Criticize Your All Time Favorite Game...HARSHLY

[Ragsnstitches]

System Shock 2:

Looks like Ass. Even in its day it had an ugliness to it.

The game gives you absolutely no rope to work with. Levelling, stat assigning and specialisation are all things I learned on my second run through. This consequently made the game ludicrously difficult. Couple this with genuine horror elements, the game was pretty stressful.

Inventory and HUD controls were wonky.

Repair and Maintenance of guns, while thematically sound (survival elements go hand in hand with horror) it's execution is just irritating. Weapons break way too fast and the degradation of effectiveness makes experimenting with other weapons pointless.

Energy weapons aren't particularly useful but demand high stats to use properly.

Same for exotic weapons... aside from the Crystal Shard, the exotic weapons are just poorly designed both mechanically and aesthetically. Even worse, they require heavy research investments to make use of. Reward for such investment is painfully underwhelming (especially since it has a "insta-kill the player" function built in).

The game is a nightmare to get running on modern rigs.

Has a tendency to bug out, even some cases of save corruptions. Can get pretty stressful.

psiamp has a ton of functions that are practically useless.

The spiders in the game are nightmare inducing... especially the ones that ARE FUCKING INVISIBLE. Damn you Looking Glass/Irrational.

That's all I can think of... and now I want to reinstall it.

Captcha: "Have Fun"... it knows what I'm in for.

 

[NickKuroshi0]

Disgaea
-longest grind of any game ever
-easy to overpower characters, reducing strategy later on in the game (excluding certain battles)
-enemies sometimes work against each other

 

[elilupe]

I have a few favorites:

Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2:
1.The story, at least once you get into the Organization XIII stuff in the second game, is INCREDIBLY convoluted, and a lot of it was really not needed.
2.Many of the in-engine(non-CG) cutscenes are really awkward, with strange pauses and sometimes bad dialogue.
3.Gummi-ships, how could I leave these babies out. The Gummi ship sections of both games, though they were improved in 2, were not needed and felt like a completely different, less imaginative game.

Shadow of the Colossus:
1.I...um...uhh...The Colossi near the end of the game were kind of hard to find?

MGS 3:
1.The dialogue was really over-wrought. Many things were said in cutscenes that did not need to be said.
2.The controls are really complicated. Of course, you can do many different and nuanced things with the controls, but upon trying to explain them to someone completely new to the series, I realized just how many buttons do how many things.

 

[SlaveNumber23]

League of Legends:

1. The AI is really bad. Like really, really, really terribly awful. Not really a problem though since the vast majority of the time you are playing with humans.

2. The graphics and art style are disgusting. Very unappealing and desperately needs a face lift.

3. Has the worst online community I've ever had the misfortune of playing with.

4. Devours your wallet with no remorse.

5. Developers are unable to iron out all of the balance issues, while they simultaneously create new ones.

6. It can really fuck up your academic and social life, pretty much the gaming version of crack.

 

[Suncatcher]

Morrowind:
Best graphics the year 2000 had to offer.
Combat mechanics are, quite frankly, shit.
Bugs everywhere.
Spellcrafting and alchemy horrendously broken.
Enemy AI is just kinda stupid.

Skyrim:
Simply removed things that were broke in older games instead of fixing them.
Oversimplified stats.
Removal of anything that varies mobility to allow for...
Over-scripted dungeons instead of playing freeform.
Without heavy modding magic is useless after level 25.
Clearly built for an xbox; UI is terrible on pc until heavily modded.
DLC comes late for anyone but xbox.
Invisible walls everywhere.

Mass Effect:
Hordes of guns that are not-quite-identical; most are useless.
Looks like mud.
Spends hours on repetitive, poorly written sidequests or skips half the game.
Classes that manage to be too complex to be fun to build up and yet too similar to each other to yield significantly different playstyles.
Clumsy dialogue.

ME2:
Cuts things down too far in order to act like a normal shooter.
Planet mining.
Lots of DLC that you can't get except straight from EA's shitty distribution system.

ME3:
[long and expletive filled rant redacted]
(Basically, the 90% they didn't fuck up is one of the best games I've played in a long while and I love it. But that remaining 10% is so bad I can't bring myself to do a second playthrough)

Fallout 1+2:
Buggy as all hell, often to nonfunctionality.
Shit for graphics and controls.

Fallout 3:
Sacrifices scope and immersiveness for a lackluster main quest.
Tiny population.
Throws out logic and tries to have a 'just after the apocalypse' feel with nothing having been rebuilt and the economy based on salvage over a century after that would stop being viable.
Lower quality writing than the rest of the series.
Buggy as all hell.

Fallout NV:
Sacrifices main story and protagonist for scope and immersiveness of the world.
Buggy, though not as much as the others in the series after patching.

XCOM (1994):
Terrible graphics, terrible controls.
Oscillates between being torn apart relentlessly and tearing them apart relentlessly with little middle ground.
Overly complicates logistics.
An average recruit has a tendency to miss the huge target five feet away and headshot half your squad.
Difficulty settings are borked.

XCOM (2012):
Overly simplifies logistics.
Simpler controls sharply limit options in combat (blasting down walls and such).
Difficulty setting skip from crippled AI and significant tactical bonuses to the computer being a cheating bastard, with no 'fair fight' option in between.

 

[Yabba]

Halo 3

Short campaign
Terrible online community
limited gun choice

FNV:

Small area to explore compared to F3 and the map actually includes more than what you can explore
No playing after ending
Black and white moral statues for NCR and legion

 

[Gardenia]

Fallout 2:
The bugs, OH GOD THE BUGS!
Horribly unbalanced skill system with small guns being miles better than the other combat skills.
The menu system for companions is horrible, and their AI is bad.

 

[Padwolf]

Silent Hill 2:

I love you, I really do but goddamn your camera is annoying sometimes. I understand why it's bad, I understand it adds to it all, but it's still annoying. James, why must you stick your hand into random holes?! Have you not seen enough around town to know that sticking your hand into a hole you can't see into is bad?! I can't find much to judge

Fallout 3:

Bugs. I want to love you, PC version, but I'm finding it hard. My XBOX version never froze once, it never had an issue. But PC version... just damn. Three Dog's voice does become slightly annoying after a while. I just want more music, there isn't enough music!

L.A Noire:

So there I am driving to my next case, when suddenly the radio goes off, there is a disturbance and it's apparently in the area I'm in. I take the call, I say it's no problem, I can get there within seconds. But no. I can't. It's on the other damn side of town! I'm nowhere near that! Nowhere near at all! So I have to go all the way to the other side of town, then drive all the way back to get to my next case. It ruins my damn game mood! And then when I get to the disturbance it's barely anything at all.

Also the end. I get we are trying to go with a noire theme here but that was just something else. It was such an amazing game, I wish it didn't end that way. Not that it was a bad ending, just that I felt it was rather sudden.

Rune Factory Frontier:

The Runey's are killing my crops! Where was the explanation for this?! Hell where is the explanation for anything in this game?! Why is marriage so impossible?! What the hell is the runey system? What the hell do I have to do in this game?

The Darkness 2:

Why are you so damn short?! I love you so much. So very much. But damn that was too short.

 

[minispike47]

Summoner

-Graphics are poor, even for the time of release
-Combat is pretty bad
-The quest log is the worst thing ever to be created by mankind. It might be a bug but because i'm pretty sure its meant to update itself. I have forgotten where I was meant to go and spent 2 hours walking round Lenelle looking for the quest-giver.
-There are about 10 character models

Despite its faults I can't hate it.

 

[Darren716]

Bioshock
-Arcadia
-The collection quest to make the gas that will save the trees
-The little sister escort section
-Bioshock 2

 

[bananafishtoday]

Final Fantasy 6

-First off, the bugs that (I assume) have been fixed in re-releases, but we're talking about the original. Vanish-doom, nothing more needs to be said about that. Psycho Cyan, same. Evade literally does nothing; magic evade is used for dodging physical and magical attacks. Totally destroys item balance since you can ignore evade and stack mevade. Banon's infinite heal plus an infinite loop on the raft section lets you powerlevel by putting a stack of quarters on the A button and walking away. Relm's Sketch can literally destroy the game by glitching your inventory or deleting your saves, though it can also give you 200 of every item.

-On the topic of Sketch, character abilities. Sketch is useless, Runic is useless, Steal is useless without GameFaqs telling you what to steal from, SwrdTech is useless, Rage is OP, Morph is OP, tools are OP early game. Osmose is gamebreakingly OP. With infinite mana, nothing stops your from using your strongest abilities every turn on every enemy. Wallchange would be cool if I couldn't just use flare every turn, Ultima would be scary if I couldn't just Life 3. Etc.

-Combat as a whole is too easy to exploit. Espers giving bonus stats on level up is a horrible mechanic. The optimal way to do it is to always get +2 magic attack, so you're constantly checking how much exp you need to level, switching a +2 matk esper on, leveling, switching it off. Besides being obnoxious as hell, this makes the 9999 damage cap too easy to hit, especially since with osmose you can always use your best magic. So everything devolves to hitting as much as possible. Quick, gengi glove, gem box, etc. That's if you're not already unstoppable, which you should be. The mevade thing means your whole party can be nigh-invulnerable by their mid-30s. The Floating Continent is the game's last real challenge.

-FF6 came out a year before GameFaqs. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume GameFaqs came out because of FF6. So much of the game is stuff no one would ever figure out on their own. Cursed->Paladin Shield, Relm's best gear, the whole Colosseum, Gau and Strago's skills, the imp set, Zone Eater, saving Shadow, etc etc. Too much of the game's content is impossible to find/understand without a guide.

-The illusion of choice is annoying when it crops up. Terra can reject joining the Returners three times, after which she's forced to join anyway. The Cid fish thing should just have ended the bad way every time. I doubt anyone chose the Golden Hairpin over Mog.

-Sprint Shoes are stupid. Normal move speed is achingly slow, but Sprint Shoes waste a relic slot and turn you into the goddamn Flash.

But now I'm nitpicking. Granted, maybe the combat seems so easy to exploit because I've played the game so many times. I first played FF6 when I was 7 years old, and I still replay it every now and then because it's just so damn good. One of my favorite games of all time.

 

[Madara XIII]

Bioshock
-Arcadia
-The collection quest to make the gas that will save the trees
-The little sister escort section
-Bioshock 2

I personally think my most hated sidequest was the Bee Quest. That was just so damn annoying and frantic

 

[Nonomori]

I only agree with "color pallet is very limited". Wander can endure the majority of falls, and you can jump and grab Agro. But maybe that's because this is one of the few games that I learned to play very well.

A few more:

-The fifteenth colossus is quite buggy.
-Time attack has inconsistent difficulty.
-Radar for fruits and lizards are quite inaccurate.
-So much pop-in.

I think is a far better critique than the previous poster, but I have to ask, how is the 15th colossus bugged? In my 10+ play throughs I never ran into any issues.

It's hard to explain, but sometimes he just stands there with black eyes, or repeatedly attacks someone invisible on the other side of the arena. It happened to me several times in the PS2 and PS3 versions.

 

[Madara XIII]

I only agree with "color pallet is very limited". Wander can endure the majority of falls, and you can jump and grab Agro. But maybe that's because this is one of the few games that I learned to play very well.

A few more:

-The fifteenth colossus is quite buggy.
-Time attack has inconsistent difficulty.
-Radar for fruits and lizards are quite inaccurate.
-So much pop-in.

I think is a far better critique than the previous poster, but I have to ask, how is the 15th colossus bugged? In my 10+ play throughs I never ran into any issues.

It's hard to explain, but sometimes he just stands there with black eyes, or repeatedly attacks someone invisible on the other side of the arena. It happened to me several times in the PS2 and PS3 versions.

Oh that kind of Bug. Yeah. It's happened rather frequently in the HD collection of Shadow of the Colossus. I had a personal hate for the 11th one though on how it was just so unfair if you got hit once.

You'd have about half a second to move as soon as you got up before getting gored by that damn bull