I just struggled hard with the gameplay. Some games throw up road blocks, but TW1 threw up entire mountain ranges for me. Maybe I just didn’t quite get something in the mechanics, but it felt like the game would routinely go from playable, to “die incessantly until you grind and overlevel”. A lot of the game’s difficulty felt like it was just level-gating progression blocks. Maybe I was just trying to go too fast? I admit that I may have just brute-forced my way through things that probably had a more nuanced or subtle solution.
This is also not to say that I dislike TW1 at all. I quite enjoyed it. It just frustrated me more than 2 and 3 combined.
Absolutely. Daggerfall is an excellent game! It has some bugs, sure, and the procedural dungeons are sometimes broken, but it is such a fun game that really pushed what was possible in its time.
Final Fantasy IX. Just… everything to do with Vivi and Quina. Those to characters cemented IX as my favorite in the series after initially writing it off as inferior to VII and VIII. While those games have some great narratives, Vivi and Quina both do such a great job of exploring what it is to be human, in their own beautiful and heart rending ways.
The entire experience of Outer Wilds.
So many parts of Persona 3, 4, and 5, but especially 4.
Here’s a weird one: Starflight on Genesis. Not so much because of the story or content, but because I played this game so much with a friend of mine in middle school, and had all but forgotten about it. I was playing through some old Genesis games a month or so ago, and started this game up. As soon as the title screen came up, a flood of memories washed over me and took me right back to 1992. Bawled like a kid for about ten minutes as I realized I had an awesome friend that I had basically completely forgotten about.