Are there any games that you keep trying to play and it just NEVER works out?

maybe its a long game that you burn out on or whenever you try to play it something else comes up and you lose interest again.

ive tried to restart and continue Xenoblade Chronicles so many times and it just cant keep my interest for long and i have yet to finish it. The same goes for Chrono Cross, which i recently restarted, and im starting to think its not going to hold my focus for that long again.

The Secret of Mana. I've attempted that game well over a dozen times in the last twenty years, and I've always hated it. What a bland, lifeless world. I've since given up trying to discover what other people like about that one; I'm fairly convinced it's just a nostalgia thing at this point.

I liked Legend a whooooole bunch, though.

I've been working my way through Xenoblade Chronicles bit by bit for a couple of years now. I like the world and the mechanics but the story and characters dont interest me at all. It doesnt help that when you get to Mechonis the game gets real tedious. I'll see it through to the end though, i'm in too deep at this point. I also really liked Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Persona 5 currently. I see why it's popular, but none of it is resonating with me. The writing, characters, play mechanics, none of it is enjoyable to me.

I SLOGGED through 20 hours of Xenoblade Chronicles until I realized "hey, I don't like this game."

20 hours is enough to make that decision, yeah?

Restarted Far Cry 4, 4 times. Make it around one or two hours in stop playing, same thing happened with Watch Dogs for me. I have come to accept that i will never finish nor go back to those games.

No man, 60 hours is where it starts to get really good!

Those arguments are always insane to me. A great game can afford to have a not so great first hour or two, but anything more than that and it's just not worth it. There are too many games out there to waste time on a long crappy build up. Maybe it wasn't true in the like the N64 era when there was one game released every two months, but these days there are tons of amazing games on every platform and more coming out every day.

20 hours is a huge amount of time to spend on something you don't enjoy. That's like 2 weeks of game time for me (and those are two good weeks) and I just don't have that time in my life.

As for OPs question, my answer is Xenogears. By all rights I should love that game, and I do enjoy it, but every time I start it I just fall off for whatever reason. The pacing or something, I don't know. I keep meaning to go back, but it's SO long.

I have also been playing Darksiders off and on for like 5 years now. Every year or so I'll play a couple hours and then put it down. Not starting over, just picking up where I left off, even though I lost the plot long ago. Not sure why. I do like that game I guess I just don't love it?

Total War games (cool in concept but just not all that appealing on the tactical level), Far Cry until recently but Blood Dragon/Horizon sort of led me in slowly so I was able to beat 4 (don't really have any desire to play another Far Cry game but that was still a good experience overall).

Alpha Centauri - me is two dum :(

Vampire the masquerade bloodlines. I've played up to getting to the second city so many times. Every time I take a break there and don't pick it up until a couple of years later.

@bigsocrates: It was just a weird experience because 95% of the time, I like the things I also recognize are good.

I recognize Xenoblade Chronicles is a good, well made video game(or at least it's certainly not a BAD video game by any means)....but the gameplay, story, and characters left me almost lifelessly playing that thing for so long WAITING for myself to like it. So I just...kinda quietly put it down and was like "mkay. I tried. No hard feelings, xenoblade."

I've probably tried Half-Life 2 like four different times. I just think the pacing is really bad.

Any Nintendo property - because their controllers seem to be designed for use by crustations.

Have you tried the Switch pro controller? It's fantastic for a Nintendo controller. It's a good controller over all but for a Nintendo controller it's just the best.

Of course it's basically just an Xbox One controller with a few tweaks, but I love the Xbox One controller, so, you know, no problem there.

Oh N64 controller. People try to defend you but...you were very innovative and kind of bad. And the Wiimote was terrible for playing games I actually wanted to play.

Most JRPGs. With a few exceptions where battle/gameplay systems really changes things up the rinse repeat of grinding for levels/gold, going to a new area to speak with every NPC and buy better equipment and then go to the dungeon to fight the boss gets tiring fast for me nowadays.. I was fine with that kind of repetition when I was younger but not really anymore. In some instances where the writing and story is especially good I might try to stick through to the end but most often not.

Bayonetta-great gameplay but it's hard for me to get into games where I have zero investment in the world, characters or story. I've been playing it for a few months in very small bursts.

Bloodborne-its really good and plays better than the other souls games I've played. My problem with it is that souls games often feel like work to me so I need to be in a certain mood.

I started new vegas 4 times before i managed to get past the first few hours. I even bought it on PS3 & PC :D

FF6. People keep praising it so I haven't given up on it yet, but I've started it at least 5 times. Picked it up in the Steam sale in the hopes that I'll actually finish it on a platform where I can throw up a podcast in the background easily. Maybe it gets good after the opera scene, I dunno.

An entire genre: racing/driving. I love the idea of driving games. They look like relaxing fun. Any time I try to play one - and I've tried quite a few of the "best" - I just get tired of it almost immediately. I drive in real life all the time and I don't much enjoy it then either. Losing a race due to one stupid mistake in the final lap is not my idea of fun either.

I also had many, many false starts with Metal Gear Solid. I didn't understand stealth game play for a long time since I wasn't playing very many games during its heyday. I remedied that a few years back though and now they're some of my favorite games. MGS3 is possibly in my top ten.

Anyone having trouble with Xenoblade Chronicles: the game gets good about 50 hours in. Trust me. ;-D

Clear Sky. Tried a couple of times to catch the Stalker bug again but it ain't working.

I can feel this. I recently finished Bayonetta again, and while I loved how it played, I found myself annoyed with the amount of pomp and gimmicky interludes (motorcycle level and Space Harrier). I was skipping the story because I just wanted to play the damn game.

That's because the pacing is pretty bad. Half-Life 1 is one of my favorite games of all time and I didn't enjoy HL2 anywhere near as much as the original. It has plenty of top-tier gaming moments, but there's so many underwhelming sequences peppering the game with what seems like almost experimental gameplay and level design in between. Some people actually LIKE the airboat level for whatever reason. It's weird levels like that which pop up out of nowhere and seem to almost exclusively exist to drag out whatever new mechanic they've introduced that sometimes are never seen again. Ditto for the car levels and a few of the overly long physics puzzle based sections.

Horizon Zero Dawn. Just can't gel with it for some reason.

Monster Hunter. Not sure it's that great solo.

Although each new entry I play gets its hooks into me a little deeper. I think MHW is where it will finally click for me

Dragon's Dogma. Gotten through the Griffin fight 3-4 times and just dropped it shortly thereafter each time.

@fredchuckdave said:

Yep, I always get jazzed for these but I never make it past a night or two. Happened with the first one I played, Medieval. (Hey I'm not into Shogun, but I love knights and stuff, this is one for me!) Happened with Rome (I'm a huge Latin nerd from high school, this will be perfect for me!) Happened with Warhammer (I've always wanted to play the tabletop version, this will be so much cheaper!)

Nope, nope, and nope.

Dishonored 2, made it past Karnaca 4 times periodically starting again since it's release and each time I lose interest. The game just doesn't feel as tight as the first one, the later game might improve the level design a lot but I just can't jive with the how D2 feels. The generally poor technical side of the game also doesn't help.

Doom 2016. What's wrong with me?!

@mylifeforaiur: the gameplay is fantastic. It's just everything else that kinda sucks. The writing is really bad and they're constantly shoving how "sexy" she is down your throat even though she isn't attractive. Idk if that makes the game better or worse. She just looks goofy when she's spreading out on all fours on the ground during a fight and not actually sexy at all. It's such a weird game.

Dragon Quest 8 I've restarted several times, and I've always enjoyed it. But it just ends up being overshadowed by something else in my life before I finish it. That said, I haven't quite been able to get into any long RPGs like I used to for the past couple (many) years. Don't make the time or investment to just sit down and do it when I have so much other shit.

Bioshock infinite

Too much of a grind fest, finished most of the game but got stuck on this stupid boat fight where you have to stop the bad guys from destroying the portal or whatever and you have to shoot down those blimps. Tried it like 30 times and just gave up, such an overrated game and I love bioshock 1 and 2

@guitargod: That's literally the last thing you do in that game. Well, right before 20 minutes of story exposition, anyway.

Games like Crusader Kings II. I come back after hearing all of these amazing stories from the game, but I always quit within an hour of installing. They are simply too dry for me.

That game's 20 hours is another game's 1 hour, but even then I would say that's enough.

The really strange thing is that the main thing that has been motivating me to keep playing that game is the music. After the music on Gaur Plain and Satorl Marsh at night I wanted to keep going to hear what themes the other areas had.

Im not a huge fan of Secret of Mana either, but if you can somehow find a way to play Seiken Densetsu 3 (Secret of Mana 2) I would try that.

Not only is it more interesting than SoM but it also improves on a lot of SoM's issues. I have no idea why it didn't come out outside of Japan but it's a much better game than its predecessor.

Never beat the witcher 3 , thinking about getting the dlc to motivate me to finish. The game is still one my favorites, but i just burn out on open world games especially 100+ rpg ones.

Modern Fallout games. I tried several times to get into them but man I just couldn't. I forced myself through Fallout 3 but after several hours in Fallout 4 I had to call it quits.

I mean, it's been a few years since my last attempt, but I've never managed to get anywhere in Morrowind in the numerous times I've tried. At this point, I imagine if I ever installed a bunch of mods to make it look better and then carved out a chunk of time I could probably actually make some headway. I'm just not sure if it would be worth the effort.

I can never muster the attention for multiplayer shooters. I'd love to be able to get into a Rainbow Six: Siege or a Battle-grounds/front/field, but I don't have years of FPS reflexes trained up and I hate learning map layouts. When I'm spending more time respawning than running around only to get sniped by someone I never saw, it's always like, "wait I could be doing something I actually enjoy."

I love the game but....

I played The Witcher 3 for four straight days for three or four hours...maybe 15 hours in total. Then I stopped playing, and when I try to re-start I get an hour in and I'm not hooked. The game looks great. I can see a lot of fun stuff is in there to see and experience; but, I just cannot restart it no matter how much I try.

Horizon Zero Dawn consistently loses me after about a half hour. I just hate the writing, it turns me off every time. Plus the gameplay doesn't make up for slogging through the over exposition. I have too many other games to play.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Just can't like that game at all.

This is why the only driving games I can get into these days are the Forza games with their rewind button. I have to force myself to not use it constantly as a crutch. Even still I usually hit a skill ceiling where I keep telling myself the only way I'm going to get better is to go out and get an actual driving wheel, but I can't justify the $200.

Diablo III, I suppose. Even after hating the original PC release I ended up picking up the PS3 version because people were saying it had fixed the major problems with the original. It hadn't.

There's a bit of the same thing with Shadow of Mordor, though in that case I wasn't sure if it just ran poorly on my PC because the controls felt like absolute garbage, and I had loved every previous Monolith game, so I bought the console version to give it another shot, and still didn't like it at all.

Yeah a lot of Paradox stuff requires an investment of concentration and learning through failure and repetition. I would recommend Stellaris though, its quite straight forward mechanically.

Witcher 2, since I've been spoiled by Witcher 3's gameplay improvements.

I've never lasted more than 5 hours with any GTA game.

Dishonored 2.

I loved the previous installment. However, the level design of this game didn't click with me.

Horizon Zero Dawn - Just really don't like it.

Life is Strange - Always start it, always stop 30 mins in. Wish I could stick with it.

Superhot - Same as above.

Bioshock 2 until recently. I literally had to power through it and push myself to go through each level. The story was eh, and some of the game play got frustrating. I finally beat it recently and will probably never touch it again. Now Fallout 4 is sitting there and I just can't get into it. I don't know if it's me or the game in general, but it just seems boring and not as fun as New Vegas.