Sometimes you hear great things about a game, everything points toward it as being a game you’ll love, and so you start it up… and it doesn’t click with you.
Today, I’d like to talk about a few of those games. Not games I consider bad, not games I have no interest in, but games I really wanted to love and just couldn’t get into.
5. Inazuma Eleven
When I heard Inazuma Eleven was finally coming to the 3DS eShop, I was thrilled. I bought it right away. After all, it’s an RPG from Level-5, a company whose games I love.
But Inazuma Eleven is also about soccer. Since it’s crazy anime soccer, I thought it would overcome my dislike of sports games.
Unfortunately, while I liked the premise and characters, I didn’t enjoy the soccer games. And since soccer matches are Inazuma Eleven’s version of RPG battles, I finally put it down.
4. Real-Time Strategy
That’s right, an entire genre fits on this list. From Age of Empires, which I wanted to like because my best friends loved it, to StarCraft, which I found on sale and thought sounded really cool, many RTS games passed through my backlog before I finally said, “Huh. Maybe I just don’t like real-time strategy.”
Now if I want to know the story of an RTS game, I watch someone else play.
3. Half-Life
Most people consider Half-Life and Half-Life 2 great games. I wanted to be one of those people. I tried the originally and kept plugging away at it until I finally asked myself why I was playing a game if I wasn’t having fun.
Then I tried Half-Life 2 and again found myself not enjoying it. I kept going until I reached Ravenholm, which was awesome and exciting… and as soon as I left Ravenholm and returned to the rest of the game, I went back to not having fun.
2. Radiant Historia
The previous three can be explained. I don’t like sports games, RTS isn’t my genre, maybe there’s a reason I only play a handful of shooters.
But this?
Radiant Historia is a turn-based RPG, one of my favorite genres. It’s frequently mentioned alongside other games I love. Fans describe it as a must-play JRPG. Friends highly recommended it to me.
I played it and played it, and I want to love it. I like the idea of switching to a different timeline so you can learn things to overcome a problem in the first timeline. The combat seems interesting.
And yet… I feel nothing for the characters. I rarely think about the story. When I get into battles, I mainly want to just get them over with.
I put it on hold when Yo-Kai Watch came out, and I recently tried to return to it. Once again, I found myself wanting to play other games instead.
I’ve played about 17 hours of Radiant Historia, but it looks like that’s as far as I’ll go.
1. Okami
More than any other game on this list, Okami is one I wanted to love the most.
It’s filled with Japanese mythology, it plays similarly to a Zelda game, and it was developed by Capcom’s now-dissolved Clover Studio that went on to form PlatinumGames.
Every time I played it at first, I enjoyed the general gameplay, but I never found myself wanting to play more. Overall, I think I would have liked it more if it was shorter.
After the first false ending, I played some more, got tired of it, and took a break. When I returned, I was determined to complete it even though I was increasingly playing it just to get it done. At last, I pressed forward to the end of the game… and got stuck, at which point a walkthrough alerted me that no, I wasn’t at the end of the game.
I stopped then, probably forever. Okami is the #1 game I wish I loved.
All of these games stand out as ones I expected to love and just couldn’t get into. What games have you felt that way toward? Let me know in the comments… and if you think I need to give one of these games another chance, go ahead and make your case!
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Last night, new Ace Attorney 6 footage was shown during an Ace Attorney stage show.
