What some game you have liked and otherwise find good that has this one scenario, phase, achievement, or mechanic that sends your overall enjoyment of the game careening into a wall?

For me, I’m currently playing a Super Mario 64 rom hack called Mario and the Multiverse. It’s basically Super Mario 64 crossing over multiple other gaming titles with some power-ups to boot. Fifteen major worlds, each providing one power-up based-on or inspired by their respective world. Now you’re thinking, “Wow! Fifteen Power-ups!? I hope they’re all super cool to use”… or perhaps you’re thinking “Freakin’ fifteen power-ups? Lemme guess, balance issue, ey?”.

I tell you one thing, the game is not perfect: there are definitely issues with it! But there are plenty of great moments in that rom hack. Out of the fifteen, some are situational, a good few are universal (especially the last power-up that breaks the game in half), but there are two significant power-ups that are absolute TRASH in their use!

First is the power-up Chronos based on the game Katana Zero. I gotta say, the power-up’s world in the game isn’t all that good either. Really expansive but very few distinct landmarks that you will get lost rather quick. The boss of that world requires you to use this horrible power-up and the boss itself is ultimately a gauntlet sequence. So Chronos is a move that allows you to slow down time and use your katana to dash-slash. Sounds good on paper and probably great in practice from the root game: not here! The time slowdown barely works and the katana’s hit box is absurdly small and short lived. You’ll more bump into enemies more than actually striking them and it’s real easy the dash-slash yourself into a pit. 9 times out of 10, you don’t even have to use Chronos: however, this one situational enemy type requires the time ability to properly defeat it. That is, if you CAN defeat them being shot to death! And yes, the enemy is part of that boss fight!

Second is the “Esteemed Mortal” that is the saw axe from the Walking Dead… Could not find any practical use of it. Upon activation, Mario’s dives become a repetitive, bouncing, front-flip meant to mow down enemies. It may seem otherwise as you’re using it, but you’re not totally invincible as you bounce-flip. There’s a small window where enemies can hurt you, and it’s real easy to knock yourself out of it by hitting a wall. There’s actually a better invincibility power-up and its home world is labeled a number before the world where you get this one: so most would actually prefer using that power-up over the Esteemed Mortal anyway. I’ll admit, it is fun to bounce around, but it’s very impractical in almost all cases.

I’m a huge fan of Zelda Skyward Sword, and in my opinion, it gets way too much hate. HOWEVER, the fact that there are only three extremely linear areas was a downside. While these areas did change a lot and were expanded (which was cool in itself), I still felt the lack of variety. These changes could have been introduced in the post-game (though it seems Nintendo isn’t a fan of post-game content within the Zelda universe). For the main story, I would have preferred more areas that combined the existing linearity with the open-world elements of Breath of the Wild.

I beat Castlevania: Symphony of the Night the other day and while I really enjoyed it, I hated the "knockback" mechanic, especially when an enemy would literally hit me out of the room I was in

Jak 2 and Spongebob the Movie Game would be some of my favorite games if not for the egregious slide/drive levels.

I enjoyed how hard Jak 2 was, but those fucking races (especially in the city) where hot fucking garbage, I came for a combat platformer, not a driving sim with piss poor turning.

Jak 3 suffers from the same fate, but instead 30% of the game being driving, it's 80%???? The open zones where more fun, due to the lack of the time limits being super harsh, but it felt like I had less control when I had to fight enemies.

The game still has god awful races though, first hour of the game and you see yourself at the hardest part of the game (I'm serious), which is a fucking race level.

The mini games where annoying, but they didn't make me want to drop the game out of rage.

Spongebob The Movie Game... the best Spongebob platformer imo, it has the best combat and level design imo, and it's pretty difficult as well! But like Jak 3, half the fucking game are racing levels (and now sliding stages from BFBB!!!), the drive levels just feel fucking awful for one thing, and this game takes the slide levels from BFBB and makes them three times longer, and adds a fuck ton more of them, the extra challenges for the drive stages where way too hard as well.

Difficulty is not a bad thing! But it should NOT be harder than the actual main content of the fucking game, not to mention the easy slide levels in STMG where monotonous and boring when doing challenges, one slip up and you start ALL the way back at the beginning of the long ass courses.

A lot of ps2/GC era platformers unfortunately suffer from having driving levels with poor control, and some even being cursed to have 20 - 60% of them being driving levels in my experience.

All of Breath of the Wild.

You gotta gimp Alucard somehow! That guy could easily break the whole game just by finding one of quite a few weapons scattered about in the castle!

The jungle temple in terraria is kinda meh. I feel like it would be cool if it was a twisted nested maze like the dungeon, giving you something to explore, but instead it's kinda just a straight line without junctions. Also the golem is not the best boss. I still love the game tho.

Rogue Galaxy has this annoying weapon level-up system, where the weapons you had equipped after beating the mob gains one experience point, and they level up after 15 to 20 completed mob encounters. This makes grinding weapons and absolute slog.

It would've made way more sense if you got a point for every enemy killed within the mob.

Oh yeah also there's some enemies that can only be damaged after you hit them once with either the barrier breaker or shield cracker gun, because some psycho thought that there should be two different forms of enemy invulnerability. So if you're leveling up your guns, don't forget to re-equip the gun that you actually care about before you knock out that last enemy or else you'll be giving precious weapon EXP to one that does zero damage even at max level.

The Settlers II: Gold / History Edition

Limited number of saves.

So you have to choose between normal and World Campaign levels to keep playing.

I hate how god-awfully ugly the random NPCs of Baldurs Gate 3 are.

A Half-Orc with long, flowing, bright pink hair? Seriously? Is this a circus? Total clown show, please do not use the "generate random character" button to populate your towns in a AAA game.

Skyrim being remade for the 50th time. And Todd Howard's pretty lies..

Do bizarre port issues count? Because as a kid I could never figure out why I sucked ass at the snowboarding segments of MegaMan 8 until I discovered it was an issue with the Anniversary Collection years later

Glitches in Fallout and TES. These games are the GOAT but this is straight up embarrassing

Got a doozy.

So the Pokemon games tend to have this postgame thing called the Battle Tower where you take on a gauntlet of Pokemon trainers. I'm one of those weirdos who enjoys turn based RPGs for the strategy & combat so I'm all for it... in theory. In execution, the fights end up being either a boring clean sweep or a shitshow of the AI reading your inputs and always getting the lucky roll on a low accuracy low chance secondary effect moves.

They started off really stingy with rewards, offering a handful of stat-boosting vitamins for seven straight wins, then it turned into receiving a unique currency for your wins, which could be used to purchase... stat-boosting vitamins, among a few other worthless consumables that you could already obtain at the Pokemart. Eventually they realized that nobody wants to defeat dozens of consecutive trainers only to be rewarded with easily obtainable items and they changed it to one point per victory with bigger payouts as you get higher streaks, and also you got access to some actually decent items.

Sun & Moon imo have the "best" Battle Tower point reward thingies: good ol' Mega Stones! (yeah those were found just lying around in the regions in Gen 6 but fuck you) The Pokemon games with Battle Frontiers also reward you with symbols for beating milestone bosses, but those are even less valuable than the damn consumables! Collecting all of the symbols rewards you with the Pokemon Center lady having a shorter "heal your Pokemon" textbox which doesn't even matter at this point because they auto-heal your team after every match in the Battle Tower. They may as well have just tucked an NPC in a corner somewhere who says "You collected all the Battle Frontier symbols? Well done!" and called it a day.

The most recent game doesn't have a Battle Tower for some reason. But considering they've made it extremely easy to get your hands on all those stat boosting items and special battle equipment in this one, the devs probably just didn't know what to give you as a reward!

The game corners in Pokemon, mainly Gen 3 to 4. Okay, here's why: they're really boring and aren't interesting enough for me. To me, card casino games are a deal breaker for me. If there IS a card game, I'm sold in. But Game Corners in Pokemon has NOTHING for that. Sure, Card Flip exists in Gen 2, except that one's a glorified paper version of roulette. Everything's in fucking slots. Kanto? Slots only. ...Except for Gen 4. Johto? Slots or goddamn roulette. Hoenn? Buddy, it's slots or roulette. Sinnoh? Still more slots. Sure, you don't have to play the Game Corners for prizes, since you can buy coins with money, but why can't I just BUY the items straight out of my money if I'm only going to the Game Corner just so I can buy a bunch of TMs?

And another one for Pokemon, this time on Scarlet/Violet and that's breeding. Now breeding isn't something I care so much about considering I'm not into the PvP scene of the game. While I haven't finished the game as I'm typing this post, I FUCKING HATE THE BREEDING PROCESS. For starters, instead of a daycare, you can get eggs from picnics, which is fine, until you realize that it breeds Pokemon within your party, meaning you can get eggs from every POSSIBLE pair combination. Worst of all, there's no way to know what egg comes from what parents, so if you accidentally took 6 Pokemon in your party who happen to be compatible with each other, you're not only going to have so much eggs and also don't know what eggs you want to release until you hatch ALL of those eggs. Sure, you could get a Destiny Knot and a Everstone to lock those pair in, but that doesn't solve the main issue of breeding in this game and that's how it TAKES UP TIME. In other games, all you had to do was put two Pokemon in a daycare and if they can breed, you can get an egg and you can take it as long as you return to the daycare, even while you're away from it and doing something else. But here, you gotta wait for the eggs to arrive, and that's BORING because you then have to settle in on whether you want to do something important in the game OR take the time for 2 Pokemon to fuck.

Last one; trading evolutions. I HATE trading evolutions because sure, this isn't a problem in modern times, my biggest issue is that it's not really possible to trade Pokemon in older generations if you don't have the games AND systems to do it. It's not an issue in Generation 3 thanks to mGBA, but later generations, unless you have the systems AND games to do it, you're completely fucked on an emulator and MUST use something like PKHex to do it (Which isn't good because not only is it debatable on whether this is doing it official, but it also ruins the fun of collecting other Pokemon since you can just program them in without much issue. Personally, I don't mind especially for Shinies because no way am I gonna spend time trying to get something that's LOWER than 1%. There USED to be a point for Gen 2 because of DVs, but beyond that, there isn't any point because Shiny Pokemon are purely cosmetic with ungodly RNG for not much reason.) and that's the worst part; there's NO WAY of doing trade evolutions unless you find someone to do it, and the solution was already there in Legends: Arceus, why didn't Scarlet/Violet NOT allow the Linking Cord to access trade evolutions? But hey, that's GameFreak for ya.

Two PokéGripes back-to-back!? Hope the GameFreak woes won’t dominate the whole thread!

Never cared much for Battle Tower in most Pokémon post games. As you described a little later in your posts, yeah, the rewards aren’t exactly worth it. But to me, Pokémon is a long enough game as is: beating the Elite Four and a postgame side story is more than enough for a game in that series.

Haven’t touched any of the Switch Pokémon games, to be honest. This looks to me, the franchise is definitely turning to the more casual market if the breeding process is now THAT much more convoluted. They probably got the idea from Sonic Adventure’s Chao Garden if I’m hearing this correctly. Quite the shame they ain’t following the “if it broke, don’t fix it” rule.

I don’t have a specific game but the one that comes to mind is Gears of War. The mechanic where you auto heal by just hanging out is so dumb and so not fun. I want to beat up whomever came up with that. I like life kits. I think they offer better opportunity to be resourceful.

What did Duke Nuken say in Forever? “Power Armor is for pussies”, right? While at the same time, Duke Nukem also auto-heals just like power armor in that game!

One I really hate in general with games is when they randomly have a fucking casino stage, my problem stems when you have to literally wait and let RNG do it's thing, holding behind content (Pokemon), or holding back the next fucking stage (Mario Sunshine), and god forbid you have to do it at all to even progress the fucking game (Chibi Robo Clean Sweep).

I just abuse save states in Pokemon when I need the Casino pokemon, fuck that shit dude.

Mario Sunshine is not as stingy at all thankfully, just a good minute of trying (still annoying).

Chibi-Robo Clean Sweep, when you enter the hallway, uh oh! this fucking asshole wants you to pay in poker chips to enter the other rooms, but the 300 you picked up near this vent wasn't enough, so you have to go to the ghosts' casino in the attic through the vent, and the games are soooo fucking slooooow and like irl you're gonna lose a lot, a huge pacebreaker in other wise a good game, there is this ghost you can cash in with to get pokerchips, but you need to literally gamble IN GAME for like a good hour to level up your card to Level 4, to even buy pokerchips, none of the things the salesman sells are needed really, thankfully.

Shit game design imo, nothing like having to spend hours gambling in a video game to progress!!!!!!!

The first Warhammer Space Marine had the right idea when it comes to the health system, armor regenerates, but health has to be regained by executing Orks/Chaos forces. (Of course the enemies can still kill you before finishing the execution)

If nothing else, it keeps the pace of game steady without the need to backtrack for health kits, especially when most games tend to get either stingy at the worst times, or simply flood them, rendering them as filler.

My annoyances are a little...strange but whatever:

Minecraft and Terraria are both SUPER bloated with nothing in the gameplay that warrants the need for all the craziness they added.

The "sonic storybook series" never needed gimmicky controls, and would be decent to perfect without having to use the wiimote and dealing with Sonic having onrail controls.

Unless Pokemon AZ changes things, gamefreak failed. In no generation after gen3(?) Can you naturally catch them all, I heard they even had to get rid if that tagline because they KNOW it's not possible without hacks.

Most RPGs are menus, so traditional stories, lack of creativity and lack of actually funny humor destroys most of them, imo

Multiplayer based games with very little for single play, yes I covering every game that does this: people keep saying they're lonely and have no friends, don't pound into their faces by making nigh every game they get unplayable unless you get friend codes or whatever... Geez man! (Playing with random people can work, but people love to argue during online matches, so...)

I won't go in detail, but I think Story of Seasons series can't work anymore. It's not the games' fault, but times have changed.....

Probably will come back when I remember another game or series of them..

Bowser's Inside Story and Dawn of Sorrow are great games, but suffer from being victims of being DS titles, witch resulted in really gimmicky shit that puts dirty on rather shining gems.

Inside Story has the fire breathing in the giant Bowser fights, which you had to blow in the DS to work (or in my case, since I used an emulator, had to find and use a sound file until I got an excellent). This is really troublesome with the Fawful Express boss, which not only can be only damage with the fire, but will kill Bowser once the amount of limited turns are up.

Dawn has the magical seals, which involves you having to draw a pattern to end most boss fights. These patterns get more complex later in the game, and if you fail them, you have to kill the boss again. Lovely.

So yeah, as much as I miss duel screen consoles, i really wish they're weren't so gimmicky.

There's a PS1 game I really really love called Tail Concerto but it has some deep flaws. I don't like that u play as a cop and I don't like the bumbling race allegory they attempt to create with dogs and cats. But the world and characters are so fucking cute and so charming that I luuuuv it despite those glaring issues

God dammit, I'm in this thread again.

This one however is not very original.

I hate it when achievements in singleplayer games are locked behind multiplayer.

Playing Castle Crashers on my Switch, and one of the achievements is for winning 40 online battles, okay, I can do tha- oh I'm using CFW...

So I'm fucked on that because I'm not buying Nintendo Online, fuck that, and I'm more than sure I'm banned.

So many games actually have multiplayer oriented achievements/trophies in singleplayer games, and as someone who loves completing them, it irks me.

Maybe I could find a way to cheat the achievement someday.

I'll probably be back lmao.

I hate this too. Especially if the game is pretty old and obscure and nobody's playing it online anymore. Or if people do still play it, you know it's probably going to be a small group of hardcore fans who will steamroll any newbie they come across.

Also, limited time achievements, and achievements behind a paywall. Bad enough when it's DLC (I would really like it if achievements came with the DLC insead of automatically being attached to the main game even if you didn't buy it) but it's especially awful when it's connected to some lootbox/gacha mechanic. Looking at you, Fallout Shelter.

No, what makes the Shine Sprite in that level annoying is not exactly the slots or anything “casino-related”, it’s that stupid pipe reveal game after lining up both slots! I tell you, the PHYSICS in that segment!

What’s funny is that there exists a DS Mario & Luigi that was released BEFORE Inside Story and because it was developed during the DS’s prototype phase, Alpha Dream played it safe and used the four buttons and dual screens over the drawing feature. This game, I’ll admit, is underrated as all hell!

I see people glazing Mass Effect 2 as the best game of the series, but it has three massive flaws.

1. The hacking minigames. Every time you have to open a door or hack a data pad, you have to play the same annoying minigames. You could also include the planet scanning here, but at least you can sometimes find side missions when scanning planets. The hacking never gets interesting.
2. "Can it wait for a bit? I'm in the middle of some calibrations." On-ship dialogue is extremely limited for every character not named Mordin Solus and Joker. Garrus is a famous example of this, saying the aforementioned quote for 90% of the goddamn game.
3. Legion shows up right before the final mission. This is FAR too late to gain a new squadmate. It absolutely shafts what is easily one of the most impressive plot twists and most interesting characters, and it ruins the pace of the story. Instead of rushing off to the endgame, you suddenly have one more loyalty quest to do. I cannot stress enough how much Legion got fucked over by showing up at the end of the game. You spend the entirety of Mass Effect 2 building a team at your own pace: two waves of dossiers and two waves of loyalty missions, completed at your own pace. Then, when you've recruited all of the characters and made all of them loyal, you suddenly have a completely new surprise character recruitment and loyalty mission.

It's pretty easy to forgive the first two points as 2010s video game design flaws, but the third is a complete narrative failure. Arguably the coolest character gets almost no screen time before the endgame. Who the fuck writes a story like this? I hear people talk about Mass Effect 3's flaws (Kai Leng and the ending) but then completely overlook how much bullshit Legion's late recruitment is.

I'm gonna go pure autism mode and say the Battle Mode in Mario Kart Wii. I know everyone thinks of the Mario Kart 8 Wii U Battle Mode as being awful, which it's 100% the worst battle mode in the series. Wii's Battle Mode is honestly ass too. You're forced into time matches based on score. Which would already be a bit sucky but it's made 10x worse by how you're forced into teams with bots if you're playing offline. Which means you can be absolutely built different at Chain Chomp Wheel but the AI teammates can completely drop the ball. And it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the only option available. Not helping is how you're locked to only two vehicle options for some reason. And it also feels slow as shit because i think it's at like 100cc. What makes it even worse is that Wii's battle mode has some actually pretty decent original maps, and none of them have come back yet. I'm sure i'm the only one who cares this much about the Battle Mode in Mario Kart Wii but idc.

This also kinda related to Mario Kart Wii but is a way broader issue than it. Fuckin games locking content behind online services that they will shut down eventually with no alternative method of accessing it. I don't just mean achievements but like full ass maps and even unlockables you won't be able to play in a few years. You telling me my great grandson won't be able to knock the spiny topmen off of galaxy coliseum while i die in the other room? Get real

Honestly, I also miss the more independent Battle Modes in Mario Kart as well. Nothing’s wrong with fighting against only three other drivers.