Criticise the game you're playing right now!

[Wolf Kanno]

My other beef is Ikeburo, where a scenario plays out that seriously shifts your alignment either towards Law or Chaos faction. There is no Neutral option so you're basically forced to be stuck with one of the alignments for awhile before you reach a place that lets you change your alignment easily. Neutral alignment really is the hardest to play...

Ugh, this, so much. I'm playing Shin Megami Tensei IV and maintaining a neutral alignment is a study in micromanagement. Basically, almost every dialogue choice detracts or adds to your score, and the range for neutral is only -8 to +8. There is not a large margin for error given that +10s and -10s crop up a fair amount sometimes.

Funny enough, it's not as hard as you think. The easiest way to stay Neutral in IV is to ignore the Hunter Tournament missions and the few that change alignment and then simply always choose the first option in most dialogue options that doesn't have a neutral option. That or just make sure to check with the guy in the bar who tells you your alignment. It honestly sounds more difficult on paper than in practice.

[NeoCracker]

My other beef is Ikeburo, where a scenario plays out that seriously shifts your alignment either towards Law or Chaos faction. There is no Neutral option so you're basically forced to be stuck with one of the alignments for awhile before you reach a place that lets you change your alignment easily. Neutral alignment really is the hardest to play...

Ugh, this, so much. I'm playing Shin Megami Tensei IV and maintaining a neutral alignment is a study in micromanagement. Basically, almost every dialogue choice detracts or adds to your score, and the range for neutral is only -8 to +8. There is not a large margin for error given that +10s and -10s crop up a fair amount sometimes.

Funny enough, it's not as hard as you think. The easiest way to stay Neutral in IV is to ignore the Hunter Tournament missions and the few that change alignment and then simply always choose the first option in most dialogue options that doesn't have a neutral option. That or just make sure to check with the guy in the bar who tells you your alignment. It honestly sounds more difficult on paper than in practice.

I scored Neutral on IV my first go, I just kind of answered how I thought was the best way to go about everything.

[Zanmato]

Space Trader (Android; Brucelet.com)

Paying 3000 credits for giving a "+1" to one of my skills at random is like a slap in the face! I know that the improvement is very important, but upgrading could be done more user-friendly, in my opinion.

[Wolf Kanno]

Oh Shin Megami Tensei, how you're logic works is amazing. So Paralyze is basically a death sentence as it's the only status ailment besides Stone and Poison that can't go away unless an item is used. Only human characters can use items, even out of battle only they can do it. Yet the game also treats status effects as real world stuff, so having my MC paralyzed means NPCs you talk to will recognize your in trouble but do nothing to fix it and thus move the story along.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the Succubus demon? They have wickedly high speed and love to cast Dormina, a spell that hits my whole party and has about a 70% chance of inflicting sleep, they almost always go first in battle. To make matters worse, their basic physical attack inflicts Paralysis with a 30% chance. A whole sleeping party with more than one on the field gives them plenty of time to inflict Paralyze on your whole party, at which point your options are to sit there and watch them murder you slowly since they do crap for damage and then load, or simply just jump to the chase and boot up the last save.

Oh did I mention there is no equipment or special monsters with resistance to help with any of this?

[Fynn]

Dragon Quest VII is damn near perfect, so I'm happy this one scenario happened today that I can complain about and not seem like a total fanboy To put it simply (and spoiler-free), a lot of hype was built up around this one vignette on the Internet that ultimately completely failed to live up to my expectations. It involved a lot of stupid assumptions and decisions made by in-game characters and lots of unnecessary padding to what otherwise could have been a pretty sad story.

[Vermachtnis]

Dragon Ball Xenoverse, forgot what a pain in the ass that mission was during the Namek Saga where you have to protect Krillin and Gohan while defeating 20 minions and in the cramped Freeza ship. And I can't do any online stuff without plus.

[Formalhaut]

I swear Kingdom Hearts II is harder than I remember. Devastators are the worst. So they have two forms. The first form is a tank which fires energy spheres at you at various tempos, which can be rather hard to avoid. Then it can transform into a floating tank which relentlessly pursues you. But the worst thing is when it transforms. It tries to get close to you and then spams a lightning fritz which if it gets you, is impossible to get out of and hurts like hell.

And this is on top of any other heartless you're trying to focus in on. Infuriating!

Berserkers, the nobody enemy, are also frustrating because you can't really hurt them until you block their (hard-hitting) attacks.

[Fox]

Mass Effect 3's fetch quests are the worst.

RANDOM PERSON ON SPACE-PHONE: "If only we had the [Relic Of Place], we could [Do Vaguely Helpful Thing]"
*Alliance Commander Shepard, Spectre, Hero of the Citadel and the galaxy's best hope of survival, overhears*
*Flies the Normandy - the most advanced ship in the Alliance navy - tens of thousands of light years to enemy occupied space*
*Plays even-more-tedious-than-Mass-Effect-2's scanning minigame*
*Finds Relic of Place*
*Flies tens of thousands of light years back to the Citadel*
SHEPARD: "Here you go."
RANDOM PERSON ON SPACE-PHONE: "Thanks!"

Mass Effect 3 also has some really crappy arena based side missions which only exist to say: "Hey, look at our multiplayer maps! Wouldn't you love to play these in multiplayer?"

Finally, the game is 4 years old now. The multiplayer community is not exactly giant and I don't really want to play the multiplayer anymore. But not doing so adversely affects my single player campaign. So that's fun.

[Wolf Kanno]

Finally, the game is 4 years old now. The multiplayer community is not exactly giant and I don't really want to play the multiplayer anymore. But not doing so adversely affects my single player campaign. So that's fun.

To be fair, you can still get to the finale and regular endings without touching multiplayer. I never played any of them and still reached the end with no problem.

[Fox]

Finally, the game is 4 years old now. The multiplayer community is not exactly giant and I don't really want to play the multiplayer anymore. But not doing so adversely affects my single player campaign. So that's fun.

To be fair, you can still get to the finale and regular endings without touching multiplayer. I never played any of them and still reached the end with no problem.

I know you can, it's just that you have to a lot more busywork without the multiplayer. Whatever military strength I get is going to be divided in half when I get to the end game, so I have to worry more about dumb fetch quests and multiplayer map preview mission than I would like in order to make up the difference.

[Wolf Kanno]

Digital Devil Saga - Okay, scratch what I said about the sewer level not being so bad. That was before I discovered there were three more of them and you have to traverse them to reach the bosses. Even worse is the one to reach Orochi, random encounters are either with a Nidhogger who has tons of HP and a move to give himself more turns. The worse part is that these levels introduce reinforcement encounters which are not new, they happen all the time and most of the time its against an enemy who is huge and can take some punishment but the ones in these areas could be mini-bosses in their own right. The ones in Beelzebub's section are Arabahaki, who aborb all elements except ice, their one weakness, and reflect physical unless frozen but they use a powerful melee attack that has a high chance of causing stone which can be a quick death for your party. The ones in Orochi's are surprisingly worse. You run into Samael who can cast physical and magical reflect, Vanity (DDS's version of Bad Breath) a spell that hits my whole party and has a 50% chance of turning them back into their weaker human forms, and brutal group hitting physical attacks that can inflict Mute on your whole team. They are also resistant to physical, most elements and their only weakness is to certain status magic so it's hard to pull off extra turns against them. Did I mention that they make you fight two of them at a time? Also they can show up during any battle in these areas and while it's possible to retreat, you don't get any rewards if you do so, so killing the first wave only to run when these guys shows up nets you nothing but lost resources. Heaven help you if you can't retreat against them.

The dungeon also has a water maze where you have to swim to the exit by taking one way paths that have a high possibility of circling around. The real challenge is that the water pressure fluctuates as the Solar Noise/Moos Phase goes and it changes every time you take a path. What this all means is that you have a limited amount of turns to find the exit before the water pressure skyrockets and launches you all the way back to the start of the maze. The first three I've dealt with were not so bad but the one on Orochi's path is designed to be a nightmarish complex compared to the others and more annoyingly, you still get into fights in these sections which is a bit annoying because several other puzzle locations usually made it so this wouldn't happen. So yeah, after spending an hour trying to work my way through this maze, I got jumped by the Sameal's who were able to revert two characters back to human, protect themselves from the magic my one active member could use, pelted us with melee that killed two characters and then charmed the last one so I could do nothing but watch as he sat there like an idiot getting wailed on while I tried to remember the last time I saved. Oh MegaTen.

The 4 Heroes of Light - Ever played a game that felt really long but really wasn't? I'm very close to finishing up the last mission before going after the head honcho himself but damn if its hard to play this game for more than a few hours before seriously wanting to take a break. The first half flew by and now the clean up duty section is kind of killing the game's momentum, which it really shouldn't be doing cause this is kind of the part where my heroes actually start solving problems instead of just making things worse. What really bugs me is that the last four job classes are locked behind four optional bosses that apparently all reside in their own one hundred floor dungeons, and it's obvious that the new classes are really more bragging rights than actually useful. Even more annoying is the fact said bosses require you to be in the high 90s to stand a chance level wise but the main game has been such a cakewalk that I still haven't reached level 40 with any of my characters, and the final dungeon is literally the next dungeon. So it's got Crisis Core's problem of a a really unbalanced main game to post game difficulty curve.

Shin Megami Tensei - Curse you low drop rates! All I need is a damn Opal and I can finally purchase a Sylph demon from Rag's Jewelers which I can then use to start the Sword Fusion sidequest to get the best sword in the game. The problem is that drop rates are kind of low in this game and I have not been really putting much into my Luck stat to help. Thankfully there is an early section that contains three of the four enemies who normally drop them all neatly together. The only issue I have is that killing so many of them to get this drop may also change my alignment and screw me out of the Neutral route.

[Galuf]

The grind in Rise of Iron is lengthy. This may have been the same in earlier expansions for destiny but this is the first time ive been there at the start. Also do think its a bit overpriced (but then the first expansion was £20 for 3 missions a strike and a raid. So glad I wasnt around for that rubbish)

[Bubba]

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[NeoCracker]

SMT IV Apocolypse is fantastic, but dear god the 'Trap' thing is stupid. In some areas you will randomly get surrounded by a black mist, and you have to tap X to escape. You're not at risk of getting attacked, and it's so simple there is really no reason for it to be there. It just happens, goes away, and then you continue on. It's annoying.

[Wolf Kanno]

Silent Hill 3, man I hate Tank controls and the pre-rendered areas are just making it feel even more awkward. Seriously, I know Silent Hill isn't known for it's great gameplay but I feel like ditching the tank controls for something more standard would make the game more user-friendly. It's not terribly fun getting cheap shots by faster and more agile enemies that attack off screen and I can barely dodge cause my character walks like she's wearing cement shoes.

Final Fantasy VII, have I ever told you how much bulltrout I feel the All Materia is? I mean it's just a waste of a slot to do something you could do for free in earlier games. In fact, while magic is not bad in this game from a damage/cost standpoint, the game just gives you so many better options to make you ditch them and goes out of their way to make magic just seem inferior. I mean All materia so you can multi-target, status magic that is broken up into two-thirds of Green Materia you'll obtain, Summon/Enemy Skills that do better damage/can't be reflected/hits all enemies/cost effect compared to -ra and -aga tier spells that can all be obtained long before you'll grind the AP to even reach the third tier spells. I mean it's like Square set it up to fail. Don't even get me started on how useless and situational at best the Elemental and Added Effect Materia are.

Theatryhthm:Curtain Call - Man, why are some of my favorite tracks from VI and VII relegated to DLC? Hell it seems to me like the entries with the best song selections have the least representation in the game that requires things to be unlocked or paid for. I also remember that the original game was somewhat short to reach the "ending" as much as this game can have one, but it feels to me like it takes less time in this game. I have barely unlocked half the character and barely played half the track list before getting my showdown with Chaos and the ending credits.