Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
I have a few:
Tunic: I thought it had more than one puzzle, with how it was being talked about online, but it ended up repeating the same thing for 6 hours reusing the same gimmick over and over - after a below average first half.
Xenoblade Chronicles (DE): the characters were really uninteresting, the story kept spoiling every attempted twist it had with needless foreshadowing and the combat felt really boring. The world was empty and it felt like a dead MMO.
13 Sentinels: I won’t spoil anything specific, but the story was just a bunch of the most generic sci-fi cliches.
Monster Hunter Rise: I love World/Iceborne and really enjoyed the parts I played of GU and 4U but Rise just felt bad to play.
Games that force daily tasks/gacha games: I hate being forced - or even just being hinted at having - to grind daily. It just ends up pushing me away from the game, even if I’m enjoying it. I can’t play games like Genshin Impact and Star Rail, but also the daily challenges in sf5/6 bother me every time I see them.
I also don’t really get roguelikes, but I’m not sure if I just haven’t found one I enjoy or I don’t like the genre.
Xenoblade 1 is over a decade old and launched on the Wii. While it is an important game, and was mind-blowing at launch, the sequels surpassed it imo.
Skip 2 and go straight to 3. The gameplay is a combination of both titles and the battle system is FUN. By the end, you’re changing classes, 7 team members at once in battle - switching between them at will, 12 arts available to each member at once, chain attacks and transformations into massive mech-like beings called Ouroboros where you can really fuck shit up. If you install the rebalance mod it’s even better, battles are fast and if you don’t keep up you can get fucked over quite bad. Or you can just go YOLO and just punch things with the fighter class loaded up with attack gems.
The story is very strong (endless war between two nations where the lifespan is only ten years (born at 10, die at 20), and your life is replenished by taking others) with some incredible voice acting from the UK cast, the world feels alive - full of warring factions and roaming armies, and the quests all actually mean something now (help any colony and you gain their leader as a computer played party member, as well as their class and weapon that you can assign to other team members and level up through use). The game runs a dream on a good Yuzu setup in 4k 60fps too.
The great thing about Xenoblade is that you can arguably play the main games in any order and still enjoy the full story. XB2 is super horny, has a fucking terrible menu system and has a lot of it’s own issues, despite it still being a very very good game. But there’s a reason Xenoblade 3 was nominated for Game of the Year at the game awards, you know.
XC2 is a lot better than XCDE, XCDE really suffers from the era it came out of. XC2 was when Monolith really got their stride.
I might consider it in that case, if I ever find it on sale.
Altho I’ve seen a bunch of people complain about XC2’s story, but they usually say that XC’s was better - so I’m not sure what to think.
If you have a hackable switch, dump your keys and demo it on your PC assuming it’s beefy enough. You’ll know if you like it within about an hour or two.