Top 10 Worst Cases of Padding In Video Games

The Halo franchise is notorious for reusing the same enemies throughout their games, but The Library level in Combat Evolved takes the cake. The mission for the level is to retrieve an index in a library to help defeat the parasitic hoard the flood. That might sound like fun, but in practice it’s about as exciting as a real trip through the library. This level is designed with a predictable maze of the same corridor copy pasted everywhere. While that’s bad enough, the level also has you fighting the same enemy over and over again as well, with the same weapons and using the same tactics. The result is a level long enough for your Doritos to go stale and mountain dew go flat.

One of the essential elements of any Mega Man game is the boss rush. Near the end of every Mega Man and Mega Man X game, the player is rewarded for beating the previous bosses by- making you fight them all over again! With each new boss defeated, mega man gains a power-up that makes it easier to advance in different levels and gives him an advantage over certain bosses. That means that once you fight them again in the boss rush, the battles are often far less challenging, and altogether uninteresting. While it’s kind of nice to obliterate some of the bosses that were giving you trouble earlier on, did it really have to be in every game?

For a game with the word ‘core’ in the name, you’d expect there to be a lot of thought into the core gameplay, but not so for this game. For the most part, collecting those shiny orbs is pretty fun, but the problem is that everything involves these cores, including story missions. Nearly every time you want to advance the story, your character needs to collect a certain number of a certain kind of core. Gameplay runs especially thin near the end, when the objective is basically to climb a staircase, but every flight of stairs is blocked by a door that needs a certain number of cores to open it. For the player, this means a ton of back tracking and a whole lot of busy work, all in the name of artificially extending the length of the game.

After powering through a challenging series of well thought-out missions that can easily soak up many hours of gameplay in the fantastic first chapter of MGS5, The second chapter however is where such a great game starts to fall apart. A large portion of the 2nd half of the game; are filled with missions lifted straight from the first half of the game with some extra requirement; like going in with no equipment, or not being allow to be detected at all. But the worst offender is by far the game’s final mission, which forces you to play through the entire prologue, in all of its painfully slow glory, all over again.

After playing through a game that boasts a rich storyline, a complex fighting system, and several interesting side quests, the heroes of Bravely Default finally awaken the four crystals in order to save the world. Only instead of saving the world, they’re all booted into a parallel dimension where they’ll have to do it all over again, and again, and again, and again. That’s right, the four final chapters of this 8 chapter JRPG are all reiterations of previous chapters. Granted, some bosses and side quests are optional in the subsequent parallel universes, but that’s no excuse to have the player trudge through 4 levels of the same, if slightly different story.

In No More Heroes you play as an unemployed loner who, after running out of money, begins his career as a hired assassin in order to buy more videogames… Naturally. It doesn’t seem like a game with a strong emphasis on realism, but for large swaths of the game, things get a little too real. Each mission requires Travis to pay a large administration fee to take on a ranked assassin, which means your character has to raise money by working odd jobs around town. These gigs include lawn mowing, garbage collecting, and graffiti cleaning. And yes, they are just they’re just as dull and boring as they sound.

Let’s face it: nobody really likes escort missions all that much. Having to stop the action in order to protect a helpless NPC can really bring a fast-paced game to a grinding halt. The egg quests in the Monster hunter series take the annoyance a step further. For these quests your character picks up a heavy monster egg to deliver it far across the map. Because these eggs are so heavy, your character’s walking speed is greatly reduced and you’re unable to use your weapons to defend yourself. Oh and if you get hit once, the egg breaks and you’ll have to start all over. Oh and the worst part, the quests sometimes require more than one egg. That means: Multiple trips.

Getting all the collectibles in a game is usually saved for side quests that reward the player with secret items or in-game perks, but apparently Jet Force Gemini never got the memo. In the game there are a total of 32 tribal NPCs hidden throughout every level and you need to rescue every single one to get to the final level. The problem is how the game keeps track of the Tribal’s you collected, As it’ll only count the number of Tribals saved in one area, rather than the specific ones you’ve rescued. Missed just one tribal during a run? You have to start the process all over again. Not only that, but it’s also possible for enemies to kill the tribals in the heat of battle, again making you start that level all over again.

Because of this game’s multiple endings, it’s entirely possible to finish the game without ever knowing that you only played half of it, and you might be better off. If you do manage to crack the code and make it to the second half of the game, you get to play the entire castle again, except it’s turned upside down. [that can’t be true!”] Although the inverted castle offers a few new enemies and bosses,
and some of the rooms were designed with the upside down castle in mind, there’s no denying that flipping the map is about the laziest way of extending a game.

But before we get to our top pick, here are some Honorable Mentions

Running on a Hamster Wheel
“Super Paper Mario” (2007)


Color Coordinated Collectibles
“Donkey Kong 64” (1999)

Wind Waker does a great job at creating a world that feels expansive and interesting, with a huge ocean map featuring plenty of islands to discover and explore. Hoisting your sails and setting out on the water for the first time felt like a grand, unforgettable adventure that would never get old, and for the most part, sailing was pretty engaging, right up until the final dungeon. In order to enter Ganon’s tower, Link must retrieve the 8 shards of the Triforce of courage, scattered across hundreds of square miles of ocean. But before he does that, he has to find the 8 maps to locate those shards. To make matters worse, the charts have to be deciphered by Tingle for just under 400 Rupees. EACH. Fans were so put off by this drawn-out quest that it was shortened in the game’s HD remake, but for those who played the original version, they know this quest was quite the slog.


Don’t agree with our list? What other fluffed out games make it to your list? For more long-form top 10s, subscribe to WatchMojo.com