Say something you hate about a game you love/Something you love about a bad game

[Mysterymask]

Rules are simple name 2 games. 1 you like and 1 you hate then be critical of the game you like and compliment the one you hate. Can be as nitpicky or as minor as you want.

Like: Final Fantasy 9. Trance system is literally the worst mechanic in ff games period. Can strategize around it, too many times it popped up RIGHT as the battle ends then I have like 2 minutes of down time watching the transformation animation. Add in half of them are useless and we got a winner

Hate: Wild Arms 3. The setting is fantastic and honestly the presentation was really good here. I mean it slows down the gameplay immensely and a lot of the novelty wears out really quick at the least the first time it was pretty neat

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Like: Trails of Cold Steel 1&2 is perhaps one of my most favorite games ever. Replayed them a bunch of time. But... I hate the obscure, hidden quest placement. Like in previous games, there are sometimes hidden quests that are arbitrarily placed in out of the way locations you would never think to visit during the story. Yes, it's enjoyable talking to NPCs and all, but I shouldn't have to travel all the way back to Aurochs Fort when I just came from there to do a hidden quest for maximum points. The story is urgently telling me to progress the story in Bareahard and there is absolutely no indication that there is a sidequest in Aurochs. And this happens quite a few times, and the narrative places a lot of importance on getting the highest score (whereas 100%ing other games isn't something you really think about). Cold Steel is nowhere near as bad as in Ao no Kiseki/Trails to Azure where meaningful story content happened in ridiculously out of the way areas with limited time to do them, with walkthroughs being absolutely mandatory.

Hate: Ys II. Never finished it. Very aggravating to play. Combat isn't fun and a lot of the paths are so ridiculously hidden or obscure you constantly need to alt+tab out to consult a walkthrough. But I like the nice attention to detail. If you go up and interact with the tree right in front of Lilia's house, you will get a textbox showing lines Lilia scribbled into the tree when she was a little kid measuring her height as she grew. It's a cute little thing that helps humanize her and make you more attached to the character, and helps immerse you into the world, but you're not forced to do it so if you discover it on your own it's really nice.

Kinda bending the rules, but I'll throw in another:

Hate: The Last Remnant. I love/hate this game. The combat is fun and I love the aesthetics and the battle music, but I absolutely hate literally everything else about this game: poorly explained mechanics, counter-intuitive mechanics, obscure side quests and consequences, the RNG, etc. Really bad case of walkthroughitis and needing a cheat engine. But it had dynamic final boss difficulty. In many JRPGs, the final boss is never the hardest boss in the game, because he has to be beatable by everyone who wants to see the story. So the optional superbosses are the hardest. If you're a hardcore player, then it can be anticlimatic to work so hard to kill the optional superbossess... and then when completing the game, the final boss is a pushover. Well in TLR, the final boss becomes more powerful the more of the game you have completed. If you rush through the game and only do the story, then you can pretty easily beat him. But if you do every quest (and there are A LOT of quests and you can easily miss some, so if you completed them all you're probably a hardcore completionist or have a walkthrough), and you beat the optional superbosses, then the final boss will be far and away the hardest boss fight in the game. A true worthy final challenge.

[Dead Moose Fandango]

Love: Dragon Age Origins.
Hated about it: The goddamn dream part in the tower. A long slog and a terrible time.

[Soeroah]

Love: The Kingdom Hearts series
Hate: How forced in the Disney elements get sometimes, when the anime bullshit is far more fun


I can't really think of a game I hate with redeeming qualities... I've only played very few games I hate in my life and I don't have anything good to say about them. The most I have are games I think are overrated. Even 'bad games' is subjective enough and I don't play games I don't think I'll love so I've played as few of them as games I hate.

[Santti]

Love: Painkiller. The gameplay is still great and a lot of fun. It took the standard gameplay loop of ye olde boomer shooters, and elevated it to be it's own thing, and it's absolutely kick-ass. I absolutely hate how it has this stupid-ass mechanic, where you can only experience the whole campaign, if you play it on the hardest difficulty. The easier the difficulty you play on, the shorter the campaign, as more and more maps are straight-out removed from the campaign. It's just awful, and I've never seen that in any other game.

Hate: Dragon Age II. Okay, my memory is a little hazy on this one, but I seem to remember the combat being better than in Dragon Age: Origins. But my god, does the game repeat itself a lot. First by making you run through the same street(s), throwing the same baddies at you, and second, by shamelessly re-using it's assets. Going to new places, only to notice that's it's a direct copy-paste of an earlier place you've already been in. I seem to recall some areas used at least 3-4 times, and it got old, very fast. Something like that might fly in a huge game like World of Warcraft (we've all seen the same caves and buildings used many times), but not a game as small as this one.

[fatgunn]

Love: Breath of the Wild but the utter lack of a clawshot/hookshot item in a game where 60% of the gameplay is traversal really saddened me.

Hate: Darkest Dungeon. I legitimately love the atmosphere and art of this game but I can't for the life of me play it for more than 10 minutes without risking hypertension.

[bledgor]

Love: Dota 2, I fucking loathe tinker. I think the hero design is ass, and every game he is in I make it my goal to kill him till the person playing wants to abandon the game. Fuck that hero.

Hate/feel from loving to hating: Ark Survival Evolved. The first 20-30 hours I really enjoyed the game, had so much fun taming dinosaurs. Then the server I was playing on disappeared (still don't know what happened). Started on another server but didn't realize it was pvp with a buddy only to have all our dinosaurs killed and base destroyed while we slept losing our weekends work. The 3rd attempt I didn't have my heart into it and with various bugs at the time I just logged in less and stopped playing. The game had really cool concepts, and man any game with dinosaurs I am always going to at least look into, but various factors tainted the game for me.

[Ashleyxoxo]

Every game I love is flawed in at least one way, because taste is subjective, so no one can make the perfect game for someone.

[Skirdus]

Like: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The epilogue / ending is probably one of the worst conclusions in a Mario RPG. All of the villains magically survive their defeats and turn good because... why? No reason. After Vivian's whole arc about breaking free from her abusive sisters and valuing herself as a person, said siblings suddenly decide to "make amends" after literally summoning a demon that tried to cover the entire world in darkness? The only lesson that teaches the player is to stay in toxic, abusive relationships, and that's pretty horrible. And even characters like TEC who visibly sacrificed themselves and died for the sake of the story get to mysteriously come back to life as well. It makes no sense to me and cripples what I would otherwise consider to be a wonderful take on the extended Mario universe.

Hate: Paper Mario: The Origami King. I'll be honest- if the developers had absolutely no choice but to make some sort of creative boss lineup purely out of giant, sentient art supplies, then they did an amazing job given that restriction in particular. The Legion of Stationery is as creative, entertaining, and downright threatening as giant, sentient art supplies can be. Still wish the game had any semblance of originality beyond that, but I'll take what I can get. Here's hoping the next Paper Mario entry actually returns to the glorious roots of the pre-Sticker Star era.

[Jastall]

Love: Doom Eternal. The fucking purple goop. I've no idea why, in a hyper fast-paced shooter, someone decided that the best investment of dev time was to have random instances of purple sludge that slows down the player to a crawl and disables dash. And then some genius decided to put tentacles in it for cheap jumpscares or something. I actually like the platforming segments of the game overall, but fuck that purple goop sideways.

Hate: Hate may be a strong word, but I don't really like TES IV: Oblivion. That Dark Brotherhood questline, however? *Chef's kiss*. Especially the parts where you're the murderer in a whodunit, and when you have to purge the sanctuary.

[nocturnus]

A game I love: Metroid
Hate: I hate that I missed all the Prime versions because the Wii was poop.

A bad game: Diablo
Love: The atmosphere

[Mysterymask]

I can't really think of a game I hate with redeeming qualities... I've only played very few games I hate in my life and I don't have anything good to say about them. The most I have are games I think are overrated. Even 'bad games' is subjective enough and I don't play games I don't think I'll love so I've played as few of them as games I hate.

It happens I mean I fell asleep playing my pick don't think I even got past the 50% point

So I posted so yay more

Love. Guilty Gear Accent Core...the multiple versions I can forgive, the barrier to entry being a brick wall I'm fine with, Testament in general I actually enjoy but why in fuck did they change the announcer from what was a bad ass heavy metal announcer to some stereotypical geek with a microphone...almost sounds like that was some kids make a wish dream and now it's there forever

Hate: MK11. I hate this game, I hate how it plays I hate how it moves I hate how they Redeemed Liu Kang and turned him into a god but them bringing Cary Tagawa back as Shang Tsung almost made me want it JUST for him. Games still bad though

[Zuben]

Love: Witcher 3. I hate how you can get by with overusing the quick dodge. Makes combat kind of boring. Picks up in the DLCs, though. I also don't like Velen, it's a downer of an environment with little of interest in the landscape. Quests there are of good quality like in the rest of the game, but I'd rather skip the whole area if I re-played the game. Thirdly, I don't really care for the Wild Hunt as the main plot point. Witcher is at its best when it's about character-driven mortal issues, to which the Wild Hunt is the opposite.

Hate: FFXIII. Love Lightning's design. Even though my inability to care about any of the characters in that game includes her, I like that she features in Dissidia and all. She's an aesthetically well-designed character, a bad-ass woman without feministic compensation.

[Amariw]

Love: Spiderman 2 for the PS2 (awesomely fun old game). I dont like how the combat system has all these cool tricks but when it comes down to it the best way to fight is repeat dodge combo (circle-square-square) and the stepping-on-enemy combo.

Dont like: FF xiv. I like how old content is kept relevant and how the outdoors are generally worthwhile with long lasting/mechanics mobs. Reminds me of Pandaria in wow and prior expansions.

[Faldric]

Love XCOM2 WOTC: They streamlined far too much to a point where there is always one clear path forward. One build order. One next area to contact. One next research to do. XCOM EU/EW had a lot more variables, making the whole thing more varied. XCOM2 is pretty much on rails. Also the setting of defending the world vs an unknown threat was more intriguing than the resistance approach. It felt more desperate that you would start cutting your own soldiers into pieces to build mech troopers, experimenting on them to make them psionics, etc. It just had more style.

Hate: FF13 Lightning returns: The combat is actually pretty fun. The presentation with all the effects etc is very cool. Too bad the game itself with story, characters, timed missions, etc is pretty garbage.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

What if you have a love/hate relationship with 1 game?

[Orby]

Love: Dragon Age Origins.
Hated about it: The goddamn dream part in the tower. A long slog and a terrible time.

Its a common opinion too, so much so that a mod was made to skip that part of the game altogether... personally I don't use it, but I do find that pretty funny

[Queen of Hamsters]

Something petty that I hate about a game I love: World of Warcraft's horse animations. Out of all horses, only 1 has something resembling a horse gait, and that is the Hearthsteed. But then that horse is malformed 3000. All other horses animate like shit, not a single one displaying the grace and power becoming of a horse. Invincible being most egregious imo. Triple A studio, can't animate horses.

Something I love about a game that was otherwise bad: The custom coloring of items for The Sims 3. Too bad that f-ing game was a hot mess in every way. I lost all saves to a client-side error and that was that. A house and family I spent 150 hours with, gone. I never touched it again. Haven't touched TS4 neither.

[Baine]

Cities Skylines :Traffic management is a mess. There is a 3 lanes highway and cars are remaining on one, forming a long tail

[Fenrys]

Love: Dragon Age Origins.
Hated about it: The goddamn dream part in the tower. A long slog and a terrible time.

100% You've given me flashback trauma from my 8 playthroughs