lol My first run through of Pokemon Red when I was 8, only trained my starter pokemon. Was at the elite 4 with a lv99 Charizard and random weak pokemon

If you wanted to win, that's how you played that game. All the top players I knew dropped to their knees and started with the handwork immediately. The true elite maintained eye contact, so they had a good idea what was happening.

I managed to totally screw up my character builds in Final Fantasy XIII-2. I've never messed up so badly in an RPG. Coupled with some bad shit going down IRL, I bailed, and deleted my data. Want to get back to it some day.

Also,I messed up the first time I played Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. It was the first time I've ever played a Fire Emblem game and I wasn't aware of the death system, so I just let my characters die all the time...It was just late in the game when I noticed they weren't coming back and I thought to myself "waaaaaaaaaait a minute..."

Always played the GTA PS2 games with cheats. Same with the Gothic games on PC. These games are just more fun with cheats. Is this the wrong way to play the games? Well I would say that if the developers don't want the gamers to use the cheats, then why put them deliberately in the game? :P

I'm pretty sure I somewhat played TLOU wrong. I went ALL in on stealth kills and full on exploration.
That stops working at a certain point in the game when you're forced to aggro the enemies, because otherwise the game just keeps spawning more enemies at you.

I spent a considerable amount of time on that section, because I just kept stealth killing everyone until it became apparent that thats not what the game expects you to do.

Edit: Also the Sims and partly Anno 1503. Infinite money to build pretty houses/empires was all that interested me for a time. For Anno I eventually figured out how to get rich and plan out my cities and islands without having to cheat, but with the Sims i completely lost interest in the actual gameplay after the first one. (I was pretty young for both of these though...)

One time I played Halo 2 campaign mode with just vehicles (when applicable). Even tiny doorways I would force the ghost in somehow by breaking off a side or 2, or throwing a grenade next to it so that the blast would put it through. Had to be really precise too because the vehicle might just explode.

Sometimes when I got really OP in DW3 I would do the whole level with bow only, which is pretty dang slow. Other times I did horse only, which is much faster.

When I played Metal Gear Rising, I never figured out how to properly parry or how to aim my free slash until the Armstrong fight. Holy buckets that was a trial by fire.

I played that game for the first time on PC so sadly I had to do it the "right" way (It wasn't really that difficult tbh, at least from what I recall). I did do the "turn controller upside down" thing when playing EarthBound though, since this happens in that game too.

@OP I don't think I've ever played The Sims without using cheats for money, it's way more fun that way xD

When I first played Kingdom Hearts 2 (had no experience with the others) I didn't know that you could equip different keyblades. Went through the whole game with the first keyblade. Even fought Sephiroth with it.