Can a game be too long?

I may be biting my tongue here, especially since I am normally on the side of getting all the bang for your buck but sometimes, I feel overwhelmed. In this case, I say with Persona 5!

Yeah, it's awesome and addictive but the more I play it, the more it feels like it doesn't want to end! I've already gone through 3 separate occasions where they say it's your final mission and now it's just getting ridiculous! This may be the first time in a while that I've ever said that a game is just too long! 80 + hours and I'm yet in ANOTHER dungeon!! Hopefully the last!

Anyone else experienced this with other games? Mass Effect 2 and GTA 4 have felt like this too to me.

Darksiders II was too long. Game was 40hrs when it should have been 25-30hrs. Too many useless dungeons and the convoluted story made you explore areas you had no idea why.

Mario & Luigi Dream Team Bros. I enjoyed it a lot but at some point I was just done with it.

Assassins Creed is also way too long for a completionist. Too many pointless things to collect.

Hell yeah. Most JRPGs are waaaaay too long.

Agreed with that. It even often goes to a point you think you've beaten the game only to realize you're at the halfway point.

In Tales of Phantasia for instance, Dahos was hyped to be the final boss. You face him and defeat him only to realize this was only the first encounter and you're about 60% done. Anything after felt like post-game stuff.

I honestly don't think so. I don't mind a game being 100-150 hrs as long as I still enjoy playing it. Timeframes don't matter and I don't really like super short games because I like to get my money's worth even though I buy games all the time. There are literally millions of people who have hundreds of hrs logged into COD, Halo, and GTA and they do the same things over and over and over. Therefore I welcome games like Persona with their intricate storylines and their overwhelming lengths over repetitive shit like Destiny or COD any day

Totally. I got tired of Persona 4 after about 75 hours and took a break. Tried to restart a few times, but found it hard to jump back in once I'd lost momentum.

Vanquish was short, but relentless the whole time. Some of the most satisfying six hours of my gaming life.

I put most of my time into fighting and racing games. Things you can play for a while, forget about for a year, and then easily jump back into later on.

Hell yes.

Talking purely from a story standpoint, very few stories benefit from being all that long. Books work the way they do, because they are descriptive, not necessarily because there is a shit ton of content. So as a result a lot of game stories just fucking drag and hit a lul (rockstar for instance, always has a bad middle stretch of their game where the story comes to a screeching halt, because of the nature of their games).

Talking purely as a game there are only so many scenarios one is going to come up with a game, and usually long games throw in upgrade systems that utterly trivialize any sense of difficulty in the game, so it becomes a cake walk. I'd much rather play a game that's less than 10 hours and actually excellent, then play a 40 hour game that stopped by interesting by the 20 hour mark. A long game is just that, long, it's not good, or bad, or anything. It's just long, in the case of games though, often that absurd run time comes at the expense of things like pacing of the gameplay and the story itself.

Not to say there aren't some excellent games with a longer run time: Mario's games for instance have been fantastic, but the lion's share of RPGs are bloated, and it already doesn't help that very few of them have any sort of depth to them.

Portal for instance is like 3 hours long, it's also fucking excellent as a game unlike the tripe you people gas up. I've got 30 hours in Bayonetta PC, because it's genuinely fun to play and replay. The mechanics n pace are tighter across the board for its run time. The story is shit, but lolvideogamestories.

@Pedro:

Persona 5 still takes the cake for jrpg length though.

no, persona 5 can be long because what is there is quality

ME Andromeda is too long and too big.

@killered3: all those AC and Farcry games are too long.

Definitely... some games drag on way too much and end up ruining the experience.

Absolutely. It took me three tries to actually get into Witcher 3, just due to looking at the scale of the world map, and dreading the time committment which would be required.

Of course, once I did get into it, I was hooked.

Ubisoft.

@killered3: Persona 5 is probably one of the longest JRPGs you'll ever experience. I felt FF6-FF9 were considerably long games to finish.

*Goes Howlongtobeat.com*... Wow! FFXV only takes 27hrs to beat in contrary to it's predecessors which in average takes 40+ hours to beat. Absolutely shocking Square-Enix, a game in 10 years of development and you put an incomplete storyline on a single disc... pathetic!

Yes, games can be too long. I remember completing Dragon Age: Origins in just over 60 hours, and I was so knackered I couldn't play any game for a month. I think the sweet spot for RPGs for me is around 30-35 hours. Any longer and it tend to feel more exhausting than fun.

Of course. agreed about Persona 5 being overly long, it could have been better if the dev cuts some boring texts on phone as well as the palaces drag on far too long. Less is sometimes better. I don't mind a game that lasts very long, as long as it's good and doesn't have fluff.

They most definitely can be sometimes. I always prefer the quality of the experience in a game then the overall length of it.

I'm starting to get the feeling TW3 is WAY too long. There is a quest where you have to go looking for a poet, who happens to be the guy telling the story and it takes about 2-3 hours to complete and you don't end u finding the guy, you don't end up with any coherent story telling and each segment of the quest is broken down into several boring side quests.

I love big games but they have to have meaningful content (Skyrim, GTA V, FO3 etc).

@aigis:

I agree, there's tons of quality to enjoy from Persona 5 and I love it! But after 80 + hours, I just wanna be done with it and move on already! I want to see the ending! The TRUE ending and all these palaces and dungeon crawling just keeps on piling up! I'm almost frustrated with how long it is!

And I can't just put it on a backlog either because then I'll force myself to start a new record later. I'm too emotionally invested to give up now but I'm almost too sick of dungeon crawling to carry on. If I find out that there's 10 more hours after where I am, I swear I will explode!

opinion on the texts aside, I dont think there are any palaces they could have cut. Each one had a purpose, if you cut one they would have to remove a whole character or the story wouldnt make sense. Its not really fluff when it serves an important purpose, even palace 5 needs to be there.

@killered3: I feel you on that one. I started feeling burned out after about 100 hrs and I tried to take a break and play something else. It didn't work, though, and an hour later I was right back at it. At that point I was already too invested.

@killered3: where are you at?

@aigis: I mean the length of each palace.

A game can be too long. A game's length should NEVER be longer than the ammount justified by the ammount of content the game has. And when I don't consider filler and trash fights to be content.

ya, I guess it kinda depends. Really they need to be long-ish so there is enough actual dungeon crawling and to justify taking multiple days (for most people).

Play Any Assassin's Creed game that isn't 4.

It should only be as long as it needs to be

@aigis:

Right at the door to beat up Holy Grail...again but y'know, successfully.

Why do they need to be long-ish and take multiple days in the first place?

Padding the game out with trash encounters is not compelling game design. Trash encounters are ESPECIALLY bad in Turn Based games.

Yes, absolutely. And the Persona games are the number one violators of this.

I put 75 hours into Persona 3 FES and barely even made it halfway through the game.

youre almost done then

Persona 5's last 2 palaces especially unecessarily long due to Atlus forces you to fight mini boss after mini boss before encounter of the last boss of each dungeon. There are 6 mini bosses in the 7th palace but the you have to fight the 6th twice, so there are total of 7 mini boss fights in that dungeon.

Definitely. Although, I find correct pacing can make a short/long game feel that much better.

more for the social sim aspect

Though P5 does do variety pretty well in its dungeons, even palace 5 had a variety of puzzles to do. Personally I never felt like any were too long though

Yes it can. Repetitive , boring games tend to feel too long.

Not used to hearing that?

Some games definitely overstay their welcome but often it's down to the player. Open world games are a perfect i.e. People absolutely resolutely insist on doing everything that can possibly be done then complain they feel burned out early or doing the 'optional' stuff over and over has become boring. Really? No shit.

You don't have to do everything in every game. You don't. It's not the law. Stop fucking doing it then complaining you're bored of doing what you yourself made yourself do.

Persona 5. I really love the turn based combat and DIY Personas but absolutely hate the mundane activities you do in between the 'good stuff' so take that on face value I have dissed the god of turn based RPG's well he can f*** off if he's going to make me go to a diner to 'eat up' to level up an attribute. Only the Japanese would be this weird, God bless their chopstick-wielding little socks.

Around 5-8 hours is perfect for games.

I think a lot of games nowadays are too long.

I think too many developers add tedious padding that is not enjoyable to their games just to make it longer and I hate that. I would prefer a 5 to 10 hour game that is fun the entire way through with no padding over a 40+ hour game that has added tedious tasks to the game just to pad out the length.

As an adult with a job, I also just don't have the time to play many very long games and I would usually prefer to use my time to play multiple short games over one very long game.

Plus, shorter games are easier to replay in the future. I've replayed short games like Super Mario Bros. 3 many times throughout my life, but the thought of ever replaying a 40+ hour game is very daunting.

First thing that popped into my mind.

@blueinheaven:

I think I can relate. Persona is a fun rpg when the pacing starts to pick up momentum but the downtime gets kind of annoying. 21 days to do a palace and if you do it earlier than that, you got alot of days where you don't know what to do to kill time. Just repeat the same shit until you raise your stats and hang out with friends. During the downtime, I've often found myself just repeating boring activities like going to a bath house because I need to raise my charm to continue hanging out with someone. You pretty much have to.

Old JRPGs easily. Garbage random encounters are never fun.

Witcher 3 took me like a year to finish

Totally worth it though

Yes, both TR reboot games. I was like will this shit ever end.

Yeah, a lot of them actually. It's not that the length itself is a bad thing, but what it usually takes to achieve that length. Bloat. A developer can only come up with so many ideas for the combo of mechanics and level design they're working with. You end up with a lot of padded out shit. Sometimes just too much repetition on a good idea, sometimes shit that isn't even good at all, but just busy work.

Two games that I greatly enjoyed this gen, MGSV and BotW. Both games could have really used some trimming. Especially so with MGSV, that game could have trimmed off half the content and been a better game for it.

It's incredibly rare to find a lengthy game that's all-killer-no-filler. The longest examples of games like that I can think of usually tap out at 15 to 20 hours. Not every game can be Super Mario Galaxy 2 lol. And I can't think of a single 50+ hour game that doesn't have significant amounts filler/busywork/bloat.

Any game with many parts I don't like is too long. I don't mind repetitive parts so long as I enjoy them.

I only hate it when the games add fluff. The recent tales games do way too much to stretch the length of the game near the final battle.