I know some gamers are dedicated and plough through games they don't really enjoy as they understandably wanna get their money's worth. Personally I've got no patience for that. I give up a game I was previously interested in very quickly if I realise it's not connecting with me. To make this financially bearable I tend to only buy games that are already a few years old...
So it is with Final Fantasy XV which I got for my Xbox One S for €6 in a bargain bin. I love FFVII, and liked & completed VIII & IX and also have XII on my to-play list, so no stranger to this series. But all I needed was less than an hour to realise this game is garbage:
- the install size was 80GB, I had to wait 'til the next day just to check it out. No possibility to play while it installed in the background.
- once the game finally starts there's loads of system pop-ups suggesting I download add-ons, took me a bit out of the atmosphere of the title screen. One of them said something about first-person view. I thought great, let's try that. Oh, it costs €30 to upgrade to the edition that has that simple function which GTA V has in its standard edition...
- the story is introduced with two lines like: "there is darkness so we wait for a King of Light to save us". That's it. Hardly inspiring stuff.
- the opening scene with overly-dignified Dad and cliché moody teen son was just awful.
- the main character is a spoilt prince is another well-worn trope.
- weird graphical glitches like fuzzy black spots on faces, overly-sharpened hair, rough edges (no AA-filtering).
- the load times are appalling.
- the animations and collision detection while running/walking with your mates is cheap, but not as cheap as the animation for the first encounters with the local wildlife. We're talking PS1-era animation quality here.
- a painful version of Stand By Me while pushing a car on the road really didn't feel much like Final Fantasy...
- The mechanic girl with the open boobies...designed as a teen-boy's wet dream, but groans all round if you're a more mature gamer.
I ended up just running and exploring the 'open world'...some games are great to just explore their worlds (like GTA V or AC:Origins), but here I quickly came up to a locked checkpoint at the end of a road, and I realised "this game is garbage". Sure, that checkpoint will open up at some point and the game will open up with it, but it hadn't impressed me up to this point so I concluded it never will.
I turned it off, and it will never be turned on again. Life's too short and there's too many potentially fine games out there still to discover. First impressions are generally accurate in my experience so no regrets.
I'd add another hyped game to this list: Fallout: New Vegas...for similar reasons too.
What games have you felt no desire to 'give a chance' and quickly, unceremoniously, gave up on them?
Log in to comment