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!”
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’ve long accepted that I’m only ever going to get through my enormous backlog and keep my sanity if I just grab the collectibles that are directly en route to any objective I’m trying to complete. It did take a long time to get there though and I still think I must’ve done about 95% of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey though.
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I don’t have much experience with X, but I had a similar feeling about MMO combat before I played Chronicles. I always thought of that kind of pseudo real-time combat as the worst of both worlds (I felt that way about Dragon Age Origins too), but actually playing Chronicles I ended up liking the combat. The basic formula of MMO combat actually is pretty solid, and with a few of their own twists to it the combat works surprisingly well in single player.
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Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for sure. Even just doing the main quest is exhausting. Origins was much more manageable.
Someone brought up Mass Effect 1, but for me Mass Effect 2 & 3 are way worse. Three especially, with the enemy wave system, is just exhausting. I’m one of those weirdos who think ME1 was by far the best one.
And the worst offender for me: Dragon Age Origins. There is just sooo much filler combat. I’ve tried to get in to it 2-3 times but I just can’t.
For me games with “too much game” are usually the ones with a ton of filler combat that aims to pad out the hour count of the main storyline. I always try to finish the main storyline first, and then I feel more comfortable doing the side stuff.
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Quick question about Origins, but when does the game start to pick up? I’m in Siwa doing quests but right now I don’t see why I have to care about defeating the boss dude. Frankly, it feels like I’m missing explanations on who Bayek is, what are his motivations, or what he is working towards. Does that get better after the first few hours? Because right now I gotta say it’s a bit of a slog.
There’s a fairly big contextualisation in Siwa during a flashback scene for why Bayek cares and I think it’s elaborated on a bit more in Alexandria. The game delves a bit more into the wider implications of the Pharoah’s misrule and loses, imo, a bit of the personal stakes in the process after that.
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Honestly it’s been a few years since I finished it, so my memory of it isn’t super clear anymore. I did feel like it opened up when you get to Alexandria. I felt like the stakes weren’t always super clear and the story a bit muddled, but you get more background on Bayek and him and Kassandra are probably my top two AC player characters.
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