I’ll give my example and I think I’m going to get a lot of hate for it. I DESPISE Dark Souls 3. It is such a mediocre game when it comes to the actual gameplay. There is like zero build diversity, the combat isn’t indepth and, while the other souls games have at least decent RPG mechanics and exploration can make things easier, DS3 just demands you rolly polly your way to victory. There is no weight to like anything, you feel so floaty and light, and you fold like a peice of paper when you get hit. And so many attacks don’t care about your positioning, and instead only if you mashed the dodge button at the correct time, something Elden Ring kind of does too, but it adds a jump button to retain some offense and I find that I’m able to out position bosses and enemies more often in it without actually dodging.
Dark Souls 3 is such a mindnumbingly boring game for me, I feel zero excitement playing it.
Love DS1, DS2, Bloodborne and Elden Ring though, great games all around.
And the music for DS3 is amazing and I do love the Pontiff Sullivan fight.
My list would be too long, so I’ll just mention the most recent one: Expedition 33.
I think it has a fantastic intro and decent ending, but I found the story to be kinda weak and it lost me at the Gestral village, and never really recovered. I still finished it as I knew it was pretty short and I was hoping for it to get better.
The gameplay tho is what I really can’t tolerate. I think both dodge and parry are overpowered, as they completely negate damage, making the rpg part weaker - healing becomes useless, turn order is less significant, there’s less stats. It ends up encouraging you to build for damage, making everyone a glass cannon. This is made worse by the fact that the equipment is focused mostly on boosting damage (often with multiplicative effects).