I've played a bunch of PS1 games that were revered among gaming circles, only to not find them entertaining. Let's see which ones I can think of:
Xenogears, for one. Boooooooring. The battles were boring, the story was boring, the characters were boring. I kept waiting around for it to get good, and it didn't. That was a while back, though.
Then Final Fantasy Tactics. I couldn't make heads or tails of the story, and it was so focused on story that that was a huge problem. (The cause of the problem might have been the translation.) The battles themselves were really hard with very little reward for beating them. It was really frustrating to keep redoing the same battles over and over and over again, moreso even than Fire Emblem (where there was much more repetition) because I could never tell what I was doing wrong. If I forced myself to play the game for long enough, I'd start to have fun with developing my fighters, but then I got the feeling that they were all running into dead ends, because there just wasn't enough to do with them. I stopped playing long before the end. It's nowhere near as fun as Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is generally overlooked.
I tried playing the original Tomb Raider. I like its concept: Indiana Jones done as a realistic action-platformer. That's pretty ambitious. But those controls drove me crazy. I could see what they were going for style-wise: they were trying to impose realistic limitations so that it would be more impressive when you actually get somewhere. But they went way too far. Lara was having trouble with jumps I could easily make in real life. I mean, she walks right off cliffs, even when you're pressing the jump button! And turning was so frustrating- the most simple thing in a 3D platformer is jumping straight, then turning 90 degrees and jumping again. I wouldn't have believed how hard it is to do that simple maneuver in this game. I was very disappointed by how lousy this game was.
Most recently, I tried playing Silent Hill. The significant tension that was there wasn't enough to get me over the monotony. You walk through fog. And you walk and you walk and you walk and you walk. After a while, it gets old. Right when you start playing, it sends you on a treasure hunt around town. I normally like treasure hunts. The areas treasure hunts are in usually aren't this dull, though. Every street looks the same, every alleyway looks the same. It's a big world, and an empty one. Not fun. The action itself didn't have much variety to it. So I went into a school, and walked through every silly room in it, and then it told me to go through the whole school again. That's the point where I stopped. Why waste my time with this nonsense? I dunno, maybe I'll get back to the game some time to see if it goes anywhere. But I've pretty much given up.
I haven't been able to play Psychonauts because I don't have a PS2 or a good enough graphics card. Hearing that the control is even worse than Prince of Persia makes me feel a lot better. Thanks.
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