The Top 8 Game Franchises I Can’t Get Into

Welcome all to another edition of The 8 Ball! This week I’m here to talk about gaming franchises that I can’t get into. This usually falls into two camps, either franchises I’ve pretty much never touched or franchises that I’ve tried to play but almost immediately bounced off of. Most of these aren’t “bad” franchises, just ones I have little to know interest in. Let’s begin:

#8: Dragon Quest

I’m pretty sure I’ve never played a Dragon Quest game, ever. Well, I did play/review/enjoy Dragon Quest Heroes, which was an action game. I think part of it was because, initially, they didn’t make too many in America. I think the first to make it to the USA was a pretty late-era PS1 game (Dragon Quest 7), then they made a reasonably popular Dragon Quest 8, then the series was largely banished to handheld consoles, which I don’t really play for almost a good decade, or else a MMO. I should give it a shot some day but frankly, I have another JRPG franchises to play as it is.

#7: Medal of Honor

The only Medal of Honor game I remember playing was the original one on a PS1 demo disk. That was a game that came out 2 years after GoldenEye on the N64 yet I thought was worse. It sounded great, having actual CD music and some voice acting was nice, but it looked awful even back then. Since then, the franchise has largely gone from a single-player franchise to one more about multiplayer only and honestly, that just doesn’t appeal to me too much.

#6: Fifa/Sports Games

I have occasionally played a sports games, but I usually operate on a 5 year schedule. Like, I played Madden 18, and I think I bought/played one of the MLB The Show PS4 games, but not sure which one. I’ve never touched a Fifa game though, the only soccer game I ever played was Mega Man Soccer. For one, I’m really not a big sports guy. The only reason I bought those games was because they were on sale. The bigger reason is because these types of games are just roster updates for the most part. So, going back to them every 5 years or so probably is for the best bet.

#5: Minecraft

I played Minecraft for about 10 minutes and didn’t get it at all. To be fair to it, I tend not to really understand most survival/building games, but Minecraft, in particular, did nothing for me. I like games with at least a bit of direction, so just giving me a world, a shovel and told “Do what you want”, means I’ll be shutting it off in 5 or 10 minutes. I need some type of goal in the game to keep going. The bummer is, there seems to be a lot of really cool stuff to do in the game, based on the pics and videos I’ve seen. But you have to put in dozens, maybe even hundreds, of hours into it, to even get that far.

#4: The Sims

I’ve actually tried to get into The Sims a few different times and bounced off. My big problem with the game is that your Sim(s) don’t actually do what you tell them to do. They do, to a degree, but they also have some element of free will. So you can direct one “Read a book”, and they’ll either do it, or sometimes they won’t. I thought this was annoying since the whole thing seemed to be designed to have a virtual character that you could do what you want with them but it didn’t actually happen. This was mainly based on The Sims 3, maybe they fixed it in The Sims 4 but it was enough to really put me off from trying the franchise again.

#3: Battlefield/Battlefront

This is the same story as Medal of Honor but magnified. Most of the games in both franchises have no “real” story mode. They might have a campaign but it is really just a glorified tutorial system to get you into the real game. Battlefront 2 did have the one that (you guessed it) was taking place in the middle of the main Star Wars movie timeline, but it was so half-assed that no one cared about it. To me, these games are all either about territory control or unit counters and neither appeals to me that much.

#2: Fortnite/Apex

While not the first Battle Royale game, I don’t think, if I was going to play one of those, I’d rather play the originator, which was PUBG. I mean, without PUBG, there would be no Fortnite or (probably) Apex. I generally get annoyed when games just wholesale copy another game’s specific point almost word-for-word. Both games do have their own unique hooks, Fortnite keeps cramming more licensed stuff into it (and has building) while Apex is generally much more of a co-op game, but if I wanted to play this sort of game, I’d want to play the original version.

#1: Pokemon

I actually have one of the newer Pokemon games, Let’s Go Evee, played it for a few hours and then got bored. I never got into the series when I was a kid. The original came out in 1998 so I was 13, which was just around the sweet-spot. I think, even back then, that I was generally done with portable gaming so I didn’t really look into it too much. I did watch the cartoon some but that was it. The franchise generally stayed on handhelds also, so outside of a few niche titles on the N64 or GameCube, it was mainly a Game Boy, GBA, DS, or 3DS franchise. Now with the Switch though, the “main” games are on home consoles and…eh? I guess I see the appeal of them but, like I said, I got kind of bored with the one I got. Weirdly enough, I did like a little game called “Jade Cocoon”, which was basically a Pokemon clone for the PS1, back in the day.

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For comments, list which games or franchises that you can’t get into.

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Top 8 Overall Game Companies