11 replies to this topic

[Orithan]

~ Orithan's Vulpine Rants of Hate ~

 

Sometimes, I come across games that I hate or parts of the gaming world that irk me so much that I wish to mouth off and rant about. While some of these subjects (namely one of the more furry related ones) are NSFW and therefore are not suitable for this community or are ones that I am hard-pressed to rant about without making personal attacks to various members of this community and therefore can not trust myself to handle appropriately.

 

This is what this thread is about. Things I rant about because I feel like ranting about them. Regardless of wherever they come from good or bad games, I will rant about them because these things are either downright terrible or they irk me so much that I must rant about them.

 

Notes:

• Important: These are all my opinions. Please take them with a grain of salt. If you agree or disagree, please bring it up tactfully.
• There will be spoilers in this rant thread, particularly when I am ranting about a game. You have been warned.
• Due to my nature, I have no definite timeline in which I make my rants. I may make multiple rants in the space of a few days or I could leave the thread dead for months before I revive it with the next rant.
• The length of these rants can vary, depending on how much I want to rant about them.

So, to kick off with something that I have been bashing for years, pretty much ever since I've joined this community:

 

 

- Pokemon Heart Gold/ Soul Silver -

 

Note: This applies to the original games; Gold/Silver/Crystal, where applicable.

 

Back when I first heard about these games from my brother, I was in nostalgic bliss. I had joyous memories of the original Gold that I used to play as a kid because my copy of Yellow had a dead battery. I used to love Gold and was super-excited about Heart Gold and Soul Silver, moreso with the addition of the Pokewalker. I brought Heart Gold on day one of it's release and started playing it to relieve the memories I had when I was a child. Oh what a joyous time I had. Surely my love would last forever.

This did not last for long and when my nostalgia finally wore off, I realized how awful Johto was, especially in comparison to Sinnoh and (eventually) Kalos. No I am not trolling here, I am 100% serious that I hated this game and was relieved when Black and White were released.

 

By far my biggest complaint with HG/SS it not even directly aimed at Johto itself - It is Kanto and it's influence on Johto.

Imagine eating a loaf of bread by yourself, with maybe a little bit of butter. This is how I felt as I played through Kanto in HG/SS. If R/B/G/Y and X/Y were bad for their postgames, HG/SS was even worse in that regard for a terrible postgame. Not just because of the content, which was virtually all filler made to pad the game out, but because of how it adversely affected Johto in it's inclusion.

 

Even in Johto, the game was very centered around Kanto. In almost every route, the Gen I pokemon far outnumber the Gen II pokemon and some routes even consisted of just Gen I pokemon. Even the Gym Leaders rarely made an effort to showcase the Gen II pokemon. A good portion of the story that was in the game was centered around Kanto pokemon (ie. Red Gyarados). The villainous team was just the same aimless Team Rocket from Kanto, but in shambles after Red defeated them back in R/G/B/Y. A good deal of the pokemon introduced were evolutions from Gen I pokemon (ie. Scizor, Steelix) or baby forms of other pokemon (ie. Pichu, Cleffa). Johto ended up feeling like a Kanto 2.0 after all this, something no other region has come even close to doing with the possible exception of Unova in B/W1. This wouldn't be as bad if Kanto was better executed in this game, but Johto would have still felt stale overall.

 

 

The second primary complaint I had about this game is the level grinding involved, especially in regards to reaching the Elite Four, despite them being much weaker than what they are in the other games. The strongest wild pokemon you can encounter in the Victory Road before facing up against the E4 were in the mid 30s and were tough to grind on. Typhlosion and other pokemon whose types are resisted by Rock or Ground have a very tough time there because there were very few wild pokemon that were not Rock or Ground types there. To contribute to forcing you to grind, the only trainer you encounter there is your rival. Nobody else shows up to test their powerful teams on you to provide you with EXP to lessen the grind, especially for pokes that have trouble grinding up on the wild pokemon. The E4 doesn't help much in regard to that either and made it exceptionally difficult for Poison types that are not part-Grass types to work there.

 

 

The final nail in the coffin for HG/SS (specifically) is that, while it added in many extra features like the Gen III/IV pokemon swarms, it did not attempt to fix many of the problems that the originals had aside from maybe the empty Kanto and even then it was not a good job - They should have made Kanto more eventful, not just add in more stuff on the side. And the pokemon following you? Forget that! That is the most overrated feature that I've seen in the series because it is so minor and yet people praise it like no tomorrow. Granted it would be nice to have it in B/W and X/Y, but I have trouble understanding why people make such a big deal over it.

 

 

In conclusion, G/S/C and their remakes are among my least favorite pokemon games in the main series, barely edging out Black and White 2. The primary reason I ranted about them is because of how overrated they are, because they are not bad games by any means. They are just terrible compared to the rest of the main series because of forgettable region design, bad pacing and the things I just mentioned and not much to make up for that. Also, Whitney's Miltank can go burn in a fire

Edited by Orithan, 22 June 2014 - 06:54 AM.

[Koh]

I never had trouble with the E4 on either the originals or the remakes honestly.  They give you everything you need before you reach there, like Ice Pokemon (which wipe out Lance's Dragonite's with x4 Weakness), thunder types, flying and thunder types.  Since when has a Pokemon game ever been hard, outside of competitive battling anyway?  It's just a giant rock-paper-scissors battle system.

 

I'm honestly on the other side of the coin, and think people praise Black and White too much.  The only thing they had going for them was a more intricate story than the previous games (except, maybe Platinum), and the fact that Pokemon constantly animated in battle.  Other than that, they made the game extremely linear, even more so than Hoenn and Sinnoh, its lineup of new Pokemon weren't all that interesting save a few, and the fact that you HAD to work with Pokemon you mostly had no interest in, until post-game, was a major turn-off.  I get they were trying to hammer in the new Pokemon, but if people don't like them to begin with, then you're ultimately shunning them away by not providing alternatives.  Why couldn't they just have the previous region Pokemon encounter at a lower rate?  Also, it's post-game was lackluster compared to Platinum and HeartGold/SoulSilver, since all you could do was go to the other half of the circle, fight Cynthia, and find expensive things to sell, because they've no other purpose.

 

Team Rocket was honestly the only team that I've actually cared about stopping, since they were the only ones that made you feel like they're causing destruction, since their main goal was money and didn't care about anything else.  All the other teams just seem super ridiculous.

 

Team Rocket = Pokemon Mafia

Aqua/Magma = Environmentalists

Galactic = Fascists

Plasma = Pokemon PETA Led by a Fascist

Flare = Want-to-be Rockets with Loud Business Suits.

Edited by Koh, 22 June 2014 - 07:48 AM.

[MarinaraSauce]

I have a problem with the third paragraph after objection.  Imagine for a second that you go to France and you go all over the country to make a list of all of the wild animals you see.  Then you go to Germany to do the same thing.  How different do you think the lists will be?  They probably won't be all that different, since they're on the same latitude and right next to each other.

[anikom15]

Yes Johto is supposed to be like Kanto because THEY ARE RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER. If you want variety, go play Gen 3.

[The Satellite]

I really don't see the problem with your "complaints." Like Grant said, neighboring regions are likely to have similar wildlife, and much of Gen II's Pokemon were an extension of Gen I's anyway. Besides, I don't see the problem with the first sequel building off of what was successful, especially if they had more ideas that may not have been possible in the first installment; after crafting the baseline for these ideas, which worked very well to begin with, they took them and built something completely new in subsequent entries, refining the elements as they went. Sure, they could have gone completely unique in the second entry while they introduced the new elements, but perhaps they were erring on the side of caution, or again, they wanted to build on the first games using ideas they may or may not have had to begin with but were either unable to develop or were saving in case the franchise didn't take off. I see no issue with this. And honestly, seeing Team Rocket again was nice for the sake of continuity, seeing what happened to them after they were taken down, still struggling to be relevant, only to be put down again.

 

I'm not really gonna touch on the grinding aspect since I dislike grinding in general, but at least the levels aren't just handed out to you like candy, ain't that right Mr. Gen VI Exp. Share?! Okay sure you can disable that.

 

What I really take issue with is the accusation of the postgame content being "filler padding." What the actual f— It's postgame! It's bonus content! It's an updated, time-skipped Kanto that lets you see how some things have changed in three years! I don't understand this complaint at all, I love this kind of stuff in video games, letting us revisit old places and see how they've changed and all, honestly I think it did so better than A Link Between Worlds, and I love that game. I just don't see how you can possibly call this the worst when it comes to postgame content, especially when Pokemon X and Y exist.

 

As for the Miltank, just sleep powder that heifer and wail it to death, easy.

 

As far as the following Pokemon, please don't call this the most overrated thing. Is the Pikachu in Yellow the most overrated thing? Honestly it adds more immersion to the adventure, your Pokemon following behind you and you can check on its activities and health and even sometimes find random items they've picked up, even if they're useless. It's a neat experience that drew me into the game more, and while yes, I don't hate future games for not including it, I don't see why they took it out.

 

I get if you like the other Pokemon games more, but to be quite honest this entire thing comes off as anti-nostalgia more than it does anything resembling legitimate criticisms.

[Koh]

When it comes to post-game, HeartGold/SoulSilver, Platinum and Black/White 2 sport the most and best.  HG/SS has a lot more to actually DO and SEE, Platinum is much of the same, but slightly less, and Black and White 2 is the World Tournament, where you can battle every existent Gym Leader and Champion.  You'd think X/Y'd do all that and more, but from what I've seen, they took way more than step back.

[Kite]

I loved HG/SS overall. Granted I haven't been able to experience anything past generation 4, it's probably one of my favorite Pokemon games.

 

But... as someone that didn't get to experience generation 1 or 2, I'm not a fan of the post game Kanto content and I stopped playing shortly after getting to it. I really love the idea and it hit a lot of the right "oooh. I remember that" things since I'd played Fire Red and Leaf Green, but the main problem I have with it is the trainers you have to fight vs. the areas around them. The wild pokemon are extremely under leveled for this point in the game because they are almost direct rips from the original Kanto. I'd be fine with that if it were not for the fact the gyms expect you to have much higher levels. I think it would have been neater if either the wild pokemon scaled up or if you could do a pseudo fresh start or sorts without having to worry about gym leaders flat out curbstomping you.

Edited by Nick, 22 June 2014 - 02:23 PM.
Clarified a bit

[The Satellite]

Honestly I think in the original games that you could more or less breeze through the Kanto leaders, while the remakes gave them a bit of leveling. I definitely get the wanting the wild Pokemon to have higher levels, I agree, but what do you mean regarding "the trainers vs. the areas around them"?

[Kite]

I was lumping "gym leaders" under trainers.

 

I was basically talking about the levels of wild pokemon battles vs. the levels of everything else.

Edited by Nick, 22 June 2014 - 02:25 PM.

[Dawnlight]

You actually thought Johto's Elite Four was difficult? I personally thought the difficulty of Johto's Elite Four was just right. Not too easy and not too hard. You should be fine if your party is at least Level 40. If you want to talk about a difficult Elite Four, then look at Sinnoh's Earthquake-spamming Elite Four. The grinding in that game is far worse than this one. 

 

The second primary complaint I had about this game is the level grinding involved, especially in regards to reaching the Elite Four, despite them being much weaker than what they are in the other games. The strongest wild pokemon you can encounter in the Victory Road before facing up against the E4 were in the mid 30s and were tough to grind on. Typhlosion and other pokemon whose types are resisted by Rock or Ground have a very tough time there because there were very few wild pokemon that were not Rock or Ground types there. To contribute to forcing you to grind, the only trainer you encounter there is your rival. Nobody else shows up to test their powerful teams on you to provide you with EXP to lessen the grind, especially for pokes that have trouble grinding up on the wild pokemon. The E4 doesn't help much in regard to that either and made it exceptionally difficult for Poison types that are not part-Grass types to work there.

 

If resistance is an issue, then use an EXP Share and have a Pokemon strong against Rock/Ground types take care of the battles. Sure you get half the EXP, but you're working on leveling two Pokemon at once instead of leveling one Pokemon at a time. I think you're being a little too exaggerating when it comes to the game being "too grindy". Take the amount of exp that you need for the next level and divide it by amount of EXP you earn per battle to know exactly the amount of battles you need to get to the next level. 

[Orithan]

~ Terraria ~

 

"Why are you ranting about this game? I thought you liked it?"

 

I do like Terraria very much, and I consider it to be a great game with a very promising development team and I expect it to get even better with the 1.3 Lunar update. But it is quite overrated by its fanbase, praising everything the game does (aside from some minor things) like it is one of the all-time greats and it has few flaws. I consider Terraria to have a lot of flaws, several of which are major and can not be fixed without what I would estimate to be significant revamp to either the progression or the engine - which means that those will never be completely fixed during Terraria's time given that 1.3 is set to be the game's last major update.

 

First up, I would like to talk about one of the biggest issues I have with the game: The World size. It is just too small to support all of the features properly. Before Hardmode, this isn't much of an issue given that there is plenty of room for all of the world's surface features - Forest, 1-3 areas of Corruption/Crimson, Snow, Jungle, some deserts, an ocean at both ends of the world, 1 or 2 Living Trees, maybe a Pyramid and the Dungeon entrance. Come Hardmode and where do the major strips of Corruption/Crimson and Hallowed spawn through? Almost without fail at least one of these strips run through either the Jungle, Snow or (amusingly if this is Hallowed) a Corruption/Crimson biome. This is bad if the Corruption or Crimson is generated over the Jungle: Half it would be gone by the time you got the Clentaminator that is pretty much required to eliminate the threat. This can be addressed somewhat by altering the generation of the Corruption and Hallowed so it runs through the correct places, but the world is simply too small - In order to fix the issue properly without scaling everything else down, you have to allow the game to generate larger worlds.

Surely this would be a easy fix? Apparently not, according to the devs. According to them, it is impossible to generate any worlds horizontally larger than the current Large setting due to limitations within the game's messy code from possibly Day 1. So looks like this is something for Terraria 2 to fix.

 

Secondly, Melee is a terrible class. Terrible as in "The game wasn't built around Melee" terrible. Vs regular mobs, it is fine (most of the time) because you are easily able to fight using your sword and tank them with superior defense. It is against bosses that melee has serious trouble with. Melee relies on high defense and tanking while packing powerful weapons to shred anything at close range - remove that and you have a gimped class. A good majority of bosses, especially in Hardmode, do this - The Wall of Flesh pretty much requires Melee to build a hellbridge to fight it due to it's nature which makes close ranged weapons ineffective against it without a hellbridge. The Twins are not much better, as they tend to stay away from even lance range and have powerful melee attacks (also ranged in the case of Spazamatism) in their enraged forms - pretty much forcing the player to fight the Destroyer first if they lack the Beam Sword, a rare drop from Armored Skeletons, Bananarangs, which are rare drops from Clowns, or that ice sword sometimes dropped from Ice Mimics, which is in an area above Mechanical Boss tier.

Instead of addressing this issue at the core like the devs should have, by making the bosses easier for Melee to handle, the devs instead opted to "band-aid" around this issue and turning it into yet another way to spam projectiles and therefore making it only Melee by name. Don't believe me yet? Answer this simple question: What do the Terra Blade, Horseman's Blade, North Pole, Flarion, Scourge of the Corruptor and Vampire Knives all have in common, aside from dealing Melee damage? Their reliance on projectiles to deal damage. That is Ranged, not Melee. It is now too late to redesign the game around the proper principles that Melee should operate on without significant changes to the boss AIs, which is again going to stay in the game.

I don't count the new Summoner class, as that is not fully fleshed out yet.

 

Thirdly, I hate how the endgame has degenerated into a DPS race. Pretty much everything post-Plantera in the game is geared around dealing rapidly increasing levels of DPS and whatever doesn't (eg. Shadowbeam Staff, Sniper Rifle, Golem Fist) is shunned in favor of DPS machines like Razorpine, Flarion, Vampire Knives, Chain Gun, North Pole and even Megashark. This is because the game itself turned into a DPS race with the moon events and the HM Dungeon heavily favoring pure DPS over weapons dealing flashy, less-direct forms of damage.

This was getting pretty bad with the mech bosses, as the limited amount of time forced you to meet a certain DPS threshold or you fail to defeat the boss. This was significantly more lenient, which allowed for a wider range of strategies and loadouts involving what weapons and armor you choose. This should have been fixed in 1.2, not make it worse post-mech.

 

Fourth, the game progression post-Plantera revolves around the RNG in a bad way. Way too many weapons are locked to the RNG when they really shouldn't be and there is not enough craftables for each tier for those who hate grinding and just want their weapons to be obtained through mining or 1-2 kills. Case in point - Does any of these weapons (, , , ) look like they fit with Plantera (seen here: http://hydra-media.c..._screenshot.png)? My answer is "No" but yet they are randomly dropped from Plantera anyway. Going off Terraria standards, all of these weapons should be able to have been crafted instead of being a random drop. However, Plantera's other drops make sense and so do the majority of the mob drops elsewhere.

However, the problems pertaining to the RNG don't stop here - You are greatly reliant on the RNG to get you the drops required to progress post-Plantera with very few craftables to carry you through anyway. Even before that, Mages are heavily reliant on RNG drops from the first moment you enter Hardmode, until you get your hands on the tomes. This sucks big time for those who don't want to grind. What the devs should do in 1.3 (and I hope they are doing so) is adding in more craftable weapons for all parts of Hardmode, especially for Mages who have very few craftables. This is like the only criticism I have that is fully fixable in 1.3

 

Finally, the unfair deaths. I hate unfair deaths and the game has plenty of them, especially early game. Before the materials for the new Dangersense Potions become readily obtainable, you have to traverse the underground a little bit, before you are able reliably see traps before you set them off. The issue here is that all three traps types of underground traps; Dart, Boulder and Explosives, can be generated at any level of the underground. The latter two are instakills on weak players starting out and deal hefty amounts of damage to stronger players, and neither of which can reliably be dodged should you set them off by mistake (Boulders you can maybe dodge if the ceiling is high enough, but that is rare and not at the layer I am talking about).

Oh, and that's not all. Knockback can easily make for cheap scenarios regarding multiple mobs and/or being pinned up against a wall or knocked off a long drop, which is negated through having the Cobalt Shield equipped. I constantly died to Spasmatism's Eye Fire in it's enraged form because the knockback prevented me from doing anything, before I realized how important the Cobalt Shield is. And then we have the Dungeon Guardian, ready to kill new players for not knowing that you are not supposed to enter the dungeon before you kill Skeletron (the Old Man might not even warn you about it depending on what message you get when you talk to him at the entrance!) - This is killgating and is a lazy way to enforce linearity in almost any game. Then we have the Mechanical bosses spawning on their own during Hardmode before they have been defeated, often well before the player is equipped to fight them. This is especially stupid in the case of the Destroyer, who you can't really escape from via the usage of the Magic Mirror if you are unprepared for it.

 

 

Well, that's what I have on Terraria. Don't get me wrong, it is still a really good game overall, but I just think it could be much better if these issues were ironed out when they could have been (if applicable). If they were fixed, Terraria could have turned out as a masterpiece; rivaling the likes of those produced by Nintendo. It doesn't help that the fanboys attempt to blindly rip apart any criticism people give the game, including an older, less well structured version of this rant I posted over on the official forums.

Edited by Orithan, 25 February 2015 - 06:52 AM.

[kurt91]

First off, because I only now noticed the thread, and have something to say about HG/SS...

 

My biggest complaint about the game has been how the Berries work now. Before, it was simply remembering to come back each day to pick the berries you planted and grow some new ones. If you had a rare Berry or something with an awesome effect, you stuck around and made sure to plant it a few times to build its numbers up. If you were patient enough, you never needed to buy a status-curing item at all, you'd have a full set of Berries. The soft soil locations were spread around enough that you always had a way to slowly build up Berries even when you were only stuck there for level grinding or something. Considering this was on a portable system, you could make steady progress even if you only turned the game on for a couple minutes a day.

 

In the remake, this was replaced with some gardening item. I have no idea how to get it to work beyond watering it and having to baby this think like an Animal Crossing town. I have never gotten a single Berry out of the damned thing, and they've now gone from a steady source of items that you could build up yourself to suddenly too important and rare to actually use. I used to love steadily stocking up on Berries and Apricorns. Even as a small kid, I'd plan out everything with military precision. I'd poke into a Gym long enough to scout for possible status ailments, or duck into a new route for a minute to see what types of Balls would be most efficient, then spend some time stocking up on the appropriate equipment and countermeasures before diving in for real. I just wish that they'd have kept the older system in place.

 

Regarding Terraria, I admit that I haven't played it since before the last major update that added content, but from what I remember, the game got really boring once you hit the final tiers of metal before activating Hardmode. I've already fully explored everywhere once, now I have to do it again with no incentive other than searching out a single specific type of metal only to use it to get a tool to find a second specific type of metal, and repeat the process a final time to search out a third specific type of metal and make a full set of equipment that I know I'm going to throw away later once Hardmode kicks in. At least the earlier stuff had my tools mining up more than one type of thing and I had new stuff that I could make with each one. This stuff is too hard to find to make house decorations out of, and is only good for making a new pickaxe to go looking for the next tier up.

 

Note: If the newest update changed this specific part of the game particularly, then I take it back. I just need to find the time to get back into Terraria again. I got burned out at that part and never turned it back on. (That, and I swapped out a pirated version for a legit retail copy after my last PC broke and I was replacing my stuff that I lost. I did that for a lot of stuff.)