whats a game that you got significantly far into, only to realize you were doing something wrong or missing a key feature/ability altogether?
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.
I think the worst game I've ever played regarding skill progression is Oblivion.
Honestly, that game's levelling is completely busted. Basically your class has a couple major and minor skills. You gain skill levels automatically by using them, and when you got enough levels in your class skills, you are supposed to rest and gain a character level.
Almost everything in Oblivion is levelled to match your character's level. Gaining a level only serves three purposes : gaining a very small amount of health, gaining a few points in two stats depending on which skills you've used ... And most of all spawning more, stronger enemies.
Lots of skills in Oblivion are not directly (or absolutely not at all) combat-related. Lots of default classes come with quite a few of them as major or minor skills. And those that don't come with several damage-related and several defence-related skills.
Progressing in non-combat skills, or in too many at once in a "master of none" fashion, will make your game impossible. "Playing well" requires knowing and exploiting this by blocking your level up until you've maxed the right skill. Or even having some of your favourite skills not class skills at all.
This is really not my idea of fun character progression.
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.
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 mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.
To be fair, that game really isn't about shooting or even taking out enemies. Taking their gun only slows you down!
I should go play that again. It's got a great atmosphere (and soundtrack)
Doesn't Mirrors Edge have a forced tutorial at the beginning and it literally requires you to pick up a gun at some point? 🤔
This is the right way to play the game, IMO. There's even an achievement for it.
I played through all of Tears of the Kingdom without making a hover bike.
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.
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 played the original AoE2 I was completely unaware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different units. I just build whatever I found to be coolest and wondered why I struggled so much.
Only when I bought the Definitive Edition much later I looked that up.
For my defense, I was ten back then.
Who wanted soldiers when elephants and catapults were so much cooler? Ooo flaming archers!
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. 😂
Wow, that's awful lol. I explored a little and very quickly encountered a shrine where I figured out there must have been a paraglider cause it needed it (that might have been purposefully placed?).
But also, no paraglider means no map. I can't imagine going for too long without progressing the story till you can reveal the map!
Heck, it felt like it was taking too long to give me the photo mode feature. I knew it had to be there, but I was expecting to get it much sooner and didn't like missing opportunities to take photos for the compendium.
Dwarf Fortress.
Enough said lmao
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 😂
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.
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!
I also played that game by killing everything I saw; I just happened to also stumble into the fact that if you aim down while using the knife, it can one shot anything you hit. So it was easy af. lol
"Advanced" combat in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
Most of the time combat is a slog and it's the least interesting part of the games. I just get strong weapons and hit the enemies with them, or shoot them from afar. I don't think I even broke more than 5 shields per game, and barely did that slow motion avoid thing. It's much faster to just slash and slash, stagger, slash, etc.
Hell, a lot of the devices in TotK are useless because I can just slash or shoot the enemies myself. Tried them out once in shrines and that's it.
Jup, same here. Got the extension mode and in master mode this is suddenly all required.
Honestly, no matter how much strategy you're using, Master Mode is not exactly balanced. The sword trials in particular become unbearable.
I understood it in BOTW, but it was still frustrating to pull off compared to just stocking up good weapons and beating them with it.
TOTK, on the other hand, is hella fun. Now instead of having to string together odd mechanics to maybe make funny stuff happen, I can build a flying fortress of doom that drops bombs and shoots lasers. It also kills them way faster than going in and fighting them normally.
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 :^)
In Breath of the Wild, I never learned how to cook in the starting area. I completely bypassed the intended path up to the cold area and somehow climbed up the other side, and then just froze my ass off while eating a bunch of apples. I made it out of the starting area and I think I beat two of the divine beasts before I finally looked up how to cook. I knew the game had cooking, but I thought there would be some kind of cooking menu when you walk up to a cooking pot, I didn't realize you had to just hold items and then drop them in.
Doing the hermit's cooking tutorial fully actually makes that Great Plateau mountain even easier, because not only you'd learn how cooking works but he'd also give you the warm doublet right away.
Most of the mountain (all? except maybe a small area around the summit) is only level 1-cold, so the doublet is enough even without cooking.
YES! This is actually how I finally learned how to cook. There was another cold area I was trying to get into, and looked up where to get warm clothing, and it said something like "You should already have the warm doublet from completing the hermit's cooking tutorial." and I was like "the what?"
I did that, but I was eating whole chillis in the first area rather than cooking with them.
Turns out in Elden Ring, you’re supposed to go left when you leave the initial starting area so you can pick up the ability of teleportation to bonfires.
Well, imagine my surprise learning that from friends 10 play hours later after going right and opening up a teleporting treasure chest to some crystal cave…
that's wild that it doesn't just give you the bonfire teleportation when you reach any bonfire. didn't realize it had to be that bonfire in particular
I never got past the first boss on the horse.
Somewhat hilariously, that boss is supposed to teach you a key lesson of Elden Ring's design and gameplay philosophy:
Considering the design philosophy of Elden Ring, you were probably supposed to do that rather than going left.
I got through all of Breath of the Wild without cooking anything. I knew the feature was there, but I don't remember ever being taught how to use it and ultimately decided I'd just armour my way around it.
Okay… this is impressive
Lol, I managed to get off the starting island without cooking or coldproof armor. I escorted a torch up to the shrine and found out twenty hours after that you're supposed to cook a coldproof meal to get the clothes that protect you.
Life.
XCOM: Enemy Within
I think they've added a max turn timer from the point you call in the airstrike now.
That was added in an update, cuz I remembering having the same experience when I got the game at launch.
Now because I had gotten used to that, I see the move timer as a challenge to wipe out all the chrysalids before we all die to an airstrike. 😏
Took quite a while for me to find out about queens in Starcraft 2 as a Zerg player.
The first ever game of harvest moon was on the switch last year. I repaid the debt by fishing and collecting shells as I couldn't figure out how to dig as I couldn't obtain a pickaxe to finish my first ever quest. After 6+ hours of foraging around the staeting area, I realised that if you sleep, the quest progresses and you get the pickaxe...... Yea!
When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren't the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie's portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody's materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.
I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because "I've played this game before, I know how it works." I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn't until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that's when all the systems fell fully into place: you're supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.
Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there's a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.
Hah well today I learned. It's recently occurred to me that I never beat any video games growing up because I didn't read the instructions or learn how to play. FF7 is one of those games that I haven't ever eaten even though I really really liked the game. Never even considered that you should have a trio of healer mage and fighter even though it makes total sense.
About 50 hours into xenoblade chronicles 3 I realized I could pick character order when doing chain attacks. Up to that point I had been going left to right every time.
I went from doing 200k damage per chain attack to 17 mil lol
I was doing the same thing with driver combos back in XC2
I'm 50 hours in, choose my character order and still getting like 500k. What's your secret?
Ngl it's been a long time but a mixture of grinding like hell and maxing out damage related stones for pretty much everyone
But I love that game an abnormal amount so I wouldnt recommend that, 500k is more than enough damage for anything that isn't post-game
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).
Fallout New Vegas, I still haven't figured out how to gain xp effectively.
Ugh. Yes. It's one of those games where the devs thought we would learn by doing stuff, but instead (imo) I was really flailing around, guessing what to do 90% of the time.
I got stuck once when I attacked a Caesar location and beat them, but then would be randomly killed by this group of three soldiers who would appear anywhere I went. That whole game was frustrating for me.
I encountered the legion only once.
The best way to level up in New Vegas is doing the powder ganger glitch right at the beginning of the game.
Basically if you do the first quest in good springs with Ringo and the powder gangers in a specific way, you can keep turning the quest into the powder ganger leader dude indefinitely. Max out your entire character in like 15 minutes.
Hammerwatch. You can reach the end of the game and be unable to proceed if you didn't collect specific things. I believe it was wooden boards.
FF7 Remake. I played the original but didn't pay attention to differences in the remake. I went the entire game with only the Buster sword, and thus did not learn any new abilities. Still beat it though.
I did this exactly, I went through like half then realized that you learn new abilities by equipping weapons and using their ability 10 times.
I'm pretty sure Animal Crossing: New Horizons never actually tells you that you can run by holding B. You just have figure it out by accident... I think I played for a month or two before I realized it was possible when watching someone play on YouTube.
In Hollow Knight I didn't learn the stab down feature and by the time I found that out I couldn't go back to learn it.
There was an old PC game called MegaRace. Somehow I changed my controls and set steering to Left was Right and Right was Left. I never noticed this for the entire time I played it.
When I bought Test Drive 4 the first race I proceeded to drive straight into a wall. After struggling for a while I went back to MegaRace and instantly realized what my issue was.
Fast forward a decade or two later after doing only console racing games, proceeded to buy Dirt Rally and use my keyboard and muscle memory kicked in and drove straight off the track. I basically have to set driving games I play keyboard with to reverse steering. Thankfully a wheel, seat, pedals, and shifter have alleviated this problem in my current life.
And I thought I was weird for having my vertical controls switched for shooters. Lol.
That at least makes sense, like I can wrap my brain around the idea that the control from behind the camera about the axis of the lens means it would be inverse and would thus feel 'correct' to a certain number of players.
I got good at mirroring controls on the fly from Mario kart on the DS, that weapon basically had no effect on me.
Though if you put upshift over downshift I will lose mind. Upshift is always X and downshift is always A for me on the Xbox layout (cross/triangle) also screws me up when real cars do this, upshift should be towards the rear and downshift should be forwards. That's how most sequential gear shifters are configured in race cars. Ostensibly because you are downshifting under deceleration and upshifting during acceleration.
Never understood you southpaws lol
Man that game was so weird and quirky! It was fun, but I also remember having problems exiting the game for some reason lol. It's available from GOG if you ever get the itch.
This story is delightful, thank you
I think a lot of the reason Dark Souls has a reputation as a super hard game is that it doesn't do anything to explain how weapon scaling works
I missed the dodging and flurry-rush shrine in BoTW. Beat Ganon without ever learning. Finally went back much later and was like "wow, this game is so much easier now!"
Yeah, it wasn't until my second time starting the game that I took in any of the combat tutorials
I finished botw with 250 hours game play and currently on totk and cannot dodge, parry or flurry rush to save my life.
In Elden Ring, my first every playthrough, I got the Baldichin's Blessing basically immediately and played through the entire game with that nerf. It wasn't that bad though! Powerstance halberds for the win.
My first experience with Dark Souls 1 was a real test of patience. I hadn't realized how helpful the roll mechanic was. So there I was, from the start to the finish of the game, either blocking attacks with a shield, or just tanking them.
Once I got to Anor Londo, I remember kitting myself out in the Giants Armor, with a paired Giants Shield, and a Black Knight Sword that had been carrying me through the rest of the game. I was at something like 99.8% equip load, just enough that if I equipped a longbow, it put me in the over-encumbered slow walk.
And that's how I beat the game. Just tanking everything that came my way. I got up to Quelaag in NG+ before I had to call it quits.
During the run, the rooftop Gargoyles gave me enough grief that I had to put the game down for a couple weeks. Had I decided to just give up then, I imagine my opinion of the Souls-like genre would be quite different today.
I managed to get through the starting area on keyboard and mouse before a friend told me, "What the hell is wrong with you, use a controller for chrissakes."
ALmost reminds me of Maple in Bofuri lol.
Half Life. Final boss fight. Not enough ammo and I couldn't be bothered to go several hours of saves back to replay and conserve ammo.
I'm playing a similar game called just "Life". I seem to have misplaced the manual for it which is quite the hurdle because there are no save/restore points.
It's an open-world game and there are many NPC's, but the few bosses seem randomly placed (at least, I haven't found any pattern to it) and what's worse is that you can't really tell them apart from regular NPC's until you've already engaged them! Got burned by that a fair bit more than once.
I've considered just starting over but the prospect of losing literally my entire progress... 😬
I got stuck on Resident Evil Rebirth for the same reason. Took me years before I motivating myself to give it an other shot.
I have a similar experience with Quake's final boss. It's the only thing in the entire game you don't kill by shooting. Took me 3 freaking days to figure it out.
It's stupid as hell because it's like the easiest thing to do, but no game had anything remotely like that, and it wasn't a mechanic shown to the player at all in SP (if you don't know you have to telefrag the boss by jumping into a gate when a purple spikey thing flying around the room clips through the boss).
In the Final Fantasy Legend (or "Makaitoushi SaGa" as it was called in Japan), I somehow managed to make it to the game's final boss without realizing the shops in the game sold more than three items per shop.
The game's shopping interface presented you with a list of items, three at a time, but there was no indication on the screen that the list was scrollable, so I thought that the list presented were all they sold. That meant I missed out on about 75% of the items in the game, including a few that turned out to be kind of important for the last boss fight.
Of course, I couldn't beat the last boss, and the only way to escape the last boss's lair was to use an item that was sold in late game stores, but was buried in the list of items, so I had to start the game again from the top.
Good user experience design is important in games.
You just unlocked a memory of why I now scroll down every shop menu before even looking at what they have for sale in any game.
That's the reason. Some random gameboy game from like 30 years ago.
In Legend of Dragoon I hit a wall on a Disc 2 boss and was stuck for months. After I took a break and came back I realized you could change your equipment--I'd never upgraded anything equipped and was using all of the starting equipped weapons and armor. This was not my first RPG, nor was I young enough to use age as an excuse.
I always get stuck trying to replay FF8 because I can never properly get enough items to ever upgrade anyone's main weapon- which is usually good enough to get through till mid-late game there's some point that requires more physical weapon use and I just get roadblocked and give up. I could probably follow a guide but I always think I can do it myself.
More on track with your game though - I love Legend of Dragoons art style for their character sheet, but it feels so slow navigating it. I'd really really love a remaster.
Yup, same issue in FF8, though I've never tried to replay it. My party was always underpowered/undergeared.
I also messed up big time in the fight against Adel/Rinoa at Lunatic Pandora. I blasted through practically ALL my spells in that fight (and it took me multiple attempts). So now I'm at Ultimecia Castle and I have no spells to use and I know there are tons of minibosses in there, along with the final boss sequence. I softlocked myself.
Legend of Dragoon is close to the top of my list of games I'd love to see remade, but almost certainly won't.
Actually, FF8 is at the top of that list. It's my favorite of the "mainline" FFs and the story has aged by far the best out of the series, but the systems, equipment, and stat working is awful. Like you're running into, the systems are confusing and difficult to figure out, but as soon as you "get it" you almost have to handicap yourself so as not to completely break the game. A remake along the lines of the FF7 rework could fix that, and I think 8 would benefit from the treatment more than any other game in the series.
Did this with a couple RPGs too bud, first time I played mass effect way back when I got so frustrated because everything was so hard. Didn't know you could upgrade stuff. Closest game I had played before was halo, where you get a few guns but they never upgrade, and armor never does either.
Second time through was much easier
I played Mass Effect 3 all the way to just before the final mission using only level 1 weapons. When I was doing my final walk through of the ship I went down to the hangar and encountered a terminal I hadn’t seen that let me upgrade my weapons. I had like 700,000 credits and upgraded everything right then and there.
The latest dumb one for me was Sonic Frontiers.
As a Soulsborne veteran who's beat Malenia, I can admit I just never really got all that good at parrying and mostly avoid it. So when I saw Sonic Frontiers had a parry option move, I just kinda filed it away in the back of my mind and never did it, despite the fact that timing is inconsequential in that game and you will parry as long as you're holding the buttons to do so when the hit lands. I kludged my way forward all the way through to the third boss where it was mandatory and learned my mistake.
OK game, better than a lot lately, but still a 5/10 at best.
In the original XCOM my brother and I didn't realise you needed to collect and research everything. We thought it was like a horde-survival game, however it could infact be completed. Learning this years after starting to play was one of my best gaming experiences - I came back to my parents for the weekend just to blow my brother's mind!
I had a similar thing in Xcom 2 (the only one I've played) where I kept getting alerts that I needed more relay stations to contact the resistance, or something like that. Assuming these relays were on the ground, I kept doing missions hoping to find some. Eventually I found out I needed to clear rooms in my spaceship and build them myself. By that time I was seriously behind however.
I couldn't imagine storming the base on Mars with only the basic starter rifles in the MicroProse version. Though apart from the Hovertanks it might be actually doable.
That said I watched a friend play the fireaxis version of XCOM2 and he never put his troops into cover, just had them standing out in the open - yet somehow managed to beat the game using this "strategy". He blew through troops like tissues during flu season though.
I'm currently playing Diablo IV and I generally refuse to use the healing stations and stat-boosting shrines scattered around the map. I guess I want to save them for later in case they don't respawn or something. I also don't know what the shrines do until/unless I hit them so I don't know if they're worth triggering or not. I'm getting by without them so far, so it's okay, maybe?
The shrines respawn over time. No need to worry about consuming them. The Lillith statues are permanent stat boosts to all characters, not activating them when you encounter them is harmful.
The shrines aren't really a balance element, because they only last a minute or so, and usually make you hilariously overpowered for a little bit.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I got to this part in the game where I absolutely could not beat a boss. Consulted IGN and learned that the only way to defeat her was to have some ability that was only gained at some prior point. Unfortunately I didn't have any save points prior to that, so the only way I would be able to defeat that boss would be to completely restart. I just kind of noped the game after that.
What the heck... That sounds like an absolutely miserable experience. I would have done the same. It wasn't an optional boss or anything?
This game is WIDELY criticized for this and has since been patched (via a new Director's Cut version of the game) to fix the oversight. Essentially, thr boss battles were outsourced to abother company, causing them to not line up with the implementation of the rest of the game.
You could make it through most of the game as a 100% stealth/hacking build, but a single boss towards the end REQUIRED some combat abilities in the vanilla version. They've since added environmental aids to keep you from this exact frustration.
Source: i too got EXTREMELY stuck here before they released the Director's Cut...
It was not an optional boss, sadly.
In the game bug fables I missed that there was a badge shop in one of the starting areas. I played through most of the game without using any of those badges. You don't need them, but it's nice to have options
Dead Space 2. There was an ability to slow/freeze time which I thought was silly and OP so I didn't put any points into it. Later on there's a boss that requires the ability to freeze time. The stupid thing is is it wasn't even a fight, you just had to run away through a locked door but you needed the time ability to open it before it gets you which is impossible to do without frickin freezing time.
I never finished it.
Not necessarily a feature but I went into Forager blind and was playing on a shitty linux laptop through wine, leading to me playing at half speed for about 12 hours before I eventually opened the game in a window on accident and discovered that the game was meant to run at 60 fps and my laptop just couldn't handle running it at that speed in fullscreen
In the SSX series you can use one of the analog sticks to move along the rail instead of just falling off like a moron(me)
I got hard stuck on one of the seymour fights on Mt. Gagazet and couldn't be fucked to grind out enough levels to brute force it so that's still where my save file is stuck at some 20 years later.
Lol, the Seymour fights are some of the worst. Along with a nasty one a bit later that you never got to.
But oof, I'd so encourage revisiting if you ever have the motivation, cause FFX is one of the best games ever and you quit near the peak of the story.
Star Ocean 2! I didn't realize I didn't have to find a save point, that I could just save on the world map, until like 90% through the game cause I noticed when I was in the menu screen that save was lit up like it was useable. Oops.
Also, the first time I played, I didn't use the feature that empowers your stats on FFVIII, cause I didn't bother to read the directions. Got caught on a late game boss fight and gave up until years later when I finally read the directions and had so much fun save scumming and exploiting renewing magic draw points. (Basic memory from like 15 years ago so I could have some details wrong, but you get the point)