As I mentioned yesterday, speaking of the first Dishonored, I've never finished the game, despite thinking it is positively brilliant. Come to think of it, I didn't finish Dishonored 2 either, and I liked that game even more than the first. When I go through my lists of top ten games in any given year, it's a good bet that most of the longer games are marked with a sad, shameful DNF in my own imaginary history book.
I don’t know about love, but I never finished Braid despite being delighted by Braid’s mechanics and the aesthetics of its gameworld. There was just that one puzzle that required precise timing, and without solving it, I wasn’t able to unlock the… attic world? Something like that. And you can’t just look up the solution to a timing puzzle, you need to actually execute it yourself.
Sigh.
I know it’s been literally years and it’s not like a narrative game or anything, but I’m still sticking to no-spoilers for Braid, just in case one day I am cybernetically enhanced and/or uploaded into a robot body with superhuman reaction times.
Both of those games are firsts in a genre for me and I got all the way to the final boss encounter & just, never finished. I just didn’t speck myself properly & am stuck with a bad save & honestly I don’t want to replay them all over again just to finish.
Maybe I’ll go back to XCOM but my red headed elf mage is probably going to be staring down that dragon’s throat for the rest of eternity.
Or maybe you go back and realize that the extremely difficult solution you were trying wasn’t the actual solution. That may or may not be true (no spoilers); just sayin’
Fallout New Vegas. It’s not even that it’s too long a game. I’ve finished longer. I had bought it on a steam sale for 2.99 and at that point had already known how the game scoped story-wise out so I just thought I’d play until I got my fill and never got close enough to the end.
Also LISA: The Painful that indie Children of Men like RPG. Made in JRPG maker but had an unusual side-scroller PoV. I got to a point where the game let me grind out characters and it gave me WAY too many party members. The idea was that you’d take the party members you’d like and want to work on but things can happen where they’ll leave or get permanently killed so my RPG OCD made me want to grind at a fighting arena about 70% of the way through the game. I also can’t pick party members unless I feel certain I know which ones will be the most fun so I have to grind out characters until I see which ones get better skills/stats faster and which ones have the best synergy with each other. That just killed my momentum and it was entirely my fault. Same reason I stopped Xenoblade Chronicles X too many party member OCD issue. Thought that was also because in a lock-up glitch I had lost hours of hyper-specific grinding, team load-out customizations, gear-purchasing, party member social-link questing, etc and I couldn’t be asked to recreate that amount of meticulous gameplay.
Half-Life. The final boss is absolute bullshit. That whole last chapter is terrible, especially after the entire rest of the game.
What really annoyed me about Half-Life is how the tutorial taught you the “long jump” and then you don’t actually get that ability until the VERY END where it’s really not that useful.
Dishonored 2! Bought it at launch but life was too busy so I decided to put it away and play it again when I had more time to devote to it. 1 year on it’s still in my steam library and I keep saying that I’ll get to it when I have time to truly savour the experience.
Love is a bit strong, but NAtURAL DOCtRINE is the one that comes to mind. If I really like a game that much, I’ll definitely see it through to the end.
ND is just a case where it was brutally difficult at times, and I refused to turn down the difficulty. I was on a level where enemies just kept spawning from the back, forcing me to move my team through the level in a limited amount of time. Since the tactical mechanics of that game are such that you want to place all of your units in unison, and in a very specific manner, being pushed through the level proved to be a really difficult challenge.
I was never great at the combat system to begin with, so I died to that level some 15 times and ended up losing interest. It’s something I’d still really like to go back to now and see through to the end, but I would need to start over to learn the combat system again. Pushing through another 35 hours just to get back to that point is pretty daunting.
Fire Emblem: Awakening is probably my favorite tactics game ever and I can’t beat the final boss. I consider it finished because I don’t believe in bosses being an actual part of games.
I really liked Okami, but I never finished it. Unlike most folks, it wasn’t even the padded hour count that got me-- I dropped it about 2 hours in. It’s beautiful and I liked the drawing gimmick, but for some reason I just couldn’t bring myself to play more.
Along a different track, I reached the final boss of Persona 4: Golden then dropped it. That’s not something I usually do, but I just couldn’t bring myself to end one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had with a video game. A year later, I picked it up again and blew through the boss, devoid of much of my connections to the world and characters.
I think I mentioned once that the Gamecube version of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is one of my favorite games because I love banging on the drums to control the game, but I’ve never properly finished it. There is a “final boss” you face, but once you defeat him, the game tells you there’s a bunch of post-game levels left to unlock and a rematch with the final boss in order to see the game’s true ending, and I’ve never managed to do it. I think you have to get gold medals on every previous stage in the game, which ends up being an order simply too tall for me to manage (those post-game levels are obviously some of the most difficult).
I dunno if I’d say I loved it, but I enjoyed the heck out of the original Far Cry right up until it went weird alien shit on us. That said, I don’t even know if I quit it because it went weird, or because I wandered off and then never backed up my save next time I wiped my computer.
I’ve also found myself dragging my feet an inordinately long time on final boss fights of late. In both DOOM and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, I’ve let last levels and boss fights sit for weeks, possibly even months, before finally attacking them. To borrow a post from another site, long, annoying final bosses may be the gaming shit I’m too old for now.
I like that game so much, but I have NEVER gotten past that one on one fight after you pick up the twins in the desert. But wow, so much to just love about that game. The look, the combat style, its the first game I played where you send your dudes out on missions that you don’t actually play. The MUSIC. Just… everything.
Basically all of the old 2.5d PC RPG classics. Baldur’s Gate 1&2, Torment, etc. I loved them and invested a ton of time into getting every scrap of information I could only to grind away my interest into dust and leave them unfinished. I just couldn’t bring myself to pause my way through strategic battles and reload after unlucky rolls anymore.
Also currently sitting on BotW, although I will finish it eventually. PUBG and Heat Signature just keep pulling me in, although I do wonder if I’ll hit the wall with Heat Signature. I’ve got about half the galaxy liberated, but it’s getting to the point where levels are practically trivial with skill so it might start feeling like more of a slog.
Nooo Danielle, you’re going to make me come face to face with that ever-growing pile of shame?
I guess I’ll just pick out a couple especially noteworthy titles in my mind…
Fallout 4 - I really enjoyed the last two games and like Fallout 4 quite a bit as well, but the way I play these kind of games (lots of exploring and side missions, very rarely if ever fast traveling, and only occasionally doing the main story missions) means that it’ll take me many many more hours to finish this. (I’m 80+ hours in and pretty sure I’m not even half way through the main story…)
Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (and Monster Hunter Generations) - Loooooove me some Monster Hunter (points to avatar can’t you tell?), and to be honest, I’m not really sure why I haven’t finished either of these lol.
Resident Evil 7 - I love horror games and will definitely finish this one eventually, but I made it a point to play through the entire thing in VR so…yeah, I’ll take my time lol.
Dance Dance Revolution X2 (for PS2) - Why did I pick this, you ask? Because for the last 7 PS2 DDR games, I’ve tried to unlock all of the songs/beat whatever “story mode” was in the game, and I’ve somehow managed to be successful up until this one. The songs I have left to unlock require me to either beat stupidly difficult story missions or alternatively, just play a couple hundred more songs outside of story mode. Maybe one day…or maybe not.
Most of the JRPGs I’ve played. Final Fantasy VI and Suikoden II stand out. Love what I’ve seen of the stories but I’m just not a fan of that style of combat (even though I feel FFVI does a lot to make it interesting) and they’re so hard to pick back up after a long break.
I may be speaking too soon because I haven’t given up yet but I’m afraid Thumper is going to become one of these too. I love so much about it but it just seems inevitable that I’m going to hit a wall skillwise.
I’ve never gotten past the second world of Lovely Planet, but I still load the game up every few months to take in its sunny, cheerful ambiance and re-learn the controls I find so comfortable, despite my being utterly incapable of using them properly.
