These are probably two of the most beloved games, but I just could not get into either of them.


Final Fantasy 7 -- The characters were not all that interesting, and Cloud has less personality a cardboard cutout. Other games have done the silent protagonist thing a lot better. The sprites for Chrono in Chrono Trigger include him laughing, for example. In Persona 3 and Persona 4, intermissions will grind to a half waiting for the player to select a dialogue choice. Most of these choices only affect how the other characters respond to you, but it gives the main character a semblance of having some personality. There's also Final Fantasy 6, which had a huge cast of playable characters, yet the game managed to give them all time for you to know who they are.


To The Moon -- It's not a game at all. I wouldn't even call it a visual novel. You have a bunch of RPG-style intermissions of the sort that you might encounter in Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 4, or Final Fantasy 6 and virtually nothing that feels like gameplay. Oh there's that weird sphere thing between intermission sequences, but it really feels like it was tossed in after the fact so that the developers would have any excuse to call this a game. It really isn't.

Fair enough - I kind of treated it as a different game (i.e. pretended it wasn't a Max Payne). I totally agree that it was a bit jarring dropping the Noire theme.

Hitman, I like stealth games but the hitman series never clicked for me (tried blood money and the reboot)

Dark Souls III: encountering a tedious boss fight 5' into the game killed all my excitement to understand what the Dark Souls fuzz was all about. Watching a few videos afterwards confirmed my choice to uninstall the game for good. I don't get what is the point to all that madness when the story doesn't go anywhere :S

Dragon Age: Origins: I found the premise of its plot to be extremely cookie-cutter and uninspired, and I honestly couldn't see the point of investing so many hours into such journey.

Most contemporary JRPGs: I used to like them back in the day but as of late I find them grindy, purposeless, and sometimes really dumb (they even managed to screw up the remake of FFVII!).

I wonder, given your hard stance against having your save deleted, do you play roguelikes?

Recently

Graven: I know it's early access and I wanted to love it but the game play just isn't fun and combat is terrible especially hitting the zombies with the staff.

Telling Lies: I liked the actors but the 'game' just wasn't for me, would of rather just watched it as a movie.

Other

As someone else pointed out Tyranny, P.O.E., Pathfinder Just couldn't get into them and didn't like the writing and presentation. Back in the day someone on Youtube did a really in depth review of why POE feels empty because of lack of real consequences for your actions, they could explain it better then I ever could. Having said that I'm having a blast in Black Geyser.

Counter-Strike - Extremely popular among Norwegian youth when it came out, but I never got into it. Just not my type of shooter I guess. Too much thinking and planning. And my reaction time is crap. I tried Global Offensive as well (bought for 2 Euros in a sale), but I just couldn't get into it at all. Everyone you play against is a much better player, and the map knowledge required is something I'm not prepared to learn.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Probably the most popular game of the Nintendo Switch, and it was also a very big motivation for me buying one (I wasn't going to get a Wii U for this). I've played several older Zeldas, but I just couldn't get into this one. I gave it a honest attempt (between 30 and 40 hours of playtime), but I couldn't enjoy it. It felt like the weapons broke after only a few hits, and I found the puzzles difficult (not the game's fault, I just generally suck at puzzles). I did like the four (?) main dungeons, but not so much the other stuff. I never finished it, and ended up selling it.

Cyberpunk 2077 - I played this on Xbox Series X at launch, and didn't have any performance issues. I just found it boring. The shooting wasn't all that solid, and the story didn't interest me much. Worst of all were the braindance sequences. I sold my copy after a few days and got 80% of my money back. I did enjoy every Witcher game, but this one was just not for me.

the Hitman series.

I've played many of them for a few hours each, but where I love games like Splinter Cell, the Hitman games leave me cold. I tend to prefer scenarios where I am accomplishing a task with a higher ethical or moral imperative. Being a straight killer with a dubious controller doesn't have the moral compass I need to enjoy the experience.

Mafia 3

I finished the game -- and have nothing against playing as Black characters -- but felt by game's end like Clay was more serial murderer than hero and all of the characters I enjoyed from 2 were either absent or intentionally undermined. Again, if the setting and characters were the same, but instead of a mafia story it was about a Vietnam Vet returning to avenge the death of his sister at the hands of a serial killer (much like True Detective meets one of the Mafia 3 dlc), I could have potentially dug it.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Sluggish controls, sluggish story, poor mission creation (many fail states that aren't obvious... especially if you want to play minus most of the HUD), too much simulation, and an constant fight with the story progression if you want to play with a moral compass. And Westerns are one of my favorite genres.

Call of Duty WWII

Some great mechanics with poor map design and gameplay (SP). Love military and WWII games, but this...

Bard's Tale 4

Feel like I need to go back to school to learn the mechanics.

The list would go on-and-on, but that seems like enough for now

Rogue Legacy handles this issue quite well, let's you replay the same map but with a different character each time.

Too bad that the game falls apart after enough New Game +, as:
* You don't have free choice over which class to play.
* Not all classes are viable after a certain point, so you essentially need to throw away characters.
* (Also, there's no use for money at this point, so why can't you pay money to start with your preferred class?)

Incidentally, Romancing SaGa 2 did this generational thing before, but it had free save/load (though it didn't have procedural generation, and isn't a particularly accessible game for other reasons).

There is a respawn mod for Noita, but it may be buggy. But of course, the game was ultimatively designed for roguelike.

But it's curious, though, how some people see permadeath as a superior feature, whereas others see it as an absolute no-go. It's the same with horror movies or cringe scenes; people either love it or hate it.

Would you go so far as to say it doesn't even reach the level of Final Fantasy 9's Active Time Events?

Oh, actually I couldn't get into Mafia 1 & 2 (never played 3). Mafia annoyed me with its time-sensitive taxi driving missions in the beginning and a terrible street map (I really hope it's not designed after an actual city). Mafia 2 had odd tonal inconsistencies from "hey, this guy isn't that bad, he just means to look out for his family" to "haha, we just shot a bunch of policemen dead, that was really fun" in no time. It's worse than young Lara Croft in the TR reboot. XD But the reason I dropped it is because after already being annoyed by another time-sensitive driving mission, I really hated to play hide-and-seek with the cops while being on foot after a robbery (and no manual saving either - cops see you, start from the beginning).

I have not played Final Fantasy 9 at all, so I'm not familiar with the Active Time Events, so I will let you judge for yourself. Here's a video that should start at one of the actual gameplay sequences in To The Moon.

https://youtu.be/GUf7hTVLumw?t=1778

The objective is to walk around the screen and just click on random stuff. I theoretically played the iOS version, which meant just tapping all over the screen at these points.

This video is for the PC version, where the player is clicking on stuff with the mouse cursor. I suspect that this isn't their first time through as they seem to know where to click, but there's no commentary. There is no logic to what produces one of the memory orb things you need to collect so if it's your first time through, you really are just clicking/tapping around all over the place on everything.

After this, there will be another long intermission, followed by another sequence of walking around and clicking on random stuff. This is how the entire non-game goes.