Games NOT Beaten: 2016

[retrosportsgamer]

Let's do this officially.

[ElkinFencer10]

This will make 7 years in a row that I still haven't been able to beat Demon's Souls...

[dsheinem]

Not gonna lie, I've never fully understood how to use this thread. Is it basically an "admit defeat" thread? I play lots of games that I don't beat, but largely that is just to try 'em out or have some fun with them...

[Sarge]

That's how I've always understood it, as a thread where you just give up on a game either from sheer boredom or ridiculous difficulty and decide it's not worth playing anymore. If I posted everything I haven't finished but actually played, it'd be 90% of my library.

(By the way, Holy Diver came really close to this category.)

[Exhuminator]

I always saw this thread as "this game isn't fun so I stopped playing it and here's why".

The "admit defeat" angle works too though.

[retrosportsgamer]

Not gonna lie, I've never fully understood how to use this thread. Is it basically an "admit defeat" thread? I play lots of games that I don't beat, but largely that is just to try 'em out or have some fun with them...

Right, it certainly isn't "What games are you playing?" or some kind of "gaming diary". These are titles you've sunk a number of hours into with the hope of beating but it just didn't happen. You've accumlated enough knowledge from playing the game to espouse its positives and negatives and you get to share that with the group as well.

[Markies]

Not gonna lie, I've never fully understood how to use this thread. Is it basically an "admit defeat" thread? I play lots of games that I don't beat, but largely that is just to try 'em out or have some fun with them...

For me, I used it as a 'This game is stupid and I'm done with it. I'm going to remove from my collection and eventually sell it or trade it in.' Remove it from my collection and Backloggery as it is a bad game.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Star Ocean: Second Story (PSOne)

I really tried to like this game, but I just couldn't. As someone who mainly plays RPG's for story rather than mechanics, it just fell flat, mind you I stopped around an hour into disc 2, so I gave it quite a fair whack. The setting was fairly interesting, but the pacing was just so slow that it often left me just questioning why I was doing what I was doing or even just forgetting where I was supposed to go. Couple that in with characters who I just really didn't care about and a character acquisition method that had me constantly second guessing myself, and it was just added stress on top of all of that. Having characters you can either choose to keep or let go was a neat idea, but when you had no idea what the next character you might get instead would play like, and/or how many hours of backtracking you'd have to do if you ended up not wanting to keep that next character and wanted to go back to get the first guy you ditched really just ruined it for me.

Even given what I said in the last paragraph, the combat itself really didn't really stick out to me. The fact that you could essentially attack as fast as you could mash the button made any manual mode virtually useless unless you were one of the one or two offensive casters in the game, but because magic seemed to be just about as strong as melee anyway most of the time, it just made more sense to just stick it on auto-target and mash away while you fill your party with melee bashers, making every battle feel the same.

Speaking of your AI partners, the amount of options to control them felt really lacking, and no matter what I did it always felt like they did one of two things: Either they'd barely use any special attacks and they'd be barely effective, or they'd burn through ALL of their mana in one fight. Very occasionally I could get a balance on one of them where they wouldn't immediately run out of mana, but that just made me super nervous to even allow them to use their new moves they'd learn.

I can see why some people might like it with the varried endings and extensive skill/crafting system, but it just really failed to engage me. This is frankly how I've felt about most Tri-Ace games I've played, and I'm hoping Resonance of Fate dodges the trend of.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Having characters you can either choose to keep or let go was a neat idea, but when you had no idea what the next character you might get instead would play like, and/or how many hours of backtracking you'd have to do if you ended up not wanting to keep that next character and wanted to go back to get the first guy you ditched really just ruined it for me.

Yeah, the biggest issue I had with the game is that it feels like it expects you to be playing with a strategy guide or some other reference in hand. It's far too easy to screw things up otherwise.

First time I played the game things got real tough towards the end because I had apparently made some "bad" choices like 15 hours prior.

[Exhuminator]

Yeah, the biggest issue I had with the game is that it feels like it expects you to be playing with a strategy guide or some other reference in hand. It's far too easy to screw things up otherwise.

That's how I felt about Valkyrie Profile. I mean, it was a bomb ass game, but if you don't play it with a strategy guide I have no idea how you'd find the "true ending" and not miss 15% of the end game content. Before GameFAQs was a thing, publishers were bad about pushing developers to develop games which all but necessitated buying a walkthrough. Makes sense from the publisher point of view, but it was always a dicky thing to do the consumer.