When I was younger I got stuck about 60 percent of the way through FF7. My cousin was over and I knew they had beaten it so I asked for help… They checked my gear and saw that I was still completely in the gear you start the game with :^)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I got to this part in the game where I absolutely could not beat a boss. Consulted IGN and learned that the only way to defeat her was to have some ability that was only gained at some prior point. Unfortunately I didn’t have any save points prior to that, so the only way I would be able to defeat that boss would be to completely restart. I just kind of noped the game after that.
This game is WIDELY criticized for this and has since been patched (via a new Director’s Cut version of the game) to fix the oversight. Essentially, thr boss battles were outsourced to abother company, causing them to not line up with the implementation of the rest of the game.
You could make it through most of the game as a 100% stealth/hacking build, but a single boss towards the end REQUIRED some combat abilities in the vanilla version. They’ve since added environmental aids to keep you from this exact frustration.
Source: i too got EXTREMELY stuck here before they released the Director’s Cut…
About 50 hours into xenoblade chronicles 3 I realized I could pick character order when doing chain attacks. Up to that point I had been going left to right every time.
I went from doing 200k damage per chain attack to 17 mil lol
In Legend of Dragoon I hit a wall on a Disc 2 boss and was stuck for months. After I took a break and came back I realized you could change your equipment–I’d never upgraded anything equipped and was using all of the starting equipped weapons and armor. This was not my first RPG, nor was I young enough to use age as an excuse.
I always get stuck trying to replay FF8 because I can never properly get enough items to ever upgrade anyone’s main weapon- which is usually good enough to get through till mid-late game there’s some point that requires more physical weapon use and I just get roadblocked and give up. I could probably follow a guide but I always think I can do it myself.
More on track with your game though - I love Legend of Dragoons art style for their character sheet, but it feels so slow navigating it. I’d really really love a remaster.
Yup, same issue in FF8, though I’ve never tried to replay it. My party was always underpowered/undergeared.
I also messed up big time in the fight against Adel/Rinoa at Lunatic Pandora. I blasted through practically ALL my spells in that fight (and it took me multiple attempts). So now I’m at Ultimecia Castle and I have no spells to use and I know there are tons of minibosses in there, along with the final boss sequence. I softlocked myself.
Legend of Dragoon is close to the top of my list of games I’d love to see remade, but almost certainly won’t.
Actually, FF8 is at the top of that list. It’s my favorite of the “mainline” FFs and the story has aged by far the best out of the series, but the systems, equipment, and stat working is awful. Like you’re running into, the systems are confusing and difficult to figure out, but as soon as you “get it” you almost have to handicap yourself so as not to completely break the game. A remake along the lines of the FF7 rework could fix that, and I think 8 would benefit from the treatment more than any other game in the series.
Did this with a couple RPGs too bud, first time I played mass effect way back when I got so frustrated because everything was so hard. Didn’t know you could upgrade stuff. Closest game I had played before was halo, where you get a few guns but they never upgrade, and armor never does either.
I’m pretty sure Animal Crossing: New Horizons never actually tells you that you can run by holding B. You just have figure it out by accident… I think I played for a month or two before I realized it was possible when watching someone play on YouTube.
I got hard stuck on one of the seymour fights on Mt. Gagazet and couldn’t be fucked to grind out enough levels to brute force it so that’s still where my save file is stuck at some 20 years later.
I got through all of Breath of the Wild without cooking anything. I knew the feature was there, but I don’t remember ever being taught how to use it and ultimately decided I’d just armour my way around it.
There was an old PC game called MegaRace. Somehow I changed my controls and set steering to Left was Right and Right was Left. I never noticed this for the entire time I played it.
When I bought Test Drive 4 the first race I proceeded to drive straight into a wall. After struggling for a while I went back to MegaRace and instantly realized what my issue was.
Fast forward a decade or two later after doing only console racing games, proceeded to buy Dirt Rally and use my keyboard and muscle memory kicked in and drove straight off the track. I basically have to set driving games I play keyboard with to reverse steering. Thankfully a wheel, seat, pedals, and shifter have alleviated this problem in my current life.
That at least makes sense, like I can wrap my brain around the idea that the control from behind the camera about the axis of the lens means it would be inverse and would thus feel ‘correct’ to a certain number of players.
I got good at mirroring controls on the fly from Mario kart on the DS, that weapon basically had no effect on me.
Though if you put upshift over downshift I will lose mind. Upshift is always X and downshift is always A for me on the Xbox layout (cross/triangle) also screws me up when real cars do this, upshift should be towards the rear and downshift should be forwards. That’s how most sequential gear shifters are configured in race cars. Ostensibly because you are downshifting under deceleration and upshifting during acceleration.
Man that game was so weird and quirky! It was fun, but I also remember having problems exiting the game for some reason lol. It’s available from GOG if you ever get the itch.
Dead Space 2. There was an ability to slow/freeze time which I thought was silly and OP so I didn’t put any points into it. Later on there’s a boss that requires the ability to freeze time. The stupid thing is is it wasn’t even a fight, you just had to run away through a locked door but you needed the time ability to open it before it gets you which is impossible to do without frickin freezing time.
My first experience with Dark Souls 1 was a real test of patience. I hadn’t realized how helpful the roll mechanic was. So there I was, from the start to the finish of the game, either blocking attacks with a shield, or just tanking them.
Once I got to Anor Londo, I remember kitting myself out in the Giants Armor, with a paired Giants Shield, and a Black Knight Sword that had been carrying me through the rest of the game. I was at something like 99.8% equip load, just enough that if I equipped a longbow, it put me in the over-encumbered slow walk.
And that’s how I beat the game. Just tanking everything that came my way. I got up to Quelaag in NG+ before I had to call it quits.
During the run, the rooftop Gargoyles gave me enough grief that I had to put the game down for a couple weeks. Had I decided to just give up then, I imagine my opinion of the Souls-like genre would be quite different today.
The first ever game of harvest moon was on the switch last year. I repaid the debt by fishing and collecting shells as I couldn’t figure out how to dig as I couldn’t obtain a pickaxe to finish my first ever quest. After 6+ hours of foraging around the staeting area, I realised that if you sleep, the quest progresses and you get the pickaxe… Yea!
I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.
Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn’t that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.
I don’t know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren’t easily resettable. I’m so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played regarding skill progression is Oblivion.
Honestly, that game’s levelling is completely busted. Basically your class has a couple major and minor skills. You gain skill levels automatically by using them, and when you got enough levels in your class skills, you are supposed to rest and gain a character level.
Almost everything in Oblivion is levelled to match your character’s level. Gaining a level only serves three purposes : gaining a very small amount of health, gaining a few points in two stats depending on which skills you’ve used … And most of all spawning more, stronger enemies.
Lots of skills in Oblivion are not directly (or absolutely not at all) combat-related. Lots of default classes come with quite a few of them as major or minor skills. And those that don’t come with several damage-related and several defence-related skills.
Progressing in non-combat skills, or in too many at once in a “master of none” fashion, will make your game impossible. “Playing well” requires knowing and exploiting this by blocking your level up until you’ve maxed the right skill. Or even having some of your favourite skills not class skills at all.
This is really not my idea of fun character progression.
And you can make Acrobatics a class skill for super fuck you hard mode. I didn’t know this as a 13 year old playing Oblivion, and I thought “levels good” and wondered why I couldn’t get into the game for years until I learned about this little “quirk” of the leveling system.
When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren’t the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie’s portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody’s materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.
I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because “I’ve played this game before, I know how it works.” I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn’t until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that’s when all the systems fell fully into place: you’re supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.
Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there’s a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.
Hah well today I learned. It’s recently occurred to me that I never beat any video games growing up because I didn’t read the instructions or learn how to play. FF7 is one of those games that I haven’t ever eaten even though I really really liked the game. Never even considered that you should have a trio of healer mage and fighter even though it makes total sense.
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When I was younger I got stuck about 60 percent of the way through FF7. My cousin was over and I knew they had beaten it so I asked for help… They checked my gear and saw that I was still completely in the gear you start the game with :^)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I got to this part in the game where I absolutely could not beat a boss. Consulted IGN and learned that the only way to defeat her was to have some ability that was only gained at some prior point. Unfortunately I didn’t have any save points prior to that, so the only way I would be able to defeat that boss would be to completely restart. I just kind of noped the game after that.
What the heck… That sounds like an absolutely miserable experience. I would have done the same. It wasn’t an optional boss or anything?
It was not an optional boss, sadly.
This game is WIDELY criticized for this and has since been patched (via a new Director’s Cut version of the game) to fix the oversight. Essentially, thr boss battles were outsourced to abother company, causing them to not line up with the implementation of the rest of the game.
You could make it through most of the game as a 100% stealth/hacking build, but a single boss towards the end REQUIRED some combat abilities in the vanilla version. They’ve since added environmental aids to keep you from this exact frustration.
Source: i too got EXTREMELY stuck here before they released the Director’s Cut…
About 50 hours into xenoblade chronicles 3 I realized I could pick character order when doing chain attacks. Up to that point I had been going left to right every time.
I went from doing 200k damage per chain attack to 17 mil lol
I was doing the same thing with driver combos back in XC2
I’m 50 hours in, choose my character order and still getting like 500k. What’s your secret?
Ngl it’s been a long time but a mixture of grinding like hell and maxing out damage related stones for pretty much everyone
But I love that game an abnormal amount so I wouldnt recommend that, 500k is more than enough damage for anything that isn’t post-game
In Legend of Dragoon I hit a wall on a Disc 2 boss and was stuck for months. After I took a break and came back I realized you could change your equipment–I’d never upgraded anything equipped and was using all of the starting equipped weapons and armor. This was not my first RPG, nor was I young enough to use age as an excuse.
I always get stuck trying to replay FF8 because I can never properly get enough items to ever upgrade anyone’s main weapon- which is usually good enough to get through till mid-late game there’s some point that requires more physical weapon use and I just get roadblocked and give up. I could probably follow a guide but I always think I can do it myself.
More on track with your game though - I love Legend of Dragoons art style for their character sheet, but it feels so slow navigating it. I’d really really love a remaster.
Yup, same issue in FF8, though I’ve never tried to replay it. My party was always underpowered/undergeared.
I also messed up big time in the fight against Adel/Rinoa at Lunatic Pandora. I blasted through practically ALL my spells in that fight (and it took me multiple attempts). So now I’m at Ultimecia Castle and I have no spells to use and I know there are tons of minibosses in there, along with the final boss sequence. I softlocked myself.
Legend of Dragoon is close to the top of my list of games I’d love to see remade, but almost certainly won’t.
Actually, FF8 is at the top of that list. It’s my favorite of the “mainline” FFs and the story has aged by far the best out of the series, but the systems, equipment, and stat working is awful. Like you’re running into, the systems are confusing and difficult to figure out, but as soon as you “get it” you almost have to handicap yourself so as not to completely break the game. A remake along the lines of the FF7 rework could fix that, and I think 8 would benefit from the treatment more than any other game in the series.
Did this with a couple RPGs too bud, first time I played mass effect way back when I got so frustrated because everything was so hard. Didn’t know you could upgrade stuff. Closest game I had played before was halo, where you get a few guns but they never upgrade, and armor never does either.
Second time through was much easier
I’m pretty sure Animal Crossing: New Horizons never actually tells you that you can run by holding B. You just have figure it out by accident… I think I played for a month or two before I realized it was possible when watching someone play on YouTube.
I got hard stuck on one of the seymour fights on Mt. Gagazet and couldn’t be fucked to grind out enough levels to brute force it so that’s still where my save file is stuck at some 20 years later.
Lol, the Seymour fights are some of the worst. Along with a nasty one a bit later that you never got to.
But oof, I’d so encourage revisiting if you ever have the motivation, cause FFX is one of the best games ever and you quit near the peak of the story.
I got through all of Breath of the Wild without cooking anything. I knew the feature was there, but I don’t remember ever being taught how to use it and ultimately decided I’d just armour my way around it.
Okay… this is impressive
Life.
There was an old PC game called MegaRace. Somehow I changed my controls and set steering to Left was Right and Right was Left. I never noticed this for the entire time I played it.
When I bought Test Drive 4 the first race I proceeded to drive straight into a wall. After struggling for a while I went back to MegaRace and instantly realized what my issue was.
Fast forward a decade or two later after doing only console racing games, proceeded to buy Dirt Rally and use my keyboard and muscle memory kicked in and drove straight off the track. I basically have to set driving games I play keyboard with to reverse steering. Thankfully a wheel, seat, pedals, and shifter have alleviated this problem in my current life.
This story is delightful, thank you
And I thought I was weird for having my vertical controls switched for shooters. Lol.
That at least makes sense, like I can wrap my brain around the idea that the control from behind the camera about the axis of the lens means it would be inverse and would thus feel ‘correct’ to a certain number of players.
I got good at mirroring controls on the fly from Mario kart on the DS, that weapon basically had no effect on me.
Though if you put upshift over downshift I will lose mind. Upshift is always X and downshift is always A for me on the Xbox layout (cross/triangle) also screws me up when real cars do this, upshift should be towards the rear and downshift should be forwards. That’s how most sequential gear shifters are configured in race cars. Ostensibly because you are downshifting under deceleration and upshifting during acceleration.
Never understood you southpaws lol
Man that game was so weird and quirky! It was fun, but I also remember having problems exiting the game for some reason lol. It’s available from GOG if you ever get the itch.
Dead Space 2. There was an ability to slow/freeze time which I thought was silly and OP so I didn’t put any points into it. Later on there’s a boss that requires the ability to freeze time. The stupid thing is is it wasn’t even a fight, you just had to run away through a locked door but you needed the time ability to open it before it gets you which is impossible to do without frickin freezing time.
I never finished it.
My first experience with Dark Souls 1 was a real test of patience. I hadn’t realized how helpful the roll mechanic was. So there I was, from the start to the finish of the game, either blocking attacks with a shield, or just tanking them.
Once I got to Anor Londo, I remember kitting myself out in the Giants Armor, with a paired Giants Shield, and a Black Knight Sword that had been carrying me through the rest of the game. I was at something like 99.8% equip load, just enough that if I equipped a longbow, it put me in the over-encumbered slow walk.
And that’s how I beat the game. Just tanking everything that came my way. I got up to Quelaag in NG+ before I had to call it quits.
During the run, the rooftop Gargoyles gave me enough grief that I had to put the game down for a couple weeks. Had I decided to just give up then, I imagine my opinion of the Souls-like genre would be quite different today.
ALmost reminds me of Maple in Bofuri lol.
The first ever game of harvest moon was on the switch last year. I repaid the debt by fishing and collecting shells as I couldn’t figure out how to dig as I couldn’t obtain a pickaxe to finish my first ever quest. After 6+ hours of foraging around the staeting area, I realised that if you sleep, the quest progresses and you get the pickaxe… Yea!
I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.
Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn’t that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.
I don’t know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren’t easily resettable. I’m so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played regarding skill progression is Oblivion.
Honestly, that game’s levelling is completely busted. Basically your class has a couple major and minor skills. You gain skill levels automatically by using them, and when you got enough levels in your class skills, you are supposed to rest and gain a character level.
Almost everything in Oblivion is levelled to match your character’s level. Gaining a level only serves three purposes : gaining a very small amount of health, gaining a few points in two stats depending on which skills you’ve used … And most of all spawning more, stronger enemies.
Lots of skills in Oblivion are not directly (or absolutely not at all) combat-related. Lots of default classes come with quite a few of them as major or minor skills. And those that don’t come with several damage-related and several defence-related skills.
Progressing in non-combat skills, or in too many at once in a “master of none” fashion, will make your game impossible. “Playing well” requires knowing and exploiting this by blocking your level up until you’ve maxed the right skill. Or even having some of your favourite skills not class skills at all.
This is really not my idea of fun character progression.
And you can make Acrobatics a class skill for super fuck you hard mode. I didn’t know this as a 13 year old playing Oblivion, and I thought “levels good” and wondered why I couldn’t get into the game for years until I learned about this little “quirk” of the leveling system.
Oh yeah, acrobatics and athletics, the two skills that go up every time you jump and run. Good ways to fuck your progression both.
Also the social skills, Mercantile and Speechcraft.
When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren’t the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie’s portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody’s materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.
I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because “I’ve played this game before, I know how it works.” I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn’t until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that’s when all the systems fell fully into place: you’re supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.
Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there’s a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.
Hah well today I learned. It’s recently occurred to me that I never beat any video games growing up because I didn’t read the instructions or learn how to play. FF7 is one of those games that I haven’t ever eaten even though I really really liked the game. Never even considered that you should have a trio of healer mage and fighter even though it makes total sense.