Games you hate, yet everyone else cherishes.

IX has a good story, but I think it didn't need two total joke characters (Steiner, Quina), and the most pointless character ever made (Amarant. Like really. His whole reason for joining the party is moronic and he has no point in anything). Also, I hated the gameplay, and the need to never, ever, sell anything, ever, just in case.

Yeah, I liked FFIX's story and characters, but it's battle system and character progression systems really bugged me. Overall battle speed was annoyingly slow and I hate equipment based skill systems. It also has the most convoluted stat-gain mechanic....something like, every level ending with a 1, 4, 7, and 0, your STR and MAG goes up by 1. Every level ending in 0, your SPD goes up by 1, etc. In other words, you can level up and your stats don't even increase, which completely threw me off when I played the game. I started creating excel spreadsheets to record my stats each level, so that I could figure out why my characters weren't getting stronger on level ups.

Then it has the punishing "hidden" system where every time you level up with a stat-boosting equipment, it puts a hidden fraction of a stat towards a "bonus" stat. So if you level up while having a total +2 STR from your equipment, you might get 0.25 "bonus" STR and you won't see any actual change until you level up 4 times with that same set of equipment... And since you don't  get +3 or +4 stat boosting equipment until late in the game, you feel like you are being punished for leveling up early on. I hate stat-progression systems that do that.

My biggest issue with FF9 was the ridiculously high encounter rates, combined with slow ATB gauge, loading screens and the annoying slow start and end-phase of combat - run for a few seconds, slow transitions screen, annoyingly slow camera pan, then slow combat, then another slow camera pan with victory pose, and then another slow transition to the field screen. It took forever to run through relatively small environments.

My second biggest issue was with the skill system, and the AP rate not really matching up with the general story-progression, meaning that even if I always had a good weapon or armor at hand, I was forced to keep sub-par stuff equipped until I had learned the skill of that equipment despite advancing to a new area where it slows me down to have the sub-par stuff equipped.

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All that being said, FF9 is another game I enjoyed to the point that I've dished out more than 90+ hours playing it.

I just watched my wife play it instead. I got to see all the story parts without slogging through all the gameplay that made me angry.

Nice one.

Lately, I've been watching a lot of playthroughs on youtube rather than buying the games, because while I'm often interested in seeing where the story goes, I can't be bothered to suffer through hours upon hours of sub-par game-play.

Final Fantasy III I love FF but I just didn't like this one at all. I have no idea why but it's just...So bad :p

Can I add Dragon Age Origins?  I picked it up for free and... I don't see why people enjoy it so much.  It's kind of a slog.  It's like the Mako sections of Mass Effect 1... if they were the entire game.  Just a huge freakin' time sink without a whole lot to show for it.  It's very easy to make really bad class choices and have them be irreversible.  It's also really easy to not have the equipment you need due to the very limited amounts of cash you are granted from the game.

But, you know what I think is the absolute worst part of it?

Party members cut you off from dialogue and even learning anything new about them if their disposition isn't high enough or hasn't been raised in a while.  So, my favorite part of the Mass Effect series is essentially a broken mess in Dragon Age.  Why can't I learn about my party members and have conversations with them after every quest like I could in Mass Effect?  Why do I have to bust my hump to find special rare items to give to them in order to get them to talk to me more?  It's so freakin' stupid to have this artificial gate there that makes conversation feel so artificial.

All overrated shoot 'em up games like Call of Duty and .

You are my hero! That was my least favorite game of the entire FF series. From a plot so bad I can't even remember it to that last tower...whoever thought it was a good idea to make it so that you would go 2.5 hours of playtime without a save just to hit the final boss and have it two hit combo kill you needs to be fired. That was *awful* design.

I'm going to put Tales of Xillia 2 on here. I just don't get the appeal of that game, as the game is nothing but a grindfest. Seriously, the plot goes like this:

Also, the game has many bosses that are utterly sadistic. In many areas I can kill the wandering enemies in 5 - 15 seconds, but the boss still wipes out my party in no time, forcing me to grind for another 5 - 7 levels (when the EXP rewards are non-extant and don't even match what the game says it is! Seriously, compare the EXP displayed to how much your EXP actually advances sometime) to even have a chance to take out the boss who has ~281K HP (and I'm not kidding about the number, I looked it up to check), and loves to go berserk when down to the last 25% of HP and use attacks that one hit KO whomever they are used on, causing quick party wipe outs (and this is on Normal difficulty too. Seriously? Who balanced this game?).

Let's also add in the fact that the plot feels like it was drawn from a blender, to bosses that can cheat and start the battle over on a whim (anyone who has made it to the endgame knows what I'm talking about). It's just....errrrrgh.

In fact, I am going to go as far as to put all Tales games on here. I've now played 3 of them (Grace F, Xillia, Xilla 2) and 2 to completion (I'm giving up on Xillia 2...Chronos is just too cheap in my opinion and I can't be bothered to continue), and only Xillia was any good in my opinion (and then only up to mid chapter 3 I felt). I just don't get the appeal of them, as they all feel average to bad grindfest buttonsmashers to me, with poor plots (Xillia was the exception, I felt like that plot was decent at least).

Putting on the whole series because of only 3 games? XD I would recommend some of the earlier titles, namely Symphonia, Vesperia and Abyss. They're better paced, have decent stories and characters and they're not so big on simply grinding. They all have annoying moments of course (most of the dungeons completely suck) but otherwise they're solid RPGs. The soundtracks are superb too.

That's what I have heard too. I do have Symphonia and Abyss already so will play them someday and give them a chance, but based on these three I will probably be going in with *much* lower expectations.

For Xillia 2, I agree with many of the complaints but I still managed to have a lot of fun playing the game.

The "need to grind money to advance the game" argument is made over and over when all you have to do is fight ONE of those bounty monsters and you get enough gald to pay off the debt and advance the plot. But still, it's a pretty horrible mechanic and a dumb way to gate progression. 

Tales bosses have really bad mechanics anyways but Xillia 2 bosses at least have an opportunity to unload combos on. You need to start a weakness combo and keep it going as long as you can, and the boss won't be able to interrupt you. And for Chronos, once he starts to use the ability that resets the fight, you need to cancel it by having Ludger Transform.

This was introduced with Xillia 1 and carries over to Xillia 2: depreciating EXP from enemies. I HATE games that do this but Xillia / 2 does this even worse by not even updating the new EXP value. So if you're too high a level for the enemies in an area, their EXP starts to scale down but the end of battle EXP display is not updated to reflect this. Caused me a lot of confusion early on until I realized they went the frustrating route of having EXP scaling.

As for disregarding the series as a whole: while Symphonia is often praised, if you are used to the free roam mechanics in recent Tales game, it's going to feel extremely primitive (you're stuck on a 2D plane without the ability to freely run around on the battle map).

I quite liked Abyss and Vesperia, but I'm really not sure I'd recommend them to someone who didn't enjoy Graces, or Xillia 1/2. They're not THAT different (battle system changes very little from Abyss onwards).

My biggest praise for Tales games are the characters and their stat progression systems. While the stories are often very subpar, the character's interact with each other in hilarious ways that I really like. The writers seem to excel at character interaction while being very lackluster in creating an actual story.

I get addicted to recent Tales games because of their very satisfying progression systems: namely Graces'. I LOVED collecting and mastering the Titles and there were SO many of them. I was still learning new artes for Asbel at the 90 hour mark after completing the main story (because I for some reason hadn't unlocked certain titles that taught those artes), and it felt really cool to still be learning new abilities that late in the game.

One? All of them give me 12000 to 15000 G and I need 150000 G. Not sure what ones you are fighting.  Still, it feels like a cheap add on to artificially inflate the game time to me, especially early game when all you had were quests with poor payouts.

Great. And this tactic was explained in the game WHERE? Or is the player supposed to be psychic and know to cancel abilities by a transform?

Yeah, how this was not caught in bug testing I have no idea. Poor QA?

That makes one of us then. I didn't like the titles myself. Hard to explain why though, just something nagged at me about that system.

When you advance in the story, and a new Elite monster becomes available, the amount of Gald it gives is either equivalent, or almost equivalent of the needed loan amount to advance. The 12000 to 15000 gald Elites could be ones that unlocked earlier in the story and you just hadn't gotten around to defeating yet.

For example, the first Elite Monster becomes available after completing Chapter 3, and his bounty is 6000 Gald. The needed loan amount to "unlock" Chapter 4 is 7000. When the next Loan Gate comes up after Chapter 4, you need to pay 10,000 Gald to advance, but the second Elite Monster unlocks, and his bounty is 12,000 Gald.

I'm defending against the argument, but I still agree that the fact they even gate story progression in the first place is ridiculous. While the Elite Monsters will allow you to advance without grinding, if you can't beat the Elite Monster in the first place, then you... have to grind. Some of the Elite Monsters are stupid strong and unforgiving (I struggled against the giant Bee in Cumor Trail).

Pretty much everything in terms of combat mechanics is explained in the in-game manual, but there is a Transformation tutorial at some point as well. It explicitly says that you can activate Ludger's Transformation to cancel enemy attacks to save allies. I think it uses the example that if an enemy is casting an Arte, you can cancel it by activating Transformation. There is even one Battle Challenge (that award Grade points) that requires you to "Save 20 allies by Transforming". Now, as for Chronos, there is no reminder before or during the fight of what you're supposed to do so if you forgot about the mechanics, then yeah, the fight is frustrating. The first time he reset the fight, I yelled at my TV in confusion. It is not very well conveyed.

It's not a bug. Some RPGs try to provide a disincentive to grind by making the enemies give less and less EXP as you level up. Every enemy in Tales of Xillia 2 has their own level, and once you exceed their Level by a certain amount, they start to give less than 100% of their normal EXP rewards, with that percentage going down with each new level you gain. Every monster's Level is mentioned in the Enemy Book in-game.

No, no, no, no, that's not what I said. I was saying how did they miss the fact that the displayed EXP is not equal to what you earn? That to me speaks of lousy testing, as it displays both on screen at the same time. You think someone would have noticed that an award of 1800 EXP was only increasing an EXP bar by < 100 sometime.