much happening on screen and everything becomes a clusterfuck of polygons, which isn't very fun because you end up dying for seemingly no reason.
-Exploration. You spend too much time in the Mako, which handles like a shopping cart on ice, and while exploring different planets has a certain charm to it, it's not handled very well. The terrains aren't very fun or entertaining to traverse, partly thanks to the fact that you have to drive the Mako on them and also because they're pretty lifeless. Aside from random geth or buildings you might find, which all seem to have been made by the same 2 or 3 architects (seriously, it's ridiculous how much those small buildings are copypasted in the sidemissions).
-Navigation is more cumbersome than it should be. Getting from place to place with the main missions is a walk in the park, but the side missions... Ugh. If you want to take on a side mission, you have to look in your journal, memorize exactly where you have to go to initiate it. That means you have to remember which of the numerous systems that mission is in, and again memorize which of the several galaxies in that system you can find it in, and go there. There is nothing on the HUD that displays that information on the galaxy map, for some reason. It's a minor annoyance, but it's still rather annoying.
Thankfully, pretty much all of these complaints were fixed in Mass Effect 2.
All these games suffer from similar diseases. Ugly textures, mannequin-like NPCs with stilted dialogue, bugs galore, a total lack of urgency or pacing in the narrative (most of which are irredeemably shoddy), and open worlds that react poorly or not at all to your activities. The play balancing tends to be horrendous as well, they're amongst the most shallow and ass-backwards RPG systems on the market.
Sandbox/immersion engines. Tremendous sense of freedom, and the open continuous world gives a better sense of place/space than almost any other title on the market. Requires willful suspension of disbelief and a willingness to play the game in particular ways to avoid staring at the seams. I've long looked at the Elder Scrolls series as games you either "get" or "don't get". If you "get" them, they're GOTY material. If you don't, you're left sitting there wondering WTF everyone is praising them for.
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