That game isn't hard, you're just stupid. No. Really.

[Ionait]

My husband and I recently went on a "let's beat all of those old games we've never finished!" kick. So I just finished Persona 4. Still feelin' it, I immediately loaded up my three year old Persona 3 saved file. I clicked through the status menus and whatnot to get a feel for where I had left off. Oh my god. I felt like an investigator on a crime scene.

The Persona I was using didn't make any sense. It should have become absolutely useless 15 or 20 levels ago. The social links I had chosen to upgrade were huge wastes of time and I even had a couple of them in "reverse" status which means I made a lot of NPCs pissed at me. I could go on, but, I won't.

Suffice to say, I chose to restart the game, despite having invested almost 100 hours into it (so my save file said). I am finding the game is much, much, easier than my memories made it out to be. I can look back and only say that, really, I had been playing it wrong. This isn't a term I believed in until now, but, yeah. I was stupid three years ago, that is for sure.

Are there any games you've gone back and picked up again only to realize your years younger gamer self really hadn't "got" it?

 

[Meatman]

Viva Pinyata

 

[random_bars]

Yeah, Brutal Legend. When I played it first off I thought of it the way a lot of people seemed to: nice looking and pretty well written, but with kind of bad gameplay. Specifically, an RTS element which didn't fit in with everything else, which was way too hard, had no way of controlling troops properly, no strategy, was boring, and made me want to throw my controller out the window when I failed a mission after half an hour of struggling and had to start from the beginning.

Then I lent it to a friend, became interested in the multiplayer, got it back, and gave it a shot. And like you, I realized that I had been playing the game completely wrong - treating it like a typical RTS and pretending I was a mouse cursor, flying in the air the whole time instead of taking part in the battle, and completely neglecting most of the attacks and spells I had available. Now? It's one of my favourite games ever and I play the multiplayer all the time.

 

[Irony's Acolyte]

Ocarina of Time
It took me quite a while to beat that when I was a kid. Alot of the puzzles seemed hard, as well as the timing for certain events. Went back to it several months ago and breezed through a large portion of it.

 

[Tony2077]

i feel that way for every game i play even now i think i'm stupid thats why i don't play online that much

 

[Gxas]

Pokémon

I look back at all of my old teams and see just mounds and mounds of legendaries. So sad...

 

[cryogeist]

final fantasy tactics i couldnt even figure out the controls but know that i know and im kicking ass at it

 

[ThatLankyBastard]

Pokemon...

Rare Candies make your Pokemon suck!

... and it took me 4 years to realize that...

*cries*

 

[Mallefunction]

I find it the opposite XD I am having much more trouble with Sands of Time now than I ever did when I first got the game. I've been spoiled by modern controls (camera angle especially) so going back even to just PS2 games is difficult for me.

 

[VaudevillianVeteran]

Fable 2. I never got into the whole house investment thing and now, I had no idea how stupid I was. The same goes for Fallout 3, apparently the whole 'repairing' thing was lost on me before.

 

[Realitycrash]

Dragon Age. I picked a Warrior as my DPS char, Alastair as tank, Morrigan as Shapeshifter-DPS andhad that old lady what's-her-name as healer.
It was horrible. Wiped on pretty much every occasion.
Rerolled a mage, specced into glyphing and Manaclask. Facerolled everything in the entire game.

Then again, Mages were so sadly OP in Dragon Age.

 

[Jamboxdotcom]

the first MMO i spent much time on was Shadowbane. in case you don't know, it was a 95% pvp-based MMO (i.e. moreso than EVE). i made a dual throwing dagger Scout. now, keep in mind that Shadowbane was also horribly unbalanced. but even then, throwing daggers was not an optimal spec for Scouts (they were best with bows). i got in a few arguments with people over it, but eventually changed to a bow spec.

in hindsight, i was an enormous jackass n00b. although, to be fair, i was actually a noob. now i look back and laugh. i was doing the same thing i later bitched people out about in FFXI and WoW.

 

[Thunderhorse31]

That happened to me back in the day with the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. For some reason my 11-year-old self could NOT wrap my head around the light-dark mechanic. A few years later I popped it in and blew through it in a matter of hours. Had similar experiences with other SNES games (Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, etc.), I can't even remember why I played so many games that were so damned difficult at the time.

 

[Nokterne]

Singleplayer games in general have been getting easier as I get older, especially the ones I finished that I end up playing over again years later.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

FFVII, I was only 9 at the time and being Greek my English wasn't up to snuff yet thus I didn't understand any of the story and got stuck in the swamp that you needed to get a chocobo to cross.


I thought you had to beat that huge snake...which you're really not supposed to be able to do. I remember beating it once at the expense of all of my items and magic...and you know what happens when you beat it? It freaking respawns!


After that I just quit the game for years but after FFVIII making me love rpgs all over again and since I was old enough to be able to play a story-heavy game in a foreign language (around age 13 or so) I gave it another go and it was great.

 

[TiefBlau]

Pokemon...

Rare Candies make your Pokemon suck!

... and it took me 4 years to realize that...

*cries*

Short-term benefit over long-term nerd tears.

I curse my child self.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Pokemon...

Rare Candies make your Pokemon suck!

... and it took me 4 years to realize that...

*cries*

Short-term benefit over long-term nerd tears.

I curse my child self.

Rare Candies don't make your pokemons suck though, they just don't give them effort points. If you max them out first and then feed them rare candies they'd be identical to if you just trained them without, all the way to 100.


Also, a rare candy to evolve something or to make it learn and awesome move which only a first form learns but not an evolution is a great way of using rare candies, they're really versatile.

 

[Kirkby]

Black and White! My god i sucked at that game when it first came out, i thought fireballs where the answer to every question...

 

[BVBFanatic]

Snake's Revenge.

 

[SageRuffin]

Sonic Adventure for me. I thought getting all the emblems was the hardest thing in the world. Got the game last year for my 360, noticed a few things here, some nuances there, and now I get to smoke with the big boys that also had all the emblems completed.

Now, to effectively raise my chao so that they're all awesome-like...