Games I Thought I’d Like More

Image Credit: Activision Blizzard

I’ve played a lot of video games in my time. Given that I’m part of a gaming podcast, that sort of thing comes with the territory. And in my 20 years of gaming experience, I’ve learned what I do and don’t enjoy. I know what my tastes are. I’m a lot more comfortable throwing hands in Street Fighter than I am with dropping squares in Tetris. I’ve certainly won more games of Street Fighter 6 than I ever will in Tetris 99.

But then there’s the games that you thought that you’d like, but then when you played them, the vibes were just off. Something about it just wasn’t quite clicking like you wanted it to. That’s what we’ll be looking at today. I have four games from franchises that I love that just didn’t click with me.

Before we get started, this article is all my opinion, and does not reflect what my podcast co-hosts think. If you have any complaints, direct them at me. Feel free to tell me how wrong and dumb I am for what I’m about to say.

Final Fantasy XVI

Image Credit: Square Enix

I’ve been very vocal about my disdain for Final Fantasy 16 on the podcast, and that’s for a multitude of reasons. I was actually very excited when this game was first announced. All the trailers that they showed looked incredible. It was a return to medieval fantasy, which is one of my favorite settings for a story. Final Fantasy is one of my all time favorite series, and this would be the first time that I’d get to play the new game with the rest of the community. And to top it all off, this game was released a day before my birthday. 

You can imagine my chagrin when I brought the game home, played it for three hours, and just felt bored with it. This is still in the middle of the child Clive section, but I was willing to put the game down for the night and come back to it the next day with fresh eyes. Unfortunately that feeling never really passed.

Final Fantasy 16 is just very boring to me. The story starts interesting, but drops off after the first act. The villains either don’t stick around long enough to get fleshed out, or they get too much attention where I don’t care about what happens to them. I could argue any of these points in this article, but I want to focus on 16’s gameplay.

Final Fantasy 16 truly has one of the most bland, uninspired, and weirdly restrictive combat systems I’ve experienced in an action game. Let’s start with what I consider the most egregious problem. Clive has one sword combo in this game. Yes. You read that correctly. For the entire runtime, Clive will only have access to one basic sword combo. There are no combo modifiers, and no delays that you can do to get different moves. The best you can add to your basic combo is peppering in fireballs in between sword slashes.

Clive also has access to seven different Eikons that all give him access to different moves, but even this has bizarre restrictions. You can only have three Eikons equipped at a time, and each Eikon can only have two of their four moves equipped. I understand that the dev team wanted to make an approachable action game. But accessibility shouldn’t come at the cost of fun for people who are veterans to the action game genre. 

Kingdom Hearts 2 is a very simple game on its surface, but it has a ton of depth lying beneath a very solid set of mechanics. I’m old enough to remember Kingdom Hearts 2 getting criticized for being a “button masher”. Meanwhile FF16 has one sword combo and everyone heralds it as the greatest thing since sliced bread because there’s pretty lights in the boss fights.

The worst feeling that you can have when you walk away from a piece of media is boredom, and that’s how I felt when I finished FF16. Between a lame and underutilized cast of characters, to the cutscene centric Eikon fights where the devs decided to jingle keys in front of the player, rather than make anything meaningful.

Maybe one day I’ll take a full dive into why I don’t like this game, but we’ll leave it at this. I’m not strong enough for that yet.

Pokemon Colosseum

Image Credit: Genius Sonority, The Pokemon Company

Alright, Final Fantasy 16 is the only game on this list that I genuinely don’t like. When it comes to the rest of these games, I’m more ambivalent than anything towards them. Pokemon Colosseum is a game that I was always fascinated by as a kid. I had a GameCube growing up, but I was more of a PS2 kid. I had the popular games, but my GameCube library was always very small. The appeal to Colosseum was mostly based on romanticizing it in my own head. Then when I finally played it, it was alright.

Pokemon Colosseum is an interesting game. It’s different from the mainline Pokemon games. Rather than being able to use whatever Pokemon you want, there’s a pool of about 60 Shadow Pokemon that you can capture off of certain trainers, and that’s how you get your teammates.

The problem that I run into is that most of the choices are just kind of bad. Given that this is Gen 3, there’s no Physical/Special split yet, so Pokmeon like Sneasel or Misdreavus don’t get to take advantage of the Attack stat they specialize in. And the movepools of every Pokemon are just so shallow.

Then there’s the actual process of purifying the Shadow Pokemon that you catch. Shadow Pokemon don’t gain experience normally. Rather they have a bar that has to be emptied, then they need to be purified (which isn’t available at the start of the game) and then they’ll gain all of the accumulated EXP they would’ve gained to that point. Now an astute RPG player will know that no EXP means no level ups. So you’re just stuck with these Pokemon not getting any stronger, all while they sit on 3 or more levels once you finally purify them.

And the selection of Shadow Pokemon is just garbage. Yeah, there’s good early game stuff like Quilava, Flaffy, and Quagsire. But there’s also just absolute rubbish like Delibird, Dunsparce, Qwilfish, Furret, Skiploom. When I finally beat the game, my team just looked like a team I’d use in a Soul Silver playthrough. It was Espeon, Typhlosion, Ampharos, Quagsire, Hitmontop, and Skarmory.

I think that the setting and plot are very interesting, but it never feels like it goes very far with the ideas it proposes. Also I haven’t played Gale of Darkness yet, but from what I understand it fixes a lot of gripes that I have with Colosseum. Maybe one day.

Crash 4: It’s About Time

Image Credit: Activision Blizzard

Let’s step away from RPGs for a little bit. I do love a good platformer from time to time. Something simple that I can easily beat in a couple of play sessions. Growing up, the two mascot platformers that I had were Sly Cooper and Crash Bandicoot. If you’ve followed me for a while, you should know my history with the orange marsupial. I’ve been following Crash speedruns since 2013. Heck, the whole reason why I got on Twitch in the first place was to stream my speedruns of Crash: Wrath of Cortex.

My history with Crash 4 started when my copy came in a week late. This was at the tailend of the pandemic, so I can excuse that. It did suck that by the time my copy came in, all of my friends had already finished the game, some of them even getting 106% completion. So I was just there to stew in the game by myself.

As for what I like about the game, Crash 4 certainly offers some of the most unique level design in the series. Each stage feels different from each other, and you won’t mix up any stages with the others in that same world. The boss fights are also fantastic. Having multiple characters to play as is a great addition. Overall, I think that if you run Crash 4 from start to finish, you’re going to have a great time.

My opinion starts to sour when you get into trying to go for 106% completion. See, this isn’t like regular Crash games where you break all the boxes, get your Gem and be on your way. In each level there’s 6 Gems that you can get. 3 Gems for getting 40%, 60%, and 80% of the level’s Wumpa fruit. 1 Gem for breaking all the boxes. 1 Gem for not dying 3 or more times. And 1 Gem that’s hidden somewhere in the level. Now that sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable. But how do you feel about playing the level again, but different?

About halfway into the game the N. Verted levels unlock. This is another challenge added to the levels where each stage has a new gimmick tacked on. Usually it’s some kind of an ugly filter that makes it impossible to see what’s going on. And on top of that, you now have 6 N. Verted Gems to collect by meeting the same requirements from the base level. Now how do you feel about playing these levels again, but doing it perfectly?

Adding on to this there’s also the N. Sanely Perfect Relics. You get these by doing a perfect run of a stage. Break all the boxes, and don’t die a single time. Sounds simple enough, but some of these levels (especially in the end game) can go on for upwards of ten minutes! I’m looking at you, Rush Hour!

Now thankfully the devs were slightly merciful with these. Every level has a Perfect Relic to get, but you can either perfect the normal stage or the N. Verted version of the stage to get this. They aren’t separate collectables. It doesn’t change the fact that it still feels like unnecessary bloat and padding to justify the price tag.

Crash 4 is 30% of a great 3D platformer, and 70% of a game that I never want to touch because of how demanding and not fun it is. Shame that we’ll never see Crash 5 though.

Earthbound

Image Credit: Nintendo

And finally, let’s bash an old classic. Earthbound is a game that really needs no introduction. It’s a quirky RPG from the SNES era that forgoes wizards and swords, and instead opts for wizards and baseball bats. Now I’m no stranger to a classic SNES RPG. Super Mario RPG was my childhood. Final Fantasy 5 and 6 are two of my all time favorites. And I wrote a whole other article on why Chrono Trigger is one of the most important games for the genre. And having finally finished Earthbound this year, I can safely say that it’s fine.

Again, let’s start with the good. The music is incredible. Every track has that signature Earthbound charm. The graphics look great for the time, and all the battle backgrounds are super trippy and fun to look at. The main cast are all super likeable. Giygas is such a cool, mysterious being that doesn’t really get a lot of in-game explanation. And Porky is one of the most hateable characters in gaming.

There was just something on the whole about Earthbound that didn’t grab me. I think that this can be chalked up to a few factors. First is the fact that I already knew a lot about the game when I played it, which probably lessened a lot of the bigger moments. 

This is also a case of not liking something that I’ve heard is super hyped up. It’s a feeling that I’ve talked about a few times on the podcast, but whenever I play “one of the best games of all time” there’s always this fear in the back of my mind of “what if I’m the one person that doesn’t like this?” This was a fear that I had going into games like Resident Evil 4 Remake and OG Final Fantasy 7.

I realize now that was a stupid fear to have. This should go without saying, but you don’t (and shouldn’t) blindly follow the thoughts of others. I played Earthbound from start to end, and when the credits rolled I learned that this just wasn’t my kind of game. I didn’t really get along with the world, and the only real memory that I have from my playthrough was getting the Sword of Kings drop on my second encounter. 

For me, the Earthbound experience is a bunch of small annoyances that all compound into a game that I’m glad I played, but probably won’t run back anytime soon.

Closing

I’ll be honest, I’m not fully sure why I chose this as the topic for the month. I hate feeling indifferent when it comes to the media I consume. I don’t hate any of the games on this list. Three of them I’m neutral on, and when it comes to FF16, I’m more disappointed than anything.

I think that this all ties back to an early episode of the podcast. A very early episode where we were giving our first impressions on Ghost of Tsushima. For that whole episode I just lied and pretended to like it because I didn’t want to go against the grain.

As the show has gone on, I like to think that I’ve gotten better at vocalizing when I don’t like a game. If you want examples, check the spoilercasts for FF16 and FF7 Rebirth. Whether my points came across, or if I just got berated by my co-hosts is another discussion in itself.

There’s also this idea I see get floated around (typically with Kingdom Hearts fans) that your love for a game or franchise has to be all or nothing, otherwise you aren’t a “true fan”. I love all of the franchises I talked about in this article. If anything, I’m harsh on FF16 because the Final Fantasy series means a lot to me, and I’ve seen how great it can be. And FF16 (to me) just doesn’t have the magic of the older titles.