[Question] Games that grow on you

So we have all had it happen. We buy a game because it is cheap/looks good/follows a type of genre we like/is popular and really don't like it at first. Maybe it wasn't what we thought it would be, maybe the gameplay is harder than it ought to be, maybe something else, or maybe a combination of all of the above. However, we still play it...and we notice that we start to like it. Little by little, hour by hour, we play it mroe and more such that while the game will never become your favorite game, it's one you look back and say "That was pretty darn good game".

What games has this happen to you before? I'll start off with one of my own.

Name: Puzzle Quest
Description: More or less a medieval puzzle game. The basic premise is you try to match at least three items (same colored mana, skulls, etc) in a row. You can even do four or even five of a kind if you are really good. There are four types of mana that allow you to cast spells, purple stars that give you experience (beyond that you get from winning a battle), skulls that take off the toher guy's hit points, gold that lets you buy stuff, and X2, X4, and X6 blocks that when lined up right, gives you the amount of mana you normally would get for a three/four-in-a-row multiplied by the number. Gold can be used to guy various items, most of it that gives you items that give you starting mana, gives you mana for matching a certain type of item, take off some of the damage, and so forth. experience allows you to become higher proficient in various attributes that help you from raising a percentage to get anextra turns if you match a certain item, to increasing the damage you deal out, to increasing the gold/experience you get from battle, and more. There is a main storyline which seemingly can ark depending on some of your decisions, but also many, many optional quests to let you get gold/experience.

Why I didn't like it at first: I was thinking there'd be a better assortment of puzzles. It's the same puzzle gamet he entire tme and in fact if you turn of your NDS and turn it back on, it seems to go in the same "order". Furthermroe, when first starting out, you find the computer is able to "predict" the future and knows just when it is going to get xyz mana or even though the next level of mana can't be seen yet, it knows which blocks to match to get things just right. In other words, it gets "lucky" way too often.

Why I started to like it: After getting through the fact that it's virtually the same throughout, and after getting use to the computer's tricks, it did become a fun and the strategy became enjoyable too. I think the level system sucks (you get four points per level but many of the upgrades require 2 or 3 points and most of the decent armor requires some insane level like level 24 to equip) but I get by just by pounding my opponent with combinations of three and four-in-a-rows. Oh, and the best is the start of each game being able to match three golds, which sets of a series of three and four-in-a-rows that culminate in a "Heroic bonus" that also gives me an extra 100 XP.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I had the same feeling with Puzzle Quest, and yet I still play the damn game.

See my thread about Shaun White to see exactly what you were saying about games you buy cheap or like the genre, and hate, but then love.

The key example of this though would be something that would eventually lead to some life changing things, FINAL FANTASY!
I started out absolutely hating this game series, (although I didnt know it was a series at the time, I just thought the 7 on the end of it was a cool title, like in XIII or Toejam and Earl Too - Altho I later found out Toejam and Earl Too was a sequel too). I worked in a little computer game shop, I was about 15 ish at the time and saw this game land on the shelf, its box looked pretty uninteresting, the title didnt inspire much, but the reviews screamed about it: "ITS FINALLY OUT ON A NEXT GEN!!!" "THANK GOD THIS SERIES HAS AN UPDATE" "THE WORLD WONT KNOW WHATS HIT IT" - I mean, I never judge a game by its cover, but this one just didnt leap out to me at all so I just left it there. Then they put it on the PSX Pod instore so people could play it. It was always in the Midgar section and nothing ever seemed to happen, and I thought the 10 minute timer was the demo timer, so again, just thought what a pile of crap and let it slip from my mind.

2 Weeks Later...

Im sitting in my mates room and were playing Tekken 2! (Hell yeah that game was awesome). We clear a few more characters and watch the awesome endings, then he suggests we try a new game he picked up, Final Fantasy VII. I groaned and said "Dude, its awful, its all jappy and confusing, and nothing happens, it just sits on a bridge doing nothing, looks really buggy and graphics are crap". He still goes ahead and pops in the first disc, I couldnt work out for the life of me why it needed 4. The intro fires up (which to this point I had not seen) and my jaw dropped, but I didnt say anything as I was still standing my ground that this game was a bridge over a light and that was all. My mate then moved down the screen, and up popped a whole new area, I was starting to see what was going on, and we worked through to the bit where the reactor blows up (forgotten the game spans over 4 discs at this point). Reactor blows up, Game COMPLETE.... right? We had fun, its all over back to Tekken 2 now? WRONG!!!! The game drops us into a destroyed section of Midgar and then the next part of the story fires up! We are hooked, but we dont know it yet, out of curiosity we follow it along, and realise this might be the most epic story we have ever seen, so I go to my piratey friend and order the NTSC copy of the game for full screen fun (I was a naughty pirate back then, I have redeemed since). Me and my cousin begin the experience, and find the game to have hundreds of hours in it, a deceptively amazing storyline, lovable characters and gameplay so addictive, its infuriating!

Final Fantasy VIII came out a few years later and I was salivating over its release, bought it, hated it at first, mastered Junction, then loved it, me and another cousin had a bet on who could get to the ending first, I won by literally 2 minutes, it was so much fun, and loved every second.

Final Fantasy IX hit the shelves and me and my cousin had a new bet on, beat Ozma, he beat me by a few days, but after collecting the animals it was done.

Final Fantasy X came out, we both played and didnt get the same feeling of immersion as the other games, the free world was gone and there didnt seem to be as much, the world had lost its freedom.

X-2 slid through the cracks and we enjoyed mastering the dress-spheres, and collecting the catnip, but otherwise pretty non-eventful.

XI.... XI... I wish I had never picked up that game, 2 years of my life wasted on that addictive pile of crap. Nearly ruined my university, I got fat, nearly lost friends, but it was my own fault, now im through the looking glass, passed my WoW and FFXI addictions and realised I just need to avoid MMoRPG's.

Amazing how all this started from a game I never intended to give the time of day.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Metroid Prime, believe it or not.

I never had the chance to play Super Metroid in my younger days, I have no idea why.
I'll assume we just hadn't heard of it or something.

Anyway, not having played Super Metroid, not even knowing Metroid existed at all, I purchased Metroid Prime on its release day because a friend told me I had to get it.
I turned it on and literally hated it from start, I think got past the parasite queen before I decided to return it.

So I did.
But a couple of the next few nights something was bugging me, I got this massive craving of wanting to play it again, and it just kept growing.
So maybe 5 days later I had to re-buy it again, got home and played it non-stop until I finished it.

Since then MP has been one of my favourite games, and the series is amongst my top 3.

Definitely grew on me, and I wasn't even playing it.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Metroid Prime was the game where i learned how to press a button extremely fast. I played like halfway through it, then sort of lost interest and gave it back to the friend i'd borrowed it from. I was impressed that i got as far as i did, i've never been much for FPSs in the first place.

There are a couple of games that really grew on me. One is the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance titles. When I first started, i really didn't know what i was doing, and the game was extremely difficult. gradually, though, i figured out that you learn abilities from weapons, and some abilities were just nuts. Double sword paladin with bonecrusher and fighter moves. Gunners with mog knight abilities. Doublecasting summoners. The possibilities are almost endless. I've been through the first one something close to 5 times.

The other game is Skies of Arcadia: Legends for Gamecube. At first i thought that it felt really clunky and didn't work well, but once again, as i started to understand how the system worked and enjoy the story and environments, i played it through to the end within a week. It's another game that really just never gets old for some reason.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

The other game is Skies of Arcadia: Legends for Gamecube. At first i thought that it felt really clunky and didn't work well, but once again, as i started to understand how the system worked and enjoy the story and environments, i played it through to the end within a week. It's another game that really just never gets old for some reason.

Even though I have never actually played it, I love this game.
I used to watch a friend of mine go through it.

And the music was just fantastic, I loved it.

We still quote certain stuff from the game, but most often it's Drachma-related.

(And yeah, I started off not liking it for the same reasons as you did. Although later on it grew on me, especially the music.)

I was speaking idiomatically.

There's a couple like this for me. Super Puzzle Fighter, my mate bought years ago when it first came out and we played it a bit before deciding it wasn't as good as Bust a Move and never really played it again. Then last year, my girlfriend picked up a copy in a charity shop and we played it loads. I guess I love it because although I'm probably a fair bit better at it than she is, it's still possible she'll win, primarily because I've tried to wipe her out with a huge move, not quite killed her and gifted her a ton of shit to send back. Every time I play it I swear I learn something new too, primarily planning your setup based on the character your opponent has and where their blocks will drop when they send them over.

The other game is Too Human. I bought it mainly because it's cheap and I like vikings and initially I thought it was ok but nothing special. Then after a few hours of playing it, I was getting more and more into it and now I love the game, having spent an outrageous amount of time playing it. Couldn't even tell you why I like it so much.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Quote:

Metroid Prime was the game where i learned how to press a button extremely fast. I played like halfway through it, then sort of lost interest and gave it back to the friend i'd borrowed it from.

Definitely not a grow on me game, but absolutely loved it. The minute somebody told me sequence breaking still existed after the transition to 3D I couldn't put it down. Nothing quite as awesome as beating the game with 22% complete.

For my grow on me game, its almost the equivalent of a guilty pleasure as well. A friend of me gave me Final Fantasy Mystic Quest for a birthday present, and at first it was a total dog of a game, particularly compared to pretty much any other RPG with decent depth. But...there was something just awesomely mellow about it. There weren't zillions of stats to keep track of, combos to master, or secrets to unearth. After about half way through, I oddly realized that I actually liked not having to be OCD about everything in the game, and worry I'd missed an item, or skipped a sidequest. Ended up loving that aspect by the end. The game was still really simple, and not top tier by any means, but it advanced way beyond initial impressions.

FELIPE NO

The first time I played Jade Empire I wasn't overly impressed. Even though the story system and plot structure were practically identical to Knights of the Old Republic, the much-different combat system was a huge turn off for me at first. Then I let one of my friend's borrow it and his brother-in-law ganked it from him and never saw my game again. Then out of nowhere, my friend who I had lent the game to bought me a copy to replace the one his brother-in-law had stolen and, as luck would have it, I didn't have a single game to play on the Xbox and started going through that one again.

Then I don't know what happened. I just LIKED it. I plowed through the entire game twice in less than 3 weeks just so I could get both the good and bad endings and found practically everything in the game, including those infernal concoctions you create while you're in that celestial garden. I never really understood why the game got such a bad rep from everyone who played it but, for all its faults, Jade Empire was a solid game that didn't need to rest on the laurels of KotOR to be good.

How ya doing, buddy?

I really liked Jade Empire. The only problem with it I had was that the move that slowed everything down was completely broken and made every fight exceptionally easy. Good game though and one I'd happily recommend to people.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Definitely Battlefield 2.

It is the one game I mention when anyone has anything to say about learning curves in video games. There's no real single player, there's no intro or training level, there's just you on a playing field with 64 people, now sink or swim.

To be honest, the first few months I had it was like torture playing it. But my friends were totally sold on it, so I stayed with it. And I started learning when to do what. Which kit counters this scenario? Should I use the vehicle or get out and run? Do we have a commander? Can he artillery that point for us before we take it?

The pure, unequalled variety in the gameplay makes for a daunting experience when you first start it up, but if you have the patience for it, there's big rewards in store. It's a neat game because almost anybody can be a big fish in their own little section of pond.

Originally Posted by Shin

I really liked Jade Empire. The only problem with it I had was that the move that slowed everything down was completely broken and made every fight exceptionally easy. Good game though and one I'd happily recommend to people.

I've tried to play it a couple of times, and have basically the same problem as you with it, except it was a dealbreaker for me. Almost if not all of the battles I fought were a kind of lather, rinse, repeat thing. There weren't actual combos to use, just the different styles and then BUTAN MASH, so I never got invested in the combat.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I bought Sudeki simply because it was cheap and there a blue-haired chick on the cover!... Turns out the game was very fun, with the environments and abilities. The only part I didn't like was the boss where you play only as the scientist (will never remember his name.) The last level of that game has probably the best BGM ever, I also have to mention.

How ya doing, buddy?