The game has escort missions, which are already widely hated by pretty much everyone. It isn't so bad early on, defending thermobaric tanks and such, but the escort mission immediately before Elizabeth Greene's boss fight will likely cause broken controllers. One pump vehicle pumping BloodTox veeeery slowly and wave upon wave of Leader Hunters who just sprint straight for it and smack it with AoE's until there's not even a bolt left. Wonderful.
The racing side missions, where the player has to move through a variety of waypoints in order, under a particular par time. Fair enough on its own, but the mechanics of the player movement tend toward going very fast, but also being very imprecise. Moving through a tiny waypoint when you overshoot your target because you were moving too quickly feels like Fake Difficulty.
In ActRaiser your god avatar has a set number of spells per level attempt. That's right, not per life, per level attempt- you don't get your magic back when you die. If you use all your magic against a boss but just fail to defeat it, then your only choices are to work out a way to beat it without magic or to lose all your lives and start the level from the beginning again. Although the unresponsive controls and mediocre collision detection are pretty bad problems, the magic issue sticks out as both clearly deliberate and plain mystifying. Worse, you have to manually equip spells through a clunky interface before going into the level, every single time.
The digging minigame. It is a timed event which requires you to dig by using your brush powers to remove certain obstacles while you escort a companion whose life mission it seems is to walk into every time reducing object possible. Add to this that on the Wii version, the brush controls only work half the time. Also, certain actions such as blowing your companion over gaps or shooting them up with water spouts only work if your timing is absolutely dead on, and even then he will tend to walk right off the edge you just popped him up on, making you start again. Thankfully, there's only two times it's necessary and they're the easiest ones.
Some of the (luckily optional) secret brush techniques require unorthodox drawing figures, such as drawing infinity symbols, drawing lightning bolts (and it's extremely hard to aim them), or drawing a snowflake.
The Wii version requires that you Waggle the controller for a basic attack.
Ōkamiden has its own, which is both simpler and far more pervasive: Ink doesn't regenerate if you picked the Old Hand way, back on the title screen, which is the game's Hard Mode. This will cause you an enormous amount of pain during certain boss fights, particularly King Fury. It doesn't help that because of the difficulty names (Greenhorn and Old Hand), it's an easy mistake to think they're asking if you want a tutorial, but it's actually a difficulty select. If you chose Greenhorn, ink DOES regenerate, but only after you've run out of ink, making this not so much a scrappy mechanic as an added challenge. The real mechanic is the aforementioned not realizing it's a difficulty select in the first place.
Some of the best equipment and rune words in Diablo II are restricted to players on the ladder, a harder version of the game on Battle.net with a finite amount of time to find the ladder-only itemsnote Every 6 or so months, the ladder resets. All ladder characters from that season are permanently booted and lose the ability to find ladder-only items but get to keep whatever they found. Players who want a slower-paced game, prefer single-player, or don't have reliable Internet access are out of luck.
Pierre in Tomb Raider I. To wit, he'll ambush you at times to shoot at you forcing you to either run away or shoot back, and while you can't kill him yet once you inflict enough damage he'll run away as a French stereotype is wont to do and duck around a corner to vanish Behind the Black. It becomes an issue since if you're too close to him he won't vanish, and while he's trying to run shooting at him can actually aggro him to come back to fire some more, and shooting him is the only way to interrupt his scarily accurate and powerful gunfire. Since he likes to ambush you in tight areas (especially in The Cistern), it's actually easy to get into a scenario where you're in effect just stuck in a room with an invincible Boss in Mook Clothing who is capable of emptying a full health bar in about 10 seconds, and everything you do or don't do results in him standing there like an asshole shooting you. It's very telling that Core realized this was an issue in development as almost every Pierre encounter has a save crystal right before it, since most of them boil down to "keep dying until you figure out a Cheese Strategy to get rid of this guy while taking as little damage as possible".
The kayak in Tomb Raider III. Vehicle sections are welcome most of the time, but the kayak handles just a little too realistically to be fun having to navigate lethal rapids and waterfalls full of deathtraps with. There are some points with the kayak where it's impossible to proceed without taking heavy damage from the traps and falls.
The underwater propulsion vehicle in TR3 is pretty annoying, given how hard it is to maneuver around the tight corners and oddly-shaped corridors you have to use it in.
And really, the quad bike in TR3 isn't much better. It should be cool and fun (and is, on the track at Lara's mansion) to race around on it, but the game level where you use it the most, "The River Ganges," has a lot of tight corners, narrow ledges, and tricky jumps that will see you plummeting to your death several times and keep it from being enjoyable.
The tightrope walk sections in Tomb Raider Chronicles. Lara can easily fall off if you fail to regain her balance and crossing is sometimes based on luck. Since Lara losing her balance is randomized, you could wind up spending more time readjusting than actual tightrope walking.
Lara losing her balance or grip in Tomb Raider: Anniversary is, on paper, a mechanic where sometimes she slips when grabbing a ledge or balancing on a pillar and you have to press a button to steady herself before she falls. In practice, it turns every single "time your jumps to avoid moving blades, crushing walls, etc" segment into a Luck-Based Mission since, if she happens to lose her grip or balance, you will be hit by the obstacle and killed before you can act.
The poison mechanic in Tomb Raider III and The Last Revelation. Once you're poisoned, you'll gradually lose health and the only way to cure it is by using your vital health kits. What makes this worse is most enemies that can poison you either travel in groups or are hidden from view.
The original Metroid features a punitive health system wherein, no matter how many energy tanks you had when you died, you start back off with 30 health units. Want another chance at the thing you died at? Better spend time laboriously farming enemies for 5-point health units and the occasional unit (that looks identical, no less) that might restore 10 or 20. Later titles in the series wisely kicked this mechanic to the curb without a second thought.
The game has an infamous Wall Jump, which requires the player to roll-jump towards a wall and hit the opposite direction on the control pad, before pressing the jump button a millisecond later. This takes hours to perfect and is needed to escape a certain area, and to collect all the powerups.
The Shinespark jump allows Samus to store energy from the Speed Booster and use it to make a super-jump. It's a difficult but manageable technique that isn't used very much. Using it, however, damages you over time, so you better be careful that your health isn't low enough (this was fixed for the GBA games, but... well, see below). Another thing scrappy about it is how the move is done: you need to be in midair to use it, the diagonal version requires you to use one of the shoulder buttons to perform it and there is a high chance that either the horizontal or diagonal version will come out as the vertical version instead. In later games, all you need to do after storing energy is hit jump and hold the direction you wish to travel in.
Thanks to the button architecture of the Game Boy Advance, the Speed Booster in Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission isn't activated with a run button, and instead activates after running continuously for a few seconds. This means if you don't expect Speed Booster blocks to be up ahead, you're going to have to (rather slowly) backtrack a short distance and spend those few seconds building up the Speed Booster to progress, bringing the pace to a screeching halt. Even worse is that someone on the development team must have loved the Shinespark a bit too much and made it come into play far more often than in Super Metroid, so if you want 100% Completion, you're going to have to build up the Speed Booster and use the Shinespark aLOT, and some rooms make you do it again if you screw up. After backtracking back and forth across two or three rooms trying to get that Missile Tank for the thirtieth time, you'll be begging for the GBA to have one extra button just so that it could be used as a run button to speed the process up.
The main three games have a controversial implementation of a scavenger hunt toward the end. The first Metroid Prime isn't all that bad, since you can collect the required artifacts throughout the game, with only one unavailable until the endgame (and even then, it's only located two rooms away from the spot where the endgame really starts). In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, however, you must have the Dark Visor to begin acquiring the keys — a few also require the Light Suit, which is approximately 95% of the way through the game (and you need to scan the slots where the Keys should be placed, or else their lore entries will be lost forever). Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has a better-implemented scavenger hunt with the Energy Cells, as you don't need all of the Cells to complete the game and some are gotten automatically as you progress normally; also, a simple speed trick on the Valhalla allows you to skip two more cells in the Aurora Chamber; if you're just looking for bare-bones completion, you needn't go out of your way at all for Corruption's scavenger hunt.
Echoes also has the ammo system, which is a conventional gameplay device for most first-person shooters, but not for a Metroid game. The fact that the Light and Dark Beams have a finite amount of ammo (which can be increased with ammo expansions) means that players have to balance the use of both as it's the only way enemies will drop ammo supplies when they're defeated. It's made worse in the case of the Missile Combo powerups, because they need 30 ammo of a particular type in addition to 5 Missiles per shot (in the case of the Sonic Boom, it requires 5 Missiles, 30 from Light Beam and 30 from Dark Beam per shot). Fans didn't like this mechanic, so it was ditched in Corruption.
Even Metroid hacks have been known to imitate the Prime series' scavenger hunts. Super Metroid Redesign sends you in search of twelve well-hidden Chozo guardians, some of which are inaccessible until the right conditions are met. The worst is a tube in Maridia which, unlike all other tubes of that design, can't be broken by Power Bombs; instead, it breaks when you defeat Ridley (halfway across the planet).
While the game wisely stows away with the idea of a third-act scavenger hunt, it introduces the Concentration-based health system. In every other Metroid game, enemies drop health (and missile) boosts when you kill them, keeping you topped up on-the-go. Other M does away with this completely; the ONLY ways to restore your health at all are through save stations (which function here as recharge rooms as well, similar to those in the Chozo Ruins and Mothership in Zero Mission), and through a new technique called Concentration. At any time, you can point your Wii remote upwards and hold A to replenish your missiles fully, but with health it's trickier: you can only restore health when you're so low that a few more hits will kill you, and to do it you need to perform the technique while standing still and unable to defend yourself for a few seconds. Now, where are you most likely to run your health low enough to be allowed to use this technique? In heated battles where the enemy won't exactly sit around while you're trying to heal. And even then, it only gives back 99 units of health at first - you can find upgrades that increase how much you can get back, but you need to go out of your way for them. It turns the entire game into a Nintendo Hard endurance test.
Then you have the "Pixel Hunts". There are several scenes where the player is locked and immobilized in a first-person viewpoint until they spot some background detail. Unfortunately, such details are almost all extremely difficult to notice, from a splotch of green blood in a grassy area to a brown caterpillar in a dark brown room. These moments kill the flow of the game and often become a Guide Dang It!. Worse still, the final boss is one of these, and can kill Samus in a matter of seconds.
In a broad sense, the "Authorization" mechanic, in which, instead of losing all upgrades at the start and gradually replacing them as time goes on, Samus gets the use of various aspects of her suit "authorized" over the course of the game. So expect to be trudging through a procession of lethally hot rooms for a good fifteen minutes, before Mission Control finally allows you the environmental protection of the Varia Suit that you already have. The mechanic so flies in the face of basic logic, that the idea that Samus and her commanding officer are in an abusive relationship seems to be the only logical explanation.
There's also the Camera Screw that the missile mechanic introduces. Most of the game is in third person. In order to fire missiles, one assumes a first person perspective. Zero Punctuation adequately describes it as feeling "as smooth and natural as deflecting bricks with your head while wearing another brick as an earring."
Both Metroid: Samus Returns and Metroid Dread, despite being 2D platformers that don't use analog for movement, force the player to use the analog stick for Samus' movements and don't allow mapping to the D-Pad. This makes Samus' movements feel loose, delayed, and wiggly, and make it difficult to perform the quick and snappy movements the 2D Metroid games are known for. At the same time, there are moments where the game requires the analog stick for making precise, aimed shots, preventing the player from easily using a third-party controller with remappable buttons or one that lacks an analog stick outright. The simple idea of having both the analog stick and D-Pad mapped to movements, allowing the player to situationally use whichever one is best by simply shifting their thumb, is inexplicably not an option.
Aerial levels in Drakengard are, sadly, half the game. They start off all right, but then the enemies gain homing attacks. Every last one of the enemies, that is. You have homing shots yourself (albeit weaker than non-homing) and a magic-attack "bomb," but in order to gain all the weapons, you have to clear several aerial missions without using the magic attack and under strict time limits. It doesn't help that you can't "hover" (this was fixed in Drakengard 2), making aiming a game of luck, and that you turn so very slowly.
In certain circumstances, death will simply send you back to the start of the room with a little less health. If you lose a fight enough times, you're given the option to spend 50 "chips" to Continue. Otherwise, you're booted all the way back to the opening screen. Not even the menu, the cutscene you get when you boot up. And when you load your save, if you saved in a boss room, you have to sit through the entire pre-boss cutscene. Every. Single. Time.
There's also the Drill Missile. Inside are platforms with little electric orbs on them. Two different types, in fact; blue orbs that move at a steady pace, and pink ones, which move like they're on crack. There are also elevator platforms that flip over to reveal their electric underside. And it's timed. Fail the extremely precise timing challenge, and you get booted out and have to start the mission again. And you will.
Blast Corps has the Backlash, a dump truck. A clumsy drive combined with its unique method of building destruction (powersliding so its flatbed hits buildings) make every level where it's required a pain. It's also in the running for "most common vehicle in the game", and certainly has the most levels devoted to it.
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon: The weapon you use can break at any time, you have a very limited capacity to carry things with you and to see certain objects you have to come back to a save point. The battle system is kind of annoying too; even if there are different kinds of weapons and each of them has a decent selection, the player is limited to a single combo for the whole game.
Throughout nearly all the side-scrolling games in the franchise is your characters habit of being flung uncontrollably back about three hundred feet every time he's so much as nicked on the shoulder by a Nerf dart. Though later games have somewhat softened this by giving you more control of your aerial movements and sometimes allowing you to not be flinched at all if you duck before being hit, it's still very easy to be ping-ponged around helplessly if you get caught in the middle of a some Goddamned Bats or sent falling to your demise. This game mechanic, lots of platforming, spikes and moving gears, and of course the dreaded and foul Medusa Heads is why every veteran of the series shudders when they hear the word "Clock Tower".
The day and night mechanic which many people hate, mostly because it makes everything take twice as many hits, the towns unsafe, and the slow-as-hell unskippable text box stating the obvious to pop up. The phrase "WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE" will be drilled into your head forever by the time you complete the game.
The grinding to get hearts and running back to town just to get an item. And if you get a Game Over, you lose all of them!
Egoraptor : The towns were dumb, and boring, and had nothing to do with hitting enemies with your whip.
You can't use items. You instead have to equip them to one of your hands. This means either having a curative item equipped in anticipation of needing it (and foregoing your secondary weapon or shield), or needing to swap between items and equips on the fly. Of course this also means you need to keep track of how many of that item you have: if you run out Alucard just silently reverts to his empty fist, making it easy to just throw a blind punch because you thought you had one potion left — and then be killed by the attack you were attempting to use it to survive. The only way to use items without equipping them is to rely on the Fairy Familiar... who only uses them automatically.
Of course, this means that weapons, shields, throwable items, and consumable items are all stored in one menu. Late game this can mean needing to wade through pages of consumables just to swap between your shield and said consumables. This is made worse by how there are tons of items, over 40 of which just replenish varying levels of HP and many of which are entirely useless and restore only piddling amounts of HP at best.
All of this is made worse by there being no method to sell items. A patient player can burn through their food items, but there are dozens upon dozens of weapons in the game with many of them being already outclassed when you find them at best or outright Poison Mushrooms at worst which will only serve the "purpose" of clogging up the player's inventory and forcing them to slog through to find the two or three useful weapons they currently have, and can't even be sold to save up to fill the Tactics menu or buy that absurdly expensive Duplicator.
The Magic Seals are a good example of how implementing a part of the system's capabilities isn't always a good idea. In order to finish off the boss, you have to draw a particular seal using the DS's stylus, or the boss regains a portion of their health. While simple at first, it gets frustrating as you're forced to use more complicated seals as well as less time to finish drawing the seals and most of the later bosses (Gergoth, Death and Abbadon in particular) are simply a nightmare to fight, particularly if you slip up. At least the bonus Julius mode doesn't force this on the player again. The worst offender is Magic Seal 4. Due to a glitch, it won't cancel when player makes a mistake or runs out of time (the only way to cancel is to stop drawing the seal), making the seal unfinishable upon either happening. It may take a while before the player notices what's wrong.
Defeating the Balore boss gives you to the Balore Soul, which can only be used in six rooms in the entire game, including the room you found it in.
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin features the Sisters mode, which has a set of controls completely unique from the other character modes; you use the D-pad to move your floating characters around and attack by touching where you want to attack with the touchscreen. Unfortunately, the developers neglected to allow movement with the four face buttons as well, making the game effectively unplayable for left-handed players.
Sly's "ledge jump". To elaborate, if you land on the very edge of a platform and jump, Sly will kick outward away from the platform. True you gain more air than a normal jump, but that's a moot point since it's much easier to use his paraglider for that. Most often you tend to activate it by mistake when you jump to a far ledge, making Sly jump blindly towards the camera and most likely into the Bottomless Pit you just jumped over.
Murray missions in general. Since Murray lacks pretty much every sneaking skill of his allies, he's reduced to lumbering through levels and taking enemies on head-first. Because of this, he tends to get the crappy mini game levels such as the much abhorred Murray Games.
The Clue Bottles in the fourth game. The first game's linear levels make them fairly easy to find, but the sprawling areas in Thieves in Time make them absolutely miserable to track down even with a walkthrough. One of the obtainable bonus items, the Clockwerk Eye, alleviates this by marking the bottles on your mini-map, but you don't get it until well over halfway through the game, and to acquire it, you have to find all the clue bottles in one of the levels.
Also in Thieves in Time, one of the developers apparently loved the side-scrolling camera angle. Often when you try to make your way across a wire or a set of tricky jumps, the camera will re-orient to a side-scrolling perspective which roughly doubles the difficulty of said tricky jumps. It's particularly scrappy since if you actually wanted that camera angle, it would be very easy to just orient it that way yourself if the camera didn't abruptly jerk around.
Also in Thieves in Time are the controller-tilt mechanics that serve to stink up the otherwise fun hacking levels and contribute to the scrappiest part of the Murray Games mentioned above.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has the Hero/Menace meter. At first glance, it seems similar to those seen in other games, like Red Dead Redemption, but the way it's handled turns this from a promising mechanic to an annoying one. The game has side missions showing on the map for a few minutes, and completing them before they disappear makes the meter go to the "Hero" side. How does the meter go into the "Menace" side, you ask? Well, it has to be by committing acts of cruelty, like attacking civilians, or destroying property, right? Well, no. The meter goes down by not doing the side missions. That's right, you're called a "Menace" not by doing something wrong, but by failing to do a few more right things than all the ones you are constantly doing. It's popularly known that Uncle Ben died due to Peter's inaction, so maybe the game design is simply enforcing the theme of responsibility. Alas, late in the game, the number of side missions that show up is so large that several of them will disappear at the same time. That means that you might be completing a side mission and your meter will still go down, since several missions disappeared in the time it took you to complete one, so even if Spider-Man is doing is best, he's still a "menace" because he's not preventing every crime in New York City at once. Note that the Hero/Menace meter is not just for decoration. If you go to the "Menace" side you'll be attacked by a Task Force, which will make your progress a chore. You'll be forced to grind a lot of the side-missions just to keep them from attacking you, and considering that every time you end one of them you're forced to hear a news report about it that gets old really fast, it will be extremely tiresome. Even worse is the fact that when you manage NOT to fight these guys you still have to deal with the electric nets that the Task Force puts up that prevent you from web slinging as effectively. It gets real tiring real fast.
The solar sensor, the core mechanic of the series, was divisive at best and reviled at worst. While it was integrated into the game quite well, it was just hard to find anyone who felt like sitting out in the sun and baking like a potato to play, and while you could play without sunlight it put you at a serious disadvantage and you'd eventually hit a Road Block that you can not pass without the sun. It's very telling that each subsequent game relied less and less on the solar sensor, added melee weapons that didn't need sunlight to operate, and introduced more incentives to not play in the sun (like having items age faster under stronger sunlight), but even with that the series remained a Cult Classic at best and the third game in the series didn't even make it overseas. The fourth game even tried to distance itself from the others by dropping the solar sensor altogether and changing its name to Lunar Knights in the west to sever tiesnote Though even the original Japanese entry was an In Name Only affair at best so this admittedly didn't change anything significant, but that game relied on Waggle like the touch screen and microphone which also wasn't well liked, so despite it ending on a Cliffhanger there's not much hope of a follow-up.
Those damned vanishing solar platforms will drive you bananas if you're actually playing the game fair and square in the sun rather than just cheating. They vanish if the solar gauge is less than three or greater than six, and keep in mind that falling off a cliff on this game is a straight-up Game Over rather than simply dropping you back at the entrance with some missing life. Expect to die, and die, and die just trying to get across that chasm.
The greatly reduced MP meter in the third game will become very frustrating in very short order. The first game gives you only the solar gun, and so you have upgradable batteries as your power source. Item space is ludicrous (99 of every individual item) and you can also swap in your old batteries for backup (A grand total of 15 full bars of energy). The sequel reduces this to a single MP meter and a 16 slot item cache, but also makes using your magic optional since you get melee weapons instead. The third is a hybrid of this, giving you the gun but only one MP meter to go with it and the much more restrictive item system. You will be starving for a skylight or a solar nut every step of the way.
The game has Weapon Affinities, wherein each individual part grants bonuses or penalties to certain types of weapons. The problem? It's based off of what the mecha uses in its home series, effectively limiting your builds to aping the source material. For example, the Zaku II has affinities for Machineguns, Bazookas, and Axes; if you want to use anything else, your damage output will plummet and you'll be forced to either suck it up or either waste valuable Module space on items to bolster your Affinities. When the sequel was announced, the removal of Weapon Affinities was one of the first improvements Bandai Namco mentioned; instead, Head and Arm parts have Weapon Masteries that grant damage bonuses. While they still generally reflect what a machine uses in its home series, they can be changed with items, and there are no more penalties.
In a lesser example, all parts have a star rating (from 0 to 10) which determines their overall stats and are Random Drops. This results in lots of grinding and lots of Shop Fodder, as well as inflicting Complacent Gaming Syndrome since everyone tends to pick parts from only the most powerful machines (like those of the Strike Freedom and 00 Gundam/Raiser). The sequel removes stars in favor of an Item Crafting system that lets players create and level parts as they choose, meaning that pretty much everything in the game can be viable if given enough work.
The fourth game in the series New Gundam Breaker had several, which contributed to its poor reception:
The ability to swap parts mid-battle. At best it means that players lose their carefully coordinated design for a negligible stat boost, which would be easy enough to ignore... If it weren't for two things. First, the fact that as a consequence, players can only pick up so many parts before going to a container to save them. Meaning actually acquiring parts (you know, the entire point of the game) is incredibly tedious. Secondly, if a player loses a part, rather than it just coming back eventually or picking it up, they will automatically equip any compatible part they come across. These two things mean that players may be avoiding parts they're not interested in more than they're avoiding enemy fire. The Burst mechanic also causes you to purge and drop the parts equipped on the go to bring back the suit's loadout back, further contributing to the mechanic's scrappiness.
The Inner Frames. On paper, their idea is simple: You choose the frame corresponding to whichever play style suits your mech and/or the mission ahead, choose two power ups and level them up through experience earning. In execution, 3 of those frames end up so extreme in their specialization that they turn you into a Glass Cannon or a Stone Wall, leading to players keeping the Balanced Frame, or going with Searcher Frame due to the better stats balancing across them.
Forcing players to collect energy orbs to recharge Actions (as opposed to them recharging automatically) was seen as needlessly overcomplicating combat, since players now had to spend the first few minutes of any match smashing crates and hoping to get enough energy to actually use their assigned abilities etc.
Restricting players to only four Actions (a Head Actions, an Arm Action, a Body Action and a Leg Action) was seen as a massive step down to the previous game (that allowed for up to 8 different Actions). It especially crippled parts that had multiple weapons or moves. For example, when equipping the backpack of the Strike Freedom Gundam (equipped with railguns, beam cannons and Dragoons, the player can only utilise one of those weapons.
Levels in Chibi-Robo!: Park Patrol are entered via a game of chance called the Wheel of Destiny. Before entering a stage, the wheel is spun and the player will land in whatever level the wheel hits. There is no choice in what level the wheel will stop on, so you can very easily land on the same level again and again, even after 100% completion of it. To top it off, the pause menu lacks the option to quit the level even if it has been cleared. The game does include power-ups for the wheel to attempt to skew it in the player's favor, but they don't help much.
LEGO Adaptation Games have the habit of dangling some minikits out of your reach after solving a puzzle. You can play levels in Story Mode or Free Play, and some minikits can only be found in Free Play as their puzzle requires a non-story Player Character. For others, however, the puzzle itself is quite solvable in Story Mode but then the reward minikit appears in a place where an ability like Double Jump is required to reach it... which your character lacks. Not only do you need to come back in Free Play to find it, but you need to do the puzzle all over again like a chump.
The Upgrade glitch in the Playstation 3 version. Every time you load a save, the game forgets that you've unlocked any and all suit upgrades. The glitch is usually (keyword being "usually") fixable by accessing the Bat Computer and going to the upgrade menu, and thankfully the upgrades are optional and not required to finish the game. It's still frustrating when you consider upgrades are your reward for finding the red bricks in hero mode.
Since Batgirl doesn't appear in Story Mode and has the same abilities as Batman, the dev team decided to foist her on you in Free Play instead of Batman roughly 95% of the time. Unfortunately, she controls more loosely and is cursed with the useless Wall Cling and Backflip moves. The former tends to activate accidentally when trying to jump to a ledge, and the latter tends to activate accidentally during platforming segments, meaning you'll be falling into a lot of Bottomless Pits every step of the way. On the flipside, Nightwing actually controls better than Robin and has the same abilities... and yet you almost never get to play as him.
Phoenotopia: The melee attack, the one that the player is relying on deal most of their damage, is agonizingly slow and only connects at the very end of the attack animation. This means there are a lot of enemies you need to maneuver onto level ground just to have the space to get your attack timings right. In particular, harpies need very finicky dodging and/or timing to land a hit.
There is no button to keep you aiming diagonally as you move, just one that roots you in place and lets you aim freely. The lack of it makes combat more difficult than it needs to be. Also, items are simply not marked on the map, not even if you already got them and considering how quite a few are hidden in walls means you'll just have to flat out guess where some are.
Dashing is mapped to double-tapping the movement direction, and you can't remap it. This tends to result in the dash not working when you actually want it to, while at the same time randomly causing you to blast off in one direction or another while you're just trying to make precision adjustments in the air while platforming.
Seminal recycled in the wild westThe Legend of Zelda clone Gunple: Gunman's Proof had the stairs. When you begin walking up or down stairs you lose all control until your character automatically walks to the other side, leaving you wide open to attacks from enemies. This single fact turns the bomb-dropping pelicans of Red Canyon into Demonic Spiders as they inflict two full containers of health per hit (either by touching you or with a bomb) and will gleefully swoop in and drain all your health if you make the mistake of touching some stairs while one is on-screen. For comparison, the game this was heavily based on, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, wisely froze all the enemies on screen until you reached the other side of the stairs.
Remember Me demonstrates that a game can have either: a) unobvious points of no return spread across its levels, b) autosave checkpoints set after said points with a single save slot being overwritten every time, and c) hidden collectibles that you need to upgrade your character and that are lost if you don't find them before you reach the next cut-off point (which, again, you have no idea is coming), but not all three at the same time!
The parkour was very poorly implemented - the game simply doesn't support the necessary motion fluidity and freedom, and all the stunts were strictly prompt-based which made for as much excitement as walking through a series of sluice doors.
The game uses a checkpoint system similar to Dark Souls, where death causes the player to drop "Guilt," reducing their ability use Prayers (spells) and respawning all enemies. The player must guide the Penitent One back to the site of their death to reclaim the Guilt, or else pay a Confessor statue for absolution. That isn't the Scrappy Mechanic; reclaiming the Guilt will actually restore your health and spirit gauges, and it's possible to unlock a free, unlimited-use Confessor by donating to the Albero church. The problem is that numerous platforming sections include impaling spikes that cause instant death upon touching them, requiring the player to hike back from the last checkpoint and hopeful stick the landing this time. The sequel made it so that landing on spikes simply takes away some health and kicks you back to the last platform, but they'll still kill you if your health's low enough.
You can only equip three Relics at a time. While there are occasions where removing a Relic is a good thing (sometimes, for example, the platforms created by Three Gnarled Tongues get in the way of jumps you need to make), there's really no good reason to make you have to constantly swap your Relics around instead of just making their effects toggleable, especially since some Relics (like Linen of Golden Thread, which keeps Bottomless Pits from killing you) are things you'll want on all the time.
A variant happened in Batman: Arkham Asylum, where complained that Detective Mode is just so damn handy, you'll never not want to use it, since it'll track any henchmen in the area, even in the next room, and light up secret areas - the downside is that you have to play the entire game in a blueish hue, seeing every character as a translucent skeleton. The loudest complaints came from Rocksteady's own art directors, who were upset that players weren't seeing the game as they intended it to be seen, so they Nerfed the mechanic for the sequel, giving the player reduced visibility when it's turned on and making certain interface aspects unable to be seen in detective mode.
The fat powerup in No Time to Explain. It slows you to about a snail's pace unless you're rolling uncontrollably down slopes, and the physics of it are far too dodgy and imprecise for anyone's liking. Expect to miss a lot of jumps and then have to crawl, ever so slowly, back up the slope for another attempt, and just wait until you have to fight a boss using this ability!
Hollow Knight makes the odd decision of not showing you where you are on the map by default. Instead, for something as basic as a "You Are Here" icon, you need to buy and equip a specific Charm.
