yeah I always stop playing sloppy CRPGs like that when I realize that any sense of anticipation has been depleted from the mechanics and the writing partway through and I’m just going through the motions because they’re there
This for me, except in more action-heavy games where you have to upgrade things. The final time I tried to play God Hand I finally managed to grind my way through the opening level, was greeted with a massive “now design your own fighting style” menu and straight NOPE’d out of the game forever. Granted I was not having a good time at all up until that point, but that was the end for me.
Also don’t bother asking fans of the game for a nice general purpose combo to aim for, I don’t think any single gaming question I’ve asked in my life has been answered less helpfully.
I stated elsewhere recently my aversion to boss rushes and I gave up on Gradius V early on as they put a five or so boss long one at the end of the second stage and… well I did the math on how many times I’d have to go through it if I wanted to get good enough at the game to beat it and quickly lost all interest.
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I was playing Link to the Past. I got really far into the game, I’d play it with my girlfriend when we hung out, she’d watch and help me solve puzzles. I would smoke weed every time we played.
I was doing really well this way. I had the game in my sights and had gotten pretty far (at least into the mirror dimension/whatever). then one time we were hanging out we were drinking wine. I decided to play the game drunk for the first time. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do, wound up dying pathetically and losing my bearings in the game entirely. I never played it again!!!
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I’m similarly intimidated by stuff like that because I feel like I’m not going to mentally invest enough to reach a satisfying level of mastery, but I found God Hand fully intuitive, like there was no overhead in thinking through what wasn’t working and what might combo better at the end of each level
compared to something like Absolver which demanded way too much from its meta from the get go, it’s actually a huge design virtue of God Hand’s
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Worth noting, and this is a cousin of the topic at hand, is that if in a game I have to restart for any reason I am almost certainly just gonna drop the game instead. A save corrupting is like the ultimate sin and a game has to be a solid 9+ out of 10 for me not to declare it dead to me at that point.
I recall in the original SB or IC God Hand thread all those years back people going “yeah you’ll probably have to restart a certain ways through once you know what you’re doing to better build your combo unless you want to save scum the gambling” and I would rather never play a game again than do that.
And whenever I express the opinion that I don’t want to deal with this aspect of the game at all and would just like a nice basic combo I get something like Felix’s response, which is both well intentioned and not actually helpful in the least (to clarify it is a very fair response here, but I also got it almost word for word in the past when asking for specific combo help which made it markedly less so in that context), or the whole “you can beat the game with the default moves” spiel which is similar except without the good intentions. You can probably beat it blindfolded with enough practice too!
All that said this aspect of its fanbase is probably a blessing as, as I’ve stated previously, I did not get along with the whole game part that I encountered beforehand in the least and considered it janky as hell (I despise its camera), yet so many people kept talking it up that I’d have probably forced myself to play longer if not for this and I’d have probably continued to have a bad time.
Now I’m not gonna mention this game again for several months as it always makes me cranky >_>
(Considers making a “games that always make you cranky” topic)
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sorry for being overly helpful, at least now you’ll never try absolver!
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Save corruption is terrible, I stopped playing LEGO Worlds pretty quickly because of it.
I started a game of Twilight Princess with someone I was dating. She had the idea of naming the horse after herself. We broke up shortly after and it was too weird to continue given the horse’s name.
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Indiana was the dog.
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Viewtiful Joe. I was so sick while playing that game. Had some sort of stomach bug and was puking a lot and drifting in and out of sleep while I played. Having terrible nightmares of course. So when I was well again and tried to play it I would feel completely sick and it was impossible to go on. Also got sick right after watching the first LotR movie in the theater and haven’t rewatched it since, even though I like those movies
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Talk about condition taste aversion.
I actually did almost try Absolver once due to playstation plus because I for some reason got it and Ruiner crossed up in my head. Good to know that I narrowly avoided disaster!
Oh it’s definitely like that, yeah
when a game scares me i will usually put it down for awhile until ive worked up the nerve to keep playing lol. im a huge wuss. (i will someday play through the Resident Evil games but it’s gonna take me awhile)
Stealth sections give me literal pause for the same reason. im jumpy and the tension is a little much for me
the bigass snake in Sekiro was such an intersection of those two things that i actually couldn’t play this wildly anticipated game for a couple days!!
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i stopped playing Horizon Zero Dawn coz i got to the big city and there were too many options for what to do next
i started again a few days ago and played it for an entire day and a half and then abruptly stopped again for basically the same reason
the robot combat is very good but all the rest of it is a bit much sometimes
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OMG same, except I never really got a hang of the combat and found the stealth kind of unsatisfying
OHH yeah this is why I quit Planescape Torment too, got to some hub city and found like 6 quest threads and was like
not gonna happen
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I too turn off any game the second it steals an iconic(?) scene from a b-grade Christopher Walken actionish picture.
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There was a jump rope minigame in the first city of Final Fantasy 9, where you’d win a tetra master card if you hit 100 jumps. But, the timing on the jumps was really really weirdly off, because you had to take into account the janky windup and leap part of the animation. This made it so you had to hit the button exactly when the rope was at eye level with your character.
It took me enough failed tries to figure this out that I just was like, “fuck this,” but regarding the entire game, not just that minigame.
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