My DNF Video Games
Shame! shame! shame! shame!
I don’t finish every game I play. Before you boo me, I have multiple fair and valid reasons not to. These range from a game being too difficult, requiring an insane amount of grinding or simply because I find it too boring. I can always look past some issues if the story and the gameplay is engaging… but when all of these fail, I have no option but to DNF it.
Instead of simply listing games, I’ll group these into buckets to tell a more cohesive story. I don’t follow a specific metric to abandon a game, and I am more than capable of accepting bad aspects of a game in order to enjoy it (I’m a Sonic fan for god’s sake). I try my best to give the game a chance before quitting (a chance that could result in over 30 hours of game-time), but if I’m not having fun, I hit the bricks.
Wait there’s more?
I am such a huge fan of open world games. Nothing better than just having a huge world to explore and get lost in, do side-quests and find secrets. In a post-Breath of the Wild era, games in this genre have only gotten better and more common. Sadly, not all games can be as interesting as Zelda, and what often happens is that games overstay their welcome and become so exhaustingly long that I take the harsh decision to DNF it.
There’s no better example than modern Assassin’s Creed games, specifically Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Dear GOD this game is long. It’s a bit ridiculous to start this list with a game I technically finished, but rolling credits is nowhere near the end of this game. Imagine my surprise when I realized I was dozens of hours away from the “true ending”. Why? because the RPG mechanics here are made to make you grind, and I mean GRIND, over 70 levels to actually explore all the beautiful Greek islands. Thankfully people with more patience (and time) simply uploaded the true ending to youtube, which encouraged me to never look at this game ever again.
JRPGs are also guilty of creating impossibly long games, but at least they know how to finish a story! Because of this, one DNF game I regret heavily is Dragon Quest XI. Everything in this game is made with so much love to mimic an 80s RPG with a modern code of paint. I immediately fell in love with the characters and the story and lore of such an old franchise………. but having “the real game” begin 25 hours in was simply ridiculous. When I realized how early I was into the game, I simply sighed and moved on to the next game. I will come back to it, eventually, for sure, but I’ll do it knowing well and good that I will have to clear my schedule for it.
Since we’re in the topic of RPGs, here’s an unconventional DNF: Ring Fit Adventure.
I know, I know, I sound like a crazy person complaining about the story in a fitness game, but hear me out.
Ring Fit just kept rehashing the same story beats over and over again, with no ending in sight. I know I shouldn’t pay attention to this games story, as it is just an avenue to make you exercise, but it is so frustrating how it just keeps going forever. You rarely feel like you accomplish anything, and that should be like the most important thing in a workout routine.
Game over and over again
The Mega Man franchise is so beloved to me. Since I was a little kid I loved watching the Battle Network anime, learning about the franchise online, and just admiring the cool character design. I had multiple toys, including more than one Zero figurines. The games were sadly out of my reach; the NES games were difficult to obtain and play in 2003, and I never had a GameBoy Advance or DS to play the Battle Network saga.
After being a fan for over 10 years, I was finally able to play these games from start to finish with the release of Mega Man Legacy collection, which compiled the first 6 Mega Man games in the NES. To my surprise… these games hard, yo.
I fought tooth and nail to beat Mega Man 2, the easy one. The rest of the franchise though? impossible. I get these were older games, but even with the added save states and infinite lives and rewind features, I simply lacked the patience to beat these difficult games. I even gave Mega Man X a chance with its respective legacy collection, and I got nowhere near finishing any of them.
For me and many others, video games are an escape. It’s our way to relax after a hard day of work… So why the hell would I spend my free time dying hundreds of times in Dark Souls? To me, there’s nothing worse for me than a game that has a wonderful aesthetic, beautiful level design, excellent characters, cool story and……. they just make it stupidly hard for no reason.
Hollow Knight is also guilty of this sin. The game is outstanding, the metroidvania-syle map is so perfectly crafted… but it’s souls-like elements ruin it for me. It’s a game where you’re expected to die frequently, which really sucks like wtf what kind of decision is that, and every time you die you have to fight a shadow version of yourself to get your money and energy back… which leads to long stretches where you’re basically limping towards the last place your character died. After a very frustrating string of events, I lost all my in-game money, turned off my Switch and never played it again.
D- Design
Let me tell you about Watch Dogs Legion for a bit. The idea of this game is that there’s no main character; you can play as any NPC. It’s a fascinating system where, if you see an NPC in the street with a nice skill, you can do a mission to recruit them and literally play as them. This applies to literally every single pedestrian. Thinking how this is possible literally makes my brain hurt.
The game lends itself to several types of gameplay. You can go stealthily, guns blazing or anything in-between, so the characters you pick from the street are categorized into these archetypes. I started one of the first missions in the game with Billie, the introvert teenage hacker. After quietly making my way to the main objective of a story mission, an alarm sounded and a bunch of guards game in, shooting away. Killing them all was a mandatory requirement to finish the mission. Billie, a stealth character, obviously didn’t have a big gun to shoot back, so she was killed in action.
Poor game design is something that can’t be simply fixed with a patch. These are intentional choices baked into the core of the game. It was an intentional choice to have these missions be big-gun-oriented, even when they promised a “play as anyone” mechanic. No, you can’t play as anyone, you have to play with the character with the biggest gun. As a stealth-head, I simply could not accept this and DNF it.
These design choices can break a game completely for me, especially when many other games have done it successfully in the past. Wargroove, a grid-based strategy game, has such a cool character design and style… but horrible QoL features. Fire Emblem set the standard for grid-based combat, but Wargroove decided not to follow it and, in my opinion, suffered from it. This game came out in 2019, they had plenty of time to see what other strategy games were doing to improve the experience.
Video gameZzz…
I’ve mentioned multiple reasons to DNF a game. Some of them valid, some of them not as much. Sometimes, though, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game design. Some games are just a snoozefest.
Take Days Gone, for example. It’s a zombie game that came out at the right time, with a big Sony budget, Open World… but it was simply not good. Nothing interesting happens! I’m just moving from objective to objective, feeling brain-dead. I can’t even write a deep review about it; the game fails to be good, but it also fails at being bad? it’s just a big meh. The game’s title is perfect, though, I lost so many days of my life trying to like this game.
Another game that hurts to put in here is Hellblade. It’s such a fascinating concept, specially if you’re wearing headphones. The main character has schizophrenia, so you get a bunch of voices talking to you while you play. And it IS interesting. But this concept cannot carry this game for 8 hours. After the first hour, you’ve seen, and heard, everything.
This last one is a low-hanging fruit, but stay with me. I am a HUGE Banjo-Kazooie fan. I’ve 100% it and its sequel multiple times. A collect-a-thon platformer with goofy humor and fun characters. Gaming at its finest. Knowing well and good that everyone hates the third game, Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts, I wanted to try it for myself.
They changed the gameplay to be a Lego-inspired vehicle building game. Clipping engines, wheels and chassis together to make a car go vroom. And it just works! vehicles have weight to them, so you can’t build heavy vehicles with weak engines, or make asymmetrical cars because they topple over.
But, there’s just nothing here. Seeing all those characters and world be transported into the most boring game ever was so sad. Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts is… nothing. It’s not even a fundamentally “bad game”, it’s just boring. You have the characters and the humor and the wacky world, but then NOTHING happens within it. I can’t even say it’s a bad game mechanic, because it does work, (hell, they did something Tears of the Kingdom was praised for 15 years early), but nothing interesting ever happens in here to turn this mechanic and the world into a fun game.
I want to stress that, despite all the haterism in this article, I do finish most of the games I play and give a chance to those I don’t. Even bad games have thousands of fans, and I try my best to understand why people like them. Sometimes a game I am not sure I’ll like becomes one of my favorites, but the opposite happens as well.
One day I might give the games on this list a second chance, but until then they will remain on my DNF list.