WHAT'S THE WORST RPG MAKER GAME YOU'VE PLAYED AND WHY

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Dudesoft
always a dudesoft, never a soft dude.
6309
How is my name not plastered all over this thread?
I'll just say my games and be on my way! :P
Because people are capable of divorcing games from developers and are focusing on the one but not the other. Everyone is capable of making a bad game, it doesn't mean that their name is synonymous with that game only (unless it's the only one they ever made).

I've made bad games, you've made bad games. It's one experience we all share as developers - shit games that we've made.

So I feel absolutely no issue with talking about crap games and the worst ones I've seen before because I've made ones like them before myself. It's part of the experience.

How the heckie have I not been mentioned here yet? Or, well, my games. Don't tell me... they're not as bad as I thought.
This thread got self deprecating real quick...
There have been a lot of games I've played over the years and some just stick out as So Bad They're Bad. I'll go into some deets I guess, since WHY is in the thread title.

Blockland was a game that was pretty bad. Part of it was the developer's insistence that every bad thing was a feature or that people were deliberately playing it wrong but the biggest part was just how bad the gameplay, writing, story and graphics were. I even went out of my way to fix up the animated corners of a water tile for the dev and they wouldn't use them. As a note, if your game has a caterpillar system and you can get stuck in corners and frozen there, even on restart, the game ain't good. Add in that it was literally badly clipped shapes as faces and bodies that just bopped around a mix of custom and RTP and terrible music and writing and it was a humdinger of a memory.


Megaman GX was like the love child of Blockland and something terrible. It was incredibly badly mapped, there were errors everywhere and the writing was terrible. Another dev who wouldn't listen to critique just added the cherry on top, sadly. The game involved Megaman going through doors floating by themselves and running into bugs and bad spelling/grammar every 10 seconds or so. >.<;

Attack on Playtime was interesting in that it looked really good and it started out well. It had great custom graphics, interesting ideas and then it just became boreville. The idea was that you had to fight mess in order to clean up a kids' room. The issue was that the battle system got boring after a few fights, it was skewed towards two settings - insultingly easy or maddeningly difficult - and there was nothing to do but fight. And fight. And fight. And fight. You went to different areas and fought. No items or exploration, just kill all the things on the map and go to the next place to kill all the things on the map. Of which there were many. An hour in and I was half asleep. I've never played a game that was just so mind-numbingly bland and boring after such a promising start.

Okay, so I don't recall the name of this game - not because it was so bad or bland that i forgot but because i had played about a billion games during the IGMC (same IGMC that had Attack on Playtime within it) that year. So, I call it 'the one with the bell chimes'. The best part of the game was that you went into a shop and there was a wind chime to indicate you entered and then a shop screen. That was it. The best part. This game was a hot mess. The mapping was nice - well-used RTP. The aim of the game was to grind up on items to sell to buy to grind levels to get more items to sell to buy more weapons/armour to grind to sell to buy...
You started out with some item spots you could just continuously take items from. You then sold those so that you could go into the long grass where the enemies were. The enemies that were far outside your level range. Oh, and there were bugs. Nessy also played the game and she started on level 99. I started on level 1. We have no idea how that happened but it did. I died even with the best that you could buy with armour and weapons in all the areas that monsters dwelt. Fun times.

Another one that i don't recall the name of was one from a few years back - the last IGMC I judged. In it you had a very badly mapped RTP 'town' that was the hub. You were default character 1. Your aim was to defeat the five bosses, but to do that you needed to grind up in the different dungeons and get strong enough to beat them. Sounds fine in theory, but the issue was that balance. Oh boy, the balance.
Let's see now - the lowest level dungeon was a square RTP room with nothing in it but random encounter rate set to high. You run around, get into a fight, beat the monster and move on. Except that monsters gave you a tiny amount of EXP and Money. And money was only managed to be gotten via fighting. And the inn cost 10 money to use. And you got 1 gold per battle. And the battle took over half your health. Items cost 50 gold to buy a potion. You didn't start with potions. Someone clearly didn't test their game. But at least it had the chicken. That was the best part.


I don't think I need to detail Kung and Hawkman here, yet again. Needless to say they were both notoriously bad.
Hawkman's terrible battle and encounter design (my first unannounced random encounter, with two enemies, which took at least six turns, where I was dropped to about 25% of my HP, and which I would have died in if I hadn't gotten a lucky critical;oh yeah: no skills, no items) made me ragequit long before the weird rapiness. Anyway, assuming that game's database simulates its world correctly, Hawkman will be eaten by bats in a cave long before he reaches the surface to begin what can only be described as his genocidal rape crusade.
author=J-Man
I'll just say my games and be on my way! :P

Naaaah I had fun with the Phantasia serie. A lot!

What about......... this?
It's on Steam...


author=StormCrow
no skills, no items) made me ragequit long before the weird rapiness. Anyway, assuming that game's database simulates its world correctly, Hawkman will be eaten by bats in a cave long before he reaches the surface to begin what can only be described as his genocidal rape crusade.


Hawkman starts out with three skills, aura of terror which is used to prevent random encounters for a time, devour soul which can only be used on enemies with 20% of their HP or less in order to steal points from them to spend on raising your own stats, and regenerate which removes negative status conditions as well as recovers HP and MP.

The goal of the game is to basically drain every enemy you come across for points in order to improve your own Attack, Defense, Magic, and Agility. Though, I'd argue that agility is probably one of the best stats to raise early on. Since the game appears to utilize an active time battle system.

So if you play the game as intended it should be fairly easy to get to the parts where Hawkman begins raping women left and right. At least if you have the patience to do a little grinding.
I never played anything offensively bad. That DOOMS game looked DREADFUL.

Personally, the worst I played was Planet Stuck. But it was just a kid's first project made with custom art. It had enough neat elements to it to make the bad hit. But it was still actually cool for some 13 year old to pull off something like that.
I feel like I could list more wrong with my own completed games than I could anyone else's, even if I thought they were the worst.

On top of the player's bringing up valid issues, I may like the talent to fix, I sometimes look back at games I completed and think "I wished I did X better." Keeps me up at night sometimes.

The RPG Maker games I'll feel safe about ratting on about, however, are the ones that are clearly one of the creator's first projects... but it's commercial. They clearly hadn't looked at a single mapping tutorial and haven't done nearly enough playtesting for the battles... but they think it's a game at a standard worth paying for.

At least with any other awful games, it could be an innocent attempt for the developer to actively learn about game design and writing. Even if the developer is a dick, at least they've taken nothing more than a bit of your time.

But if you're selling, and you don't have the skills worth selling, then your full of yourself.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
I went back and replayed Lost Legacy: An Animania Story at level 99 and an item that allowed me to increase the walking speed. The game is aggressively bad, and it's going to take me a few to reflect on precisely why. Be back in a second.

---

Okay, so the mapping in places taken from FFIX are supposed to reflect the functionality of the original game, but it's really bad. There were two dungeons (Cave of Trials and Castle Raoul) which were so anti-player that I went into RPG Maker 2003 and set up shortcuts and tabbed through walls. There was one town on fire where the game started practicing throwing the same exact battle at you dozens of times with scripted encounters that cannot be avoided (three Knights of Raoul x??). This is how the gameplay was aggressively bad, but that doesn't cover the story.

Here's the thing about the story: there's these two kids who start the game at ages four and two who are sister and brother respectively. Immediately, there's r- bad touch overtones, and this carries through the entirety of the game. If there's a person who doesn't make sexually charged statements towards these kids over the next twelve years, they either die or are background characters to the extreme. Even some of the people who do die make sexual advances on these children... and it's never addressed. For years, these two children are under the tutelage of someone who immediately fondles them and is still revered by these legendary warriors known as the Kokon, with the only challenge being self-imposed in the form of a "it'll never happen again," which immediately goes out the door when he moves from sister to younger brother. Then there's the "several hundred year old woman trapped in a ten year old body" who just wants to grow up so she can have sex... which apparently hasn't stopped anyone of these Kokon from "sleeping" with her anyway, so the whole clan are pedophiles.

I think Darken said it best when he wrote "Fuck this game." It almost makes the incest seem normal, but I guess that's a consequence of "crossing the line twice." I truly am surprised that this went through the developer's mind (or the dozen others who contributed to/tested the game) and not once set off a warning that maybe this isn't a good thing to promote and be proud of. It's no longer publicly available (unless you go to an archive), which I consider a very good thing.

And the voice acting is poor.

This game makes me very sad (disgusted, mostly), and if given the chance, I'd want to ask the developer why he decided to write the story this way.
Touhou Mother 2 is probably my least favorite. Despite being technically impressive and having a lot of custom art, it has like zero plot and the most annoying meme-y joke writing ever. It represents what I fear most about meme culture and stories focused around comedy. The Mother series did not take itself too seriously (except Mother 3, which this game just happens to be based on), but it never went out of the way to be absurd. Touhou Mother is outright braindead and does not match the spirit of Mother at all. It was just about how to make things look like Mother as a joke. There were tons of other random references thrown in because all this game could do was reference. I did play it before I knew much about Touhou, but I still think the storytelling should be able to hold up on its own a lot better. Touhou fandom generally has a problem with getting too mentally ill with memes and referencing and that is helped by the fact that ZUN kind of writes that way. All of the characters are supposed to be based on something, but you really do not get an impression besides their names. So basically, the game emphasizes the worst traits of the main franchise, which I hate playing too.
I think Dhux’s Scar looks amazing and its visuals are one of my favorite things about it.
Also, it’s rm2k right? Someone said XP.

I never played and intentionally bad game, and all RM games I played were serious game to which the authors put their best. There are some I deeply hated, but like people said, I don’t feel comfortable naming them.
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