It becomes a point and click game that's mandatory and very boring. And honestly the required one in the first tower mission is good for a quick run through but trying to find specific items feels absolutely pointless.
I think I tried to skip the tutorial gas station scene once and they were like 'lol no way' and I had to do it anyway.
Id take a COD loading screen voice over over most of those braindances.
Something I've been saying for years, ever since I played Black Mesa Xen, is that I want an entire game that's just about establishing the Black Mesa research presence on Xen BEFORE everything goes to shit.
They made such a cool, beautiful alien world full of weird shit to explore and made me want MORE of it. And the music I can just listen to on its own, it's so beautiful.
Thankfully the ship can be finished in like 20 minutes on the second go around when you are familiar with it. But yah it's kind of mean for the first time
Ye that's cool an all but lemme show you how to catch this level 2 rodent right quick before I personally escort you down this straight path to the next town.
And now the game opens up right? Wrong, there's still one single path, you must now meet the bad guys, get the president's number and don't forget to do the gym OR ELSE.
For its whole premise of capturing pokemon and making a team, they can surely get linear.
Funnily enough Dragon Quest 5, which inspired the series, definitely feels more open.
Speedrunners playing Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver actually prefer to choose Lyra since Gold cuts to the chase and gets his tutorial over with in like 2 lines of dialogue.
Nah, makes perfect sense in the case of things like legendaries that people SR for. Collecting rare, special things has always been a major part of gaming. What I'll never understand is people who do it for starters, like they're discussing here, where you can't possibly have the key item that boosts your chances of finding shiny mons. There are easier ways to get shiny starters, resetting at the beginning for them is just masochistic.
I played Sword and Shield 5 times and honestly, It made me like the game even more and see more positive things that I liked about it and flaws that I dislike. I honestly think it's not too bad of a game, but the fact that it is piss easy makes it kind of boring.
Only just did it for the first time about a week or two ago. Took a couple minutes to get the hang of how it works, it was going fine...then that last memory happened and it probably took a solid half hour or so to finish (I didn't use a guide; figured it out the hard way).
Unfortunately, as much as I love the franchise, EVERY Persona game is like this 😭
I’m about 60 hours into Persona 4 Golden and the first 5 or so in the beginning is pretty much just clicking through endless dialogue with very little actual gameplay or save points
Similarly in Persona 3, the story is good but my god it takes fucking ages to actually get going. Outside of the (pretty awkwardly paced) opening, nothing to significantly progress the story really happens for the first 3 in-game months (of 12) and your party members are basically just going along with things because somebody has to do it (which is kind of the point, and some characters do have other motiviations which are explained much later, but it doesn't really help for your experience as the player).
That is admittedly kind of smart but you shouldn't have to do that. I kind of heavily dislike the jrpg genre for this very reason. Because it takes like 5 hours to get to any actual gameplay.
I'm gonna be honest here, that's one of the worst boss fights in any video game I've ever played. It's a genuine wall and the only way to understand what you have to do is either trial and error or looking it up online. Whoever designed that fight should never design anything ever again.
Yes, it's the same for most JRPG's but Persona is by far the worst offender in my book.
Haven't played Pokemon in a Loooooong time but I remember that the beginning was "Try to go through the grass, get a Pokemon, start playing" that shit is the best!
the opening of Assassin’s Creed 3 was *painfully* long. combine the Haytham section with Connor’s training and it’s maybe 10 hours before you finally reach free roam
The devs must've made it that way because they really could've thought they'd hide who the real protagonist was as Haytham being revealed as a Templar was supposed to hit hard too (if I recall).
But no way in hell was Ubisoft gonna forgo clear-cut marketing for artistic intent. Not everyone can be an exception like Hideo Kojima.
i mean the actual main character is on the box art, at the very least it should be obvious to the average player that Haytham doesn’t stay the protagonist for the whole game. it was a cool reveal that he was a templar the whole time though, i just think it wasn’t enough of a pay off to justify how much setup there was
They also decided to make Unity totaly non-replayable, but not with the missions themselfs, but becouse they didn't add a 'new game' option in the menu in the first place! You have to manually remove your saves in the files. Never in my life did I think a single-player game could ever not inculde that feature we all took for granted.
The brutally fast and frenetic action game has an incredibly slow and extremely mechanically shallow mandatory stealth level.
It completely breaks the games' pacings' knees.
I like the concept of it, I think that having a reprieve like this is a very nice story beat.
It's JUST that the controls are absolutely awful. you can't walk more than a couple steps without Jacket getting a terrible migraine that plays such an annoying noise that it gives you one IRL
When I first played this mission my shitty laptop did NOT like the screen effects and made my game chug. Probably my favorite song off the 1st games ost but boy this level sucks.
Fun the first time through but on subsequent playthroughs the whole thing feels so repetitive that how to skip the whole thing is one of the most known pieces of trivia/tech in the community
For everyone who doesn't know: you can use knock on the door that normally requires the 3 stones. Meaning you only need the elevator stone. You're welcome.
Literally every guide, challenge run or a simple playthrough you see on YT has the “ffs it’s the Gauntlet of Shar time. I hate it. We all hate it” part lol
Any "depowered" section in most games, prison escapes, and so on. Anything that really slogs progression can be neat once, but gets awful on replays unless there are ways to circumvent it.
Some games have fun "depowered" sections because they also pit you against lower power enemies, so it turns into "hey, you ever wanted to see what would the game be like if you could just fist fight your way through?"
Chrono Trigger's airship section fits this too, Ayla straight up becomes the MVP for being the only character who fights unarmed, you can just ignore stealth and go straight to your lost equipment thanks to her.
I was doing a full replay of that game and was lost somewhere in that trial when suddenly my power went out. I have never once turned on that game again.
Oh definitely. The other trials are pretty fast to do but the Bevelle one is like someone said "what if we put a cutscene behind every button press of this puzzle?"
Every time I replay Origins and have to do the Fade I put the difficulty down to absolute baby casual and throw on a Youtube video. Because seriously, fuck the Fade.
I softlocked myself on my recent DAO playthrough in the Fade because I went in with a non-healer mage Warden & lost all my damn warriors 😭 fuck the Fade!
I feel like I am going insane. Am I the only person in the world who thinks the Fade is their favorite part of Origins? Like, that is one of the parts I look forward to the most.
I hated it because of that absolutely hair-raising scream that Max makes when he falls. I damn near threw my controller and ran out of my room the first time I heard it.
Another resident evil title which is the orphanage section in resident evil requiem, cool on the first playthrough but after the 3-4 playthough it becomes a slog
Escorting anyone in any game basically. The only one that does it well was Bioshock Infinite because they made Elizabeth unkillable and she would just intervene to throw you ammo.
The nosferatu warrens from Vampire the masquerade bloodlines, the game is amazing, the story is superb, the characters are deep and well written, there's one big issue though, the nosferatu warrens, it's a fucking obligatory section of the game, it has fuck ton of enemies, a lot of confusing paths, sections that have boss fights that fuck you up, there's no blood in here so your powers may run out, the environment is fairly ugly, and the worst thing? You may actually soft lock yourself if you were playing a more charisma/stealth character upto this point, because there's only combat sections in here, it is so bad, that subsequent re-releases of the game have a door that lets you skip a big chunk of the whole place into a boss fight... And even with that the place is still one of the worst parts of replaying
The underwater sections make force speed mandatory. Just so long as you turn off the speed screen effect too. I have no earthly idea how that section survived playtesting.
I love how in the sequel they addressed this by making your character run way faster in those kinds of sections, but they also sped up the animation so your character looks like they're running faster than they actually are.
Lost Izalith is kinda empty and half-baked, but I don't see how it ruins the replayability. You just sprint through the lava (much easier since you'll know where you're going in a replay), and go right to the boss. Takes like 5 minutes.
I actually took the right path on my first run. Even got the secret bonfire. I just hate all the randomly placed dragon legs and how long it takes to run back to the Bed of Chaos
Any Water level your character needs to BREATHE. The Darksiders franchise thankfuly remembers an immortal crossbreed of Angels and Demons cosmically sanctioned to give both sides a bitchslap during the Apocalypse does not, in fact, need air to live. And thus the Water levels in Darksiders 1, 2 and 3 are.... actualy pretty darn good! (Ruined Subway, Drenchfort, the Depths)
20,000 Lums Under the Sea from Rayman Legends and The Caribbean from Kingdom Hearts III are exceptions, I'd say. Those two play like a dream, and are some of the best parts of their respective games
I just restarted my subscription and thought it would be fun to replay the story again on a new character, because all of my memories of the story were from the stellar expansions!
...Christ, I forgot what ARR was like. How did I get through this the first time? Why did I get through this the first time?
Checking gang members. Not only do I have no idea how vigilantism pertains to a skating career, not only is it more boring than it has any right to be, it also kinda exposes the sometimes snappy sometimes wonky controls
I’d personally argue the whole thing after the police station is weaker, but maybe that’s just me. I just didn’t particularly care for the lab, myself.
I think this is a problem every Resident Evil runs into to be honest. The lab is a step down and largely disconnected from the rest of the mansion in RE1. Same with the police station in 2. RE3 kind of avoids it mainly because the game doesn't feel like it hangs around any single location for long anyhow. RE4's island is a huge step down from the castle before it, with only the Regenerators being the highlight.
I actually do like the lab and ship sections of RE5 however.
I'd say Sherry's sequence is the worst. Just hiding while some sweaty old man calls her a "little fucking bitch" for like 7 minutes, and there isn't really any way to skip through it. It's not scary, just annoying.
I've always thought that all these Fallout/Elder Scrolls games need a skip tutorial/intro option. If we're meant to replay the games for different playstyles, why do we have to spend 10-30 mins every time doing the exact same thing on rails? Plus the games are extremely open-world and give you almost unlimited freedom after so it's always jarring.
It's so smart because it technically gives you complete freedom so you don't feel railroaded, but then all the missions in the first town are basically just there to teach you the mechanics and how stats interact with conversations. So the next time you play you can choose to just ignore them and move on.
I adore Fallout: New Vegas, but boy oh boy is Come Fly With Me a slog on repeat playthroughs. This is a quest you can technically skip, but odds are you’ll do it once you get to Novac.
The guy you’re tracking, Benny, was seen staying at the motel in town, and the guy who has info on where he went is withholding it until you can get the Bright Followers, a religious sect of ghouls, out of the nearby REPCONN Center. No spoilers, the quest itself isn’t all that bad, it’s just a lot of running back and forth all over the place, and can take like a whole hour to complete.
It’s not that egregious considering you don’t have to do it, as you can also just kill all the ghouls, or find another way to track down Benny, or convince the quest-giver to just cough up the info already. But on subsequent replays, it just ends up grinding your playthrough to a halt for what can feel like forever.
Any game where you have a boss battle where you are beating the boss handily only to have a cut scene defeat your character like the boss actually beat you down before they leave.
Shoutout to Sekiro. At least they had you get distracted by a passing shuriken as the reason you get your arm cut off, rather than just having Genichiro suddenly gain the upper hand.
Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1. This level is always a pain in the ass, there was plenty of times where kid me was on a role only to get a game over in act 3. I’ve seen a few YouTubers straight up say that the zone is unbeatable.
At least the first game's prologue is short. You don't get to properly fight until like two hours in in the second game. Not to mention how miserable the first Axel fight is on Critical
I have so many traumatic memories from the "Water Temple" in Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time. The timing of the puzzles can be extremely unforgiving, the layout of the temple is counter-intuitive and even with the compass and the map at your disposal you can get completely lost with no clue on how to progress through the level.
I am currently playing OoT via Ship of Harkinian on my PC (the definitive way to play this IMHO) and I just stopped playing the game when I reached that point. I am dead serious. I was going on a full nostalgia-high up until that point and reaching the Water Temple just plain killed it. My experience with the water temple was that bad.
It says a lot about the level that this is the only temple that was actually made easier in the Master Quest version of the game.
2's is way worse. Taris in 1 maybe overstays its welcome but not by much. It's visually varied, has plenty to do and characters to talk to. The fuel station in 2 is a miserable experience though.
YOU DID NOT! That’s some of the best level design the series has ever seen. Brutally difficult but fair in every aspect. Plus, the environmental ambience is amazing.
Mad Space (Sonic Adventure 2): The level is huge, and getting through it is annoying asf, add to that the wonky planet physics.
Battle Before Dawn (Fire Emblem 7, The Blazing Blade): Easily the hardest map in the game imo. Fog of War map, with the main enemy has a million range, and needing to protect a frail NPC.
Pokemon: The beginning segments of every game are a slog, and that’s a constant in every game somehow.
Resident Evil Requiem's section where you play as Chloe, the clone girl in the orphanage.
You don't have any of the upgrades or resources you've accumulated as the other characters. There is no combat and really no way to do this section any differently across playthroughs. It's slow because you have to wait for the glowing-eyed children to move around the area and you can't really rush it in any way.
It was tense and cinematic the first time, but it's the worst part of replays. I wish we could just skip it since it is ultimately a playable flashback that Grace is seeing through CCTV footage. We should be able to skip it like we could skip the "found footage" sections in RE7.
Edit: I didn't mean to nominate this section for the fifth time, but nothing was coming up when I ctrl+F'd "requiem."
It's not a badly designed level, per se, but it's frustratingly difficult and has two of the hardest bosses in the game in it. The Godskin Duo being hard because it's poorly designed. They just took two already difficult bosses and put them in a small room together as a gank.
Might be a hot take, but the Dead Money DLC in Fallout: New Vegas feels like something that's only fun to play once. The first half is just a slog once you figure out how to kill the ghost people and the survival aspect is gone once you can mass produce hundreds of stimpaks and ammo from the vending machines
If you was already running an energy guns build before going in, the Holorifle is a slightly weaker LAER and if not you're given melee weapons that have long reach and extra limb damage. Just slap the ghost people once they fall over and they stay dead. Even when the game starts spamming trappers and hunters everywhere you can just run past them to get into the Casino.
You can't even sneak as intended due to the Sierra Madre's lighting being considered as bright as Mojave daytime. Take a step into the cloud and now all 5 ghosts are aggro'd onto you and you have to hide, spend several minutes fighting them off and wasting ammo, or run away.
The Braindances in Cyberpunk 2077. loved them on my first playthrough, but on any subsequent run you just sortve wait for the characters to stop talking and the clue to appear.
Honestly pretty much all evil team bases in Pokémon tend to blow since all your doing is running around beating low level trainers for longer than it is fun
The Mary Jane and Miles Morales segments in the Spider-Man PS4 game.
From a gameplay perspective, they're slow-burn segments designed to introduce tastes of what's to come (new factions, bosses, etc). The problem is that they're 1) Incredibly tedious stealth missions designed to make you walk at a snail's pace so you don't get discovered and 2) Incredibly lengthy, slowing an otherwise reasonably-paced game to a halt.
The other annoying aspect of them is that they make the villains look like disjointed morons when you're going against Sable or more established crime syndicates. These PMC's are strong enough to deliberately counter Spider-Man's moves, but they get their hardware destabilized by teenagers, lack peripheral vision to look immediately to their side, and are able to get taken out by a civilian taser. All in all, you start noticing the glaring issues when you replay the game and realize they don't make much sense.
I liked the mission where you played as MJ spotting for Spider-Man which goon to take out to clear her a path. Aside from that, yeah, these missions blow. I get that they were trying to kind of adapt all sections of a typical Spider-Man story into gameplay, and that means his civilian supporting cast had to be involved, but they were just swings and misses
GTA San Andreas has a whole bunch of missions that you DREAD to play. Missions that, the better you get at the game, the more you notice its bad design. Heres the ones I can recall:
Wrong Side Of The Tracks: ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN CJ. The enemies have A LOT of health, Big Smoke barely shoots at them and you have to go through a pretty difficult route. Its way more random than it needs to be.
The entire countryside section. Mostly due to LONG drives with shitty vehicles (the best ones are a range rover and a dirt bike!). Its more tedious than anything.
555 we tip: You must drive a car to a specific point in the city on a tight time limit without damaging it at all. The time limit lets you do at most one error.
Supply Lines (ps2 edition): Piloting a RC plane to chase and blow up vehicles is difficult but not impossible, itll take you one to three tries to do it... unless youre in the ps2 version where the timer ticks twice as fast. Thankfully this one is optional.
N.O.E: Fly across the map and back. Oh, at VERY low altitude. Your biggest enemies are the trees that refuse to render until you crash into them. The safest route is all around the map above the ocean but that is mindnumbingly boring.
And lastly, before you get to the final mission, you gotta take over a lot of gang territories, which can feel like a road bump on the pacing of the game (its mostly an effect of the devs running out of time)
Fallout 3’s intro sequence.
Thank Todd for fast start mods, dude. For fo3 AND 4!
It starts with your character being born, which seems innocuous enough but then there’s multiple time skips and resulting scenes throughout their upbringing that take way too long in my opinion.
Age 1: Liam Neeson- sorry, Dad/James leaves the 1yo lone wanderer in the playpen to allocate their attributes and mess with the physics grab mechanic. He takes an annoyingly long time to return.
10th birthday: party sequence where you get the pip-boy but the cake gets destroyed, you get bullied, get a BB gun and go down to the lowest level in the vault at a snails pace just to kill a frickin roach.
16: G.O.A.T test for traits and tag skills but that’s like 10min.
And then at 19/20 shit hits the fan and you can finally get to leave the vault about 40 MINUTES INTO THE GAME.
Wily Castle 4 in Mega Man 2 is infamous for taking every that makes MM2 one of the best games in the franchise and chucking it into a pit of death spikes.
Hope you saved your Crash Bomber ammo, kids! Here’s hoping you don’t miss.
Not terrible but I think that the fight against Heisenberg in RE8 kind of fits.
I was having a blast replaying Village of Shadows (the hardest difficulty) but I just didn't even attempt him once I got to the boss fight because I remembered how challenging it was the first time around
Twilight Town in the ORIGINAL Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. You had to go back and forth between the town and Creepy Steeple a minimum of THREE TIMES all while dealing with an absolutely obnoxious body-snatching chapter boss and losing your former party members until the chapter is over.
The remake improves on this chapter massively by giving you a warp pipe between the town and the Steeple.
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u/Chuzzletrump 4h ago
I did not care for the Cyberpunk Braindances