Great games with one fatal flaw...

[Burrito With Legs]

Dead Island's fatal flaw was all of those freaking sewer sections. Those were boring and totally unnecessary, and the game was also buggy as heck.

 

[York_Beckett]

Tales of Symphonia

Honestly, it is a great game. It had great ideas, the world was expansive and the gameplay was very entertaining and fast-paced. It all worked incredibly well.

Here's my big problem with the game:

The characters. All of them (well, almost.)
Pretty much all of them just annoyed me or just made me facepalm. They were all either whiny, clumsy (because that's still funny and not overused at all), stupid, over-enthusiastic, emo or generic.
The only one I kind of liked was Regal. He had a good backstory which made him likeable and easy to sympathize with. Presea was also alright (from what I remember, which is very little), and she was voiced by Tara Strong. That's a bonus point.

Aside from that, it was all good and didn't make me stop playing. I guess that doesn't count.

 

[Kapol]

There's one game that wins this for me hands down. Advent Rising. I love the game. I loved the gameplay; I loved the story; I loved the setting. It's one game I consider a lost gem (for good reason, but I'll get to that). It was kinda like Mass Effect before Mass Effect in a lot of ways. And the cliffhanger ending made it worse since the sales were too bad to make another one.

There isn't anything about it I really didn't like... but one thing that ruined it all. The game was horribly glitchy. I'm talking worse then a Bethesda game on launch day level of glitches in the game. Bug after bug showed up. It's like the game had no real quality testing. It was enough where it almost made the game unplayable. Yet I still loved it.

Resident Evil 5 would have been insanely better if it was just Chris and no Sheva, at least if you played the game single player. Even this is nitpicking though and not a fatal flaw, but I seriously hated Sheva.

That's a good one. I honestly hate forced co-op in any game. It's one of the reasons I worry for ME 3 (that and the constant 'buy this and we'll give you DLC you can't get otherwise!'). Co-op added to a series is almost never good. But forced co-op like RE5 is especially bad.

Honestly, I could have lived with it if they'd fixed one more thing... make it so the companion AI isn't dumber then a box of freaking rocks. Seriously, playing through that game on the hardest difficulty on single player, where you would be downed in 1 or 2 hits, made it so bloody obvious. I get sent into the 'be healed or game over' state multiple times. My partner is filled with healing items because, let's face it, she's not good for anything else. She's standing right next to me. She does nothing and just watches me die. I destroy controller.

I can't think of a single instance where a single-player game has been improved by constantly having a companion with you whose sole purpose is to allow for a campaign that is doable in single player or co-op. It is especially bad in a series that didn't previously have co-op elements, like Resident Evil.

OT: Just about any game that has a serious difficulty spike will stop me from playing the game completely. It's not that I don't enjoy difficult games (I love Super Meat Boy), it's just that one super-difficult level totally disrupts the flow for me, and in most games if I die more than twice at one section I'll just stop playing. Metro 2033 is one game that I gave up on because of ridiculous difficulty spikes.

I agree with the difficulty spikes and the co-op points. Though I don't really remember any real difficulty spikes in Metro. Maybe that's just me.

I think inventory management could have used a bit of tweaking too. Why do I wear my body-armor and still have it taking up inventory space for example? Why is this golden egg taking up the same amount of space as my stacked up rocket ammo? Also, I thought the game was easily broken with the store that you visit between missions: Someone like me could have just kept doing the first level or two until they'd bought up the best weapons and ammo.

I would have prefered they kept RE4's inventory system. It worked much better. And the having an item in your inventory while equipped was annoying (though not uncommon for RE games as I remember RE4 had it as well).

 

[algalon]

Resident Evil 4. The second the game turned into babysitting is the second I stopped playing. Sheva can at least shoot back and duck for cover. Ashley can only eat bullets and my precious precious herbs.

 

[TheLogicalGamer]

Star Wars Battlefront 2:Removing maps. You guys who played it know what I'm talking about, all the great maps that got removed in the second game. I mean with all the jumps forward the series made it just didn't feel like Battlefront anymore.

On a side note, there are rumors about Battlefront 3, if they are true I will probably migrate to the consoles.

 

[Crazedc00k]

Neverwinter nights 2. Such an incredibly good game.

Yet so much crashing.

 

[DJDarque]

Let me first say I LOVE Resident Evil games. I have almost every single one their games. But my biggest personal pet peeve with ALL Resident Evil games is not being able to shoot and move at the same time. As technologically advanced as these games are, they're trying to tell me programming the characters to shoot and move and the same time is difficult? That's more retarded than trying to drown a fish under water....

This is my biggest pet peeve with any game ever, and I'm not even a huge Resident Evil fan.

 

[Keepitclean]

Far Cry 2

The thing that killed this game was how repetitive it was. It had great health, upgrade and weapon degeneration systems in an interesting landscape. The story wasn't half bad either, too bad it was broken up by hours of mindless driving and generic checkpoint fights. Awesome potential that was completely squandered.

 

[DustyDrB]

Metal Gear Solid series (with the exception of 4). The flaw - the controls. I'll be flamed and blasted for this but mgs controls are... garbage. Still love them though

Agreed on all points. I hate starting on a Metal Gear Solid game. It's just a struggle against the controls for a pretty long time. But I still love them as well.

 

[greatcheezer2021]

when i think flaw, i think back to Gears of War 1 multiplayer and the shotgun.

as for other games, XCom: Enemy Unknown was difficult as tits, even on beginner because the aliens were vastly superior in the end.

cant think of many flaws, i usually found a way around it or repressed the memory of it.

 

[Dandark]

Battlefield 3 and it's refusal to let me try it out in any way to see if I like it, would a demo or the ability to rent it of killed the game EA? I mean really?

Also Bad company 2. I loved the first bad company but the multiplayer in 2 was ruined in my opinion by the damn perks or whatever they called them. They pretty much looked at COD then tried to copy it. The result?
I got the game late and everybody had leveled up and did more damage, had better weapons and equipment etc

I played the beta for BF3 and it seemed that they had made that crap even worse which is what makes me question getting it.
That would probably be what I hate most actully, multiplayer games where being a higher level gives you great big gameplay advantages because how dare you be new at our game and try to enjoy it.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Tomb Raider Anniversary was really good but the grapple ruined it completely. Not sure how that got past testing. I would have just left it out.

 

[dagens24]

The shinning example of this; The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass. After my 6 or 7th time running through the same dungeon again, I couldn't do it anymore. It's the only modern Zelda game (since OoT) that I haven't beaten and probably never will.

 

[xPixelatedx]

Battlefield 3 didn't quite sit right with me. Everything about the game more or less worked, but aside from things like the claymores and maybe one or two other devices/vehicles, there just doesn't seem to be much fun to have in this game. I have maxed out all the classes and got my eagle medal, played some amazing games and basically have a 3.0 K/D ratio. So please don't tell me I didn't 'play it enough' or 'play it right'. No, it was just an experience that was lacking, especially after Bad Company 2. But I guess Bad Company is all about fun when compared to it's more straight faced cousin, eh? Battlefield 3 just felt like the functional bare-bones skeleton of a good game that has yet to be made. Every map and level just looks so... plain and boring. They all meet the qualifications to be the environment they are trying to depict, but it has ZERO artistic flare. That rubs me the wrong way. I much preferred the maps of Bad company 1 and 2 which were more exaggerations of real locations made to be more fun then realistic. Battlefield 3 is a functional game, a very functional game... but just a functional game. I can't really say anything more about... I just imagine that if computers ever get to the point where they can auto-generate games, this is exactly the type of thing we will be seeing more of. Stale yet flawless functionality. Meh..

 

[Lord Mountbatten Reborn]

Morrowind and the first two Fallout games have the same problems for me. I can't get into them because I can't stand the combat systems. Dice roll combat doesn't bother me for something like KotOR or Planescape: Torment, but it feels even weirder in Morrowind when you're hitting something in first person, right in the face, and it won't die.

 

[Ziame]

Battlefield 3. Major flaw? Mostly indestructible maps. WTF DICE? You kiddin?

And then they release an expansion pack which has maps that have much destruction. Jump on cash, much?

Besides, I still say BF3 is worse than BC2. Period.

 

[Meight08]

The stealth sections in metro 2033 and the human ai that comes with it.
I shoot one guy with a silenced rifle and everybody knows where i am immediatly
Oh and the librarians you go for a long surface mission and you dont even get to buy filters THE FUCK!
How must i do the librarians with just 9 filters!?

 

[ChaosStep]

Resident Evil 5 would have been insanely better if it was just Chris and no Sheva, at least if you played the game single player. Even this is nitpicking though and not a fatal flaw, but I seriously hated Sheva.

Let me first say I LOVE Resident Evil games. I have almost every single one their games. But my biggest personal pet peeve with ALL Resident Evil games is not being able to shoot and move at the same time. As technologically advanced as these games are, they're trying to tell me programming the characters to shoot and move and the same time is difficult? That's more retarded than trying to drown a fish under water....

I can double whammy Resident Evil Revelations here. You play as several different characters but they ALL have a co-op partner, every one of them. So that's also my current peeve with a good game with one flaw.

BUT! With the inclusion of the Circle Pad Pro, you can move and shoot. MOVE and SHOOT!

I really do hate NPC partners in games. Even if the game isn't all that special to begin with. But I can kind of imagine Prince of Persia (2008) would have been a little better had they ditched the girl.

And a game like Ico, which completely depended on it. They could have at least fixed the AI a wee bit when they re-released it. When you call on Yorda when she's climbing a big ass ladder and she decided to climb all the f-cking way back down again. Controller snapping.

Kane and Lynch 2 though, perfectly fine.

 

[Mister K]

Resident Evil 5 would have been insanely better if it was just Chris and no Sheva, at least if you played the game single player. Even this is nitpicking though and not a fatal flaw, but I seriously hated Sheva.

This , so much this .

Also : dragon age 2 if it had a better story , everything else i kinda liked.

Hm, I don't know. DA2 Story seems pretty good to me.

On-Topic: Final Fantasy X is great, but gaining sun and saturn sigils was pretty darn frustrating.