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.
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.
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 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!
I played through all of Tears of the Kingdom without making a hover bike.
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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 :^)
I played a substantial amount of Zelda TotK without the paraglider which made quite a few adventures a lot more treacherous, some borderline impossible, and some actually impossible. 😂
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.
Resident Evil Director’s Cut on PS1. I was fairly young and not very good at the “survival” aspect of the survival horror. I tried to kill everything I encountered and consumed copious amounts of ammo and herbs doing so. I reached a place where I had a single ink ribbon left, no ammo, health on the red, and confused on where I needed to go next. And I had to go do homework. So I used my last ribbon and saved.
I discovered next time I played that the way forward was through a tight corridor I missed filled with zombies who could now one-shot me. I tried and tried and literally was unable to get through. First time I ever learned the word “soft-locked” as my brother wheezed it out while laughing. Good times!
Not me, but my wife got all the way to the end of Journey to the Savage Planet before discovering there is a skill tree you can invest in 😂
I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.
Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn’t that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.
When I first started playing WoW in 2006,I always wanted to play Balance (as it was the only caster option for Night Elves), but I thought that the point of the druid was to shape shift. So I had this janky hybrid build with the goal of collecting all the shape shifting appearances. I also thought that back then Blizzard was converting agility to spell power, because that was the only explanation for the lack of intellect leather. I though I had to only wear leather, but always believed that the gameplay was to cast until I ran out of mana, then switch to feral, and to bear if I needed additional armor and then back to casting when my mana bar recovered or if I needed to heal myself.
I leveled to 40+ with this funky build. Eventually a guild member was helping me on a quest and asked me if my build was “purposeful” because it was a garbage build. That’s when I learned about how specs work. He offered to make a dedicated set, but needed to know what spec. I told him I always wanted balance, and so he made me my Big Voodoo set, which lasted me until well into Outlands.
Lol, that’s me who was leveling with some wierd protopal build at the same time
Frankly, I enjoyed WoW more when there was that “freedom” to do what you wanted with the specs and not have the theory police breathing down your neck. The game felt much more imaginative. Once I found out the only way a class worked was by going down a specific path, I was incredibly disappointed. Specs never felt fun to me after that. It always felt like the developers didn’t have time to complete the design and lobbed the ball over the fence to the player to “code in” the last pieces - since even from Vanilla there was really only “one way” to do it (according to the theory police).
On my first play through, I completely misunderstood Mass Effect and basically played it like a standard shooter. Hardly used power, didn’t talk to anyone and more or less just went from main mission to main mission.
The amount of stuff I missed out on, in retrospect, is staggering. I’m so glad I gave this game another try because I really did not understand what all the fuss was about.
