Don't remind me, one of the worst bosses, I had to grind an excessive amount of levels to get through this phase, with the help of some luck. The librarian dragon (had to look its name up: Professaurus), at the start of the second half was another tough nut to crack. Pretty much every boss that gave you a party member back was horrible. :P

Going to be honest, the events just before the second half broke me, had to stop playing the game for a week.

Technically, I wasn't near the end of Heroes of Might and Magic III when I gave up the first time I attempted the campaign. And I did go back some years later, which was also partly how I stumbled upon GOG.

It sort of has a four-part campaign, each with a character to develop while progressing through the story. After going through all of them, there is supposed to be more to the story, and the development of each character plays part in that.

The start screen allows starting any part of the campaign and doing them in any order, as the screen is essentilally split into quadrants for choosing one or the other. It is possible to save progress during each part, so I chose one, completed it, saved my progress and came back later.

Then a second one, saved, came back later. Third, same thing. And the fourth.

Nothing had changed on the start screen.

I read the manual again, and tried to figure out how to proceed further. Yes, the game is that old, that it actually had a manual (and definitely not renamed as an optional "hintbook" bonus item at an exorbitant additional cost like they do nowadays). Turns out I had inadvertently created four beginnings, because I didn't LOAD my saved progress before choosing another part of the campaign.

It just wasn't obvious to me, because I had remembered from the manual the progress would be combined. And maybe because I was used to Nintendo consoles where sometimes the progress affected the whole cartridge (f.e. multiplayer bonuses for StarFox 64), or else it clearly listed all prior saves along with a "New game" selection.

I sulked because I wanted the familiarity of my progress through all four parts I had completed, I wanted to continue with the story in mind I had pieced together from all of that. I toyed with the idea of picking one of the four and continuing, maybe for each one. But I knew I would forget where I left off at with the others, and I knew I would get the different results confused along the way. So, instead, I switched to the plethora of individual maps and eventually stopped sulking about it as much.

About ten years later I discover GOG and found it again. I recalled how much I liked it and that I never finished the campaign. So I bought it, loved the nostalgia, played some individual maps to refresh myself with the gameplay, then dived into the campaign to finally complete it.

But...

I did the exact same thing again. Inadvertantly created four beginnings because I didn't think to load my saved progress. Then I remembered that had happened to me the first time, too. And I sulked again, but in a manner fitting with it being the exact same thing that had happened a decade eariler. And then I switched to the individual maps to relieve my sulking, again.

I have yet to try the campaign again, but I am pretty sure I will remember next time, when priorities and opportunity work out again. Really, I remind myself every time I think about the game, and that happens about every time I load GOG in the web browser because it is usually in the top ten games (was #1 forever, until maybe last year?). Just gotta set up a system that can support the installation. Someday again.

I play mostly RPGs, but the one thing that invariably invokes feelings of anger and loathing is mini games that have no point. I don't want to race chocobos, play Triple Triad, engage in sporting activities, participate in cooking competitions, go fishing, or do any optional battle arenas. If you're going to give me a plot where the world is doomed, only I can stop this from happening and need to rush over there in the next two hours before another city is wiped out, we're off to save the world. Right now. Don't make out like there's any sense of urgency, then bog me down with useless non-RPG time sinks or I'm just not going to want to play the game.


The two worst offenders that had me abandoning them would be Final Fantasy VIII (FF8) and Final Fantasy X-2 (FFX-2).

With Final Fantasy VIII, I happened to be in the room while someone else was playing it that was a bit further along than me. I don't remember if it came before or after Squall and Edea are trying to kill each other, but the short of it is that you have the option to drop everything to play Triple Triad. Failing to do so would mean not getting some rare card. No. No. No. If I just tried to off me, the last thing I want to do is play a card game with them.

FFX-2 takes the mini games to the extreme that playing them or not playing them impacts what ending you will get. At least in FFX, I could decide to not dodge all those lightning bolts with the only impact being not getting some weapon upgrade that was completely unnecessary. How urgent can whatever the plot of FFX-2 be if I'm going to be wasting the next five hours getting better at some otherwise irrelevant diversion because the game will punish me if I don't. How about I just don't play the game.


Now there are times when I don't mind mini games, such as the carnival when playing Chrono Trigger because what else are you going to do at a carnival besides play a bunch of silly mini games? It also occurs very early into the game when things seem to be just okay. It's not like you have only ten minutes to save the world, but let's waste time spending the next nine minutes at some carnival when we have better things to do because the game is really insistent about this carnival.

Love Rimworld, but I must admit, I do lose enthusiasm after creating an effective kill box and spamming mortars, then the enemy starts spawning inside your base!

That is one thing I... am not sure I like in the Homeworld games, how what you have built in the previous mission(s) can make and break the next mission. I kinda wish it was like a "normal" RTS where each mission is self-contained, with its own set of units, resources etc.

However, I think that is why I always kept one savegame from the previous mission, just before teleporting out of the mission. That way I could go back to the end of the previous mission, retire and build ships if I feel I need a different set for the next mission's start, and then try again. No need to replay the whole previous mission.

BTW was it the original or the remastered version you were playing (both come with the GOG version)? I recall that mission and some others were somehow much harder in the original game. I recall that asteroid mission, and an earlier one where you have to navigate the mothership through an asteroid field and destroy lots of asteroids coming towards it... both were considerably easier in the remastered version.

I quit for a long time around the fourth or fifth chapters (out of six) because sometimes the whole game just felt a bit meh. But I persisted, and actually enjoyed some latter parts of it (a few big battles) quite a bit.

Oh this was the original, way back in the day :) Not too long ago I finished the remastered version, and got past that level very easily. I think it was an issue the first time round because I only managed to advance to that level with a smattering of ships.

If memory serves, in almost all levels you have enough time to build up a sizable fleet before engaging the enemy in earnest, so being able to start with a large fleet and some resources doesn't end up having too much of an effect on the difficulty, save I suppose from having to rebuild it the fleet as many times if it gets annihilated.

In IWD2 upon rechecking it seems I didn't manage to get that far - only up to chapter 4 it seems. By contrast I didn't have much issue getting through BG1, Planescape Torment and IWD1.

Took screenshots of my character at the end and seemed really easy to me (those four deaths were stupid). Bad game from where I'm standing, but not a genre I care for.

I agree with this sentiment, but more for gameplay reasons than plot reasons. If I sit down to play an RPG, I want to play an RPG, not some other type of game. For me, this was one of the multiple major issues with Final Fantasy 7.

Incidentally, I got up to disk 3 of FF7 (which, from what I've read, only has one dungeon) before I quit, mainly because of the fact that it felt the game had no content (other than 2 non-repeatable optional boss battles) that could possibly challenge me, and the fact that the game never opened up the way FF6 did. (In Final Fantasy 6, once you get the second airship, the game opens up and becomes non-linear, and the story and cutscenes finally take a backseat to the gameplay; in FF7 this never happens.) The fact that the PC version had its issues on the computer I was using to play the game didn't help.

The game being too easy is one reason I've quit other games before the endgame, incidentally.

Final Fantsay Legent 2 and Paladin's Quest are two games that I would quit near the end because of a difficult late-game boss, but I kept replaying those games over the years and eventually beat them. FFL2 isn't too back once you understand the game well enough, but Paladin's Quest's final boss is just ridiculous (can kill a party member in one turn in a game with no in-battle resurrection, and if you use the intended strategy, only one character can do meaningful damage to the final boss; it also doesn't help that the female lead doesn't get anything to make up for the power the main protagonist gets endgame, and that also didn't sit well with me).

I quit Stranger of Sword City Revisited at the final dungeon for a different reason; the game would sometimes crash on the computer I was using to play the game, and the game only lets you save in town. I ended up then switching to Saviors of Sapphire Wings, which had the same crashing issue but at least also has save anywhere, and then finishing that. With that said, disabling meltdown/spectre mitigations did seem to fix the crashing issue, so I might give SoSCR another go at some point; whether that means finishing the old save or starting anew has yet to be decided.

Underrail. Great game that I enjoyed playing... until reaching the last area. The final boss was right around the corner. After exploring too many look-alike corridors, I was feeling some lassitude and decided that I had enough. I ended up watching a Youtube video about the final fight.

According to my calculation around 5% of games I've played the last boss has defeated me, and are classified as unfinished. Which is frustrating I agree.

Oh that's the other half of my rant against pointless mini games in RPGs that I had to cut short as I had to leave to take my cat to the vet, but now that we're back home....

The other issue that I have with non-RPG mini games in RPGs is really also the gameplay aspect of it. If someone buys an RPG, they obviously want to play an RPG. Nobody buys an RPG because they're looking forward to spending 20+ hours getting good at any non-RPG mini game just to get the Magic Doohickey or as in the case of FFX-2, the one true ending. This is just a time sink to extent the game to be artificially longer than it actually is.

More game developers need to get the memo stating that you don't make fans with surprise mini games.

I seriously would rather find myself in whatever part of hell where the only thing you have to pass the time is Wizardry 4 than play any random nonsensical non-RPG mini game in an RPG. For anyone reading this not familiar with Wizardry 4, this comment here summarizes the brutality that is that game:
https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/65y81n/the_return_of_werdna/dgeouvq?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3


Oh and Final Fantasy 7 reminds me of the other thing that has caused me to abandon games: SPOILERS!

Such as when I bought Final Fantasy 7 back in 1997, only to have someone spoil the Sephiroth and Aerith play date scene that occurs around the half-way point on me within two weeks of its release. My party was pretty much Cloud (because hero guy), Aerith (because she heals), Cait Sith (because cat, best theme song and one of the few legit interesting characters) and someone completely forgettable. Most of the characters were just not that interesting, and I didn't have any motivation to use them beyond what was actually required.

It's bad enough when you're blind-sighted by this type of situation but when you know you're walking into it, the motivation to continue knowing that you'll have to spend time playing leveling catch up with an uninteresting party member.

FF6 was a much better game. It wasn't just the world opening up such that you could go wherever you want but that the characters themselves were interesting in their own right. I didn't need a hint guide to tell me to wait for Shadow because what would happen if I didn't? Spending time getting Gau's attacks also didn't feel like a waste of time either. Yes there was some sense of urgency, but it also felt a bit leisurely where it didn't feel like I was racing against Kefka. It wasn't like FF10 where it felt like you need to hurry up and get to the next town because Sin might show up in the next hour or two to destroy the place, but let's not do that and instead drop everything to go play an entire season of Blitzball even though the world cannot be saved by becoming the master of Blitzball.

Happened to me plenty of times. Some I can remember:

Demon Stone - the final boss is ridiculous. Only one of your three characters can damage him at all, the other two being entirely useless, which goes against how the whole game worked up to this point, and there is no checkpoint before the fight. When you die, you have to replay the whole damn level from the beginning. I have no idea what crazy person thought this would even resemble fun. I just couldn't be arsed anymore.

Dragonshard - the mostly forgotten D&D RTS. It was actually somewhat fun, but the last mission (at least I think it was the last one) had a time limit. I hate timed missions, in any kind of game. It just makes me feel stressed and saps all the joy out of the game. It's even worse in an RTS, a genre I'm not that great at to begin with. I lost once, and didn't even bother again.

Prehistorik 2 - I love this game to death, one of my childhood favorites, and I spent god know's how many hours on it. But on the higher difficulty setting it has an additional final (or post-final) castle level which is just insane. I think even by the standards of old school platformers it would rank high up as cruel and unusual punishment. Couldn't beat it. Though I'm not sure if you could call it "abandoning" a game, as even thought I gave up on that level, I still played the rest of the game numerous times.

Legend of Grimrock 2 - this is a curious case, I'm not sure if it counts. The game is about your team trying to get off an island, right? So eventually you fight what seems to be the final boss and you do get a way off the island, and you even get a short outro if you take it... but you're also given the option to keep playing, to explore the rest of the island, which was closed off untill now, and face the real final boss. But I took that way off and was happy to let the game end there and then. For one thing, while I enjoyed the game greatly, even getting to that ending took quite some time and I just felt like moving on. And for another... playing on didn't make much sense. The whole point was to get away from the island. The characters would have exactly zero reason to stay in that deadly place and face god knows what to fight some final abomination, which could just as well be left there to rot.

I would argue that FF5 is a much better game than FF6:
* The main customization system is introduced much sooner, aftter the first boss instead of midway through the linear portion of the game.
* You can't just teach everyone all spells and have a party of all master-of-everythings; there's a cost to equipping magic, just like any other ability (and there's multiple different types of magic, each a separate ability).
* The game has a better difficulty curve, managing to remain fairly challenging in a way that FF6 does not. (FF6 is the sort of game that's easy enough for me to abandon due to low difficulty.)
* FF5 has tons of interesting strategic options that were either neutered (Blue Magic (why does the spell that halves level fail on instant-death immune enemies in FF6?)) or removed entirely (Drink, Mix, and Sing for starters)? Yet, they kept Throw, which is not nearly as interesting as FF5's Mix.

About the only things missing in FF5's ability list are a free reliable party heal (which even FF1 had) and attacks that cost health or defense (like FF4's Dark Wave, or FF3 (3D Remake)'s Advance and Souleater; on the other hand, FF5 has useful Transfusion (kill caster to restore all HP/MP to the target). FF6's ability list, by contrast, is rather lacking. FF5's endgame isn't as nonlinear as FF6's, but it is still less linear than FF7's, with a quest to unlock the ultimate weapons (with spells along the way) in addition to the sort of sidequests that have been in the series since FF3.

Holy crap... Reading that, all I can think is why would anyone want to put themselves though something like that...

And to answer the original question (though I'm sure I said so before, so I wonder whether this wasn't asked before on here too), Final Fantasy 8 was the game I know I abandoned close to the end, after reaching Ultimecia's Castle and ending up with no skills. Tried a lot of times, but there was absolutely no way to beat that first boss with just normal attacks and I didn't want to go back and grind, so eventually just watched the rest on YT.

One I just managed to avoid giving up on at the end was Diablo 2: LoD. Hated the game overall, for a number of reasons, but pushed through, yet the final boss... Damn, getting a hit in meant dying, no way to survive once I engaged, so I'd manage a couple of hits, respawn, recover gear and companion, go back and repeat, time and time and time and time again. Just managed to finish before I ran out of gold for the recoveries.

But if campaigns also count, had to give up before completing the Undead one on Warcraft 3, again tried and tried and tried and tried but never managed to survive long enough. Was wiped with less than 30 seconds left at least once, less than a minute a few more times, but there was just no way.

Can't really think of reasons that might make me willingly give up on a game close to the end other than impossible difficulty (there could be technical reasons of course, but hence the "willingly" part). I mean, if I got that far...

Later edit: Oh, going through the list, seems like I also gave up on Nox when I was close to the end. Might have been a technical issue though, considering the, er, version I had played, so not sure whether I couldn't figure something out or it just couldn't be done.