DS Daily: Disappointments

I'd say Duck Amuck or Sim City, but I don't really feel like digging that turgidness up.

There will probably be many a groan about Sonic games in this thread.

Yes, sadly. Whe I was younger, I played a game on the SNES which amazed me. Sectret of Mana was a stunningly beautiful and well made game, in my opinion. Then, years later, I discovered that they were making a Mana game one the DS! The screenshots looked even more beatiful than the original, (or even Seiken Densetsu 3) and all I wanted in life for the next few month was this game. Now, don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying its a bad game, but it really wasn't what I expected or wanted. I've never been one to care too much about what games look like, but the hub of the game was beatuiful. Sadly, the rest of the game was entirely tile based backgrounds, which when compared to the hub, looked awful. In retrospect it's not a bad game, and it's appearance isn't that bad either, but at the time, nothing could have been more dissapointing.

Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass... After going through the EXACT same dungeon for the 4th time I said, "That's enough. This sucks."

Most of my DS games were rented before I got them. So, I'll usually know if I like the game before I buy it. Gamefly, you help so much :3.

Bleach: The Blade of Fate, Drawn to Life and Meteos were disappointments for me. :(

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. Final Fantasy XII was awesome, so why is its sequel a piece of crap?

Super Princess Peach. Argh.

I know that just about everyone else in the world loved the game but I was sorely disappointed with Kirby Canvas Curse.
Starfox Command was also disappointing.

Wario: Master of Disguise.

Nintendogs and Brain Training. Also Wario Ware, but I wasn't particualrly hyped up for that.

The closest I have gotten to disappointment was with two SRPGs. First FFTA2; I was hoping for a more epic or fun story and a better leading character (sorry i don't like Luso, he is too childish). But I haven't finished the game (because I've put it on hold due to other games), so maybe i'll change my mind about the story and Luso after i finish it. Second, Disgaea DS, I think I was over hyped for this one. It's not bad per say, just too much level grinding in it; leveling up weapons is a pain in the @$$. Sure you don't have to, but I'm a completionist and I want to get the best weapons etc etc. Going through 10 floors just to gain 10 levels for each weapon is a bit much. Again it's a solid SRPG, just not what I was expecting. The same with FFTA2, I love the gameplay, but I was expecting more from the story and Luso.

Recently picked up Lock's Quest and Bangai-o Spirits... Just could not get into them.

Definitely Myst.

Perhaps memories are stronger than reality. It was great on the PC back then, completely crap on the DS.

Izuna: Roguelike aspect delivered, but the promised comedy plot was paper-thin and the repetitive grinding and dungeon crawling weren't worth the ten seconds of Izuna wisecracking after every completed dungeon. I love a good story-based RPG and I love quirky localizations; Atlus advertised a combination of the two but really exaggerated it.

And I'm about to die for this next one, but TWEWY. The insufferable emo characters, teen angst, and the underlying air of pretension in the pop and style themes didn't kill it, but the gameplay did. I really liked the concept of two-screen gameplay and the pin system, but the execution was poor. Button-mashing for the top character, wild stylus-scratching for the bottom character. The potential for creativity from the variety of the pins was stunted by the fact that many of them overlapped in their powers and in the motions required to execute them, so there was no motivation to tinker around with pin combinations to create a working strategy. There game even destroyed the sense of urgency it was trying to create in the Reapers' Game by making time limits to complete missions part of the plot and not passing these limits onto the player to complete in real time. I could leisurely grind for hours or days to get money for expensive stat-boosting items and only then complete the mission out of finally getting bored with that day's Noise. I finally put the game away half way through. I might pick it up again this summer if there's a game drought then, but it didn't meet expectations.

Quite honestly? Mario Kart DS. Obviously being the first Nintendo-made Online game led to a whole round of disappointments, but the killer for me was Snaking.

There's a difference between snaking and other so-called "game breaking exploits." Take, for instance, the Noob Combo in Halo 2 (never played it, but had to hear about it often from friends in high school who bitched about the combo), sure that move was cheap, but the very good player could simply kill the Combo user faster

Snaking, however, crushed that. You HAD to snake if you wanted to win. HAD to. There was no option, there was nothing you could do to beat a snaker, no matter how good you were otherwise. The fact that snaking had nothing to balance it out, like, say, making it extremely hard to control after a while, is what killed it.

Pokemon Diamond. I really though it could be better than Crystal, my all-time favourite old-school Game Boy game. Emerald was bad enough, this one was downright disappointing. I don't think I'll ever play Pokemon again, except maybe Crystal once in a while.

I bought a DSlite just to play Pokemon Diamond(which means I was excited as hell!), the new graphics were cool but I was always getting that feeling of been there, done that. It was the same old, same old except for a few things.

Even though the last guy got flamed for it, I'm also going to say Phantom Hourglass. I usually love the puzzles in Zelda games, and it's easy to recall many memorable puzzles and moments in the older games. This one never had me stop and think, and really lacked any memorable moments at all. It wasn't terrible, but it was certainly disappointing.

Remember how freaking epic the end bosses and ending sequences in Ocarina of Time were? Yeah. Instead, Phantom Hourglass's climax takes the day off and instead hands you a boss you could take down using your tongue as a stylus. I may have set my expectations too high, but that's just what I've come to expect from the franchise.

Also, Sonic Rush. Decent, but far from dethroning Sonic Advance as my go-to portable hedgehog fix.

FFTA2.
The game is beautiful and well made, the gba fft was myu fav game, buttt....

It doesn´t has a solid story.
Square Enix made us wait like a year to translate it!!!
It´s so damn easyyyy if you play it on normal, by the time you are un 150 missions completed it provides no more challenges, but by that time, you don´t wanna start ALL OVER AGAIN just to play it on hard.
The protagonists name is LUSO ¿What kind of name is that?.
They added two razes, but they have only 4 jobs.

Sonic Chronicles.

It's a BioWare RPG, so it couldn't possibly be bad. But Sonic Chronicles is a really fantastic example of what happens when ambition gets the better of game design. And why does every enemy run from you? It's the only RPG that punishes you for trying to play it. It's insane. I desperately want my 35$ back.

I have a lot of games, so a few of them were bound to be disappointing in some way or another. Jam Sessions had me really excited at first, but when I bought it and discovered that chords would have to be pre-selected and that only a few would be available at any given time, I realized that it was really only suitable for making covers of other songs and wasn't useful at all for making new ones. Not unless you already knew what chords were going to inspire you. Mario Party DS was the first game I ever considered returning due to poor quality. I haven't been able to play it for more than five or ten minutes. Sonic Rush was the biggest disappointment for me, though. The level design is so spread out and seemingly random that I could never figure out if I was falling down to a new part of the level or falling to my death.

I'm going to have to third Phantom Hourglass. I just couldn't get into it, no matter how hard I tried. I've always been more of one for 3D Zeldas, but still.

I didn't really have tremendously high expectations for Megaman Starforce 2, but I didn't expect it to have the highest encounter and lowest run rates I've seen since just about ever. By the end of the game I was going insane from the repetitive battles. Luckily I got it for free, but nevertheless.

There's some other DS game I have that falls under this, but I can't remember it right now. Eh.

Dragon Booster was god awful.

I don't get disappointed that much, but I'd say Drawn to Life and Duck Amuck.

Drawn to Life was pretty much the most primitive platformer I've ever played, and I've played a bunch of bland platfomers in my time. It was just a real nothing game, a game with a cool concept, but wrapped in such a dull package. And that hub world, with the fetch quests, simply terrible. Maybe I was too old for that game but my little cousin thought it was boring as hell as well. (13).

Duck Amuck mainly for wasted potential. Presentation was awesome, shame it was just a bunch of mediocre minigames.

I'd add the final quarter of Sonic Chronicles to the this list as well. A good story descends into typical Bioware scifi nonsense, losing all its previously garnered charm, and ends on the limpest note ever. I wasn't even sure the game had ended until Sonic started congratulating the developers.