QTEs. I utterly loath them. I also dislike the "quickly bash a key to fill a bar"

Did you finish the story mode? It's not quite as long as one would think. On my first playthrough, I suffered a little frustration with the odd death, and felt a little boredom creeping in, but for some reason, after giving it a little rest, I forced myself to try again. I set myself the goal: finish the story mode and then you can uninstall it.
The special areas you encounter break up the tedium of generated areas, and by the time Scout made it out to sea, I found myself hooked. I only struck boredom reaching River God status, and now my only issue is that the crafting & animal pool wasn't a bit more diverse. I swore I'd given it up...but I'm yet to uninstall it...

No, I just played for, like, 2 hours. I didn't hate it, it's not one of the games I'd avoid out of principle, and I haven't written it off completely, I might actually get back to it one day if I'm in the mood. I think the main problem is that I'm spoilt for choice with all these hundred of games in my library, so if something doesn't grip me right from the start or makes me feel like I'm wasting time, I just move on to the next one ... But thanks for the encouragement to give it a second chance!

I'm not sure what exactly to call it, late game unexplained mechanics I suppose. When I played Metro Last Light for the first time I didn't realize you defeated the train by shooting the glowing pieces. I didn't even notice it with all the gun flashes and since at no point prior in the game did that particular mechanic crop up I wasn't looking for it either. I had to go look up what to do, which made the grand finale a disappointment since it wrecked the pacing for the climax.

Got to side with hating scripted stealth events...

I play games to relax, so I don't like games with only one difficulty setting: brutally difficult

(I'm looking at you, Super Meat Boy).

I happen to like short-term resource management, like deciding when to cast a spell or take an intentional hit (and lose health as a result). I do not like long-term resource management (since that could get you permanently stuck), and I don't like permadeath, but short term resource management is a mechanic I enjoy. (There are limits, however; abilities that require resources need to be significantly stronger than those that don't, for example, or at least be useful in sutiations where resource-free abilities would not be.)

As for death, I prefer it if a game encourages, rather than discourages, player death. I generally enjoy having mechanics like deathwarping available to me, and I like it when death is common but has little consequence. (For example, toward the end of Dragon Quest 2, the monsters are extremely dangerous, but there is a place to save and revive your party for free, and party death only costs half your gold (which you no longer need at that point); as a result, having enemies that can easily wipe your party (one enemy has a spell that is *guaranteed* to do so) feels fun rather than frustrating.)

Glad I can spread interest in the game. I really enjoyed it, but others may not given their more diverse gaming history. *shrug*
As for tutorials in TFITF...It doesn't have a "tutorial" so to speak, but does "ease" you in with the abundance of food & wildlife encounters, getting harder until the end. The initial area you start in has signposts to kick you off with the basic mechanisms, but generally you learn as you go.

And thankyou dtgreene for this thread. In a forum rife with politcal discussion and GOG ragging, it's great to still find a thread actually talking about playing games. :)

While I very, very seldomly rage-quit, there are some things that might keep me from buying a game, if I know about these features beforehand:

- weapon wear down: never happens in that way in reality, thus nothing but a huge PITA.
- racing segments against the clock in games that are not racing games - it's never done well. Thus PITA.
- simulated passing of time with consequences (dying of player and/or NP characters). Gets almost never done well.
- limited turns. Nothing more angering than to automatically lose a game, one or two turns before I could have won it.
- checkpoints set so dumb, that I have to watch a cutscene over and over again, if I repeatedly fail to win a fight.
- point and click adventures, where necessary items magically appear in already searched locations, only after an event is triggered - but with no indication that there might be something to find again in that area/bucket/wardrobe, etc. that you already emptied before.
-enemies in stealth games, that seemingly know exactly where to look for you, as soon as you kill someone.

I'm sure, there are more, but out of my head - these are the most annoying.

Something I absolutely detest in racing games is rubberband AI: You see your opponent crash and burn and race that track nearly perfect at top speed - and a few seconds later he's right behind you. Or the other way around - you hit that concrete block and need 20 seconds to be back on the track - but your opponent has kindly waited just behind the next corner.
This destroys any kind of immersion, achievement or failure.

It's even worse when this happens in a racing segment in a non-racing game. Zelda: Majora's Mask is an offender here; in the Goron races, I have lost the race with much better times than I have won. It is part of the reason that part is so hated; if you are going to have an out-of-genre minigame, it better be easier than the main game, not harder.

(Of course, I have decided that I will likely skip that minigame on future playthroughs for an unrelated reason; I feel like the Gilded Sword obsoletes way to many combat options, and I prefer to actually have to use alternate forms and secondary weapons for combat. This also ties into my comment involving resource usage; attacks that require a resource need to have a significant advantage over those that don't or I (and many other players) will not use them.)

So, in combat, on the field, you have these healers, or technicians repairing your stuff. Everybody is shooting or hacking or exploding but they run to your staff and keep their health bars above zero.

And then the fight is over. Back to the map, or whatever interface simulates the passing days between action phases. Days, months, whatever.

Next action phase, all your wounds and damages are still just as they were at the very instant where last fight had ceased. Why ? Because, of course, your healers and repairmen won't work outside a raging battlefield. If you want to be restored back to 100%, hey, just hope that a new fight will break out.

Oh it pisses me off.

The original Bard's Tale games had an interesting solution to this problem: You can start intra-party combat at any time and have your bard heal your party via song.

Unfortunately, the remaster deliberately removed that particular feature. (It's one change the remaster made that I disagree with; there are a few others as well.)

(Of course, after a certain point the best way to heal is to just cast Restoration; it's cheap and it fully heals your party instantly.)

Edit: Actually, this reminds me of one other complaint that affects certain SRPGs. There exist SRPGs that have the following two features:
* If a character is dead at the end of the battle, that character is gone for good.
* There exists a spell that can revive a dead character, but only if the battle has not ended.

Equipment/items as DLC. Or, more generally, difficulty or gameplay changing DLC.

When DLC adds new levels, maps or side quests at least it's clear what you're getting or missing with your purchases. You can just buy the base game and decide what content you want to add later. Also, usually it's content that blends in well with the base game when it's included in the different Gold/Definitive/GOTY editions...

But I hate it with a passion when you get some GOTY edition "with all the DLC" and 15 minutes into the game you already got the Super Duper War Horse, the Mighty Armor of Invincibility and the Ultimate Sword of Doom. While some people might have been excited at the time to purchase those items to advance more easily in the game (or even worse, maybe they were pre-order exclusives), I don't want them. Sounds like pay-to-win to me.

So with some suspiciously powerful items I've found myself checking online if they belong in the base game in the first place and dropping them or hiding them in the darkest corner of the inventory, to get an experience as close as possible to the base game.