My first playthrough of Mass Effect I had no idea there was a second level of my ship. I totally missed all of the crew member backstory dialogue and relationship building, which is pretty essential to the game... the second playthrough was much better once I found the elevator!!

Storytime: It's 1997, I play a game that my uncle shows me on his Playstation 1. There's tons of reading and a weird fighting system but it seems really awesome and has some amazing FMV scenes. He tells me I'm too young to play it and won't let me borrow it to keep playing... So I go to blockbuster and rent it for a few days.

I remember the back of the instruction booklet showing off one of those memory cards and saying "try beating the game without one" which is exactly what I tried to do, because I didn't have a memory card! Then my mum turned the game off when I was at school one day and we had to take the game back to blockbuster after a couple of days. Damn I lost all my progress!

ADAMANT that I would play this game I got my own copy after swapping for it at my local game store and got my own memory card. Finally I could save my game and not worry about losing my progress. The game continues to challenge me a ton and I don't really understand how the systems work but I'm 10 years old and having fun so who cares.

I figure out that I can buy grenades from the shops and I use that as my main attack for awhile... at least until I get to the big city with the gun on it. Buying and using healing items is such a pain all the time though but thankfully money isn't hard to get.

Fast forward further into the story and one of my characters has to go one on one with another dude, this is like that other fight with the guy and his dog when I didn't have 3 characters that could throw grenades and heal! I can't beat this dude with the gun on his arm with just 1 guy!

... Then after failing over and over again, I finally figure out what putting "Restore" on his weapon does... then I figure out what putting "Fire" on it does...

Suddenly the FF7 materia system clicks into place in my brain and about 15 hours after the tutorial teaching you how to do it I figure out how to play the game.

Still my number 1 game of all time to this day. And I never forgot how much trouble Dyne gave me that first time playing through the game.

tl;dr I didn't understand how the FF7 materia system worked until about 15~ hours into the game and was using grenades and potions for all fighting and healing for a loooong time.

I just beat BOTW for the first time and never figured out what to do with Korok Seeds. Missed out on the extra weapon/shield inventory slots the whole game!

Black & White

It has a mechanic where you bless a stone, then throw it across the map, and you get to build and influence an area around the rock. Basically it is the only sane way to expand.

I did not know. I spent painstaking hours slowly growing my village trying to get its area of influence to spread into where I needed to go.

I don't know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren't easily resettable. I'm so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.

I played through all of mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.

I played through all of Tears of the Kingdom without making a hover bike.

My first time through Final Fantasy 8, I was a bit too young to grasp all the concepts. I missed the memo on the fact that you had to craft gear based on finding the weapon magazines so I ended up playing through the whole game with everyone using their base weapons.

When I played the original AoE2 I was completely unaware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different units. I just build whatever I found to be coolest and wondered why I struggled so much.

Only when I bought the Definitive Edition much later I looked that up.

For my defense, I was ten back then.

"Advanced" combat in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Most of the time combat is a slog and it's the least interesting part of the games. I just get strong weapons and hit the enemies with them, or shoot them from afar. I don't think I even broke more than 5 shields per game, and barely did that slow motion avoid thing. It's much faster to just slash and slash, stagger, slash, etc.

Hell, a lot of the devices in TotK are useless because I can just slash or shoot the enemies myself. Tried them out once in shrines and that's it.

Dwarf Fortress.

Not me, but my wife got all the way to the end of Journey to the Savage Planet before discovering there is a skill tree you can invest in 😂

I played a substantial amount of Zelda TotK without the paraglider which made quite a few adventures a lot more treacherous, some borderline impossible, and some actually impossible. 😂

On my first play through, I completely misunderstood Mass Effect and basically played it like a standard shooter. Hardly used power, didn't talk to anyone and more or less just went from main mission to main mission.

The amount of stuff I missed out on, in retrospect, is staggering. I'm so glad I gave this game another try because I really did not understand what all the fuss was about.

Resident Evil Director's Cut on PS1. I was fairly young and not very good at the "survival" aspect of the survival horror. I tried to kill everything I encountered and consumed copious amounts of ammo and herbs doing so. I reached a place where I had a single ink ribbon left, no ammo, health on the red, and confused on where I needed to go next. And I had to go do homework. So I used my last ribbon and saved.

I discovered next time I played that the way forward was through a tight corridor I missed filled with zombies who could now one-shot me. I tried and tried and literally was unable to get through. First time I ever learned the word "soft-locked" as my brother wheezed it out while laughing. Good times!

When I was younger I got stuck about 60 percent of the way through FF7. My cousin was over and I knew they had beaten it so I asked for help... They checked my gear and saw that I was still completely in the gear you start the game with :^)

Turns out in Elden Ring, you’re supposed to go left when you leave the initial starting area so you can pick up the ability of teleportation to bonfires.

Well, imagine my surprise learning that from friends 10 play hours later after going right and opening up a teleporting treasure chest to some crystal cave…

Took quite a while for me to find out about queens in Starcraft 2 as a Zerg player.

XCOM: Enemy Within

I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.

Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn't that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.

In Breath of the Wild, I never learned how to cook in the starting area. I completely bypassed the intended path up to the cold area and somehow climbed up the other side, and then just froze my ass off while eating a bunch of apples. I made it out of the starting area and I think I beat two of the divine beasts before I finally looked up how to cook. I knew the game had cooking, but I thought there would be some kind of cooking menu when you walk up to a cooking pot, I didn't realize you had to just hold items and then drop them in.

Life.

When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren't the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie's portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody's materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.

I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because "I've played this game before, I know how it works." I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn't until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that's when all the systems fell fully into place: you're supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.

Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there's a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.

Fallout New Vegas, I still haven't figured out how to gain xp effectively.

I got through all of Breath of the Wild without cooking anything. I knew the feature was there, but I don't remember ever being taught how to use it and ultimately decided I'd just armour my way around it.

FF7 Remake. I played the original but didn't pay attention to differences in the remake. I went the entire game with only the Buster sword, and thus did not learn any new abilities. Still beat it though.

When I first started playing WoW in 2006,I always wanted to play Balance (as it was the only caster option for Night Elves), but I thought that the point of the druid was to shape shift. So I had this janky hybrid build with the goal of collecting all the shape shifting appearances. I also thought that back then Blizzard was converting agility to spell power, because that was the only explanation for the lack of intellect leather. I though I had to only wear leather, but always believed that the gameplay was to cast until I ran out of mana, then switch to feral, and to bear if I needed additional armor and then back to casting when my mana bar recovered or if I needed to heal myself.

I leveled to 40+ with this funky build. Eventually a guild member was helping me on a quest and asked me if my build was “purposeful” because it was a garbage build. That’s when I learned about how specs work. He offered to make a dedicated set, but needed to know what spec. I told him I always wanted balance, and so he made me my Big Voodoo set, which lasted me until well into Outlands.

The first ever game of harvest moon was on the switch last year. I repaid the debt by fishing and collecting shells as I couldn't figure out how to dig as I couldn't obtain a pickaxe to finish my first ever quest. After 6+ hours of foraging around the staeting area, I realised that if you sleep, the quest progresses and you get the pickaxe...... Yea!

I missed the dodging and flurry-rush shrine in BoTW. Beat Ganon without ever learning. Finally went back much later and was like "wow, this game is so much easier now!"

In Hollow Knight I didn't learn the stab down feature and by the time I found that out I couldn't go back to learn it.

I'm pretty sure Animal Crossing: New Horizons never actually tells you that you can run by holding B. You just have figure it out by accident... I think I played for a month or two before I realized it was possible when watching someone play on YouTube.