Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Amazing music, but a terrible game (just to give an idea of how bad, the entire game is one giant dungeon, you have a time limit to complete it; it's an RPG by the way, you turn into something that doesn't even resemble a dragon, battles are long, tedious and boring, and if you run out of time, you have to start the entire game over from the beginning).
That's funny. Dragon Quarter is easily a top five PS2 game for me and a tier two game overall. The only thing holding it back from being a tier one game is the music. Don't get me wrong, Sakimoto is a good composer, but I just feel that he was a bad choice for this game as the music didn't suit it very well (although there are a couple of fitting tracks). I've also got some comments on what you said:
1. Not sure why the entire game being one giant dungeon is a bad thing. There are tons of games where this is the case (many dungeon crawlers and rogue likes). I can see that not being your preference, but that doesn't mean the game is bad. Plus, the game is very short.
2. You don't have a time limit to complete the game. There is a d-counter though, and if that reaches 100%, then you die. However, that's based on actions you take - not time.
3. The dragon-like creature you turn into isn't the point of this BoF game. There is a recurring theme involving various things regarding dragons, which is more important than what your transformation is.
4. The gameplay takes some getting used to, but you'll fly through it once you understand it.
Anyway, my go to for this type of discussion is Persona 3. My main issues with this game are:
1. A main focus is interacting with characters, but there are very few of them who have their own personalities to make them more interesting than your typical anime cliche of their respective archetypes, and they offer very little in terms of development.
2. Whenever there is a part in the game that is supposed to be emotional, the characters ruin with with their dialog.
3. Tartarus has no personality and is extremely long (similar to the social links).
4. Your allies battle as if they only have the most basic understanding of the game.
5. After choosing to play the game on hard, it gave me a warning stating something like, "This mode of only for people who are experts of the genre, and you will not be able to change the difficulty later in the game. Are you sure you want to continue," and then the game was actually pretty easy.
It's kinda like Skyrim. They created a solid foundation and did nothing with it. The music in Persona 3, though, is top notch. The endings were well done but didn't matter if you didn't care about the characters. The game would have been better if none of the characters said anything. I would have been fine if everything were the same but the dungeon was actually interesting/engaging.
