every year dozens of award shows hundreds of reviewers and tens of thousands of fans praise these games as some of the greatest works of art Humanity has ever created then you try them and you just don't see it you're not the only one either over a year ago I made a video on this very same topic and plenty of people shared a similar sentiment in that video I had one simple goal I wanted to create a strategy you could use to understand whatever game you wanted to however this time I want to push those methods to their limits to see if they really do always work by testing them on some games that I've tried to get into for years some over a decade so let's see if they work and if you really can get any game we do need to answer a mildly important question though what exactly is the strategy in question well there are three of them technically four but I usually lump the last two together you'll see why first is the Gateway game method much like potentially dangerous substances you have to work your way up with smaller more incremental I shouldn't finish that joke Gateway games are games that allow you to get into a genre you otherwise wouldn't have by giving you a more beginner friendly version of that same experience Celeste is the most beginner friendly challenging game I've ever played so it stands as the perfect example of this idea the difficulty in Celeste has increased so gradually and the punishment for failure is so minor that you can easily fall in love with the challenge without getting frustrated this leads to you searching for that same challenging experience elsewhere and just like that Celeste has acted as your gateway game to get you into challenging games that are less beginner friendly like Dark Souls next is a pre-established connection with the media imagine there was a show that you became completely obsessed with you binge the entire thing in one sitting with each episode drawing you in more than the last each twist further cementing its place is one of the most important pieces of media you've ever experienced then the last episode plays the credits rooll and the screen goes black you're alone it's over what do you do now you could rewatch it but that wouldn't create the same feeling as the first time then you glance over and you see that familiar glow your PC you remember that this show was based on a game and before you even realize the mistake you've made it's already far too late you can never go back you've started playing League of Legends you see had you not watched Arcane you could have easily been spared from this ter fate but tragically you did you loved it and now here you are dropping dozens of hours into a game you s you would never touch this is a pre-established connection I joke but this happened to me with Yu-Gi-Oh Master duel and I can't get out please help me please help me put the final method is that combo I mentioned earlier getting into the mind of the players who enjoyed the game and the developers who created it ask yourself two things how do the players who enjoy the game react to the thing you don't like and why did the developers choose to implement them in figuring out the answer to both of these you'll almost certainly see another side to these IDE and realize that they may be far more beneficial than you had initially believed despite me considering this a separate method from the first two you'll often find that one way or another it ends up sneaking its way into both methods anyway this is less of a single method and more of an overarching Trend and it's for this reason that I consider the Silver Bullet as it practically always works I mean it does always work right yeah yeah no it'll be fine Ocarina of Time is a very special game to me I remember the moment when I was sitting there on the living room floor for some reason When the Thought popped into my head for the very first time a combination of words I had never used before favorite game of all time it felt right and it's titled it remained for over a decade I've always enjoyed Zelda games even the ones people are a bit less fond of but there was one game that despite it often receiving the title of favorite of all time I could never get into now although I may be the biggest coward on the face of the planet when it comes to scary games the whole most unsettling game Nintendo ever published thing isn't actually what drove me away granted I won't pretend I was excited about that part but it was actually something else that made me swear to never touch the game yeah that I like to play games to calm down or take my mind off the overwhelming stress of day-to-day life because of this I usually avoid games with time based mechanics it just feels like this overbearing weight that you have to drag behind you throughout the entire Journey every choice you make has to be made with that timer in mind every step you take is yet another grain of sand that's fallen through your fingers as The Hourglass gradually empties this crushing pressure quickly becomes exhausting and turns what would have been an exciting journey through a fantasy world into a desperate scramble against the clock where every second you spend not chasing your ultimate goal is a second wasted at least that's how timers feel to me naturally then when I learned of the timer in Majora's Mask with a heavy heart I chose to skip what many people consider the best Zelda game so to address this I wanted to try using method one I needed a Gateway game that would help me better understand timers as a mechanic and I knew just the one unsighted is a criminally underrated indie game that I really should wouldn't have enjoyed when I played it back in 2021 let alone as much as I did it takes after the Legend of Zelda funny enough but with a timer that may be even more overwhelming so why exactly did I like this game well that's easy because you can turn the timer off okay now that's obviously cheating but that's exactly what I did in my first playthrough of this game back then timers still stressed me out far too much so I just didn't want to have it on importantly however the devs of unsighted were extremely generous in how much control they gave the player whenever you want you can just go to this menu press this button and sudden the timer doesn't exist anymore the only thing I can think of that's easier than that is pressing the Subscribe button since you don't even have to open a menu it's this level of control that made me far more comfortable with this timer idea and recently in preparation for this video I was ready to try a playthrough with the timer on for the entire duration Not only was this successful but it even created some one-of-a-kind experiences that I've never had in the game before so for a bit of context on the timer United takes place in a world where these robots gain sentients thanks to a meteor made of something calleda humans didn't like this and so as humans do they threw a cap on the meteor effectively limiting the amount OFA to the outside world now everybody is on a timer once the anima in their system runs out they'll lose their sentience become mindless machines and go unsighted you know like the title of the even the player character Alma relies on this anima so the same fate will befall you if you wait too long thankfully there's meteor dust scattered around the world that you can use to extend your time and even the time of the shopkeepers and NPCs in the village crucially though this resource is limited and you can't give it to every NPC just the named ones these other guys walking around yeah they're they're cat but eventually this is a fate that everyone will meet if you don't do something the game does such an excellent job of reminding you of this fact too the clock in the top right that constantly shows how much time you have left the unsettling X hours left on the text box of every single NPC that you speak to and of course the terrifying reminder that pops up at the bottom of your screen when someone has less than 24 hours left your choices carry so much more weight going down One path over another is a sign ific decision that path may not lead towards your goal but maybe you'll find some meteor dust down there or maybe something even more valuable is that risk worth it though would those be precious hours well spent the timer also creates these dramatic moments where you turn a corner only to be faced with this terrifying Abomination from the abyss your partner will tell you to find another way around since this is too dangerous but you'll remember those timers and the people back at the village and realize that you don't have time to find another way around you have to fight your way through as you go through the game there's this constant feeling of dread as you know for a fact that you can't save everyone especially not if you're busy treasure hunting and yet from that comes an overwhelming sense of Hope in an almost backwards way it's this ability to move forward in the face of such overwhelming odds the willingness to help people despite how tight the timeline you're on is and the eagerness with which you gift others meteor dust barely saving any for yourself that this belief that everything is going to work out begins to shine through the timer a mechanic that once brought stress and despair ended up becoming something that created excitement and hope it's thanks to these benefits and the level of control that unsighted provided that I was able to gradually understand and even appreciate this mechanic with this new knowledge and understanding in toe I was even able to go back to Majora's Mask I'm not going to pretend the timer doesn't still stress me out a bit but I see now even if it's only a brief Glimpse why this game means so much to so many so I think we can comfortably check method 1 next I decided to test method 2 in 20122 Persona 5 Royal released and what what the Okay so concerning as it may be Persona 5 Royal came out 5 years ago and when it did I tried to get into it for the second time after dropping the original game about halfway through in 2017 I tried a second time in 2020 with royal but once again I bounced right off this time even faster I wasn't exactly sure why though I loved the style of the game the music was great none of the characters were particularly annoying and I really liked some of them I even enjoyed the gameplay despite having some minor problems with it but for some reason I just had no drive to play the game fast forward a few years and smt 5 vengeance is about to drop I knew I wouldn't like it so I didn't bother but then I saw some gameplay and what people were saying about the game that it wasn't this story of changing the hearts of evil people but instead about challenging mythical figures and gods while two competing factions Vibe for dominance over Humanity I've always been into mythology and this game seemed to be centered around myths from all over the world so with all of that in mind I decided perhaps foolishly to give it a shot in hopes that I'd finally be able to enjoy one of these critically acclaimed Atlas RPGs the results of doing so were completely unbelievable to me I didn't just enjoy smt 5 I beat the game twice in a month I mean I was so obsessed with this game that despite being on a break from YouTube at the time I wrote a 32,000 word script that I just never made into a video maybe I will someday anyway this didn't make any sense some of the gameplay problems I had with Persona were still here you still got a game over if the protagonist died and the game still relied on you switching out and even discarding your demons for newer stronger ones in fact that happened more often in in smt as in Persona your entire party is made of humans that never really left in smt you're basically expected to have a totally different lineup for every boss I do think a large part of this was due to that pre-established connection with mythology though so we can safely check that box however I don't think that tells the full story I have a theory as to why this happened and with it comes the key to finally enjoying Persona 5 after all these years believe it or not if you've been paying attention to the timeline and you know just a bit about Persona 5 you might already be able to figure it out so Persona 5 has this calendar system in short most activities in the game like spending time with party members or friends crafting tools or playing baseball will take up some time you have a limited amount of time to complete your mission you'll get this warning here that shows you how many days you have left and failure to complete your task before the deadline will result in a game over sound familiar it's a pseudo timer system you're not actively on the clock you can put your controller down and stand still in shabuya for an hour and nothing will happen but your actions are limited and your choices do matter making a series of wrong choices choices will lead to a game over and it's this that I assumed was the reason that I didn't enjoy persona but fell in love with smt since in the latter there is no timer because of this I had a game that was almost like a distilled version of my favorite parts of persona however if we look at the Timeline I played Persona before my second unsighted playthrough now that I had both a better understanding and appreciation of timers thanks to unsighted along with a tolerance and acceptance of some mechanics I didn't necessarily enjoy thanks to smt I effectively had not just one or two methods at my side but all three at the same time I could use smt as a Gateway game and a pre-established connection thanks to many demons appearing in Persona they're also an smt I understood the timer its benefits and why the developers chose to include it and now finally thanks to all of this when I went back to Persona 5 Royal I dropped it once again wait what thanks to all of this went back to Persona 5 Royal and dropped it once no I I definitely read that right okay there had to be something I was missing I follow all the steps that always worked before maybe there was some secret fourth method that I was unaware of and had yet to discover no that's not it maybe it was a seasonal thing I mean I played Persona in the spring and come on that's ridiculous it couldn't wait could it be that okay I have an idea one final test that'll give a single definitive answer to whether or not it's possible to get any game metaphor ref fantasio is the most recent game released by Atlas I had no plans to play this game even after smt I assumed it would be another persona a five situation where I tried it and just bounced right off as usual however with this last test in mind I knew I had to so let me show you this final test that I keep mentioning the way I see it my problem with Persona is either personal or structural if it's structural we can figure out how to address it and if it's personal we can figure out if we want to the structure of metaphor is extremely similar to that of persona you explore for a few days with that very same pseudo timer system in the calendar you meet and befriend allies who make you stronger and you run through these massive dungeons before the deadline to progress through the game they've even got Anime cutcenes just like Persona you know how Elden ring isn't Dark Souls 4 but it also kind of is Dark Souls 4 metaphor is the same it's not literally Persona 6 and there are plenty of significant differences the most obvious of which being the setting but they're more than similar enough for the test So the plan here is simple I'll play metaphor and go over the three biggest parts of persona's gameplay that also exist in here to see if I still have a problem getting into the game if any of these three do stop me then we'll know for sure that it's a structural problem and if they don't it's personal so let's start with the dungeons dungeons in metaphor have an interesting structure compared to most dungeons in games planning plays a massive role here due to the lack of healing in dungeons themselves you have rest points throughout the dungeons that you can use to save and even fast travel but crucially you don't get to heal they're not recovery points I really didn't like this system it seemed unforgiving and inconvenient at first but a deeper look and a bit of patience revealed a profoundly satisfying experience that's only possible exclusively because of this design decision as you go through these dungeons you'll fight enemies and in these fights you have to defeat the enemies yeah real groundbreaking stuff I know here's where things get interesting you have limited MP and MP restoratives are extremely rare finally we've got those deadlines from before which act to tie all of this together you see the only way to recover your MP outside of items is to rest for the day and advance to the next one this brings you one day closer to the deadline so the less MP you use in each fight the further in the dungeon you can safely go before you have to end the day the further in the dungeon you go the fewer days it takes to reach the end this creates something that if you've watched some of my videos in the past you already know that I love risk reward there's this immense tension you experience from pushing yourself as far as you can go fighting these enemies with barely any MP left even your Mage moves to the front lines and begins swinging since your resources are just that depleted but you're still so desperate to make it to that next rest point then you finally get this immense release when you somehow reach your goal your party grabs a meal and rests at the end of the day and you feel the very same way they do as that overwhelming tension that crushing pressure finally Fades away if these rest points did heal you this entire system would totally fall apart you'd finish every dungeon in a single day you wouldn't have to strategize nearly as much both before entering the dungeon and during your battles within it that feeling of relief would hardly even exist anymore now I know what you're thinking couldn't that same feeling be achieved by having rest points that heal you with no deadline well not exactly here's why the deadline adds Stakes without it there would be no reason not to stop for the day and heal every single time you reach the rest point however because of this deadline you have both a reason and a reward for pushing yourself as far as you can go if you have 10 days to complete a dungeon and you do it in two now you've got 8 days to hang out in town get stronger talk to your friends and do pretty much anything you want it's in this way that the more you struggle inside of a dungeon the more you're rewarded outside of it so I think it's pretty obvious but I really do enjoy the dungeons in metaphor next we need to look at what happens with the Encounters in those dungeons the combat combat in these games can get pretty intense it's not like Pokemon where the opponent is green so you press the red button and instantly win there's far more strategy planning and perhaps most importantly volatility that last one is what I really want to focus on as it's basically necessary in making this combat fun similar to the restrooms I did not like this volatility when I first played Persona or even smt it almost felt unfair that I would lose an entire fight from making what seemed like just one mistake however as much as I hate to admit it this was a pure skill issue see in these games if you hit a weakness or land a crit you gain an extra turn the same holds true for your enemies though as you could probably imagine this has the potential to snowball completely out of control and that's where the planning part comes in what you do outside of combat is arguably just as important if not more so than what you do in it for example if I don't know your entire party is weak to lightning maybe don't fight a boss that has a lightning AOE with that party cuz if you do you'll make a single mistake or even get some bad RNG and then he'll respond by wiping your entire team with multiple lightning AOE and you'll have the nerve to think wow that was unfair there was nothing I could have done as if you didn't stand under the hoop waiting to get dunked on you know like in theory that could happen this volatility goes both ways though if you plan correctly you can absolutely use this system to your advantage and when you do it's immensely satisfying this much like the tension and release of the dungeons creates this Edge ofyour seat feeling where you know you're balancing on a knife's edge and one mistake WIll spell disaster but if you planned everything out properly and you executed that plan just right you get to enjoy the other end of that one-sided Victory you see one of the biggest problems with turn-based combat is this trend of attack when you have high HP and heal when you don't this is technically the case in basically any video game turn-based or not but the difference in turn-based games is that generally speaking you can't avoid getting hit like you can in real-time combat if I'm low on Health in Monster Hunter I don't have to heal I can just lock in in most turn-based games however I am going to get hit because of this that healing and attacking thing should become far more one-dimensional however thanks to the level of depth here and the choices the player is allowed to make while that fundamental rule May Remain the player has far more agency in how the fights progress let me show you an example from one of the first bosses this guy has a few things you can focus on his eggshell his arms and his heart the heart acts as the main source of HP take that out in the battle lens the only problem is that heart is all the way up here and you're all the way down here so melee attacks aren't going to work unless you first break the shell when you do this though you'll unlock a powerful AOE for the boss to use when he gets back up finally there are the arms which can use weaker aoe's and even heal the shell after it's broken now this is a lot and that's intentional because the key here is that you don't need to follow one specific path if you want to ignore the arm and just full Focus the shell and heart you can do that you'll have to deal with some AOE and the shell will always fully regenerate but maybe you have enough DPS that that doesn't matter to you alternatively you can play it safe fully focus on the arms and weaken the boss to a point where they can barely even fight back all in all this combat is phenomenal and while I've barely even scratched the surface here I think we know more than enough to say with confidence that the combat was not going to make me drop this game like Persona finally there's the third pillar of the game play what you do outside of the dungeons in metaphor you're time outside of the dungeons will be spent either getting stronger or hanging out with friends obviously the first part revolves around Min Dungeons and side quests which mostly boil down to dungeon crawling and combat both of which we've already established are great here naturally then this is going to come down to the characters so in theory I should like these characters way more than Persona and that would explain the difference between these two games for me but I kind of don't I mean to be clear I like them a lot probably even more than persona but not by all that much not anywhere near enough to explain why I fell in love with met 4 but not Persona 5 now I guess there's an argument to be made here that some of this stuff is better or worse than it is in Persona but a lot of it is nearly identical like the rest points in dungeons the general structure of combat or bosses having multiple different paths to go down furthermore while I could keep going like this with every single aspect of both games I don't know if there would be a point to that the similarities are just too great for me to consider this a structural problem there's nothing about the structure of the gameplay of persona that would stop me from playing it so with that I think I finally have my answer I can't fully understand why I've never been able to get Persona like I have metaphor maybe that's due to the mental state I was in when I first played Persona maybe it's because of the fantasy setting and metaphor maybe it's because Persona doesn't have eand belli Mel hulkenberg I don't know exactly why but Persona 5 just isn't for me and I think that's okay ultimately it seems like my inability to enjoy Persona is a personal problem and because of that I don't know if I'll ever truly get it at least not in the foreseeable future but there's something even more valuable that I found in my attempts to understand this game I found metaphor I found smt even if I had failed to enjoy Majora's Mask I still would have found unsighted which for me is criminently underrated had I given up and stopped trying to enjoy this game and games like it I would have never been able to find these one-of-a-kind experiences so to answer the initial question can you use these methods to get any game you want well they'll work most of the time but will they work with any game no probably not however I think it's still worth it to try because in that search to understand a certain game you may find something even better regardless of how good a game is sometimes they have seemingly terrible decisions and that might be a good thing check out this video on that