Not me, but my wife got all the way to the end of Journey to the Savage Planet before discovering there is a skill tree you can invest in 😂
Tears of the Kingdom. I haven’t finished it due to time, but still even now after many hours, I often overlook the use of Ascend. I have spent a lot of time climbing or building flying contraptions when I could have just ascended
I played Mass Effect 3 all the way to just before the final mission using only level 1 weapons. When I was doing my final walk through of the ship I went down to the hangar and encountered a terminal I hadn’t seen that let me upgrade my weapons. I had like 700,000 credits and upgraded everything right then and there.
I’m currently playing Diablo IV and I generally refuse to use the healing stations and stat-boosting shrines scattered around the map. I guess I want to save them for later in case they don’t respawn or something. I also don’t know what the shrines do until/unless I hit them so I don’t know if they’re worth triggering or not. I’m getting by without them so far, so it’s okay, maybe?
The shrines respawn over time. No need to worry about consuming them. The Lillith statues are permanent stat boosts to all characters, not activating them when you encounter them is harmful.
The shrines aren’t really a balance element, because they only last a minute or so, and usually make you hilariously overpowered for a little bit.
Nioh. You can transform into demon mode and I didn’t know until I played the sequel. It’s a soulslike so I played it exactly how I play Dark Souls which made me completely lose out on the unique and in-depth systems the game has to offer.
You can transform into demon mode and I didn’t know until I played the sequel
You didn’t miss that, that mechanic doesn’t exist in the first game. In Nioh 1, you can briefly power up your weapon. Nioh 2 removed that and introduced the demon transformation instead (and yokai cores, which also don’t exist in N1).
I know, that’s what I meant because it’s tied to the demons you equip, I used them solely as stat boosts.
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Honestly, most status moves aren’t worth it in normal, AI battles because the pokemon AI is so bad.
Sword dance and nasty plot are the exception. Use that once or twice and you can usually sweep the entire opponent team with one hits. They’re also fantastic in the raid features that the last 2 generations have had. A big meta in SV raids was belly drum + drain punch (which would easily heal the damage belly drum dealt). It’s practically impossible to win 6+ star raids without status moves. Some of them are so brutally hard that you have to go for cheese strategies.
Sleep Powder is the only one IMO. 75% hit rate and an expected 2+ turns of effect means it’s a good gamble vs a stronger opponent, plus it’s practical for catching Pokemon.
Well, that and Gen 1 Toxic + Leech Seed is pretty fun…
I played Pokemon games against other kids in battles, and I also never saw merit in the status effects. If it didn’t deal damage, it was just a waste of a move.
Now, my experience is solely from the original Red/Blue generation so maybe they’ve gotten a bit more complex, but the first games were shallow af.
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I forced my way through that cave in Blue/Red that was completely pitch black. I don’t know why I didn’t get HM Flash (I was a dumb kid). I remember listening intenselywith headphones to the noises that would be made from running into walls, along with counting each press of the d-pad so I could sorta figure out where I was. Still got lost often. I don’t know how many poor Zubats I murdered in that cave trying to get through it. Nor do I remember how long it took me to get to the other side.
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In Legend of Dragoon I hit a wall on a Disc 2 boss and was stuck for months. After I took a break and came back I realized you could change your equipment–I’d never upgraded anything equipped and was using all of the starting equipped weapons and armor. This was not my first RPG, nor was I young enough to use age as an excuse.
I always get stuck trying to replay FF8 because I can never properly get enough items to ever upgrade anyone’s main weapon- which is usually good enough to get through till mid-late game there’s some point that requires more physical weapon use and I just get roadblocked and give up. I could probably follow a guide but I always think I can do it myself.
More on track with your game though - I love Legend of Dragoons art style for their character sheet, but it feels so slow navigating it. I’d really really love a remaster.
Legend of Dragoon is close to the top of my list of games I’d love to see remade, but almost certainly won’t.
Actually, FF8 is at the top of that list. It’s my favorite of the “mainline” FFs and the story has aged by far the best out of the series, but the systems, equipment, and stat working is awful. Like you’re running into, the systems are confusing and difficult to figure out, but as soon as you “get it” you almost have to handicap yourself so as not to completely break the game. A remake along the lines of the FF7 rework could fix that, and I think 8 would benefit from the treatment more than any other game in the series.
Yup, same issue in FF8, though I’ve never tried to replay it. My party was always underpowered/undergeared.
I also messed up big time in the fight against Adel/Rinoa at Lunatic Pandora. I blasted through practically ALL my spells in that fight (and it took me multiple attempts). So now I’m at Ultimecia Castle and I have no spells to use and I know there are tons of minibosses in there, along with the final boss sequence. I softlocked myself.
Did this with a couple RPGs too bud, first time I played mass effect way back when I got so frustrated because everything was so hard. Didn’t know you could upgrade stuff. Closest game I had played before was halo, where you get a few guns but they never upgrade, and armor never does either.
Second time through was much easier
I got through all of Breath of the Wild without cooking anything. I knew the feature was there, but I don’t remember ever being taught how to use it and ultimately decided I’d just armour my way around it.
Lol, I managed to get off the starting island without cooking or coldproof armor. I escorted a torch up to the shrine and found out twenty hours after that you’re supposed to cook a coldproof meal to get the clothes that protect you.
Okay… this is impressive
Half Life. Final boss fight. Not enough ammo and I couldn’t be bothered to go several hours of saves back to replay and conserve ammo.
I’m playing a similar game called just “Life”. I seem to have misplaced the manual for it which is quite the hurdle because there are no save/restore points.
It’s an open-world game and there are many NPC’s, but the few bosses seem randomly placed (at least, I haven’t found any pattern to it) and what’s worse is that you can’t really tell them apart from regular NPC’s until you’ve already engaged them! Got burned by that a fair bit more than once.
I’ve considered just starting over but the prospect of losing literally my entire progress… 😬
I have a similar experience with Quake’s final boss. It’s the only thing in the entire game you don’t kill by shooting. Took me 3 freaking days to figure it out.
It’s stupid as hell because it’s like the easiest thing to do, but no game had anything remotely like that, and it wasn’t a mechanic shown to the player at all in SP (if you don’t know you have to telefrag the boss by jumping into a gate when a purple spikey thing flying around the room clips through the boss).
I got stuck on Resident Evil Rebirth for the same reason. Took me years before I motivating myself to give it an other shot.
Life.
In the Final Fantasy Legend (or “Makaitoushi SaGa” as it was called in Japan), I somehow managed to make it to the game’s final boss without realizing the shops in the game sold more than three items per shop.
The game’s shopping interface presented you with a list of items, three at a time, but there was no indication on the screen that the list was scrollable, so I thought that the list presented were all they sold. That meant I missed out on about 75% of the items in the game, including a few that turned out to be kind of important for the last boss fight.
Of course, I couldn’t beat the last boss, and the only way to escape the last boss’s lair was to use an item that was sold in late game stores, but was buried in the list of items, so I had to start the game again from the top.
Good user experience design is important in games.
You just unlocked a memory of why I now scroll down every shop menu before even looking at what they have for sale in any game.
That’s the reason. Some random gameboy game from like 30 years ago.
There was an old PC game called MegaRace. Somehow I changed my controls and set steering to Left was Right and Right was Left. I never noticed this for the entire time I played it.
When I bought Test Drive 4 the first race I proceeded to drive straight into a wall. After struggling for a while I went back to MegaRace and instantly realized what my issue was.
Fast forward a decade or two later after doing only console racing games, proceeded to buy Dirt Rally and use my keyboard and muscle memory kicked in and drove straight off the track. I basically have to set driving games I play keyboard with to reverse steering. Thankfully a wheel, seat, pedals, and shifter have alleviated this problem in my current life.
And I thought I was weird for having my vertical controls switched for shooters. Lol.
That at least makes sense, like I can wrap my brain around the idea that the control from behind the camera about the axis of the lens means it would be inverse and would thus feel ‘correct’ to a certain number of players.
I got good at mirroring controls on the fly from Mario kart on the DS, that weapon basically had no effect on me.
Though if you put upshift over downshift I will lose mind. Upshift is always X and downshift is always A for me on the Xbox layout (cross/triangle) also screws me up when real cars do this, upshift should be towards the rear and downshift should be forwards. That’s how most sequential gear shifters are configured in race cars. Ostensibly because you are downshifting under deceleration and upshifting during acceleration.
Never understood you southpaws lol
Man that game was so weird and quirky! It was fun, but I also remember having problems exiting the game for some reason lol. It’s available from GOG if you ever get the itch.
This story is delightful, thank you
The first ever game of harvest moon was on the switch last year. I repaid the debt by fishing and collecting shells as I couldn’t figure out how to dig as I couldn’t obtain a pickaxe to finish my first ever quest. After 6+ hours of foraging around the staeting area, I realised that if you sleep, the quest progresses and you get the pickaxe… Yea!
I don’t know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren’t easily resettable. I’m so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played regarding skill progression is Oblivion.
Honestly, that game’s levelling is completely busted. Basically your class has a couple major and minor skills. You gain skill levels automatically by using them, and when you got enough levels in your class skills, you are supposed to rest and gain a character level.
Almost everything in Oblivion is levelled to match your character’s level. Gaining a level only serves three purposes : gaining a very small amount of health, gaining a few points in two stats depending on which skills you’ve used … And most of all spawning more, stronger enemies.
Lots of skills in Oblivion are not directly (or absolutely not at all) combat-related. Lots of default classes come with quite a few of them as major or minor skills. And those that don’t come with several damage-related and several defence-related skills.
Progressing in non-combat skills, or in too many at once in a “master of none” fashion, will make your game impossible. “Playing well” requires knowing and exploiting this by blocking your level up until you’ve maxed the right skill. Or even having some of your favourite skills not class skills at all.
This is really not my idea of fun character progression.
And you can make Acrobatics a class skill for super fuck you hard mode. I didn’t know this as a 13 year old playing Oblivion, and I thought “levels good” and wondered why I couldn’t get into the game for years until I learned about this little “quirk” of the leveling system.
Oh yeah, acrobatics and athletics, the two skills that go up every time you jump and run. Good ways to fuck your progression both.
Also the social skills, Mercantile and Speechcraft.
I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.
Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn’t that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.
