My Personal Most Disappointing Games of 2014: Vol. 1

4:03 PM on 01.02.2015 (server time)0

Full disclosure. I haven't completed all of these games, because I found them so disappointing.

1) Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

I decided to give this a try because of all the high praise I keep seeing for this title everywhere I read about games. I'm a huge fan of 999, and Virtue's Last Reward. I love Ace Attorney as well - the small amount of it that I've played. So I wasn't particularly skeptical about this game, but I still wasn't rushing out to buy it because it just looked low budget, and low quality. After it dropped to $20, I decided to give it a try.

I'm actually currently playing through this title right now, and I'm still pretty early on in the game, so it is theoretically possible that I could have a seismic shift in opinion and change my mind at some point. But let's just say that I seriously doubt it.

I'm struggling to come up with anything to compliment in this game. The writing isn't good. The main villain so far is not clever, and is not even close to as well done as the similar villain in Virtue's Last Reward.

The cast is really not compelling to me either right now, and seem like an annoying collection of cliche's and bad art. Ultimate fanfic creator? Ultimate swimmer? I mean ... this is pretty much the bottom of the barrel in terms of casting. Ultimate gothic lolita gambler? (okay, that ones' a little more interesting). Ultimate .... what was it, clairvoyant with stupid hair? Ultimate class president guy that yells and is annoying every single time he speaks about anything? Ultimate fashonista that doesn't even do anything in the story or speak about a single thing related to fashion ever? Even Ultimate martial artist, which sounds cool on paper, is basically turned into a joke instead of daring to take any aspect of the design seriously.

Next up, the music. It sucks. And the thing is, I actually love this composer. He did most of the best tracks on Vanquish, which is one of my favorite OSTs of all time. How does he come up with drivel like this?

What a boring, low quality song.

.... ugh.

Then there's the fact that - as far as I can tell from my early hours playing - the entire game takes place in only a handful of hallways and rooms that you are cursed to perpetually wander around scouring for clues with an awkward camera system. Characters are portrayed as literal cardboard cutouts. And painfully, you are encouraged to repeatedly search the same camera and monitor in every single room, over and over with the same text description in the hopes you might get a random coin for the shop.

I'm not going to comment on the trial systems yet, since I want to see more of it, but this represents basically the only gameplay in the game.

I'm going to play this one until the end so that I'm more qualified to trash it as the disappointing, overrated garbage that it appears to be. The popularity of this title is baffling to me. It appears that all that one has to do to wind up on GOTY lists these days if you're a Japanese developer not named Nintendo, is fill your game full of trendy high school hipsters, fill it full of ultra cheesy dating sim elements, and get it released from a publisher not named SQEX, and you're well on your way. I'm shocked Mind Zero wasn't on people's GOTY lists if people are pumping up low quality stuff like this. Ignore the actual quality of any aspect of a game's design as long as it reminds you a bit of Persona and has a story you like. If the story somehow manages to salvage this trainwreck, I'll recommend people watch the anime instead at this point.

999 and VLR are about 1000x better, in every category. We'll see if I change my mind when I get further in.

2) Drive Club PS+ Edition