2. Oh Mr Fire Elemental! I'm A Huge Fan, Let Me Get My Autograph Book!
This is a very specific moment that I've had that made me turn off my PS2 and refuse to play the game in question for months on end. What game you ask? Well you know already, good old Final Fantasy 12. It could possibly be because this is my favourite RPG and the one that I've logged the most hours on but most of my frustrating moments have occurred in this game. Sure the crystalbug was annoying, but it only happened once and I knew exactly what to look for when I re-loaded my save. You see this game has a very unique quirk for a FF game as it allows you to flee past monsters as you run across the map (no random battles her sir, nope). This proved to be rather useful when I was more interested in completing the story than spending my youth grinding for XP as well as when I was low on health and needed to find a safe zone. By holding the R2 button on my PlayStation 2 controller my character would ignore all monsters and prompts and just run. He wasn't fast, but he could usually out-pace most monsters. Sadly the game designers had a bit too much at the Christmas office party and decided that in some areas, rather than just pass over to a new area you would have to stop and press the "x" button to open a door and flee with your tail between your legs (in the most dire of cases most of my characters would be dead and I'd have to use Fran, so it's not really a metaphor). Now you may be wondering why on earth this would be annoying, but in order to open the door you'd have to stop fleeing and this is where life gets tough. You see the character seems to think that because you've stopped holding the flee button it means you want to fight, even though he's only level 20 and he's being chased by five level 80 monsters. At any other time I'd be impressed at his heroism, during the rather long animation of the character drawing their weapons you can't press the specific button to open the door and flee. This left me in many a case being killed inches away from sweet sweet salvation purely because I didn't press the "x" button in the split second between releasing the flee button and good old Vaan taking out his weapon. It didn't help that they also put the are I was supposed to be grinding in right in the middle of a dungeon with high-level monsters. I tell you, there's nothing on earth that can compare to the rage I experienced after spending a few hours grinding only to be killed in a few seconds because I pressed the button too slowly. I ended up smashing my Ps2 on the floor, it still works though unlike my PS3 which died when I sneezed too close to it.