After the amazing success of the last one (a whole 54 minutes, thanks @exodus) it’s time to play again!
This one is for a week, to allow people time to play and it’s a simple game: What are the games that you want to play but for whatever reason haven’t?
Feel free to name them without judgement (maybe), and you can free yourself of the burden of your backlog and play something you really want to. Or maybe sharing it with friends will inspire you to play it once and for all. Who knows, you may even like it. The timer is set for 23:59 PST on the 21st.
I’ll start the ball/whale rolling/swimming: Mine is Xenogears
As a huge fan of Squaresoft, especially their 90s era I’ve played most of the games released and finished them, but this one always couldn’t hook me in (pun very much intended). My last play in 2023 I got 25 hours in and still couldn’t continue, simply because I wasn’t enjoying it and felt I was playing for the sake of it which isn’t how I like to play games. I know the depth of the story, the characters and what disc two is like, but I really can’t force myself through. Maybe I’ll try again this year, I’ll see. There, it’s done, got that off my chest.
I’ve been staring at Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity (and by extension, Pillars of Eternity II) for years at this point…
For whatever reason, I just don’t click with Obsidian’s games. I’ve finished The Outer Worlds and that’s it, which was such a middling experience I barely remember it today. Not even Fallout: New Vegas properly got its hooks in me: I put that one down after beating Bennie to death with a pool cue in his hotel suite. The story felt done after that, and it never felt like the character I had been playing would get involved in all the sweeping political conflict, so that was the end of my time in the Mojave
And so, Obsidian’s CRPG revival games just sit in my Steam library, languishing. I want to play them for their historical significance in rekindling a genre I love, and I mean, I can only replay Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous so many times! Tyranny in particular vexes me: I love playing anti-heroes and villains in these sorts of RPGs, and it’s usually what I play first, so one would think…
But no. Obsidian and me are just like oil and water, I guess, and it’s frustrating!
I’m totally with ya. I’ve only played the buggy, unfinished Kotor 2 game and around 5-6 hours of Pillars of Eternity, and both failed to capture my imagination. Kotor 2 felt really bad because I was about 14 and had just crested over my peak star wars interest. Return of the Sith was overall a disappointment to me because I didn’t care as much about Dark Vader except to see how dark the makeup around Hayden Christensen’s eyes could get. I was always more into the pulpy rising action of episode 4 specifically, and Episode 3’s focus on “big moments” didn’t wow me. I was also at the peak of my ability to pirate PC games and had the family computer to myself. In retrospect, Star Wars fandom had peaked with Kotor 1 where I went in knowing nothing, not even knowing I’d get to play as a Jedi in that game … and then being very impressed by the game’s dialogue and morality systems, big cast of party characters, and scope that was so much larger than any PC game I’d played at the time. When I downloaded Kotor 2, it felt like their world was less grounded and less imaginative than the one that Bioware. IIRC they wanted to make a cosmic horror type of thing and it was trying to be more dark and brooding but it just didn’t land. It also kept crashing and soft-locked me at a certain point. So I stopped it and that’s when I discovered Jade Empire, and I fell in love with that game, bugs and all, so I am comfortable blaming Obsidian for not enjoying Kotor 2.
Then around 2016 or so, I was interested in CRPGs for the first time in a decade and wanted to see what the latest and greatest was, and the fiction and gameplay of Pillars of Eternity both failed to grab me. I don’t think I could even point to something bad about it, it’s just one of those games I couldn’t care about, and now that I know more about the lineage of CRPGs, if I were to pick one one that’s 8+ years old I’d go with almost anything but Pillars.
I gotta go with one of the first games I got on Steam (was it free?) -Half Life. One of them classics, a before and after in game history, yet… I have started it more than a handful of times over the years; I tried skipping to the second one, and even got Black Mesa, the fan made HD remake… It just doesn’t hold my interest. Nothing about it does. It’s an aggressively dull universe riddled with what feel like archaic limitations and the star of the show seem to be these semi interactive scripted moments which I don’t care for at all. I understand its significance, but a lot of what it innovated on are things that aren’t super interesting to me even in new games, so I can’t ever muster the enthusiasm to keep going.
Honestly this is probably a huge part of my disconnect with Obsidian, especially in relation to Bioware, as it’s the character writing that I’m often most interested in when it comes to western RPGs. That’s never particularly been one of Obsidian’s strengths, and the strengths they do have I’m not particularly interested in
I have heard some folks over the years say they bounce off of Pillars of Eternity while being able to enjoy the sequel, but I’ve never been the sort of person who can jump in to a sequel when the first game is also sitting in my library and/or easily-accessible
My white whale is probably… The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
if there’s a whale in that game my pun is intended… but I couldn’t get off the first island. I think it was always the game I tested Dolphin with and have only just messed around on the opening island so I don’t really take the game too seriously. I struggle to flip the switch in my brain to actually get invested in it.
Whenever people talk about that game they talk about the “freedom and exploration” but then every gif looks like you’re just out on an empty ocean. I think I’ve played enough games that take on the ocean where it’s just a big empty zone to convey a feeling of scale without really having interesting stuff to do in it. I feel like maybe people from the Gamecube Generation of gamers might just be associate the game with having enough free time to just sail around aimlessly for a few hours to find hidden islands or whatever, and it’s not actually that fun to do so. People don’t really talk about the story or the dungeons or how the gameplay evolves in that game either, which makes me think maybe it’s not a priority as much as the exploration.
I think “Zelda Exploration” worked for me exactly once – on my first run through Breath of the Wild. Going back on “hard mode” and in Tears of the Kingdom left me underwhelmed, and I just can’t hang out there the way I could before. In general I’m not really a fan of 3D Zelda. I like Ocarina of Time but I think there is heavy nostalgia value backing up that opinion. I even put 25 hours into Skyward Sword in vain hope that I would be able to really enjoy these 3D dungeons people keep talking about, but it didn’t land with me, and that game’s lack of progression through using the same weapon and repeating zones really bummed me out. Not to say that Wind Waker will have those same problems, but I’m a 3D Zelda skeptic at this point.
I do want to play The Witcher 3 but its gargantuan length (apparently, if you savor the sidequests) scares me. I have it around but been postponing it successfully for several years. Did the same with Red Dead Redemption 2, ultimately enjoyed it but boy it was draining.
Another one is The Last Remnant. Had the X360 version, now the remaster, but I’ve only been able to play for an hour or two. Love the SaGa series so my mind tells me I’ll enjoy it but my heart says do something else (or the other way around).
Final Fantasy 7 OG. I started playing it last year, left Midgar and ended up at some beach resort before letting everything fizzle out. I’ll go back to it one day but for reason I felt a little tired of it pretty quickly despite being able to tolerate much more old game nonsense.
Similarly Final Fantasy X-2. I started playing this a few years ago and dropped off after the first proper mission. I’ve hit the same point again very recently and I’m not really feeling it either. I feel very disengaged from the battle system because it whips along at a ridiculously quick pace in my mind.
I’m most likely to continue FFX-2 aa I’ve recently played it but 7 is seemingly more enticing.
i suppose i have many, but i’ll say the second two games in the ace attorney trilogy. i completed the first one and quite liked it, even if i had to rely on gamefaqs for most of it, but are those other ones also good? do they have that same sense of intrigue, deduction, humor, and joyfulness? maybe i’ll find out someday… (maybe that someday’ll be this week, but maybe not…)
While I don’t think I’d recommend finishing Wind Waker, I think there is certainly a lot of charm in its first half. I wouldn’t have thought of “exploration” as a major aspect of the game, as the structure is much more like any other Zelda game, where you’re always told where to go. The sailing is relaxing, and has some great music, but I never felt the expectation that I would find anything out there.
These are old memories, but I do remember the dungeons being quite interesting, and there are some unique mechanics in there. It plays around a bit with the dungeon/pre-dungeon structure common to Zelda games. And of course, it looks cool!!!
you’re saying that writing characters has never been a strength of Obsidian’s? just looking for clarification
i tend to not play games i know i’ll like. while not exactly white whales the longest offenders are Dishonored and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. i’ve played through about 75% of both three times, lol. i just stop, wait a few years, and forget what was going on. i also had this issue with MGS5 but i am currently rectifying that atm.
a true white whale is Dark Souls as a series. i think they’re so dang cool and i love everything about them except playing them.
I have loads of RPGs I haven’t gotten around to. My initial thought reading your first paragraph was also Xenogears but I guess that’s taken!
Another big one would probably be Earthbound. I’ve played the intro to that game several times. I kinda like the style and the humour of it, but the combat is off-putting and it seems like a bit of a slog.
They are both brilliant. The second game suffers a bit from a less interesting prosecutor but the cases are better overall. The third game is arguably the best of all the AA games and has some of my favourite moments in videogames in it.
hell yeah. i totally think the opposite but i think it’s neat to see that crit. i’d love to know what your favorite companion quest line in Outer Worlds was. i think that one sorta suffered from abbreviation and i half soured on it. i only just played it like a year ago and never got much outside feedback so i’m just curious to hear another person’s take on the stuff they did like!
totally. everyone else is truly forgettable. Parvati is definitely the canon companion, or so the emphasis would suggest. i appreciate how straightforward that all is, being presented with the best right off the bat. it does get to a point where just having the silent robot third is probably the most viable. not for me, tho. i was afeard of robots.
i never played any of the dlc, wonder if they were a little more interesting.
