Super Robot Wars series, for those who aren't aware, it's a Fire Emblem like series that has mostly stayed in Japan though recent titles have had english translations from the start despite only being sold in Japan.
The reason why they would suck to speedrun, though?
A lot of dialogue to start, my God, SRW games put a lot of emphasis on story, though newer games have a fast forward function to help people who don't want to run through minutes of dialogue before each fight...though fights still have dialogue.
The problem is the fights, sure, it's like Fire Emblem...except the more recent the game, the longer animations it tends to have, some animations are really pretty damn long, and sure, you can skip them or remove them entirely...but then you get a SRPG where you just skip dialogue and you only see some figures on a map momentarily flashing and a bunch of numbers appearing, making for a boring speedrun, also a lot of menuing.
Playing casually, it's a really fun series with good plots and lots of awesome stuff and animations to watch: But as a speedrun, it's just a SRPG and menus with almost nothing happening but a few flashes and numbers for many stages.
Well for 1 and 3 I'd say Gears of War 1 and UE especially PC because how poorly made they were. UE was not supported for PC or ported well despite it being years after release. Even the console version sucks for UE.
I encountered what seemed like bugs or glitches every time. Kim being blocked by Cole and walking around in circles. Softlock on an area with two e-holes in the extra chapters because the music still kept playing with no enemy in sight. This happened at another point in the chapter with the wretches coming from the pipes in the extra chapter. Killed what seemed like all of them and music was still playing. Looked everywhere and well there's no wretches. There's other stuff that happened I can't remember because of how infuriating it was to run and have it die to something beyond my control.
As for Gears 1 I only experienced one on Xbox One with the wretches in the hallway killed all the ceiling ones and the others in the hole coming up. Again music is playing with nothing in sight but I can hear the wretch behind some wall.
Oh but the worst Gears game to run is definitely Judgment. Good lord if you want to have a heart attack run that game. Let me give you a run down of what to expect. There's I believe up to 4 variations for each section with some losing 2-5 minutes depending on the RNG. You can get possibly two e-holes to open in the hammer of dawn section at the start or 4 holes opening. Easily costing you a little more time. For Any% it's not as frustrating sure, but if you try All Stars Any% then you're up for more stress.
For All Stars you naturally need all stars in every section so on top of having good RNG for more meter. Some RNG are absolutely required to get three stars like theron guards in some sections. Otherwise it is literally impossible EVEN with declassified missions on. Because for some stupid reason you are not guaranteed three stars even if you do well and don't get downed. With all that I believe it qualifies for 2 because you're resetting a lot and is not good to watch.
@SilentStorm Yea looks like you can skip attacks, was watching someone play the game a couple hours in. But my god Super Taisen X game seems so story heavy. It is like they cannot stop talking. Not sure if you HAVE to watch some of those moves. Some moves are almost a full minute for a single round of an attack. At least the attack effects look fantastic and the music is great. Dark Wizard has super long animation attacks too, they would easily add hours to your gameplay if you played causally. @WhatTheFox_ Those seem like solid pretty short games and there are people that are really into those. There are WAY worse games to speedrun. @Slevanas GOW 1 was one of my favorites for a while. Beat that on the hardest difficulty. Speedrunning that would be horrific, because yea there are issues that can screw you over. I do remember the wretches driving me crazy a couple times.I might have even had that glitch happen to me with those wretches early on, pretty sure I had to restart there. Think I remember an issue with a door not opening at some point. The bats seemed really iffy too sometimes around the edges. The super aim of the AI, and the weird explosion radii, the sneaky exploding wretches that would kill you in one hit even after you rolled away... ahhh you are making me remember the trauma. That seems like a good candidate for a segmented run since the game likes screwing you over so much, think I watched one that a couple years back.
Yep, people who aren't aware of SRW would be suprised at how story heavy it is, between every stage and even during the stages there is a lot of dialogue, as for attacks, there are some whose animation automatically plays in story moments where a character beats another one, or one of your characters unlocks a new attack and it's time to show it, i think you can skip those by pressing a button though.
And Super Robot Wars X is nothing, the OG sub series(there are various sub-series that are one really big story) is the king of long animations for robots as far as the series is concerned, X is just a stand alone game so the animations aren't always really long.
It's a great series, just don't know if it's that good for speedruns...OH, right, cool little detail about SRW, it has led to two animes being created, and it loves to reuse and reintroduce robots in new stories, Mazinkaiser in particular was created for SRW F Final for the Sega Saturn/Playstation and got so popular they made an OVA and movie out of him...not even kidding: You must be really damn popular when you aren't the main character in any of the games and you still get your own AU where you are the hero and a freaking movie.
Actually, Kabuto Koji and his robots tend to appear a lot in Super Robot Wars, to a point where the only games he skips are the OG series and he's pratically considered an unofficial mascot for the series, needless to say, the upcoming SRW T game for PS4/Switch features the guy and his mecha in the trailers.
@WeaponLord Is it like a B-Movie where you have fun with it because it sucks?
@WeaponLord You got the right idea
The thing is Duke Nukem TTK has playstation one Tomb Raider controls (notorious for being difficult), but it's more an action game than a platformer. So imagine how it is like.
In other hand, it's so fun, has the best references for movies like Evil Dead, It smells of the 90's, got the best Duke Nukem quotes in the series (in my opinion) has good gore. Nice animations, Nice weapons, cool bosses, It's decently fast to run (about 40 minutes in easiest category),
Only problems is "the controls make it sooo difficult" and makes you want to break your tv sometimes
The most unappealing game that I have seen/played/experimented with (so far) has been "Super Sonic Racer" for PC and Wii.
idk how the Wii game functions, but the PC game I found to be the buggiest shit. See, the game is a kart racer right? So as such you get power-ups through blocks on the track, the PC version gives you the ability to use almost any of the power-ups for free by using the number buttons on your keyboard. So you're sitting there just spamming power-ups to break the AI for about 40 or so minutes.
So the runner is left getting carpal tunnel and the viewers get to watch races with no action or challenge other than the steering that the player has to occasionally worry about... At least that's where it's at now.
@Doodletones Wow that looks like an awful racer. I knew it was not a good sign when there are only a handful of reviews, and on top of that they seem like troll reviews like "You really should play this masterpiece". It seems super bland and boring.
No doubt: The Last Airbender.
The game mechanics are horrible. They are spamming battles as 'gameplay'. The battle mechanics are horrible, it's spamming A and sometimes swinging your Wii remote. The boss battles are broken. It's just a terrible game, imo even worse than the movie lmao.
@Seydie I skipped around in that run and to be honest it does not LOOK too bad. There are multiple mechanics it looks like, and not completely monotonous levels and platforming. It does look flawed though. That last boss looked bizarre, is there no lock on feature? Something tells me there might be more to this game as in better methods to do stuff. The soundtrack is not too bad either. For a 2010 game it really looks much older. Mass Effect 2 also came out in 2010 and the difference is startling in how poor this Last Airbender looks graphics wise.
@theripper999 I bet if this game gets routed and if there are glitches being discovered, this game could be fun indeed. There isn't a lot information about this game, so who knows.. but when I did this speedrun of 3+ hours it really felt like a pain in the ass to complete it.
Maybe I should revisit this game, maybe it's not as bad as I remember