10 AMAZING Video Games (That Are Too Damn Long)
These incredible games are also incredibly overstuffed.
In an age where new video games regularly cost as much as £70, it's little surprise that publishers pack them with reams of filler in an attempt to justify that steep asking price.
But value should mean more than merely rinsing the maximum amount of time possible out of your purchase - it should be a meaningful and rich experience, not stuffed with arbitrary content that exists merely for its own sake, to pad out the core experience.
Respecting the player's time is important, because why put yourself through a 50-hour slog when you could play 10 brilliantly paced five-hour masterpieces instead?
That said, even many incredible games have a terrible idea of when to wrap things up and let the player move on.
While in some cases a game's pacing and excess length can severely compromise the overall experience, on the flip-side, sometimes a game's mechanics, story, and visuals are so damn intoxicating that they're still a masterpiece in spite of their blatant padding.
These 10 games are all fantastic in their own right, but they'd probably be even better if a decent chunk was cut out - or in the very least, turned into optional side content...
10. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
The latest entry into the Like a Dragon/Yakuza franchise is in many respects the epitome of everything it has been building towards all these years - a dizzyingly entertaining action-RPG that's by turns thrilling, hilarious, and heartfelt.
Infinite Wealth successfully passes the torch to new series protagonist Ichiban Kasuga while lending added emotional dimensions to former lead Kazuma Kiryu, but the game's many great achievements also bristle up against its outrageous length.
It's not just the 50-hour critical path that's the issue, but the pacing - Infinite Wealth gets off to one of the slowest starts in the entire series, and it's a surprising number of hours before Ichiban even ends up in the new central location of Hawaii.
Though the story is packed with all the cartoonish insanity fans of the series expect, it also overeggs the pudding by the end.
The final few chapters in particular prove hugely patience-testing in the sheer number of enemies they throw at you - especially as many of these encounters are nothing more than never-ending hordes of general mobs.
The fine folk at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio probably don't want to hear it, but where Like a Dragon is concerned, a "less is more" approach would benefit future entries.