- Final Fantasy XII

- Any game with complex Magic systems. lol

Nights into Dreams.

I remember a lot of flying and circles and capturing tokens, and some boss fights... and no clue whatsoever of what the game actually was about.

hmmm... I suppose other games includes Earthworm Jim, Krusty's Super Fun House, and others...

Life, great graphics, terrible gameplay, still struggling to understand how to play :V

These titles are from a time when games were packaged in real boxes withthe manual printed on real paper. Sometime the manual was a great addition to the game, with lots of artwork and background story...

Anyway I think Krusty's Fun House was about Krusty the Clown having to save his house from a rat invasion by luring them into traps, some kind of platform/puzzle mix, think lemmings but more action oriented, and the goal is to kill the rodents, not save them. (I think, only played it once on emulator.)

Mhmm. I remember reading the manual, and it had something about going into a dream. But it was kinda too vague.

I remember figuring that out, but we had rented the cartridge back in.... 1997? I don't know. Didn't have the manual. I suppose more the 'this is suppose to be a Simpson's title' or something but made no sense why Krusty was there.

Regardless, it seems there could have been a more enjoyable platformer than 'activate trap'.

Lemmings seemed pretty easy, get from A to B with as many lemmings as you can; Though why they had to move wasn't explained. Or if it was my 10 yearold mind and limited reading ability couldn't follow but point&click made sense.

Final Fantasy 9: While the minute systems were easy to understand, there are a few exceptions to this; two of which I think were purposefully designed bad to get players to buy a guide. There's Terra Master, the obligatory card minigame (as was the style at the time), and Synthesis, the weapon merging system. The basic idea is sound, but the execution is insane as one of the best weapons involves keeping your starter weapons.

There's also the overarching plot, which as was the style for the time, is convoluted while not actually saying a whole lot.

Legend of Mana: As above, I'm inclined to believe that The various systems were invented as an excuse to make players buy a guide. There's forging, magic, monster ranching, fruit growth, magic balance, and several more. It reaches SaGa levels of opaqueness for the sake of opaqueness. Want to unlock a quest? Better hope your magic levels are balanced, or you're never seeing that one!

Though, the combat is simplistic, so there's that.

Call to Power 2: A fair bit, actually. A fair number of the systems are badly explained and left as an exercise in bad UI design to the player.

Uru Complete Collection: The actual game itself is fine. Some of the puzzles though, like the fireflies appear to have been designed by a puzzle sadist.

Block'hood: Just the entire thing. But that's more an issue of bad design. It's supposed to be about synergistic relationships, but doesn't actually make any sense; there's no penalty for overabundance of bad resources.

Fez: Anti-Cubes and Heart Cubes. Mostly has to do with the fact that the full of themselves designers thought that a flipped cipher was a good idea along with a cipher language.

Well, when I first played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, I didn't understand the deep gameplay and narrative. I was young and mostly just played it because it let me do whatever the crap I wanted. It wasn't until many years later, after seeing this video, that I decided to go back and give it another go with my knowledge of how RPGs (and later TES games) work that I finally came to understand it and love it as one of my all-time favorite RPGs.

What's wonderful, though, is that unlike the later TES games (which I love to death), Morrowind still maintains such an air of mystery. I've put thousands of hours of my life into the TES series as a whole but the later games eventually start to feel like you're an unstoppable force of nature (even early in replays) once you get really good at the gameplay. Morrowind doesn't do that. Instead, when I replay it, I ALWAYS feel like I'm going on that epic adventure again, from noodle-armed outlander to god-king who saves them all. While Oblivion is my favorite in the series, Morrowind and Skyrim are tied as my second-favorite for different reasons and Morrowind will always have that beautiful balance of old school sandbox RPG gameplay and the more detailed gameplay and game worlds that the later games have.

Agh, just talking about this is making me want to start a new full series playthrough but I have too many games on my backlog haha

Good old M.U.L.E. on the C64. I was just a kid, with no manual (and no Internet) to refer to and, let's face it, it's not the easiest game to get into in the first place. But I still occasionally played it and had some fun with it. This maybe goes to show how good it is.
Also: Nexus

So many small level-ups, constant microtransactions and upkeep mechanics. But the controls are out of this world.
This one has always rubbed me. I bought that one (only had ever played a friend's Secret of Mana) and... I liked it, but it quickly became a labrynthine mess. At a certain point, I had no idea where to go. I fully explored ever place I had laid and had no more places to drop down or anything. It was a pretty game and sounded OK, and had fun combat. And I loved the IDEA of what they were doing. It just didn't do it well, sadly. I regularly think, "I should load it up in emulator and play it, see how it goes differently" and decide not to.

Good notes on Blockhood. It also wasn't at all what I was expecting when I got it, which made it easy to abandon.

And it's a real shame, because the couple of weeks I tried out Hearthstone I had a ton of fun with it, and I probably would with MtG as well. The only thing I found comparable was table top wargaming, in which the gameplay is more stable by comparison. As in, I don't think an army would as easily suddenly become useless compared to a specific deck in a CCG. But that of course is also a great time sink, though at least without the 'grind'.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood for the Commodore 64 is the most incomprehensible game I've ever played, I never understood what I was doing or what I was supposed to do. :)

Drakkhen was also a difficult game to understand; to make matters even worse it was badly translated from French and sometimes the text wouldn't even fit the text box, so you missed part of it. Too often it's not clear what you're supposed to do next. Also, the magic system is really weird. Back in the day, I loved the game anyway (still do) because of the monsters, the exploration and leveling up your heroes, but I couldn't complete the game until a couple of decades later when I found a hints guide online.

Me too, lol. And it was the same with the first game in the series. The only Sim City I've played where my cities didn't fail miserably was the SNES version. :D

Baldur's Gate is one that comes to mind, especially when it comes to magic.

I had that problem with Icewind Dale 1 and 2, which I played before the BG series. It took a while to understand the magic and other features. But now the Infinity Engine games are at the top of of my all time favorites. :)

In major or minor level, several during my child/teenage years thanks to English is not my mother language.
Few from the top of my head, Atari:
-Flight Simulator II
-Desert Falcon
-Into The Eagle's Nest

Sure, those were mine and I had the manuals, But hey! In English...
Then, goes all those cartridges temporary borrowed from friends with gameplay/ideas/texts not easily to figure out... so, the list grows.

Anyway, the lifetime reward goes to the infamous -Fez-. No excuses there: The total fault is on the game itself.

The Last Remnant by Sqeenix
I never did understand its battle system among other things.