2 hours into Kingdom Hearts (9 on the list) and I want to punch a wall. Some of the worst game design I've ever seen.
You start off on an island, and right away you are sent on a fetch quest: 3 mushrooms, 3 fish, 3 coconuts, etc. I spend... I waste a good 30 minutes of my life looking for the coconuts them all over the place, until I realize I have to hit the trees to make some fall. How am I supposed to know this? No one told me, and hitting the X button locks you in an annoying swinging animation that prevents you from moving, so it's not like I'm gonna mash the button all the time and discover it by accident. Plus, you can climb those tree and no coconuts are to be seen, so how could you know hitting the tree makes huge coconuts appear out of thin air? There's also this "race" you have to participate in, except that the platforming mechanics are just broken. They simply are. So that makes for even more frustration.
So I finally make it out of the island, land in some generic FF town, and I'm not told what to do but it's implied you have to join up with Donald Duck. The thing is, the town is fairly big, with a fair number of doors you can enter all over the place, and you have to enter them in a specific order to trigger just about half a dozen "ooh, just missed him by a hair" cutscenes. I scoured the whole place a dozen ****ing times for a whole hour just because I didn't think of revisiting a place I had already been to, but not at the "right" moment to trigger the cutscene.
And enemies are constantly spawning all over the place, all the time. Eventually, you realize that there's nothing to gain by fighting them, so you just have to flee. Except that, if you need to examine something, or open a chest, you can't as long as there are enemies around.
I feel like I've found the perfect game that "proves" the fallibility of game critics, their tendency to be unduly swayed by high production values, hype and great presentation, but I'd probably stared at blankly if I brought it up in a discussion because apparently, very few people picked up on the fact that this game is objectively, undeniably, terrible.
It's got some of the worst game design I've ever seen in a game, and keep in mind I'm playing Suda 51's Flower, Sun and Rain.