The Quitting Point

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

Game EXP: Missing Features: 2D (NS)

Missing Features 2D

Systems Released: PC, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: December 18, 2020

Publisher: QUByte Interactive

Developer: High Level

Play Time: 5-10 Hours

I really enjoyed playing Missing Features: 2D and I love the concept.  If you are familiar with Evoland then it was kind of like that but in a 2D platforming world rather than in the RPG/JRPG genre.  I would say that the first five or six levels were just straight up fun with a great mix of difficulty and the concept of putting together a game as you play through each of the stages.  These early levels are what exactly what I was hoping the game would be.  The next three levels really presented more of a challenge, which is not to say that they were not fun, but the difficulty factor was encroaching on the fun factor.  The last two levels I completed were an un-fun slog and I stopped playing during the twelfth level.

The concept behind Missing Features: 2D is that you are playing a game that is missing features.  Your character avatar is missing so you are an empty green box.  The landscape is missing so it is just a featureless black plain.  There is no music, there are no sound effects.  Essentially, you are playing Pong the platformer.  But without sound.  As you progress through each stage, you pick up computers which add features to the game and the visual loading process is what adds a lot of the charm to the game.  When you collect a computer, you do not know what feature you are going to be loading permanently into the game, although typically the computer unlocks a feature that will directly allow you to progress through the rest of the stage, be it the double-jump or dash ability.

Each stage is made up of stereotypical platforming elements.  Platforms, spikes, enemies, projectiles.  But not all of those elements start out implemented.  Even the background and the stage's music are non-existent when you start each stage.  And like a lot of well designed platformers, you are not expected to be able to perform all the abilities you have at the end of the game and gain the necessary skills to pull off complex maneuvers.

When you start out the game, you are a a filled-in box and eventually you become an unanimated character sprite with a blocked outline, which is essentially your hitbox, the specific area that is affected when you run into an environmental hazard or an enemy hits you.  As strange it is to have a non-moving avatar is for your character, I found it to be the most useful and practical, especially in a platforming game.  Knowing where your character's hit box starts and stops is significantly more important than having a sprite that looks amazing, especially if your character's animation is going to have their foot elevated mid-jump, but that they can still be hit where their foot is not.  The same goes for environmental hazards.  When you have a triangular spike but the hitbox for the spike is a rectangle, that presents a visual problem when making jumps over and around spikes.

In Level 10, I was able to capture enough screenshots showing my character dying without visually hitting anything, which is infuriating when you are expected to land on a small lip of a ledge before jumping across a gap while dashing mid-air over another row of spikes.  In another section (in the clip below, and ignoring the first spikes I het because I did not press the dash button at the absolute apex of my double jump), there were ceiling spikes that would hit your without physically coming into contact with you, being another problem with the hit boxes.  This made various areas of level 10 and absolute slog to play through because I felt that I was no longer trying to improve the way I played, but just make it through section by sheer luck, which in my opinion is no way to design a game.  Another issue I had with Level 10 was how late in the level you gained the music.  For a level this difficult, I feel like you would want to have the player gain the music early on to at least keep them interested, assuming that the music is good, and for the most part, the music was pretty good.

My biggest critique with Missing Features: 2D is the difficulty curve.  For the majority of the game, the levels felt fun and I would look forward to the new feature that I would unlock and how that would improve and modify the existing gameplay.  By the ninth stage, once levels started feeling like they were going to take a fair amount of playing to get the new mechanics and recently integrated features down, specifically the mid-air dash, I began to dread starting the game up.  By the 10th level, I genuinely felt that I hated the game, in part due to its difficulty, but also because of the lack of user-friendly options for the type of game that this felt like it was trying to be.  

On top of all of this was how the checkpoint system was implemented.  Sure, you could argue that the existence of checkpoints implies that they make the game easier because you no longer have to start back at the beginning forcing you to be better at the game, but in this game when the difficulty ramps up to the point that getting passed jumps/enemy placement feels more like luck that actual skill, I say bring on the checkpoints.  But the checkpoints are only good during your current playthrough, meaning if you turn off the game, you have to start over from the beginning and collect all of the missing features you had previously collected.  But more importantly, you have to luck your way through the level again.  This problem is alleviated somewhat by playing on the Switch in that you can just pause the game, and put the system to sleep, but this means that you are unable to play any other game until you either quit the game or beat the level.

You know what, I am going to end the article here because I feel that I could just go on for a couple of more paragraphs about how Missing Features: 2D let me down.  I will say that I love the concept, I enjoyed the early levels and even to a certain extent, the complete mismatched sprites for the characters, in-game elements, music, sound effects and enemies added a kind of charm to the game, like you were playing a game pulled from random bits of pixel art downloaded randomly from the internet.  But the difficulty of the game got the better of me and I no longer enjoyed playing the game and when that happens, I do not really feel the need to force myself to slog through any more levels.  Had the level 10 been the end, I might have forgiven the game a bit, but after Level 11 and onto Level 12, like this article, I just had to stop.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Sleepwalking to the Gallows

P.S.  On that last screenshot, the stalactite did in fact hit me, but my issue with it was that where it fell from was out of frame, so there was no indication that you could trigger one to fall by standing there, which is what happened.  I believe the was