Dissida: Final Fantasy

Or, the worst designed game that I put ~80 hours in.
See, I love competitive games. I've had so much fun going 0-30 in a fighting game, because it's going up against another person, not an AI. I love that. I know people that play Dissidia, and I wanted to play against them.
Then... I found out just how much effort it took to actually max characters out in Dissidia, to be able to play it against other people. At 80 hours in, I didn't have a character that was at maxed out strength. Or even near to.

Now, let me digress. There's a large amount of customization available in this game. Abilities are your attacks, that you can choose from and set the activation input for, based on what direction you're holding, relative to your opponent. Bravery attacks lower your enemy's bravery and raise yours, and are triggered by square. Bravery is the amount of damage you do on a successful HP attack, which are mapped to circle. Each character has a varied number of these. Abilities also include increasing your speed, jump height, number of jumps, and ways to conditionally increase how often you critical hit (to deal more brave damage).
There are 4 equipment slots, which each character able to equip a subset of each one, which... I dislike as an idea, as it cuts options to characters in a fairly arbitrary manner.
Accessories increase your damage or defense, how long you stay in EX Mode, how quickly you can get into EX Mode, etc. and there are 10 accessory slots... once you earn up to that number, via grindy methods.
EX Mode being this game's version of supers. You build up a meter, via picking up EX Core that randomly spawn and EX Force balls that get generated by clashes between the fighters. Once you get full bar, you can activate EX Mode, which typically makes your character's attacks better, and allows you to deal more damage on your HP attacks.
Strength, for this, includes fairly optimal accessories and equips. This game is, to put it nicely, FUCKING STUPIDLY grindy. I just got tired of it. Any game that requires you to play it that long to get to the point where you can start playing against other people is just *dumb*. Levels in a fighting game aren't an inherently bad idea and neither is customization, via like how accessories and equipment and the abilities in this game work. Hell, I think they're amazing ideas, if not incredibly hard to balance. However, the equipment in this game isn't typically a customization vector - It's the standard Final Fantasy obsession with numbers. All the majority of the equipment does is raise your stats. Now that is an inherently bad idea in a fighting game. A few do give you abilities, however, but in some cases, the best choice is static to each character... taking away customization. Though, it does help make the system a bit more transparent, the implementation here is just a barrier to entrance.
Same, really, are accessories. There are tiers of accessories, with the best one requiring hours of grinding to get. Sigh.
Now, to get to a customization vector that's really just... bad. Summons! They're the equivalent of a bad SNK boss, an ability to just destroy your opponent or boost you, through no fault of theirs or no skill on your part
Now, as another design thing, EX Mode entrance automatically breaks you out of a combo you're in, and puts your opponent into stun. This... is, in my opinion, dumb. It means that, if you have a full bar, you can break out almost any attack that's close range and immediately hit with an HP attack. There's changing things up due to your opponent having stock, and then there's making it impossible to attack you. It allows you to punish perfectly acceptable play. And, if this is how the person wants to use EX Mode, it would be next to impossible to bait it out of a smart player. Gah.

Now, to be fair - The game does do a lot of things I really liked. The game is mostly very fun. The characters are very different playing from each other, giving each matchup a fairly different feel to it, and there's a large cast of characters, 22, with no clones. For a fighting game, that's very impressive. The customization is a great idea, in theory. As a single player experience, it's fun until you, inevitably, get really bored with it, as there's an insane amount of content density. Getting everything would take, probably, another 100 hours on top of my play time, to say nothing about maxing out each character. So, fun single player in a fighting game is a pretty insane thing. The AI, though, I do have to say... it's fairly obvious that they cheese you by reacting to your button presses, to do things that no human could ever do. They're stupid, in their own time, though, as well. I mean, I did put 80 hours into the game, and they were fun, if not... stale, towards the end.
Competitively... if you can find people willing to fight on terms that are fair to everyone (so, you know, not via Adhoc online play), then it could be fun. But, really, only under that idea. And then, that takes some of the fun out of the game, as it destroys customization aspects. So... blech.

So, the game was designed to be amazingly grindy. For a fighting game, that's just a bad idea. I liked some of where Square was going with this, but overall, bad design decisions just made me... stop. Abruptly and suddenly. My annoyance just went over the top, in the end.