Flawed games that you love anyway

[Bofferbrauer2]

Elemental: War of Magic and it's replacement Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.

Both were deeply flawed, so much so that Stardock gave every buyer of Elemental Fallen Enchantress for free. But that one also was pretty rough around the edges, so Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes got released. Nominally an expansion, Legendary Heroes includes the entire Fallen Enchantress content plus all the additions it itself brought to the game, and has fully replaced Fallen Enchantress in their storefront, just like Fallen Enchantress fully replaced Elemental at it's release.

Eador: Masters of the Broken World and it's expansion, Eador: Imperium.

As broken as in the title, with a very pesky memory bug (which will overflow even if you 1TB RAM), so save often! Also extreeeeeeemely long and slow (The story is divided into several "rounds" where the main protagonists fight over the shards of Eador. On bigger shards those Rounds can easily take longer than a full Civ campaign. Did I mention that you have up to 60 such rounds before the story is done?)  and very difficult (there's a reason why the "easy" setting blurb is "A Reasonable Choice"), but I just love it.

Heroes of Might & Magic IV.

Most people prefer the third one and dislike the fourth due to the changes it brought, especially on the units and city developments. However, I actually prefer this one over the third entry due to the other changes it brought (caravans sending troops from one place to another; flaggable buildings that produce units or random ressources, etc...) and the better campaigns. 

Might & Magic VIII.

Might & Magic VIII was the last title of the Erathia trilogy, and certainly the most rough around the edges: The world looks quite a bit smaller than the first two titles and monster variety is down. But those all pale to the balancing: Minotaurs and Vampires are wimps, while Dark Elves and especially Dragons are absolutely broken. Minotaurs, Vampires, Dragons? Yeah, those are some of the possible party member classes in this game, which is very cool. But trying to balance their traits with their mythological skills broke them into either useless or absolutely OP with little in between (well, the Troll class is pretty balanced and refreshing - but that's sadly the only one). Plus, at some points in the game the game forces some party members on you, and by the second time this happens you probably already have your dream team assembled, forcing you to let go of one of them for the new guy.

But other than those goofs and quirks, it's a great RPG, and they even fixed some bugs that were present in VII (which runs on the exact same engine).

EricFabian said:

Rune Factory: Frontier

The rune mechanic is awful, so I cheated and made them infinite. My most played Wii game

Yep, the runey system was godawful. I tried to avoid doing anything with those as much as possible

Also, the fast that tools did more damage than weapons. I went through entire dungeons armed  with a watering can and a fishing rod as backup when the can was empty...