I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Pokemon Legends Arceus. I rage quit after playing more than 200 hours.
On paper, it is the best Pokemon game for me. I can complete the in-game collection without having to trade with other versions of the same game. The end-game is moderately grindy and gives a fun sense of progress (catch 15 of this pokemon, defeat 20 of that one with ice attacks).
Unfortunately, the spawn rates are very very broken. When you first enter an area of a map, it is swarming with creatures, but as you catch or defeat them, they do not respawn. It takes some combination of distance and in-game time to get a map to repopulate so I have to travel away for several minutes, travel back, and then find that the map only partially refilled. Plus, there seems to be some sort of back-off that reduces the spawn rate of rare Pokemon the more often I clear a zone in quick succession which only resets when I teleport back to the hub area and teleport back. It is all very painful when certain Pokemon seem to have a 5 or 10% chance of spawning and the game asks me to catch 15 of them and then defeat 20 more.
And don’t get me started on Space-Time Distortions, random events where a small part of the map gets unique creatures for a short while. The game does not explain how often they are supposed to occur, that certain player actions (like battling) pause the timer, and that in-game weather events can reset it. A player can wait hours for a distortion to appear before looking up the formula online and being told that the best strategy is too load into a map, put down the game for exactly 5 minutes, and if a distortion is not starting, teleport out of the map and back in, wasting a minute looking at loading screens.
Overall, it is so frustrating that I cannot imagine it is all intentional, but that it is caused by bugs that the developers never patched. I have heard that it is fixed in the new Pokemon Legends.
I never really stayed in one map for too long but now that you’ve mentioned it I do recall thinking things were taking too long to respawn during some specific mon grinding.
Z-A has definitely fixed this with more intuitive respawn mechanics, but it’s got much more of a focus on battling and less on collecting this time around, so it isn’t for everyone. Much more fun than the main series has been in a while though!