Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Games usually have to grab me pretty quickly, or I just drop them, so I don’t play a lot of unfun games for a long time.
Some exceptions were Final Fantasy 13, and to some extent the most of the Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).
Final Fantasy 13 I just tried a bunch of times, put in a combined 40h over the course of like three attempts, I don’t know why, but it was just mediocre at best. During the final one last year, I made it about halfway through, and actually got turned off from gaming altogether for a few months. The story sucked, as well as the characters. I thought the combat could be interesting, even with the auto-battles, since you’d have to decide what “stance” your characters were in, but it was just lame for the most part.
The Trails series is a bit different. I actually liked the gameplay (turn-based JRPG combat is fun), but the story and especially the villains are just complete garbage. Two years ago, before Cold Steel 4 came out on PC, I sat down and played through all the games in like two months. While Trails in the Sky is trash, I was actually surprised to really, really like Zero and (to a little bit lesser extent) Azure. Those gave me hope, but Trails of Cold Steel just goes back to being terrible. I might still go back and play Cold Steel 4 and whatever other games continue or maybe finally finish the story, just because I’ve invested too much time at this point.
Deeprock Galactic.
On paper it’s everything I like in games. But when my friends invite me to play, I get bored so much, that I have microsleep episodes. It’s so incredibly boring I can not understand the hype at all.
Maybe not the most unfun game I have ever played (I’ve played games since the late 90s), but certainly the most unfun I have played in recent years: Elex.
I liked Piranha Bytes’ old Gothic series a lot despite its weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. The Risen games weren’t that great, but the reviews for Elex were pretty promising. So I gave it a shot, and tried for about 16 hours to find the fun in it. I stopped playing when I realised:
- I couldn’t hold my own in almost any battle because I didn’t have good enough gear
- In order to get better gear, I had to join one of the game’s factions
- In order to join one of the factions, I had to perform a number of tasks for them
- The factions were all just dickheads, and I didn’t want to do anything for them, much less their dirty work
So yeah, no fun to be had with this one.
For me it was Cyberpunk 2077. Yes there were all those bugs at launch but I did not have too many issues. My main complaint was the story and the characters. The protagonist V was without any compassion, just a loud asshole. I couldn’t empathize at all. I felt like I wasn’t able to make any decisions were I was happy with the outcome. Additionally the gameplay was mediocre at best. A lot of places in the world felt completely rushed and unfinished. Combined with the lies from marketing, I wasn’t hooked at all and felt betrayed.
I felt like I wasn’t able to make any decisions were I was happy with the outcome.
That’s generally a consistent theme in the cyberpunk genre. You can’t win and you can’t get out of the game.
Yes this is true. I wasn’t expecting a happy ending either (I never finished it). But there is no rule, that you can’t be the nice guy in a cyberpunk world. In the end this still is a game which is supposed to entertain the player. I think both blade runner movies are a good example of a cyberpunk story, where love and compassion is a central point to the story.
The advantage of story telling in games over movies is the decision making. The capability to influence the direction a story is headed. My point is, that I wasn’t able to connect with the main character although the game was advertised as an rpg. And I know they acknowledged this flaw as they rebranded the game as action adventure.
Did you play male or female V? A general consensus I hear is that male V makes a better merc while female V acts more like a real person with some compassion
