We've all played them. Games that live long in the memory; games that dominate your every waking moment for weeks at a time and games that you'd replay over and over again if you had the time....
But what I want to know is this..Have you ever played a game that you loved, but had to work around the fact that one of the games core mechanics was just... kinda trash?
For context, I'm currently working through the excellent Bloodborne. I can see why it's largely considered the best one of those games, and potentially one of the best games released in the last decade.....at the same time I cannot abide the way the game handles healing and health vials.
There is a mobile game called "Kingdom Adventure" that had a lot of mechanic's I was looking for. It had town based RPG elements that let you send out adventurers to get resources and beat dungeons. Sounds like a great experience! However it's a translated game that hardly had ANY explanations in game, or online. I had to take notes from a 7 year old reddit post comment that gave more info than anywhere else.
I really liked most of the game. The pixel art had good resolution and was cute. The monster mechanics added more flair to the game. The fog mechanics on the map were cool and made you think about whether you wanted to take a new area or "refog" the area to farm experience. There also was no calendar mechanic so you weren't forced into a time cycle and could play at your pace. But after a while all the guessing about stats and mechanics felt like too much and when I got to the point where I could place a second town hall, I was too unsure of where to place it I just never did. My game is forever in limbo because I'm just tired of finding stuff out the hard way.
What’s wrong with Bloodbornes healing? It’s been a while since I played it, but it was just press-a-button-to-heal-a-set-amount wasn’t it? And you could only carry a set amount of healing vials on you, while any extras that were picked up are sent to storage that would auto-replenish when you went to the hunter’s dream, no?
Persona 4 Golden is one of the most influential games I've played in terms of the music, characters and story, and the time in my life during which I played it. However...
The dungeon crawling is just so rote and repetitive to me. The random generation in that game is just shit, boring hallway after boring hallway, I put it on easy and just struggled to remain engaged for those portions of the game, but I would still say it's one of my favorite games of all time.