Broadly sounds like my experience with Skyrim.
Yeah, I\'m looking forward to playing Skyrim exactly once as well.
Meditating under the weight of the log with a thousand backs.
my two cents after reading this:
sounds like what my experience was, except i\'m not a trophy hunter so i ended up blowing through the game in less than a week. also had it on hard difficulty, which felt like it did absolutely nothing except make enemies slightly tankier (not by much).
absolutely loved the story and all that, but after clearing it the game was really struggling to hold my attention afterwards. there\'s only so much sidequests can do when your only \"enemy\" 90% of the time is the unchanging terrain, and it\'s pretty old after experiencing it more than once.
weaponizing Dungeon Fighter Online elitism since 2018
Yeah, I had one friend who took my route and another who just went for the story, completely different experiences/wants in the end. I really only persevered all the way to 100% because of how much the story meant to me and a stubborn desire to not have to go back and do it all over again if I ever felt the need to platinum my entire catalog - no shame in just being in it for the story and spending a whole lot less time on it as a result.
Meditating under the weight of the log with a thousand backs.
I feel replayability has become overrated. Back in the day it used to make sense and of course it\'s always interesting when a game has different options and styles to play, but more and more games are on the lenghty side. If you invested more than a 100 hours on a playthrough, it\'s ok to be satisfied with that.
That's a broad generalization to make. I'd say it depends on the game.
For example: Tales Of Vesperia offers plenty of incentives for replaying it. There's a NG+ mode, you can pick and choose what you want to carry over from your cleared save filed, which can save you the trouble of having to do certain quests over again if you already have the rewards from them. There's even an in-game achievement for finishing the game in under 15 hours.
Xenoblade: Definitive Edition lets you do the same, with the added bonus of an epilogue story that adds 10-15 hours of additional gameplay. And anything you unlock in "Future Connected" can be transferred to your main save file and vice versa. So if the player wants, they can start a NG+ at Lv.1 with end game weapons, armor, and all their Arts and skill trees fully unlocked and maxxed out right from the start.
Whereas the FF VII: Remake offers little reason to play it after beating it, other than unlocking hard mode.
It seems you misunderstood me or I didn't express myself well enough. Let's go with the latter. I didn't meant that replaying games are bad, quite the contrary, they are a selling point. However, given that the OP needed to clarify that saying they wouldn't play the game again wasn't a bad thing, it strung at an issue I have with people putting too much importance to that. A good example is Sekiro. From Demon's Souls to Bloodborne, there was high replayability on the games due to the customization, however people complained about Sekiro's sole character and limited playstyle, even though 3 of it's last bosses Owl, demon of hatred and Isshin require you to best your character's mechanics, DS's mechanics and master this game respectively.
I mentioned the replay thing specifically because of how I generally play most games more than once - often not for variety of gameplay or new endings, but just to experience that story/gameplay again (see: my multiple runs of Darksiders II, the 4th or 5th of which I just completed). So I saw it fit to mention here that I\'d be abstaining from doing so with Death Stranding, not because I didn\'t like it, but because unlike most games I\'ve played, the time investment is not worth multiple runs, at least to me.
Meditating under the weight of the log with a thousand backs.
@marcellX: My bad. I did indeed misunderstand your post. Fair point.
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A Unique, Incredible Game That I'm Never Playing Again
I just finished Death Stranding by getting the platinum trophy in the post-game. That was a one-of-a-kind experience about isolation, connections, and survival that I don't think will ever be replicated or fade from my memory...and at 130+ hours (for my run), it's something I'm never playing again.
Death Stranding is my first Kojima game, so I wasn't ready for his particular brand of weirdness and obsession with details/references. The character names, the soundtrack choices, the imagery and cinematography, Sam's understated characterization and relationship with his BB, Mads Mikkelsen; all these things blend together to create a whole new type of narrative, one where the night-irreversibly fucked-up apocalyptic world around you balances surprisingly evenly with the quirky and bizarre people inhabiting it, who are presented as naturally as someone casually reading a newspaper on a park bench. Just about every actor works wonders with their character, major or minor - only a couple got on my nerves throughout the entire game, and the rest were all memorable in their own way, each with a certain obsession or characteristic that their entire personality revolved around yet never left them feeling one-note (Cliff is a standout example of this, and the role that made me truly appreciate The Mikkelsen). Per the overarching story, I'm really glad I went into this only having seen the first gameplay trailer because I really did not see most of the plot twists coming, especially in the last 5 hours of the game, and enjoyed them all the more for it. Having recently gone through an extended period of isolation from my loved ones due to two mind-numbing jobs with terrible working hours, the narrative's themes of debilitating isolation, the importance of connecting with others even if you're not necessarily on the same page as them, and Sam himself slowly but surely growing a bit more open to others over time really hit me hard. It was a learning experience, in many aspects.
I also wasn't expecting a completely new gameplay system in the form of the cargo delivery and balance systems, but after a couple hours I got the feel for it and really started having fun. It takes a bit for the vehicles and guns to be made available, but once they are your options really open up for completing deliveries, though I won't deny that there were still a few points of frustration (one that made me quit for a solid 3 weeks to do other stuff, another that had me switch over to Firewatch and beat it in an afternoon just to feel a sense of progression). What few boss fights there are feel pretty damn hype because of how dialed-back most of the game, and the combat by extension, normally is.
That being said, as much as I appreciate this game and as much enjoyment as I got out of playing it, I am never, ever starting a new game. I've gotten all the trophies (which is thankfully quite possible to due in a single playthrough, since you can change your difficulty at will and nothing is missable) and, having read all the emails and interviews, feel quite confident that I've experienced the entire game...so I'm not gonna dedicate another several dozen hours to trekking through it all over again, unlike other long games I've played through multiple times like Kingdom Hearts II, Darksiders 2, and Fallout 3. It was a very fulfilling journey and one I don't regret embarking on, don't get me wrong - but I can only justify sparing 3 months for such a game once. But I do recommend it to anyone interested in a new experience.