Worst Games of the Decade (2001-2010)
I've played a lot of games over the years. Some excellent. Some...not so much. This is a list devoted to the worst games I played during the decade stretching from 2001 to 2010. Still a work in progress, folks!
List items
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Not a bad game from a technical sense, but with a story based on time travel and a plot that warps the timeline to the point where the events of the original Valkyrie Profile (on of my all-time favorites) are written out of existence, this one really hurt.
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A game that is nothing but unfulfilled potential, from its Xenogears-inspired battle system to a tale of adventurers out to destroy the world. Only the combat becomes completely unbalanced after about four hours of play and the plot is beset with cliche after cliche and characters that never grow to be truly likable in any sense.
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Capcom at their laziest. After cancelling the 3D fighting game Capcom Fighting All-Stars, they went back to the drawing board and gave us this. A bland crossover that reuses ancient sprite animations yet again and no sense of cohesion or passion anywhere in the product.
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Oh god. Take an excellent game, remove the enjoyable atmosphere and gameplay, insert cocaine-addled pop-princess power and overload it with inane actions seemingly meant to drive anyone gunning for 100% completion stark raving mad, and you end up with this piece of trash. There are few games that I have played that were as utterly soul-crushing as this.
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The first Xenosaga introduced an interesting cast of characters in an intriguing universe and a plot that felt self-contained while leaving plenty of doors wide open for the planned sequels. This second episode, however, does almost everything it can to squander the first game's potential. A needlessly rebuilt combat system, a much more poorly paced plot, a generic Space Pope villain, and sidequests meant to do nothing more than pad out an already shamefully short game. (Two PS2 discs long, and yet disc one is only ten hours.)
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Playing this, I just got the sense that the developers didn't really care anymore. They threw every character the series had ever seen onto the roster, wrote an incomprehensibly lazy story involving a magic pyramid and defeating Blaze somehow being the keys to stopping Armageddon, a terrible fatality system, bad graphics, and issues that plagued the combat system since Deadly Alliance were still present. I'm glad that they got back on track with the 2011 Mortal Kombat, but Armageddon was a low point if there ever was one.
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Wow. Okay, so I've played all of the games on this list to one extent or another, but few of them were as agonizing as Heavenly Guardian. Imagine someone wanted to make a modern Pocky & Rocky game with different characters, and then did so with horrid controls, hellish enemy spawn patterns, and SNES-era graphics. I would love a new Pocky & Rocky game, but this is a horrid substitute.
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The worst part about Yoshi's Island was the inevitability of hearing Baby Mario's crying almost constantly. Now imagine a game where all you do is babysit him for as long as you possibly can. You have one stage in which you have to guide the baby safely from the air to the ground, and then the rest of the game is Yoshi traveling straight ahead with Baby Mario on his back. And you keep Yoshi walking for as long as you possibly can by drawing cloud bridges and barriers with the stylus. And Baby Mario won't shut up. Ugh.
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