Gaming

Dwarf Fortress.

When I first started playing WoW in 2006,I always wanted to play Balance (as it was the only caster option for Night Elves), but I thought that the point of the druid was to shape shift. So I had this janky hybrid build with the goal of collecting all the shape shifting appearances. I also thought that back then Blizzard was converting agility to spell power, because that was the only explanation for the lack of intellect leather. I though I had to only wear leather, but always believed that the gameplay was to cast until I ran out of mana, then switch to feral, and to bear if I needed additional armor and then back to casting when my mana bar recovered or if I needed to heal myself.

I leveled to 40+ with this funky build. Eventually a guild member was helping me on a quest and asked me if my build was “purposeful” because it was a garbage build. That’s when I learned about how specs work. He offered to make a dedicated set, but needed to know what spec. I told him I always wanted balance, and so he made me my Big Voodoo set, which lasted me until well into Outlands.

My first playthrough of Mass Effect I had no idea there was a second level of my ship. I totally missed all of the crew member backstory dialogue and relationship building, which is pretty essential to the game... the second playthrough was much better once I found the elevator!!

I missed the dodging and flurry-rush shrine in BoTW. Beat Ganon without ever learning. Finally went back much later and was like "wow, this game is so much easier now!"

I just beat BOTW for the first time and never figured out what to do with Korok Seeds. Missed out on the extra weapon/shield inventory slots the whole game!

I played through all of mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.

FF7 Remake. I played the original but didn't pay attention to differences in the remake. I went the entire game with only the Buster sword, and thus did not learn any new abilities. Still beat it though.

My first time through Final Fantasy 8, I was a bit too young to grasp all the concepts. I missed the memo on the fact that you had to craft gear based on finding the weapon magazines so I ended up playing through the whole game with everyone using their base weapons.

Not me, but my wife got all the way to the end of Journey to the Savage Planet before discovering there is a skill tree you can invest in 😂

Resident Evil Director's Cut on PS1. I was fairly young and not very good at the "survival" aspect of the survival horror. I tried to kill everything I encountered and consumed copious amounts of ammo and herbs doing so. I reached a place where I had a single ink ribbon left, no ammo, health on the red, and confused on where I needed to go next. And I had to go do homework. So I used my last ribbon and saved.

I discovered next time I played that the way forward was through a tight corridor I missed filled with zombies who could now one-shot me. I tried and tried and literally was unable to get through. First time I ever learned the word "soft-locked" as my brother wheezed it out while laughing. Good times!

I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.

Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn't that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.

Storytime: It's 1997, I play a game that my uncle shows me on his Playstation 1. There's tons of reading and a weird fighting system but it seems really awesome and has some amazing FMV scenes. He tells me I'm too young to play it and won't let me borrow it to keep playing... So I go to blockbuster and rent it for a few days.

I remember the back of the instruction booklet showing off one of those memory cards and saying "try beating the game without one" which is exactly what I tried to do, because I didn't have a memory card! Then my mum turned the game off when I was at school one day and we had to take the game back to blockbuster after a couple of days. Damn I lost all my progress!

ADAMANT that I would play this game I got my own copy after swapping for it at my local game store and got my own memory card. Finally I could save my game and not worry about losing my progress. The game continues to challenge me a ton and I don't really understand how the systems work but I'm 10 years old and having fun so who cares.

I figure out that I can buy grenades from the shops and I use that as my main attack for awhile... at least until I get to the big city with the gun on it. Buying and using healing items is such a pain all the time though but thankfully money isn't hard to get.

Fast forward further into the story and one of my characters has to go one on one with another dude, this is like that other fight with the guy and his dog when I didn't have 3 characters that could throw grenades and heal! I can't beat this dude with the gun on his arm with just 1 guy!

... Then after failing over and over again, I finally figure out what putting "Restore" on his weapon does... then I figure out what putting "Fire" on it does...

Suddenly the FF7 materia system clicks into place in my brain and about 15 hours after the tutorial teaching you how to do it I figure out how to play the game.

Still my number 1 game of all time to this day. And I never forgot how much trouble Dyne gave me that first time playing through the game.

tl;dr I didn't understand how the FF7 materia system worked until about 15~ hours into the game and was using grenades and potions for all fighting and healing for a loooong time.

Hammerwatch. You can reach the end of the game and be unable to proceed if you didn't collect specific things. I believe it was wooden boards.

Black & White

It has a mechanic where you bless a stone, then throw it across the map, and you get to build and influence an area around the rock. Basically it is the only sane way to expand.

I did not know. I spent painstaking hours slowly growing my village trying to get its area of influence to spread into where I needed to go.

On my first play through, I completely misunderstood Mass Effect and basically played it like a standard shooter. Hardly used power, didn't talk to anyone and more or less just went from main mission to main mission.

The amount of stuff I missed out on, in retrospect, is staggering. I'm so glad I gave this game another try because I really did not understand what all the fuss was about.

Took quite a while for me to find out about queens in Starcraft 2 as a Zerg player.

When I played the original AoE2 I was completely unaware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different units. I just build whatever I found to be coolest and wondered why I struggled so much.

Only when I bought the Definitive Edition much later I looked that up.

For my defense, I was ten back then.

When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren't the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie's portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody's materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.

I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because "I've played this game before, I know how it works." I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn't until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that's when all the systems fell fully into place: you're supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.

Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there's a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.

Nioh. You can transform into demon mode and I didn't know until I played the sequel. It's a soulslike so I played it exactly how I play Dark Souls which made me completely lose out on the unique and in-depth systems the game has to offer.

Tears of the Kingdom. I haven't finished it due to time, but still even now after many hours, I often overlook the use of Ascend. I have spent a lot of time climbing or building flying contraptions when I could have just ascended