P5R took me like 160 hours, lol. And that’s having already put 100-something hours into the original and knowing exactly what to do most of the time.
I loved most of that game, but there’s definitely some areas where you could trim some fat.
Although maybe I’m the wrong person to say that, considering even after all that I still had enough desire left in me for more to start up a NG+ afterward. (Unsurprisingly I didn’t finish though.)
Breath of the Wild, though I know that’s not going to be a popular choice.
I like it in theory but there’s just…so much…for it to never really evolve much beyond the basic mechanics and the small enemy variety.
I can totally believe this and I don’t think it’s anything to do with the actual game itself just it’s one hell of a time sink when the last thing I gave myself over to to the exclusion of everything else was Red Dead and that last October - December.
Rage 2 has managed to be a game that simultaneously felt like it had too much and not enough.
The nanotrite abilities are absolutely necessary to enjoying the combat and that they are hidden and separated from the player by miles of empty space is frustrating. The car combat is not engaging enough to justify the huge open map.
After mainlining the abilities I found myself wishing the game was more linear. I’m wanting the game to lead me to more combat arenas without forcing me to drive (Once I unlocked the Icarus vehicle fairly early on I did not drive anything else for the rest of the game) for minutes at time between missions.
If they had cut the vehicle mechanics and just made a Doom 2016 style progression with Rage’s combat I would have been satisfied.
This may not be in the spirit of the question, perhaps more literally: I loved walking around the enviroments of the Yakuza-games/Judgment, and hated every time it forced me into a fight and actually play the game. I really wanted a pacifict mode, where I could just eat ramen, play old Sega-games, and sing karaoke.
That’s Shenmue.
Already gonna say Last of Us 2 preemptively, since I looked it up and thought I had just hit like the 2nd Act, and really I’m maybe not a quarter of the way through.
As funny as some parts of it are, and it unlocks the special combat styles for both characters, the real estate minigame for Kiryu and the host club one for Majima in Yakuza 0 become time-consuming turbo grinds and I would not recommend completing them.
Yakuza games usually leave you with more than what you asked for, and not always in a good way.
To quote the estimable Steve Gaynor: “There’s so much game in this game!”
AARPGs like Diablo where the endgame is where the cool stuff is always have four times more main campaign than they need. Example: Monster Hunter World Iceborne was an expansion to a game that was already too long somehow was still 20 hours longer than it needed to be and if it wasn’t I probably would have played 40 more hours of it than I did
Final Fantasy XII. How come I’m finding it incredibly special, loving the character treatment far more than the last two FF that I’ve played (for the record, they were FFIX and FFXIII), I am quite compelled with the judges story, and still I ask myself while playing if this has been going for too long. It’s a good game, but there’s a better game in there and it’s way shorter.
Could not agree more with this. That game has way too many large, empty maps and too much unnecessary stuff going on that really obscure a pretty wonderful story.
On a related note, can we please stop putting collectibles in games, especially when they have story content and are impossible to find without scouring the environment or reading a guide? I don’t have time to play games twice these days, so when this is the case I either have to play the game with a guide and turn it into a lifeless checklist or not engage with them at all and feel mildly uncomfortable that I’m missing shit the whole time. Ugh.
I agree about Kiryu’s real estate, but Majima’s Cabaret Club is one of my favorite parts of the game. I’d honestly play a stand-alone game of just that. (With some necessary tweaks and changes.)
That being said, I do agree that doing everything in Yakuza games is almost always well past the point of enjoyable completion. I usually just do the parts that interest me and move on.
Half-Life 2
If you haven’t replayed it recently try doing so, there’s a lot that could be better trimmed down. Everyone remembers how long the water section is near the start with the boat but no one remembers the later parts of the game where you spend way too long at the prison and far too long in the end game City 17 street battles that don’t serve much purpose other then to pad the game out with gun fights that don’t feel especially great.
I like Half-Life 2 a lot but I’m not going to sit here and pretend it’s a well paced game.
I agree with this 100%. By the time I got to the good stuff in MHW I was ready to put the game down. It doesn’t do a good job showing what makes the series good, because there’s such a barrier to get to that point
the Xenoblade series has come up a couple of times on the pod recently, and every time it does I get a big hit of FOMO from having never gotten to the mech bits of Xenoblade Chronicles X before I sold my Wii U. almost nothing fills me with gamer ennui more than thinking about how I didn’t even especially enjoy that game but … maybe I still missed out
Xenoblade Chronicles is a game where there’s an npc with a ! over their head that gives a side quest. Then immediately talk to them again to get a second side quest. Then talk to them again to get a third side quest. Repeat for multiple npcs throughout the town.
These side quests are normally collect items or kill monsters and complete automatically once the goal has been achieved, no need to return to the npc, but if one doesn’t like side quests it is absolutely not a game for them. I can’t say it’s too much game for me though because I love that shit.
I’m always a little confused when Austin, and others, say “it has MMO style combat” as if it’s a selling point. Combat in MMOs always feels clunky and constrained by the technical and gameplay needs of the genre. Bringing that to a single player game just seems pointless.
IF games are gonna do collectibles, please handle them like the first inFamous: offer a path to both 1) highlighting collectibles around me, and 2) putting them on the damn map.
