Oh god, Genshin Impact flashbacks. Plus I nominate the versions of MS Word from before they got rid of the paper clip for this thread
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I honestly think that Sonic Adventure makes a pretty rough first impression - The game immediately throws you into a boss battle that you have to beat as your first taste of it.
Sure, itâs a straight forward boss battle, but Iâm really surprised that they didnât throw you straight into Emerald Coast, that would have been a far less daunting introduction.
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Oh. Youâre right. I forgot Emerald Coast wasnât the first level. HA!
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I forgot that you donât start out in the village. I actually really like the village in the beginning! But the celestial tutorial area is extremely boring.
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A whole lot of JRPGs that arenât made by Square. SMT Strange Journey comes to mind.
I feel like the first 3 hours of Hollow Knight kinda stink, and it doesnât really start to show its colors until you get to the garden area. I donât blame anyone for giving up before then, although I also kinda think that the drudgery of the first parts are necessary to make the gardens seem so out of place.
âOh wow some greenâ wouldnât have the same impact 25 minutes in.
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I liked playing Shin Megami Tensei 1 for the Super Famicom a whole lot and even finished it probably entirely due to how strong of first impression that game makes with its beginning. Waking up from a weird nightmare to have a normal day in a normal suburb only for demons to slowly start making themselves known in grim ways? Good stuff!
By contrast though I really couldnât get into SMT2 at all due to its dull start of what seems like generic demon killing missions in abstract future city and then having to backtrack the exact same way you came with all the same random battles. Several times over too from what I remember. I think HG101 said itâs supposed to be an intentional JRPG parody or something? Didnât laugh.
Iâm almost certain it gets better from hearing fans praise the game even higher then the first one so itâs a shame.
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Worst Offender 2020/maybe for the last two generations:
Getting beyond the Ubisoft Proprietary Online Crap login-page in Watchdogs3. Applies at least for the XB1 version, havenât started it again for two weeks now, maybe they have patched it now⌠if so, I will report back and add a âup until the december-updateâ bit.
If you donât want to create an account with them, you have to be creative and map out what each transition between screens do, since they do not behave in a consistent manner.
Maybe it is a problem with their background-loading code, but it is honestly too consistent to be coincidental, especially since you have to figure out that cancelling out to the initial screen must be done once to trigger the background loading of the main menu in the background.
This bs also makes the effort of the usability team look ridiculous or even outright cynical, because IF you are disabled and dependent on audio cues/feedback for navigating to the main menu, HOW on earth are you supposed to figure out THAT state-chart by yourself?
Makes it even more seem like this was a deliberate decision for bullying users into registering to their account-thingy, and guess what! I want to believe that QA and testers lobbied for the online Account thing to be optional, or not put in front of the main menu, especially since you cannot navigate it easily. Still, someone should have caught that.
Thereâs no love lost here, ayup, and in the end this stupid decision is the #1 reason why I have been angry every.single.time i started the game, it has been a month by now and the hate did not subside.
edit:
also did forget another BS they pulled off:
Careful when you are on the Account selection screens, because âBâ and âYâ are used in different fashion there, and add injury to insult.
Bastards.
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The evil of Ubisoft truly has no bottom
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Symphony of the Night honestly. the Alchemy Lab isnât a bad area overall but as the first major stretch of playtime itâs rather meandering and incoherent, re: the room layouts and what enemies inhabit them. i think i liked it more later as a revisited junction between other areas but that context isnât apparent when youâre railroaded in at the beginning. on top of that the first several branching paths in the game just lead back to where you started, while the actual way to progress bottlenecks into an absurdly long corridor featuring the same intimidating âbrick wallâ enemy cloned multiple times in a row, which winds up being pretty discouraging.
obviously the messiness and refusal to follow any âsensibleâ formula is a big part of the gameâs charm and mystery but i definitely feel like that first hour or so could have sold it better
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Vakyrie Profile has a terrible intro. Youâre given a vague goal of collecting heroes and the context of the beginning isnât understood unless you watch a long drawn out cutscene selectable from the main menu. Then you run around as a different character talking to the right NPCs while still not doing anything, then the game lets you fly around the world map while telling you youâre on a time limit to complete the game and you have to sactifice time to discover new locations that may or may not have anything to do in them, at this point in the game. And you wonât know until you enter that location and lose time.
IF you can make it into a dungeon youâve overcome the greatest challenge of your playthrough.
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Thatâs a second impression though right? What I remember from the beginning of SotN is scenery-chewing Dracula followed by Alucard barging into the castle at maximum speed. I donât remember Alchemy Lab at all
Anyway, âboring second areaâ seems to be a common problem in Metroidvanias in general, IMO Super Metroid and Hollow Knight suffer from it
EDIT: Err, I bumped an ancient thread by accident because Discourse recommended it to me in the bottom bar. Well, whatâs done is done. Arise, necrothread
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bumping old threads is a chad move. iâve been thinking about sotn a lot lately so itâs good timing anyway
i suppose youâre right but the real âmeatâ of the game isnât apparent at that stage so all i had to go on were âthis is prettyâ (but all iâm doing is moving in a straight line?) and âhaha i finally get the internet memeâ. i guess itâs partially also an impression of bafflement if youâre not familiar with rondo of blood since we open halfway into a story.
i was playing it with a friend so perhaps patience was thinner than if iâd been attacking it on my own, but iirc we were kind of waiting for it to sell itself, and it seemed to keep getting lost in circles
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I hated the first three hours of Assassinâs Creed 3 where you play as Haytham Kenway. The rest of the game wasnât much better but it really soured me on the rest of the game as I played through it.
If youâre consumed by existential despair and ennui like I am, nearly every game makes a bad first impression
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Deus Ex
Dragonâs Dogma
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Half Life 2. I remember everybody being amazed by the gravity gun but I never managed to stay interested long enough to pick it up
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Always appreciated Square Enixâs evolution from FF13âs this game takes 20 hours to get good to FF14âs this game takes 100+ hours to get good to FF15âs this game never gets good
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Final Fantasy 8⌠I tend to dislike the strange placelessness that characterizes most final fantasy worlds (7 and 9 being notable exceptions) and 8 is probably more guilty of this than most. It makes up for it by being a game about losers hanging out, though
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I think episode 1 of DUSK is far less interesting than episodes 2 or 3, which are fucking incredible. kind of an AntiDoom in that way. Not a bad impression per se but certainly a generic one.
Doom starts with absolutely amazing levels and never really tops them IMO
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