Ah, the good ole egg delivery problem.

Oh, I thought I mentioned that. Thanks much for pointing that out. I'll edit that in.

My guess is that they want the clout, acclaim, and money like that of a theatrical blockbuster release in part due to the rising cost of AAA game production, as if they even needed a reason to want to make more money. Critics in general prefer serious stories they can wax about around award season also and the gameplay for most AAA games will probably be decent/samey enough where it's not a good enough way for games to stand out in their minds. It's a formula that Sony seems to particularly exploit. That's part of my guess as to why they resemble movies more, anyway. And, we can also look at how movies meant to be simply fun are looked down upon by critics and even audiences (very few people would intentionally in a serious ranking put a comedy or action movie over movies with more serious and dramatic stories).

Multiple times in Saviors of Sapphire Wings, but seen this in other games:

* You get into a random battle, but after you waste time fighting, the enemy runs away and you get no rewards from the battle.

(I mentioned Metal Slimes from the Dragon Quest series before, but at least there it's expected that they run away, and they're not dangerous, so you're not wasting many resources if you do fail to kill them before they run away, plus the exciting prospect of far more XP than most enemies give. On the other hand, it feels lame when an ordinary enemy, particularly one that is a threat, runs away.)

(Then again, it occurred to me that Final Fantasy 5's Skull Eaters are an exception. They only appear in one area, are deadly (1000+ damage when your characters have only 3 digit HP at that point), tend to run away, but still award you 5 ABP (a nice amount at that point) if they do run.)


Another one: In Might and Magic 3-5, there's this issue:
* You can access the menu that has the Save/Load options during battle.
* If you try to save, you get a message like "No Saving allowed in combat.", which I can understand.
* If you try to load, however, you get a message like "No Loading allowed in combat.". Why disallow loading a save? It's annoying to have to do Mr. Wizard before I load a save anytime I enter a battle that I do not want to be in. (At least the penalty for using Mr. Wizard doesn't matter if I'm just going to load a game, but still.)

I agree with you.

I'm underlining this part because it's the good old myth: costs aren't rising, it's not a forced expense like electricity could be. Publishers are simply overdoing it, they decide how much to spend and then complain when the batshit insane budget they wasted doesn't come back in a week after release.
Besides, the vast majority of all that money goes into marketing, not even in development - see the underpaid, constant crunching wage slaves that get laid off in mass as soon as the project is finished.

Quest compasses. Now that's lame.

When I finished D, what should had been an epic climax had me howling with laugher. The whole thing had had a really eerie feel so far, but [redacted] is just too cheesy to be scary.

On its sales page, a reviewer says "That plot twist was one of the dumbest I've ever encountered in any medium, ever"

As an aside, I would add that a close contestant is found in the movie BLOODY PIT OF HORROR. Here, the serial killer reveals his true motive with this epic declaimation: "I was forced to retreat to this castle. Mankind is made up of inferior creatures...spiritually and physically deformed who would have corrupted the harmony of my perfect body." after which he proceed to smear oil over his Perfect Body in front of multiple mirrors. (I've heard it argued that the entire movie is intended as a critique of the body building ideal popular at that time)

The Guitar Hero episode of South Park was pretty funny. Weeks of training to clear the hardest stage, only to be greeted with a screen saying "YOU SUCK" when they finally pulled it off.

Yeah, D is definitely a game that really gives players the D.

Excellent for riffing, though.

Etrian Odyssey 1 has one point where you're basically forced to genocide the native population of the dungeon. While the gameplay is fun (and better balanced than its sequel), this part where you are forced to do something immoral (and which could be triggering for some, particularly indigenous populations (disclaimer: I'm not indigenous, and I haven't actually talked with any such people about this issue)), really rubs me the wrong way.

Etrian Odyssey 2 handles it better, and 3 not only gives you a choice, but neither choice felt as bad as what 1 requires.

Another lame thing: You've just defeated the boss of the stratum where you have to do this, but when you try to head to the next floor, the game doesn't allow you to do so until you return to town; this means that you have to walk all the way through these 5 floors again, even though (just like with every other new stratum), there's a warp point on the next floor that could've been used as a shortcut.

I'll have to admit, I actually recall learning that at one time when I heard a rebuttal to Extra Credits trying to tell us why we need to pay more money for games (another defense for microtransactions I read about was "Well, we live in the (San Francisco) Bay Area, so it's expensive here...") but I've heard the meme so many times it's one of those pieces of conventional wisdom I forget is incorrect.

I like KOTOR overall, but the underwater section of planet Manaan is no fun. You are forced to travel a fair distance at a painfully sluggish pace in a diving suit. There is a also similar situation where you need to walk in a spacesuit, but at least the distance is relatively short.

I can't blame you, publishers go far out of their way to make sure some details remain well hidden while their half-truths are always in display.

But back on topic: I remember playing Tales of Vespeia a decade ago.
At first I thought it was pretty bold for a JRPG, going another way from the usual tropes... then chapter 3 starts, and it deletes EVERYTHING good the game did to revert into the lamest "we are the chosen heroes that must save the world from an ancient evil" clichè. Goodbye morally grey main character, unpredictable actions and interesting villains, welcome back impersonal incarantion of Evil™ and paladins of Light.
Also, as in any JRPG, the main antagonist's motivation were irrational bullshit. "I don't like a thing I could easily fix with my superior power and infinite fame, hence I must destroy the world".

Another thing I could see as lame is when you have a game that allows a gender choice for the protagonist, but the sequel takes away that choice, forcing a male protagonist. It happens both in Ultima (Ultima 8 took away the choice) and Dragon Quest (DQ3 introduced the option, but then DQ5 took it away).

Speaking of which, I don't like the way Dragon Quest 5 handed its female characters (excluding Debora, who wasn't even in the original version), as it was a major step back.

That reminds me of another thing: When a game has two main protagonists, one male and one female, but only the male character is the legendary hero with the special weapons/spells. We see this in Paladin's Quest (Chezni eventually gets all the spells, including the ultimate spell, but Midia never gets Fire Magic), and in Dragon Quest 5 (the son gets to be the legendary hero, while the daughter doesn't get anything special, being a mage in a game where magic isn't that great (barring the Echoing/Duplic Hat, which doesn't appear until late game, and is not even in the remakes at all).

Edit: Dragon Quest 4 is much better in this respect, with it having a strong female protagonist in Chapter 2 (where strong means a fighter-type protagonist with the highest Strength of all party members, a really high critical rate, and being the only DQ female character (excluding generic recruits in 3 and 9) who can't use magic). Also, some people who are tired of more common main characters will likely enjoy Chapter 3 of DQ4; the protagonist is male, but he's not young, and he's not of a class you typically expect in an adventuring party.

This one just occurred to me but in the game Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (Spoilers ahead): the big reveal of the entire game is that the entire franchise is just a video game. All the characters are NPCs with one possible exception (basically) and everything life threatening, universe endangering, or otherwise cataclysmic for the cosmos is just a joke. None of it matters. This point did not bug me that much the first time I saw it but the more I thought about it and the more I dwelled on it the more and more it just felt not only stupid but unbelievably lame. The game was so good up to that point and then it throws the entire franchise up to then and after into the trash because... I dunno, it's almost a neat plot device? It is not dissimilar to a point in Xenoblade but that's the difference is that it's not a game in the game the characters in Xenoblade "believe" in their world still and there is no moment to sit and reflect, "Well, gee, this is a game in a game... it's not even pretending to believe in its world anymore..."

I know the point is to illustrate how through technological innovation man becomes his own god and the virtual lives he creates are his own creations in his own image blah, blah, blah... it's not even contemplated that far in the game. So, the characters in the game determine that it is not important that they are 1s and 0s, they are going to live their lives because they are real to them, it's a classic existentialist theme. Similarly, in Xenoblade the god of that setting (Zanza, who is not even strictly a god so much as a man who managed to recreate the world with himself as its supreme being; hence the similarity to Star Ocean III) treats the characters in his world as pawns, foodstuff meant to serve a purpose and then be disposed of at his leisure. The characters then determine that even if he gave them their lives that their lives belong to them and that they are going to take the reins of their own existence even if that means opposing him. Once more, a good existentialist theme. And, to you playing the game, the characters are "real" people in their world. Whereas in Star Ocean, all they are ever going to be, awareness acquired or not, are 1s and 0s going through rote steps on your TV screen.

That basically broke the game along with the criminally aggravatingly designed final dungeon.

Xenoblade X takes the next cake for "it is not that bad when you hear it but after thinking about it breaks the story" plot point. In that game, (I do have to start from the top on this one) mankind is in a war of survival with a coalition of extraterrestrials (to us) who are aggressively pursuing us throughout the galaxy after they blow up Earth. So, there are themes of homesickness (just to whip out those literary creds like a jerk) in the vein of Odyssey as well as connecting to the little things. So, in the ships the humans built they have something I wanna say is called the Life Hold (it probably is not) where, since they did not know how long they would be running away from the aliens (they did not run fast enough) they all went into cryostasis... in the same detachable part of the hull... It stretches believability already. So, your ship crashes and, because you have no memories (being a blank slate character) it is assumed you were a member of the crew (and forgive me for getting details out of the correct order) and that is why you were in an escape pod. However, at some point in the story your character suffers an injury and they lose an arm... a robot arm... not a prosthetic, a robot arm because you are a perfect robot copy of you... your consciousness is, I guess, connected through 5G to your robot body so that you can do stuff (and, for a member of the crew, maybe this kind of works), but your body also simulates eating (and I am well to assume the remaining bodily functions) so that you still feel human. And since there are like kids and cats and stuff I guess they are also robots too.

I dunno, this is not the absolute worst plot point it could been but it is still pretty lame. However, the plot is pretty thin in this game. The thing that derailed it for me was this: give you freedom to do whatever you want however you want, man, but it rolls the game out very deliberately and slowly. As such, features are blocked from you until around the fifth or so chapter. Anyway, at one point you need to befriend Lau (Lou, Lao?) up to like an A or B relationship. Well, I had not really talked to him... at all. That pretty much killed it. It was already bad enough that there are character quests which you literally cannot quit* that can be very time consuming and my enthusiasm kind of tapered off. It becomes obvious around this point that, while a truly excellent game in so many ways, it was designed to be a multiplayer game and then a single player more or less tapped on later.

*:(Lyn's can be particularly insufferable with other characters fawningly going on about how she "tries so hard, yet she is only 14;" a plot device I never like on top of having to actually wait for a random item to be mined from one of your automated outposts)