Same for cut scenes. If I wanted to watch a badly written movie, I would watch badly written movie.
You can disable the startup movie from the settings after you sat through it once, but if you don't do that you'll get the same 8 minute movie again the next time you start the game.
1) The movie in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfjoCqEo6I
Anyway, my main grudge with GT is that you buy a new episode and start from scratch. Maybe they got smarter but I remember that when I bought GT4 I had to go through all the licenses again. That could be OK because even if the controller is the same there are changes in the physics model etc. What I don't forgive them is that I must unlock again everything. Cars, tracks, money, they take a massive amount of time. I had that time with GT3, I didn't have it anymore with GT4. Give me at least all the tracks and the cars and the money I had on the GT3 memory card. The result is that I unlocked some new tracks, I played only a tiny amount of the game, kept doing laps on the tracks that I unlocked and never bought a newer Playstation. That cost them some missed sales with me. I would pay an extra to buy a totally or partially unlocked game.
By the way, I play only racing games and I'm not interested to play against other people with a network connection. There are apparently too many jerks and lapping alone or against the AI is entertaining enough.
I don’t play online so I don’t know how well it works, but GT7 has a sportsmanship rating system that is supposed to combat this.
- Entering/exiting shrines (infuriatingly, you can skip about half the time, but not all of it). I've seen it a hundred times already (literally). I only needed to see it once, if even that. There's not even any variation.
- Unlocking a tower. You're making this a bigger deal than it really is.
- Interfacing with Great Fairies and Hestu. Again, some of it is skippable, but not everything. Why half-ass it?
- Pause and modal popup whenever you pick up certain items, even if you pick up some amber for the 1000th time. Why.
- Dialog and popups not immediately reacting to input, but every such thing has an artificial 1000-1500 ms delay. Can someone explain why this was added? For players to not accidentally choose an option without reading it? OK, maybe stop doing it after the first, I don't know, 100 times?
- Opening (and closing) chests.
- Praying in front of goddess statues and the things that ensue.
It's like they've done extra "fuck you" work to ruin your experience. Just let me skip. The whole thing. And don't fade in/out from/to white/black over 3 seconds, just cut it. Cut it. Begone.
You just climbed a tower-- behold this sweeping view while you catch your breath.
You can't feel the weight of this heavy chest lid, but you do feel it in how long it takes to open.
I hated the cooking animations (fuck those dancing vegetables), but they make you feel the effort involved in the process.
Letting you skip that stuff ruins the immersiveness. Nothing you can fast-forward through is ever going to feel epic. (It's not a fuck-you unless Hideo Kojima was involved.)
Red Dead Redemption did this too. By the end I had seen so many animals skinned it broke something inside me, which gave fourth-wall consequence to what I was doing in-game.
There was this one level, which begins with a cutscene and then a car chase on a highway, eventually (after many game crashes, restarts, rewatches of the unskippable cutscene) lands you on ... I'd like to say an aircraft carrier?
Perhaps it was my hardware which was shit, but the game worked well enough on every other level, but that one. damn. level... it just kept crashing. Which lead to a restart and that unskippable. fricking. cutscene...
ugh. just ugh.