Oh god the controls. Makes me weep.
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The previously mentioned FFX-2. Oh God, that game was so terrible it should never have seen the light of day. And yet I love it! It is just so much fun and I don't even know why. Also, there was this Dragonball Z RPG for the GBA I can't remember the name of. It was horrible and made me want to pull all my hair out. But I still played it. It was fun. It didn't make any more sense then than it makes now.
Mission Impossible. Those that have played it probably know what I mean one way or the other.
Addams Family is a horrible and unfair game. I like it regardless, but that has a lot to do with nostalgia.
I'm also oddly fascinated with Clock Tower 2 which is a near unplayable game, for many reasons. I only reached Act 2, but it's definitely a game I'm still drawn towards.
This is perhaps odd...but that "Shake it Aeris!" thing just seems oddly sexual to me. Haha
Saga Frontier 2
The jumping around fo the storyline was so horrible but, I love the graphics and characters.
To this day I've never gotten the chance to play it. I owned the original Saga Frontier at one point and remember it being the hardest turn-based jrpg I've ever played and not understanding the story at all.
I also remember being wowed by the fact that your party could be so big in battles and that you could save anywhere.
Yakuza 3
the gameplay sucks monkeyballs (I mean srsly what were they thinking), but the storyline is intriguing enough for me to keep playing.
I remember just hating the original Saga Frontier in general. I beat it once with the robot, but...ugh.
I love the first one too but yeah, it was pretty hard and also hard to follow.
Red Ninja: End of Honor. I love the tenchu series, and this was close enough, and different enough to be fresh. The controls, graphics, and story were all pretty piss poor.
Way of the Samurai. It's just shouldn't be as enjoyable as it was. I even played the little fighting mini game with m friends.
You keep playing it because although you hate the story you love the fun. It is fun in a lot of ways. Personally I never minded the story on the Halo series, it has a better story by far than any of the Call of Duty or Medal of Honor series games. Frankly, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty suffer from one insufferable flaw: Early Medal of Honor games cast you as Jimmy Patterson a normal US soldier and yet most of the time he was a one man frigging army! When they eventually decided to give you a support squad in missions in Medal of Honor: Airborne the support squad died so easily you still felt very overpowered, not to mention they never seemed to actually kill anything so it was more hindrance than help since they'd hog the decent cover leaving you exposed to the elements. Call of Duty does the supporting squad better than Medal of Honor but frankly the story involved is often the weak point. The first few games where it was WW1 and 2 were believable yes because they were often based around historical units. The newer ones, Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops have such unbelievable characters and stories it's only just about playable for the game mechanics itself and even those don't feel as smooth or polished in my opinion as the ones in Halo, especially Halo Reach.
Oh God Alundra 2! Alundra 1 was insanely difficult, Alundra 2 was just horrible in oh so many ways but you try to complete it for some God forsaken reason! I've no idea why I stuck it out it was almost as bad as sticking Grandia 2 and Jade Cocoon 2 out to the end.
Which yeah brings me to my games I think are pretty crap but couldn't help playing and enjoying:
Jade Cocoon 2 - the first game was awesome, the second game ditched the "realistic" graphics and went for a kind of 3D cell shading approach which was fine, the tiny fairy what followed you around and told the story in animated cut scenes was irritating but survivable if only because she was scripted with some attitude and her voice was possibly the least annoying voice in the entire game cast. The monster combining got nerfed completely but left just enough evolution options that you'd keep going trying to make something good and the voice acting and music throughout the game was so awful I tended to mute my TV whenever I was playing the game and listen to my own music, only turning the volume up so I could watch the cut scenes to know what was actually going on in the story.
Grandia 2 - Jeez this game was terrible I think I actually completed it more because it was Grandia 2 than anything else and I liked the original Grandia. Never picked it up again after that one completion.
Too Human - Lets face it, the game was received terribly, I think it's pretty bad, the idea behind it technologically advanced telling of the myths of Ragnorak and the Aesir (Asgard is another name for them, the viking gods) yes please! Controls wise? Yeah never experiment with your melee controls and camera controls being on the same damn thing it just gets irritating. The story was what I expected it to be, Viking myths do make great stories. However the game was let down by just about everything else including it's death animation sequence. Because enemies level with you and can number in the hundreds in an area before one will drop health on higher levels you will die a crap ton. Whenever you die you get treated to the same 30 second no skipping animation. The animation of the Valkyrie coming to pick your dead body up causing knock back damage to enemy units (about the only benefit of this) and then to re-spawn 200 yards up pathway back the way you came with the same enemies attacking you is annoying as hell. Just let me skip it! I'm likely to bloody die again in 20 seconds! Seriously, you could die that often depending on what character class you were.
Dwarf Fortress - Face it, Toady is no coder he's a mathematician and therefore the code behind DF sucks. The interface would be much nicer if it had some graphics to it rather than pure ASCII but since you can download a tileset to overlay it's not such a big deal. I know Toady considers it to be his baby and all but if he just let a couple of coders work on the game code so that the game utilizes multiple core processors correctly, some of the many bugs don't take ages to fix up and maybe a graphical artist to actually design it's own graphics set to overlay rather than a tileset which will undoubtedly interfere with the text in the game unless you change the .ini files so it never uses special characters in names. The the game would be vastly improved. DF2010 is a major improvement over old DF but still, I think it's a terrible game but playing it is so much damn fun it's surreal.
For me, the overall feel of the game does a lot for how fondly I feel about it even when there are technical things lacking about it. The charm, the personality, the ambition, the quirk. I'd never hold up Yakuza's combat to something like Bayonetta, but it's all the other things about that game and its world that win me over. Similar story with Shenmue. I'll still be buying Yakuza 4 when it comes out, even though I have no intention of getting my PS3 fixed anytime soon.
Earth Defense Force 2017 and Robot Alchemic Drive are two other games (made by the same company) that fit a different category. They are technically sloppy--EDF is a worse-than-average 3rd person shooter, R.A.D. has an incredibly cryptic control scheme--but both of them have so much personality to them that it's hard for me not to love them. EDF has you fighting giant bugs with weapons of mass destruction, and eventually giant armoured alien dinosaurs in completely destructable environments. R.A.D., as a giant robot fighting game, has you fighting other giant creatures in completely destructible environments, though in R.A.D. you actually get penalized for breaking stuff. Both of them have voice acting so bad that it just has to be intentional. Love both of 'em though and can't wait for the new EDF.
Deadly Premonition is a game that did tip against my favour, but I do have fond feelings for the game. I generally do not like 'horror' games, and Deadly Premonition really does control horrifically, but there is so much charm in it. I was luckily able to watch most of the game get played by other people, so I'm not too worried about the $20 it cost me to get it.
I'm glad someone mentioned Way of the Samurai, as I almost forgot it. #3 is one that I go back to regularly just to mess around in. Definitely more fun than it deserves to be.