I remember when playing a Rapala fishing game for the 360, we didn't know that you had to hold down one of the trigger buttons to reel in the fish (we thought that you only had to press the quick-time buttons), so the fish always got away, and we were talking about how hard the game was and how quick you had to be

Gran Turismo: When I started the series I was a child who only played GTA and NFS games so when I got my hands on my first GT game on the PSP I was playing without using the brakes at all and never won a race. The cars also felt really heavy. I thought the gameplay was terrible and gave up. Gran Turismo 6 brought me back into the mould as I was looking for a content rich racing game on PS3 and marvelled at its huge content. I got it and got hooked and played it for two years. Now its my favourite racing game series and one of my favourite game series.

GT6 also made me play other racing sims with my first non GT racing sim being Forza Motorsport 4 which I also enjoyed but not to that extent. I still haven't played a racing game that I adore as much as GT6 not even GT Sport.

Demon's Souls: I knew it would be a difficult game but when I started playing I spent 3 hours on my first playthrough and found myself going back to the start of 1-1 after all that time. I did make my way to Phalanx at last and beat him first try. When I loaded the game next time I was in 1-2 and the game was saving and the lights went off. When it returned I discovered my save file was corrupted. I was frustrated as hell.

After some time I decided to return to Boletaria to give it another go. Little had I realised, in my first playthrough I had forgotten about the lock on mechanic and that's what made the game so frustratingly difficult! Once I discovered it things went a lot more smoothly but there was one more mistake I had made.

My first character was a mage and mages have very low defense in these games. So I was scared to fight anything up close and kept spamming fire toss from a distance. My whole playthrough went like that with some limited use of weapons. I went online and saw other players playing the game on youtube with different weapons so I decided to do that the next time as it wasn't possible to do it with my low defense character in ng+. So I finally did that when I got Dark Souls by starting with a knight. After finishing Dark Souls I went back to Demon's Souls to play it the more fun and thrilling way.

Yup :D

And you likely never played Zerg because the drone is consumed in the process =P

Oh, I did. But I kept my drone stock at 4 all the time because I thought that's how the game wanted me to play it, lol.

This is how you play FF8 to a point. Early game you use summons loads because it deals massive damage compared to poking enemies with Attacks, then when you do get powerful magic, junction it to attack and attack them. If you use the magic, you decrease your attack so you don't use the magic.

Early on though I never understood the importance of GF abilities and making them learn certain things first for things like convert items/cards, if you just leave it to do it automatically it may not even learn some abilities. This makes the game so much easier. Plus Aura, Meltdown combo makes every fight easy.

On topic, I was thinking and couldn't remember a single instance but then I remember FF7, I was leveling up characters for ages but what I didn't realise is that one of the weapons I had on didn't level Materia, I didn't understand it back then so I leveled up characters loads but never materia they had on them.

Mega Man, I had no idea you were supposed to tactically use weapons against certain bosses, the Rock, Paper, Scissors element... I just played and played with my Pea Shooter...

Similar story for me. I liked arcade racers so I gave GT3 a try on my PS2. I had no understanding of braking and apex, so I'd always struggle and eventually gave up. I gave the series another try with GT5 and have been hooked since.

I play Tales of Symphonia by exploiting glitches

Does that count?

I had no magic linked and I never drained anything, never upgraded my weapons so I had no limit breaks, and at the time thought summons were the coolest thing.

By the time I got to disc 4 (which is impossible to beat without any upgrades besides leveling your character as the game levels with you), summons alone could not get me through.  I am pretty sure doing it my way was conpletely wrong lol.

Also towns were locked in disk 4 if I remember correctly, because when I figured out the limit break exploit I thought I could just upgrade my stuff on disk 4 and get the better limit breaks I had my hopes crushed when I came to realize this fact.  The game literally broke for me.