Games You Had to Force Yourself to Finish

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So I'm playing through Fallout: New Vegas right now. I'm pretty late to the party because I was one of those snobby people who refused to play the modern Fallout games because they abandoned the turn-based rpg roots of the series. For reasons I won't bore you with, I decided to give the modern Fallouts a shot and went with New Vegas because I had heard that, in terms of story, it's more faithful to the original games. I've been playing for a few weeks and honestly, I find that I have to force myself to keep playing. Logically, I know that I should just quit if I'm not having fun but maybe I feel like I've gone too far to just stop now (though I'm pretty sure I'm still in the beginning), or maybe I just want to justify the money I spent. In any case, I keep playing even though I kind of wish I were playing something else.

What about the rest of you? Have you ever had a game that you didn't really want to keep playing but you kept telling yourself, "No! I WILL finish this game!"?

 

[paeloras]

Yes! With several games actually :/ Usually happens if I'm playing through the game for a second time. This has happened for games like Final Fantasy X, Witcher 2, Mass Effect, and others. Not bad games but its like watching a movie over and over. It can get old fast.

But first time through I'd have to say Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Ratchet & Clank a Crack in Time stand out the most. But those were both at the tail end of a franchise gaming marathon and after going through AC 1 & 2 and then brotherhood with playing nothing else in between probably killed the experience.

I think all gamers may experience this with a title or two from time to time.

 

[Catfood220]

I found LA Noir really hard to finish after the Homicide missions, that game just seemed to drag after that. The only enjoyment I got out of that game after Homicide is repeatedly running over my partner from the Vice cases.

I struggled to get through Portal 2, yeah it was funny but it was nothing else. Doing more or less the same puzzle over and over again before it introduced something new was boring. I never made it to the end and I don't care.

At the beginning of the year, I was predicting The Last of Us to be my game of the year. Upon playing it, I was underwhelmed and that feeling never went away. There are little bits that I liked and the story was alright but other than that I wasn't impressed and struggled to play to the end. Maybe I need to play it again now that my expectations have been put into check.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Advent Rising, seriously, that game was a test of patience that I never want to go through ever again. It just drags on and on and on and on.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Not sure if Mass Effect counts as the story was able to get me through it (not that I didn't put it down about half way through with no intention of ever completing it), but at the very least most of my subsequent playthroughs of the series have me forcing myself to stomach the awful gameplay just so that I can develop of a character for ME2 and ME3, not that I actually want to be playing a game with such clunky controls and horrible AI.

There was also Dante's Inferno. I made about half-way through Greed without any trouble, but then it just became a repetitive mess, and if it wasn't being mind-numbingly easy then it was just being unfair.

 

[Andy Shandy]

Red Dead Redemption. Personally, after hearing all the hype about how magnificent it was, I was severely let down when I played it myself. Promised myself I would finish it though, believing that at some point it would all click. Never did.

 

[piinyouri]

Digimon 4.

Some combination of "Maybe next level I can see the evolution?" and "I've got this far, I may as well keep going."

 

[Joffas16]

I do this a lot, the last time it happened was with one of my favourite games, Final Fantasy VI. I absolutely love that game but those constant random encounters really test my patience. By the second, crappier half of the game I was just wanting it to end.

 

[Barbas]

It took me years to download and install enough mods to get the unstable, frustrating mess that is Fallout: New Vegas to run properly. Once it was optimised, though, I began to enjoy it more than I did Fallout 3. I think it's the better game of the two, just not in its Vanilla state.

Dead Island was disappointment after disappointment. The melee combat was a clunky, frantic mess, NPCs with guns were the bane of my life and one of the playable characters had a throwing skill that was essentially useless, because you often lost the expensive customised weapon you threw if it landed in a glitch spot or fell in a hole. On top of all that, the engine it was running on was uglier than a bag of smashed crabs. The hours really started to drag on when it got to the sewer-trekking stage. It's a shame when I consider all that, because there really were some well-executed moments of heightened tension and fright in there somewhere. Techland just isn't a very good developer, it seems.

 

[Superlative]

Well there was this one time at band camp... I was playing LoL wasn was getting merced super hard but i stuck it out to avoid being a douchebag and we won,

 

[Exhuminator]

You have to make yourself stop playing a good game, but you have to force yourself to play a bad one. Easy barometer there. But sometimes we get hung up on something that falls in between the cracks. So the two games I had to really force myself to finish this year were...

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice For All on DS. Maybe it's just me, but this game seemed a major step down from the awesomeness of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The first case was OK, the second case was boring, the third case was sheer torture and took all of my willpower to withstand... and the fourth case was merely DECENT. I worked through the third case because I heard over and over the fourth case was so "amazing". Many people cite Justice For All's fourth case as the best in the series. Well, IMO it was not all that amazing, the fourth case just seemed amazing compared to the horrible crud you dealt with in the third case. The sheer dichotomy bloated the elation. But I put up with all of it because I want to play this series in order. I just hope Trials And Tribulations actually lives up to the hype it receives.

The other game I had to force myself through this year was Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for PC. GRAW for PC was excruciatingly unfair and outright sadistic towards the player. For some reason I took that as a personal challenge and had to prove I could beat the damned thing. I did beat it, but the effort didn't justify the means.

One other runner up was Shining the Holy Ark. I got about 75% of the way through that one this year... but I just couldn't make myself finish it. Some RPGs age like fine wine... but some age like moldy hog's head cheese. Well, Shining the Holy Ark fell into the latter. Real shame as I had sunk nearly thirty hours into it before I finally couldn't take it anymore. But that's a good thing... knowing when to quit. I barely have time lately for the good games, there's no sane reason to suffer through the bad.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Red Dead Redemption. Personally, after hearing all the hype about how magnificent it was, I was severely let down when I played it myself. Promised myself I would finish it though, believing that at some point it would all click. Never did.

I knew I wasn't the only one...I got to Mexico in that one when I'd finally had enough. I re-bought the game recently since the complete edition was pretty cheap but, I haven't even tried the additional modes yet since I've since come into better games to spend time with.

---

Dragon Age II...the first red flag should have come from the lazy title. Even the expansion DLC for origins had a proper subtitle (Awakening...it isn't even an RE title, like Rebirth or Redemption!) Then was the fact that I had to play as a human...none of thee above were damning when it came to the game of course; What damned this to me was the boring combat mixed in with linear, re-used dungeon corridors. The plot was interestingly set up but part one seemed to be building to something which never ended up materializing. Chapter 2 played out in a way that I was expecting would have ended the game. By chapter 3 I was just too bored and, too tired to care about maintaining relationships with the shitty, shitty party members. Sidenote: Isabella is absolutely the only Bioware party member who I absolutely hated. I didn't like the Jersey Shore inspired squad mates from Mass Effect 3 but Isabella utterly repulsed me...I wanted to do to her what my Dark Jedi did to Jolee Bindo and split her in half...with my broadsword...NOT A METAPHOR!

I realized after a few months of not having played it that I never actually finished Dragon Age II...So I booted it, speed-ran through important sounding quests and finished the game in a few hours when it probably should have taken me ten more...or more...

 

[Exhuminator]

Ah... Metroid Prime 2 was another game I got 70% of the way through this year and just stopped playing. I forced myself to play it for far longer than it was at all fun. I got all the way to the Sanctuary Fortress and couldn't take it anymore. It's not that the game was hard (and it was sometimes), it was that it felt like constant busy work. Nine Dark Temple keys, ten Sky Temple keys, six Echo Key Beam keys... wtf I'm not a space bounty hunter anymore I'm an intergalactic locksmith.

 

[CrackerJack]

I had to force myself to complete Terminator Salvation for the ps3. I had to have those easy gold trophies for some reason.

 

[Snotnarok]

Metroid Other M, comes up a lot from me I'm sure none of you have noticed but it's the only game I forced myself to beat. Friends INSISTED I buy it because I loved the previous Metroid titles and Nintendo made it, therefore it must be worth playing.

Just 2 videos were enough for me to know the game wasn't going to be very good but nothing prepared me for how shit the game is, no powerups to recover, just hold your wii remote up, same for the ammo, whew I almost felt some kind of tension there! Cruddy controls, shit story, tries to retcon the Prime series <=it does, very sneaky-like infact.

 

[1Life0Continues]

Assassins Creed 2

I loathe Ezio and everything about the character. Playing the game became a chore and when the credits rolled, I breathed a sigh of relief, and immediately uninstalled the game.

 

[Trunkage]

These are all games I love but..
Bioshock after Ryan,
I did everything first in Skyrim, Far Cry 3 and Fallout New Vegas, but when it came to it, the story missions were a chore. It took me three attempts and a year to complete New Vegas
The last boss fight on the witcher 2.

 

[NoeL]

Skyward Sword. I wasn't particularly enjoying myself, but it's Zelda. You gotta play Zelda.