What Do You Both Love AND Hate At The Same Time?

Although I don't feel like it worked well as a theme for a livestream, I've discovered I definitely have some things in the geek entertainment world that I can both love and hate with seemingly equal passion.

The Shadow Hearts games have my favorite turn-based RPG combat of all time and many other things I really enjoy. But the voice acting and writing irritates me more with each entry in the series.

I'm REALLY enjoying the Assassin's Creed games right now as a newcomer. Traversing the open world via parkour, leaping from buildings and taking enemies by surprise is so satisfying. But the main story missions so often rely on time limits, stealth or other "insta-fail" triggers that force a restart. It makes those parts extremely frustrating, or just boring as I feel forced to play/pause along with a youtube walkthrough in order to avoid tons of repetition.

It's so weird to be so attracted to these things that are also so repulsive to me at times. I'm curious if anyone else has something similar in their entertainment life?

Paradox.
No, I don't mean it is a paradox, although it might be, I was answering.
Paradox Interactive games. Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Sengoku... I love the games and their ambition and depth, and I absolutely hate how long and boring it is to do anything of note in them. Worse, you can't simply ignore the screen and do something else, like the "browser strategy" games that you can find, because drastic things might come up at any moment...but mostly it is just sitting there for an hour waiting for a particular resource to build up enough to allow you to spend it.
And of course it is super easy to use cheat codes, but then what point is there in playing? There isn't a set "win state" you just play until time runs out or you get sick of waiting around, so you can simply cheat your way to a super score right off the bat and avoid the whole play/wait thing altogether.

But... they are all still on my computer, and I'm sure I'll go back, and I'm sure I'll get more DLC, and I'm sure I'll be just as frustrated...

Star Wars.

Morfinwen wrote:Star Wars.

lol!

Any particular reasons you both love and hate Star Wars? Are we talking whole movies, or smaller details of the franchise?

Paeter wrote:

Morfinwen wrote:Star Wars.

lol!

Any particular reasons you both love and hate Star Wars? Are we talking whole movies, or smaller details of the franchise?

Really Paeter?
I didn't think about it, myself, but once it was said, SW definitely fits the bill.
I guess we each have our particular likes and dislikes on the series, but I can't think of a single person I've ever talked to who doesn't have a love/hate relationship with the films.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice fits the bill for me. I love what they did with Wonder Woman and Batman in it, but I'm annoyed at a lot of the Superman stuff. I think their fight against each other made sense from Batman's perspective, but not so much Superman's. I hate that they rushed into using Doomsday so soon, but I liked the final battle with him (it?). I loved it enough to buy the Ultimate Edition (with a gift card), but I still cringe at certain parts (most notably "MARTHA!" It made sense as a thing to bring them together, but it seems so unnatural for a guy to say his mom's name rather than, "He's going to kill my mom!").

Another one: The Princess Bride book version. I just finished the story proper, and I'm currently reading the extra stuff in the special edition. I love the characters, the setting, the story, and that it led to the movie, but I didn't like the rambling style of a lot of the writing (both in the story and in the "annotations"). It was like listening to a particularly gregarious friend who can't get to the point. I also felt like it had a similar problem to the Marvel movies where parts of the story that seemed like they should have had weight were interrupted by a joke.

Hey, there's another one: the Marvel movies. They're fun, they're colorful, they're full of all the superhero fights I wish I could've seen as a kid! They all go together to make a large story that's really fun to follow. But they're all so similar, they're always fighting earth-shattering threats, and they break the emotionally heavy parts up with jokes far too often. I know Paeter has talked about this ad nauseum, but it really hit me while recently watching Doctor Strange (particularly the part where he suits up for the big battle, and then his cape wiggles around his face and he tells it to stop).

Okay, that's all I've got for now.

Paeter wrote:

Morfinwen wrote:Star Wars.

lol!

Any particular reasons you both love and hate Star Wars? Are we talking whole movies, or smaller details of the franchise?

I don't think i need to go into what there is to hate in Star Wars. My list is pretty similar to most people's, with the exception that i don't think the original trilogy is that much better than the prequels.

As for what i love, there's the Knights of the Old Republic games, particularly the first one, which got me into computer RPGs and have some great characters and even decent writing (mostly).

There's also all kinds of meta people have written up about the films -- most of it probably unintentional, but it suggests a deeper story than the one we actually got. The stuff about Anakin especially gets to me.

There's just something about the entire universe that's intriguing, no matter how disappointing the rest of it is.