While writing my articles for Metroid: Zero Mission and touching up the article for Missing Feature: 2D, I had a kind of realization, at least for me when it comes to gaming. We all have games that we have stopped for one reason or another. Maybe the game itself ceased to be fun, or the writing was bad, or the controls were bad, or there was a fight that just straight up felt impossible after failing multiple times. There frequently seems to be a point in a game where I question whether or not I will be able to finish a game, be it a difficult boss fight or a platforming section that requires split-second reaction time to avoid anything that is set out to kill you. Sometimes these difficult sections come early in the game, while others are the final boss fight after a 30+ hour adventure to reach the climax. This is not an exhaustive list otherwise it would be pages upon reams of paper long (maybe not that long, but you kind of get the idea). The point is that there are times in a lot of games that try the player's patience to either stop, or to soldier on and I wanted to talk about a few of those, both in recent memory and that has dogged me for most of my gaming life.
Most recently, and I talked a bit about it in my article for Missing Features: 2D, was that the game was no longer fun to play because the difficulty had risen beyond the point of an enjoyable challenge. Challenges can be fun and engaging, but when a game starts to feel that it is being difficult for the sake of being difficult, then it ceases to be fun for me. I should emphasize the 'for me' part because there are people who do enjoy this level of difficulty. For instance, the recently updated mode for Metroid Dread, titled Dread Mode where you play through the game as normal, but one hit from anything will kill you. This mode is not for me.
Emulated games are a somewhat different beast altogether because with emulation often comes some form of modification to the game that was not there in the original. This often manifests in the form of save states, where you can save the game on a whim, only to reload that save file and continue playing where you left off, either because you have to leave to do real-world activities, or because a particular section is difficult to get to or get through and it is easier to approach from the save state. That being said, I have never felt great about spamming the save-state function, although there are a few exceptions like Kirby Super Star and Kirby's Dream Land 3 because I was not really having a fun time but I felt compelled to finish the game; I still have yet to finish Kirby's Super Star. I also have similar feelings towards Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island but I feel like there are more redeeming qualities in that game than there are in Kirby's Dream Land 3. Had I been playing either of those games on their native systems, I probably would have quit.
Let us now "quickly" run through a couple of games that "briefly" go into the reasons why I stopped playing each one.
The first Assassin's Creed I played on PC was close to seven or eight years ago (checks Steam account: x years ago apparently) and was a fun game although at times a source of frustration when [name] would leap to the wrong building or get janked by surrounding enemies in quick succession. I know that I did not excel at combat in the game, often attempting to separate my opponents and take them out one at a time or just outrun them until I was relatively safe. Progression in the game came to a halt for me during the mission where you are tasked with assassinating Robert de Sable during a funeral. However, the game enters a scripted scene where Altair is spotted in the crowd and you are quickly surrounded and attacked by city guards and additional templar knights. Even after watching multiple playthroughs and walkthroughs, I was never able to get past this point in the game. Eventually, I just gave up because I felt that I was not getting any better at combat, and aside from finding new ways to die, I was not learning anything. And I was just frustrated as hell.
In God of War: Chains of Olympus, I had to stop playing during the final boss battle. I watched a playthrough on how to beat the boss and a lot of the fight was about countering while using the Gauntlets of Zeus, which annoyed me because outside of a couple of context-specific mechanisms, you were not required to be proficient with these weapons and instead I used almost exclusively [Kratos' weapons]. I did retry the battle many times with the Gauntlets of Zeus equipped but I could just not get the timing down to perform the counters and because the game does not let you change the difficulty after starting a new game, I decided that I did not want to start a new file over from the beginning on Easy difficulty to say that I beat the game.
Lastly, there was the final boss fight in Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light that I talked about pretty extensively back on our old site but this game fits well in this topic. Essentially, I accidentally overleveled the characters and since the enemies level with you, I was going up against a level 80 boss with level 50 gear and getting destroyed by the time everyone had their turn to move. I had calculated that I could spend an additional 40 hours getting enough supplies to defeat the boss, or start the game over and spend those 40 hours getting to where I was currently at, but not at level 80.
And then there are games that I have quit not out of a desire to stop playing, but partly for reasons beyond my control that resulted in me just losing interest or not having the gumpshun to jump back into the game again. And again. And again. You know, like Nintendo Hard levels of hard.
Despite many attempts, I have never finished Final Fantasy VII, and the reasons kind of vary. The first time I played it on the PlayStation was back in 1999-2000 and I got up to the point where you get the Bronco from Cid Highwind so you could now fly over shallow waters. Part of the reason I stopped was that I moved and no longer had access to Dr. Potts' PlayStation, but also by the time we moved out, I had become lost and somewhat disinterested in the story. Frustrated with Cloud and Avalanche's attempt to stop Shinra from blowing up the comet/asteroid from hitting the planet because they wanted to save the memories of the planet embedded in the Materia seemed silly; I cannot remember if that is accurate. The second time, I played it on my PC using the CD Rom but did not get very far. The furthest I've gotten, I think this was back in 2006. I had gotten to what I am pretty sure was the end of the game, the area you have to get through before the final fight against Sephiroth, and thought I would attempt at breading the Golden Chocobo, albeit without a guide because why make life easier? Unfortunately, I did not know all the time that is needed to raise one so that you could fly to whatever island to get the Knights of the Round summon. The reason I stopped was that I moved, leaving my desktop with my previous housemates so I no longer have that save file. My most recent attempt was about seven or eight years ago when I got the game on Steam and I made it as far as repelling Shinra from the Condor tower, and then probably got distracted by another game on Steam that I hadn't played yet, that felt more exciting than playing through a game that I had attempted three previous times.
With Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation: Similar to Final Fantasy VII, I have started this game twice. The first time was back in the early/mid-2010s and got 15-20 hours in, but then put it down to play something else, for what I thought would be a short time before coming back. Eventually, when I did pick the game back up, I had no idea what was going on or where I was supposed to go. Then my DS broke. So after getting a 3DS, I eventually decided that I would try DQ VI again and played it pretty regularly up until the buttons on my 3DS stopped working and I know that if I were to pick the game back up, I would most likely need to start over because again, I do not remember exactly what it was I was doing and where I would need to go. DQ VI is also a special case because the game moves back and forth between two world maps often requiring the player to find an item in one world map to use in the other, or to traverse across a section of the map in one world to access another area in the other world map. Part of the reason why I do not feel like restarting is that I have just enough memory about the game that I do not want to go through the early parts of the game again, or at least not right now. Maybe in five or 10 years I might come back and decide that it is time; or when I run out of DS/3DS games to play.
With the recent announcement of Chrono Cross being released on the Switch, I have thought about if I want to buy the game or not for the same reason mentioned above. I first started the game back in 2000 and never finished it because Dr. Potts and I moved and so his PlayStation and copy of the game went with him to his new apartment. Then four years later after getting a PS2, I bought a copy of Chrono Cross to replay it. I got further than my first playthrough but then I got caught up trying to level up and evolve a creature called Pip. Then the laser in the PS2 died and I apparently lost my PS2 memory card during one of my moves between 2009 and the present.
[Insert meaningful transition to the conclusion here]
I do not think that I have an actual conclusion to this article as I just wanted to talk about reasons why I might stop playing a game, partly to normalize not playing games if you are not having fun, but also to absolve myself of all of the games that I have never finished*. To those games, I apologize. Maybe one day we will meet again and we will see your conclusion together.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
