Do you have a game that lives in your head rent-free? No matter how long it’s been since you last played it, you find yourself thinking about it? Maybe it was a great game with one fatal flaw, or a nostalgic favorite that you love warts and all, or just a game that was so bafflingly terrible that you don’t know how it made it to store shelves.

Whatever the reason, sometimes a game leaves a lasting impact that outweighs the actual fun of playing it. Here are just a few games that I love to think about but will probably never play again.

Kingdom Hearts

Yes, this game kicked off an amazing series of action RPGs with one of the most intricate storylines in video games. Yes, it’s very near and dear to my heart. No, it isn’t nearly as fun to play as you remember it.

Pretty much every Kingdom Hearts game suffers from a bit of a saggy middle, but none more so than the first game. Unlike later entries, which were mostly just straightforward character action games with some light RPG elements, Kingdom Hearts also tried to be a platformer. As a result, a lot of the Disney worlds in this game are a boring and frustrating mess, forcing you to jump awkwardly from place to place as you wander around aimlessly trying to figure out where you’re supposed to go.

The combat is still quite fun, and the writing might be the strongest in the series (thanks to it not being bogged down by half a dozen other games’ loose ends), but you spend way too much time slogging through bad platforming and inscrutable adventure game puzzles for me to consider it fun.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy

Speaking of bad adventure game puzzles, how about those first few Ace Attorney games? Who doesn’t love schlepping around to half a dozen different suspects and presenting ten different pieces of evidence to each of them until one of them magically makes the plot advance?

That may be a bit harsh – a lot of the fun of the Ace Attorney games is discovering just how convoluted these murder plots can get. But the investigation phase in the first few games is just a bit rough. Playing without a walkthrough inevitably devolves into that most hated adventure game scenario, where you have to just brute-force your way through by rubbing every item on every interactable thing until progress happens. Not to mention the frustration of figuring out a witness’s lie during cross examination but having no idea what evidence you’re supposed to present to communicate it.

Later games in the series would get better at telegraphing how to progress your investigation, but those speed bumps in the first few games make me more inclined to just watch a playthrough on YouTube rather than pick it back up myself.

Drakengard

Before Yoko Taro gained critical acclaim for his Nier games, he directed a strange, divisive title called Drakengard. The premise is simple, yet interesting – it’s a Dynasty Warriors-style game where you hack and slash through hundreds of enemies every level, but with the twist that the player can summon a dragon onto the battlefield at basically any time. This concept lends itself well to some interesting design challenges, but instead of doing anything interesting it just throws the same giant crowds of the same handful of enemy types at you for 10-12 hours and then ends.

Taro has stated in interviews that this monotony is intentional. He is interested in exploring the mind of the kind of person who would kill hundreds of people, and one of the ways that he explores that is by making the killing as mundane as possible. The Japanese title, Drag-On Dragoon, is an intentional pun alluding to how the killing “drags on.”

I genuinely respect the creative vision, especially because it opens the door to a lot of interesting conversations. Why are games so interested in violence? Do games need to be fun? Is it hypocritical to implicitly scold a player for playing the game as you designed it? But, at the end of the day, it’s hard to argue that the actual gameplay is worth your time.

Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII is a textbook case of interesting ideas being ruined by bad execution. It came at a time when Square Enix was trying to transition Final Fantasy from traditional turn-based RPGs into fast-paced action RPGs, and with one foot in each of those subgenres, it felt like the worst parts of both.

I really wanted to like Final Fantasy XIII more. The paradigm system is interesting and unique, and the stagger-focused combat laid the groundwork for Final Fantasy VII Remake, one of my favorite games of this decade. But there are just too many terrible design choices. The drip-feed of new party members and combat roles is agonizingly slow, meaning that it takes well over ten hours before you can experiment with the paradigm system. The game practically plays itself during combat. The world is disappointingly linear.

It’s a game with very serious flaws that make it hard to recommend to anyone, but the flaws are so interesting I can’t help but keep talking about them to anyone who will listen.

Earthbound

Yes, you read that right. One of the most beloved games of the SNES era? Unquestionably. Directly inspired modern classics like Undertale and Omori? For sure. Stars my favorite Super Smash Bros. character? You bet! But here’s the thing: it just hasn’t aged that well.

The main problems with Earthbound’s design mostly stem from its mimicry of early Dragon Quest games. This gives the game some unnecessarily complicated design quirks, like each character having their own bespoke inventory, or needing to select “talk” and “interact” from a menu rather than just pressing a button. It also means that some boss battles practically require the player to level-grind, which in my opinion has always been antithetical to good or fun game design.

There is obviously still plenty of joy to be found in Earthbound. The writing is incredibly charming, the art direction is spot on, and don’t even get me started on that killer soundtrack. I just wish that the RPG elements were a little less crusty.

I want to reiterate that I don’t think any of these games are irredeemable – even the bad ones have some good ideas. And I think it’s good that games like this exist! I prefer a game with some interesting rough patches over a perfectly smooth, perfectly functional game that leaves no lasting impression. Better to have a game that I play once and think about forever than a game that I play forever and think about never

What do you think? Was I too harsh on these games? Are there other games that you haven’t stopped thinking about? Head on over to our Discord and join the conversation!

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