Board 8 > What's the worst game you've sunk 50+ hours into?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've never heard anything but positive opinions on FE incest.
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Mac Arrowny posted...

I've never heard anything but positive opinions on FE incest.

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Circle always made more sense than X.

I think Final Fantasy is brought up mostly because they're many and they get compared to each other. Besides, ideally, the game you liked the least but still put 50+ hours into isn't too bad or at least has enjoyable aspects.

It's weird holding mini-games against FFX when you can lose that one game you're forced to play (and likely will on your first playthrough). I dislike Blitzball. Maybe it would be fun if you could control anyone when the other team had the ball. But you don't have to invest yourself even the slightest in it. Unlike what it seemed like at some point in this topic, you're not forced to power up celestial weapons at all. Don't bother with them if you don't want to.

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Mac Arrowny posted...

I've never heard anything but positive opinions on FE incest.

https://youtu.be/G1C0uWYAI9w?t=508
(8:28)



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ctesjbuvf posted...

Circle always made more sense than X.

I think Final Fantasy is brought up mostly because they're many and they get compared to each other. Besides, ideally, the game you liked the least but still put 50+ hours into isn't too bad or at least has enjoyable aspects.

It's weird holding mini-games against FFX when you can lose that one game you're forced to play (and likely will on your first playthrough). I dislike Blitzball. Maybe it would be fun if you could control anyone when the other team had the ball. But you don't have to invest yourself even the slightest in it. Unlike what it seemed like at some point in this topic, you're not forced to power up celestial weapons at all. Don't bother with them if you don't want to.

Yeah, X became the default in the US (outside of Japan?) in the PS2 era. It's so confusing going back to PS1 games where everything is circle. Plus circle and X are like "yes" and "no"

Unfortunately to get to a lot of the fun content in the game you need to do unfun things. Like the fights in the monster arena are fun, but they only represent a few hours of new content. The whole endgame is a huge repetitive grind. So if you want to fight Penance but you don't want to play the minigames the minigames are directly hurting your enjoyment of the game.

Also if something is in the game it's fair to criticize it. You can make games better by removing things. Imagine if fire had a spell between fira and firaga? It'd be inelegant and kind of ugly. The game would be better without it. Ditto for things like the chocobo racing minigame, which you don't have to do but still cause you to have an unfun experience

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DotA2. There were a couple months where I got super into it and I haven't played it since.

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I don't know the true answer, but to offer something up that hasn't been mentioned yet: Warframe. I enjoy the actually gameplay for the most part and the amount of things they've been able to shove into the game is impressive, but the vast majority of your time is spent grinding for one form of resource or another.

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Realm of the Mad God is pretty fun, and I got addicted to it for a long time. But it goes so far out of its way to disrespect the player's time that it's an easy pick for me.

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Final Fantasy XIV

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Shonen_Bat posted...

Realm of the Mad God is pretty fun, and I got addicted to it for a long time. But it goes so far out of its way to disrespect the player's time that it's an easy pick for me.

That's the game where (most of) my username came from! Despite that, I don't quite think I put 50 or more hours into it, but it's nice to know that someone else played it here.

On topic, I think Pokemon ORAS is my answer.

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I liked Sonic Adventure 2: Battle but I don't think I would call it objectively good. It's probably either that or some mobile game or other.

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NeatoAnAccount posted...

why are 2 different people calling FFTA the worst game they've ever spent 50 hours on

y'all are crazy

Popular games are generally hated by contrarians on GameFAQs forums.

FFTA is particularly hated by Board 8 for not being FFT. It's been that way since release.

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It's also not good

FFTA is not a popular game

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It's just not very enjoyable and some classes have weird skills that are very rarely useful instead of more straightforward skills.

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I found it enjoyable but imperfect. The worst problem I had with FFTA was the character design and losing quest items making it nigh-impossible to ever get them back to continue. Laws were a secondary issue.

Good music, spritework, maps, and an interesting tale on escapism logic though. Highly addictive gameplay too.

Addendum: I have the sequel which I heard was better. I'll eventually start playing it while I wait for Triangle Strategy.

Tom Bombadil posted...

I liked Sonic Adventure 2: Battle but I don't think I would call it objectively good. It's probably either that or some mobile game or other.

This game is objectively good. I'd give it around the 7-8 range.

Good game, memorable classic, but imperfect and that's okay.

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Using "objectively" doesn't make your opinion factual

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Leonhart4 posted...

Using "objectively" doesn't make your opinion factual

Not even seems to understand that. What they really mean is subjectively.

SA2 was one of my favorite games as a kid. Sonic/Shadow levels were great, music was great, liked the character designs, liked the plot (really! it's got a lot of big melodramatic events in it!), liked getting some of the emblems. I even liked the Chao garden. It was a relaxing place to hang out in. I think I was just prepared to like whatever the game threw at me. I don't think it'd work now but man was it effective when I lived with my brother and we would play together.

I've heard multiple people mention disliking laws in FFTA. Why is that?

I know what you mean wrt useless jobs lol, like, beastmaster? k.

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All I remember about the Law system is, doing something annoying to get the laws I wanted for every battle. Like walking around the map and/or rebooting my system or something. So the system was pure annoyance for me.

I remember generally liking FFTA except for that aspect.

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NeatoAnAccount posted...

SA2 was one of my favorite games as a kid. Sonic/Shadow levels were great, music was great, liked the character designs, liked the plot (really! it's got a lot of big melodramatic events in it!), liked getting some of the emblems. I even liked the Chao garden. It was a relaxing place to hang out in. I think I was just prepared to like whatever the game threw at me. I don't think it'd work now but man was it effective when I lived with my brother and we would play together.

I've heard multiple people mention disliking laws in FFTA. Why is that?

I know what you mean wrt useless jobs lol, like, beastmaster? k.

I don't think it aged too terribly. I think Sonic Adventure 2's real problems today would be things like the camera, a few bugs, and whatnot. Still a solid and unique 3D platformer with tons of variety in its stage design and a stellar soundtrack. You could remaster a game like that and it would end up still selling well and being as great as it was back then.

FFTA laws restrict your ability to use certain abilities. Unfortunately, most of these aren't even preset and just random based on how many turns it takes for you to touch a map point. This can effectively screw your party over if your focus revolves around a particular battle strategy that gets banned.

I heard FFTA2's law system was improved. But also consider FFT never restricted your abilities and is naturally the most popular entry in the series for good reason.

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Kinda a tie between Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects and Megaman X7. This was when I first started buying my own games and I loved comics thought it would be cool to have a Marvel fighting game. Spent hours actually getting good at it even though the game is trash. As for X7 I saw Megaman and thought heck yeah Imma finally own a Megaman game. Bad choice.

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Oh now that I think about it, I beat Metal Gear Survive.

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The Last Remnant. I got to one point in the game I could not beat because my Battle Rank was too high in contrast to my army strength. There's a series of boss fights that literally become impossible if you grind too much BR. This was the 360 version. I heard the PC version fixes it. I think I put 40 hours into the game.

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Probably Gems of War

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Fall Guys

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gotta be either Final Fantasy Record Keeper or Fire Emblem Heroes. both games which I had a ton of fun with but were eventually ruined by power creep (yet I still log in to both <_<).

for a game that's relatively unchanged since release it's a lot harder. probably some crap on the SNES like WWF Royal Rumble or Madden '93, though i'm not sure i ever hit 50 hours on either of those.


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ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Oh now that I think about it, I beat Metal Gear Survive.

I guess someone had to.
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I play a lot of gacha games and there is one called Tales of Erin which I think is the worst I've sunk a significant amount of time into. Like the game came out in 2018 and even then mechanically and graphically better games were out for the genre.

FFTA fits this. I still have no idea how I finished that game. It's probably more due to the lack of GBA games I had at the time than anything. The game is a poorly designed mess of grinding a couple sets of battles on repeat constantly to learn your skills, and the battles barely evolve as the game progresses. (How many times did I kill "Clan Dip?" 50+?). Various quests are functionally broken, even to the point where you can lose permanently lose characters due to bad design. The game slogs along for a long while... Until it effectively breaks halfway through. Most battles suddenly become "Hit enemies with 100% accurate status effects that disable them for the rest of the fight, then poke them until they die". A lot bosses can be killed before they really do anything without any significant grind.

The story, whose initial premise has value, turns out asinine because they really don't do... Anything at all to even try to build on it or enhance it until the very last second. Marche is the "villain" because he's "the only sane man" until the very end when Cid turns, but Marche himself isn't an interesting or developed character - Cid is the only character that gets anything even resembling character development in the game, which leaves him as the only character I care even a little about. There are no real plot developments or twists - Almost every character unquestioningly follows their starting path without a single moment of self reflection. This, for the most part, leaves the story stale and repetitive, only getting towards the end for the sake of getting towards the end. The law system is merely a crutch against the players that doesn't add strategy except for what specific day you want your fights on, as various enemies in fights that actually matter can violate them at will and not get red-carded.

The thing is, most games I find bad I don't play for... 50 hours, or don't last 50+ hours to sink into. There's some notable ones I very much disliked that I played for longer periods of time though.

Legend of Dragoon would definitely have fit this, and is a long enough game, but I dropped that well before 50 hours. I could manage the awkward timing based battle system just fine, but it didn't stop it from making FFIX's fights look super fast. The dialogue just... Felt like someone going through the motions, not really putting any meaningful effort it. There was no personality to the game or it's characters, and little incentive to actually care about any of them. The game felt terrible - potentially irredeemably so - within 10-15 hours. The knowledge that the combat system, that was already, by far, the slowest I've ever experienced in a game, was still going to get over two to three times slower was also really sinking in. If the number were 10 or 15+ hours, this would be the game I'd choose.

Speaking of FFIX... Dropped that probably around 20-25 I'd wager. The game is slow and/or clunky all over the place in both speed and design. Most of the characters are bad, and quickly become caricatures of themselves that constantly parrot. (Steiner and Garnet are especially bad at this, and are completely unlikable as a result). The equipment system encourages constant grinding on bad, rotating equipment for because of how long it takes to get item skills, many of which are situational and only have niche uses at specific points, and its worsened even more due to the terrible pace the game runs at. I have heard the remake on Steam at least drastically speeds up the game and takes off some of the rough edges, but that feels more like lipstick on a pig than anything else.

Didn't like EO4 at all... But again, didn't make it to 50 hours. Probably 30ish. The game forces you to grind at an incredibly slow pace at various times because the level scaling of enemies is amazingly unbalanced. You can effortlessly 1-turn enemies in one area for piddly gains... And the enemies in the next area you're supposed to go can 1-turn you if they feel like it, even with the best equipment you can manage at the time, leaving you to try to slowly scrap away at enough encounters to actually get somewhere, since you'll need 2-3 turns to kill them. This happens constantly - Probably more often than in the first 3 games combined. They level locked so many skills that you have to stop spending skill points for a long time to wait until you get to the next threshold, which artificially slows the pace down even more. Eventually I just got tired of dealing with it.

I guess there's all sort of random MMO types I've played (like Maplestory) that'd fit this. I haven't played those in many many years though.

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red13n posted...

Final Fantasy XIV

Despite how much I absolutely love FFXIV, I could maybe agree with this if you have only ever touched the base game. The content in the base game is the most mediocre stuff, and with how they've changed the jobs over the years, base game levels of the jobs feel even more stripped down than they should.

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the first thing to come to mind. I would have stopped long before if I hadn't gotten my mom wrapped up into the game too.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Oh now that I think about it, I beat Metal Gear Survive.

You are officially the 2nd person I've seen who actually played that

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Crescent-Moon posted...

Didn't like EO4 at all... But again, didn't make it to 50 hours. Probably 30ish. The game forces you to grind at an incredibly slow pace at various times because the level scaling of enemies is amazingly unbalanced. You can effortlessly 1-turn enemies in one area for piddly gains... And the enemies in the next area you're supposed to go can 1-turn you if they feel like it, even with the best equipment you can manage at the time, leaving you to try to slowly scrap away at enough encounters to actually get somewhere, since you'll need 2-3 turns to kill them. This happens constantly - Probably more often than in the first 3 games combined. They level locked so many skills that you have to stop spending skill points for a long time to wait until you get to the next threshold, which artificially slows the pace down even more. Eventually I just got tired of dealing with it.

Gemerally agree with your thoughts on these games in the post but I never had anything resembling this experience with EO4 and I suspect you just didn't get the mechanics very well, no offense.

There are just a lot of mechanics and stiff learning curve in there and a poorly composed team is going to have a ton of trouble

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shadosneko posted...

Despite how much I absolutely love FFXIV, I could maybe agree with this if you have only ever touched the base game. The content in the base game is the most mediocre stuff, and with how they've changed the jobs over the years, base game levels of the jobs feel even more stripped down than they should.

I am definitely counting 1.0 and A Realm Reborn as separate games.

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swordz9 posted...

First stuff that came to mind:

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Was that in the 50+ range? I hated it, but it felt like an agonizing 35 hour game.

CaptainOfCrush posted...

Brawl immediately came to mind

Also an honorable mention for me.


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Tom Bombadil posted...

I liked Sonic Adventure 2: Battle but I don't think I would call it objectively good. It's probably either that or some mobile game or other.

I have 110+ hours in SA2:B. That was back in early '02 when GameCube had the drought after Melee.

Also, I love how this turned into a stealth FFIX assassination topic. For what it's worth, I've always thought FFIX was the weakest of the golden era (VII-X and Tactics). Some other posters hit it on the head with the unnecessary supporting characters, the sludgy battle speed, weak late game, and the lack of star power in the main cast.

That said FFIX is still solid. Just not "tied for best FF evar" like people have been saying in recent years.

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plasmabeam posted...

Just not "tied for best FF evar" like people have been saying in recent years.

Im pretty sure thats only some users on this board who have said that.

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Man this is why collective thought can kinda ruin things. Growing up I always had alot of fun with SA2 but when all these people tell me its bad it gets in my head.

Like every Pokmon game after gen 3

Quest 64, Aidyn Chronicles, or Tecmo Secret of the Stars

Still love enjoy em though

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2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil

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Probably Phantasy Star 1, if that got to 50+. My original playthrough got around halfway through before being distracted and I've beaten it twice since then.

It's got a sort of neat setting, good production values for the era, and not too much else.

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