My first playthrough of Mass Effect I had no idea there was a second level of my ship. I totally missed all of the crew member backstory dialogue and relationship building, which is pretty essential to the game… the second playthrough was much better once I found the elevator!!
That seems kind of ridiculous that they technically make it all optional.
Storytime: It’s 1997, I play a game that my uncle shows me on his Playstation 1. There’s tons of reading and a weird fighting system but it seems really awesome and has some amazing FMV scenes. He tells me I’m too young to play it and won’t let me borrow it to keep playing… So I go to blockbuster and rent it for a few days.
I remember the back of the instruction booklet showing off one of those memory cards and saying “try beating the game without one” which is exactly what I tried to do, because I didn’t have a memory card! Then my mum turned the game off when I was at school one day and we had to take the game back to blockbuster after a couple of days. Damn I lost all my progress!
ADAMANT that I would play this game I got my own copy after swapping for it at my local game store and got my own memory card. Finally I could save my game and not worry about losing my progress. The game continues to challenge me a ton and I don’t really understand how the systems work but I’m 10 years old and having fun so who cares.
I figure out that I can buy grenades from the shops and I use that as my main attack for awhile… at least until I get to the big city with the gun on it. Buying and using healing items is such a pain all the time though but thankfully money isn’t hard to get.
Fast forward further into the story and one of my characters has to go one on one with another dude, this is like that other fight with the guy and his dog when I didn’t have 3 characters that could throw grenades and heal! I can’t beat this dude with the gun on his arm with just 1 guy!
… Then after failing over and over again, I finally figure out what putting “Restore” on his weapon does… then I figure out what putting “Fire” on it does…
Suddenly the FF7 materia system clicks into place in my brain and about 15 hours after the tutorial teaching you how to do it I figure out how to play the game.
Still my number 1 game of all time to this day. And I never forgot how much trouble Dyne gave me that first time playing through the game.
tl;dr I didn’t understand how the FF7 materia system worked until about 15~ hours into the game and was using grenades and potions for all fighting and healing for a loooong time.
You beat the materia keeper without using materia!?
Materia Keeper is further into the game after Nibelheim. Dyne is after you go to Golden Saucer for the first time and get sent to the prison at the bottom of it in the desert.
I don’t know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren’t easily resettable. I’m so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played regarding skill progression is Oblivion.
Honestly, that game’s levelling is completely busted. Basically your class has a couple major and minor skills. You gain skill levels automatically by using them, and when you got enough levels in your class skills, you are supposed to rest and gain a character level.
Almost everything in Oblivion is levelled to match your character’s level. Gaining a level only serves three purposes : gaining a very small amount of health, gaining a few points in two stats depending on which skills you’ve used … And most of all spawning more, stronger enemies.
Lots of skills in Oblivion are not directly (or absolutely not at all) combat-related. Lots of default classes come with quite a few of them as major or minor skills. And those that don’t come with several damage-related and several defence-related skills.
Progressing in non-combat skills, or in too many at once in a “master of none” fashion, will make your game impossible. “Playing well” requires knowing and exploiting this by blocking your level up until you’ve maxed the right skill. Or even having some of your favourite skills not class skills at all.
This is really not my idea of fun character progression.
And you can make Acrobatics a class skill for super fuck you hard mode. I didn’t know this as a 13 year old playing Oblivion, and I thought “levels good” and wondered why I couldn’t get into the game for years until I learned about this little “quirk” of the leveling system.
Oh yeah, acrobatics and athletics, the two skills that go up every time you jump and run. Good ways to fuck your progression both.
Also the social skills, Mercantile and Speechcraft.
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How can you be under leveled? Isn’t Alduin level scaled?
Yes and no.
Everything still has a minimum level. Alduin being the final boss is still pretty high level at his lowest level. Same with the Dragon Priests. Those dudes are almost impossible when you’re less than level 10.
If you just did the MQ and nothing else, even if you kill everything in your path during the dungeons, you’ll barely have leveled. You won’t level at if you just run through everything!
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I just beat BOTW for the first time and never figured out what to do with Korok Seeds. Missed out on the extra weapon/shield inventory slots the whole game!
Black & White
It has a mechanic where you bless a stone, then throw it across the map, and you get to build and influence an area around the rock. Basically it is the only sane way to expand.
I did not know. I spent painstaking hours slowly growing my village trying to get its area of influence to spread into where I needed to go.
Oh my god I never learnt this! That would’ve made the final level so much easier
I may have misunderstood, though. This is my vague memory of a friend trying to explain to me how I was supposed to have played the game after I gave up and uninstalled it long ago.
If you use your godhand to place a boulder in the midst of one of the villages worshiping you, the villagers will start praying and dancing and chanting and whatnot around the boulder. After a long enough time with the villagers charging the bolder, it would radiate with your divine presence. At this point, it is a ready “artifact”.
Artifacts don’t expand you influence zone directly, but they do a really good job of getting non-believer villagers to start worshiping you, which does extend your influence in a major way.
Ahh, thank you!
You can also throw that annoying immortal guy who somehow allows you to use your powers around wherever he is
Oh man, it’s time to give this game a replay one of these days.
Let’s go man. Can’t wait to get stuck at that tree puzzle again.
I played through all of mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.
To be fair, that game really isn’t about shooting or even taking out enemies. Taking their gun only slows you down!
I should go play that again. It’s got a great atmosphere (and soundtrack)
Doesn’t Mirrors Edge have a forced tutorial at the beginning and it literally requires you to pick up a gun at some point? 🤔
This is the right way to play the game, IMO. There’s even an achievement for it.
My first time through Final Fantasy 8, I was a bit too young to grasp all the concepts. I missed the memo on the fact that you had to craft gear based on finding the weapon magazines so I ended up playing through the whole game with everyone using their base weapons.
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Honestly, most status moves aren’t worth it in normal, AI battles because the pokemon AI is so bad.
Sword dance and nasty plot are the exception. Use that once or twice and you can usually sweep the entire opponent team with one hits. They’re also fantastic in the raid features that the last 2 generations have had. A big meta in SV raids was belly drum + drain punch (which would easily heal the damage belly drum dealt). It’s practically impossible to win 6+ star raids without status moves. Some of them are so brutally hard that you have to go for cheese strategies.
Sleep Powder is the only one IMO. 75% hit rate and an expected 2+ turns of effect means it’s a good gamble vs a stronger opponent, plus it’s practical for catching Pokemon.
Well, that and Gen 1 Toxic + Leech Seed is pretty fun…
I forced my way through that cave in Blue/Red that was completely pitch black. I don’t know why I didn’t get HM Flash (I was a dumb kid). I remember listening intenselywith headphones to the noises that would be made from running into walls, along with counting each press of the d-pad so I could sorta figure out where I was. Still got lost often. I don’t know how many poor Zubats I murdered in that cave trying to get through it. Nor do I remember how long it took me to get to the other side.
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I played Pokemon games against other kids in battles, and I also never saw merit in the status effects. If it didn’t deal damage, it was just a waste of a move.
Now, my experience is solely from the original Red/Blue generation so maybe they’ve gotten a bit more complex, but the first games were shallow af.
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I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.
Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn’t that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.
Dwarf Fortress.
Enough said lmao
Not me, but my wife got all the way to the end of Journey to the Savage Planet before discovering there is a skill tree you can invest in 😂
I played through all of Tears of the Kingdom without making a hover bike.
When I played the original AoE2 I was completely unaware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different units. I just build whatever I found to be coolest and wondered why I struggled so much.
Only when I bought the Definitive Edition much later I looked that up.
For my defense, I was ten back then.
Who wanted soldiers when elephants and catapults were so much cooler? Ooo flaming archers!
“Advanced” combat in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
Most of the time combat is a slog and it’s the least interesting part of the games. I just get strong weapons and hit the enemies with them, or shoot them from afar. I don’t think I even broke more than 5 shields per game, and barely did that slow motion avoid thing. It’s much faster to just slash and slash, stagger, slash, etc.
Hell, a lot of the devices in TotK are useless because I can just slash or shoot the enemies myself. Tried them out once in shrines and that’s it.
Jup, same here. Got the extension mode and in master mode this is suddenly all required.
Honestly, no matter how much strategy you’re using, Master Mode is not exactly balanced. The sword trials in particular become unbearable.
I understood it in BOTW, but it was still frustrating to pull off compared to just stocking up good weapons and beating them with it.
TOTK, on the other hand, is hella fun. Now instead of having to string together odd mechanics to maybe make funny stuff happen, I can build a flying fortress of doom that drops bombs and shoots lasers. It also kills them way faster than going in and fighting them normally.
