Last game you DIDN'T finish and your thoughts

No more Platinum Games.  It's not them, it's me - I think.  With this one it's kind of hard to be sure, because the in-between-combat segments chugged egregiously and put me off the most.  Trouble is, I didn't like the combat either (so yep definitely me not them).  It's not that it's bad, it's just that without satisfying exploration or whatever between the combat it didn't do enough for me.  Ironically I think I found it taxed my brain a bit, as shown by several game overs to the first boss because I couldn't figure out how to stop its one really powerful attack for ages.  

And the story was meh and the voice acting was meh and and and.  I didn't get far in this, but people on here have said it gets worse before it gets better, and I don't have time for that.

Comebackability: 0/10.  Trade-in fodder and I won't miss it.

I bought this back when in the middle of a gaming drought, possibly in 2018.  There was enough eShop stuff around, but I hadn't had a new retail game that I liked for a while and Jim Sterling recommended this.  You could only actually get it in retail as the big special edition box with soundtrack and everything, but in a 'money > sense' moment I bought it anyway.  It's got decent challenge and flashy graphics, but its gameplay is almost utterly mindless - and not in a cathartic way, it's still sometimes quite stressful.  It's a bit like playing in a casino where you can influence the outcome a little bit based on how hard you cheer for the ball to land on red.  After not getting along with Hyrule Warriors I was never really going to finish this.

That said, I have a soft spot for this game, as I do almost all the games on this list.  It's got bright colours and a cute art style; the way your warriors' heads are all stacked on top of each other while you cycle through them is never not funny; and you can make a female vampire with skimpy clothes and blue hair and give her a bloke's voice, or a massive armoured destroyer that sounds like a Japanese schoolgirl.  Like Iconoclasts, I'm disproportionately keen on it compared it its quality; unlike Iconoclasts, not enough to ever finish it.

Comebackability: 2/10.  I'm fully intending to trade it in, but I'll be marginally sadder to see it go than I will Astral Chain.  The special edition box looks nice on my shelf.

Here's a genuinely good game, top 25 on Switch good game, that I will never finish and that I'll struggle to play again.  It's kind of because of where I left it: right in front of one of the challenges for the hidden doohickeys that you need to get the best ending.  After what happened for the bad ending in Guacamelee 1 there's no way I could settle for that in 2, but for that I'd be dropping into the game with no muscle memory in front of a bastard hard platforming challenge.  The only realistically option would be to restart and play through it again, learning it up again as I go - and while Guac 2 has been good up to now, it hasn't been that good.  It hasn't been special, it's been solid.  By the end of the machine's life I fully expect it to have dropped off that top 25 list.

Comebackability: 3/10.  If I ever play it again it'll be from scratch, so I'll be deleting the data to free up space.  Y'all know how good I am at replaying games.

Now we start to get into the ones where I feel guilty.  I liked Katamari!  It was daft and fun!  It had great music!  It had that bit where the big head peered down from the sky!  It had... kinda subpar gameplay?

Sigh.  It's partly the controls, intuitive in theory but tricky in practice, which I'm sure I'd have come around to if I'd given the game more time; and partly because of what you're actually being asked to do.  It's essentially a high-score challenge.  I don't like high-score challenges, lads.  I like having a goal that's a place to get to, not a number to surpass (JRPGs ask you to surpass the number and use it to get to the place, they don't count).  There's a bit near the end of every level where you've seen everything it has to offer and are just rolling around for two minutes.  I like the trappings, but I don't think I actually (sharp intake of breath) like the core game.  Sorry everybody.

Comebackability: 5/10.  There's a decent chance I'll give it another go because it's just so odd, but it's not like I made much progress so I won't miss the freed up space.

Technically I finished this - as in, I saw an ending.  I didn't really though, did I?  I only got to the space world, and lots of puzzles remain.

Having fallen out of the mental loop, having let the part of my brain that hardened into a diamond of puzzle-solving while I was playing a lot of BIY revert to squishy carbon again, returning to BIY has always seemed like a daunting prospect; and truth be told I was already feeling like the game was too tough for me when it was doing the sort of stuff you see above.  No, returning to BIY would be a project.  I'd have to set aside some time, probably while on holiday.  I'd have to sit down and tell myself, 'You're playing BIY and you're going to enjoy it.'  I'd have to take on some of the easier puzzles again to get that part of the brain back in gear.  I probably would then enjoy it, all told.  

That's not going to happen while there's the stress of lockdown going on.  It might not happen again until I retire.

Comebackability: 5/10.  I do want to return to Baba, and it like Guacamelee 2 is in my top 25 games on Switch.  That scenario I described above is looking awfully unlikely though.

Okami is in my top 25 games ever.  I played it originally on the Wii and now, without the twitchy motion-controlled brush or   waggle to attack, it's the best it's ever been.  It's a gorgeous massive adventure, steeped in Japanese culture and filled with wonderful things, that I've already played and that has no respect for the player's time.

Yes, whether it's the treacle-slow dialogue or the repetitive aspects of the gameplay (including a very long boss you fight three times), I found myself not enjoying my replay of Okami, despite slogging it through to the first big boss in the game - you know the one.  I can still see the things I loved about it, yet shorn of the wonder of a first playthrough (which, I reckon, would still hold up today) I felt the niggles more keenly.  Better to leave it to blossom in the imagination as a thing of beauty.

Also: in retrospect, Issun, Sakuya, and Rao are all dodgy as.

Comebackability: 6/10.  It's easy for me to see a world where I forget the flaws and come back to Okami, so I'll be keeping the save data around; but the game itself will be vanishing from my SD card, solely because it's no doubt a bulky one.

I forgot I had this!  I forgot I had this until I looked back through the backlog thread, then up at my shelf, and saw the yellow box.  I didn't have much interest in the user-generated content, either playing or making; but the campaign mode was pretty high-quality, what I played.  Not full proper Mario platformer campaign-only high-quality, but high-quality nonetheless.

The SMM2 campaign mode's only real flaw was that other games came along that were more exciting, at least at the time, than a thematically inconsistent Mario game that wasn't even the main point of the Mario game it was in.  That's... still kind of true, but I can easily see a time when it isn't.

Comebackability: 7/10.  I'd probably seriously considering playing anything on 8/10 or higher right now, and I'm not considering playing SMM2's campaign right now; but I'm holding onto it.  Discovering I still had it was quite exciting!