RPGamer 2024 Awards – Biggest Letdowns

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Biggest Letdown

Reynatis

First Place

Second Place

With contributions from across the RPG-scape, Reynatis is a testament to developer talent not always culminating in a great game. In fact, Reynatis is a bad game in numerous ways: it’s clunky, repetitive, narratively wasteful, and profoundly disappointing considering its obvious vision and fascinating premise. An underground society of techno-adept wizards forced to linger in the shadows of an oppressive, magic-policing government in Shibuya should make for a gripping story, but the execution is horrific. Character arcs and plot threads often diverge erratically or terminate suddenly, culminating in a chaotic, difficult-to-follow narrative.

This could be forgiven if the game was fun, but here too Reynatis fails to deliver on a promising setup. Freely switching between the offensive and defensive battle modes should offer a fluid combat experience that constantly keeps players on their toes; instead, the overly powerful and broken dodging system trivializes most of the game’s regular encounters. While some early-game bosses at least offer a few decent thrills, the balancing crumbles away until it collapses entirely during the game’s closing chapters. While the gorgeous character portraits and a smattering of Yoko Shimomura’s compositional genius offer some audiovisual flair, the overall experience can only be described as one of high disappointment.

 

 

Sometimes games, unfairly or not, have to deal with the weight of expectation. Such is the case with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, whose overall reaction perhaps wasn’t helped by the lead up to the release selling the game for much more than it ultimately ended up being. While trying too hard to emulate Mass Effect 2′s impact on BioWare’s “other” series, the game loses much of its own character in the process. Though fun in the moment, combat is heavily diluted by a lack of variation and strategy in its encounters, while its locations fail to properly come to life as they did in previous entries. Dragon Age: The Veilguard certainly isn’t a bad game by any means, and it has absolutely earned some ardent fans, but when things were being aimed as high as they were, it unfortunately counts as a letdown.


Staff Regrets

Elrentaros Wanderings

First Place

Second Place

Third Place

When choosing which video game to play, one of the core compnents to think about is time. When a game is adamant about not respecting a player’s time, then the simple answer is to play something else. Elrentaros Wanderings sadly offers players a bland, repetitive game experience with a nothing burger of a story and equally vapid characters. There’s no fun, no excitement, and the only thing the game is capable of is pure bordem, which is the greatest sin in any form of media. It’s unfortunately tough to find redeeming qualities in Elrentaros Wanderings, and it goes down as our top regret this year.

 

 

Fate Seeker II suffers from a great idea at heart being executed in a frustrating manner, doubling as a warning about cutting corners in translation. It’s an action RPG with a pretty decent combat system that is rarely used, instead taking a back seat to isometric detective work that could have been interesting if it wasn’t translated so weirdly. Poorly worded clues and a ridiculously random reward system just makes dialogue-heavy detective work a chore to get through. It’s not even that these puzzles are difficult, it’s that they tax comprehension and logic to a degree that causes a headache recalling it. Every main and side quest has some aspect of dialogue-based puzzle solving where hints are all so tangentially connected that it’s a leap to even try figuring out how it all connects. The launch was unfortuantely so far from the mark as to be a great regret.

Reynatis has plenty of ideas that could have led to success, explaining multiple staff members’ initial attraction to it. The setting has some intriguing elements and there are some interesting gameplay ideas. However, the game’s execution just wasn’t up to snuff. The experience is one that at its best illicits mild curiosity about where its story might be heading. However, it’s all undercut by too-easy combat encounters and simply wandering between checkpoints within Shibuya, ultimately stoking annoyance at its systems, which largely hurt more than they help.

 

by Jordan McClain, Alex Fuller, Sam Wachter, and Ryan Costa