Devil May Cry 4

Right, I played DMC 1 through once. The upgrade/item system annoyed me then, and it annoys me now in DMC 4. Plus I find boss battles irritating. In DMC, these two issues combine to be REALLY annoying.

So I'm fighting this frog thing. Having some trouble. So I buy a green star (which regenerates health) to use during the battle. I still fail, despite having more time to try to beat the thing. Now, the price of the NEXT green star is higher, even though I gained no real benefit from the first one since I failed. Now I have to restart the entire level to reset the star price, since a higher star price just means more difficulty later. So this game gets harder if you're not good at it; that's really stupid. It also gives you more upgrade points when you play really well. I can understand that from a rewards perspective, except it makes the game easier for people who are already good at it! That's also really stupid.

DMC's system that allows the player to fall behind or get ahead of the difficulty curve makes no sense to me. Not that this kind of thing never works; I've seen that done right in Diablo II. When you got ahead of the curve, you'd go into areas designed for higher level characters, and you ended up always fighting things that were at your level of competence. With DMC's strict mission system, you can't rush forward to the tougher sections without continuing to earn more power.

I'm not sure how much further into this game I will go.