Tanukitsune

Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

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Quitting Metro 2033 at Chapter 4 because it's an area with a *lot* of different light sources, which makes my FPS go all to shit, and I'll be damned if I'm going to shoot them out to make things run smoothly.

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I think I'm finally giving up on Final Fantasy XIII.

It's dull. The combat doesn't engage me (I might as well not be doing it at all!) I can't really grind to make upcoming battles easier, because it caps off how far you can advance your characters in each chapter. Granted, exp carries over when you unlock the next sort of level of levelling up, but then that just means half the battles in the next chapter are completely useless.

 

Also, the Eidolon battles are the bane of my existence - they're like a regular battle, except instead of killing the enemy, there's a little bar that fills up when you do certain actions. The actions that fill the bar are different depending on the Eidolon you're fighting, and the only way I've found to pass these battles is to find a guide telling me what I should do and when. Once the bar is filled up, you press a button and poof! You capture the Eidolon.

 

Plus, for a Final Fantasy game, I really don't like the characters. (Except Sazh, he's pretty cool.) I honestly cannot give half a shit about whether or not they live or die.

Also, I'm like 10 hours in and it's still blasting me with tutorials on how to do stuff. Holy flipping fuck why is the tutorial extended out this long? I'm usually a pretty patient person when it comes to in-game tutorials. I don't really mind things like "Press B to Jump!" popping up on the first level, it doesn't bother me that much. But 10 hours in and its still showing me new stuff? I'm getting kind of sick of it.

I just don't think I have the time or patience to continue this game, especially when I don't care about what happens at the end.

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FFXIII ultimately has a fun battle system, but you wouldn't know until about 20 hours in when it finally stops drip-feeding each mechanic. I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping the game given the glacial pace and charmless cast; the aesthetics alone can't be expected to sustain people until the game finally opens up.

 

My pick of JRPGs from the last generation is Resonance of Fate. It came out at almost the same time as FFXIII but stands in complete contrast to it, with layers of interlocking mechanics that are open right from the start. Naturally this places it at the other extreme where some will find it impenetrable, but it's one of the most mechanically interesting games I've played in years and is endearingly bizarre.

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I stuck with it to fully unlock the battle system, and was very excited to see the story coming to a head and building to a conclusion

 

and then it fucking didn't

 

and I'm still mad about it years later

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I think a cliffhanger ending is probably a lesser sin than what they did because at least it's an explicit promise for resolution.

 

So FFXIII makes clear that the characters are doomed unless they manage to reach Pulse and discover a way for them to subvert the quest placed on them. They get to Pulse and explore around, and eventually find Fang and Vanille's former village, and a road beyond that that ends at... something, it's hard to see. It's been long enough, you've closed Fang and Vanille's arc, now you put something at the end of that road that reveals more about the compulsion the party is under, and what they have to do in the final act to save the day. That's a nice, solid bit of storytelling in a game that's had a lot of pacing issues.

 

What happens instead is that mysterious figure at the end of the road is the god that put them under the compulsion in the first place, they fight him, then conclude there's nothing there and they'll have to leave Pulse entirely and figure something out, which turns out to be a last-minute deus ex machina. Whyyyyyyyyy. They knew they had to have something at the end of that road, and what they had was stupid.

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I give up on Volgarr The Viking, I was OK with the fact the game has NO checkpoints and forces you to beat it a level in one go... until I found out it had bosses. I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure even maso-core games have checkpoints before a boss, or the boss is just a level, or the level is just shorter, this is just asking for too much. I'm just glad I got with a Humble Bundle.

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I think a cliffhanger ending is probably a lesser sin than what they did because at least it's an explicit promise for resolution.

 

So FFXIII makes clear that the characters are doomed unless they manage to reach Pulse and discover a way for them to subvert the quest placed on them. They get to Pulse and explore around, and eventually find Fang and Vanille's former village, and a road beyond that that ends at... something, it's hard to see. It's been long enough, you've closed Fang and Vanille's arc, now you put something at the end of that road that reveals more about the compulsion the party is under, and what they have to do in the final act to save the day. That's a nice, solid bit of storytelling in a game that's had a lot of pacing issues.

 

What happens instead is that mysterious figure at the end of the road is the god that put them under the compulsion in the first place, they fight him, then conclude there's nothing there and they'll have to leave Pulse entirely and figure something out, which turns out to be a last-minute deus ex machina. Whyyyyyyyyy. They knew they had to have something at the end of that road, and what they had was stupid.

I've no idea if they made good on that promise as I didn't particularly feel like paying them more money for the actual ending. Given that they also made Lightning Returns, which I haven't touched, I assume it wasn't very final. Fantasy.

 

As for the spoiler:

I want to say that the part you highlighted is where the bad guys' motivation, or at least manipulation, is revealed. Like a lot of the game's plot it's presented rather poorly in cutscenes but summarised fairly succinctly in the Datalog, a clear failure of storytelling.

 

In essence your party's journey was a fool's errand to incite fear and disruption on Cocoon, the end goal being its destruction via in-fighting. Such a massive loss of life would supposedly fling wide Etro's Gate, a passage to the afterlife, allowing the fal'Cie (demi-gods) to follow their creators (actual gods) through to wherever they buggered off to, or at least get their attention. This wasn't an event the fal'Cie could enact directly as they were charged with taking care of humanity, so the manipulation was basically a way of bypassing their programming.

 

So, when Lightning et al get to the end of that road they know that they have to return to Cocoon to put a stop to the civil war they helped spark, even though space-pope fal'Cie wants them to return and cause further disruption. So they essentially do what the bad guys wanted and kill Orphan, the source of Cocoon's power, but then Fang and Vanille turn into Ragnarok — as per their Focus — and destroy/save Cacoon: making it fall fulfils their objective which turns them to crystal, which then props up Cocoon. And then the rest of the party stop being crystal for reasons.

 

In other words the game's about subverting one's fate, like pretty much every JRPG. It's also told really badly, like pretty much every JRPG.

 

I often wish my brain was as much of a sponge for useful information.

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I did read the datalogs but the details kind of ran together a bit over the years. So this was helpful.

 

Iam okay with the fool's errand, except of course that their focus was to destroy Orphan anyway so it's not so much of a fool's errand if they get what they want either way so why try and spark a civil war?

 

But my issue is that when they find out that nasty surprise on Pulse, they go back to Cocoon with no information that will really help them. It was obvious to the party members that the fal'Cie were manipulating them, because they were explicitly charged with killing the most important fal'Cie. They go back to Cocoon, tails between their legs, with no particular narrative drive - they know that they'll have to kill Orphan, but they don't want to and they're hoping that something will happen that means they don't have to - essentially, they're letting fate decide whether or not fate will get its way. (As soon as they arrive at Cocoon, of course, they immediately start wrecking random shit because that's how you stop a civil war - more destruction).

 

A much better way to handle it is find information along the way that allows them to genuinely take a third option; that there's something on Pulse that means there is a way to kill Orphan and ensure that everyone survives, turning killing Orphan into a heroic act. The "reveal" then shows that killing Orphan isn't such an evil act after all (although that really should be something the villains don't straight-out volunteer, because there's the risk of making jerkass heroes who are only heroic because the plot made their jerkassery justifiable after the fact). Then the crystallisation of Fang and Vanille is an 'emergency' sacrifice because their initial plan didn't quite work out.

 

I've gone on the record in the past as liking the first half of the plot;

I enjoyed Snow, the incompetent plucky hero who no-one likes, and I enjoyed how Lightning's bitterness turned Hope into a little shit she couldn't dial back down, and that entire chapter of the game where Snow is all 'come on kid, we'll make it across this town together!' while Hope's muttering 'I'm going to throw you off a building' and Fang and Sahz are basically all fun. Vanille, I think, was poorly localised - I understand they really, really wanted a genki girl, and then hired an Australian, and Australians do not do genki and it's basically just a Japanese thing anyway. So there were some highs but yeah on balance it was not great.

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Dishonored- I have no idea WHY, I just could NOT get into this game. It seems like, on paper, it was tailor-made for me. A blend of sci-fi and fantasy, intriguing gameplay elements and a vibrant world, crazy-deep mission structures that allow for incredibly unconventional win scenarios and after the first mission, which I beat by branding the guy, I just COULDN'T keep playing it.

 

Also not sure it counts since there's no real "end," but I keep WANTING to play Hearthstone more, and can't seem to bring myself to. I've never wanted to be a guy that netdecks, if I'm playing someone else's deck with someone else's strategy, I'm not sure why I'M playing the game, but I also can't seem to rise above rank 18 without finding myself UTTERLY dominated. It's unfortunate because I CAN have fun with it, and I understand that losing is an integral part of getting better (I spent three years in the bottom half of my household of 6 friends at Super Street Fighter IV) but there's just something about this game that grates on me.

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I think I've quit Metro 2033 (Redux). It's kinda just a rather bland shooter, with a cool setting. I just got sick of enemies charging at me. That's not a fun mechanic to deal with in shooters, and it's so incredibly old hat by this point. The stealth sections were pretty fun, I really enjoyed trying to take out a bunch of human enemies without being found, but the monster stuff is tedious. The bullets as currency felt pointless to me. I was never low enough to need to use them, especially as I carried 2 other guns that couldn't use them, rending the whole mechanic null. Might as well have been bottle caps.

 

I wanted to like it, but it's just not for me. For a shooter to grab me in 2014, after playing a billion and 1 shooters, it's got to be something special. Metro isn't bad, it's just OK, and hence I don't really have time for it.

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I give up on Volgarr The Viking, I was OK with the fact the game has NO checkpoints and forces you to beat it a level in one go... until I found out it had bosses. I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure even maso-core games have checkpoints before a boss, or the boss is just a level, or the level is just shorter, this is just asking for too much. I'm just glad I got with a Humble Bundle.

WHAT?! there are also bossfights? I barely cleared 1 level.

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Wait, I can't believe I got farther than you, even if it just a little more. And yes, it was very annoying boss you had to make a spear ladder and hit him before he smashed you and the spears.

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I give up on Volgarr The Viking, I was OK with the fact the game has NO checkpoints and forces you to beat it a level in one go... until I found out it had bosses. I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure even maso-core games have checkpoints before a boss, or the boss is just a level, or the level is just shorter, this is just asking for too much. I'm just glad I got with a Humble Bundle.

 

Kind of mixed on the checkpointing (feel like I could have beaten that first level much faster had I been reset to just the boss when dying) but I'm still going so I guess it doesn't bother me that much yet.

 

Have you checked out Tiny Barbarian DX? It's Volgarr-like in that the levels are tough and you have to reach checkpoints to continue progress later, but it checkpoints bosses. It also doesn't demand the same precision that I feel Volgarr does at some points, as I've gotten by and have been a little sloppy.

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Yeah, you're right, the second episode with the bees was the worst, but like you said, it might be a bit more demanding than Volgarr in many senses, but since it has more checkpoints it "hurts" less. Also, Tiny Barbarian has an actual health bar.

 

But to me no checkpoints before a boss is just too much, if it was at least a shorter level I could begrudgingly continue, but this is too much for me.

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Is there more to Bioshock 2 than killing Big Daddies so I can protect Little Sisters from waves of Splicers? Or have I basically seen what the game has to offer at this point?

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Oh, I fought one and disliked that more than the other things I didn't particularly care for. It looks cool and Marin did a good job of masking or transforming the re-used assets, but I just am not over the moon on this game.

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Play Minerva's Den?  I picked up B2 from one of the bundles solely so I can play through Minerva's Den at some point. 

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Oh, I fought one and disliked that more than the other things I didn't particularly care for. It looks cool and Marin did a good job of masking or transforming the re-used assets, but I just am not over the moon on this game.

 

I finished Bioshock 2 recently and I'm glad that I did, but I hated fighting Big Daddys in both Bioshock games, and Big Sisters even more so. It seems like an absurd design choice to me that such an atmospheric and cerebral shooter would essentially - and CONSTANTLY! - revert to 'circle-strafe and unload all of your ammo into a big thing' type of gameplay in order for you to progress. The whole protect-the-little-sister-while-she-collects-ADAM thing was almost as tedious.

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Bioshock 2 was fun, but I didn't find it to be a necessary game, and it really didn't add much... I played through it because it was the only FPS I had on my 360 for a long time, so I went through it. But it didn't stick out to me the way Bioshock 1 or Infinite did... (Although one of my favorite gaming moments came from Bioshock 2, when I got quite drunk on Jaegermeister and played the online multiplayer mode while talking with my roommate while he played some other game on the other TV... it was a good time.)

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How special is Minerva's Den actually? It's obviously a classic that people have recommended time and time again, but usually without that much explanation or detail in their recommendation. Is it as expected an expansion on the existing Bioshock 1/2 story or is it more of a discrete separate thing, like Burial at Sea is to Infinite?

 

I ask mostly cause I dropped out of Bioshock after a couple hours because I liked the world but had no interest in the plot, characters or gameplay and I'd seen enough of the world after just a little while. I've never played 2, though I do know the rough synopsis of both games, so if Minerva was related but a significant shift in tone or storytelling I could possibly still get on board.

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Is there more to Bioshock 2 than killing Big Daddies so I can protect Little Sisters from waves of Splicers? Or have I basically seen what the game has to offer at this point?

 

Bioshock 2 took four or five hours to grab me. Up until that point, I despised the game for being a rehash of a predecessor that was already long in tooth in a lot of ways. It took fully upgrading enough of the guns and accumulating enough plasmids so that I had actual tactical options in a given fight and wasn't always optimizing for my only gun with upgrades and/or ammo. From that point onward, I enjoyed it immensely, but I also recognize that the same breakpoint might never arrive for some.

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