[General Discussion] Games that are supposed to be really good but you hate

Here's one game that people haven't mentioned that's topped out my list of pet peeves recently: Dragon Quest 8. I still haven't understood what it was about the game that got it so many rave reviews. Maybe old-school isn't my thing but my list of grievances include the following:

Battle system: They tell you that agility has something to do with turn order. In reality, everything appears to be completely randomized and in many cases, my lowest agility character ended up going first with the rest of the combatants (both allies and enemies) following in a completely unintuitive manner or one backed up by game stats. That pretty much took out all of the strategy from combat because you'd have no idea when an action you inputted would take place. Heck, give me ATB any day of the week despite its shortcomings. Furthermore, most battles were pretty boring, making you input in the same attack combinations each round of every combat ever. A drunken monkey could play this game and do just as well.

Random encounters: I usually don't have problems with random encounters, but the amount in DQ8's was just flat-out excessive. It really became quite a chore to just walk from location to location or navigate some cave complex in order to reach the boss in that location. It was even worse when you went back to the early parts in the game and be forced to face weak creatures you fought as a low-level character. For those of you telling me to use Holy Waters, realize that if they didn't want to make the game so burdensome, they should have removed those encounters after a certain point. Having you fight slimes at level 40+ was just a poor design decision and an insult to my intelligence.

Boss battles: Since they've removed the strategy element and made combats a dull, routine process, the only way they could make bosses interesting was to make them defeatable in a way that was dependent on levelling up to justify the random encounter system they had in place. Needless to say, most bosses went by with me having to use the Whistle command to snag random encounters for the purposes of levelling in order to defeat the upcoming boss. It was a chore and a really boring one at that.

Plot: It was so-so. I'd say that this is even mediocre compared to the games of the SNES era when you had storylines like FF4, FF6, and Ogre Battle running around. Everything is so cliche and predictable in DQ8 that poking fun of it is no longer fun and you can get sauced really fast if you turn it into a drinking game.

Everything except for the graphics and music just bugged me a lot about this game. I've also been told that the rest of the DQ series is like this and that's pretty much put me off the entire series forever.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

While we're still hating on Xenogears, I'd like to add that I would've played more than 10 hours of that game if the camera controls weren't so damn bad (trees and buildings kept blocking out my field of view so I couldn't see where I was going) and they stopped stupid miniquests like "play hide-and-go-seek with a stupid kid". That was the point where I just gave up on that game completely, so the battle system didn't even get a chance to show how degenerate it was.

There's nowhere I can't reach.