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Things that frustrate you in games?

Gimmicks and difficulty at the expense of fun factor. That's the most simple way I can put it.

Just experienced a nasty case of it in Bravely Second...
 
Games that have a needlessly slow start and ridiculously slow pacing. Dragon Quest 7 is a notorious case of this. In the very first scenario, you spend a couple in-game hours on your home island doing quests to open a temple that transports you to other islands, and never encounter a single monster in that frame. Only once you finally get to the second island after some three or so hours do you finally get to do anything. Then it takes roughly an average of 20 hours before you finally unlock class changes, just cause the game wants you to trudge through different islands and force feed you their stories before getting to the real meat of the game.

It's a good thing I'm being open-minded with this franchise, cause Dragon Quest 7 otherwise left a bad taste. Thankfully DQ 8 has redeemed it for me by getting to the damn point.
 
I have no queries with any gaming properties but the most irritating thing is LAG. It caused me to restart the whole Seoul mission in Splinter Cell 3 because I got killed by an random AI.
 
Anything that forces me to grind. If you need to make your players grind to extend the life of your game, then you've made a badly paced game. BW/2 were good, since it forced you to take a little time to level up every now and then, but it didn't take long before you were able to move on. Anything Johto however, was terrible, since by the end of Johto you'd be forced into tough battles (Claire, Kimono Girls, etc.), and if you failed at the battles and needed to level a bit to overcome them (like I did), then you either needed to grind on Pokemon 20+ levels below you (that had a bad habit of blowing up in your face), or wait 10 minutes between phone calls from trainers that might not even ask for a battle when they call. Honestly I never finished a Johto game because of this.

Needlessly complicated stuff (Zestiria's battle system)
I actually like Zestiria's system. Mapping attacks to directions along with individual buttons lets you weave together specific combos for a specific situation prey on each enemy's individual weaknesses. It's still possible and not even that hard to brute force your way through the battles, but it's much more satisfying to figure out the perfect move combo for each enemy.
 
Map exploring in Mary Skelter Nightmares is one of mine it's too easy to miss a minor detail on the map cause it doesn't show up on the map

Don't even get me started on the grinding session

Also returning to home from exploring a map is another one you could be deep in map exploring and when you get back to the map it starts you at the first area from scratch
 
Constant weapon upgrades in action RPGs. Children of Mana and Ever Oasis both do this. Instead of having lots of weapons with progressively better stats, how about having less weapons, each with their own unique, meaningful effects?
 
- A sudden difficulty curve in an otherwise simple game. Eg. getting the true end in Cave Story.
- Going back through the same area multiple times. Eg. The temple in the Phantom Hourglass
- Grinding so much that almost 90% of the game is grinding. Eg. Earthbound Beginnings
- A game with no story. Eg. All the old games pretty much
 
When a game gives you target lock on but doesn't auto lock on to the next target after defeating the first one.
 
Insta-death quick time events. Meaning, you have one second to push this button or you die. The first Bayonetta game was terrible for this, with one of the last boss fights having so many. Honestly, if you really need QTEs in your game, make it so you just lose some health or some time or something, instead of an instant death. Or at the very least give more than a second to react.
 
Insta-death quick time events. Meaning, you have one second to push this button or you die. The first Bayonetta game was terrible for this, with one of the last boss fights having so many. Honestly, if you really need QTEs in your game, make it so you just lose some health or some time or something, instead of an instant death. Or at the very least give more than a second to react.
This gave me flashbacks of Hideout Helm in Donkey Kong 64, where you're required to perform a chain of subsequent tasks in limited time to stop the laser beam from launching. It was already bad enough, but it was exasperated by Diddy Kong's rocket barrels and how god awful they are to control.

With that said, mechanics with bad controls. Diddy Kong's rocket barrels are insanely difficult to control as they are hyper sensitive to button pressure and require absolute precision to maneuver. Add peanut pistols that are hard to aim to mix, and you got yourself a migraine. Worse of all, I recently played DK64 on the Wii U Virtual Console and I swear to god that Diddy Kong's rocket barrels are even worse in that than the original.

Seriously, screw that rocket. I was forced to use restore points in the final boss because of it.
 
When enemy reinforcements arrive and attack the same turn.
 
Ooh, I finally placed one of mine the other day: random encounters that are triggered by chance while taking a step in the game world, instead of the enemy being represented by a mob that the player can avoid. Think Pokemon or old Final Fantasy vs. something like Mother. The former gets very annoying to me because every random encounter is no less sudden (and can have me cursing the RNG), but the latter allows me to anticipate the encounter coming up, get ready for it, and pounce - and this is actually more effective at creating tension than the encounters being totally random.
 
Ooh, I finally placed one of mine the other day: random encounters that are triggered by chance while taking a step in the game world, instead of the enemy being represented by a mob that the player can avoid. Think Pokemon or old Final Fantasy vs. something like Mother. The former gets very annoying to me because every random encounter is no less sudden (and can have me cursing the RNG), but the latter allows me to anticipate the encounter coming up, get ready for it, and pounce - and this is actually more effective at creating tension than the encounters being totally random.
I'm the opposite.

Well to be more precise, it depends on the game. In the 3DS remake of Dragon Quest 7, they changed it where instead of random encounters you would have on-map enemies, like how the modern DQ games are. But the problem is that they did not update the size of the dungeons to conform to this change. The dungeons in DQ7 are very narrow and cramped, to the point where more often than not, it is nearly impossible to avoid an on-map enemy simply because there is no space to move around them. Worse of all, the on-map enemies can re-spawn in a second, sometimes right after you just defeated the first one. You can have it where an enemy will literally spawn right in front of you. At least with random encounters, they're just random.

And it is just one of the most annoying things about DQ7. That and its ridiculously slow pace.
 
One that I recently discovered to my ire was the near-exclusive usage of the touch screen in Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It's really stupid when the buttons (in terms of controlling Link) are 90% non-functional, considering that that was what was the norm in most 2D games prior or 3DS games thereafter. I mean, it couldn't have been that difficult to assign some basic commands for Link's sword and somersault with two buttons, and changing train speed and direction with the d-pad. This and the mediocre story made me ditch that game altogether. (See my latest blog post.)
 
I'm now remembering when people were insisting (in a "I don't want this to happen, but it probably will" kind of way) that A Link Between Worlds would have touch screen controls before it was released. Gee, it's not like the overwhelming majority of 3DS games are set on the top screen or anything...
 
Something I've run into a few times in Cyberdimension Neptunia that I've decided I dislike a ton. In a stupid easy game getting a fetch quest for an item that's the only way to progress the story and the item has a stupidly low drop rate.
 
Further speaking of Zelda, having to start over a boss fight after falling down. I eventually gave up on A Link to the Past because of Moldorm.
 
Please note: The thread is from 2 years ago.
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