Taking all the power-ups in 2 player co-op is absolute banter though. Especially in games where there's a limit and gettimg more power ups just gives you points (or nothing)
Don't really know one. I like getting used to the unique quirks and design decisions of any game. However...
Over the top weapon degradation. Like I can live with it being present, but don't destroy my fricking weapon after 15 shots.
Those two remind me of Castlevania the Adventure, which took away your whip upgrade (you can have up to two) if you got hit. So if you have the fully upgraded whip and get hit twice, you're gonna be back to using the very weak one. It definitely makes the game a bit obnoxious, especially since the controls are also not very good.
For a second there I thought it's some complex metaphor, like preparing to play the game, setting up your system = driving towards the fun. Really took me some time to connect the dots.
I guess if you''re going to play 16-bit Outrun, you'll be mega driving to the fun. Like, literally.
Are you really going to tell me that System Shock 2 is reasonable in this regard? I know it showers you with maintenance tools, but this makes it even more dumb.
[...]
I might be wrong in that case, was it later GTAs they introduced tap to sprint? I know a few PS2 era games had it and I hated it though.
In ps2 games you can both walk or jog on the analog and hold A to sprint, but starting with 4 analog is only used for walking and you hold A to jog and tap it to sprint. funny enough they did bring back ps2 style controls in max payne 3 only.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Can you sprint forever like that in 4? in PC there is no tapping and you can only sprint for a bit until you start jogging
I quickly tire of playing Rockstar games that have this fricking dogshit mechanic. Hustle run at grandma speeds unless you button mash, to quote avgn, what were they thinking?
Not a mechanic, but that part in Shenmue where you drive a forklift everyday made me dumbfounded. I was just standing there hoping there was some else with me to witness this shit.
Of course now it's a big joke in the community but i will never forget how it made me feel just in awe of the utter lack of fun.
It truly is mind-numbing but kind of in a fascinating way. No other video game has ever made me truly feel like I was 17 again going to shitty warehouse jobs like that portion of Shenmue. It's so fricking boring and I found myself daydreaming the entire time in the very same way I did back at those shitty summer jobs. I love really genuinely love Shenmue after playing it for the first time two years ago but I think I'd struggle to get through that section of it again. It's 5 in game days but it feels like 4 hours. What a game
It truly is mind-numbing but kind of in a fascinating way. No other video game has ever made me truly feel like I was 17 again going to shitty warehouse jobs like that portion of Shenmue. It's so fricking boring and I found myself daydreaming the entire time in the very same way I did back at those shitty summer jobs. I love really genuinely love Shenmue after playing it for the first time two years ago but I think I'd struggle to get through that section of it again. It's 5 in game days but it feels like 4 hours. What a game
I'm sorry you lead terrible lives and didn't find this entertaining. Maybe you should have tried playing the game with friends.
The soul eating mechanic in Mask of the Betrayer. I tried to go the evil route so that you can feed on humans, but there's only 2 specific ways to complete the quest that gives you that power and I locked myself out of both of them before taking the quest - even though the location of the quest is adjacent to a female npc living alone on a farmstead a stone's throw away! (You can't feed her to the ape-men because she's actually part of another quest.)
I thought that was really dumb. I get the game putting limits on you but I found there was no upside, hence no fun.
This and long intros and opening segments in JRPGs.
One of the best things about Dragon Quest VIII is that is opens almost immediately with a fight and provides just the tiniest bit of exposition as to who your characters are and what the overall plot is. You don't get a detailed account of what happened at the beginning of the story until you're well into the game, and by this point you are invested in what is going on so you actually want to see it. This is so much better than most games.
>no dude the game doesn’t suck just wait 6 more hours until it gets fun
If a developer can not make their game entertaining for fun for me in the first hour then I will not be playing their garbage ass game
Since Deus Ex is on screen I'm going to go with skill bloat and useless RPG skills in general. A lot of the skill choices don't make any sense in the context of the story, you're supposed to be a human bio weapon trained by a secret anti terrorist organization, but it's possible that you don't know how to swim or use a pistol?
With Deus Ex you can pick what you're proficient with at the start at least and unlike most games with tacked on RPG shit it's done in a way that makes sense. One thing I can't stand about modern games are skill trees or upgrades that is some inane crap like .005% movement speed while reloading.
You can, but why would you ever pick something like environmental training or electronics? Even upgrading them later in the game is pointless since you can find scuba gear and hazmat suits lying around the bases. You also have EMP grenades and the GEP gun for any robot guards.
Environmental Training is actually a really strong combat skill because it boosts the power of the damage reduction armor and the duration of the stealth camo by a ton. You can be near immortal because of skill investment in it if you use those for the right fights/areas.
Electronics is for electronic locks, why is this one even in contention? You can't blow those up like with physical locks so it's good to have, otherwise you won't have enough multitools to go everywhere in levels.
Physical lockpicking and swimming are low-priority skills that you could say are semi-useless but you still wind up in situations where you'd benefit from them. Medicine is the real true "never take this" skill.
Environmental Training is actually a really strong combat skill because it boosts the power of the damage reduction armor and the duration of the stealth camo by a ton. You can be near immortal because of skill investment in it if you use those for the right fights/areas.
Electronics is for electronic locks, why is this one even in contention? You can't blow those up like with physical locks so it's good to have, otherwise you won't have enough multitools to go everywhere in levels.
Physical lockpicking and swimming are low-priority skills that you could say are semi-useless but you still wind up in situations where you'd benefit from them. Medicine is the real true "never take this" skill.
This is the genius of Deus Ex. All this time later and it exposes who does and does not think outside the box.
This isn't about "thinking outside the box" it's about the skill choices making no sense in the setting. I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to J.C's augments having to be activated, but I can't when it comes to a supposedly trained black ops agent not knowing how to swim, or aim his gun. I think the skills are one of the very few things Invisible War did better.
the RPG aspects of deus ex always felt shoehorned in, the game would be better if it was done away with and more attention was paid to the augmentations
You are a rookie fresh out of the academy, the partner you are assigned by UNATCO is supposed to introduce you to the field.
Your success is attributed to your talent as an agent who can "think outside the box" and your ability to solve problems, not your augs or training. That's why the gameplay is about using different approaches to a situation, you can use superior gun skills to massacre the enemy, but you can also sneak in a ventilation shaft, swim through a canal, bribe a street urchin with candy for a keypad password and lockpick doors to achieve the same goal
The setting doesn't make sense to you because you got it all wrong - the story does talk about JC and Paul's augs and JC's swiss school training but Manderley/Carter/Tong/Everett praise you both mainly because you are brilliant operators in the field
11 months ago
Anonymous
So the idea is that skills you choose are options J.C has at his disposal, rather than what he's actually capable of? My version of J.C might use stealth to sneak up on terrorists before gutting them like a fish, where as someone else's J.C might use his augs to tank bullets and blast through any terrorists in his way. If so, that makes far more sense than what I was picturing.
Stupid hard jumps that kill you if you miss. Why have a health bar if you're going to include jumps that require pixel perfect precision and just drain all your lives?
Off hand I can name the enemy health scaling in Ratchet and Clank 2 that made early game weapons useless in the late game because the devs didn't want people using the same guns for the entire game for no real reason
I remember beating the first ratchet and clank with primarily using the blaster cannon you get in like the second or third planet
the electricity gun was just a direct improvement over the flamethrower tbh
Games that have an open world and force you to travel from mission to mission. Completely kills the flow of the game and disrupts your investment in the narrative. Games like The Getaway and the Driver series have it right. Missions are back-to-back but the open world is there for you to dick around in if you'd like.
having to stand still to shoot your gun, god if it isnt inconvinient for most shootouts.
the only mechanic that can be as annoying as this one is being forced into only being able to shoot by your side windows, makes the vigilante side mission really bothersome
Flying enemies with knockback over a pit that infinitely respawn as soon as you scroll the screen even a millimeter off their spawn point and then being it back into view.
The random damage scaling in Blood 2. Just completely brundlefricks the entire game, your weapons will shift anywhere from half decent damage to obnoxiously underpowered, usually trending towards the weak side. This means your most powerful weapons are mostly gimped, and that any remotely durable enemy is going to be an unbearable grind.
I know the game is unfinished and otherwise packed with a lot of other bad design, but GOD, why would you ever think this would be a good thing to implement?
Fricking. Long. Unskippable. Fricking. Cutscenes. >when my life is over and brain is dissected it will disgorge all the decades old pent up rage brought on by early fmv games
1. R-Type does not send you back to the start of the level
2. There is always force pickup at a midpoint to shield yourself with
3, Charge shot is insanely powerful, you can 1shot most enemies with it
Diagnosis: skill issue
strips you from all weapons and puts you at the start of the level >Might as well remove lives completely
Haven't played that one, but yes, I don't get the mentality in general behind games that if you die make you retry what you failed at but with all your upgrades gone.
Bitch, I just failed WITH upgrades, what makes you think I will have a better chance without them?
I've never found R-type as punishing as gradius. With gradius in the later stages if you die it's game over since your ship is always so slow and it takes too long to power up.
Literal skill issue. It incentivizes you to not die and get better at the game, instead of just brute forcing through it like a dumb fricking zoomer who just wants to mark the game down on his "beat it" checklist and move on.
NTA but I think the point was that if the game punishes you so severely for using extra lives, then why have them instead of just having an instant game over upon death? Wouldn't the latter be as much of an incentive to git gud?
Oh man, yes. And that one stage where it gets incredibly fast. You HAVE to have speed ups to keep up with the stage and if you die once it just starts you off from a check point going 500 miles per hour and you have no speed ups so you just fly into the wall. Might as well restart the fricking game at that point.
Enemy devil trigger in DMC3 DMD difficulty being tied to the amount of enemies killed (and not a timer like it claims) is pretty miserable for a variety of reasons.
Any loss condition that isn't "I can't solve the puzzle and give up" in puzzle/adventure games are also generally horrible, unless you only lose progress on the puzzle that caused the game over.
Its whatever in Megaman except the ones where the Final Boss is the same stage as the gauntlet, like X4. So you can't even practice the final boss without doing the damn gauntlet every time you game over.
>Having to rematch a gauntlet of bosses near the end of the game. Peak laziness. Frick Mega Man for making that a tradition.
The only time I find this acceptable is in games where you can significantly level up and/or or have significantly better gear by then, so that it's not so much a gauntlet or challenge but more of a curb-stomp battle showing how much stronger you now are than all these old bosses that used to be a challenge as well as show just how powerful the last boss that hopefully is still a challenge is compared to anything else you have faced before (not counting any secret optional super-bosses)
>Semi-retro.
A lot of things from the PSP remake of Tactics Ogre, but the biggest one is leveling up skills you can mix around like FFV or FFT unless you have the Lord class. >Retro.
-Passwords not saving the retries and currency you have at that point.
-Hardest difficulty not available right off the bat.
-Having a shit tonne of status abilities but most of them aren't useful on mosters nor bosses, unless it's a very specific fight where that's a feature. And, of course, your party falls to these status effects 100% of the time unless you have equipment that nulls them.
>Hardest difficulty not available right off the bat.
Umm... many modern games STILL pull that.
>Having a shit tonne of status abilities but most of them aren't useful on mosters nor bosses, unless it's a very specific fight where that's a feature. And, of course, your party falls to these status effects 100% of the time unless you have equipment that nulls them.
Ditto
>items that are exclusive to stealing from enemies
why can't they just fricking drop them?
that are exclusive to stealing from enemies >why can't they just fricking drop them?
I'll do you one better (worse): very important items that are exclusive to stealing from a one-time boss.
FRICK you Final Fantasy 8 for hiding a SUMMON of all fricking things as an item you have to steal from one of the first bosses in the game, a summon that gives you the ability to lower the game's annoyingly high random encounter rate no less. There are several other steal-from-a-boss-only summons like this as well if I remember correctly.
Yes, you will get a second chance to get them RIGHT IN THE FINAL AREA SHORTLY BEFORE THE LAST BOSS but they are mostly completely useless by that point, as well as good fricking luck leveling them up in the final area because 99% of the game is closed off by that point, which makes the lower encounter rate one especially useless to get there, not to mention there is no point since you are about to finish the game anyway by then.
at least in FF8 you just have to draw everything from the boss and you get them first try (for spells it can fails but not for summon i think),stealing items like in FF7 or 9 can take fricking forever.
FF9 (Or one of the FFs, can't remember which) was worse in this regard, you had to steal an item from a boss to get it, but you had a very high chance to steal a common item from a boss instead, after which you can't get the rare item without a reset. So not only do you have like a 1/32 chance to successfully steal something, after tanking all that damage and wasting all that time you have to reset because you didn't get the 1/16 chance of getting the item you wanted.
More than just being tedious, without knowing that's a thing beforehand you could easily assume your first successful steal was the only item an enemy had and just continue on without seeing some rare, important item that changes the game drastically.
>Semi-retro.
A lot of things from the PSP remake of Tactics Ogre, but the biggest one is leveling up skills you can mix around like FFV or FFT unless you have the Lord class. >Retro.
-Passwords not saving the retries and currency you have at that point.
-Hardest difficulty not available right off the bat.
-Having a shit tonne of status abilities but most of them aren't useful on mosters nor bosses, unless it's a very specific fight where that's a feature. And, of course, your party falls to these status effects 100% of the time unless you have equipment that nulls them.
Any mission that requires you to guard a fragile item that's in the open or useless brain dead npc for X mins as the enemy waves from front, behind, side, above, below and from past/future time.
Also you get little to no health refill over that time
I always found it funny how the crash bandicoot games try giving you extra free masks if you die too much, even though like 100% of the time if a level is hard it's because it's full of death pits that masks do jack shit to protect you from.
I guess just having points and items that give you points and nothing else is very anti-fun. It only makes sense on very old repetitive arcade games with little progression like Space Invaders, Pac Man and Donkey Kong. All that useless secret treasure in Wolf 3D is crap.
Dark Cloud is such a wonderful game. It's a game I can imagine the UI for building and my brain has stored the clicks and clacks it makes as you slot items into slots and plop things down.
Oh well, the post was deleted as I was replying to it, I just wanted to talk about Dark Clouds UI.
Noone knows what anti-fun really is until they've played this RPG
>start the game near the starting village >enter village, talk to an NPC >get beaten up, thrown out of the place, money and gear gone
at this point you can't do anything but reset, but it's still the start of the game so no biggie
>your main mean of attack is a dragon you raise >you start the game with just an egg >the type of dragon and its strength depends on how you play while you have the egg >shit is so hard it's pretty much impossible not to flee from all battles until the egg has hatched and therefore end up with the worst kind of dragon
>reach a nursery to put the dragon in to hatch it and make it stronger >shit needs money and items >without the dragon even the easiest enemies are are so hard it's basically impossible to raise money with the cost of healing >make a SINGLE step out of of the a narrow path and you end up facing later tries enemies that will kill you in one hit anyway and you lose stuff again
>so, the game has a money borrowing mechanic, try it >after just a couple days if you haven't returned the money, the loan sharks will come beat you up in your sleep, steal all your stuff and leave you naked again >sleep which also auto-save the game so your save is now fricked
start from scratch again, get to the same point >turns out you can also battle the loan guy and if you win, steal the money from the chest >yeah finally I'm getting somewhere and got my revenge on those frickers! >turns out the loan sharks still come frick you up in your sleep
being able to lose your progression items in mundane ways such as dropping them or getting pickpocketed and then not being able to recover them at all essentially softlocking yourself
>was playing Suikoden 1 and having a really good time >get to first war
And then the game went from beloved JRPG to a game that I was surprised was held to any esteem. >rock paper scissors combat >no way to predict enemy faction >party members can randomly die if you choose wrong >finally get done with it >fight a tough boss >then fight the final boss of the area >more rock paper scissors combat
Why… why would they do this? It’s the most anti-fun thing I’ve ever seen in a game. Perhaps if there was no punishment for it, but you have a random chance of picking wrong and losing one of your most useful characters permanently. What made them think that was fun?
>rock-paper-scissors combat
Fate extra on PSP took that to the next level. Worst combat system in history of rpgs. The enemies had patterns you would learn by grinding but bosses you only learn their pattern after repeated failed runs, or reading their patterns on gamefaqs.
RPS is a thing in Japan for some reasons, lot's of shovelware arcade games had them. Some Famicom games (adventure or even platformers) had RPS bosses too
So damn weird. It’s just wild how they think RPS is fun in anything outside of a quick dispute with a friend, let alone attaching serious stakes to it.
It sucks because I was having a pretty good time with Suikoden 1 before I got to that point, but after having to reload several times, kill the mini boss, then die to the RPS final boss and having to do it all again, I just quit. Now I’m finally getting FFIX off the backlog instead.
[...]
So damn weird. It’s just wild how they think RPS is fun in anything outside of a quick dispute with a friend, let alone attaching serious stakes to it.
It sucks because I was having a pretty good time with Suikoden 1 before I got to that point, but after having to reload several times, kill the mini boss, then die to the RPS final boss and having to do it all again, I just quit. Now I’m finally getting FFIX off the backlog instead.
RPS unironically requires more tactical thought from the player than 90% of RPGs if it's not truly random.
That's what you'd think but actually, most of these games the AI have patterns and/or habits that you can learn, they're usually not "choose 100% at random every time"
I disagree, it was interesting specially as a diversion from the usual.
[...]
RPS unironically requires more tactical thought from the player than 90% of RPGs if it's not truly random.
There's clearly more to it since you have skill points and it can't really be the worst, at its most mundane in a rpg you grind by pressing to ATK over and over, an animation happens and rarely it misses. This time there's fewer fluff, you simply select some choices. It's mitigated since you're doing rps 3x, it's not like you'll always lose thrice. It's cooler because it's your servant doing it, it makes each move more impactful than it would generally(there's more importance to them), feels like a short serious battle that's decided by a few quick clashes(minor realism) and it's like a gamble simulator(obvs). People go "yeah, this battle system sucks" then go into generals to talk about modern fate which is literal gacha.
RPS is a thing in Japan for some reasons, lot's of shovelware arcade games had them. Some Famicom games (adventure or even platformers) had RPS bosses too
Penalty powerups (debuffs)
Sunsoft games had these. You needed the max powered up gun in festers quest because it shot in a straight line. You had to grind and grind powerups to get your gun leveled up to makenit anywhere in the game. But rhe game has penalty powerups that actually rob yoy of levels and they randomly drop in your path and never disappear over time. In the narrow passages of the sewers if a power-down randomly drops in your path you are fricked. You either accept the downgrade or you backtrack and start over the entire area to avoid the RNG demotion.
The “bowling ball gun” and other shit weapons fire in a sinewave pattern, not a straight line, and the projectile vanishes if it hits a wall. It literally cannot be used in the tight spaces that make up much of the game. If you get downgrade its over.
- Stupid long passwords, specifically frick Road Rash because I love the game but holy shit 20 character password. I dont blame anyone for using save states there.
- Looooooong intro sequences in RPGs. Dont throw all this lore at me before I actually care.
- God dammit I hate menus
Persona 3 has a bunch of these. >You can't control your party members in combat, each party member has their own personality and does whatever the frick they want. There's a strategy menu where you give them instructions but they don't have to listen to those orders either and will sometimes flat out ignore you. >You're on a constant time limit no matter what you're doing. You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor, you have to get certain dating sim statistics by specific dates or you miss a character permanently for that playthrough. >The soundtrack is massive, well over 4 hours long, but they save ~80% of it for special occasions and the rest of the game is just hearing the same four songs over and over. BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY
It's such a cool game, but it's so frustrating to play, no matter how you approach it.
>You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor
These aren't hard limits. For the former you just get tired which inhibits you but it doesn't block you from doing more battles. For the latter the Reaper just shows up and you can avoid him or kill him for mega exp.
Yeah Persona 3 feels like the entire game just has this filter to make sure you dont have too much fun, I think another major one is that party members can just randomly not have time to go into the dungeon that day, or you can randomly get sick when you study at night.
I get the purpose of it was to make sure the player doesnt feel like theyre the center of the universe and just an organic part of the world, and it works. They unfortunately overcorrected in Persona 4 and 5 by making the main characters complete overpowered self inserts that the entire plot revolves around.
>You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor
Getting tired doesn't actually matter, the game hypes it up as a bigger deal than it really is.
>There's a strategy menu where you give them instructions but they don't have to listen to those orders either and will sometimes flat out ignore you.
That's just not true at all. I actually really enjoyed the strategy system and it made battles feel so fluid and cool. I really cheered on the other characters whenever I knew they were about to do a sick move. >You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor
Literally not true at all. The "tired" mechanic doesn't work like that and it genuinely just kind of disappears after the first 10 or so hours. Whenever someone brings it up it just confirms they were filtered. You can very easily do all the next section of Tartarus in a single night. >you have to get certain dating sim statistics by specific dates or you miss a character permanently for that playthrough.
Maybe I'm biased because I love games that run on a real timer like Dead Rising, but I always enjoyed this aspect of the Persona games. It just adds so much replayability and makes you really think about who is worth spending time with. >>The soundtrack is massive, well over 4 hours long, but they save ~80% of it for special occasions and the rest of the game is just hearing the same four songs over and over. BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY
I've beaten P3 twice and I've never gotten sick of Mass Destruction.
It was so simple, but one of the reasons I like Breath of Fire 1 is that the battle theme changes based on what "chapter" of the game you're on. Makes things feel like they're progressing not just in plot, but in how you as a player handle encounters with your party.
In the early 90s it was trendy in Euro games to make the player beat the entire game within a time limit. Prince of Persia was the most popular one, but on computer platforms it was everywhere
>rts game where the maps are covered in dense fog that obscures literally everything >the only way to remove the fog is a special fog-removing unit that clears out tiny squares of fog at a snail's pace
lol, I spent one playthrough and half doing the steal+attack move 90% of the time with him. Stole about 3 items total.
and this fricker barely even has anything useful to steal anyway, the whole thing a huge fricking troll move and I fell for it because I love thieves in RPGs
Unironically manual/quick saving. Especially if the game has no autosave and expects you to save often. Checkpoint systems are way more fun and tense, being able to cheese a section by savescumming it or having to replay a whole fricking hour of gameplay because you forgot to save is gay as frick.
Excessively high random encounter rates in JRPGs, against trash enemies so that you fight the same exact group dozens of times in a dungeon.
The bosses of dungeons are several times the difficulty of the random encounters, so you need to repeatedly grind low-stakes encounters over and over so you can beat the boss.
After every fight or two, you need to open the menu, select "magic," navigate to your white mage, select "heal / cure," then navigate your cursor and heal each injured person. You will do this literally thousands of times in a single playthrough.
Hilariously the Rance series basically solved "JRPG on PC" interface. You mouseover the target, and it shows all applicable abilities, boiling it down to one click.
Shmups that make you tap a button repeatedly to fire. I cannot stand this.
I would really like to play Chou Ren Sha 68K on my MiSTer, but the X68000 core doesn't have a feature for a turbo button. I can only stand to play that game on my PC via software emulation because I refuse to sit there tapping the "fire" button repeatedly for 30 minutes straight.
A lot of old shmups do this. It drives me absolutely fricking crazy. I seriously hate it so much, why can't I just hold the fricking button down?
I feel you there, Bio-Ship Paladin is an example that comes to my mind suffering MASSIVELY from the tap spam to shoot, in a shmup where you can only use 50% of your firepower at any given time if you're playing solo
In Co-op with turbo buttons however? It's like an entirely different game
Making health / life replenishments semi-hidden is the worst. Mario does this somewhat, as mushrooms and fire flowers are always in random question blocks.
Castlevania is super annoying about this. It's already a hard game, but the health refills are easily missable because they're always "hidden" in wall tiles. So you need to go around attacking the walls instead of playing like a normal person. It really kills the fun for me.
>die in game >lose all powerups and weapons
I hate this shit. I feel like if i die at any point in castlevania 1 before the final level, i have to reset to get Holy Water back.
I've never seen an "anti-fun mechanic" in a retro game because generally retro games had proper designs, you just needed to get skilled at them.
"Anti-fun" mechanics are more of a modern gaming thing, instituted by modern developers to overcorrect for players successfully dominating or subverting game content in a manner that upsets their intent to restrict the players to a more on-rails experience.
>MGS torture scene
Push your thumb against your index finger and then mash circle with your index finger, or you know, hit select and get the best reward for your next playthrough.
>jrpg >boss has a very specific strategy and if you do anything besides it, he hits your entire party with a spell that leaves everyone with almost no health >last save point was several long rooms and 3 unskippable cutscenes back
1. Enemies that instakill you even if your health is at 200%.
2. >There are two different routes, one leads you to a boss and the other to another boss. >You can't fight the boss you didn't choose unless you start the game again.
3. >Killing all enemies in a zone. >Returning to that zone later. >The same enemies are there again.
4. >You lost to a boss but the game allows you to continue. >You return TWO levels back and must beat them again to fight the same boss.
>Game gives you a really fun upgrade/powerup >Puts a harsh limit on it, such as a limited number of uses throughout the entire game, such that you have to plan out its use for your entire playthrough >Or worse, you use the upgrade without knowing there's a limit and never get to use it again for the rest of the game
The obvious ones are things like the Magnum in RE, but this can also include Elixirs in FF or really any sort of consumable. It irks me when resources were spent creating these kinds of things but they just collect dust all game because you don't know what's around the corner, or you've played through a game and know exactly what you're going to use it on and where hours in advance.
At least in a game like RE4 I have a save file where I filled my attache case full of magnum ammo over the course of two playthroughs, sold everything else, and then finished the game for another NG+ playthrough, this time with virtually unlimited ammo. Older REs you got maybe 24 shots or so for them throughout the whole game.
Secret of Mana gauge
Literally filtered.
Enemies stealing your power-ups
Taking all the power-ups in 2 player co-op is absolute banter though. Especially in games where there's a limit and gettimg more power ups just gives you points (or nothing)
or like grabbing the pizza at full health in TMNT co-op
Don't really know one. I like getting used to the unique quirks and design decisions of any game. However...
Those two remind me of Castlevania the Adventure, which took away your whip upgrade (you can have up to two) if you got hit. So if you have the fully upgraded whip and get hit twice, you're gonna be back to using the very weak one. It definitely makes the game a bit obnoxious, especially since the controls are also not very good.
Yeah but I mean actual thieves, like the thief enemies in Dragon Buster or Kid Icarus or the little devils in Torneko Mystery Dungeon
Frick you, that was the coolest thing in Tank1990
Battle City is awesome and so are you.
Reversed controls.
>Reversed controls.
This. Inverted X axis with no way to change it. Frick that shit
Rotate your controller
I like it
putting realistic glare in your eyes when driving towards the fun. any developer that does this deserves to be publicly executed
>when driving towards the fun
Excuse me?
>realistic glare in your eyes when driving towards the fun
That's deep, man.
No way man. Nice bright suns are frickin SOUL
that isnt really getting in the way. some of the gta games it is very obnoxious
If it doesn't look like a nuke just went off is it really a sunset?
For a second there I thought it's some complex metaphor, like preparing to play the game, setting up your system = driving towards the fun. Really took me some time to connect the dots.
I guess if you''re going to play 16-bit Outrun, you'll be mega driving to the fun. Like, literally.
>when driving towards the fun
i like it
The ability to save the game
Over the top weapon degradation. Like I can live with it being present, but don't destroy my fricking weapon after 15 shots.
Nu-zelda is anti-fun, but we're talking about /vr/ games here
brainlet take
Are you really going to tell me that System Shock 2 is reasonable in this regard? I know it showers you with maintenance tools, but this makes it even more dumb.
>Are you really going to tell me that System Shock 2 is reasonable in this regard?
Yes.
run button
Run button having to be held down and not a toggle
Or needing to equip a certain item/class to even have a run button. Looking at you, OG FF5/6
For me it's when you have to tap a button to run instead of just holding it down, or it being automatic (GTA San Andreas for example)
in San Andreas don't you have to tap to use supersprint?
It's a trick speedrunners use to not run out of breath, same speed as just holding the button. You get infinite sprint after doing some side mission.
I might be wrong in that case, was it later GTAs they introduced tap to sprint? I know a few PS2 era games had it and I hated it though.
I don't know 5 but 4 has no tapping at all
In ps2 games you can both walk or jog on the analog and hold A to sprint, but starting with 4 analog is only used for walking and you hold A to jog and tap it to sprint. funny enough they did bring back ps2 style controls in max payne 3 only.
Can you sprint forever like that in 4? in PC there is no tapping and you can only sprint for a bit until you start jogging
I quickly tire of playing Rockstar games that have this fricking dogshit mechanic. Hustle run at grandma speeds unless you button mash, to quote avgn, what were they thinking?
Not a mechanic, but that part in Shenmue where you drive a forklift everyday made me dumbfounded. I was just standing there hoping there was some else with me to witness this shit.
Of course now it's a big joke in the community but i will never forget how it made me feel just in awe of the utter lack of fun.
It truly is mind-numbing but kind of in a fascinating way. No other video game has ever made me truly feel like I was 17 again going to shitty warehouse jobs like that portion of Shenmue. It's so fricking boring and I found myself daydreaming the entire time in the very same way I did back at those shitty summer jobs. I love really genuinely love Shenmue after playing it for the first time two years ago but I think I'd struggle to get through that section of it again. It's 5 in game days but it feels like 4 hours. What a game
I'm sorry you lead terrible lives and didn't find this entertaining. Maybe you should have tried playing the game with friends.
The soul eating mechanic in Mask of the Betrayer. I tried to go the evil route so that you can feed on humans, but there's only 2 specific ways to complete the quest that gives you that power and I locked myself out of both of them before taking the quest - even though the location of the quest is adjacent to a female npc living alone on a farmstead a stone's throw away! (You can't feed her to the ape-men because she's actually part of another quest.)
I thought that was really dumb. I get the game putting limits on you but I found there was no upside, hence no fun.
The first hour or 3 of the game missing the major components making it not shit.
>what is every JRPG ever made
This and long intros and opening segments in JRPGs.
One of the best things about Dragon Quest VIII is that is opens almost immediately with a fight and provides just the tiniest bit of exposition as to who your characters are and what the overall plot is. You don't get a detailed account of what happened at the beginning of the story until you're well into the game, and by this point you are invested in what is going on so you actually want to see it. This is so much better than most games.
>no dude the game doesn’t suck just wait 6 more hours until it gets fun
If a developer can not make their game entertaining for fun for me in the first hour then I will not be playing their garbage ass game
Since Deus Ex is on screen I'm going to go with skill bloat and useless RPG skills in general. A lot of the skill choices don't make any sense in the context of the story, you're supposed to be a human bio weapon trained by a secret anti terrorist organization, but it's possible that you don't know how to swim or use a pistol?
With Deus Ex you can pick what you're proficient with at the start at least and unlike most games with tacked on RPG shit it's done in a way that makes sense. One thing I can't stand about modern games are skill trees or upgrades that is some inane crap like .005% movement speed while reloading.
You can, but why would you ever pick something like environmental training or electronics? Even upgrading them later in the game is pointless since you can find scuba gear and hazmat suits lying around the bases. You also have EMP grenades and the GEP gun for any robot guards.
roleplaying
If there's an environmental training only run of Deus Ex I will eat my words.
Weak excuse to be honest. Deus Ex is just really shit in this regard
Environmental Training is actually a really strong combat skill because it boosts the power of the damage reduction armor and the duration of the stealth camo by a ton. You can be near immortal because of skill investment in it if you use those for the right fights/areas.
Electronics is for electronic locks, why is this one even in contention? You can't blow those up like with physical locks so it's good to have, otherwise you won't have enough multitools to go everywhere in levels.
Physical lockpicking and swimming are low-priority skills that you could say are semi-useless but you still wind up in situations where you'd benefit from them. Medicine is the real true "never take this" skill.
I always took a point in medicine, because getting an immediate double value from medkits felt strong
This is the genius of Deus Ex. All this time later and it exposes who does and does not think outside the box.
This isn't about "thinking outside the box" it's about the skill choices making no sense in the setting. I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to J.C's augments having to be activated, but I can't when it comes to a supposedly trained black ops agent not knowing how to swim, or aim his gun. I think the skills are one of the very few things Invisible War did better.
the RPG aspects of deus ex always felt shoehorned in, the game would be better if it was done away with and more attention was paid to the augmentations
You are a rookie fresh out of the academy, the partner you are assigned by UNATCO is supposed to introduce you to the field.
Your success is attributed to your talent as an agent who can "think outside the box" and your ability to solve problems, not your augs or training. That's why the gameplay is about using different approaches to a situation, you can use superior gun skills to massacre the enemy, but you can also sneak in a ventilation shaft, swim through a canal, bribe a street urchin with candy for a keypad password and lockpick doors to achieve the same goal
The setting doesn't make sense to you because you got it all wrong - the story does talk about JC and Paul's augs and JC's swiss school training but Manderley/Carter/Tong/Everett praise you both mainly because you are brilliant operators in the field
So the idea is that skills you choose are options J.C has at his disposal, rather than what he's actually capable of? My version of J.C might use stealth to sneak up on terrorists before gutting them like a fish, where as someone else's J.C might use his augs to tank bullets and blast through any terrorists in his way. If so, that makes far more sense than what I was picturing.
Stupid hard jumps that kill you if you miss. Why have a health bar if you're going to include jumps that require pixel perfect precision and just drain all your lives?
The Rush abilities in Mega Man that remain depleted of ammo if you die.
Rush in general honestly sucks. It adds nothing of substance.
Off hand I can name the enemy health scaling in Ratchet and Clank 2 that made early game weapons useless in the late game because the devs didn't want people using the same guns for the entire game for no real reason
I remember beating the first ratchet and clank with primarily using the blaster cannon you get in like the second or third planet
the electricity gun was just a direct improvement over the flamethrower tbh
Easily this:
"Mash button to run or win a struggle"
Or even worse, rotate the thumbsticks as fast as you can and frick your controller
>"Mash button to run or win a struggle"
I almost gave up on trying to complete RE4 on steamdeck. It's really not made for mashing.
Any games with mash mechanic, I bind a turbo button from now on. Frick that shit.
Thank you for making me aware of its existence. It's precisely what I'm going to rely on from now on.
Games that have an open world and force you to travel from mission to mission. Completely kills the flow of the game and disrupts your investment in the narrative. Games like The Getaway and the Driver series have it right. Missions are back-to-back but the open world is there for you to dick around in if you'd like.
having to stand still to shoot your gun, god if it isnt inconvinient for most shootouts.
the only mechanic that can be as annoying as this one is being forced into only being able to shoot by your side windows, makes the vigilante side mission really bothersome
timers in games/genres they don't belong in
The mechanic where you, the player, choose to make it a miserable experience for yourself and everyone else
fetch quests with nothing to them.
>everybody just ignore's OP's move
sorry OP you lose
Flying enemies with knockback over a pit that infinitely respawn as soon as you scroll the screen even a millimeter off their spawn point and then being it back into view.
Crafting.
Just give me a fricking magic weapon already.
Don't make me cart hundreds of ore chunks, bones and crystals around which I MIGHT be able to craft into a weapon at a later date.
I too sure hate crafting but it's not a retro thing.
enemies can open doors
timers, escort missions, no continues
The random damage scaling in Blood 2. Just completely brundlefricks the entire game, your weapons will shift anywhere from half decent damage to obnoxiously underpowered, usually trending towards the weak side. This means your most powerful weapons are mostly gimped, and that any remotely durable enemy is going to be an unbearable grind.
I know the game is unfinished and otherwise packed with a lot of other bad design, but GOD, why would you ever think this would be a good thing to implement?
Fricking. Long. Unskippable. Fricking. Cutscenes.
>when my life is over and brain is dissected it will disgorge all the decades old pent up rage brought on by early fmv games
How about
>Fricking. Long. Unskippable. Fricking. Cutscenes.
before a difficult final boss
and you have to watch it every time you retry
frick you FFV
Oh yeah, add qte shite to that too
>Dying strips you from all weapons and puts you at the start of the level
Might as well remove lives completely
1. R-Type does not send you back to the start of the level
2. There is always force pickup at a midpoint to shield yourself with
3, Charge shot is insanely powerful, you can 1shot most enemies with it
Diagnosis: skill issue
strips you from all weapons and puts you at the start of the level
>Might as well remove lives completely
Haven't played that one, but yes, I don't get the mentality in general behind games that if you die make you retry what you failed at but with all your upgrades gone.
Bitch, I just failed WITH upgrades, what makes you think I will have a better chance without them?
I've never found R-type as punishing as gradius. With gradius in the later stages if you die it's game over since your ship is always so slow and it takes too long to power up.
Literal skill issue. It incentivizes you to not die and get better at the game, instead of just brute forcing through it like a dumb fricking zoomer who just wants to mark the game down on his "beat it" checklist and move on.
NTA but I think the point was that if the game punishes you so severely for using extra lives, then why have them instead of just having an instant game over upon death? Wouldn't the latter be as much of an incentive to git gud?
Gradius is real shitty with this. Die nearly anywhere past the very beginning and you're already fricked.
Oh man, yes. And that one stage where it gets incredibly fast. You HAVE to have speed ups to keep up with the stage and if you die once it just starts you off from a check point going 500 miles per hour and you have no speed ups so you just fly into the wall. Might as well restart the fricking game at that point.
Enemy devil trigger in DMC3 DMD difficulty being tied to the amount of enemies killed (and not a timer like it claims) is pretty miserable for a variety of reasons.
Any loss condition that isn't "I can't solve the puzzle and give up" in puzzle/adventure games are also generally horrible, unless you only lose progress on the puzzle that caused the game over.
Having to rematch a gauntlet of bosses near the end of the game. Peak laziness. Frick Mega Man for making that a tradition.
Its whatever in Megaman except the ones where the Final Boss is the same stage as the gauntlet, like X4. So you can't even practice the final boss without doing the damn gauntlet every time you game over.
>Having to rematch a gauntlet of bosses near the end of the game. Peak laziness. Frick Mega Man for making that a tradition.
The only time I find this acceptable is in games where you can significantly level up and/or or have significantly better gear by then, so that it's not so much a gauntlet or challenge but more of a curb-stomp battle showing how much stronger you now are than all these old bosses that used to be a challenge as well as show just how powerful the last boss that hopefully is still a challenge is compared to anything else you have faced before (not counting any secret optional super-bosses)
>Hardest difficulty not available right off the bat.
Umm... many modern games STILL pull that.
>Having a shit tonne of status abilities but most of them aren't useful on mosters nor bosses, unless it's a very specific fight where that's a feature. And, of course, your party falls to these status effects 100% of the time unless you have equipment that nulls them.
Ditto
that are exclusive to stealing from enemies
>why can't they just fricking drop them?
I'll do you one better (worse): very important items that are exclusive to stealing from a one-time boss.
FRICK you Final Fantasy 8 for hiding a SUMMON of all fricking things as an item you have to steal from one of the first bosses in the game, a summon that gives you the ability to lower the game's annoyingly high random encounter rate no less. There are several other steal-from-a-boss-only summons like this as well if I remember correctly.
Yes, you will get a second chance to get them RIGHT IN THE FINAL AREA SHORTLY BEFORE THE LAST BOSS but they are mostly completely useless by that point, as well as good fricking luck leveling them up in the final area because 99% of the game is closed off by that point, which makes the lower encounter rate one especially useless to get there, not to mention there is no point since you are about to finish the game anyway by then.
In FF8 they aren't stolen, they are drawn. Draw is one of the core abilities of the game. It is a missable, sure, but not quite like Steal.
at least in FF8 you just have to draw everything from the boss and you get them first try (for spells it can fails but not for summon i think),stealing items like in FF7 or 9 can take fricking forever.
FF7's steal rate was fine except for the cursed ring. FF9 however can die in a fire.
You mean the magic lamp? Cid gives it to you.
FF9 (Or one of the FFs, can't remember which) was worse in this regard, you had to steal an item from a boss to get it, but you had a very high chance to steal a common item from a boss instead, after which you can't get the rare item without a reset. So not only do you have like a 1/32 chance to successfully steal something, after tanking all that damage and wasting all that time you have to reset because you didn't get the 1/16 chance of getting the item you wanted.
More than just being tedious, without knowing that's a thing beforehand you could easily assume your first successful steal was the only item an enemy had and just continue on without seeing some rare, important item that changes the game drastically.
>Semi-retro.
A lot of things from the PSP remake of Tactics Ogre, but the biggest one is leveling up skills you can mix around like FFV or FFT unless you have the Lord class.
>Retro.
-Passwords not saving the retries and currency you have at that point.
-Hardest difficulty not available right off the bat.
-Having a shit tonne of status abilities but most of them aren't useful on mosters nor bosses, unless it's a very specific fight where that's a feature. And, of course, your party falls to these status effects 100% of the time unless you have equipment that nulls them.
>items that are exclusive to stealing from enemies
why can't they just fricking drop them?
Any mission that requires you to guard a fragile item that's in the open or useless brain dead npc for X mins as the enemy waves from front, behind, side, above, below and from past/future time.
Also you get little to no health refill over that time
>long life bar
>you die in 4 hits anyways
Plok?
>long life bar
>game is littered with bottomless pits that instakill you anyways
I always found it funny how the crash bandicoot games try giving you extra free masks if you die too much, even though like 100% of the time if a level is hard it's because it's full of death pits that masks do jack shit to protect you from.
I guess just having points and items that give you points and nothing else is very anti-fun. It only makes sense on very old repetitive arcade games with little progression like Space Invaders, Pac Man and Donkey Kong. All that useless secret treasure in Wolf 3D is crap.
When players can beat each other up on beat em ups by mistake if they're somewhat close to each other
>the only good attack in a beat em up also drains your health for no reason
frick me then i guess i'll just keep jump kicking
Dark Cloud is such a wonderful game. It's a game I can imagine the UI for building and my brain has stored the clicks and clacks it makes as you slot items into slots and plop things down.
Oh well, the post was deleted as I was replying to it, I just wanted to talk about Dark Clouds UI.
>play puzzle game
>overly strict time limit that kills you
think FASTER
Noone knows what anti-fun really is until they've played this RPG
>start the game near the starting village
>enter village, talk to an NPC
>get beaten up, thrown out of the place, money and gear gone
at this point you can't do anything but reset, but it's still the start of the game so no biggie
>your main mean of attack is a dragon you raise
>you start the game with just an egg
>the type of dragon and its strength depends on how you play while you have the egg
>shit is so hard it's pretty much impossible not to flee from all battles until the egg has hatched and therefore end up with the worst kind of dragon
>reach a nursery to put the dragon in to hatch it and make it stronger
>shit needs money and items
>without the dragon even the easiest enemies are are so hard it's basically impossible to raise money with the cost of healing
>make a SINGLE step out of of the a narrow path and you end up facing later tries enemies that will kill you in one hit anyway and you lose stuff again
>so, the game has a money borrowing mechanic, try it
>after just a couple days if you haven't returned the money, the loan sharks will come beat you up in your sleep, steal all your stuff and leave you naked again
>sleep which also auto-save the game so your save is now fricked
start from scratch again, get to the same point
>turns out you can also battle the loan guy and if you win, steal the money from the chest
>yeah finally I'm getting somewhere and got my revenge on those frickers!
>turns out the loan sharks still come frick you up in your sleep
At that point I just gave up
>your main mean of attack is a dragon you raise
reminds me of PS1 digimon. Thinking about it, it really is what you'd call anti-fun lmao.
What game?
Sansara Naga
>What's the most anti-fun mechanic you've ever seen in a retro game?
random battles
Pressing up to jump
Also pressing DOWN to jump
mandatory tutorials, unskippable cutscenes
Autoscrolling/water level.
It can be done well, but 99% of the time, it isn't.
being able to lose your progression items in mundane ways such as dropping them or getting pickpocketed and then not being able to recover them at all essentially softlocking yourself
>Gets pickpocketed by invisible kids if you're playing the euro version
nothing personnel
>was playing Suikoden 1 and having a really good time
>get to first war
And then the game went from beloved JRPG to a game that I was surprised was held to any esteem.
>rock paper scissors combat
>no way to predict enemy faction
>party members can randomly die if you choose wrong
>finally get done with it
>fight a tough boss
>then fight the final boss of the area
>more rock paper scissors combat
Why… why would they do this? It’s the most anti-fun thing I’ve ever seen in a game. Perhaps if there was no punishment for it, but you have a random chance of picking wrong and losing one of your most useful characters permanently. What made them think that was fun?
>rock-paper-scissors combat
Fate extra on PSP took that to the next level. Worst combat system in history of rpgs. The enemies had patterns you would learn by grinding but bosses you only learn their pattern after repeated failed runs, or reading their patterns on gamefaqs.
So damn weird. It’s just wild how they think RPS is fun in anything outside of a quick dispute with a friend, let alone attaching serious stakes to it.
It sucks because I was having a pretty good time with Suikoden 1 before I got to that point, but after having to reload several times, kill the mini boss, then die to the RPS final boss and having to do it all again, I just quit. Now I’m finally getting FFIX off the backlog instead.
serious stakes
like video games
There was a RPS section in Suikoden? I don't remember that.
Oh wait, you're talking about the big war battles. Was confused for a second there.
I honestly can't remember how I dealt with them in that game, I don't remember finding them so egregious as others did though.
RPS unironically requires more tactical thought from the player than 90% of RPGs if it's not truly random.
Against a human? sure. Not against the CPU
That's what you'd think but actually, most of these games the AI have patterns and/or habits that you can learn, they're usually not "choose 100% at random every time"
I disagree, it was interesting specially as a diversion from the usual.
There's clearly more to it since you have skill points and it can't really be the worst, at its most mundane in a rpg you grind by pressing to ATK over and over, an animation happens and rarely it misses. This time there's fewer fluff, you simply select some choices. It's mitigated since you're doing rps 3x, it's not like you'll always lose thrice. It's cooler because it's your servant doing it, it makes each move more impactful than it would generally(there's more importance to them), feels like a short serious battle that's decided by a few quick clashes(minor realism) and it's like a gamble simulator(obvs). People go "yeah, this battle system sucks" then go into generals to talk about modern fate which is literal gacha.
Also, you can just spam attack skills which skip the opponent's turn
RPS is a thing in Japan for some reasons, lot's of shovelware arcade games had them. Some Famicom games (adventure or even platformers) had RPS bosses too
Penalty powerups (debuffs)
Sunsoft games had these. You needed the max powered up gun in festers quest because it shot in a straight line. You had to grind and grind powerups to get your gun leveled up to makenit anywhere in the game. But rhe game has penalty powerups that actually rob yoy of levels and they randomly drop in your path and never disappear over time. In the narrow passages of the sewers if a power-down randomly drops in your path you are fricked. You either accept the downgrade or you backtrack and start over the entire area to avoid the RNG demotion.
The “bowling ball gun” and other shit weapons fire in a sinewave pattern, not a straight line, and the projectile vanishes if it hits a wall. It literally cannot be used in the tight spaces that make up much of the game. If you get downgrade its over.
- Stupid long passwords, specifically frick Road Rash because I love the game but holy shit 20 character password. I dont blame anyone for using save states there.
- Looooooong intro sequences in RPGs. Dont throw all this lore at me before I actually care.
- God dammit I hate menus
>aerials have a ton of endlag unless you hit the shield button every single time you land
Persona 3 has a bunch of these.
>You can't control your party members in combat, each party member has their own personality and does whatever the frick they want. There's a strategy menu where you give them instructions but they don't have to listen to those orders either and will sometimes flat out ignore you.
>You're on a constant time limit no matter what you're doing. You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor, you have to get certain dating sim statistics by specific dates or you miss a character permanently for that playthrough.
>The soundtrack is massive, well over 4 hours long, but they save ~80% of it for special occasions and the rest of the game is just hearing the same four songs over and over. BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY
It's such a cool game, but it's so frustrating to play, no matter how you approach it.
>You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor
These aren't hard limits. For the former you just get tired which inhibits you but it doesn't block you from doing more battles. For the latter the Reaper just shows up and you can avoid him or kill him for mega exp.
Yeah Persona 3 feels like the entire game just has this filter to make sure you dont have too much fun, I think another major one is that party members can just randomly not have time to go into the dungeon that day, or you can randomly get sick when you study at night.
I get the purpose of it was to make sure the player doesnt feel like theyre the center of the universe and just an organic part of the world, and it works. They unfortunately overcorrected in Persona 4 and 5 by making the main characters complete overpowered self inserts that the entire plot revolves around.
>You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor
Getting tired doesn't actually matter, the game hypes it up as a bigger deal than it really is.
>There's a strategy menu where you give them instructions but they don't have to listen to those orders either and will sometimes flat out ignore you.
That's just not true at all. I actually really enjoyed the strategy system and it made battles feel so fluid and cool. I really cheered on the other characters whenever I knew they were about to do a sick move.
>You can do a limited number of battles each in-game day, you can spend a limited number of time on each floor
Literally not true at all. The "tired" mechanic doesn't work like that and it genuinely just kind of disappears after the first 10 or so hours. Whenever someone brings it up it just confirms they were filtered. You can very easily do all the next section of Tartarus in a single night.
>you have to get certain dating sim statistics by specific dates or you miss a character permanently for that playthrough.
Maybe I'm biased because I love games that run on a real timer like Dead Rising, but I always enjoyed this aspect of the Persona games. It just adds so much replayability and makes you really think about who is worth spending time with.
>>The soundtrack is massive, well over 4 hours long, but they save ~80% of it for special occasions and the rest of the game is just hearing the same four songs over and over. BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY
I've beaten P3 twice and I've never gotten sick of Mass Destruction.
Don't know what to tell you man.
It was so simple, but one of the reasons I like Breath of Fire 1 is that the battle theme changes based on what "chapter" of the game you're on. Makes things feel like they're progressing not just in plot, but in how you as a player handle encounters with your party.
Crafting. TZD.
Abe's Oddysee is a masterpiece but the repeat the whistle tune mechanic is absolute trash. Literally impossible that anyone enjoys doing it
i liked it tho, it was annoying some of the times but i liked the noises
random encounters
In the early 90s it was trendy in Euro games to make the player beat the entire game within a time limit. Prince of Persia was the most popular one, but on computer platforms it was everywhere
doom 3 flashlight
Oxygen counters underwater.
>rts game where the maps are covered in dense fog that obscures literally everything
>the only way to remove the fog is a special fog-removing unit that clears out tiny squares of fog at a snail's pace
>they think the steal rate is bad in FF9
lol, I spent one playthrough and half doing the steal+attack move 90% of the time with him. Stole about 3 items total.
and this fricker barely even has anything useful to steal anyway, the whole thing a huge fricking troll move and I fell for it because I love thieves in RPGs
Unironically manual/quick saving. Especially if the game has no autosave and expects you to save often. Checkpoint systems are way more fun and tense, being able to cheese a section by savescumming it or having to replay a whole fricking hour of gameplay because you forgot to save is gay as frick.
Doom style secrets.
>just hump the walls or we'll hide all the good weapons from you
When you have to go all the way around a waist-high obstacle
hunger, thirst, and sleep meters
Excessively high random encounter rates in JRPGs, against trash enemies so that you fight the same exact group dozens of times in a dungeon.
The bosses of dungeons are several times the difficulty of the random encounters, so you need to repeatedly grind low-stakes encounters over and over so you can beat the boss.
After every fight or two, you need to open the menu, select "magic," navigate to your white mage, select "heal / cure," then navigate your cursor and heal each injured person. You will do this literally thousands of times in a single playthrough.
Hilariously the Rance series basically solved "JRPG on PC" interface. You mouseover the target, and it shows all applicable abilities, boiling it down to one click.
Shmups that make you tap a button repeatedly to fire. I cannot stand this.
I would really like to play Chou Ren Sha 68K on my MiSTer, but the X68000 core doesn't have a feature for a turbo button. I can only stand to play that game on my PC via software emulation because I refuse to sit there tapping the "fire" button repeatedly for 30 minutes straight.
A lot of old shmups do this. It drives me absolutely fricking crazy. I seriously hate it so much, why can't I just hold the fricking button down?
I feel you there, Bio-Ship Paladin is an example that comes to my mind suffering MASSIVELY from the tap spam to shoot, in a shmup where you can only use 50% of your firepower at any given time if you're playing solo
In Co-op with turbo buttons however? It's like an entirely different game
Making health / life replenishments semi-hidden is the worst. Mario does this somewhat, as mushrooms and fire flowers are always in random question blocks.
Castlevania is super annoying about this. It's already a hard game, but the health refills are easily missable because they're always "hidden" in wall tiles. So you need to go around attacking the walls instead of playing like a normal person. It really kills the fun for me.
>die in game
>lose all powerups and weapons
I hate this shit. I feel like if i die at any point in castlevania 1 before the final level, i have to reset to get Holy Water back.
This thread is a nice way to single-out the zoomers, and the post quality really dropped during the week-end which gets to show
Cutscenes every 3 steps
I've never seen an "anti-fun mechanic" in a retro game because generally retro games had proper designs, you just needed to get skilled at them.
"Anti-fun" mechanics are more of a modern gaming thing, instituted by modern developers to overcorrect for players successfully dominating or subverting game content in a manner that upsets their intent to restrict the players to a more on-rails experience.
MGS torture scene
>MGS torture scene
Push your thumb against your index finger and then mash circle with your index finger, or you know, hit select and get the best reward for your next playthrough.
Losing all upgrades after losing once + autosave
>jrpg
>boss has a very specific strategy and if you do anything besides it, he hits your entire party with a spell that leaves everyone with almost no health
>last save point was several long rooms and 3 unskippable cutscenes back
Why? Just...why?
>this turn-based game is too hard for me
I don't understand why you homosexuals expect sympathy for this.
Your post doesn't make sense.
1. Enemies that instakill you even if your health is at 200%.
2. >There are two different routes, one leads you to a boss and the other to another boss.
>You can't fight the boss you didn't choose unless you start the game again.
3. >Killing all enemies in a zone.
>Returning to that zone later.
>The same enemies are there again.
4. >You lost to a boss but the game allows you to continue.
>You return TWO levels back and must beat them again to fight the same boss.
>Game gives you a really fun upgrade/powerup
>Puts a harsh limit on it, such as a limited number of uses throughout the entire game, such that you have to plan out its use for your entire playthrough
>Or worse, you use the upgrade without knowing there's a limit and never get to use it again for the rest of the game
The obvious ones are things like the Magnum in RE, but this can also include Elixirs in FF or really any sort of consumable. It irks me when resources were spent creating these kinds of things but they just collect dust all game because you don't know what's around the corner, or you've played through a game and know exactly what you're going to use it on and where hours in advance.
At least in a game like RE4 I have a save file where I filled my attache case full of magnum ammo over the course of two playthroughs, sold everything else, and then finished the game for another NG+ playthrough, this time with virtually unlimited ammo. Older REs you got maybe 24 shots or so for them throughout the whole game.
Vampiric touch. The attack that drains an entire level off your character and its gone forever.
>severe weapon downgrade drops in your path