Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
That’s a hard question, but the first two games that came to mind were Final Fantasy XV and Snowrunner.
FFXV is just… There’s no nice way of saying it, it’s garbage. A huge open world with nothing interesting in it, the story is pure nonsense and it’s all full of holes, the characters are generic jrpg fodder, the shallow combat literally plays itself and you don’t even get to drive the damn car yourself. I was never a fan of the series, but after that one I swore off it completely.
And Snowrunner is just utterly disappointing, for a game that describes itself as a “driving sim” the physics are horrendous, the trucks squid all over the place and they have no traction whatsoever, the entire game revolves around you driving from point A to B through the most sadist maps imaginable, if you get stuck or flip over you have to start everything from start and it’s such a slow game, I can’t stress this enough it’s glacial slow. It’s just incredibly frustrating and stressful, coming from Euro Truck Simulator 2 (a game that I consider zen like) this was just torturous.
I was pretty on-board with FFXV until the exact moment I realized the boat portion was supposed to lead you to a LOT of cut content instead of literally 1 other area. Definitely left a bad taste after that. I feel like it could have been a masterpiece if not for issues during development that I can noticeably feel the effects of during gameplay
Square’s writing has always been garbage. Only the cringiest weebs like that shit. Like the only ones I liked were FF7 and 9 and even then it was only tolerable because they didn’t had voice acting. Because I could read trough some of the awful dialogues quickly. The FF games always have cool over arching storylines but the god awful dialogues always ruins it for me. Now that their games have voice acting I can’t stand to play any of their games any more. I tried Octopath and Triangle Strategy recently and I just couldn’t force my self to listen to the bullshit those characters were muttering, voiced by those shitty anime voice actors.
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Haven’t played Square stuff, but I’d imagine it’s possible to enjoy bad writing without being one of the “cringiest weebs”…
I never understood the praise for Octopath. Even though they were technically intertwined, it almost never felt like the characters were interacting with one another; it felt like they were just monologuing and not actually conversing. It didn’t help I hit a huge difficulty spike at the end because I didn’t level up my characters the way the game wanted me to and couldn’t continue.
Maybe this puts me in the “cringy weeb” category but I just put the language to Japanese and use English subtitles. Most Japanese games I’ve played really suffer from poor dialogue localization, and this helps. Except for Exoprimal, the English voice acting and dialogue was fucking great in that game
FFXV isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s not even my least favorite Final Fantasy. But it’s probably the biggest lost opportunity of any game I’ve ever played by a wide margin. The combat is almost a lot of fun. The magic is really neat. The summons would be awesome if they were more controllable (some summons you will rarely see because of location criteria). The open world is cool, but mostly empty and completely removed from the EXTREMELY linear story.
But the worst offender is all of the story beats that are devoid of context or follow up. Apparently all of the backstory is spread out between the movie, a cartoon, and the DLC. But playing through blind it’s just random stuff happening. The game had potential to be the most epic story if they could have stuck the execution of it.
I have a really complicated relationship with FFXV because while it’s an objectively pretty bad game, I enjoyed it way more than I reasonably should for a game of its quality. Maybe it was the fishing minigame.
I absolutely agree with the overambition being one of the downfalls of the game. They wanted to go too big and create some kind of multimedia “experience” where you had a movie, a novel and many many DLCs to spread the content over.
The end result is an empty shell of a game, and even after watching the movie first and pausing the main story at the appropriate points to play the DLCs (I didn’t play on launch and bought the complete edition), I was still missing context and having beats not land because apparently crucial backstory was meant to be told through the Lunafreya DLC that never got released because the game did poorly.
The game has a lot going for it. It just has a hard time sticking the landing in a lot of ways. Once you get to Altissa the entire story goes at breakneck speed (because apparently they expect you to put dramatic sequences on hold to mill around in the open world that you already left). There’s a lot of really cool story bits that just aren’t given the respect they deserve.
Lunafreya and Prompto are two that really stick out to me that should be huge moments that the game just skims past. (I didn’t play the DLC, so maybe Prompto’s DLC helps this. I also didn’t watch Brotherhood.)
Having said that, I liked the combat mostly. I like the magic system mostly. I like the summons mostly. I like the traversing mostly. Also, I meant to mention that I’m pretty sure you can drive the car despite what the other poster said. Playing the entire FF music catalog in the car was cool. I like the characters mostly.
It’s a mostly good game that could have been amazing with some better choices.
You can indeed drive the car, but you couldn’t on launch. You can even put on some monster truck off-road wheels, I think.
The Prompto thing is a perfect example of the game shipping as incomplete. I did as was apparently intended and stopped playing the main game when he disappeared for a bit to play his DLC, and it does give a much better context. The lines after he comes back would barely make sense if I hadn’t.
I can totally see why you wouldn’t like Snowrunner … I love it, and doing rescue missions to recover flipped trucks and struggling through hard terrain at a slow pace are the parts I like about it, lol
Please tell me you meant to say “squid,” and that there is a video demonstrating this. That’s hilarious.
Shit, that’s what happens when you’re sleep deprived and it’s nearly 3AM. I’ll leave it up like that for shits and giggles though.
I mean, squidding everywhere sounds like a reasonable descriptor if the truck has no traction.