recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
For me Skyrim, The Witcher 3, botw and all souls games.
Skyrim never clicked, it just felt buggy and empty and punishing. Trying to climb that mountain just so a yeti can beat you up? Great, here is your save spot form 15 min earlyer, please try again. I know that’s why it’s fun for so many, I just hated it.
The Witcher 3 was too… much dialogue. Most of the time I can play 1-3 hours every couple of days. And in the Witcher you walk 15min through beautiful but otherwise empty forest, killing 1-15 something, walk back and talk like another 15min with the guy who gave you the quest. It’s really deep worldbuilding, but when you don’t have a lot of time it’s more “damn, what happend last?” 5min walking “ah, that happened” takes new quest, so much talking…“ah damn, my hour is gone, so I finish the quest another time.” PC off.
Botw cause the world felt empty and everything broke in an instant and I’m the player ending with 50 healing potions, 10 big scrolls and so on cause MaYbE I’ll need it another time. Doesn’t match with botw. TotK is so much better handling this, cause you can craft any good item in an instant.
And Souls Games are just a broken mess. They’re not hard by default, they’re hard cause of all the buggy and mushy controls. It never feels crisp, it’s just a big blob and maybe your character rolls or maybe it feels like an invisible wall, who knows. Games like Jedi Fallen Order in hard mode or Hollow Knight were so much more fun, cause the controls were crisp and everytime I lost, it was because of me. I did wrong and not some squishi spaghetti code.
Removed by mod
I’ll probably get roasted for this but… Pokemon. It just seems like endless copy/paste and might be one of the laziest game franchises I’ve ever seen. I’ve really tried to get into them. I was there when the Pokemon cartoon started, I saw it rise to the phenomenon it is today, but damn if it isn’t the most boring grindfest ever.
Stardew Valley. I don’t find it relaxing at all but a chore and stressful due to the day/night cycle. I feel like Terraria is handling day/night much better.
Yep. I love planting things, harvesting them… I want Stardew Valley without the time management stuff.
If you’re on PC, there’s mods to help with the time (even stopping it altogether). I haven’t tried them out myself, but this mod would solve the time management issue: https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/169
Yeah, I’ve tried those out before. It tends to make the game feel weird, if that makes sense? Like, everything is still expecting time to progress.
Really, I want a game like Stardew, but without the hard timeline baked in from the start.
Red Dead Redemption 2. Everyone goes on about how awesome it is, but I just found the story and gameplay really slow and dull.
RDR2 suffers heavily from the same problem as GTAV’s single player mode: it’s a movie posing as a video game and both aspects suffer for it.
RDR2 would have been great if it was just the part where you wander around tracking critters and collecting flowers and playing cowboy dress-up, but the game really doesn’t want you to do that. Not to belabor the point, but between how unpredictable the connection between “interact with item/character X” and “start mission with character Y” can be and the game’s tendency to fail missions the second you go off-script, RDR2 often felt like it was directed by someone who actively resented the concept of player agency.
You articulated my issue with it perfectly. In theory it was this amazing open world with tons of player freedom, but the minute you engage with the actual story at all you have no choice in anything. There was one quest where I HAD to rescue Micah and kill a butt load of people which really annoyed me given I was going for a white hat run.
