Also known as Stuff That Exists But Doesn't Increase The Entertainment Value.


Back when I was younger, I only got money for two games a year and that's why, whenever I just got my hands on a new game, I would play everything it had to offer. All bonus dungeons, all extra bosses, every single collectible... But guess what? It got old ten years ago. Here is my list of things that lessen my enjoyment of a video game.


GRINDING (almost every jrpg)
Any game that requires the player to make his or her characters run in circles for hours killing those same respawning monsters (ducks, wolves, bunnies, the Buddha...) deserves to be shot twice. All this could be avoided by ditching LVLs and EXP, and instead relying on the right kind of equipment, abilities and strategy. As I've grown older, I simply don't have the time nor the patience to kill dozens of Very Common Rats in order to beat the next boss and advance in the story only to start killing Vaguely Less Common Rats.

REPETITIVE SIDE MISSIONS
In Crisis Core, you will spend hours and hours of your time hugging the walls of exact same dungeons, each time presented to you as a whole new area. It has only a handful of levels to choose from: a ship, the plains, a ghetto, one level of Shinra HQ, mines, a beach, and some sort of a cavern. While you would think it would be easy to randomize those dungeons, there are 300 side missions and only seven different maps. Sure the enemies change, but they are more Color-coded For Your Convenience than anything else. Enjoyable? No.

ALL MONEY SPENT ON CGI
It might seem I'm attacking Crisis Core... and hell yes, that game deserves it. It has beautiful cutscenes and an okay plot, but at the same time, you notice how the whole city of Midgar has like, wow, ten different people living in whole three different areas of it. Similarly, there aren't that many enemy designs to choose from, either, even though the original game, Final Fantasy VII, must have had over fifty. With this game, developers didn't even bother coloring them differently, not the monsters nor the townsfolk.

BOSSES WITH INSANE HP BARS
Any boss against which the only true trick is to try keeping one's eyes open for an hour or more while your faithful LVL 100 characters, armed with their best equipment and strongest skills, carefully gnibble away its HP isn't challenging. No, it's actually very boring. It isn't even an endurance match more than it is a test on the player's patience... and usually the boss also has some Total Annihilation attack it will only do after its health drops to less than 25%. And so what if you beat the bastard? The chances are the stuff you get from defeating it won't benefit you in any way, because while those weapons or items you get would have been clearly useful during the fight, you have probably defeated everything else on the planet in order to even stand a chance against that boss. Enjoy your Omega Badge.

SLOTS
Why!?

MINIGAMES WITH INSANE REQUIREMENTS
In Final Fantasy X there is a minigame, Chocobo Run, that takes numerous tries to practice and perfect. You are supposed to collect balloons whilst riding a chocobo, against an A.I. rider, while freaking seagulls drop down from the sky like suicidal missiles and take a swift right only to hit YOU square in the face. With each balloon you collect, you get like 3 seconds deducted from your race time - and what you are aiming at is 0 seconds; no more, no less. However, not only are you trying to avoid those seagulls and grab balloons before that bitch steals them, obviously being hit by a seagull and losing some of your precious time recovering wouldn't have been enough of a punishment. Oh no. Instead the game gives you a nice +3 seconds on top of whatever time and balloons you lost whilst you tried scraping that seagull off your face.

"NOT MY PROBLEM / NOT INTERESTED."
Aren't we done already with angsty protagonists? It seems that more often than not, at least Final Fantasy games have a main character that has his or her personal insecurities to deal with; saving the world from utter destruction can wait while he or she broods about childhood traumas, lost love or nonexistent social skills. Although it is true that teenagers are attracted to those loner-type characters, it would be nice to see a Final Fantasy game where a male/female lead was a tad older.

BUYING A WALKTHROUGH REQUIRED
I'm fine with missing a few items or never finding the lair with an extra monster that would make the final boss cry and cover. However, when the game forces me to look at a walkthrough, thanks to its illogical and never-been-mentioned puzzles, I'm far from amused. The developers can't just expect that they can place a puzzle, solving it being crucial for the plot to advance, in the middle of a player's path and never, in any way,
bother mentioning there is one! Do they really think that the gamer wants to just wander around in the same dungeon (assuming that he or she hasn't backtracked elsewhere by then) until they step on the right plate that's... you guessed it... in no way different from every other plate there? Final Fantasy XII's waterfall puzzle comes to mind.

BUT THOU MUST!
Why do they give the player an option to choose between two different-but-equal sides only to punish them later for "picking wrong"? It just doesn't make any sense that, after doing all the sidequests and hopping through every other loop, the player is 'awarded' with a 99% score just because they kept their mind open. How can you make a wrong choice when there is none?

EVERYTHING'S OUT TO GET YOU
What has the main protagonist ever done to jack-o-lanterns, bunnies, mushrooms and goats riding bicycles? Somehow the realism of the game's world starts to suffer when, walking through a forest, a wolf teams up with a rabbit only to off you. And this isn't even Buggs Bunny we're talking about, oh no! Besides, what's with the super cartoony, goofy monsters? This isn't Pokémon. I don't like venturing in the final dungeon only to be greeted by hordes of pink, bouncing telephones with hands and gloves. Is it really that hard to come up with enemies that don't look copy/pasted from some other game clearly aimed for children? You know, something that would actually fit the world the main characters live in?

THAT CUTE LIL MASCOT
Some notable examples are Issun (Isshun? Ishun? Azn?) from Okami and Cait Sith from Final Fantasy VII. Obviously, you, the player, are supposed to sympathize with them. The problem is that you very likely won't when that annoying cricket is always forcefully holding your hand through every simple puzzle, making you listen to hours of its nininiininininini-ni-nii language without any possibility to skip the cutscenes during the first playthrough, and occasionally leering at some cartoon woman's boobs. That brings me to...

CAN'T SKIP THIS
Some developers seem to think that their game is such an unique snowflake with a story so fine that the player would be pushed into the abyss of true despair if they missed even a minute of its cutscenes. Sometimes you aren't even given an option to speed them up, despite the characters speaking in their own imaginary language consisting of one OR maybe even two syllables. Of course you can skip those damn things on the second playthrough, but by the time you have suffered each cutscene at least once, collected everything there is and beaten the final boss, you shouldn't have a reason to replay the game unless... you are crazy. Besides, you will very likely get killed one or two times during boss battles, so why doesn't the continue option start the game -after- the cutscene instead of from the beginning of it?


A very easy way to find a semi-decent game:
- avoid any Final Fantasy sequel unless it has the words 'Tactics' in it