I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Dragon’s Dogma 2. A lot of time is spent simply finding the quests and only the Sphynx ones are actually fun. Even the MQ is a shitty mess that leaves you more confused than you were when the game started, even when doing all the extra stuff needed to see the “true” ending.
The combat is infuriating because it pretty much never stops the moment you leave a city (and even in a city, large monsters can show up randomly and fuck you over like a gryphon randomly picking you up and taking you across the whole damn map to its nest) and no matter tour weapon or level, you never really feel like you get any stronger. It takes forever to kill even basic trash mobs unless you’re a Thief using instant kill moves. Your pawns don’t help much as their AI regressed from DD1, too.
For example, you and your pawns get moves that require team work, like a fighter can throw you up a ledge that’s too high to jump or a mage can give you levitation; but they have to choose to initiate these, you can’t ask, and even when they say something like seeing a chest that’s one of those moves away, they never fucking offer to use them.
It also wastes time like a motherfucker. Lot’s of waiting for quests to progress after random time periods, hella times where control is taken from you without warning like doing celebration animations after killing a dude or NPCs with absolutely fuck all importance initiate dialogue with you while traveling along in the middle of nowhere to sell their services as a pawn, getting fucked over by random monsters like the gryphon situation mentioned above, and more.
The most infurating thing about it is that DD1 wasn’t this bad; it had some rough edges and climbing on big enemies was janky, but it wasn’t an utterly annoying piece of shit with barely anything of substance behind it.
When I got to the doomed world where there was a timer, I dropped that game like a rock. I hate forced timers when I’m trying to have fun and explore.
Also, those goddamn harpies that would snatch you up in their talons and throw you off a cliff… They killed my entire party and the difficulty of it all felt insanely cruel.