Games

Breathe of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are at the top of that list for me. The "old" style Zelda games are objectively better in terms of pacing and exploration. And I absolutely hate the weapon durability system in the better ones. I've read their reasoning behind it, but they're wrong. It sucks and makes the game more about hoarding the good weapons and avoiding combat whenever possible, which is boring as shit.

Minecraft. It desperately needs some QoL improvements for it to be anything but tedious.

Pretty much any competitive online game. It's not that I don't like competing. I just feel bad for the others if I win and I feel bad for losing if I lose

Fortnite. I was excited for the original game, and amused where it ended up, but it’s not for me.

Zelda breath of the wild - it's one of the worst Zelda games I've ever played and I've played so many. There were so many bad decisions made with this game from weapons breaking to getting rid of traditional dungeons. It's a great open world game but a terrible Zelda game.

The Horizon series by Guerilla Games - These games are good for the most part, however they suffer from long stretches of boring open world where you have to fight robot dinosaurs with underpowered weapons. The whole point of the combat is to find weaknesses with the enemies and exploit/attack those weaknesses, but the game never at any point explicitly explains that concept or focuses on that concept. It expects you to just understand what to do. Not to mention the absolutely stupid grinding for mats to make new weapons and armor. Melee combat is terrible, the story for the most part is pretty good but man does it take forever to pick up, it overstays it's welcome. They are technical powerhouses but just so grindy and boring.

As a huge SoulsBorne fan, Elden Ring.

I was really excited for "open world dark souls", but I feel like this turned out to be a bad combination. The difficulty is all over the place, so you fight enemies that are really strong (which is fine), but then other areas become completely trivial as a result.

And with how many bosses they put into the game, the quality of each individual fight suffered immensely imo. I think the bosses in previous games were just a lot better designed (on average, there are of course stinkers in Souls games and good ones in Elden Ring).

There's also a ton of gank bosses, which is just lazy. You could use the summons, of course, and it almost feels like a lot of the difficulty was designed around players having that extra strength, but at the same time, the enemy AI and movesets are designed around fighting a single person, so it breaks the combat.

All around, it was just a huge disappointment for me personally, and I uninstalled it right after I beat it, whereas I have hundreds of hours in DS3.

I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.

The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.

Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn't do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.

Final Fantasy VII, honestly. And it's not like I haven't tried to like it but it's just not that good to me. I'm a long time FF fan and I have played all but XI, but VII misses me. The music is bomb, for sure, and I love a few of the characters.

It's also talked about SO much by so many in the gaming community and I'm really just tired of hearing about it. I wish Square gave this level of love and attention to some of their other FF titles.

Bloodborne.

Don’t get me wrong, the game has fantastic mechanics and great art direction.

HOWEVER. The game relied too much on its lack of hand-holding in order to be enticing but it came out just raw fuckin frustrating. You know what’s cool? Finding new areas by exploration and not by being told it’s where you’re supposed to go. You know what’s not cool? Being handed a list of names of places with no idea of what is in each of them and being expected to know where to go. I got really frustrated with a boss and quit for a few weeks. I come back, kill the boss, and learn that there’s no new door out of the boss arena. I open the fast travel list to find a long list of names of places I had been to but had no fucking idea which one I was supposed to explore next. That is the absolute worst design choice I have seen in a universally loved game. Fuck Bloodborne.

Yes, I will absolutely buy it when they decide to remaster it for PC.

Almost anything first person. It makes me incredibly nauseous, which is really unfortunate because there are some really neat games that use the mechanic. I recently sold my copy of Echo Night since I couldn't play for more than around ten minutes at a time. I also couldn't complete the tutorial in Half-Life because it made me so nauseous that I had to spend almost the entire day in bed. Weirdly I'm perfectly fine with Metroid Prime.

GTA5 and RDR2 are boring as shit.

All souls like games are just too much work, as are most metroidvanias. I just don’t have the energy or the time to spend on them.

Checkers. You start with only one piece type and they go to the trouble to make all those squares and you only use half of 'em.

Uncharted. Dislike might be a strong word. But I don't particularly like them.

The story is serviceable. Fine if you gameplay is great.

The fighting mechanics are serviceable. Fine if the story is great.

The climbing and puzzle mechanics are annoying. It constantly feels like you're not doing what the game wants you to do, even if it should work.

The characters/character interactions are the highlight of the game. But it's not enough to make the game great.

BioShock Infinite. Mostly because I hated all of the characters, with the exception of the Luteces, and even they were on thin ice, mostly because of Rosalind. And Elizabeth as a NPC companion? I would prefer Ashley from Resident Evil 4 over Elizabeth any day. It didn't help that every time I tried to listen to a voxophone, she'd start talking about some bs, so I'd wait for her to finish and start the voxophone over, only to have her start talking again. When it happened 4 times with one vox, I had to take a break from the game. I just wanted to listen to the damn recording.
Gameplay is great though. I'll play the heck out of the Clash in the Clouds dlc. I get the fun action, and none of Booker and Elizabeth's constant whining.

Any sports game, like FIFA or Madden.

ditto rdr2 - its less a video game than it is a graphic novel read by a semi-literate slow talker

the entire dark souls series is also ruined by clunky controls. give me a Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Skyrim, etc . . . fps controls pls.

X4 fails because of its controls too. Imagine making a flight sim where you can't invert the Y axis, or an FPS where the shift key can't be bound to sprint.

Neverwinter Nights.

I'm not going to say it's a bad game, but if I want to read a book, I'll read a book.

GTA games are the epitome of shallowness, for me. The story is always so vague and not interesting, you never get attached to characters. Gameplay is a boring loop, but its strength has always been being some sort of theme park. But it's 2024 and "hop onto a game just to go fast on car and shoot a couple of civilians"

Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Like Pokémon, nintendo developers know fans will buy new games regardless of how much new content there is to it. There is no legitimate reason for the game to be so close mechanically to its Gamecube entry, and I find it an insult to long time fans.

I've never been a fan of the direction the Fallout series took after Fallout 2. FO Tactics and BoS aside, Bethesda's handling of Fallout 3 and onwards really didn't resonate with me.

As someone who enjoyed the story and RPG aspects of the earlier games, the shift to fast-paced shooter mechanics was off-putting.

Back in the day, getting my ass handed to me in Quake III, Half-Life, and Unreal Tournament wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, just something to endure. Discovering turn-based combat where I could strategize and plan my moves, rather than relying on quick reflexes, made me actually enjoy gaming. The shift away from that gameplay style made the series lose its appeal for me.

Souls games, cod and most other FPS games namely the multiplayer, god of war, RDR2

• any 3d Zelda games. I didn't play OOT until I was in my late 20s and it was awful (specifically controls and camera). I tried watching people Speedrun it or do the randomizer, but the sound link makes when rolling (which most did most of the time) drove me crazy. BotW seemed like something I would like on paper, but Nintendo just had to work their new controls into some shrines and I found it frustrating. Also didn't like the breaking weapons. Link Between Worlds (神様のトライフォース　２) sits in a weird place. I mostly liked it, but hated the gimmicky 3d bits on the 3DS.
• goldeneye for the same reasons - felt like a step backward and I had no nostalgia for it, playing it for the first time in my 30s.
• anything with the N64 controller for the same reasons. It felt so unnatural and weird.
• most roguelikes (but not all). Losing to random chance is annoying. Some randomness is of course fine
• dark souls and the like. Watch boss. Die. Try again. Die. To me, that's boring. I'd rather have in-world ways of learning about the boss.
• pokemon. I was already in high school, working part time, and doing a lot of school stuff (band/theatre/sports) and just never got into it. I tried Pokemon go and didn't care for it (but did like Dragon Quest Walk that came out later)
• Final Fantasy 7 -- hated the camera and other similar things. Story and all was fine
• Most 3rd person shooters (with the exception of Just Cause). I would line up the perfect shot in Sniper Elite only to shoot the few pixels of the corner of something I couldn't see because my character's dumb body was in the way
• starfox. I was already playing better games like that on Amiga and other platforms, so it felt like a step back to me

All the recent PlayStation Studios games.

Hard agree on the Zelda example.

Survival elements without base building?

Combat that feels closer to Dark Souls than Zelda? Odd.

I'll add in a genre rather than a game: Battle Royal games.

We used to play a variety of games. Halo, warcraft, Smite, League of Legends... Now I have no gaming friends left as they refuse to play anything other than Apex Legends or the latest greatest Call of Duty.

I'm gonna get a lot of flak for this...

I really don't like Sekiro. Like, at all.

I played the inspiration for years (Tenchu) and loved that so much, but Sekiro just feels hollow in comparison. I know it's not a stealth game, nor is it trying to be, but I can't help but feel like the cliffs and stuff are just "cheap" ways of making the game more difficult. Idk, maybe I'm just not ninja enough lol...

Speaking of stealth, Dishonored. I REALLY wanted to love this game. It's just not open enough for my taste. There's only usually one main walkway to the objective (I say walkway, but there are of course roofs and stuff you can teleport to - I'm just saying, I wish you could get on the actual roofs of buildings Assassin's Creed style or explore the city open-world style). Cool story, cool theme, but the gameplay falls through for me. I felt the same way about MGS4.

Also Red Dead Redemption was meh for me. Could have been better, could have been worse. Undead Nightmare was great though.

Don't Starve I already can't stand Tim Burton's style, and I really can't get over the similarities to try to enjoy this game, even though one of my autistic special interests is open world survival crafting games.

Fallout 4 Seems like a perfectly fine FPS, very much not a Fallout game. Leans far too heavily on action and not enough on the RPG elements.

GTA 5 If GTA were a candy, GTA 5 would be a bucket of that candy. It's fine if you really really really like that candy, but if you're just not THAT obsessed with the candy, it can get a bit tiring. Having three people with different stories and event going on felt like I never spent enough time with one character to REALLY get into their development. I'd rather see them innovate than just do MORE GTA

Outer Worlds Boring af

I played Call of Duty Black Ops III and I don‘t understand how anyone can enjoy that multiplayer, it‘s such an overloaded piece of crap lol

Campaign and Zombies was fun af though.

Also, any sad dad game. I don‘t wanna be sad when I play videogames.

The 2 that you mentioned and God of War 2018.

I honestly don't get what people love so much about that game, the combat is simple and kinda sloppy, boss and enemy variety is non-existent and traversal is a joke.

I get that the story is good but it's not so good that I can look past everything else, it even has a few big issues like the amount of times the game throws a dumb obstacle in your way to justify some fetch quest like the black mist.