games

rolling people up into a ball does bring them closer together, but it's rude to abduct people in the middle of their day (katamari)

StarCraft is too hard to play with friends and StarCraft 2 made the wrong things easy making the big army fights take 2 seconds.

Magic the gathering not only has power creep but rules and mechanics creep making the game even more complex over time. Also the focus on printing cards specifically for EDH/commander makes the format less interesting.

Pokemon TCG none of the meta decks use guys i like and it's because the ones i like all suck.

DotA and mobas are basically entirely suffering and the games are often prolonged by people who enjoy suffering.

Touhou player, I just suck ass at getting anywhere past stage 3/4 in every game

Dwarf Fortress has a very silly difficulty curve consisting of an initial cliff followed by not that much, and all of its options just increase the size of the initial cliff.

Earthbound has some quest chains that can get stuck in really obtuse ways, particularly in Twoson and Fourside.

Crosscode's DLC has that fight where Apollo is way too damn hard all of a sudden.

UFO 50 has ~5 perfunctory games in genres that clearly nobody on the team really cared for, and it's worse for it. That's Fist Hell, Star Waspir, Caramel Caramel, Campanella 3, and Block Koala. There are worse trash fires in the collection, like Hot Foot, but those are at least bad because they tried something interesting and failed.

In Super Metroid, the entrance to Kraid's hideout is poorly telegraphed.

Mario Odyssey giving you moons for every silly little accomplishment is great, but giving the same reward for korok-tier stuff and actual challenges cheapens the reward feeling of actual challenges, and they should've done a tiered system.

Kenshi: after hundreds of hours put into the game and going thru multiple cycles of starting a new game, struggling to make money, fighting, losing, fighting again, building and automating a base, etc, and all the emergent storytelling that comes out of that -- I feel like it was only the combat-related systems that were fully fleshed out and ultimately, the only way to interact with the world in a meaningful way is through combat. Though the visuals and worldbuilding do great of offering the promise of a lot, the dialogue system is not developed enough to allow for any dialogue mods that integrate well with and impact the world or player characters. Animations systems are similarly limited, with the system allowing for minute customization and replacement of combat animations, and very little room for any animations not combat-related.

Trails is lib as hell with a focus on Good Monarchs, just like most JRPGs. There are also a bunch of anime tropes, although I think this has been exaggerated and people play Persona and Xenoblade, both of which have just as many if not more tropes. Barely anyone dies in the story even though there are multiple wars and one plot point muddles the anti-imperialist themes. Missable quests suck and the soundtracks used to be amazing, but are now mostly farmed to one composed who is mostly just okay.

Ys is usually either way too hard or way too easy with little middle ground. The same complaints I already had about the Trails soundtracks also apply.

Yakuza has too many nonsensical plot points, even though some of them have become memes because of how dumb they are.

The turn-based gameplay sucks because it makes every fight against a level 1 enemy a slog that lasts forever because you can't skip or speed up the animations. There's also nothing as satisfying as doing a heat action in that whole gameplay loop.

I love Portal but I would vehemently disagree with anyone who says it's a better game than Portal 2. Even just ignoring all the stuff like plot structure and graphics, Portal 2 is way ahead in terms of puzzle design. Also Portal 2 does better job at fully exploring the concept of portals, while Portal 1 feels like a tech demo in some parts

Stormworks: I think overall I'm pretty happy with it. There are some things where they don't change stuff because too many people's creations would break if they changed (e.g. parallel jet turbine bug). Also, the actual overworld game is pretty undeveloped. I think people would really appreciate a semi-live economy, though simulating the physics of that would be wild.

My main frustrations with the game are usually because I want to make things by myself, instead of downloading other people's engine controllers and ballistic computers >.>

Also having a creation tip over outside of the de-spawn range and having to restart a game because there isn't enough money to re-make it.

Then there's just a pile of parts that are either too big (pivots, sliding connectors) (usually from the early era of the game), only in one size despite it being quite a broad range of products (pneumatic piston), or just missing.

It would be nice if you could simulate/control things with hydraulics without an intervening electrical component (e.g. carburetor, piston control units), but I also get that that might be rather complicated.

It would also be nice if there was a way to have parts on non-cardinal directions at the start without shenanigans.

Also, I always play by myself and wish my friends would come join me and say "Oh wow, you're not a complete idiot" or something. :(

CrossCode

The desert temple and the jungle area are too tedious even if they are as quality as the rest of the game. The story ending in the DLC was ass and didn't resolve some things that needed to imo, mainly:

Rabi-Ribi

I can tolerate the fanservice because I have terminal weeb brainrot since childhood, but I can't recommend the game to anyone else even though it is a great metroidvania with awesome bossfights and music.

ZeroRanger

Breath of the Wild

It would have been a perfect game I could play forever if it had bigger dungeons and more than 10 enemy types.

if anything the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack is too good

Rimworld encourages you to perform Eugenics on any undesirable colonists, especially with the biotech DLC. Also encourages cannibalism and harvesting your opponents organs to sell on the market for greed and profit.

Also too many quality of life mods should be in the base game.

The most popular WoW streamer is a champion of Nurgle who has roaches crawling on him while he screeches about DEI, the people that like him are typically even worse.

Team Fortress 2 is a money printer and valve should have kept updating it regularly with new weapons. The bizarre turn to a ranked esports scene sucked and made it way harder to find community servers, the best part of the game.

Elden Ring's community sucks ass. The best way to beat the game is however you want and it's really not that hard unless you intentionally cripple yourself by not using half the tools the game gives you and screams at you to use.

Sekiro's dragonrot mechanic is really confusing and seems like a tax on progressing quests if you die too much, which is already the most punishing part of the game since you lose skill point progression when you die as well as money and there's no way to go pick it up like every other Souls game. However the combat is better than any Souls game has ever been and nothing is more satisfying than perfect deflects.

Deep Rock Galactic's escort and drillevator missions are really repetitive and boring. The game is at its strongest when you're exploring the caves and terraforming to give yourself better odds against swarms. Those two types trivialize and completely remove the value of all the classes movement tools so you're left standing on the point gunning down bugs until the timer runs out. At least they had the sense to randomize core stone phases with season 5.

Heat Signature really good but some mission types are impossible without self-charging tools and those are so vanishingly rare from crates that you end up doing dozens of Soft Target missions to roll the dice on the overpriced mystery crates for good gear. And the really really high glory score missions are frequently impossible. Time limit warzone hijack, and there's defenders and predators on board the ship? Nah.

Disco Elysium kind of throws you in the deep end. What's a thought cabinet? Why am I mulling on this tie? What do any of these stats mean?

Earthbound can be a real piece of shit, everybody knows the clunky and limited inventory is a pain in the ass, and it is completely true. Furthermore, the story, while good, lacks a lot of personality building for the main cast of characters, which is funny cause every npc has amazing dialouge. While the lack of character building doesn't harm the ending overall, it certainly does not hit as hard as Mother 1 or 3's endings, due to them actually taking a few moments to flesh out the main cast of heroes at several points.

Total War: Empire, a buggy mess that likes to crash in the late game. Unfinished, AI is illogical in both diplomacy and a lot of battle tactics (Which makes the few times they pull a clever maneuver incredibly surprising) and nearly requires modding to be playable, either through script edits or from installing overhauls.

EU4: Now this is one I haven't thought of much, but there certainly are many flaws to find in this one. First off, 93% of the gameplay is just finding buttons to press with the right timing, that's it. The DLC's have mostly been focused around adding more buttons to press. Powercreep has been a real issue, like how Spain will have colonized most of Oregon and Alaska before a Russia player can even hope to have gotten to East Siberia. Many intended paths require RNGesus to smile upon you, and whose alternative requirements can be very difficult to achieve in comparison. (So many MP games of my friends grumbling over many such cases.) And, despite being an 11 year old game, some regions are still not very fleshed out. India and parts of the Americas lack flavour and content. And of course, the UI can be a bit inscrutable at times, with a few features hidden away or poorly explained, like the macrobuilder diplo screen. And yeah yeah, the DLC policy is terrible as it locks out critical features behind a paywall, which has only been partially fixed with updates and working older DLC into the base game.

space station 13 can vary wildly from being one of the best gaming experiences out there to actually soul sucking gameplay with unpleasant people. Also the interface is dogshit but upon playing the remakes I realized that I actually LIKE that dogshit. I just wish it ran better and had a couple QoL touchups

also the mechanics can get very stale unless youre playing antagonist roles. But I guess that's what you get for playing Low-RP servers and relying on mechanics for storytelling instead of roleplay

Oh in SOTC killing the collosi made me way too sad

Genshin's character quests are a hairball. Too easy to accidentally trigger once unlocked, and then you end up with other quests locked out, including dailies. There's also limited story reward-- I don't really need a deep dive into some B-plot character who you'll never see again in the main story progrrssion.

Final Fantasy X, a game with heavy enphasis on death and mourning, didn't feature the death of a party member. Sin is terrible and named characters die to it, but it's not the same. In fact there were few on-screen deaths.

Also, I wish the world didn't feel like it had a population of 200. I get the population was dwindling after the thousand years, but it just felt so small. I think this could have been solved by having a larger unexplored world or by explicitly stating there are villages dotted all over Spira that the protagonists cannot explore on their journey.

Also also, over the course of 1000 years only five people performed the pilgrimage to the point of defeating Sin. The practice of the pilgrimage would have fallen out of favor with such a low success rate. I'd sooner expect Spirans to move underground in tunnels as mole people.

Also also also, there was no water Aeon. Leviathan deserves justice. More Aeons in general could have explored more heroes who defeated Sin in the past.

civ is a liberal great man theory alternate history sim in the worst possible way

The Elytra in Minecraft ruined multiplayer survival servers. It is too easy to just fly around with rockets, so much so that there is no longer any incentive to do the fun thing about survival Minecraft: creating infrastructure! Why build roads, lay minecart tracks, use boats, or tame horses if you can just fly where ever you want with your magical firework rocket fuel source? It's an end game item sure, but that means jackshit in multiplayer survival where inevitably someone has a gazillion of them to hand out.

I'd prefer if they just made it glide only. Then it's something you need to build infrastructure to use: high towers to leap from!

Also Phantoms fucking suck, they are so dumb. Why does a group of hostile mobs randomly spawn literally on top of me every 3 in game days just to force me to click on a bed? Wtf. Yeah I know you can turn them off, but once again, you can't do that in multiplayer!