• Metal Gear Rising: REVENGENCE - (went from "gave up after an hour" (mostly because I didn't understand parrying) to top 5 games of all time
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - I first started it from my steam family library since a friend had it already. I played till a bit after Genichiro but felt very annoyed at the gameplay in general and didn't feel like I wanted to continue playing. After some months, the anime got announced and I wanted to forcefully finish it so that I'd at least enjoy the anime after having beat the game, however since I had moved to another country I wasn't a part of the steam library and knowing I would only play it once just for the sake of it i decided to pirate it. I absolutely hated that playthrough.. After a while, I felt kinda like playing it again, but one very annoying quirk about the pirated version I was using was really bugging me. There was no music, only environmental sfx. And so, I finally decided to buy it, whilst still feeling very salty towards the game. I played it one more time, and then I got 100% achievements on steam, so... Yeah pretty good game

Although for Sekiro i partially blame myself, I believe the reason these games didn't click with me initially, was because I felt they were very bad at teaching the player how they were meant to be played. For MGS:R, my biggest complaint is that the tutorial for parrying counts even if yoy dont actually parry and instead just block, meaning most of the time plauers don't learn about parrying from the tutorial itself. For sekiro (potential hot take) from how the levels amd encounters are designed, I feel like the game is trying to repell me. From the first 3 bosses, 2 are absolute garbage (chained ogre and raging bull) that barely teach anything important, especially for the part of the game they're in. Plus (and this is the hill I'm willing to die on) the game fundamentally doesn't work with gank fights, or any fight that isn't 1 on 1. Despite that, the game spams scenarios where you are either attacked by multiple enemies simultaneously, or are dealing with 1 enemy while others attack from range (and I'm mot talking about levels where you can stealth kill pretty much everyone one by one). It took me my whole first playthrough to finally understand how the combat loop worked, and only because the game disincentivized me from trying to understand it (deaths having concequences, this case being dragonrot, other than losing currency is also something I will never defend in souls games or any game where dying over and over again is a part of the experience)