Bouncing off, only to return again

video games
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No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. - Heraclitus
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. - Heraclitus600×315 39.6 KB

I’ve given up on playing a video game many, many times, only to return later and have a different experience with it.

I remember the first time I played a Final Fantasy when I was young (I think it was VI), I thought it was dumb. Too many words! As a young teen I played VII, then went back and emulated all the SNES entries. VI turned out to be my favorite one. For whatever reason, I needed to play IV first (and ofc, VII before both of them)

As I’ve been posting about, I’m currently having this experience with The Witcher III. I had a similar journey with Elden Ring. When gave Elden Ring maybe 5 hours when I first started, and concluded it wasn’t for me. At least a year later, I went back and, after some persistence, found what I liked about it and had a great time for nearly 60 hours.

What changed?

For me, I think having the distance of time helps a lot. A game like Elden Ring comes saddled with high expectations. After some time, I’ve already observed the discourse from a distance, the conversation around the game has moved on, I am more able to approach the game on its own terms. I also think that as time has gone on, I’ve experienced a wider variety of games, which has increased my vocabulary for enjoying them. My life is also much more stable now than it was in recent past–in a very real way, my capacity for enjoying a game is greater than it ever has been.

Enough about me, though. I want to hear about your experiences. What is game that you’ve bounced off of multiple times, only to return to it later and enjoy it, or see it in a different light? Why? What changed? What caused you to try again in the first place?

It’s also possible to interpret the question in the inverse: what is a game that you used to really like, only to return to later to find you now don’t like it much at all?

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I have never clicked with a Fromsoft game on my first attempt.

I gave up and came back at least a year later to start a fresh game and play to completion:

Demon’s Souls
Dark Souls (twice!)
Sekiro
And Elden Ring

Dark Souls and Sekiro are now two of my favorite games ever.

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It took me maybe 3 different restarts since Death Stranding’s original release to finally get through the whole thing last year.

I didn’t dislike it at any point but didn’t grab me the like my most recent time. It’s now one of my favorites and DS2 is my most anticipated game for next year (maybe hopefully).

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Final Fantasy VII OG is the most relevant example for me. I started and restarted it four times then finally gave up for good. Thanks to game sharing I had free access to Remake so I took it for a spin and loved it, then a year later finally buckled down and finished the original. In retrospect it’s amazing I couldn’t get through it, it holds up so well and I’ve beaten almost every other FF on the first attempt

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Ninja Gaiden Black is one of my favorite games of all time, and one of the very few games I actually beat and can say I had thoroughly mastered for a moment.

I initially bought it, loved it, but couldn’t get past one of the very early bosses. So I figured that was my sign to move on and admit I wasn’t the type of person to take the time to beat hard games. But when I told my friend this (some time later), he made fun of me, but also helped and gave me tips. And that made the endeavor seem less daunting. So I stuck with it, it turned into one of those games I daydreamed of during classes and couldn’t wait to get home and resume playing, and the rest is history.

Even though I’ve beaten/finished other games, none stand out as much as Ninja Gaiden Black. Felt like a game that really rewarded me for sticking it out, and provided a more profound experience than I thought I could get from a game up to that point.

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I made several attempts at Dark Souls over the last 10 years or so before finally beating it this year, but the ones that stick out to me most at the moment are Owlcat Games’s two Pathfinder games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous

I bounced off the prologues of both games multiple times, perhaps because of misguided expectations. Both of the games do these “storybook” scenes to represent more cinematic segments that the isometric perspective can’t portray effectively, which struck me as particularly immersion breaking when I first started Kingmaker. By the time of Wrath of the Righteous, I had conquered that particular bugbear, instead finding difficulty finding a character I wanted to play that meshed well with the game’s overall tone and narrative

Once I got through those early sections, though, I found a great deal to love in both games, with Wrath of the Righteous sitting at the top of my personal list of cRPGs above even Baldur’s Gate II

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The first game that comes to mind is Final Fantasy IX.

When Final Fantasy IX came out, I already owned FFVII and FFVIII, and I had been playing the games since the SNES days, on a friend’s console. I would have played it, if it had ended up in wrapping paper on my lap. But I didn’t buy it and didn’t get it, instead playing Chrono Cross, Legend of Mana, Grandia II, and Skies of Arcadia over the next year. I ended up skipping the entry entirely, playing FFX.

Over a decade later, Final Fantasy IX dropped on Steam. By that point, I had replayed FFVII and FFVIII, and I thought trying FFIX for the first time would complete the experience. So I booted it up.

I played for about two hours. I spent the entire time going around the initial area as Vivi playing Tetra Master. Then I was done. Three factors contributed to me not picking the game back up:

  • It was a tumultuous time for me, game-wise. I was in the middle of slogging through a dissertation, so I found it hard to focus on longer games unless they really hooked me.
  • I could sense I wouldn’t like Zidane.
  • Tetra Master was really good, but that’s all I wanted to play. I wanted to hold on to what felt like a really neat initial experience, and didn’t want to leave that pocket of the game.

It took me 7 or 8 years to come back to the game, but when I finally did (now on the Switch), I enjoyed it and saw all the ways the game resembles Chrono Cross, the game I liked in its stead two decades ago.

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Like a lot of people, it took me a few false starts to “get” Dark Souls 1.

I’m trying to think of something I gave just a second chance to. Oh you know what, Sonic Adventure! First time I played Sonic Adventure, I was not ready. I didn’t know how to like Sonic yet and quickly got frustrated with the controls and the everything.

A few years later, I went through a journey of Sonic enlightenment and now instead of frustration I love all the bustedness and weird perspectives and awkward camera angles. I love how if you don’t cooperate with a level it will just kill you most of the time. This is when I realized that I like “bad” Sonic games more than the “good” ones.

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The only game I can really remember doing this with was Sleeping Dogs. I think at the time it came out there were a ton of those open world crime games and I was just burned out on them. I ended up playing it later and having a lot of fun with the combat systems and the general atmosphere of the city.

Edit: I remembered another. Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. I got it the first time when it was new and just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I think it just felt off to me. I really couldn’t say what about it at the time turned me off but I returned it within a few days. I ended up revisiting it after hearing Tim Rogers talk about it in one of the podcast episodes and had a real good time with it.

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Back in like, 2015 I was very into Game of Thrones and Age of Empires 3 (the best AoE) and learned about Crusader Kings 2 on Reddit, and a bunch of redditors promised was like a crossover between the two. I paid full price and made the mistake of playing the Tutorial. It did not click with me whatsoever, they just throw a ton of mechanics at you. Rather than get me invested in the politics and intrigue of 1066 Spain’s Jiménez dynasty, they kept throwing around terms like “agnatic-cognatic gavelkind” and I found myself losing my holdings when granting titles to people I thought were my vassals. It was a disaster and frustrating so I refunded the game on steam.

Years later, around 2017 there was a free weekend on Steam and so I got it, and rather than learning via the in-game tutorial, I watched a lets play with people who liked making history jokes and took the advice of just hitting ‘unpause’ and getting your hands dirty. It’s the right thing to do and the best way to learn - because there’s no real way to lose, even if you get conquered, you’re just going to adapt to a new situation. I found myself studying the game and ended up getting hooked for a long time.

Now Crusader Kings 3 is out and it’s even better. I put a ton of time into it too during covid, but it’s too good in some ways, I don’t know if I can go back for my own life productivity sake.

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I’ve played the first half or so of Metroid Prime 2 two or three times and never made it further. I love Prime 1 and all the 2d Metroids, but I think the two worlds thing just gets tedious after a while. I really want to like it! And in theory I do since it’s just more prime, but a less balanced one I guess. I’m still holding out hope that some day I’ll lock in and go the distance. Or maybe I should just try out Prime 3 already and see how that goes.

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i’m having this experience right now with that prince of persiavania from this year! got really annoyed with it on my first play in the spring, but i brought it out again on the plane ride to visit family for thanksgiving and vibed the fuck out.

i think it has a somewhat harsh difficulty spike about 2-4 hours in, which threw me off; and its sort of generic visual style didn’t keep me compelled. it’s also the kind of game that’s notable less for doing one thing in a really distinct and interesting way, and more for blending and summing up a lot of trends and ideas in one discrete package. it lacks a certain idiosyncrasy that i usually look for in games. but i realized that that’s just a Me Problem, it’s not like it’s trying to do something fantastically new and innovative; it’s about executing a specific established style of game, and it does that really well.

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they likely took this as a given

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I love all these thoughtful answers! Those dang Souls games really stick out in this category, it’s like part of their cultural impact at this point.

Another trend I notice, and maybe it’s because I also mentioned this format in my post, is this is happening with RPGs. I wonder if it’s their focus on a particular pacing. I know for me, a game can be great in all aspects but the pacing doesn’t work for how I’m playing games at that time in my life. If I feel like a game needs me to play it for 3+ hours at a time, and I don’t have that, I’ll for sure bounce off.

I love when this happens with a game. When a book, movie, painting, or anything really gets its teeth into me and occupies my imagination feels really special.

I had a similar experience with CKII. For me, I had to get the DLC that allowed me to play in the area of the world I have the most historical interest in–North-East Africa, Middle East, India. Actually playing was a real exercise and letting go of trying to “win” and just letting things play out, have a natural curiosity about them. It’s a very different position for me (as a player) to be in, almost in direct opposition to the normal power fantasy or story-listening mode.

One of the things that has helped me enjoy games in a new way, or even for the first time, is to hear someone explain why they like it. It happens all the time here on the forum. It gives me a framework separate from my own expectations, which can be helpful. I will still reach my own conclusions based on my experience with it, but listening to others can be a great place to start from.

I recently bounced off Sleeping Dogs even though I could tell it was a pretty cool game. One day I might re-visit it and get the full experience.

Prime 2 is divisive for sure. I find some of it’s sections very frustrating. It’s not the end of the world if you never play it again, but seeing as this thread promote openness to having new experiences, I love to see that you’re keeping the hope alive.

This is a great story! It’s like you arrived at a place with more developed, personalized tastes.

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First time I played Super Mario Bros. 2 it was a dog’s dinner.

A few years later I had the opportunity to play through the whole thing in an afternoon and I still remember most of what it felt like to vividly and viscerally realize how much this game rules.

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I bought Alien Soldier back when it was still humanly affordable and didn’t click with it at all. It was a little too complicated for me, and the boss rush structure felt a bit intimidating. I had imagined something closer to Gunstar Heroes, and this simply seemed to lack that whimsy and variety.

Earlier this year I started playing through all the Treasure Mega Drive games and eventually ended up on Alien Soldier, I quickly figured out the intricacies of the controls and to my surprise I blazed through those early levels that had previously kicked my ass. Before long I was trudging through the entire game, slowly but surely seeing victory after victory. Alien Soldier is absolutely phenomenal, I guess I just needed to reset my expectations and grow a little.

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This month’s game club thread has a story of me learning to like a game I initially didn’t care for told in real time.

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Majora’s Mask is the most memorable for me. Bought it when it came out, but wasn’t too thrilled with it. A Zelda game that’s not chiefly about fighting and puzzling through dungeons, but rather running errands and talking to people? Ew! Then the game crashed one time when I tried opening a chest and I lost a bunch of progress, so I just abandoned it. Picked it up a couple years later, and suddenly it’s my favorite Zelda game ever.

… and I guess Dark Souls, too. Except I still didn’t like it at all when I returned and finished it. Or when playing through Dark Souls 2. Or the first half of Dark Souls 3. Don’t think I’ll be returning to that one.

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I think I initially bounced off Majora’s Mask because it was too hard. Nintendo Power would give subscribers gifts if you had been subscribed all year, and one year, I chose the Majora’s Mask player’s guide. In my memory, though, I liked the game, I just couldn’t make any progress.

Now, I have a complicated relationship with the game. I loved it for many years, would say it was my favorite game, but then I decided to speed run it.

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