Final Fantasy XIII-2
The Offense: Academia 400 AF
Wow, this place – battle – looks really awesome – battle – and the atmosphere – battle – is really – battle – tense – battle. It seems like – battle – this game is – battle – getting ready to – battle – kick into – battle – high gear – battle. SCREW THIS PLACE.
At first glance, Academia 400 AF does look amazing – it’s a sprawling metropolis at night with lots of shiny neon lighting. The tension ramps up when a rogue Proto fal’Cie (don’t even ask) named Adam detects Serah and Noel’s presence and starts turning the entire population of the city into Ci’eth (ghoul-like creatures) to stand against them.
Looks cool, right? Now imagine this crawling with millions of low-level ghouls.
And yes, it feels like you fight every single one of them during your trek through the city. You see, these annoying things spawn at a rate of approximately twice per nanosecond and are practically unavoidable, meaning that you’ll be fighting mobs of low-level ghouls every few steps. It’s tedium at its worst, and the EXP you get from it is trivial.
And it’s a big city – like, really big – full of labyrinthine alleyways and dead ends galore. It’s going to take plenty of time to find your way through it anyway, and the encounters guarantee that time will be at least tripled. Heaven forbid you attempt to do any treasure collecting. There is no way that anyone with half a functional brain could ever think that this slog was fun or in any way a good idea.
Come to think of it, that speaks volumes about the current state of Square Enix.
Half-Life 2
The Offense: Water Hazard
Half-Life 2 is a masterful game, no doubt, but the game’s extended vehicular sections tend to go on long enough to wear out their welcome. The most egregious of these is Water Hazard, which sees Gordon Freeman piloting an airboat through Combine-infested waterways. Doesn’t sound so bad, except for the fact the controls suck horribly. I swear that at some point before this chapter this boat gained sentience and decided to do the exact opposite of everything the player wants it to do.
Told you it was sentient. It even pilots itself – do you see any hands here?
At least it has a gun, right? Then you realize that weaponizing the damn boat just makes it even more unwieldy to control. Not only that, but the level is obnoxiously long, with a ton of enemies, and interspersed with boring, grungy warehouse-type levels where you have to raise gates and whatnot.
Did I neglect to mention that you have a chopper harassing you throughout nearly the entire level? Because you do, and it shows up at the most inopportune times to rain down bullets, bombs, and general hellfire upon you as you fight both the enemies and your boat on the way through the many canals and streams on your way to Black Mesa East. Of course it’s indestructible until the end of the level, in which you finally get the satisfaction of using your boat’s puny gun to very slowly whittle its health down to nothing while dodging its hellfire – without any health bar or any other indicator of its remaining health during the fight, I might add.
Kingdom Hearts
The Offense: Deep Jungle
Honestly, there were a number of levels that I could have picked here. Wonderland is always garbage, Monstro is ugly and confusing, and we won’t even get started on Atlantica.
But at the end of the day, Deep Jungle edges them out to take the award of worst world in the original Kingdom Hearts game. It’s nothing but an hour of pointless backtracking with little to no direction as to where you’re supposed to go next. And the backtracking is bad. Really bad. As in, go back and forth across the entire freaking world multiple times in immediate succession for no apparent reason. Seriously, when you get to the tree house on the far side of the level, there’s nothing there and you just go back to your base camp, only to be told “Oh hey, so-and-so just went to the treehouse, go meet him there!” and the cycle repeats.
Hope you like vines, because you’ll be swinging on a lot of them.
On top of all that, you have to navigate vines and tree trunks in order to get anywhere in the level. And if you go in the opposite direction, you have platforming that requires you to practically start all over again from the beginning of the area if you miss a jump. And let’s not forget the random attacks by Sabor the leopard, who comes out of nowhere to be trounced easily every two seconds.
Not only that, but it just feels totally unnecessary. The world of Tarzan has little to no influence on the plot, the characters are not tied up in the grand scheme of things, and it’s pretty much forgotten as soon as you leave the world, leaving you to feel like you’ve just wasted an hour or two of your life.
Banjo-Kazooie
The Offense: Rusty Bucket Bay
Anyone who knows me knows how great I am at platformers (/sarcasm). There is no way to describe the string of expletives that normally comes from my mouth when I’m dealing with the cheap deaths and frustration that is almost a hallmark of that genre. But when I finally sat down to Banjo-Kazooie, I found myself enjoying just about every minute of the game. It had some moments of frustration, but for the most part it was a charming, well-balanced platformer that served as a great throwback to a simpler time in gaming.
And then Rusty Bucket Bay happened.
For those unfamiliar, Rusty Bucket Bay is a polluted cesspool of a shipyard. Simply being in the water is enough to deplete your air bar faster than Mr. Vile going after a basket of Yumblies (cheating bastard…). At its center is a lone ship called the Rusty Bucket, otherwise known as the S.S. Hell, since it’s a place of eternal torment. Having to navigate the labyrinth of twisting gears, rotating platforms, and spinning propellers in the ship’s Engine Room is bad enough, with the threat of instant death if you even so much as slip one foot off a platform.
Welcome to hell. And this is one of the tamer portions of the room.
But one Jiggy in particular takes it to a whole other level of douchebaggery. After activating two switches on the far side of the Engine Room, you have 65 seconds to navigate back through the Engine Room, climb the ladder, go to the front of the ship, jump into the toxic sludge, dive into the chamber behind the ship’s propeller, grab the Jiggy, and get out before the propeller starts back up and dices you into little tiny bits. Doing all that in such a limited amount of time requires an inordinate amount of precision.
And have fun if you’re not playing it on the Xbox 360. The original N64 version of the game caused you to lose all your musical notes from a particular level if you died. And you will die a lot in Rusty Bucket Bay. So have fun.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
The Offense: Motorcycle Chase and Escort Mission
Even though I’ve just experienced my first playthrough of the series this past year, Metal Gear Solid 3 is a masterpiece. Once the drastic change in gameplay from previous entries in the series clicked, I powered through the game and enjoyed every minute of it, and it earned its place as my favorite game in the series (disclaimer: I’m still playing Peace Walker and have not played Ground Zeroes or The Phantom Pain yet).
Which is why it killed me when the sequence leading up to the end of the game blew so much. After escaping Groznyj Grad, Snake finds himself riding shotgun as he and Eva attempt to outrun an insane Volgin (who is piloting the game’s token world-ending nuke launcher) and his posse on Eva’s motorcycle. The controls are beyond terrible, and the sequence goes on for far too long. But hey, it’s Kojima, and we can always expect one quirky, out of place sequence in a Metal Gear game, right?
Look at their faces. Even they know this isn’t a good idea.
Well, it gets even better. Immediately after defeating Volgin, Eva is injured and Snake must escort her through the jungles to the escape point. Problem is, you’re being followed the whole time and will be incessantly harassed by enemies throughout the whole escort mission. This is compounded by the fact that the areas are pretty large and Eva moves at approximately the speed of a three-toed sloth. It’s so bad that some people even recommend simply knocking her out and carrying her as a quicker, easier option.
Thankfully, the final boss fight and ending that follows is magnificently beautiful. It’s just a shame that the buildup to the finale is so out of kilter with the rest of the game, which is nothing short of masterful.
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No game is perfect, but some come really close, which makes these moments so much more jarring when they do happen. Narrowing down this list was tough, because I could think of so many games that just had that one sequence that you wanted to smack the developers for including. But at the end of the day, a truly great game can overcome a misstep or two, and every game on this list is worth experiencing.
I’m sure some will disagree with some of the inclusions, and there are plenty of others that could have shown up on this list as well. So what sequences dragged down otherwise great games for you? Looking forward to this (likely very, very lively) debate in the comments/forums!
I would have picked Wonderland or Atlantica over Deep Jungle. Deep Jungle at least has that blissful “totally irrelevant so I forgot it immediately” feel to it, but I still get angry thinking about how confusing Wonderland was or the horrendous controls and bosses in Atlantica. Although at least my grudges are optional, iirc, so I have only myself to blame for doing them.
For shame, Geoff, trying to paint Banjo-Kazooie in any sort of negative light
(and what are you complaining about? You played the simple XBLA version even)
He is right though. Every time I reach Rusty Bucket Bay, a sense of dread kicks in because I just know I’m going to die while collecting the musical notes. And then I’ll have to start all over.
I get that in Click Clock Wood instead