I could mention Paladin's Quest.

The final boss is much harder than it should be. (Specifically, in a game with no mid-battle revives, it can kill a character in a single turn if you get unlucky, and if you try fighting the intended way, only one of your characters can do meaningful damage.) Furthermore, the final dungeon has no save spots in it. (If they had put one right at the top of the mountain, where there's someone who can heal you and fill all your bottles, it wouldn't be so bad.)

It doesn't help that there are a couple permanent missables that are rather vital to that fight.

Age of Wonders comes to mind. Loved most of the game, but by the last 1 or 2 levels your hero is a demigod that can pretty much finish the level on his own, which just feels cheap and ruined the immersion for me. Also, the 'end turn' wait started to become annoyingly long on my system at the time. But the rest of the game was pretty amazing. It's mostly the imbalanced power levels of the heroes that ruins it for me.

Fallout 2. But I hated finishing it only because I hated that it had to come to an end :P

First game that comes to mind is Ring of Red. It's a really nice strategy-RPG with mechs in an alt-history post-WW2 setting, so you get mechs that take design queues from freaking Panzer tanks, among other cool stuff. But as euphoric as the first few missions are, the content runs dry *long* before the game ends. Not only that, but most of the latter half of the game is a slog through snowy terrain with mostly the same enemies, same abilities, same mechs and same members, with only the occasional bosses and sometimes questionably translated dialogue to keep things from getting completely stale.

Then there's FInal Fantasy 13. I can pinpoint exactly where the game goes downhill - After Act 8. From the last boss of Act 9, the difficulty spikes immensely and that's actually the only thing that kept me going because the story had given up.

I easily not finish games (and thus, clog my HD) because of such things.

- I loved Trine, but the last level was annoying.

- RPGs entering a last "no way back beyond this point" chapter tend to discourage me (I don't like losing the freedom of freeroaming and secondaryquesting, so I tend to never cross that line). Especially as the story is kinda over at that point, like the big noisy boring end fights in action movies or tv series (all superhero movies should be left 40 minutes before the end titles, typically).

- Likewise, last missions in campaign-based tactical games tend to demotivate me the same way. All the other missions build up to something, unlock stuff, help the large scale strategy... the last mission (and its gain) will have no other outcome than end titles, and somehow it removes a dimension from them. So, I still haven't properly finished Xenonauts, for instance.

- Strategy games have weird endings too, that I sometimes avoid (you build your great empire and suddenly get interrupted by the victory condition you've accidentally reached), or that get tedious (you over-dominate the map, but still, you have to conquer these little patches of different colours in order to really "complete" it ?).

- Adventure games, sometimes, discourage me once I realise that I've seen all the locations. And freeroaming games too, once everything is unlocked.

There's a pattern. I guess I like the "exploration" part of games : exploring settings or gameplay mechanics (which get unlocked a bit in the same way as map area). Once I've seen it all, I lose interest fast.

Just as a general observation, I really prefer the older 3D GTAs over the newer ones. The more recent the game, the bigger the chance that it gets bogged down in extraneous filler material.

GTA 3 is just good, straightforward fun.

Vice City is where the problems start: While Vice City is very much superior to GTA 3 in pretty much every respect, they're starting to cram in stuff that strike me as mind-bogglingly bad design decisions: To progress, you'll have to buy real estate, but the game doesn't show you which buildings you can buy, The most bizarre design choice would have to be that you have to spend a certain amount of time in a strip club. Again, the game doesn't tell you that you have to do this, but you have to do it in order to unlock the endgame mission. It makes me wonder what Rockstar was trying to get at when they made the decision to include this "mission": Were they trying to find out how many of their teenage fanbase will spend more than 5 minutes masturbating to lo-poly tits.

San Andreas I gave up on about half-way through and never felt the need to return.I decided it was time to call it quits when I realised that my main motivation for continuing was to hopefully unlock a clothing store where I could buy something which didn't make me look like a fool.

GTA 4 is a complete mess and one of the most astonishingly bad console ports I ever played. If a company can't be bothered to make their 10-year-old game to work properly, I can't be bothered to play it.

Haven't played GTA 5, but from your description, it reads like I won't like it for the same reason I gave up on San Andreas: The filler becomes the game's main raison d'être.

Agree. GTA3 was really good, always flowed nicely, had a great feel also. Vice City I found was tied for best of the 3D's, mainly due to the style (80's Miami Vice!). Gotta say, I don't remember having to hang out in a strip club (been through the game several times, but last was years ago), and the point behind not showing the property is to make you explore, its really not difficult find them all. I personally hated the flying parts of the game.
GTA SA whilst technically a great engine, the story and the whole gansta nonsense really didn't appeal, but the feeling of being able to drive for miles up into redneck territory and things all changing was really something at the time.
GTA4 was an awful dreadful mess, easily the worse in the series, and one of the worse games of that era.
GTA5 was a big suprise however. After 4 it was expected to be dreadful and it wasn't. The level of detail is quite amazing, the interactions between the players - new feature - really worked. Story progressed nicely, and there are some real did that really just happen moments. The end was of course, predictable. And there didn't seem to be as much to do, maybe it was just spread out a lot more. Still one of the better ones.
So IMO (which is the only one which matters to me):
1) GTA3 + VC
2) GTA5
3) GTA SA

Breath of Fire II (SNES)

It's a nicely made JRPG but the random encounter rate is way too high. Having to fight monsters after every other step you take made it very frustrating and grindy.
I played through it but i paused for a few months and resorted to a guide from TOTAL! magazine to get to the end.

Playing BoF II was a bittersweet experience but at least it's one of the games i will never forget. :D

I kind of saw The Witcher 2 as a more Deus Ex style hub-area action game than a full-fledged open-world RPG. It has RPG elements of course, same as Deus Ex, but I think it's very different from Witcher 3 or something like Morrowind/Fallout.



Well, agree to disagree... my thoughts finishing 5 were that I liked 4 much more. I liked 4 a lot more than the average PC gamer at the time did, as I recall lots of forum debates about it. The performance wasn't great of course, everyone knows that, but I thought the port was fine otherwise. I liked how the game was more simple and focused compared to how over-the-top San Andreas was. I like the New York look more than the California look. I liked the Nico story more than the one in 5.

They're kind of the same game at their root, so it's mostly story stuff and annoying side-stuff that turned me off 5 halfway through.

That's not the only problem with that game. There is one part where you are forced to solo with a character who you might reasonably have not used up to that point; if his level is still low and you saved at that point, you could be in serious trouble.

Well, the original unpatched version can be beaten in under 2 *minutes*, so you still did far more than the minimum necessary.

Lion King. The simba cub levels were pretty amazing, but the adult simba levels were more hit and miss. Only the first adult simba level was ok for me, the rest were either annoyingly or frustratingly difficult. The lava level especially almost had me rage quitting the game.

I liked 4 better than 5 as well, for pretty much the same reasons. San Andreas and V can feel all over the place, random weird missions and bonus activities I really didn't give a shit about. I also wasn't a big fan of the multiple character system in V, or of the characters in general.

Did you ever play the standalone expansions for GTA 4? I liked them just as much as base game.

I agree, I thought they were WAAAY better than the base game but they still suffered the stupid freezes I described earlier.

One thing I didn't like about all of them, and this took me a while to figure out, is that there was no sense of achievement. With 3, VC, and SA you have a goal; you start out with nothing, and become something. In 4 and the expansions, you end up basically in the exact same place you start out. It had me wondering what the hell the whole point was.

I can understand that, I usually hate movies where the main characters end up in the same place they started, making the whole plot seem pointless. I think I just like the characters in 4 and the DLC so I can overlook that.

I remember the freezing thing, I think it was related to specific hardware and how much video memory you had. I had an iMac (I was in a weird Apple phase due to peer pressure) when the game first game out and it did that all the time. I never had that problem again on any other PC thankfully.

Divinity 2 Developers Cut, started off great but then it ended in level after level using the same few tired assets, same design, same enemies, like they were just cutting and pasting levels to pad out a game they basically ran out of funds to finish. the last dragon flight gauntlet was beyond ridiculous and off putting, you went thru the entire game armoring up yourself and dragon skills only to have them sidelined for a forced event that had no bearing on the how you played the rest of the game