Dragon Quest Builder: having your constructions destroyed, quite often, during boss fights. Fortunately they fixed the issue in DQB2 (in which everything is back to normal after the fight scene).

Dragon Quest Builders 2: some 'room building' requests are incoherent. Good game but lacks consistency overall. And quite buggy.

Just a few...

Obligatory fishing minigames in every game with them. Yes, even Zelda. Yes, even Stardew Valley.

Blue Dragon's QTEs and missable content. Cart escort.

FFX-2's "hold attack to win" balancing. It has a great class system built in, but the enemies throughout the game are just pushovers. Especially after coming off FFX's rather strategic [especially by comparison] game play.

Random Rule in FF8's card minigame. (And the parts outside its card minigame...)

Hollow Knight's couple of superhard bosses that aren't in the just-here-for-the-hard-bosses-boss-rush-area. (Nightmare circus keeper v2, guy in the basement of the house house in town.)

Cooking recipe lady in Bloodstained.

SimCity 4's default traffic model. I have no idea how anyone ever played this game without NAM or other mods. The default one just makes it impossible to build anything reasonably functioning.

Arcanum's indstadeath (or effectively instadeath) traps in the final dungeons.

Evil Genius bodies/freezers mechanics. It basically makes the game unplayable. Bodies decay far too slowly even without freezers, and with them they last essentially forever. Good luck trying to play the rest of the game when you're constantly managing bodies of the never-ending, ever-increasing stream of agents on your island.

"autobattle" in the games that have their largescale map and battlescale, such as Age of Wonders and Lords of the Realm. autobattle is always nightmarishly bad and ends with tons of casualties for you that you always feel pressure to play out each battle... But, if you do, good luck ever completing a game because you're going to spend all of your time in tactical mode.

Already mentioned above but I REALLY have to mention it again: The space battles in Star Trek 25th Anniversary.

Early game city defense in Civilization 4. It's really too hard to wage war early game. Yes, it's POSSIBLE, and yes, plenty of people do succeed and win games doing so. But it's hard to fit it in at all unless you commit 100% to it.

Lands of Lore's one dungeon. It's been a LOOOOONG time, but there's on dungeon in the game that's progress-stopping. I think it was one with ghosts or something.

I could go on, but I want to play some games tonight after a long shift at the animal shelter today!

EDIT: I had to come back for one more: Far Cry 2's 2nd half. Yes, after all that which I did, all that time and... there's a 2nd half!? The game was twice as long as it needed to be. I gave up eventually.

EDIT2: Ok, maybe FFX-2 doesn't belong in this thread. I'm fond of it, despite it having a TON of bad design issues. The top one being that it was designed to sell a guide, more than any others in the long series. Very little of it is discoverable in game and is just a chore to do. The "core gameplay loop"/core story/central parts of it are good, but it falls apart on all of the sidequests/100%ing being out there.

Final Fantasy 4 DS has a sidequest, one that has an augment as its final reward (I believe it's the one that disables random encounters), that requires a rare drop at one point. Giving how rare the rare drops are in FF4, this feels like really bad game design.

Parts in some JRPGs (Dragon Quest 6 is the one I can think of off hand) where you have to talk to everyone to proceed.

Ultima 4's requirement that you recruit every possible companion to finish the game, in a game where the battle system gets rather clunky when you have too many party members. (This does not apply to the NES version, which is completely different in this regard.)

I didn't mind the one in Breath of Fire 1, where it just had you use a rod in a special spot, a random number is rolled, and the game then says whether you caught a fish. Pokemon, at least the first two generations, is also like this, with the difference being that the fish you just caught will attack (and can be caught with a Pokeball). (I do not know if later Pokemon games were like this.)

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: The fact that you can't swap out your starter and partner until you beat the game, and the presence of a segment where you are stuck with just your partner and starter. Let me use the Pokemon I want to use!

What's wrong with Kayran? It's just one of three boss-monster fights.

I personally don't see gunfights in Gemini Rue to be the problem either, but I can understand people who are frustrated to find such element in point-and-click adventure game. But special monsters in Witcher series is the integral part of the story.

On Topic: Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is an amazing game. You basically enter an area, have to deal with platforming puzzles, reach the end of the area, fight the boss and unlock a new form. Using these newly acquired forms, you can use their special abilities to visit previous areas, where you can access locations that where previously impossible to reach. Each area is very distinct, and the pattern isn't boring... until you reach the Volcano which is about 4-5 times bigger than any other area you've visited before. You spend about half your playtime in the Volcano working to reach the boss, and it's not even the end game, you just unlock another form.

I still haven't finished the game because of the Volcano. It never occurred to me, but I think you're right. The ending to a game should be easier, considering you've spent most of your playthrough getting more powerful. The end game shouldn't be the challenge, building up power should be the challenging part. Games are a power trip, and feeling overwhelmed/weakest after having spent 20-40-60 hours kills a game right at the end.

No wonder most of us have more abandoned games, than finished ones. Considering what, StingingVelvet mentioned above, it's no wonder Age of Wonders1&2 are at the top of my favorite games ever.

I actually have the reverse problem with games. By the time I reach the end of the game, I have learned the game's mechanics and am quite familiar with them, and I want to be able to put them to use. In so many games (particularly those with growth systems), I reach the end, have all sorts of neat abilities, but don't really get to use many of them because the enemies are a pushover. It also doesn't help that, by the end game, any balance problems the game has have been exacerbated by the fact that the player has the option of using the most powerful abilities.

The ending of a game should not be easier than the rest of the game, considering that you've learned the game well by this point, and can therefore take on a higher level of challenge.

With that said, the ending shouldn't be *too* hard, but it should still be a bit harder than the segment leading up to it, which should be a bit harder than the segment before that, and so on.

Edit: One other point I just thought of: I have been known to abandon games right at the end after realizing that the game has no way of putting up a decent challenge at this point. (In an RPG, for example, one sign of this is if I find myself not having to heal at all.)

Hacking in Bioshock 1. Poor, poor Jack...

Ryan Amusements, in Bioshock 2 Remastered. From that points onward, game is rendered unplayable. Unless you follow manual guides on how to tamper with inis, change text values in certain files and other !@#$ stuff.

THE MESS-enger! Some of those green coins SNARL ARF WOOF GRRRRR

Hollow Knight: King Grimm !@#$ Secret palace ultra hard passage !@#$ Pantheon restricions !@#$ !@#$ Trial of the Fool in Colosseum !@#$ !@#$ !@#$

Last stages (tower) in Shover Knight F.U.

Andrew Ryan's pointless death/suicide (he could order Jack to clober Fontaine). Badass Sinclair getting caught and outsmarted (me wanted to go places with that ice cold dude)

My Sweet heather dying, unless you go Sabbat. Actually not that much trouble, since i almost always choose Andrei 's gang. Plus patch makes books unsellable, so no more book training method; and gives crappier weapons to some enemies, than the ones they would normally wield.

Dexit! Sword and Shield! HOW COULD YOU?

The ending should be easier, because you, as a player have mastered and are able to exploit the game's mechanics. I never meant to say that the enemies should have lesser HP, to fake out a power trip. The enemy progression should continue normally, but not spike up, in order to make the endgame artificially difficult.

The Kayran felt more like a dance than a fight, with a specific sequence of movements that have to be performed, without strategy or alternatives. Plus, I found it brutally difficult to be the first boss fight (each boss fight after that got progressively easier and easier).

That could go wrong too though, if you're so powerful fights are trivial but they throw endless enemies at you, making it tedious. There's a balance to strive for I guess. Basically I think endings should be more or less "normal gameplay" with greater narrative thrust, rather than trying to have "epic gameplay!" which more often that not is annoying rather than fun.

Sorry but I played it 3-4 years ago the last time and I'm not really sure. I'm just sure it was too much for me.

Just loved the headshots through the walls...

As awesome as TW3 is, the one thing that really irked me is how "floaty" Geralt is. It feels like he's on roller skates or something. Second complaint is there was no build up for the main baddie. Yeah, they have been building the Wild Hunt for the last 2 games but we know next to nothing about the king and his generals.

Remember Me; One of my favourite games of all time, but during combat, moving around can be kinda floaty, like the main character is wearing rollerblades or walking on ice or something. Outside combat, she movies just fine, but moving between enemies in combat was not as intuitive as I would have liked. Also, maybe it was just my TV screen, but the text boxes for the little lore tidbits from collecting items was WAAAAY too small. I literally couldn't read any of it, no matter how much I tried to zoom in. Still a great game though.

Dragon Age: Origins; Wonderful game but gods, having to go through the Fade in the Broken Circle quest takes for-freaking-ever! Literally the worst part of the game. And having to constantly change forms, while an interesting idea, makes it feel it takes longer to get through. You have to clear out so many areas to reach even just ONE of your companions, and you have to go through it alone for like, 90% of the quest. It's just a really sucky quest/area, in my opinion.

Mass Effect 3; The reaper boss fight on Rannoch. Literally all you do is run back and forth and try not to get hit by a laser with an annoyingly big hitbox, and if you die you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN. An otherwise perfect game with a small blemish of a bothersome boss fight.

GUN: The Magruder fight

The difficulty of that fight ruins an otherwise good game.