FFT is one of my most treasured games of all time. 
But that’s not what this thread is about, so:
Kingdom Hearts. Fantastic graphics, setting, characters…but the gameplay dragged and I just didn’t see much point in getting very far.
Chrono Cross. Loved Chrono Trigger to death, and Cross seemed interesting, but it failed to engage me. I don’t even remember what the plot was supposed to be.
This thread seems to be rather heavy on Square-Enix games, doesn’t it?
Final Fantasy Tactics
Halo anything
Gears of War
Final Fantasy VIII (though I’m presently giving that one a try again) and XI. XII almost fit this until just about the point you get to the Tomb of Raithwall at which point the story suddenly sucks you in.
Call of Duty anything
Come to think of it, almost all of the First Person Shooter games that score really well just bore me to tears (or frustrate me since you apparently have to be a god to compete at these games).
I forced myself through about 30 hours of Oblivion, never spending more than about 10 hours on a single character. I got about halfway through the storyline, lost interest, and started a new character convincing myself that it would be more fun, every time.
Oblivion is the only RPG in the world where you’re penalized for using your primary skills. If you want to make a mage, your best bet is to take no magic skills as primaries, or you’ll gain levels “the bad way”. What the heck?
The first Baldur’s Gate. What’s funny about it is, I could list out my problems with it, and they all seem petty issues. But incorporated into a whole, it makes the game an infuriating, unplayable mess.
But I absolutely loved Baldur’s Gate II. One of the best RPGs ever.
I’ll also agree on Final Fantasy Tactics. So much potential there, and I was really enjoying it up to the point where I fought some boss in a cathedral. First you kill him as a human, and it was a tough fight that took me a couple tries, but I beat him… and he turns into a monster that was nigh impossible to kill. I busted my ass defeating him, which took days, and the very next scene is on top of the cathedral, where I’m supposed to save some NPC from ninjas… and the ninjas kill her before any of my characters can take a single turn. It didn’t help that the stupid, low-level, non-combatant bitch charged the fucking ninjas. At that point, I turned the game off and never went back. I don’t care what anyone says about it being the best game evar, that’s fucking incompetent game design, right there.
[QUOTE=Mosier]
I forced myself through about 30 hours of Oblivion, never spending more than about 10 hours on a single character. I got about halfway through the storyline, lost interest, and started a new character convincing myself that it would be more fun, every time.
Oblivion is the only RPG in the world where you’re penalized for using your primary skills. If you want to make a mage, your best bet is to take no magic skills as primaries, or you’ll gain levels “the bad way”. What the heck?
[/QUOTE]
That’s funny because it’s just about my favorite game of all time. I can’t wait till Fallout 3 which is going to play a lot like Oblivion.
[QUOTE=GargoyleWB]
Similarly blasphemous, I tried but never caught the hook for Planescape: Torment. It is hailed as the greatest plot, story, characters, blah blah blah but I found it to be tedious and unengaging.
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Starts building a pyre for GargoyleWB’s heresy trial
Let me see now, hmmm…
Baldurs gate - big snore fest. Played it for half an hour and wondered why everyone was raving about it. I got killed and hadn’t saved recently and couldn’t be bothered to play it again. I am of course aware that in not completing it and not playing BG2 I have effectively locked myself out of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Oblivion - I really enjoyed it initially but the game just got too hard. Whoever came up with the world/level scaling principle should have been shot as it sucked the fun right out of the game. One of the best parts of playing an RPG is getting more powerful relative to the world around you and being able to take on areas that previously you couldn’t. Making it so that the areas that were once infested with rats become infested with fire-breathing hydras isn’t trying properly.
Any final fantasy game, especially 7. I played 7 for about three hours and wondered when the serotonin wave that everyone else was experiencing was going to hit me, but it never came. The story seemed particularly mystifying, it seemed like there was this huge back story between characters that everyone in the game took as read but I didn’t seem to have access to, just threw me off.
Black and White - it was supposed to be effectively a self aware game. Instead, it was poo. Sometimes literally, even, when you creature decided that what it really needed to do was take a shit in the middle of town. Nice.
Zelda: Ocarina of time - yes I know it’s the best game ever made ever ever EVAH but I didn’t enjoy it a great deal. I got to the first major boss who keeps coming out of the pictures and you have to hit him with the grapple iron and it was so hard that it made me want to throw my controller across the room.
I have to say I’m also not feeling a great deal of love for Twilight Princess either. It got off to a great start and I really liked the fighting system using remote/nunchuck on the Wii but the story is like something one of my teenage brothers would write and there’s too much traipsing around to be had (as well as precious little direction about what you’re supposed to do sometimes).
Command and conquer Tiberian sun - most over hyped game I’ve ever played. The magazines (it was back in that era, you understand) were wanking over ever single screen shot and drip of information for the whole three billion years the game was being developed over and I eventually decided to get it to try it out (even though I’m not all that big on RTS). What a fucking disappointment. There was one level you had to play that effectively necessitated the use of constant saves to the point that when you’d completed it the game only actually registered something like 50 seconds of play when in fact I’d been playing and replaying the mission for half an hour. Lame.
World of Warcraft - loved it for about three months, played it on and off for about six, couldn’t have given a shit about it after that. Once I’d seen all the zones and played all the races I couldn’t think about what else I was supposed to do, and joining and being part of a guild seemed like a complete uphill experience.
[QUOTE=Illuminatiprimus]
[IZelda: Ocarina of time - yes I know it’s the best game ever made ever ever EVAH but I didn’t enjoy it a great deal. I got to the first major boss who keeps coming out of the pictures and you have to hit him with the grapple iron and it was so hard that it made me want to throw my controller across the room.
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That’s because you were supposed to use the bow! 
[QUOTE=Jragon]
That’s because you were supposed to use the bow!
[/QUOTE]
Makes big W sign
[QUOTE=xnylder]
Xenosaga. I couldn’t stand the cutscenes, the fighting system, the characters… Actually, I can’t think of a thing I liked about the game. I feel bad, though, because a good friend gave it to me as a birthday present.
[/QUOTE]
Which one? I’m guessing the first one? The second one had a completely different battle system, and the third one kind of combined elements of the first two with other new concepts.
[QUOTE=GargoyleWB]
Similarly blasphemous, I tried but never caught the hook for Planescape: Torment. It is hailed as the greatest plot, story, characters, blah blah blah but I found it to be tedious and unengaging.
I loved the Baldur’s Gate series though, and still replay them occasionally, so I know that I should be a raving Planescape fanboy, but I would honestly rather go fold socks than play it. 
Cooler-than-thou emo characters have always annoyed me though, and this game drips with shuffling shrugging emo angst, so that may be a factor.
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What you said, including liking BG (BG2 is my favorite and I am pissed it doesn’t run on my Vista laptop). I did manage to finish Planescape: Torment but I just could not get into it like a lot of other players did. The whole self-mutilation thing was a big part of why, I think.
I also didn’t like Morrowind, but that’s because I would get motion sickness after about 15 minutes of play. I couldn’t get myself to go back and try 10 minutes at a time; I just didn’t feel like it was worth my effort after the nausea.
[QUOTE=Autumn Almanac]
Cubsfan, Final Fantasy XII does eventually open up, a lot. Once you get past the initial part of the game and gain access to the whole world, you can spend hours and hours just exploring and doing sidequests if you want to. I’d estimate that 50-60% of the game’s content is outside of the main story.
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Without spoiling too much how much farther do I have to go before I can just free roam the lands in my airship or chocobo or whatever? I just got out of Rabanastre and that only took about 8 hours or something.
I liked Final Fantasy XII for the most part. I thought the license board was an interesting mechanic. I still though FFV (which I played via translated ROM) had the best mechanic of all with the job system, but the license was nice.
It had an interesting storyline, though, I still think VI had the best.
My main complain of FFXII, which is common to most of the later FF’s, is that to experience everything requires an insane amount of next-to-impossible to achieve without a walkthrough grinding. (e.g. Chocobo breeding from FFVII. I don’t know of too many people that didn’t just look at a hint book or GameFAQs for that one).
In FFXII, there is a secret uber-powerful boss–following two other fairly difficult bosses and all three are outside the main story line–which gives a nice closure to your clan. To defeat this boss takes around 7 hours of the same fragging battle tactics, at character levels of the high 80’s/low 90’s. The payoff, though interesting, isn’t really worth the drudgery. Bear in mind, that to just to be able to fight this boss requires you defeating just about every other enemy in the game at least once, including the previous two bosses (one of whom took a considerably less annoying 60 minutes or so to kill). Now, many of these enemies you have to kill in order to take on the final boss require special conditions to spawn. Most of these enemies are classified as “rare”, but even some of them that aren’t rare only spawn under certain conditions (and a few enemies that are in the game don’t ever show up in your list of kills, oddly enough). These conditions can be anything from the minutes on your game clock, to random percentage, to a certain number of a chain of a single enemy, to bringing a certain monster critical, to only having members of one gender in the party, yadda, yadda, yadda. So expect to spend at least 30 hours hunting down every monster even with every online resource available. Granted, you get the best weapon in the game after this provided you finished two other side-quests (it’s not the strongest, but it’s considerably faster then the weapons at its level, making it do more damage over time). However, at this point, there’s not much purpose to this powerful weapon, since there’s only one boss left.
Additionally, after getting to this point, the final story boss fight is pathetically easy. I killed him in five minutes. He’s meant to be a challenge for characters roughly 30 levels lower.
I like games where the sidequests give you a sense of accomplishment. One’s where you feel like even though your sidequest has little bearing on the overall story, you still have fun doing them and they enrich the gaming experience. Fallout 1 was great for this. (Fallout 2 had overkill.) Mass Effect, though I’m not too far into it at this point, seems to treat sidequests much the same way as Fallout 1. Side quests should never be a grind, and I wish game designers would keep this in mind.
Gotta agree with Planescape: Torment. Being a BG/BG2 (and Forgotten Realms stuff in general, except D&D) mark, I should have loved it, but the combat was repetitive, the enemies were irritating rather than scary, and the stupid little skull dipshit was annoying as hell.
Also, Icewind Dale I & II. I kept thinking they’d be like Baldur’s Gate- that when I finished the ridiculously hard dungeon I was currently wandering in, I’d finally get to a new town - but I was wrong. Really freaking wrong. There’s one town. One.
BG/BG2 depend on the action/story blend; Icewind Dale was just “fight, fight, fight, sell some of your loot for 5GP, fight again”.
Call of Duty 4 (multiplayer) - After playing Battlefield 2 with it’s huge battlefields and assorted tanks and aircraft, CoD4 just seems kind of small.
[QUOTE=zweisamkeit]
Which one? I’m guessing the first one? The second one had a completely different battle system, and the third one kind of combined elements of the first two with other new concepts.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, the first one. I got most of the way through it before giving up. I think what finally did me in was trying to wrap my brain around combat. I spent hours trying to customize mechs before I realized that some of my characters’ base stats were actually better than their armored ones, and that while in-battle healing was possible, in-battle repairs weren’t. I might have missed something, though…
[QUOTE=xnylder]
Yes, the first one. I got most of the way through it before giving up. I think what finally did me in was trying to wrap my brain around combat. I spent hours trying to customize mechs before I realized that some of my characters’ base stats were actually better than their armored ones, and that while in-battle healing was possible, in-battle repairs weren’t. I might have missed something, though…
[/QUOTE]
Ahh. Personally I think your mistake was taking the effort and time to customize the AGWS. In the first one, I thought they were rather useless and just built up my characters. Trust me, that made the game more enjoyable!
In the second and third ones, they trade out AGWS for ESes (the giant mecha) and there are dungeons (or parts of them) where you’re only fighting with the ESes. That worked MUCH better.
[QUOTE=Cubsfan]
Without spoiling too much how much farther do I have to go before I can just free roam the lands in my airship or chocobo or whatever? I just got out of Rabanastre and that only took about 8 hours or something.
[/QUOTE]
Are you in the Barheim Passage now? Technically, as soon as you finish that dungeon you’ll be free to roam. Another two major dungeons after that and you’ll have all six characters.
[QUOTE=zweisamkeit]
Ahh. Personally I think your mistake was taking the effort and time to customize the AGWS. In the first one, I thought they were rather useless and just built up my characters. Trust me, that made the game more enjoyable!
In the second and third ones, they trade out AGWS for ESes (the giant mecha) and there are dungeons (or parts of them) where you’re only fighting with the ESes. That worked MUCH better.
[/QUOTE]
Interesting. If I pick up the game again, I’ll try that.
Pretty much every MMORPG.
I love the concept of MMORPGs. I love the fantasy worlds, I love the lore, I love the different races and cultures and love it when mobs are developed as their own culture (Everquest was great at this). I love mechanics discussions and saying “For that fight you’re better off with a DoT than a DD because the fight is so long” and “If you’re playing a Shieldsman, go for Endurance mods over +Brawn”. I love being able to say “If you’re lvl 22, try to get a Chain Tunic of Longing. It drops from the Centaur Alchemist in Shadowwind Woods”.
But the actual part where I need to log in and kill orcs? Gets boring with a quickness. And I’ve tried almost all of the bigger names from “hard core” to “solo-casual cakewalk”: EQ, FFXI, WoW, LotR:O, etc.
Diablo. Click click click click click click. Click click.