RPG's You Started But Never Finished

[SpaceHarrier]

In the Deep Jungle where Tarzan is located at, invisible events will only trigger if you kill all the enemies in certain areas or return back and forth between the tree house and the camp, later on visible events will appear after killing off all the enemies in every single area, the final event though is required you to jump off the side of the map of the tree house. If you jump into the hole within the tree that will do nothing, you literally have to jump off the side of the tree house to trigger the cutscene.

Yeah, that's when I quit playing that one. The frustrating platforming in that area also filled my rage meter. Someday, I'll try to get back to it though, I did like the game's vibe.





Sonic: Dark Brotherhood

There are so many missed opportunities here. Why am I fighting swarms of bees instead of buzzbombers, or generic wild boars instead of ball hogs? They could have had a lot of fun with the story and self-referential humor but instead focused on this weird fan-fictiony thing. Also, the sound effects are obnoxious and the music sounds completely un-Sonic like. And the unnecessary stylus driven control scheme is the final nail in the coffin. All I wanted was Super Mario RPG with Sonic characters.

[Pete Rittwage]

All of them. My attention span is just too short...

[WulfeLuer]

Oh lord. My little dirty not-a-secret. Final Fantasy VI, aka '3'. It's not a bad game by any stretch for me, and I actually obsessed about it hardcore way back in the day, but one issue or another kept me from walking into the final dungeon and murdering a clown. It keeps happening again and again and again, like the world's nerdiest commitment issue or something. I'm sitting here right now with yet another playthrough right in front of the Tower, and wussing out and binge-playing Diablo III like an idiot.

For the rest, I have a private lexicon for these games: Stalled Campaigns and Failed Campaigns.

Stalled Campaigns are RPG playthroughs where I just lost interest for whatever reason, but I would be willing to pick it up again when I'm in a different frame of mind or different circumstances; I don't have any real prejudice against the game, I just want to do something else for a while. Notable stalled campaigns are:

Tales of Symphonia (PS3 version), with a battle system that just felt one-sided for either your party or the enemy depending on whether you bothered with even very conservative (for RPGs) level grinding or not and generally feeling just...off somehow. I think some of it is that it's still clearly a Gamecube/PS2 game with a shiny coat of PS3 paint without really taking any advantage of the hardware itself. There's a lot of...emptiness and feeling of omission of detail. Despite being fairly straightforward with the detail it does give you, it comes less like a trail of story breadcrumbs for you to follow than a trail of story breadcrumbs after they went through some pigeons. I ran out of patience after finding yet another mystery with a dark answer.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (PS1), less for any real fault of the game and more that at the time I just couldn't sink enough time into it to give it justice. The only real complaint is class-related, losing all those nifty options from Ogre Battle, especially conflating the Paladin and Samurai into the Sword Master. Gritty war story or not, I miss them.

Grandia, Legend of Dragoon, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy IX (PS1). The reason for all of these being lumped together is that all of these are games I actually sunk a lot of time into (at least halfway, some just before the final dungeon) and realized that I left enough things undone without any recourse short of a restart and/or I just felt like I was running a gimped party destined to get humiliated when the final dungeon or boss rolled around.

Disgaea (PS2), because I apparently suck at this style of level and item grinding. Mostly I think I reincarnated/transmigrated my characters way too early, and fixing the problem will take a lot of time. I already have 80 hours clocked and I'm actually stuck on a puzzle boss like a moron.

There are more, but mostly ones I just choked like with FFVI. Breath of Fire III, SaGa Frontier, second playthroughs of FFVII, FFT, and SaGa Frontier 2, Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny, Sword of Mana, the list goes on.

Failed Campaigns are playthoughs that flat out made me ragequit. I'm pretty tolerant of RPG quirks and flaws but sometimes I find something that just makes me put the controller down, shut the console off and stew in a puddle of nerd rage for a couple of days. Once in a blue moon, I will give the game a second chance and find that the game was actually pretty damn good and/or I wasn't playing it right. Usually, however, I sell it or trade it and try to forget it ever happened.

Notable Failed Campaigns include:

Phantom Brave (PS2), hey we have a sweet little girl that can talk to spirits and forge them into kickass squads of doom and an item system where you can actually bash your enemies with a Mighty Rock. Too bad everybody else in this game is either dead or hateful dickbags. I know that things mellow out for the heroine later on, but watching everybody crap on a little girl like that just made me angry. One of the few games I stopped just because the story scenes. I've seen all sorts of evil and grimness in fiction but this one just pushed my buttons. Willing to try again, but at a slow time of the year when work doesn't exacerbate the problem.

Legend of Legaia (PS1): Here we go again. The combat is wonky, the pacing is terrible, and traditional grinding techniques are so time-consuming that they're counter-productive. Clocked maybe 10 hours and dropped it. I want to try again, since it was something like 15-17 years ago, but I have a few other things to settle first.

Riviera: The Promised Land (GBA), a nice little RPG marred by quick time events. If they were less complex and/or punishing, it would be a very different story. I have a very bad time passing the QTEs from the third dungeon on, and having to leave sidequests and goodies on the wayside like that in a turn-based RPG is very frustrating. The details are hazy, but I remember walking into something like a 10-button sequence with a very short timer that I just couldn't do, and wrecking my end grade for it. Congratulations, you've made a turn-based JRPG that put me through the entire path to the dark side in space of two hours.

It's not all bad news, though. There are several failed campaigns that I've gone back and restarted to a successful conclusion. The latest as of right now is Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (PS3); the first playthrough fizzled and left me extremely angry because of a very nasty event flag bug encountered just before the endgame. I cooled off and managed to circumvent it in a second playthrough and broke that dragon right proper.

[Aussie2B]

Now that I think about it, I suppose I could count Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. They're victims of my Quest Corporation curse. In both cases, I lost my files, after making significant progress, and have never restarted them since (and thus have never beaten). With Final Fantasy Tactics, I was 20-some hours into the game. My boyfriend was playing through the game at the same time, and we had files on the same card. If I remember correctly, he wanted to play immediately after me, or maybe it was vice versa, so it was a matter of saving one file and loading another. However, somehow, I totally goofed and ended up saving over my file with his file. Argh. But as frustrating as that was, it was nothing compared to Tactics Ogre. I had a whopping 100 hours invested into that, and I was something like halfway through the bonus dungeon, which itself has 100 floors if I remember correctly. I was close to beating the game, but for whatever reason, I wanted to tackle the bonus dungeon first. At that time, I had bought my boyfriend the first, Japan-only King's Field. He started playing it and was fumbling through the Japanese menus trying to figure out how to save, to the same card I was using for Tactics Ogre. Well, the first King's Field came out at or near the PS1's launch in Japan, so developers were still hammering out how they'd deal with memory card management. For whatever bizarre, idiotic reason, King's Field includes an in-game, mid-game option to format the memory card. Bye-bye Tactics Ogre file......... I don't even have that copy of Tactics Ogre anymore. It was a loose disc and I planned all along to replace it with a complete copy anyway, but instead, I just sold it off and never replaced it with another PS1 copy. I did eventually buy the PSP remake, but I've yet to have the motivation start playing it seriously.

[kupomogli]

For the rest, I have a private lexicon for these games: Stalled Campaigns and Failed Campaigns.

Final Fantasy 6, Grandia, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy IX, Breath of Fire III, FFTactics. Legend of Legaia.

Maybe RPGs just aren't for you. I can see where the other games might have been a problem. SaGa Frontier can be a difficult game to get into and SaGa Frontier 2 has several sections in the game that will just stop you from moving forward. I actually consider having beaten SaGa Frontier 2, but I honestly haven't. Three different playthroughs I've made it all the way to the last boss and no matter how many attempts I couldl never beat it, and problem with SaGa Frontier 2, is when you get to the end, that's it, there's no more leveling up, nothing. You're on a timeline so you're stuck.

The RPGs listed above are either kind of easy or well balanced to where grinding isn't required all that much. I could help you out if you need some tips on these games though. If by some chance you need to grind on something like Grandia, it's as simple as hovering around a save point and then having your characters have only a single enemy left and then use support spells constantly, or keep going back and forth in and out of an area using Dragon Cut. Legend of Legaia you need to make use of spirit to increase your AP and defense. Breath of Fire 3 you do have to grind in some parts, but a huge tip on this game is to buy 99 herbs and use those whenever you get out of combat and grinding will drop to barely any.

I was kidding about maybe RPGs aren't for you, but hope the stuff above helps. As for Tactics Ogre, which Aussie2B listed also, I'd recommend doing the PS1 version simply because, imo, it's better. The PSP version does have job skills like on FFTactics, but every time you get a new class the class starts at level 1, and this goes all the way up to the fourth chapter. Any class you're interested in using is pretty useless and will be shoved in a corner until they're atleast one level away from the others. Atleast training is a much easier way to get any characters on a lower level caught up. It doesn't help that in the PSP version weapons and armor are also locked behind a level requirement.

[Nz17]

Yeah, for me, a complete* play-through of a Disgaea game takes about 250 hours, so I'd say you are about 1/3 of the way there.

*Complete by my standards means that all of the endings have been seen, all of the cameo characters have been unlocked, all of the cut-scenes have been shown, and Ba'al has been defeated. DLC doesn't count unless it is free DLC.

[WulfeLuer]

I need to make a bit of a clarification. I was half awake and poorly worded some of my response. Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Tactics are actually games I've beaten (along with SaGa Frontier 2) but I have partial repeat playthroughs I stopped after a while. FFVIII (what I mean to type, yay Roman Numerals and typos) and IX along with BoF III are ones I have not. FFVI should actually be done (finally) this weekend, I'm all stoked and just waiting for enough free time to blitz the final dungeon.

I actually do love RPGs to death; my 'beaten in 2016' and 'beaten in 2017' lists are almost exclusively RPGs or games with RPG elements. Even with the Stalled Campaigns I usually wind up finding something cool (playing FFT and at the Wiegraf fights? I tried out a Lancer and stomped him good).

[Tanooki]

I don't remember them all, but FF9 I did finish but I can't remember if I ever cleared Grandia II since you mentioned them.

I know I've never finished some of them, and FF7 comes to mind as i'll never understand the fanboy love around that heaping pile of low polygonal mediocrity. I got fed up around the second or third visit to cosmo canyon and just walked away totally bored of it. The horrible re-run no skip videos, spell animations, and clicky rambling script pieces did nothing to help that.

I can say that I've never finished a Tales of... game before but came close, it's just that they get so tiresome towards the ends with hopping all over and really stupid boss rush/runs that I just don't care anymore as that's one of the worst ways to pad out the clock. Same can be said of being tiresome when it came to Skies of Arcadia/Legends because the game just gets so overly aggressive with less than random combat and (DC side) all the unskippable animations in/out of battle and for every move it was a true drag despite the cool unique theme and ship combat I wish final fantasy would have added for years.

Oh and I've never knocked off Chrono Trigger, something about the multiple endings pushes me to a point and then it's off putting and I stop.