florenza horsefly: 2012: Your WORST/Most Disappointing Gaming Experiences ...

So there are at least two threads regarding your personal GotY. Come to think of it, I haven't posted in one yet, BUT for the record mine is Kid Icarus: Uprising so yeah.

Now, to arouse that extreme pessimism that lies so deep within us all, what gaming experiences did you have last year that...weren't so great? Oh, and this doesn't just include games that came out this year that happened to suck - I'm going to take a page out of Carbo's book, meaning that this includes events, specific moments, and games you simply played last year, but that came out some time before 2012.

So, as for mine:

Repeating the Final Boss of Final Fantasy X God Knows How Many Times

Well, this is a party I was more than a little late to, considering that Final Fantasy X is about eleven years old, but hey, when I played it before, I was a young, stupid child who didn't have the patience for a 50-hour long RPG. But sometimes, even all these years later, the patience I've gained from playing these games can be quite thoroughly tested. Don't get me wrong, Final Fantasy X is a good game - far from one of my favorites in the franchise and fairly dated due to being the first installment with such innovations as facial animations, spoken dialogue and in-engine cutscenes, but a fun little game nonetheless with a strong battle system, a great stoyline, a fantastic setting, and great characters...eh, well, three?great characters.

But that's not the point here. The point is mostly regarding those previously mentioned in-engine cutscenes. Yeah, Final Fantasy X has basically cemented in me a seething hatred of unskippable cutscenes, one of the reasons being the final boss. Prior to the final boss is a cutscene that's actually one of the most well-done and emotionally moving in the game. That's great. Then the final boss kills you. Oh, well, look at that, you get to repeat the last fifteen minutes of gameplay again! The five minutes that included running around collecting gems in a rotating room full of icicles that pop out of the ground right beneath your feet, initiating an enemy encounter! And then you get to watch the five-minute long cutscene again! Oh, what's that? You died again? Aww, that's too bad, WELL BACK TO THE LAST SAVE POINT WITH YOU! This happened to me at least ten times before I finally decided to go back to prepare myself - which, by the way, meant trekking back through almost the entirety of the final dungeon to get back to my airship, constantly being molested by randomly-encountered enemies along the way. By the time I came back, my party was totally composed of powerhouses, because God help me if I was going to sit through all that crap again.

And the moral of this story is: unskippable cutscenes are bad and you should probably be a bit more liberal with save points while you're at it. Oh, and speaking of Final Fantasy...

Playing Ten Hours of This Piece of $#!7 (self-censoring cuz I've got class)

Yep, Final Fantasy XIII-2. We all know it sucks and we all know why it sucks, but I suppose I'll beat that horse just one last time. *ahem* Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a set of videos and images that metaphorically describe the experience of playing Square Enix's RPG, Final Fantasy XIII-2. Enjoy:

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Thank you. Oh, and I know that lots of people are going to agree with me on this one:

E3 2012

Everything sucked except for Ubisoft.

Everything.

Okay, I guess Sony was okay until they brought out that moronic storybook thing that no one gives a crap about, but for the most part, it was just so...disappointingly weak. For me, there wasn't really anything that incited much excitement, and there were hardly even any massive announcements. I mean, I guess Pikmin 3 and Scribblenauts Unlimited were...things? And Halo 4 was the only even remotely interesting thing Microsoft showed at their press conference. Bottom line, it was so...depressingly meh. And on the subject of depressingly meh...

New Super Mario Bros. 2

Dear Nintendo,

Why?

Okay, to be perfectly honest, this is kind of the odd one out in this post. It's by no stretch of the human imagination a bad game - in fact, taken objectively, it's pretty good. The mechanics are solid and the level design is, if nothing else, competent. But Mario is never supposed to be "competent". ?Mario games are supposed to be great, and greatness is something that this game...thoroughly lacks. I mean, some would argue that the New Super Mario Bros. series is by its very nature Mario in its most bland and dull incarnation, but New Super Mario Bros. U, released mere months after this game, is easily my favorite platformer of the year. I guess it's true that both games suffer from some of the same problems - both essentially rehash the same tropes and BAH-BAH-tastic music used in previous NSMB games without building onto the gameplay the series' 2-D entries have been milking for more than twenty years aside from adding a few new power-ups, but New Super Mario Bros. U's levels actually had tons of creativity and diversity to them. Almost every one introduced a brand new idea or mechanic, and even the ones that didn't felt meticulously crafted with all of love and effort you'd expect from a classic Mario game.

New Super Mario Bros. 2...lacks...any sort of soul, really. I mean, yeah, it has the coin gimmick, but that's literally one of the most worthless ideas to ever have been implemented. The power-ups are kind of cool, I guess, but the coins themselves don't really do anything differently or complement the level design in any way. And the level designs themselves just feel like they were put together without any actual thought to them. I mean, obviously, there was some or else the game would be unplayable, but there's no sense of meticulousness or diversity and genuine creativity is fairly rare. There are a handful of kind of creative levels and even occasional flashes of brilliance, but nothing stands out because the game is insultingly easy, especially compared to its Wii U counterpart. It's incredibly short as well, and while Mario games aren't usually that long, the amount of content generally makes up for it. Here...not so much. Really, it feels like Nintendo just slapped together a 2-D Mario game in half a year just for a quick cash-grab from people who wouldn't be able to buy the game they actually cared about for Wii U. The coin gimmick is basically the perfect metaphor for this game - Nintendo only made this to make money, and it worked because it's freaking Mario.?I can't help but feel like Nintendo knowingly put together a mediocre product and shoved it out because they knew people would buy it anyway. I really just can't buy that the mediocrity of this game even compared to some other NSMB installments was just a complete accident. And that's really sad.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

There are some people out there who would say that Re:coded completely sucked and is the worst installment in the Kingdom Hearts franchise to date. To that, I say, "hahaha NOPE". I've actually had this game for a few years, but I didn't suffer through the entire thing until last spring because it always bored the crap out of me. Basically, it's a mission-based gross oversimplification of the Kingdom Hearts gameplay with disgustingly repetitious mission design and bosses that test the limits of your patience. It has a great story, though! Which only makes it hurt that much more that everything else is so insipid. It's not one of the worst games I've ever played, but definitely one of the most frustratingly dull.

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Watching Capcom Continue to Treat Mega Man Like Garbage

I don't even know if I can say much for this one. Even Street Fighter X Mega Man, while decent, wasn't exactly much, especially considering that it was fan-made rather than officially made. Let's just hope that 2013 is better, but knowing Crapcom, it probably won't be.

Trekking Across Tales of the Abyss's Pointlessly Vast Expanse of Blandness God Knows How Many Times

I love this game.

I really do.

But I hate its overworld.

I hate its overworld so, so much.

Imagine Hyrule Field in Twilight Princess. That was pretty dull wasn't it?

Now imagine four Twilight Princess Hyrule Fields.

Imagine having to spend about a fourth of the game in those Hyrule Fields.

Now imagine that you don't have Epona.

Then imagine that you get some sort of air vehicle, but it doesn't make navigating the heinous geography any less tedious.

Imagine that vehicle gets downgraded after you have only had it for about an hour's worth of gameplay so that it can only travel over land and sea.

Yep. This was a great game with a fantastic story, an excellent battle system, and quite possibly some of the strongest characters in RPG history, but at times, playing it could be quite the taxing experience.

*sigh* And finally...

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