If the answer isn’t Brandish, you’re probably wrong. Brandish sucks. But now someone translated Brandish 2. It doesn’t change your point of view every time you turn, but the character solved this problem by being unable to turn, the dialogue is horrid and the trailer has cheesy, LOUD eurobeat music. I feel so content right now.
Btw since when do we have standard smilies?
Sword of Mana
And my smileys are all back to normal.
Cliffhanger for SNES. I’ve never played a beat-'em up (much less any other game) that was so awful. It’s a struggle to even make it past the 1st level for me.
Harvest Moon: It’s a Wonderful Life for PS2.
… it has to be amazingly much better for the GC because when I read reviews for Tree of Tranquility, that’s what it’s being compared to (and lacking in especially the graphics section WHICH BOGGLES MY FREAKING MIND. Then again, the same people don’t seem to have liked the graphics in Magical Melody, which I loved. But maybe I’m just a freak for colors that aren’t just various shades of brown.)
Man, those are pussy games.
Aren’t you supposed to be finishing Beyond the Beyond and writing an elaborate tretise on the topic?
I was also surprised that someone actually wanted to translate Brandish 2.
Maybe FFX-2… I know BtB is bad, but I’m sure you at least got through 5 minutes of it without wanting to gouge your eyes out and slash your fingers to bits. I’m not even sure I got to experience the gameplay in X-2. The cinematography was so excruciating that I think I turned it off before the opening scenes were over, even though I could have skipped them. It assaulted every one of my disgust nerves from the very first frame.
Arc The Lad: End Of Darkness is probably the worst game I’ve ever actually owned. I don’t hate it with the fiery passion of 1000 Hitlers. It’s just so very unremarkable.
I remember old N64 Wrestling games that had such clunky gameplay that you could never really tell if anything you pressed was even having an effect on the game. All you could do was mash buttons and pray your fighter happened to come out on top. And even if they did have spectacular gameplay… they still had a pro-wrestling motif, which makes them auto-shit.
It’s not one of the worst games of all time, but the most overrated game of all time can’t possibly anything but Goldeneye. Goldeneye is the videogame equivalent of movies like Pulp Fiction: A middle-of-the-road experience with an unjustifiable cult following that would make any seasoned gamer just kind of… scratch his head.
I’m disappointed at myself for not being able to think of more. I know I’ve played worse shit than this.
My disdain for Wild ARMs 4 and Unlimited SaGa is well documented by this point (as well as Sin’s polar opposite view on the former), so I won;t bother with them. Other than that… I’d actually have to probably say any Lunar game after the playstation versions. They just felt so lackluster it was painful. And I still don;t know why I finished Dragon Song, other than it wasn’t that hard.
Scud: The Disposable Assassin for the Saturn.
It’s a few. Lagoon, Legend of Legaia, Legend of Dragoon… I dunno, maybe these are just the games I hate. In which case, add Final Fantasy Tactics.
FFTactics…nuff said
Off the top of my head…
Eternal Poison on PS2.
I only bought it because the premise actually sounded interesting, and it looked like an interesting SRPG. What I got was an insultingly short (I’m talking three to four hours to finish every storyline), incredibly poorly-paced game. It also loved those old Shining Force-style combat cutscenes…all of which had to be loaded separetly. Oh, and then it loaded again when it returned to the map…and again when a round ended…and whenever you went anywhere in the town.
The plot was trite, the gameplay was slow and almost murderously dull, the graphics physically hurt to look at, and the voice acting…ugh. Doesn’t help that the game’s so short, you can never manage to level your guys up enough for the later areas. (Unlike just about every other SRPG I can name, there are no side battles to play through, and you can’t replay finished areas. Which means that if you end up underleveled, it’s back to the start for you.) It takes a whole lot for me to downright hate a game, but Eternal Posion hit every right note.
I’m just going to add From the Abyss to this thread since it made Children of Mana look like a genuine effort by comparison (even though I got the game heavily discounted I still felt ripped off).
Also Dawn of Mana. Or really, any Mana game after SD3.
Also also any Lufia game after 2 (fuck those broken pieces of shit).
The one thing about EP that I will say in its defense is that you can (and should) turn off battle animations. Its hilarious just how generally worthless they are.
I didn’t believe it either (even moreso as I seldom check out kotaku). It’s rule 34 for games.
The multiplayer was anything but. After all what would you play in 1996/1997? There was Quake, Duke Nukem 3D already looked outdated (together with all pre-3D games, gameplay aside) and while Dark Forces II was a great game Goldeneye easily had greater appeal. Half Life (late '98) was still far away.
(Hexen II? Powerslave? Redneck Rampage? Turok? Nah.)
Mario Kart.
We could only play Mario Kart 64 for so long, man! Goldeneye was a nice game to swap in for a while.
Oh wow, this makes me glad I didn’t try playing it much past the first couple fights before I got distracted by something.
I’d still say Unlimited SaGa is worse. Rather difficult in all the wrong ways and the mechanics are incredibly opaque. Maybe it’s a decent game after you’ve memorized whatever thousand page guide happens to explain all the mechanics, but till then it’s awful. A friend of mine bought it new and within a week we had both given up on it and wound up microwaving the disc.
Dungeon navigation is this boring point and click affair that looks like an automap from any other game. I want to say you had a limited number of moves, but I haven’t played it since shortly after it came out, though I briefly flirted giving it a second chance last summer.
As an aside, are there any SaGa games that don’t devolve into sloppy guide dammit affairs? SaGa Frontier 2 was really interesting till the endgame came out of nowhere.
I didn’t say never play it, just that the hype it got was totally disproportionate to its value. It wasn’t Mario64, Smash Bros, or Ocarina. It was just another run-of-the-mill tally in the N64’s library. You don’t see games like Chameleon Twist being worshiped, even though their quality and fun-factor outstripped Goldeneye pretty hard.
You know, I would mostly agree with Hades, except for that I think Mario Kart 64 was terrible. I never played the handheld iterations of the Wii Mario Kart…but, between the ones I’ve played (SNES, N64, and Gamecube), the N64 version was seriously…just, bad. Now, if he meant the SNES version, then okay. 
Where value is a subjective matter, I suppose?
I honestly didn’t think Eternal Poison was that bad. It wasn’t any great gem, but it was a pleasant enough game to play, I can’t imagine someone not having played a much worse one before. I though the story and characters were… decent at least, and I liked the voice acting.
Okay… yeah, Ashley’s flat monotone got on my nerves, and hearing Retica try and sound menacing was somewhat funny, but in Retica’s case it may be precisely the intention. There were some awesome ones though, Thage and Ranunculus had some great VAs and Duphaston was the pure essence of shady scheming upper-class twit (Try to listen to him laughing and not feel the urge to shove his head into a toilet. C’mon, I dare you).
Though yeah, the one-cutscene-per-action thing was retarded. I disabled it in like the second battle and played the rest of the game with the minimum FFT-style effects. I can’t imagine how frustratingly slow the game could be actually playing it in its entirety with that activated.
As for worst game…
Well, I played E.T., but that seems sort of cheating. There are boatloads of old school games and movie tie-ins that blow ass, but I guess I should mention a game that had chances of NOT blowing, yet did anyhow…
Probably Rouge Galaxy for the less-enjoyable game I’ve played somewhat recently. Probably because it’s neither good NOR bad. It’s… It’s like they took the distilled, pure form of “Generic RPG” and made it into matter. There is not an original, above-average element in the entire thing, or a horrible, all-time-low feature in it either. It’s so unbelievably mediocre in every aspect I can neither like it nor hate it, just stare somewhat bewildered at the disk and wonder how a game can be so clearly enthusiastically-produced yet have not a single feature making it a worthwhile or at least memorable experience. I mean, at least Legend of Dragoon netted me a few jokes worth regarding abysmal translations, I got absolutely NOTHING from this game.