We all have games we love, and it is my belief that there is no game that doesn’t have flaws. Hence, I find it interesting to look at the flaws of my favorites, if just to keep things a bit in perspective. I’ll start out too, with Heroes of Might and Magic 3:

The campaigns have several flaws. For one, they are more than a little too hard for my tastes. One would think they’d be good for learning how to play, but no. Other than that, the story isn’t too engaging. You don’t get a good feel for the characters or setting (The expansions did help somewhat, but still.). Finally, there are the cut scenes. They are ugly, even for the time. They look so very dated, and are most often just very short loops. I actually think the cut scenes of HOMM2 look nicer, they know what they can show, and what they can’t.

The creature animations often don’t have enough frames to actually look smooth at normal speed, only starting to look okay at fast. Some also look a bit stiff, like the walking animation of the gorgon.

Like I said, I really adore Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but that doesn’t mean t’s perfect. I’d love to hear others show their favorites some tough love. And remember, it really has to be a game you thoroughly like, and not just an excuse to pick on something you don’t.

Final Fantasy 5.

* There are some unskippable cutscenes, mostly near the beginning and around the end of the second world. It's not as bad as later games in the series.

* There are permanent missables, including some summons and bard songs. (Fortunately, no blue magic spells are permanently missable.)

* The Samurai's ability to throw money is too powerful for most of the game. Similarly, Shurikens (for the Ninja) are too expensive. When throwing money is a better option than using the money to buy shurikens, you know there's something wrong. (Fortunately, the !Throw command can be used to throw scrolls, which are actually useful.)

* There are a few scenes where you need to wait until something happens (like when you are thrown in jail, for example).

* There's one item that is only obtainable as a rare drop from a boss that you can't re-fight.

* There's one chest in the final area of the game with a trap that might be funny to see, but I'm not sure forcing a player to reload from a save (and this chest isn't near a save point) just because she opened the wrong chest is a good idea.

* There's one !Mix which can berserk an enemy regardless of immunities. (It's nice that status ailments can work on bosses in the game, but I think this goes too far.)

* There are a few bugs (fixed in the GBA version) that can hinder legitimate strategies. One involves using !Mix and !Dualcast in the same battle (I have, on two separate occasions, fully healed the last part of the final boss because of this bug); another involves having everybody !Hide in a fight you can't run from. Using !Hide or !Jump against enemies that can use attacks like Zombie Powder isn't a good idea because it can crash the game.

* There's one particular fight that could be time-consuming or even be a softlock with the wrong set-up. Basically, after a boss fight and the following cutscene, one of your characters has to fight a boss solo. In this battle, you do not die on reaching 0 HP (there are ways you could die anyway, and the game continues if you do, but that won't happen as the result of the boss's actions), but you *do* need to inflect a certain amount of damage to the boss for the game to continue (or find a clever way of killing yourself). If the character is a White Mage (for example) without a good source of damage, the fight will take a while. If the character is equipped with a Staff of Healing and you (not thinking) cast Berserk, then the battle can't end, so the game is effectively soft-locked.

DIABLO II

Fuc█ing awesome!

Albion

- The story is generally great, but it does have some strange elements...at some point you get a lot of dialogues with really strange mumbojumbo that is probably supposed to be philosophical, but seemed rather pretentious to me. Also somewhat technophobic.

- Graphics of the 3D dungeons: They were pretty ugly even at the time of release...the game has such gorgeous 2D environments, maybe they should have done without the 3D.

- Limited influence on building your characters: you can only increase 3 or 4 skills, whereas stat attributes are static and can only be increased on certain special occasions...if you want an RPG where you can customize your character, this isn't the game for you.

- Bugs: It has some bugs that, as far as I know, were never fixed...some magic spells simply don't work.

Can't think of that much more...it's a really great game, one of my absolute favorites, wish they would still make games like that.

The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt

- This game has so many "come back later" places, or things that look interesting to investigate, places where you find plants and stuff... why can't I place my own map markers with notes? Hell, I could do that in Ultima Underworld in 1992.

- Why isn't there a key to pause cut scenes? Don't get me wrong - the cut scenes are perfectly pauseable already - just Alt-Tab out of the game and they stop, and continue playing as soon as you switch back. If it works that perfectly already - why not include a key-binding for it?

Great idea for a thread!

Uhm, let's see here:

Half-life : The Xen world isn't fun
Unreal : Apart from the Flak cannon, Sniper Rifle and ASMD, the guns don't have enough oomph
Tomb Raider 3 : The area 51 levels suck
Dwarf Fortress : The game doesn't seem very well optimized, and it has a horrid interface.
Caesar 3 : The education and entertainment buildings don't have enough city wide coverage & workers
Simcity 3000 : Something's fucky with the neighbor deals
Bio Menace : 3 or 4 painfully boring levels
XCom, UFO Defense : Mind control is too powerful
Stronghold : Not enough levels (or any really) where you can relax a bit and build a big and strong castle to fend off a major attack
Neverwinter Nights : The first act is boring
Empire Earth : The AI cheats to an insane degree in skirmish.
Outcast : The enemy soldiers are almost no threat to you.

A few games I can't think of a single critique:
Warcraft 3; Blade Runner; Commandos 2; Disciples 2

Yeah, it has some gaping problems and it has been outdone and improved upon over and over since it's release, but I think it says loads that there is an entire sub-genre of games called "Diablo Clones". :P
I'm playing one now called Titan Quest.

Interesting how different perceptions can be...I actually kind of liked Xen in Half-Life. It wasn't as fun as what had gone on before, but the really weird, alien setting was actually quite interesting.
Commandos 2 imo has far too many useless skills, some levels are tediously huge, but not very challenging, game is too easy on the whole...some things just don't make sense (e.g. enemy soldiers can spot a cigarette pack from a huge distance away - so you can lure them to you - but they won't see a corpse at the same distance???). Also never understood why you get rewarded in mission ratings for not killing enemy soldiers, but just knocking them out.
Concerning Outcast, I don't remember the enemies as that easy, but it's been a long time since I've played it.

Morrowind - Cliff Racers.
Lords of Shoe-lee-mar : Food........adds nothing, becomes a pita, at least you don't stop to pee.
Gnomoria - Slow down, crap loads of it......seems it's dead too, still on version 1.0, stuck a fork in it and moved on...Booo Hissssss.... i'd like something akin to it :(

NO!
I love the game too much.
I wouldn't forgive myself.
I can say plenty of bad stuff of the sequels, made by a different game studio. =)

A small army of skeletons can make a game into a matter of drinking coffee and keeping an eye on your HP, rather than a true interactive experience.

The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker

☙ As colorful as this game is, the combat in this game is incredibly easy. Not only are you given pretty obvious counterattack cues, but most monsters can be solved with easy button presses.

🚅 While this was partly solved in the HD release, navigating the ocean can be a bit of a pain, especially seeing as several of the locations you could potentially warp to aren't particularly useful waypoints, with one literally being a dead end, and many of them are redundant, being within a single tile of each other.

• The first "dungeon" of this game is utter trash. Not only does it continue to entertain the designer's stealth fetish, (in a series not designed for stealth), but what's even less fun is that the hero is disarmed, meaning that while you're still getting used to the combat, the game tells you, "Forget about that!". Thankfully, your weapon can be recovered quickly if you know what you're doing, but this shouldn't have been done in the first place.

‣ Your talking boat can be a bit garrulous when, "Go to X and do Y" would suffice.

◘ Early on, the game gives you a magic one way communication device. This is quickly forgotten about.

Here's another one: Final Fantasy Legend (known in Japan as SaGa 1):

* The RNG is horrible; as in, it is not random. If you load your save, fight a boss, and lose because you were unlucky, and then reload your save, fighting the boss the exact same way, the fight will go exactly the same. (This has other consequences, like the fact that nukes always do exactly 594 damage unless you somehow use more than one (and you only get one).) If you look at a speedrun of this game, you will notice the player doing strange things to manipulate this non-random RNG (like failing to run multiple times from an easy fight, saving the next successful run for a difficult fight).

* There are 3 races, Humans, Mutants (Espers in JP), and Monsters. Humans are the only race whose growth can be easily controlled; Monsters change form by eating meat in a way that isn't obvious (and can sometimes make the monster much weaker), while Espers may get random stat gains and skills after each battle (but see note above about the RNG).

* When an Esper loses a skill to gain another one, there is no message, and no way to refuse the skill. Hence, using an Esper involves a lot of saving and reloading (but fortunately, saving is instant and reloading is very quick).

* Only one save file per cartridge.

* The battle system code is filled with bugs, which cause things to behave in counter-intuitive ways. For example, being blind increases your accuracy with (and evasion of) the most basic attack type (STR based attacks with no special effects). Agile characters take more damage from multi-hit attacks (unless the attacks are dodged, of course). The SAW works only if attacker STR < target DEF, so at 100 STR, there are only two enemies that can be affected, one which isn't meant to be killed, and the other of which is the final boss. MELT and DRINK do more damage to targets with higher MANA.

* Late game, you get a lot of neat treasure, but there isn't enough inventory space. At least you eventually get a way to repair items (though single use items like the Glass Sword (JP, the US version gave this weapon 50 uses by mistake) and the nuclear bomb can't be re-used this way).

* It is possible to save yourself into a corner, where the only way out is to defeat a boss (and, as mentioned above, the poor RNG makes getting lucky not an option).

Anyway, I could do Final Fantasy 2 and SaGa 2 as well, as well as SaGa Frontier; those games are filled with very obvious flaws, but I still enjoy them.

Dark Souls (xbox 360 version), because the low frame rate on some places.

So many lovely games mentioned.
Blade Runner is a hard one, as it does what it sets out to really well, which is being an interactive movie. At times it only barely feels like a game though, as it feels like the player has very little input, though that can be deceiving.

Another problem is just how grainy it is. I know it’s from 1997, so one won’t exactly expect HD graphics, but between the graininess and the dark visuals, it’s sometimes very hard to see what I actually happening/supposed to be interactive.

As for Warcraft 3, it’s been so long since I’ve played it that it is indeed hard to critique (That I played with cheat codes as a kid doesn’t help). My physical release has a problem though, in that the DVD cases are made in such a way that the discs are almost impossible to get off the peg. Very odd.

As for Diablo 2 and not adding something. Needing ammo for the bow and crossbow just makes using them needlessly tedious.

But it’s not like Diablo 1 didn’t have its flaws too. It’s my favorite of the 3 games in the series, and yet, it might be the most flawed too.

There are some things that feel out of place, like the Black Death Zombies permanently removing hitpoints.

Another problem is the weak multiplayer, which has almost none of the quests present in the single player, and the ones that do show up are oddly neutered. On the other hand, you don’t get actual difficulties in single player, so it seems the true Diablo 1 experience is found somewhere in an impossible combination of single and multiplayer aspects (Well, impossible unless you get Hellfire. That has its own problems though, namely having to use Hellfire.)

Do keep the critiques coming, I find it really helps me keep my perspective to actually look at the flaws of my favorites, and not put them on an unreachable pedestal.