Mechanics you hate in games you love

[Just a Wario Fan]

When you are required to have a certain item or power-up to reach a collectible, especially when said item cannot be found in the level you’re playing, so you have to return to an earlier level just to ‘’harvest’’ items and then return to the level the collectible is located in, or when you need to carry an item through much of the level to use it where required.

This is why it took me so damn long to collect every Star Coin in New Super Mario Bros. (Returning to 1-4 over and over again to get Mini Mushrooms was annoying as heck.)

 

[CM30]

You must have absolutely loved unlocking world 4 and 7 in the original NSMB then... where you needed to use a Mini Mushroom while fighting the boss of the previous world.

Related to the topic, the traps in the ScareScraper in Luigi's Mansion 3 can go to hell. If you're caught in one on your own, you're just screwed; you lose about 1 minute (of 5) with no easy way to get it back, likely costing you the game. The last game was generous enough to disable traps when playing alone, but no, not this one.

Bonus disdain for the 'teleport your Poltergust to the other side of the map' event. It's an even bigger time waster, and if you're alone and playing in most modes, probably spells the end of your run.

Oh, and that rubber duck floatie stuff in the single player game is annoying too. Especially in this boss battle:

 

[ShyGuyXXL]

Speaking of collectibles...
...I know that I've ranted about this before...
...but I hate how in older kirby games and even Wario Land Shake it, there are sometimes things hidden behind one of two or more identical paths, and you have to guess the right one, otherwise you'll have to play the whole stage again, cuz you can't go back anymore.

That's just a big fuck you to the player. "Here, flip a coin, if you guess right, you get your treasure. If not, fuck you."
That's not how you create replay value. Replay value is when you WANT to play a game again, not when you're forced to, out of spite.
WL Shake it also does the "you should've ground-pounded here, but NOT here" thing, which is just aggravating. If you wanna condition me to ground-pound before jumping down every hole, don't then punish me for it later.

Thankfully, the more modern kirby games have more fair puzzle design. They either let you retry those areas or they give you hints about what to do and what not to, so you're not just blindly guessing.

 

[CM30]

Speaking of collectibles...
...I know that I've ranted about this before...
...but I hate how in older kirby games and even Wario Land Shake it, there are sometimes things hidden behind one of two or more identical paths, and you have to guess the right one, otherwise you'll have to play the whole stage again, cuz you can't go back anymore.

That's just a big fuck you to the player. "Here, flip a coin, if you guess right, you get your treasure. If not, fuck you."
That's not how you create replay value. Replay value is when you WANT to play a game again, not when you're forced to, out of spite.
WL Shake it also does the "you should've ground-pounded here, but NOT here" thing, which is just aggravating. If you wanna condition me to ground-pound before jumping down every hole, don't then punish me for it later.

Thankfully, the more modern kirby games have more fair puzzle design. They either let you retry those areas or they give you hints about what to do and what not to, so you're not just blindly guessing.

Oh god, this. Wario Land Shake It did this really poorly with the escape sequences, where you basically had to take the exact perfect path and never mess up if you wanted many of the collectables.

 

[Just a Wario Fan]

You must have absolutely loved unlocking world 4 and 7 in the original NSMB then... where you needed to use a Mini Mushroom while fighting the boss of the previous world.

These weren't remotely the most difficult things to do. Playing levels over and over to locate and trying to collect every Star Coin was. Some were just so hard that I couldn't possibly have done it without a video on how to collect all Star Coins.

...but I hate how in older kirby games and even Wario Land Shake it, there are sometimes things hidden behind one of two or more identical paths, and you have to guess the right one, otherwise you'll have to play the whole stage again, cuz you can't go back anymore.

Oh, yes. I hate this too. (Kirby's adventure comes to mind. ) And sometimes the developers even troll you by making the routes parallel to each other, as to show you what rewards you missed.

Mario games love this too, in the form of having collectibles scattered through midair that you have to collect wile free-falling, like in the Sunken Ghost Ship in Super Mario World. Another somewhat unfair feature of this level are the boos that show up at random. God I hate that.

 

[CM30]

The Boos there aren't random. There's a pattern they cycle through. You can see it if you mess around in Lunar Magic or something.

Though they're annoying. And the ones coming from the ceiling in the Donut Plains ghost house are annoying too.

 

[Just a Wario Fan]

Permanently missable content, i.e. anything that you can see/collect/interact with that will disappear when you fail to do something with it, and never appears again.
Here's a full list of 'em:

List of missable content

I don't necessarily dislike everything of this, since for example in Luigi's Mansion the collection of money is one of the challnges of the game, and 'resetting' the ghosts would disrupt the storyline. But in NSMB Wii for example, permanently missable content is only annoying.

 

[CM30]

Permanently missable content, i.e. anything that you can see/collect/interact with that will disappear when you fail to do something with it, and never appears again.
Here's a full list of 'em:

List of missable content

I don't necessarily dislike everything of this, since for example in Luigi's Mansion the collection of money is one of the challnges of the game, and 'resetting' the ghosts would disrupt the storyline. But in NSMB Wii for example, permanently missable content is only annoying.

Permanently missable content is definitely annoying. And while collecting money is definitely part of the challenge in Luigi's Mansion, I'm not a fan of all the content you need Toad to get in the Boilerworks in the third game, since you have no alternatives if you come back later, despite other floors (like the Unnatural History Museum) and even other parts of the same level providing alternatives (you can use paint cans to knock down walls elsewhere on the same floor).

Still, it's better now than it used to be. In the old days, you had games with a ton of permanently missable content that became outright unwinnable if you weren't psychic. Like Sierra's adventure games:

Sierra - TV Tropes

Ah, Sierra. During the heyday of point-and-click adventure games, Sierra was one of the leading names alongside the likes of LucasArts. What truly set them apart was less their stories and quirky humor, which were rather generic in some ways, but …

tvtropes.org

The game at one point gives you the chance to sell a hovercraft for money, which you will need. If you refuse, then the would-be buyer will come back and offer to throw in a jetpack as well. If you take his first (jetpack-less) offer then, a few hours of play later, you will find yourself in a situation where you need a jetpack, have no way to get one (or do much of anything besides float in space), and have no idea where you missed the chance to pick one up.

The infamous mountain-climbing sequence, where the player must traverse a treacherous mountain. During the journey, Graham will get hungry, requiring the player to eat and letting the player choose between eating a pie (which can be gotten, and eaten, very early in the game) or a piece of meat (which the player could possibly not have gotten at all). There's also a starving eagle the player meets later on at the mountain, who you have to feed to survive later on in the game. What the game expects you to do is eat a piece of meat yourself, then feed the eagle the rest, as the pie is required later on. The game never specifies that the meat makes for two servings, and eating the pie, feeding it to the bird or letting the bird starve all make the game unbeatable.

The game is run on an internal timer. If you aren't in the right place when an event happens, then you're stuck and the game is unwinnable, and there aren't any warnings that there's a time limit for certain things, either.