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.