The Wonderful 101 filters a lot of people with his camera and weapon switching mechanic

Mega man zero 2 because of Phoenix Magnion and the general stage design being huge filters

Xenoblade Chronicles and FF8

FF8 because drawing every individual spell from an enemy is one of the most inefficient way to grow your character. Spoony lied to you.

Xenoblade Chronicles because the early game promotes the idea that break > topple is the fundamental battle mechanic when in reality it's merely one of many tool used to stun enemies and keep their powerful attacks at bay.

@ulyssesgouge hard no to ff8 because that game is notoriously, extremely trivial to break in half whether you're drawing magic or using triple triad winnings as junction fodder. tenfold if you're running from enemy encounters and preventing level gains

what i played of xbc was pretty mindless in any context unless i dropped my level in the def edition. i'd hesitate to place that anywhere as well

Can't argue with that. I'll say that the combat in the games are misunderstood but I definitely can't say that games are unbeatable without properly knowing the mechanics.

He played def edition :hedgewtf:

on killzone 2, absolutely agree and i would add that this is one of the only shooters which can be effectively played (even enhanced) without the use of a reticle. pretty metal.

Dandara might count because of the unconventional controls. I've seen a few people say it's bad because of the controls, even a friend I showed the game to.

@deltawdunn havent played myself but that's a convincing sales pitch to give it a go sometime. will keep in mind

@DeltaWDunn Dandara kicks ass. Feels satisfying once you get the rhythym of combat and movement down

@Snigglegros Indeed. Definitely one of the better Castleroids I've played, and super underrated.

Never understood why x6 is the one that gets all the hate. As though most other way more popular megaman games aren't full of ridiculous trial and error design while also being significantly more punishing on death.

@poefred i think above all else it's the nightmare effects and unforgiving stage design. x6 is a pretty tough game and it's also decently obtuse for what it is. i've come to realize over time that people also generally like to blame the game for their own failures

there's some pretty stupid shit in the game - the donuts are infamous and it's not possible to beat the entire game as base x due to some impossible jumps, but like, i don't care and i feel like base x is a novelty more so than an actual character you should consider playing the whole game as

iunno. it has some misguided design choices but it's still miles more fun to me than x4, which people love to suck off in spite of its totally cookie cutter design

I just always thought it was wild how I was thoroughly frustrated by X1,2 and 3. 5 was tedious going for 100%. But 6 is the only one I didn't have ANY trouble with and was the only one I played with no guide. I became one of those people who play the game with unarmored X for fun. Never understood Mega Man fans, feels like they draw the line in the sand of what's a bad game completely arbitrarily. Like every single time I find myself enjoying a MM game I go online to see it's one of the ones that gets bad to mid at best reception. X4 being like, the one exception to that but I don't really remember anything about it beyond it having the best presentation.

Thing with X6 is that even once you get good at it, it doesn't become boring, its level design is actively engaging still. Whereas in stuff like x1 once I got good it just went from frustrating to mind numbingly boring. I'll take fighting 5 doughnuts in different scenarios over anything in the rest of the series, it's satisfying to line up just right and kill them instantly.

@poefred i'll give x6's level design this over anything else: it's insanely speedrun-friendly. i also don't really mind the donuts too much because zero can turn them into dust in a matter of seconds. i also dig stages like infinite mijinion where your forward progress gets halted often enough, but you're able to destroy the walls in an instant if you know what to do

similarly, i found the nightmare effects pretty clever. one that pissed a friend of mine off especially hard was the blizzard wolfang stage with those entities that follow you around. it's cool being able to just negate the entire effect by keeping a shield behind you. but i think because it's just a frustrating premise, most people aren't really interested in giving it a chance

if there's one thing that kills x5 for me, it's how much autoscrolling is in that game

@poefred can I ask what about X1 frustrated you cuz i thought it was pretty easy for the most part (also the best one ofc)

@NOWITSREYNTIME17 My first playthrough I found all the levels extremely easy but was tired of having to replay them because I was bodied by a boss jumping all over the place. I'm not usually one to complain about lives being archaic, I think they're actually a good thing in many cases. But the way they're done in MM specifically is a pain imo. That and a few movement related things I didn't know about at the time made the vertical climb in one of the final levels feel near impossible.

But I also don't like to hold grudges on stuff like that, playing it now I find the whole game a bit too easy. My take a couple years ago was that it was just kinda dull once the bosses stop being hard to you. But that was after revisiting it after playing through all 8 X games back to back. Could be burnout talking there. Now that it's been a while I really should give it another go or even try some challenge runs.

Yeah you should, I only played up to X5 but it was far and away the best imo

How come is the OG System Shock not here? It's like the ultimate filterer with many people that complain about the controls having "aged poorly" when said "airplane" controls are perfectly usable, if difficult to grapple with at first.