Biggest bullshit in a video game

Can we throw a few areas in DS2 at launch before patches and changes got put in. That area before you fight The Rotten first time through is complete bullshit. Non stop poison traps, you either have to know that there are hidden areas in the wall to hide in, or know to throw yourself off the ledge into the void at a specific point because there are ledges there. The boss itself is a joke, but getting to the boss first time blind is bull,

The water area after the Mirror Knight at launch. What fucking clown decided to give the spellcasters that level of tracking on their shots? Using a shield to block shots? It deals damage through the shield, try to roll/avoid, the area is water filled, so you are slow as hell and the spell tracking means good luck dodging shots. That had to be one of the most infuriating parts of that game at launch.

The Dragon Shrine at launch. Someone forgot to make the giant two handed mace fuckers have any recovery animations or stop, as well as up their swing speed, so once you got caught blocking, that was it, you were done. Watch anyone who played through this at launch, standard was to kite and hit with spells/fireballs rather than engage in any kind of melee.

Of course, post patch, they made those parts better, but at launch and playing blind...fuck off.
You also forgot a couple of areas. The lead up to Sir Alone and dark lurker is terrible even in scholar. Also fuck the entirety of the undead crypt and the mages that would spawn in.
 
If I already bitched about stats then I'll go all the way - Warrior mages. The appeal of those classes is having multiple options on how to handle a battle. But because modern gaming is mainly about being murderhobos and large numbers then you'd find those classes can't keep the damage up, making them worse than a regular mage or warior.
The only game which did this concept well is Divinity Original Sin.
On a related note, the stat system in the original Final Fantasy II was total garbage. In theory you could use whatever weapons, armor, and magic you wanted subject to proficiency (which increased with use, as the game didn't have experience points or levels). So it appeared as if you could make a character capable of using both weapons and magic, but what the game didn't tell you is that wielding weapons inflicted a massive penalty to spellcasting stats that did not appear on the stats screen. Even "caster" weapons like staves had penalty, though it wasn't as large. Armor had penalties too; again, even "caster" light armor, although to a lesser degree. So people would play it and magic would just be completely worthless for no apparent reason even if your stats were supposedly high.

Also, you gained max HP by being hit and strength by hitting things, so you could advance faster by ignoring the enemies and beating up your own party. There was also a bug where you gained stats based on the command you input, not the command being executed, so you could cancel and re-input commands over and over and raise your stats sky-high in one very tedious battle. On the other hand, if you didn't cheat, advancement was painfully slow, with multiple discontinuities in monster power that would have you going from areas that had become painfully easy to areas right next door that would brutally slaughter you. The stat system was so relentlessly terrible in every possible way that I honestly don't understand why the series didn't die right there.
 
So it appeared as if you could make a character capable of using both weapons and magic, but what the game didn't tell you is that wielding weapons inflicted a massive penalty to spellcasting stats that did not appear on the stats screen. Even "caster" weapons like staves had penalty, though it wasn't as large. Armor had penalties too; again, even "caster" light armor, although to a lesser degree. So people would play it and magic would just be completely worthless for no apparent reason even if your stats were supposedly high.
Are you serious? Holy shit, I wondered why my magic was completely useless. No matter how much I would grind for it, I could never get it to do more than 100 damage. And Ultima? Forget about it. That shit was bugged to begin with and would always do low damage, but this makes it that much more useless.

The stat system was so relentlessly terrible in every possible way that I honestly don't understand why the series didn't die right there.
What amazes me most about it is that FF2 has received a bunch of remakes over the years, on PS1, GBA, and PSP, and they somehow still haven't fixed it to where the game is actually okay. It still feels broken, and frankly I don't think it'd take much to rebalance it to make the game at least okay. But Square's more content with redoing FF1's mechanics to make it easier and easier and completely ignore the still-broken II.
 
Are you serious? Holy shit, I wondered why my magic was completely useless. No matter how much I would grind for it, I could never get it to do more than 100 damage. And Ultima? Forget about it. That shit was bugged to begin with and would always do low damage, but this makes it that much more useless.


What amazes me most about it is that FF2 has received a bunch of remakes over the years, on PS1, GBA, and PSP, and they somehow still haven't fixed it to where the game is actually okay. It still feels broken, and frankly I don't think it'd take much to rebalance it to make the game at least okay. But Square's more content with redoing FF1's mechanics to make it easier and easier and completely ignore the still-broken II.
Yeah, there's a list of the hidden stat penalties here. It's under section "2I. INT/SOUL Penalties" (oldschool text file, can't link directly to internal subsections). The weapon penalties were removed in later versions but the armor penalties stayed. Also they added some sort of forced bonuses to max HP as you progressed through the story, but it's a band-aid approach when the game needed a thorough rebalancing.
 
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You also forgot a couple of areas. The lead up to Sir Alone and dark lurker is terrible even in scholar. Also fuck the entirety of the undead crypt and the mages that would spawn in.
Fucking Darklurker, man. The second time I fought him I literally was one hit away from killing him. I would have liked to have tried again but I forgot how to Dark Souls and got slaughtered by the first phantom on the way to his area repeatedly. I ended up taking a break and coming back later after clearing the DLC. Have a flame, dark, and spell quartz ring +3 and a dispelling ring +1 pretty much neutered him.

The fight with Sir Alonne was awesome, the way to him was tedious.
 
The stat system was so relentlessly terrible in every possible way that I honestly don't understand why the series didn't die right there.
If memory serves me right, that's because that entire system of effort-based stat leveling (and the man responsible for it) got shunted off into the SaGa series, far away from where saner players wished to tread. If you've played Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy, the pain should have been all too familiar.

Then again, that game did let you kill god with a chainsaw, so it can't be all bad.
 
Bad tutorials in general. You shouldn't have to look up how things work because the tutorial didn't properly explain it. I remember the tutorial for the Fire Emblem: Fates game(s) being terrible and not really explaining anything beyond basic controlls and weapon types. It's probably why I never finished it and haven't touched it in years.

Although I doubt I'm missing much. All I hear about the game these days it that it was a shameless cash grab and not very good overall.
 
Bad tutorials in general. You shouldn't have to look up how things work because the tutorial didn't properly explain it. I remember the tutorial for the Fire Emblem: Fates game(s) being terrible and not really explaining anything beyond basic controlls and weapon types. It's probably why I never finished it and haven't touched it in years.

Although I doubt I'm missing much. All I hear about the game these days it that it was a shameless cash grab and not very good overall.

Fire Emblem is the most simple and mainstream strategy game ever made. The combat system is literally rock paper scissors.

I think you might be retarded.
 
Fire Emblem is the most simple and mainstream strategy game ever made. The combat system is literally rock paper scissors.

I think you might be retarded.
I am more referring to stats. If I'm remembering correctly, the game never tells you what exactly they do.
 
I am more referring to stats. If I'm remembering correctly, the game never tells you what exactly they do.

You aren't bright enough to figure out what strength, magic, HP and speed do on your own?
 
car loicensing in racing games
since in NFS:HP'10 remaster there won't be SLRs due to Merc's legal faggotry
I had to do a double take because where I from "Merc" in reference to cars is usually a reference to the Ford sub-brand Mercury, and usually specifically to the the 49-50's models commonly modified as chop-topped "lead sleds".
 
The random dragon encounters in Skyrim. They're cool at first, then they become like giant cliffracers. At least cliffracers didn't raze entire villages and kill quest givers in the process. Good thing there's mods that let me toggle them on and off.
I feel the same way about random vampire attacks in cities. Especially on console because every NPC will spawn at the town entrance regardless of time of day, and will gleefully charge into high level vampires power-attacking with their iron daggers. Literally lost every merchant in Whiterun my first game.

Dragons can be mostly ignored, just stick 4-5 ignite spells on them and go about your business. Vampires tend to be surrounded by NPCs and are smaller, faster targets so that's harder to do.
 
You want shit tutorials, try Crusader Kings 2. You play as some schlub in Northern Spain who stands to inherit his brother's kingdom when he dies. On top of explaining almost nothing about how the game works, it keeps most of the game's infamous RNG intact, so it can simply break. You're supposed to assassinate your brother (with the RNG tweaked to make sure you always succeed) but the first time I played it he instead got killed in a battle against a rebellious vassal and the game tried to make me kill someone that was already dead and seemed to go insane. I think that character ended up fathering the antichrist, which is one of the rarest random events in the game, then became immortal, which I think at the time was THE rarest. Hell of a first experience.
 
Fire Emblem is the most simple and mainstream strategy game ever made. The combat system is literally rock paper scissors.

I think you might be retarded.
Hell, if anything, I couldn’t get into Fire Emblem because the series is too simple, and the difficulty is boosted in the most bullshit of ways. Permadeath is bullshit, but you can’t just turn it off without keeping the difficulty set to the easiest mode, and one wrong move can have a full-health character ganged up on and slaughtered in one turn. I really don’t wanna have to restart over and over, either.

As for how it’s too simple, there’s hardly any character customization, and unlike most turn based strategy games, there are no disposable soldiers you can hire and experiment with. So you can’t really take risks and send people out to the meat grinder and continue on with the game unless you get absurdly lucky. It really feels like they’re not structured to have more than one way to approach a battle, so you have to do things the way the developers intended. I tried to play both Awakening and Three Houses, and with each game I ended up with really imbalanced parties, as like two characters would just take the majority of the kills. Every battle turned into Fredrick and Vaike cleaning shit up, while all the Smash Bros characters sat around with their thumbs up their asses because if they get killed, it’s game over.

I really like turn based strategy combat, but Fire Emblem and Xcom both give me this sense that I’m just doing something wrong the entire time, like I’m completely unaware of something that’d give me an optimal strategy. I don’t know. Maybe Disgaea made me retarded.
 
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The Difficulty in P5 is also bullshit.

Hard mode is just "All your damage is halved and all the enemies is doubled oh and you get less XP"
Well, what's the point then?

"We are going to, in every way imaginable, make this game massively more difficult to play but have absolutely no intention of sweetening the pot and making it worth trying."
 
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The fact FE Warriors only gives you 2 Archers during the main story, Takumi and Sakura. That's only half of the archers, with Niles being paid DLC and Anna requiring god knows what because I've had this game forever and didn't give me her. Plus the amount of Fatesakening in it. Heroes was out already, we had the results from CYL. Ike was confirmed to be the most popular character in the series. But no, we get Tharja instead who I don't even think was top 5. Celica was clearly an afterthought even though the could've totally given her, Alm and potentially Berkut if they wanted to show him off a good chunk of story instead of Corrin masturbation. Doesn't help the most likeable characters are either dlc or FUCKING DEAD.
 
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