My first playthrough of Mass Effect I had no idea there was a second level of my ship. I totally missed all of the crew member backstory dialogue and relationship building, which is pretty essential to the game… the second playthrough was much better once I found the elevator!!
That seems kind of ridiculous that they technically make it all optional.
Storytime: It’s 1997, I play a game that my uncle shows me on his Playstation 1. There’s tons of reading and a weird fighting system but it seems really awesome and has some amazing FMV scenes. He tells me I’m too young to play it and won’t let me borrow it to keep playing… So I go to blockbuster and rent it for a few days.
I remember the back of the instruction booklet showing off one of those memory cards and saying “try beating the game without one” which is exactly what I tried to do, because I didn’t have a memory card! Then my mum turned the game off when I was at school one day and we had to take the game back to blockbuster after a couple of days. Damn I lost all my progress!
ADAMANT that I would play this game I got my own copy after swapping for it at my local game store and got my own memory card. Finally I could save my game and not worry about losing my progress. The game continues to challenge me a ton and I don’t really understand how the systems work but I’m 10 years old and having fun so who cares.
I figure out that I can buy grenades from the shops and I use that as my main attack for awhile… at least until I get to the big city with the gun on it. Buying and using healing items is such a pain all the time though but thankfully money isn’t hard to get.
Fast forward further into the story and one of my characters has to go one on one with another dude, this is like that other fight with the guy and his dog when I didn’t have 3 characters that could throw grenades and heal! I can’t beat this dude with the gun on his arm with just 1 guy!
… Then after failing over and over again, I finally figure out what putting “Restore” on his weapon does… then I figure out what putting “Fire” on it does…
Suddenly the FF7 materia system clicks into place in my brain and about 15 hours after the tutorial teaching you how to do it I figure out how to play the game.
Still my number 1 game of all time to this day. And I never forgot how much trouble Dyne gave me that first time playing through the game.
tl;dr I didn’t understand how the FF7 materia system worked until about 15~ hours into the game and was using grenades and potions for all fighting and healing for a loooong time.
You beat the materia keeper without using materia!?
Materia Keeper is further into the game after Nibelheim. Dyne is after you go to Golden Saucer for the first time and get sent to the prison at the bottom of it in the desert.
About 50 hours into xenoblade chronicles 3 I realized I could pick character order when doing chain attacks. Up to that point I had been going left to right every time.
I went from doing 200k damage per chain attack to 17 mil lol
I’m 50 hours in, choose my character order and still getting like 500k. What’s your secret?
Ngl it’s been a long time but a mixture of grinding like hell and maxing out damage related stones for pretty much everyone
But I love that game an abnormal amount so I wouldnt recommend that, 500k is more than enough damage for anything that isn’t post-game
I was doing the same thing with driver combos back in XC2
In Breath of the Wild, I never learned how to cook in the starting area. I completely bypassed the intended path up to the cold area and somehow climbed up the other side, and then just froze my ass off while eating a bunch of apples. I made it out of the starting area and I think I beat two of the divine beasts before I finally looked up how to cook. I knew the game had cooking, but I thought there would be some kind of cooking menu when you walk up to a cooking pot, I didn’t realize you had to just hold items and then drop them in.
Doing the hermit’s cooking tutorial fully actually makes that Great Plateau mountain even easier, because not only you’d learn how cooking works but he’d also give you the warm doublet right away.
Most of the mountain (all? except maybe a small area around the summit) is only level 1-cold, so the doublet is enough even without cooking.
YES! This is actually how I finally learned how to cook. There was another cold area I was trying to get into, and looked up where to get warm clothing, and it said something like “You should already have the warm doublet from completing the hermit’s cooking tutorial.” and I was like “the what?”
I don’t know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren’t easily resettable. I’m so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played regarding skill progression is Oblivion.
Honestly, that game’s levelling is completely busted. Basically your class has a couple major and minor skills. You gain skill levels automatically by using them, and when you got enough levels in your class skills, you are supposed to rest and gain a character level.
Almost everything in Oblivion is levelled to match your character’s level. Gaining a level only serves three purposes : gaining a very small amount of health, gaining a few points in two stats depending on which skills you’ve used … And most of all spawning more, stronger enemies.
Lots of skills in Oblivion are not directly (or absolutely not at all) combat-related. Lots of default classes come with quite a few of them as major or minor skills. And those that don’t come with several damage-related and several defence-related skills.
Progressing in non-combat skills, or in too many at once in a “master of none” fashion, will make your game impossible. “Playing well” requires knowing and exploiting this by blocking your level up until you’ve maxed the right skill. Or even having some of your favourite skills not class skills at all.
This is really not my idea of fun character progression.
And you can make Acrobatics a class skill for super fuck you hard mode. I didn’t know this as a 13 year old playing Oblivion, and I thought “levels good” and wondered why I couldn’t get into the game for years until I learned about this little “quirk” of the leveling system.
Oh yeah, acrobatics and athletics, the two skills that go up every time you jump and run. Good ways to fuck your progression both.
Also the social skills, Mercantile and Speechcraft.
I got through all of Breath of the Wild without cooking anything. I knew the feature was there, but I don’t remember ever being taught how to use it and ultimately decided I’d just armour my way around it.
Okay… this is impressive
Lol, I managed to get off the starting island without cooking or coldproof armor. I escorted a torch up to the shrine and found out twenty hours after that you’re supposed to cook a coldproof meal to get the clothes that protect you.
Turns out in Elden Ring, you’re supposed to go left when you leave the initial starting area so you can pick up the ability of teleportation to bonfires.
Well, imagine my surprise learning that from friends 10 play hours later after going right and opening up a teleporting treasure chest to some crystal cave…
that’s wild that it doesn’t just give you the bonfire teleportation when you reach any bonfire. didn’t realize it had to be that bonfire in particular
Considering the design philosophy of Elden Ring, you were probably supposed to do that rather than going left.
I never got past the first boss on the horse.
Somewhat hilariously, that boss is supposed to teach you a key lesson of Elden Ring’s design and gameplay philosophy:
- Not everything is meant to be beaten immediately, sometimes you should skip things that are too strong and come back later.
I just beat BOTW for the first time and never figured out what to do with Korok Seeds. Missed out on the extra weapon/shield inventory slots the whole game!
Black & White
It has a mechanic where you bless a stone, then throw it across the map, and you get to build and influence an area around the rock. Basically it is the only sane way to expand.
I did not know. I spent painstaking hours slowly growing my village trying to get its area of influence to spread into where I needed to go.
You can also throw that annoying immortal guy who somehow allows you to use your powers around wherever he is
Oh man, it’s time to give this game a replay one of these days.
Let’s go man. Can’t wait to get stuck at that tree puzzle again.
Oh my god I never learnt this! That would’ve made the final level so much easier
I may have misunderstood, though. This is my vague memory of a friend trying to explain to me how I was supposed to have played the game after I gave up and uninstalled it long ago.
If you use your godhand to place a boulder in the midst of one of the villages worshiping you, the villagers will start praying and dancing and chanting and whatnot around the boulder. After a long enough time with the villagers charging the bolder, it would radiate with your divine presence. At this point, it is a ready “artifact”.
Artifacts don’t expand you influence zone directly, but they do a really good job of getting non-believer villagers to start worshiping you, which does extend your influence in a major way.
Ahh, thank you!
I played through all of mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.
To be fair, that game really isn’t about shooting or even taking out enemies. Taking their gun only slows you down!
I should go play that again. It’s got a great atmosphere (and soundtrack)
Doesn’t Mirrors Edge have a forced tutorial at the beginning and it literally requires you to pick up a gun at some point? 🤔
This is the right way to play the game, IMO. There’s even an achievement for it.
Well shoot, apparently it me too.
I played through all of Tears of the Kingdom without making a hover bike.
My first time through Final Fantasy 8, I was a bit too young to grasp all the concepts. I missed the memo on the fact that you had to craft gear based on finding the weapon magazines so I ended up playing through the whole game with everyone using their base weapons.
When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren’t the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie’s portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody’s materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.
I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because “I’ve played this game before, I know how it works.” I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn’t until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that’s when all the systems fell fully into place: you’re supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.
Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there’s a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.
- AnarchoYeasty ( @AnarchoYeasty@beehaw.org ) 6•1 year ago
Hah well today I learned. It’s recently occurred to me that I never beat any video games growing up because I didn’t read the instructions or learn how to play. FF7 is one of those games that I haven’t ever eaten even though I really really liked the game. Never even considered that you should have a trio of healer mage and fighter even though it makes total sense.
When I played the original AoE2 I was completely unaware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different units. I just build whatever I found to be coolest and wondered why I struggled so much.
Only when I bought the Definitive Edition much later I looked that up.
For my defense, I was ten back then.
Who wanted soldiers when elephants and catapults were so much cooler? Ooo flaming archers!
When I was younger I got stuck about 60 percent of the way through FF7. My cousin was over and I knew they had beaten it so I asked for help… They checked my gear and saw that I was still completely in the gear you start the game with :^)