I have a terrible memory for everything. That is a fact that I’ve known for… pretty much my entire life. Even then some times I still get surprised about how what I remember and what is fact ends up being different.
Case in point Valkyria Chronicles. My memories from the first time I played the game I had an easy time with the early missions and could easily get an A or B on them. Now I decided to play the game again, restarting from zero since I could barely remember anything about the gameplay or the story and the results have been pretty different from my memory.
I only got grade A on the first mission because I still remember more or less the strategy to get that result (which required a bit of recklessness). The other missions so far I’ve only got B or C. Some times even requiring to do the mission again because I did some terrible mistake.
With Skirmishes, which are kind of an optional content, the result has been pretty much the same. The difference is with Skirmishes I can at least replay them as many times I want and try to get better grades (and more XP and money).
At least this has helped me to remember why I stopped playing the game the first time, besides the usual “I got distracted by other games”. On my first try the missions were getting so hard that I was barely being able to finish them with a D or E rank which gave very little money and XP. That was making me very salty since the only other sources of those would be to grind the aforementioned Skirmishes and other optional content and I am just not a fan of grinding in general. :p
This is not the first time this happened though. Another example would be the Megaman series. I always knew I was terrible at jumping in games, since the reason Pitfall stuck in my mind all these years is exactly because of how frustrating it was for me to get those tricky jumps.
Despite that I somehow fell in love with the Megaman franchise and my memories of the first games are that I wasn’t that terrible at them. Granted I never finished any of them but that was something that never bothered me as a kid.
When the first Megaman Legacy collection was released I knew I had to buy it as it would be a chance to relive some of my favorite games from my childhood. It was only when I went to play them that I realized I how much worse at these games than I remembered.
One could give an excuse that I am older and my reflexes aren’t just the same anymore. I prefer to believe that isn’t the case and that I was always just terrible at them. I just remembered different because I was having so much fun as a kid. Having said that, thank gods the Megaman Legacy Collection has Save Estates!
There are probably other examples I could come up with but those are the only ones I can remember right now. It always amuses me though when incidents like this happen and it makes me wonder what else I am misremembering. At least with this blog I have a place to register some of these memories so I can always fact check later if I feel curious enough. 🙂
I feel you. I’m cleaning up my steam library and I’m hiding just about every platformer because I just can’t anymore. I tried a few different ones, but no. It’s probably a combination of getting older and my chronic illness worsening. My hand eye coordination sucks. My proprioception in general sucks and I just can’t process it well when I need to jump to cross the gap. Realising that sucked. But at least my backlog has 30 less games lol
I am sorry you are having to do that!
I still like to believe my reflexes aren’t that bad yet… It is just that I have been this bad at platformers all along. Thankfully with the exception of the Megaman and a few other games it has never really been my favorite genre, just the one that was predominant back when I was start playing games.
This lack of skill still makes it hard to finish Megaman games though!
My memory for story in games, books, movies — any media really — is pretty shocking too. Even for stories I *really* liked.
Most frustrating for this is with book series where I don’t (typically) want to re-read the previous entries. So if I’m not reading a whole series in a single go (which I’ll happily do if they’re all out) then it can be a bit of a time getting reacquainted with the main story beats.
In other situations it doesn’t really become so much of a problem thankfully!
Same here. I can remember the overall plot well enough and even some scenes. It is just that the majority of it can be like “Oh, I remember when that character…. uh… did the thing… to the other… uh… person who had a name I can’t remember.”
It usually doesn’t bother me unless something very specific is being referenced and my memory of it is different. Then I have to go back and recheck somehow.