Even the best games ever made have THAT part, whether it’s a level, a boss, puzzle, whatever, that are so annoying and frustrating that it brings the rest of the game down.
For me, it’s the Anor Londo Silver Knights in Dark Souls 1. If you try to block the arrows, you’ll get knocked back, usually falling off the ledge and to your death. You just have to get lucky and make the Knight on the right fall off the ledge.
The air-boat in Half-Life 2. (I know, I know, how can an air-boat be selfish?)
Arkham Asylum, that stupid side scroll with Scarecrow and the sewer with Killer Croc.
Breath of the Wild is easily number 1 on my “greatest games of all time” list.
But following that Korok who turns around and looks at you is just a really bad section.
I loved Dragon Age: Origins. Have played through it like four or five times now.
If there wasn’t a PC mod to skip the Fade section, I don’t know if I would have played it twice. What a tedious mess.
While not as well regarded as Origins, Dragon Age: Inquisition was a fun game marred by the stupid Junior Prom Royal Whodunit Mystery segment.
Tidus and Yuna in Final Fantasy X.
“HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
Also, I was annoyed how you could flirt with any of the three women in Guadosalam, but you were stuck being shipped with Yuna. I would have preferred Rikku, damn it.
The final boss fight in Bioshock was, by some way, the worst part of an otherwise good game.
Metroid: Prime is a great game marred by relying on save points that can be very far apart at certain points in the game.
It had zero auto-save. If you died, you went back to your actual save. I went about 40 minutes one time(even using a guide to make sure I did not miss a save). I made it…but eventually quit. I’m not really a FPS person and I thought that game was supposed to be more action-adventure than shooter.
:shrugs:
Myth II: Soulblighter was an all-around great game, with lots of great features, and it looked beautiful as well. But the level in the Firbolg Forest pits you against enemies of a sort not seen elsewhere in the game before or after, against whom most of your standard tactics are useless or very nearly so, and you have very few choices of how to deal with them.
The old Windows game Chip’s Challenge was a nice little casual game, mostly thinky but with some quick-fingering mixed in. Except for one level called The Jumping Swarm, full of an ever-increasing number of semi-random enemies that you had to dodge long enough to finish the level, quickly, before they overwhelmed you. Even with the best planning and strategies, it was still mostly just down to luck whether you survived, and the odds were against you.
The ridiculous ‘Present Day’ plot envelope in the Assassins Creed games. 2 and 4 are definitively great games, the others maybe not so much.
I had to look up whether this was a DLC that came with my game and I forgot about it or something like that because it was so weird. I also spent forever roaming through those rooms and never found half the shit I was supposed to.
My contribution is related: The damn mining in Mass Effect 2. God that was such a tedious time-wasting pile of BS. At least the annoying exploring in 1 and the hide-and-seek game in 3 kinda sorta had points
Mandatory stealth sections in any game, be it Witcher 2 or Ni No Kuni 2 or whatever. If the game isn’t a stealth game, don’t add a stupid section with incredibly powerful enemies (or instant game over). Another way to piss me off is to include some sort of platforming in a non-platforming game. At least Borderlands 2’s Tiny Tina DLC made it so if you failed a few times, it removed the platforming bit completely.
Unlike a lot of people I actually liked the Fade segment in DA:O. Another example of a “bad part in a good game” that I didn’t mind but a lot of people hated would be the sewer section in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.
Anyway, dodging lightning in the Thunder Plains in* Final Fantasy X *was both tedious and frustrating, especially since you needed to do it 200 times in a row without making a mistake to get Lulu’s ultimate weapon.
Which is why I never* actually got* her ultimate weapon.
On topic :
Seconding the Fade in DA:O.
Also most sewer sections are shit, but none so much than the one in Vampire:Bloodlines. In a game that heavily emphasizes social interactions and/or stealthing past most stuff as a viable path ; a mandatory and very long all-combat section, without much in the way of blood or ammunition refills (sucks to be you, Tremeres and gun guys, you shoulda rolled a bricker Gangrel !) topped by a brutal if uninteresting boss fight is just… ugh.
The Underdark in Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s disconnected from everything, you’re stuck down there for an eternity, can’t switch characters, can’t access surface shops or your stronghold (which was one of the selling points of the game !)… and while the drow plotline is kind of interesting the first time around, it really overstays its welcome.
Same goes for the Old Owl Well chapter of Neverwinter Nights 2. A million corridors all alike, infinitely respawning orcs, traps, no dialogue. It’s even more aggravating when you know that the entire point of the NWN2 campaign in general, and this section in particular, is “because fuck you, that’s why” (i.e. Obsidian chafed at being instructed by their producers to make a bland Forgotten Realms D&D fantasy story instead of the more original content they had in mind and dragged their feet in every possible way. That’s also why all of the NPCs are insufferable/caricatural examples of their respective archetypes. It’s also *also *why the campaign ends with “rocks fall, everyone dies”)
Yeah, and the bird dodging race for Tidus’ sword was shit too - but neither bit was integral to the plot or the game ; Lulu isn’t a good character to tackle endgame content with (Tidus is all right but not the best).
But good news : there’s a script out there for the PC version of the game that autododges lightning !
There is no script for that fucking chocobo race however. Yes, I did it again, because at this point the notion of self-respect is evidently alien to me. It absolutely renewed my teenage interest in arranging a prolonged meeting between whichever-designer-came-up-with-it’s penis and a ballpeen hammer.
Dear Colonization:
I know I’m going to be independent. You know I’m going to be independent. Can we just throw the two piles of soldiers at each other without going through twenty million disembarks? Or whatever the noun is for “soldiers getting off a boat and piling up nicely atop each other”.
The final above ground segment of Metro 2033. I gave up on it because of the stupidly too fragile gas masks.
The mandatory “death race” near the end of Mad Max. Driving around the apocalyptic desert blowing stuff up was great; having to participate in this shitty, completely unfair race in which you have to kill the “boss” while literally everyone else in the race is determined to kill you, completely fucking sucked. The only reason I ever beat it was pure luck.
Oh god, yes. The whole game is “Here’s you careening wildly around the wasteland flats, shooting harpoons and making jumps with abandon” then for one segment they want tight controls and have cheaty AIs attacking you, etc. Took me way too many tries and I enjoyed none of it.
Having to drive around San Francisco on a timer to defuse multiple bombs. Gave up on that one, too.
It’s less a segment than an entire mechanic, but the Batmobile in Arkham Knight. It doesn’t drive well, the camera has problems, and the entire thing feels tacked on. I hated any Batmobile mission and straight out gave up on the collectibles that required it.
I’m told that Uncharted is a great game. I never finished it because of those freaking Nazi zombies being way too hard.
These days, if I get really stuck I just drop the difficulty and move on. I finally started playing Horizon Zero Dawn and have done so twice. My personal rules are that I have to fail multiple times over at least two sessions and that it has to be a story mission where I cannot leave it and try again at a higher level. If it’s just hard but optional, I keep trying.
The Mongol Invasion in Medieval: Total War. If the Mongols do not capture a city they just keep coming, seemingly far out of proportion to their actual numbers. I’ve eliminated 10 full stacks and they just keep coming. For comparison it is unusual to see another nations field army have much more than 2 full stacks within movement distance of each other.
Oddly enough I think that once they take a city, they will no longer reinforce themselves and so can be attacked fruitfully, but once they’ve come, I always either try to fight them off, give it up as hopeless and quit, or playing as a Western Power I quickly win the game before they come.
So when I play these days I just turn the Mongols off.