Least favorite game you played to completion

[Rhuno | 190]

The opposite of the other thread on favorite games you've never finished. Let's hear some games that you didn't like, but played all the way through anyway. What compelled you to see it through despite not enjoying it?

For me, it's Winback on the N64. I was pretty amped for that game when it came out and couldn't have been more disappointed. I had no intention of playing to the end, but I let a buddy of mine borrow it and he ended up finishing it. I then felt obligated to do the same. It was a bland, frustrating and miserable experience. And somehow it got a sequel. 

[Reed Rothchild | 10,067]

Well discounting SNES since I tried to beat the entire library and got through a number of the worst games, and discounting NES since some of those are like 5 minutes long, and I had to play some real losers for the competition, for stuff I actually sought out and played on my own with high expecations...

Just beat Shenmue recently.  That was pretty bad.  Here were my thoughts about it:

I started this all the way back in February or so, and then shelved it because I could tell I wasn't gonna have a very good time with it.  Well, it's December, my list is nearly empty, and I spent the last 3 days sick and couch-ridden, so I finished it off.

I wanted to like it.  I really did.  I'm a positive guy when it comes to games, I've had a good-to-great time with basically everything in my list down below.   Look at all those stellar (on the Reed scoring scale) numbers.

But I just couldn't do it.  The controls are awful.  The dialogue is awful.  The voice acting is infamously bad.  The town is boring and doesn't offer many compelling things to do, aside from the arcade.  Didn't especially care for the combat.  Didn't really care for wandering around town over and over again trying to talk to the right NPC to trigger the next event.  Hated the pacing.  That was the major problem.  Open world games have spent the last 20 years figuring out what works, and what doesn't.  This game is full of things that don't work: evolutionary dead ends.  Making a player sit around until 7pm, with no way to speed things up, is a mistake.  Making me do the same forklift race over and over again for no real reason is a mistake.  Bugging out and forcing me to repeat one of the "work days" several times was just the added insult to injury.  Making me sit in a parking lot and do moves over and over and over and over and over again to strengthen them is a mistake.

Shenmue II is being bumped to the 2028 backlog.  I just have too many other things (including like 10 more Yakuza games) that will be a better experience for me.

No disrespect to others who enjoy this game.  I obviously caught it way too late, after playing too many other games that took the ideas here and ran with them.  If I played this in 1999 I probably would have been a lot warmer to it.

Other candidates: 
Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash, Scribblenauts, Yoshi's Story, Devilish, Legend of Dragoon (I said it!), Sin, The Simpsons Hit & Run

Objectively, Night Trap is probably worse than all of the above, but I say it's in so-bad-it's-good territory.  And I also just played through Winback, and was pretty letdown with how roughly it has aged.  But I think I'd still play it over any of these other games I've listed.

[NostalgicMachine | 383]

War Gods (N64).

[Rhuno | 190]

57 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Well discounting SNES since I tried to beat the entire library and got through a number of the worst games, and discounting NES since some of those are like 5 minutes long, and I had to play some real losers for the competition, for stuff I actually sought out and played on my own with high expecations...

Just beat Shenmue recently.  That was pretty bad. 

I played Shenmue when it was first released and enjoyed it. I wonder how I'd feel if I replayed it today. I'm kind of tempted to try it, but also don't want to ruin the memories. 

[Ankos | 595]

Pokemon Platinum

[Ankos | 595]

On second thought maybe I could come up with something worse than that. I've played quite a few broken bootleg games. I still think that Platinum was my least favorite memorable game that I took the time to play all the way through

[CT | 225]

Dredge.

Engaging story, hardly any gameplay, and I missed the "good" ending due to an arbitrary reason.

I probably have another game that meets this criteria, but this one came to mind first.

[Link | 2,951]

Majora's Mask. 

Take everything I don't care for in my favorite franchise and focus everything around that. And make the graphics ugly. 

[koifish | 628]

some of them were for the game boy completion challenge. They include every game boy version of Jeopardy, "Sports Illustrated for Kids: The Ultimate Triple Dare!", and Cool World come to mind.

Another one is "C.O.P. The Recruit" for DS, and "Need for Speed: The Run" for 3DS. The latter was a gift and I felt I shouldn't disappoint the buyer. The former, I honestly don't know what I was thinking. I spent like 25 hours beating it and I have no idea why I bothered. All I can remember is the really really lame music for action sequences, which included a guy rapping and saying "what I say is real, I'm not faking" every once in a while. Seriously, why did I play this to completion? It was as long as it was underwhelming. Was I just desperate? Did something captivate me about a very poor man's GTA clone? I still have no idea.

I think there's another game I've finished like this, but I don't remember it. Related however; My friend beat daikatana a few years ago. He said the best part of doing it was knowing that he would never have to play it again.

[koifish | 628]

10 hours ago, Link said:

Majora's Mask. 

Take everything I don't care for in my favorite franchise and focus everything around that. And make the graphics ugly. 

I feel this way but I gave up on it by the time I hit the swamp. This is the kind of game I would rather watch someone else play while only half paying attention.

[Reed Rothchild | 10,067]

Actually, that reminds me.

The answer might be Jumanji: The Lext Level for Switch.  My boys got it for me for my birthday, and I played through the entire thing with them in 4 player cooperative mode.  Terrible game, but I feigned a great time for them for the entire playthrough haha.

[Webhead123 | 831]

I played The Tick on SNES to completion because of some challenge back in the NintendoAge days (Reed...was it you that put me up to it?) and I still haven't recovered. That "game" represents 3 hours of my life I'll never get back. If you looked up the definitions of both "repetitive" and "vapid" in the dictionary, you'd probably see a picture of it. The title of the very first stage is "Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas" and they weren't lying.

What really sucks is that The Tick is a personal favorite comic book property of mine and is defined by it's goofiness and irreverence. The fact that the video game was devoid of any humor, personality or entertainment value at all is the real knife through the heart. That and the fact that no beat-em-up game should ever, EVER take 3 f***ing hours to beat. Oi vey!

Edited January 14, 2024 by Webhead123

[mbd39 | 2,147]

27 minutes ago, Webhead123 said:

I played The Tick on SNES to completion because of some challenge back in the NintendoAge days (Reed...was it you that put me up to it?) and I still haven't recovered. That "game" represents 3 hours of my life I'll never get back. If you looked up the definitions of both "repetitive" and "vapid" in the dictionary, you'd probably see a picture of it. The title of the very first stage is "Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas" and they weren't lying.

I saw someone stream the entire game on Twitch and it looks like a parody of repetitive beat em ups. In that respect they nailed it if it's intentional parody.

 

[Webhead123 | 831]

38 minutes ago, mbd39 said:

I saw someone stream the entire game on Twitch and it looks like a parody of repetitive beat em ups. In that respect they nailed it if it's intentional parody.

The word "parody" would imply that there were some level of comic/humorous value to it. There is no humor or joy to be found in the entirety of the game.

If parody was what they were going for, I think they missed the mark. Instead, I'd call it a "soulless imitation" of the beat-em-up genre. All the elements are present but they don't combine to create a greater whole. It's kinda like those famously-bad Turkish and Italian films of the 70's and 80's that tried to imitate popular Hollywood action movies without understanding how to make those kinds of films or even how to write dialog in English. That's The Tick on SNES in a nutshell. It's trying to copy the beat-em-up formula without understanding how to make it interesting.

Edited January 14, 2024 by Webhead123

[RH | 5,421]

It might be a cliche but it’s a fact for me. The game that I played to completion and was the most disappointed with was Quest 64.

[twiztor | 954]

for me the answer is Mario is Missing for SNES. i bought it WAY back in the day and was excited to play a game where Luigi was the main character. Had no idea it was an 'edutainment' game. and use that -tainment suffix extremely generously here. I hated that game. i know the whole game is only like 2 hours long, but i was fuming the whole time. But i forced myself to finish it so that i would never be tempted to try it again. To double down, I WROTE THE FINAL LEVEL PASSWORD ON THE CART WITH A MARKER. Just total contempt for it. 

[O.G. CIB | 423]

Alan Wake. I know it was about the story but the controls were a drag and the combat was stiff.

[Rhuno | 190]

16 hours ago, Link said:

Majora's Mask. 

Take everything I don't care for in my favorite franchise and focus everything around that. And make the graphics ugly. 

That game killed the franchise for me; I could tell pretty quickly I was not going to enjoy the game. Aside from the Link's Awakening remake, and dabbling for a bit with Breath of the Wild, I haven't played a Zelda game since.

[Reed Rothchild | 10,067]

22 minutes ago, Rhuno said:

That game killed the franchise for me; I could tell pretty quickly I was not going to enjoy the game. Aside from the Link's Awakening remake, and dabbling for a bit with Breath of the Wild, I haven't played a Zelda game since.

Link Between Worlds?  Seems like the entry built specifically for traditionalists.

[Link | 2,951]

31 minutes ago, Rhuno said:

That game killed the franchise for me; I could tell pretty quickly I was not going to enjoy the game. Aside from the Link's Awakening remake, and dabbling for a bit with Breath of the Wild, I haven't played a Zelda game since.

I totally get it but I think you're missing out. Every main series home console game after MM (except Skyward Sword) is really good. MM was an experiment the likes of which was not followed in the franchise. 

And Reed is right about LBW, and it's fun.

[koifish | 628]

2 hours ago, Rhuno said:

That game killed the franchise for me; I could tell pretty quickly I was not going to enjoy the game. Aside from the Link's Awakening remake, and dabbling for a bit with Breath of the Wild, I haven't played a Zelda game since.

pretty much same for me, I had no love for the aonuma Zelda games. I liked link between worlds and the four swords games too though. Tri-Force Heroes i never really had a chance to play; Now that the 3ds network is being taken down, I probably never will. For me though, none of them are better than NES Zeldas and Link's Awakening.

[Gloves | 12,582]

There's too much that falls into  this category for me, honestly. My trophy hunting years were filled to the brim with garbage games played primarily for trophies.

Just take a look at my PSNProfiles page filtered to the games I've completed to see a list that's half or more worthless garbage: Gloves_Off_Games' PSN Profile • PSNProfiles.com

[DefaultGen | 5,961]

It's probably like Fisher Price: Perfect Fit. Watching the computer player incorrectly match shapes to identical shapes sure is something. For a longer game, Airport Simulator 2014, which took around 20 hours to beat and like 16 of those hours are just driving the little luggage cart around from point A to point B.

[koifish | 628]

17 minutes ago, DefaultGen said:

It's probably like Fisher Price: Perfect Fit. Watching the computer player incorrectly match shapes to identical shapes sure is something. For a longer game, Airport Simulator 2014, which took around 20 hours to beat and like 16 of those hours are just driving the little luggage cart around from point A to point B.

so it was like the forklift parts of shenmue?

[Gloves | 12,582]

22 minutes ago, DefaultGen said:

It's probably like Fisher Price: Perfect Fit. Watching the computer player incorrectly match shapes to identical shapes sure is something. For a longer game, Airport Simulator 2014, which took around 20 hours to beat and like 16 of those hours are just driving the little luggage cart around from point A to point B.