10 Secret Ways Video Games Totally Waste Your Time

Anyone who's played more than a few Square Enix RPGs can surely appreciate how much they love to pigeonhole indulgently overlong attack and summon animations into their games - particularly the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series.

And nothing quite takes the cake like the original Final Fantasy VII, which with summons like Knights of the Round and Sephiroth's Supernova ability, can force players to sit through cinematic animations lasting around two minutes (and even with the remaster's 3x time skip, that's 40 seconds of your life you won't get back).

The last thing any player wants in the heat of a tough battle is to sit through a glorified cutscene, especially if they're fighting an enemy they've lost to several times already.

It shows a flabbergasting lack of respect for the player's time, though Square Enix has at least eased up on this nonsense in their more recent games, with Kingdom Hearts III allowing players to skip the Attraction and Link animations (even if many players didn't appear to realise).

As cool as these sequences might look the first time, after two or three repetitions it begins to reek of a developer shoving their hard work in the player's face.