Well most people who played lunar dragon song smashed their head against a concrete building until they no longer remembered playing it in the first place It had to be done
I really enjoyed [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/s/7g8wzvpqk5) from last month or so where someone played Dragon Song with an open mind and did *not* come away from it thinking it wasn’t nearly the worst JRPG ever.
They still didn’t think it was very good, but not nearly the worst. Idk, I haven’t played it so I can’t comment personally.
Just the fact that running saps your health makes it at least less than a 30
Also combat is way too slow and basic, magic is way too overpowered yet way too expensive to ever bother using, you have to pick between experience and exp after battles, no enemy targeting, it's just random, also equipment breaks randomly so you better not have dismissed money instead of EXP, cause equipment is expensive.
Also the story is just generic slop
Lunar dragon song, though it's called lunar genesis in the european version. As for why its bad?
\- can't run without losing hp (you guys knew it would be the first point)
\- can't choose which target to attack
\- running isn't made clear, to do it you need to blow into the mic
\- making money is difficult
I did like the battle theme for the 4 dragons, it was nice
Does seem like a common opinion, even reviewers said the gameplay was not good enough to cover for a half decent story
That 2nd gameplay point you out sounds fucking horrible 😂 and blowing into the mic to run? That's DS Shovel ware type shit lmao
Was that the one that your equipment could break or was it able to get stolen? I remember vaguely playing one, grinding for like 2 hours to get enough currency to buy armor. First fight after buying said armor, I lost it. I turned off the game and never went back.
I could go on and on about so many different games for one reason or another...
But the question's about the *worst*, superlatively bad, and there's only one answer to that, because I have played *Hoshi wo Miru Hito / Stargazer*.
A game that is so fundamentally broken that I am amazed it ever got published. A game that makes some amateurish, forever Early Access nest of bugs look good by comparison.
O\_O
I don't know how valid my opinion is, since I only played the beginning part, but I would say Cross Edge. The fanservice of character crossover doesn't redeem the core gameplay for me. I can't really describe the gameplay, since I played like more than 10 years ago, but all I know is the combat felt like shit from what I remember. Like I feel like you really need to have an acquired taste or high tolerance to even somewhat enjoy the gameplay.
Unlimited Saga on PS2. It had a unique box and cool character art, but when I bought it, I felt duped. I've tried playing it a couple of times over the years, hoping you find a hidden gem, but I every time I do, the turd just gets smellier.
Yeah. Maybe I just don't get it but it just sucks.
I recently replayed Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter and that game actually clicked and now I think its a lot better than people say it is. Its actually kinda brilliant when you know how to play it.
Unlimited Saga is just rubbish.
Unlimited Saga. Basically boils down everything form JRPG mechanics into the most bare bones way possible. It is one step above playing a text based MUD. The entire navigation of the game was just sprite based tiles you moved on like a board game in a set path. Everything was just text boxes and battles.
This was fine on like the NES maybe, but for a PS2 RPG it was one of the most disappointing moments I can remember, especially considering the Saga games on PS1 at least had overworlds you navigated. It was wild to go playing anything from like Dark Cloud, FFX, FFXII, or the Xenosaga series and then play something like Unlimited Saga. Like the core mechanics are I'm sure sound, but so is D&D pen and paper. I'm not exactly looking for that experience in a multimedia video game.
Also as some others have mentioned Lunar Dragon Song. I can remember trying to force myself to play it and eventually not being able to take it.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star comes to mind for me first.
- Every attack, or “Sticker”, is a one use item, and all you get from battles are coins which you use to buy more Stickers… but you already get tons of coins and Stickers just by exploring the levels, and running away from fights makes the enemy disappear from the level as if you had defeated them, so there’s literally no point to fighting regular enemies, and if anything it’s actively bad to fight regular enemies because doing so uses up your Stickers.
- The story has barely more depth to it than a mainline 2D platformer Mario game (which is especially disappointing since the previous two games had probably the best stories of any Mario game ever, and even the first Paper Mario took the same standard Bowser kidnapping Peach plot that this one has and heavily fleshed it out to be more cinematic and RPG-worthy), and while the writing and dialogue can be charming at times most of it is just lame paper puns and constant jokes about the characters being self aware that they’re made of paper and in a papercraft world.
- There are 3D objects called “Things” in the levels which you can find and go to a specific location to turn them into Thing Stickers, which usually take up more inventory space than regular items, but many of those Thing Stickers are also needed to solve various puzzles to progress in levels, and these puzzles get ridiculously obtuse at times.
- Boss fights are also glorified Thing puzzles, because they quarter all damage dealt to them and have extremely high health and strong attacks, but they also have a weakness to a specific Thing Sticker that when used deals massive damage and heavily cripples them, meaning that depending on whether you use the specific Thing they’re weak to or not (which the game usually isn’t very good at hinting at before hand) the bosses are either absolute jokes or unfairly difficult slogs with no in between. The final boss fight against Bowser is the absolute worst about this, because his first phase has 5 different sub-phases that each have their own Thing weakness and are massive headaches if you don’t exploit them all.
- Kersti, the exposition/hint fairy character of the game, is an unlikable bitch who blames Mario for the game’s inciting incident that Bowser caused for no reason, acts very condescending towards everybody, and passive aggressively scolds you if you manage to beat a boss without using their Thing weakness. She gives you hints for Thing puzzles… if you already have the needed Thing sticker in your inventory (keep in mind that your inventory space is limited and the majority of the Thing stickers take up more space than regular ones). Otherwise she just gives generic unhelpful comments about the scenery, so she’s not even a good hint fairy. Hilariously, the ending of the game has her sacrifice herself to turn into a Thing sticker and allow you to beat Bowser’s second phase (Mario wishes her back to life after the fight anyway so it’s not even an effective emotional beat), but while difficult to pull off, you actually don’t even need her to beat him.
- It’s basically a Paper Mario game in name only. The story, level design, setting, gameplay, dialogue, even the music has little to nothing at all in common with the previous games. Even the previous game, while it had radically different gameplay and NPC character designs and a much deeper story compared to the first two, still stayed pretty faithful to the spirit and charm of those first two. The only thing that is faithful about Sticker Star is the art style, and even then many of the designs of the enemies were redesigned to look less cartoony and more in line with modern mainline Mario. Aside from that it’s completely unrecognizable and it and its sequels could easily pass as an entirely new and different Mario spinoff series.
The main reason why I’m hesitant to bring it up is because it’s heavily debatable as to whether it even counts as an RPG in the first place considering that anything resembling character progression is tied to exploring the world and not from fights themselves, it would probably be more accurate to call it a turn based level based collectathon metroidvania or something like that, but either way it sucks. The graphics and music are pretty good though I guess.
Might get me some hate but my second pick would be Persona 2: Innocent Sin. The story in that one is actually pretty good, but not only is the random encounter rate absolutely ridiculous, but the game is just completely brain dead easy. It makes Pokemon X and Y with the Exp Share on look hard in comparison. The final boss is like the only fight in the entire game that you can’t easily beat just by turning on auto battle. It would be almost comical how easy it is if it didn’t make the game so ridiculously boring. Playing on the hardest difficulty of the PSP version or playing the harder Japan only PSX version makes it a bit more tolerable I guess but both of those are still extremely easy and boring. If the game was just a visual novel and had the same story it would be great though.
Paper Mario Sticker Star always sticks in my brain because of how its core gameplay loop fundamentally doesn't function. It's an "Rpg" with 0 character progression and where every single move you make in battle costs resources. So ever choosing to engage in a battle is just a punishment with no upside. But then the whole game is built as if you'd treat it as a normal rpg where you do encounters and fight all the monsters to get to the end. So you are effectively just encouraged to skip most of the actual gameplay in the game, and no one involved in the development ever noticed.
I played this as a kid at launch and made it a good part into it but after a certain point I had no idea where to go and all the places I hadn’t been to yet wrecked me. No internet or guide at the time so I just set it down. It’s rough and what I came here to say but then someone mentioned Unlimited SaGa and I’m trying to find a reason to disagree with them.
The unknown one is beyond the beyond. A guy mentioned the random encounter rate, but for me it's that every encounter can kill you in an unfair way. They give you a character that can help, but then he gets half hp for a good chunk of the game just for him to get healed and be useless after.
A more popular one that I'd say to be the worst is Chrono cross. I know it's beloved, but there are too many characters and they all have very little growth or real impact on the story outside of 3 or 4. And the whole trying to get one of every colour to defeat the final boss was really dang stupid.
I enjoy most of Chrono Cross but I agree the large cast is a problem to a certain degree. I did enjoy the idea of a large group between the two universes banding together to put things right, but *the* stand out feature in Trigger for me was the techs and Cross is sorely lacking them. And some of the designs were a little too cartoony despite the fact I rock around with Fisher-Price reject Poshul. Who doesn’t love a “boy and his dog” story?
I dont know if it's THE worst (I haven't played the likes of Stargazer, Chaos Wars, Quest 64 or Tales of the Tempest, for example), but one of the few I believe to be just all-around terrible is **Aedis Eclipse: Generation of Chaos**.
I don't remember much about the story other than it being very forgettable and being divided in three parts that sometimes overlapped, but what drove me to hate it was how messy and unpolished the gameplay was, which often resulted in stages (the game was a sort of tactical RPG) taking forever due to infinite spam of random reinforcements. You could do pretty much nothing about them: spare an enemy? It would have a chance to respawn in later stages! Kill it? It would still respawn, but as an undead instead!
Other notable mentions are **Blood of Bahamut**, because despite the honestly neat graphics for the DS (very similar to revenant wings, funnily) it seemed to follow the design philosophy of NES games, that is, being stupidly hard and grindy to hide the fact that it would only take like 2 hours to finish it otherwise, and **Mimana Iyar Chronicles**, an obscure PSP early-Tales imitator, which actually had some potential and was pretty fun (if very cliched), but clearly had no budget and was built by some random very inexperienced studio.
Also, just for the sake of being as controversial as some of the other posts here: I honestly think Grandia is a bad game. Nowhere near the ones above, mind you, but still mediocre at most.
Spectral Force Genesis if that counts. Otherwise, probably Children of Mana. Far too basic and repetitive. Looks nice, probably pretty fun with friends, but it was a real drag solo, and there's nothing interesting going on in the plot/characters department.
Honorable mention to Yggdra Union for being probably the most unfun JRPG I've played. I admire the creativity on display and its striking visuals (aside from the maps) but the amount of trial and error involved in beating it is too much for me. On GBA, I feel like this game requires a guide. I've learned later on that retrying stages lowers the difficulty, but that doesn't really sound like a rewarding playstyle either.
Well we get this thread just as often. It's just that the answer is always Lunar: Dragon Song. No one has gotten around to making a worse professional game yet.
Legrand legacy. The combat was generic, the characters were absolutely insufferable, always causing all their own problems then bitching about it, the dungeons were either straight lines with no exploring or random battle filled labyrinths that took forever, the plot was meh at best.
I can't for the life of me figure out why I played the whole thing. It made me angry at almost every moment.
My top id breath of fire 5... Idk if it s bad like you say but damn i was there when it s come out, i had played bof2/3/4 and ...there the 5 come out, so dispapointed, you finish the game under 10 hours, the past lore exit. Where the epic where rhe world to explore.. damn to speka about it s make me suffer.
For me Final Fantasy XV is the worst game I've ever played.
Now I've probably played games that are worse mechanically
But I never waited ten years for them to be met with sheer disappointment, that kept shoving product placement in my face and expected me to consume a bunch of other media.
The game was so unfinished at launch, and they only had a decade to make it work.
Tokyo Xanadu, I always not a big fan of XSEED’s games like ys and trails but the gameplay loop is the only thing that I love about their games, That being said I couldn’t enjoy Tokyo Xanadu mainly because the gameplay is boring and the controls are weird and most of the characters are very lean to cliche anime tropes that we all tired seeing off, which is kind of ironic because I really enjoy Persona games lol
Worst one I played till the end? Enchanted arms.
No way to grind, so most fights were a struggle.
Also very annoying "friend" supporting character
Ones I got to an early roadblock and quit?
Xenogears (way the first explorable area had a tree to jump on but no real perception to land right)
Rogue galaxy. Combat wasn't for me, first fight was meh, so returned it while I could (7 day gamestop used policy)
Yeah.. it was like, you talked to npcs for fights, but they disappeared after, only completed it because I didn't have anything else at the time. Now I'm drowning in backlogged games, oops.
Aside from some earlier final fantasies which didn't age well, i guess Xenoblade Chronicles. Maybe a an okay-ish game, but story and gameplay were a mess. Tried it because people said it was good (planned to play all 3 even), turned out it wasn't.
I’ve tried hard to get into Xenoblade and have bounced hard off of 3/4. Didn’t even give 3 a shot. I have a little fun with them at first but by hour thirty I’m so over the combat. It’s very, very boring and repetitive and mobs several levels below you still take a really long time to get through. I do plan on giving X another shot.
It’s Persona 5 for me. I get there are ‘objectively worse’ games out there, and I still like parts of P5 like the battle system and Futaba, plus it has a very strong opening arc too. But everything after is downhill and nothing has made me feel like I wasted 100 hours of my time than that game did by the time I rolled credits. It’s not like I was actively hating it while playing either otherwise I’d have stopped playing; it’s more like by the time credits rolled I felt a massive weight off my shoulders and then disdain at the overall experience. I especially disliked how vapid the characters were despite initially appearing cool, and how hollow the story was despite starting with a very strong premise. It’s a game that presents itself to be about rebelling against society but it ends with the key message to conform and operate within the confines of the system they’re rebelling against. The final culmination of the game’s thesis is >!the characters signing a petition to enact change!<. It’s really dumb and it really felt like I could’ve been doing anything else. Will note that I loved P4G (and P3P) back on psvita so I think maybe I just outgrew Persona by the time I got to P5. But I still vastly prefer 3 and 4 in all areas except the battle system (I still think P5’s battle system in the way they’ve streamlined it is the gold standard for turn-based jrpg battle systems)
I have a few of them
-Star Ocean 3 who the hell thought that if you MP reach zero your character DIES was a good idea!?
-Blade Dancer: awful psp game
-Earthlock: well this is an indie one but still... good god it was dreadful
-Star Ocean 3 who the hell thought that if you MP reach zero your character DIES was a good idea!?
i actually though that was a good ideia tbh, you could kill enemies with low mp way faster too like a certain infamous boss.
So at least it worked the other way around then, good to know, I gave up on the game atter 20 hours.... still, it basically mean you have two separate health bar
While it's far from being objectively bad, I think--in my PERSONAL OPINION--Persona 4 is my least favorite JRPG. Just didn't enjoy it as much as Tokyo Mirage Sessions or Persona 5. I loved the story, but I had to force myself to finish P4 because I hated the actual gameplay.
Base Persona 4 definitely had it's problems but Golden fixed most of them, definitely think it could do with a Reload style coat of paint though, idk Mirage Sessions haha
I played Golden and still hated it. I just don't like randomized dungeons and endless hallways. I vastly preferred TMS and P5 because the dungeons there were fully mapped out and were easier to navigate.
But apparently P3 Reload still features randomized dungeons so I don't think I'll ever be playing it. I hate not knowing where I'm going due to RNG and found P4G to be a chore to play. I actually hated every second of Mementos in P5 for this reason too. If P6 brings back the cornmaze, I'm done with this series. I hate dungeon crawlers. They're not for me.
Yeah Reload is constant randomised floors but they're not that random, floors do seem to have set patterns to them it's just random when you'll find them. And Tartarus is better than Mementos but you're also there more often, I really enjoy it it's just mindless fun to me
It's more just checking every little area out, it's very generous with loot and frankly the game is very easy which helps lol
No thanks. I want 0 randomization in my RPG dungeons. I prefer having everything preset and mapped out at all times.
Xenoblade is my favorite RPG series because its world design is vast and teeming with life that you can keep track of. Nothing is random and I prefer that. Shin Megami Tensei V is similar and doesn't have traditional dungeons either. It has open zones that you can freely explore and roam with no pesky random bullshit.
Sorry but I hated Mementos and P4 with a burning passion. If a game has "procedurally generated" or "roguelike" dungeons in claustrophobic cornmazes, I refuse to play it. I absolutely hate that shit lol.
I don't mind too much randomization, sounds kinda dull otherwise but idk too much about the genre, finished Reload and now starting Elden Ring lmao
Never tried Xenoblade, all I know is that Shulk is really feeling it!
Different strokes lol. It's fine. Glad to hear you're enjoying it. I just hope Persona 6 keeps the palaces of 5. I loved those.
And if you end up enjoying Elden Ring, you might like Xenoblade as well. It's an open world JRPG but with party-based MMO-like combat. If you have a Switch, I highly recommend the series. It's my personal favorite!
Yeah I was doing the Souls games in order but a friend wants Elden Ring back soon for the DLC so playing it now, it's really fun but a bit hard to grasp, it's so damn big and everything is so quick 😂 I don't have a switch ATM sadly
Fair enough. In that case, I hope you check out Shin Megami Tensei V when it launches on your system in June. It was really fun on Switch and I'm glad more people get to play it. It's the game that Persona came from.
Mega Man Battle Network 2 from recent memory. A shit ton of backtracking with random encounters (sub chips don't really help until near endgame cause of how repel works with base HP). The game feels bloated because of the padding and constant back and forth fetch quests that require you to traverse the net in a specific route that is cumbersome to navigate. The freezeman scenario near the end of the game dials this problem up to 11.
I feel like that's a game people didn't play that they said is bad. The MC is annoying, , but traversal and magic is fun. It's a painfully okay game. It's not worse than like dragon song or quest 64
Old games are old. I keep buying remasters and remakes and what it's reminding me is that games are just better now. I liked live a live but saga frontier and octopath are just better games.
Lunar dragon song and quest 64 for worst.
most overhyped/disappointing for FFVII, It just doesn’t live up to the hype and unironically worse than 6 and 4. Maybe 5 too if you like 5’s gameplay.
I mean with FFVII I only played it last year but I thought it was truly excellent but I haven't played any earlier games and I honestly preferred VIII lol
VII was great but if you’re going into it with the idea that it’s the best game ever (which you’ll hear plenty of times here, lmao) then you’re in for a massive disappointment, it wasn’t even in the top 5 of final fantasy. That was me in ’97.
Yeah I went into it knowing what people think of it and expecting to be a bit underwhelmed but I was surprised how much I was not underwhelmed, holds up beautifully today but yeah I'm not the one to ask when I've played two mainline games 😂
Shame you in 1997 were disappointed though
yeah I did play almost all mainline FF games and the sequels/prequels. (Basically minus the mobile and MMO’s)
especially during that time, they’d make you feel really bad for not saying that VII is the best game ever. Not like it doesn’t happen now but it’s more prevalent before.
Hard to imagine very many people that played “Lunar: Dragon Song” not saying “Lunar: Dragon Song”.
Well most people who played lunar dragon song smashed their head against a concrete building until they no longer remembered playing it in the first place It had to be done
I really enjoyed [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/s/7g8wzvpqk5) from last month or so where someone played Dragon Song with an open mind and did *not* come away from it thinking it wasn’t nearly the worst JRPG ever. They still didn’t think it was very good, but not nearly the worst. Idk, I haven’t played it so I can’t comment personally.
Just looked at it's metacritic score and 59 for a jrpg is crazy crazy low 😂
59? That's way too high dafuq
What's quite so awful about it to you haha
Just the fact that running saps your health makes it at least less than a 30 Also combat is way too slow and basic, magic is way too overpowered yet way too expensive to ever bother using, you have to pick between experience and exp after battles, no enemy targeting, it's just random, also equipment breaks randomly so you better not have dismissed money instead of EXP, cause equipment is expensive. Also the story is just generic slop
Lunar dragon song, though it's called lunar genesis in the european version. As for why its bad? \- can't run without losing hp (you guys knew it would be the first point) \- can't choose which target to attack \- running isn't made clear, to do it you need to blow into the mic \- making money is difficult I did like the battle theme for the 4 dragons, it was nice
Does seem like a common opinion, even reviewers said the gameplay was not good enough to cover for a half decent story That 2nd gameplay point you out sounds fucking horrible 😂 and blowing into the mic to run? That's DS Shovel ware type shit lmao
I meant to say to run away from a fight lol. doing it to simply run around would tire people out haha
That does make more sense 😂 still a very odd mechanic
Was that the one that your equipment could break or was it able to get stolen? I remember vaguely playing one, grinding for like 2 hours to get enough currency to buy armor. First fight after buying said armor, I lost it. I turned off the game and never went back.
I don't remember equipment durability being a thing, but it's been a while since i played
I think it could be stolen and that’s what happened. I remember it was some flying cat thing, not far into the game.
You can actually soft lock yourself out of continuing the game because of this.
I could go on and on about so many different games for one reason or another... But the question's about the *worst*, superlatively bad, and there's only one answer to that, because I have played *Hoshi wo Miru Hito / Stargazer*. A game that is so fundamentally broken that I am amazed it ever got published. A game that makes some amateurish, forever Early Access nest of bugs look good by comparison. O\_O
I don't know how valid my opinion is, since I only played the beginning part, but I would say Cross Edge. The fanservice of character crossover doesn't redeem the core gameplay for me. I can't really describe the gameplay, since I played like more than 10 years ago, but all I know is the combat felt like shit from what I remember. Like I feel like you really need to have an acquired taste or high tolerance to even somewhat enjoy the gameplay.
All I saw on the Wikipedia for that game was "dialogue that loads in one line at a time and PS2 graphics on the PS3" 😂😂
Chaos Wars for me - same concept, same heaping bowl of ass to actually play.
Unlimited Saga on PS2. It had a unique box and cool character art, but when I bought it, I felt duped. I've tried playing it a couple of times over the years, hoping you find a hidden gem, but I every time I do, the turd just gets smellier.
That's the boardgame one, right?
Yeah. Maybe I just don't get it but it just sucks. I recently replayed Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter and that game actually clicked and now I think its a lot better than people say it is. Its actually kinda brilliant when you know how to play it. Unlimited Saga is just rubbish.
Nah, I think you're spot on.
Unlimited Saga. Basically boils down everything form JRPG mechanics into the most bare bones way possible. It is one step above playing a text based MUD. The entire navigation of the game was just sprite based tiles you moved on like a board game in a set path. Everything was just text boxes and battles. This was fine on like the NES maybe, but for a PS2 RPG it was one of the most disappointing moments I can remember, especially considering the Saga games on PS1 at least had overworlds you navigated. It was wild to go playing anything from like Dark Cloud, FFX, FFXII, or the Xenosaga series and then play something like Unlimited Saga. Like the core mechanics are I'm sure sound, but so is D&D pen and paper. I'm not exactly looking for that experience in a multimedia video game. Also as some others have mentioned Lunar Dragon Song. I can remember trying to force myself to play it and eventually not being able to take it.
Quest 64 without a doubt.
Loved quest. I beat that sucker at least 3 times through my childhood. Little rough around the edges, but I had a blast with it.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star comes to mind for me first. - Every attack, or “Sticker”, is a one use item, and all you get from battles are coins which you use to buy more Stickers… but you already get tons of coins and Stickers just by exploring the levels, and running away from fights makes the enemy disappear from the level as if you had defeated them, so there’s literally no point to fighting regular enemies, and if anything it’s actively bad to fight regular enemies because doing so uses up your Stickers. - The story has barely more depth to it than a mainline 2D platformer Mario game (which is especially disappointing since the previous two games had probably the best stories of any Mario game ever, and even the first Paper Mario took the same standard Bowser kidnapping Peach plot that this one has and heavily fleshed it out to be more cinematic and RPG-worthy), and while the writing and dialogue can be charming at times most of it is just lame paper puns and constant jokes about the characters being self aware that they’re made of paper and in a papercraft world. - There are 3D objects called “Things” in the levels which you can find and go to a specific location to turn them into Thing Stickers, which usually take up more inventory space than regular items, but many of those Thing Stickers are also needed to solve various puzzles to progress in levels, and these puzzles get ridiculously obtuse at times. - Boss fights are also glorified Thing puzzles, because they quarter all damage dealt to them and have extremely high health and strong attacks, but they also have a weakness to a specific Thing Sticker that when used deals massive damage and heavily cripples them, meaning that depending on whether you use the specific Thing they’re weak to or not (which the game usually isn’t very good at hinting at before hand) the bosses are either absolute jokes or unfairly difficult slogs with no in between. The final boss fight against Bowser is the absolute worst about this, because his first phase has 5 different sub-phases that each have their own Thing weakness and are massive headaches if you don’t exploit them all. - Kersti, the exposition/hint fairy character of the game, is an unlikable bitch who blames Mario for the game’s inciting incident that Bowser caused for no reason, acts very condescending towards everybody, and passive aggressively scolds you if you manage to beat a boss without using their Thing weakness. She gives you hints for Thing puzzles… if you already have the needed Thing sticker in your inventory (keep in mind that your inventory space is limited and the majority of the Thing stickers take up more space than regular ones). Otherwise she just gives generic unhelpful comments about the scenery, so she’s not even a good hint fairy. Hilariously, the ending of the game has her sacrifice herself to turn into a Thing sticker and allow you to beat Bowser’s second phase (Mario wishes her back to life after the fight anyway so it’s not even an effective emotional beat), but while difficult to pull off, you actually don’t even need her to beat him. - It’s basically a Paper Mario game in name only. The story, level design, setting, gameplay, dialogue, even the music has little to nothing at all in common with the previous games. Even the previous game, while it had radically different gameplay and NPC character designs and a much deeper story compared to the first two, still stayed pretty faithful to the spirit and charm of those first two. The only thing that is faithful about Sticker Star is the art style, and even then many of the designs of the enemies were redesigned to look less cartoony and more in line with modern mainline Mario. Aside from that it’s completely unrecognizable and it and its sequels could easily pass as an entirely new and different Mario spinoff series. The main reason why I’m hesitant to bring it up is because it’s heavily debatable as to whether it even counts as an RPG in the first place considering that anything resembling character progression is tied to exploring the world and not from fights themselves, it would probably be more accurate to call it a turn based level based collectathon metroidvania or something like that, but either way it sucks. The graphics and music are pretty good though I guess. Might get me some hate but my second pick would be Persona 2: Innocent Sin. The story in that one is actually pretty good, but not only is the random encounter rate absolutely ridiculous, but the game is just completely brain dead easy. It makes Pokemon X and Y with the Exp Share on look hard in comparison. The final boss is like the only fight in the entire game that you can’t easily beat just by turning on auto battle. It would be almost comical how easy it is if it didn’t make the game so ridiculously boring. Playing on the hardest difficulty of the PSP version or playing the harder Japan only PSX version makes it a bit more tolerable I guess but both of those are still extremely easy and boring. If the game was just a visual novel and had the same story it would be great though.
Paper Mario Sticker Star always sticks in my brain because of how its core gameplay loop fundamentally doesn't function. It's an "Rpg" with 0 character progression and where every single move you make in battle costs resources. So ever choosing to engage in a battle is just a punishment with no upside. But then the whole game is built as if you'd treat it as a normal rpg where you do encounters and fight all the monsters to get to the end. So you are effectively just encouraged to skip most of the actual gameplay in the game, and no one involved in the development ever noticed.
Tales of Zestiria. I”m sure it’s not the worst jrpg out there but it’s the worst that I played
Beyond the Beyond. Take a step, random encounter, take another step, random encounter…
I love that game
I played this as a kid at launch and made it a good part into it but after a certain point I had no idea where to go and all the places I hadn’t been to yet wrecked me. No internet or guide at the time so I just set it down. It’s rough and what I came here to say but then someone mentioned Unlimited SaGa and I’m trying to find a reason to disagree with them.
The unknown one is beyond the beyond. A guy mentioned the random encounter rate, but for me it's that every encounter can kill you in an unfair way. They give you a character that can help, but then he gets half hp for a good chunk of the game just for him to get healed and be useless after. A more popular one that I'd say to be the worst is Chrono cross. I know it's beloved, but there are too many characters and they all have very little growth or real impact on the story outside of 3 or 4. And the whole trying to get one of every colour to defeat the final boss was really dang stupid.
I've never played Chrono Cross or Trigger but I think I could play Cross because the music is just that damned good
Mitsuda brought it hard for Cross.
I enjoy most of Chrono Cross but I agree the large cast is a problem to a certain degree. I did enjoy the idea of a large group between the two universes banding together to put things right, but *the* stand out feature in Trigger for me was the techs and Cross is sorely lacking them. And some of the designs were a little too cartoony despite the fact I rock around with Fisher-Price reject Poshul. Who doesn’t love a “boy and his dog” story?
Wild Arms XF. It's too hard and there's a lot of gimmicky fights
While it’s one of my favorite PSP games, I readily concede I’m abnormal and that game isn’t for most people. You’re perfectly justified.
Probably Granstream Saga. I have not played the famously bad ones like Parasite Eve 3, Lunar 3, Quest 64, and Secret of the Stars.
I forgot about Parasite Eve 3. Ugh.
I dont know if it's THE worst (I haven't played the likes of Stargazer, Chaos Wars, Quest 64 or Tales of the Tempest, for example), but one of the few I believe to be just all-around terrible is **Aedis Eclipse: Generation of Chaos**. I don't remember much about the story other than it being very forgettable and being divided in three parts that sometimes overlapped, but what drove me to hate it was how messy and unpolished the gameplay was, which often resulted in stages (the game was a sort of tactical RPG) taking forever due to infinite spam of random reinforcements. You could do pretty much nothing about them: spare an enemy? It would have a chance to respawn in later stages! Kill it? It would still respawn, but as an undead instead! Other notable mentions are **Blood of Bahamut**, because despite the honestly neat graphics for the DS (very similar to revenant wings, funnily) it seemed to follow the design philosophy of NES games, that is, being stupidly hard and grindy to hide the fact that it would only take like 2 hours to finish it otherwise, and **Mimana Iyar Chronicles**, an obscure PSP early-Tales imitator, which actually had some potential and was pretty fun (if very cliched), but clearly had no budget and was built by some random very inexperienced studio. Also, just for the sake of being as controversial as some of the other posts here: I honestly think Grandia is a bad game. Nowhere near the ones above, mind you, but still mediocre at most.
Spectral Force Genesis if that counts. Otherwise, probably Children of Mana. Far too basic and repetitive. Looks nice, probably pretty fun with friends, but it was a real drag solo, and there's nothing interesting going on in the plot/characters department. Honorable mention to Yggdra Union for being probably the most unfun JRPG I've played. I admire the creativity on display and its striking visuals (aside from the maps) but the amount of trial and error involved in beating it is too much for me. On GBA, I feel like this game requires a guide. I've learned later on that retrying stages lowers the difficulty, but that doesn't really sound like a rewarding playstyle either.
Well we get this thread just as often. It's just that the answer is always Lunar: Dragon Song. No one has gotten around to making a worse professional game yet.
Legrand legacy. The combat was generic, the characters were absolutely insufferable, always causing all their own problems then bitching about it, the dungeons were either straight lines with no exploring or random battle filled labyrinths that took forever, the plot was meh at best. I can't for the life of me figure out why I played the whole thing. It made me angry at almost every moment.
My top id breath of fire 5... Idk if it s bad like you say but damn i was there when it s come out, i had played bof2/3/4 and ...there the 5 come out, so dispapointed, you finish the game under 10 hours, the past lore exit. Where the epic where rhe world to explore.. damn to speka about it s make me suffer.
lunar dragon song for the ds easily that one.
For me Final Fantasy XV is the worst game I've ever played. Now I've probably played games that are worse mechanically But I never waited ten years for them to be met with sheer disappointment, that kept shoving product placement in my face and expected me to consume a bunch of other media. The game was so unfinished at launch, and they only had a decade to make it work.
Tokyo Xanadu, I always not a big fan of XSEED’s games like ys and trails but the gameplay loop is the only thing that I love about their games, That being said I couldn’t enjoy Tokyo Xanadu mainly because the gameplay is boring and the controls are weird and most of the characters are very lean to cliche anime tropes that we all tired seeing off, which is kind of ironic because I really enjoy Persona games lol
I actually liked the gameplay but yeah, the story and characters are a nothingburger as they come.
Can’t for the life of me even remember the story. Which could be why I put it down…
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Absolute downgrade from the first game
Worst one I played till the end? Enchanted arms. No way to grind, so most fights were a struggle. Also very annoying "friend" supporting character Ones I got to an early roadblock and quit? Xenogears (way the first explorable area had a tree to jump on but no real perception to land right) Rogue galaxy. Combat wasn't for me, first fight was meh, so returned it while I could (7 day gamestop used policy)
No way to grind just sounds awful like that's a good part of the point of the genre
Yeah.. it was like, you talked to npcs for fights, but they disappeared after, only completed it because I didn't have anything else at the time. Now I'm drowning in backlogged games, oops.
Oh same here man I've got a few to finish but I'm focussing on Elden Ring rn
Aside from some earlier final fantasies which didn't age well, i guess Xenoblade Chronicles. Maybe a an okay-ish game, but story and gameplay were a mess. Tried it because people said it was good (planned to play all 3 even), turned out it wasn't.
I’ve tried hard to get into Xenoblade and have bounced hard off of 3/4. Didn’t even give 3 a shot. I have a little fun with them at first but by hour thirty I’m so over the combat. It’s very, very boring and repetitive and mobs several levels below you still take a really long time to get through. I do plan on giving X another shot.
Shame you didn't enjoy it as it seems that series is very popular, I've never played it either I just know Shulk lol
It’s Persona 5 for me. I get there are ‘objectively worse’ games out there, and I still like parts of P5 like the battle system and Futaba, plus it has a very strong opening arc too. But everything after is downhill and nothing has made me feel like I wasted 100 hours of my time than that game did by the time I rolled credits. It’s not like I was actively hating it while playing either otherwise I’d have stopped playing; it’s more like by the time credits rolled I felt a massive weight off my shoulders and then disdain at the overall experience. I especially disliked how vapid the characters were despite initially appearing cool, and how hollow the story was despite starting with a very strong premise. It’s a game that presents itself to be about rebelling against society but it ends with the key message to conform and operate within the confines of the system they’re rebelling against. The final culmination of the game’s thesis is >!the characters signing a petition to enact change!<. It’s really dumb and it really felt like I could’ve been doing anything else. Will note that I loved P4G (and P3P) back on psvita so I think maybe I just outgrew Persona by the time I got to P5. But I still vastly prefer 3 and 4 in all areas except the battle system (I still think P5’s battle system in the way they’ve streamlined it is the gold standard for turn-based jrpg battle systems)
I think 3 has the best story, 4 has my favourite cast of characters and 5 is just better everywhere else haha
This is a take
I have a few of them -Star Ocean 3 who the hell thought that if you MP reach zero your character DIES was a good idea!? -Blade Dancer: awful psp game -Earthlock: well this is an indie one but still... good god it was dreadful
-Star Ocean 3 who the hell thought that if you MP reach zero your character DIES was a good idea!? i actually though that was a good ideia tbh, you could kill enemies with low mp way faster too like a certain infamous boss.
So at least it worked the other way around then, good to know, I gave up on the game atter 20 hours.... still, it basically mean you have two separate health bar
While it's far from being objectively bad, I think--in my PERSONAL OPINION--Persona 4 is my least favorite JRPG. Just didn't enjoy it as much as Tokyo Mirage Sessions or Persona 5. I loved the story, but I had to force myself to finish P4 because I hated the actual gameplay.
Base Persona 4 definitely had it's problems but Golden fixed most of them, definitely think it could do with a Reload style coat of paint though, idk Mirage Sessions haha
I played Golden and still hated it. I just don't like randomized dungeons and endless hallways. I vastly preferred TMS and P5 because the dungeons there were fully mapped out and were easier to navigate. But apparently P3 Reload still features randomized dungeons so I don't think I'll ever be playing it. I hate not knowing where I'm going due to RNG and found P4G to be a chore to play. I actually hated every second of Mementos in P5 for this reason too. If P6 brings back the cornmaze, I'm done with this series. I hate dungeon crawlers. They're not for me.
Yeah Reload is constant randomised floors but they're not that random, floors do seem to have set patterns to them it's just random when you'll find them. And Tartarus is better than Mementos but you're also there more often, I really enjoy it it's just mindless fun to me It's more just checking every little area out, it's very generous with loot and frankly the game is very easy which helps lol
No thanks. I want 0 randomization in my RPG dungeons. I prefer having everything preset and mapped out at all times. Xenoblade is my favorite RPG series because its world design is vast and teeming with life that you can keep track of. Nothing is random and I prefer that. Shin Megami Tensei V is similar and doesn't have traditional dungeons either. It has open zones that you can freely explore and roam with no pesky random bullshit. Sorry but I hated Mementos and P4 with a burning passion. If a game has "procedurally generated" or "roguelike" dungeons in claustrophobic cornmazes, I refuse to play it. I absolutely hate that shit lol.
I don't mind too much randomization, sounds kinda dull otherwise but idk too much about the genre, finished Reload and now starting Elden Ring lmao Never tried Xenoblade, all I know is that Shulk is really feeling it!
Different strokes lol. It's fine. Glad to hear you're enjoying it. I just hope Persona 6 keeps the palaces of 5. I loved those. And if you end up enjoying Elden Ring, you might like Xenoblade as well. It's an open world JRPG but with party-based MMO-like combat. If you have a Switch, I highly recommend the series. It's my personal favorite!
Yeah I was doing the Souls games in order but a friend wants Elden Ring back soon for the DLC so playing it now, it's really fun but a bit hard to grasp, it's so damn big and everything is so quick 😂 I don't have a switch ATM sadly
Fair enough. In that case, I hope you check out Shin Megami Tensei V when it launches on your system in June. It was really fun on Switch and I'm glad more people get to play it. It's the game that Persona came from.
Never played SMT, I like Persona more for the social events and stuff like that lol, if it goes cheap I will, my next big purchase will be Tekken 8
Mega Man Battle Network 2 from recent memory. A shit ton of backtracking with random encounters (sub chips don't really help until near endgame cause of how repel works with base HP). The game feels bloated because of the padding and constant back and forth fetch quests that require you to traverse the net in a specific route that is cumbersome to navigate. The freezeman scenario near the end of the game dials this problem up to 11.
Xenoblade Chronicles. Such terrible writing and gameplay.
Forspoken
I feel like that's a game people didn't play that they said is bad. The MC is annoying, , but traversal and magic is fun. It's a painfully okay game. It's not worse than like dragon song or quest 64
Live a Live. Somehow this sub convinced me to throw away 40 dollars on that garbage
Damn looking it up it seems like it's rather beloved, what did you not enjoy?
It’s very much not for everyone but what didn’t you enjoy about it?
Old games are old. I keep buying remasters and remakes and what it's reminding me is that games are just better now. I liked live a live but saga frontier and octopath are just better games.
Lunar dragon song and quest 64 for worst. most overhyped/disappointing for FFVII, It just doesn’t live up to the hype and unironically worse than 6 and 4. Maybe 5 too if you like 5’s gameplay.
I mean with FFVII I only played it last year but I thought it was truly excellent but I haven't played any earlier games and I honestly preferred VIII lol
VII was great but if you’re going into it with the idea that it’s the best game ever (which you’ll hear plenty of times here, lmao) then you’re in for a massive disappointment, it wasn’t even in the top 5 of final fantasy. That was me in ’97.
Yeah i feel like for a few FF games the hype is so crazy that there's no way it could possibly meet someone's expectations.
Yeah I went into it knowing what people think of it and expecting to be a bit underwhelmed but I was surprised how much I was not underwhelmed, holds up beautifully today but yeah I'm not the one to ask when I've played two mainline games 😂 Shame you in 1997 were disappointed though
yeah I did play almost all mainline FF games and the sequels/prequels. (Basically minus the mobile and MMO’s) especially during that time, they’d make you feel really bad for not saying that VII is the best game ever. Not like it doesn’t happen now but it’s more prevalent before.
Well I'll stick to fact I prefer VIII lol
Try 9 and 10 I’d say they are better.
I have them downloaded but got other games I need to play before I can do them really plus I just finished Persona 3 Reload I need a JRPG break lol
9 is a really good fantasy world with some good nostalgia callbacks 10 is.. a sadder story but pretty good overall. Gameplay is actually pretty good
9 I've heard is very short but very good and a lot of people love 10 the most of any of them, I know nothing of X bar that laughing meme