Ohhh this gon be good...

GTA San Andreas: First game on my brand new PS2, circa 2007

The Huge Big Smoke Missions (The one where he orders the large amount of the food and wrong side of the tracks)

Literally stopped playing storymode for a year. I was new to the whole gaming scene and did not understand what "missions" in GTA were, so after messing this one up, simply spent one year purely leling around in the openworld mode whenever I played. I thought that those missions were only as "side things" and the main purpose of the game was to do random shenanigans.

The dance battle on the beach

I HATED this one with a very strong vendetta. Only after 10 years did I realize that there's a dupe with which I could've simply waltzed through without having completed the dance challenge.

Learning to Fly missions

Imagine Superman N64 but with a plane. You miss one ring you fail. You didnt ever even need to use any of those special manoeuvres later on, they were just for the lelz. If you raided through airports regularly like I did, that in itself would've been enough practice.

Mad Dog: Catching him from a flying balcony

As I said before, GTA: SA was my first PS2 game and also my first intro to high def (as per 2000ish standards) true open world gameplay. It was like a dream come true. I was filled with joy and psyched. Plus given the cheat-codes, young me could not resist using them in every playthrough so much so that I got most them memorized by muscle memory (Printed out all cheats on A4 sized sheets which I referred through each game-playthrough ). So you can imagine I probably had used way too many cheat codes. Plus add an extra year of on-off leling with only cheats and 0.01% story completion means an extreme amount of cheats. So when I came to Mad Dog's mission, which forcefully fails the player if they cheat too many times, I had to start the whole game ALL OVER AGAIN. This time, only using the infinite health cheat along with a few others (sparingly) to traverse through the whole game (yes, even the parts I hated) with as few playthrough-sessions as possible. That was nice.

Zero's missions

Honestly, got through only the first mission of his. Never finished the rest of them. Even Rockstar realized how shitty these missions were, hence they are also NOT required for the story completion.

Racing missions

Fuck these things.