I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.
The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.
I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time… Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that “Sonic was never good”, “Sonic had a rough transition to 3D” nonsense.
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I enjoyed Outer Worlds. Tons of criticism online, but I liked it.
Me too, didn’t even know people thought it was a bad game until recently. Honestly I don’t get why, I wasn’t expecting anything different from what I got, there were definitely some dialogues that made me chuckle, and a lot of storylines were very tongue in cheek, and while gameplay was nothing to write home about neither is fallout and this was sold as “fallout in space”, and definitely delivered on that.
I enjoyed the hell out of that game. My only complaint was that the loot lacked variety, and it was a bit more on rails than what I think of as a proper open world RPG.
I had the opposite for this one, heard it was good and really didn’t like it when I gave it a try.
For me it was war thunder. Seen this game advertised on youtube a while ago, and about year ago i decided to just install it and see what this game is. Firstly i liked it. It was fun game to play. After some time of playing this game, i wanted to see videos of this game on youtube, and thats where i found a lot of criticizm for this game. Only after hitting about 60 hours of total playtime, i started understanding the hate for this game myself. I did not played war thunder ever since. For context, the main reason for hate to this game is that it is too grindy, and it will take hundreds of hours to reach top tier, even with premium account.
Can confirm, several hundred hours in and I have like, 3 usable jets with missiles. And I deliberately rushed the shortest tech line to get them faster. And Im basically permanent premium.
How the fuck is a free player meant to do it
That’s the neat part, you aren’t! Gaijin 100% expects you to pay to get to top tier.
I remember having a lot of fun in the first two or three tiers of war thunder. But then the higher tiers hit, everything gets way too fast and you have to deal with too many sweaters.
it’s very pay to win. it feels good to play at first then your progress stagnates to the point of frustration and paying players get put in the same matches as non paying players. paying players get access to entirely new planes and upgrades and they always kill me soon after i spawn.
Yoshi’s Story. Yeah it’s short, and level unlocking is weird as all outdoors, but people really hating on it for being too easy? Bro, it’s a YOSHI game. That’s a quarter of the appeal! It’s a game you can get younger kids involved in, or you can play after a hard day when you want to turn your brain off partially.
Plus almost everything in that game is adorable. And 64 bit sprite art is goated
Its the context and expectations. The last “Yoshi” game was a mainline Super Mario World 2, and people expected similar scope and challenge but in 64 bits. Super Mario 64 had further primed people for crazy genetlrational leaps. Yoshi’s Story was a fine game, but it wasnt SMW3 by a longshot.
Exactly this. Yoshi’s Story was a follow up to Yoshi’s Island, often considered one of the greatest 2d platformers of all time. I spent weeks if not months completing Yoshi’s Island. Then when Yoshi’s Story came out, I rented it and completed it over the weekend.
I loved Yoshi’s Story as a kid. Never knew there was hate for it for a long time.
I loved it but I was sad I completed it before the rental period was up.
I dunno, Yoshi’s Island can get pretty hard…
Story (N64), not Island (SNES).
I was referring to where they said
Bro, it’s a YOSHI game
Going based on the expectations set by Yoshi’s Island, one wouldn’t be off to expect challenge in Yoshi’s Story, its follow-up.
Dying Light 2. I honestly have no idea why so many people prefer the original.
Every game that ever gets released when you check gaming forums within the first month of a game’s release lol /s
Im joking. I get the sentiment that a finished product should be fully complete and inspected by a QA team before release. But still, the fuckin extreme hatred ill see for the game and its studio, regardless of the company’s history, is soooooo fuckin wild. And almost everytime when I get to the point of buying the game, ill check the steam reviews and it’ll be mostly positive after like one patch release.
Aero the Acrobat for GBA.
Cheap Sonic ripoff? I loved that game. Spent many childhood hours and AA batteries playing it and learning every corner of every level.
My partner LOVES that game!
How old were you when you played Sonic Unleashed? I thoroughly played and enjoyed Sonic Adventure 2 for the Gamecube when I was in middle school, but revisiting it as an adult, it was to hard to envision how I ever enjoyed the way that game controls. However, even though my muscle memory was totally gone, since all the levels I knew from SA2 were remixed, Sonic Generations was good even as an adult.
I was 10 years old when I played Unleashed. I wouldn’t even have internet back then (I’m from Latin America)
I have a lot of childhood nostalgia for Donkey Kong 64. If you were a kid who could only get a new game every few months or so, this giant behemoth of a game will last a long time.
But it undeniably is a bloated clusterfuck, the internet is not wrong in hindsight.
Bro what people didn’t like DK64? I spent a large chunk of my childhood getting 100% in that game. Lanky Kong was my boy.
hbomberguy did a 50+ hour 101% nightmare stream for trans charity a while back and I watched the whole thing. I would not subject myself to playing that game but damn it was interesting to see.
I wonder if a fan mod of DK64 where the bananas aren’t colored would fix many of the problems. I feel like that one small change might fix a lot of complaints. I haven’t played it though.
There’s a ROM hack that let’s you swap characters with a button press rather than trek through the level to find a swap barrel and then trek back again, and do that again and again for coins, bananas, etc.
Small change that has a big impact on the replayability.
If I ever do a DK64 playthrough I’ll check this out.
DK64 for me too. I played the shit out of it for probably a solid 6 months to a year and loved it but it has no doubt aged badly.
Honestly the collectathon genre as a whole doesn’t hold up much these days. A few modern games pull it off here and there, but going back and trying to play any of the classic Rare titles feels like a slog.
Loved all those games as a kid, and they did a ton to shape the industry, but they don’t really hold up.
Might & Magic VIII. The ending was underwhelming in comparison to previous parts, yes, but gameplay is exactly the same.
If I’m honest, Enroth is inferior to Xeen.
I wasn’t a fan of M&M before 6. Free movement was a huge step forward for this game…
Xeen was what I thought of our first “proper” game. So many good memories. I played it like it’s real time, spamming the attack button without any strategy.
Still play it every so often. And thanks to ScummVM I could play it on a toaster if I wanted to.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
People only ever talk about Final Fantasy Tactics and dismiss any of the other games. However, going by the original release, Tactics Advance is by far my favorite. It’s my favorit GBA game and at least in my Top 25 JRPGs, despite having played almost nothing else for the past 20 years. I like many of the things the game gets critiziced for.
I loved FFTA and have replayed it multiple times. I’ve played FFTA2 some as well, which was definitely not as good.
I thought A was much better than the original. I didn’t even know it was “not good”
Usually, whenever people talk about A, you get a few of the following arguments:
- The story is bad/too childish
- Laws/Judges are overall a terrible mechanic
- Learning skills from equipment is bad
- SRPGs need permadeath
- Send missions are bad and just there to promote the game with having 300 missions
Of course, I disagree with all of these. Actually, these are some of my favorite things about this game.
Yeah I don’t see those are negative honestly. The send missions inflated the numbers and I don’t love that you can get locked out of stuff easily but it’s totally fine
I personally dislike the skills from equipment because, compared to FFT, it creates an artificial, story-gated wall on character progression (you can’t get the most powerful magic because you can’t get the equipment, because it only unlocks later during the story)
As for the judges, I don’t think they add enough to game to make combat more interesting
This is the one where we bully our little brother into going back to the world where he can’t walk, right? :P
That’s the one! We can also bully him with snowballs in the opening scene, if we want to.
Joining the future zombies in abusing Mewt is the fastest way to get past the tutorial.
And that’s critical, because it’s one of the longest tutorials in game history (because it’s so slow).
I’ve ganged up on Newt every time, after my first playthrough. Poor kid.
Yep. It’s terrifying when you really put together the story with that being part of what Marche does - but he escaped being made into a zombie (which is such a great piece of foreshadowing).
Probably my favourite gameboy game across all generations
Bruh, FFTA is a great game and I will hear no slander of it.
FFTA is great but a hidden gem, I don’t think it counts. It’s weird though because I have never met anyone who has played all lf FFT, FFTA, and FFTA2, but I know a lot of people who love either FFT or FFTA
I’ve played them all! Although, I haven’t finished all of them. I’m planning on fixing that with the FFT remaster, however, I had to drop the original release.
Personally, it goes FFTA > FFTA2 > FFT. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who likes FFTA2 the most.
FFTA is great if you never played FFT. If you did, however, it is a cheap imitation that turns it into “baby’s first SRPG”.
FFTA2 did a better job, but those of us that started with FFT were highly disappointed with FFTA as a “sequel”.
Funnily enough, I really didn’t like FFT. The only thing I could get behind was the story. However, I’m planning on giving the remaster another shot.
I really hope square doesn’t fuck up the remaster like they did with the PSP and Android versions, both shipped with a stupid bug that caused a huge slowdown on every magic-like animation.
Marche and the general lesson of FFTA are great, to me. I love the strategic map mechanics. And honestly, I think the Laws (except in the cases where they’re intended to be screwy) are neat additions that make you have to think.
Fallout 3. The criticism is absolutely fair*, but it was the first RPG I ever played and I’m still very fond of it.
* I never got the ‘metros are hard to navigate’ criticism, I never had that issues. Most of them are pretty linear.
FO3 is my favorite Fallout (haven’t played 4 or 76 yet).
Have you played 1, 2, or New Vegas?
So, I’m an ardent ‘New Vegas is the best 3D Fallout game’ person.
But… Fallout 3 is not a bad game.
It is fun, it is enjoyable. It has solid game mechanics, it has a good number of well written characters and questlines, it is fun to just explore and find crazy shit.
It has flaws, yes.
But it is far from bad.
It just isn’t as good as New Vegas, which imo, basically just did everything FO3 did, but better, had a better overall storyline, refined and improved on all the gameplay mechanics, added in new gameplay features/elements.
i dont think new vegas had better exploration. fo3 is still pretty unmatched in that. so many unmarked gems in fo3
It also had some big gameplay departures from 1 & 2. I’m not talking about being an FPS (although no longer having to worry about accuracy was pretty significant) but the fact that putting on different clothing magically made you more intelligent, and that it was a lot easier to do everything.
In FO3 you can pick all the locks, hack all the computers, pass all the conversation checks, and take on hordes of enemies all by yourself. In FO1+2 you had to pick the couple of things you were good at and not be able to do the other things until your next run.
Fallout 3 for me works well as a sandbox and less as a narrative driven RPG. I had a lot of fun with it but I know if you went in expecting it to be something it’s not (like the first 2 fallout games) you’re gonna be disappointed.
I loved FO3. And coming from Bethesda, I was expecting a sandbox.
Actually, do people hate FO3? I thought it was well liked, even amongst New Vegas fanatics.
It got a lot of backwards hate when 76 came out and it was suddenly really trendy to hate Bethesda. This is not to say that lots of people changed their mind on the game, though I’m sure some did, more that people who didn’t like the game got more confident to speak up about disliking it. This is also around the same time the New Vegas became a huge darling in popular opinion.
Guess that’s me too. I loved Fallout 3 and wasn’t really aware of a lot of hate for it.
To be fair, Fallout 3 is a bit more of a mixed bag of good and bad features.
A lot of the metros look copy and pasted; whole hallways, rooms, so it gets a little confusing.
Oh for sure, Fallout 3 Geoguesser would be hard. Idk, I just never had a problem navigating them, even if they were a bit samey.
I lived in D.C. when I played it. Between that and it being the first of its kind in the series, none of the others come remotely close for me.
Not going to lie, I like it quite a bit more than New Vegas. I understand several criticisms that people have, but 3 was by far the better experience for me.
Ultima IX: Ascension (1999)
I genuinely enjoyed the game. Fans of the series claim that it destroyed the franchise. Perhaps they’re right, but the franchise was pretty fucked up to begin with.
Then I pick Ultima 8. It felt like Crudader No Remorse but with fantasy trappings (because it didn’t play like Ultima at all).
That said, it is janky, full of bugs and incomplete (clearly there was a second part that never came), but I had fun and at the time it felt edgy and kind of a dangerous and misterious travel.
I’m sure there are lots of examples for me, but I guess one that comes to mind is 007: The World Is Not Enough for PS1.
Reading/hearing about it as an adult, not only is it seen as a poor follow up to Goldeneye, but also the PS1 version is the worse of the two releases, with the general consensus being that the N64 version is better.
Back in the day, though, I didn’t know any better and I loved it. I expect most people have games like that.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback
I already knew some of the writing was bad, and the cutscenes/animations were fever dream-esque. Despite that I really enjoyed the feel of the combat, and how destructible enemies’ bodies are in the game.
I’ll be honest. I was curious and looked up reviews of the game, and saw mostly negative-looking videos. But I chose not to watch them because I didn’t want to ruin my enjoyment of the game. I know the game is bad. But I still like it. I will say though that it’s mostly because of nostalgia.
There are some objectively bad things about SOF Payback though: regular human bosses that are bullet sponges for whatever reason and the pc port of the game being unplayable.
Destiny 2.
Started playing the first game day one but stopped for several years. Picked up 2 when I found out it was ftp right after beyond light came out and bought all the dlcs available until after lightfall. I was at work and a customer asked what games I play. Said D2 and someone else said “why would you do that to yourself?” I thought hard about that for awhile and realized all I do is grind and don’t really have that much fun with it. It was more like a second job. And lightfall was a garbage dlc. That was also a major contributer to me quitting.
My biggest issue with Destiny 2 is that I paid $60 for it and then it soon went free to play and I had absolutely nothing to show for that $60 I paid
I was excited to start again right as beyond light dropped, but it was confusing as hell as a new player because they sunset the starting campaign. Weird to have to research how to play a game.
Even TF2 gave special cosmetics and stuff to existing players when it went F2P ages ago. It’s a standard practice at this point. I sunk 12k hours into D2 until I quit it for good this past fall, and looking back I swear I just notice more and more red flags like this that I hadn’t thought too much about.
I started with Shadowkeep and I got sucked in hard for 5 years. The first year or two I heard these sorts of negative comments here and there, mostly from long-term players, but didn’t think much of it.
Fast forward to this past year, and Revenant is what made me say fuck it and drop the game entirely. I was already sick of the state of the game, powercreep to hell and back, pvp in the dumpster, nonexistent loot, etc etc. But jesus that season was eye-opening. I uninstalled a day after Tomb of Elders launched.
I was also a major completionist - near max triumph score, never missed a day 1 raid from DSC onwards til unfortunate scheduling fucked our SE run, every GM soloed to that point, shit like that. Missing that one single season and a couple shitty little time-limited events was enough to feel like I’d fallen behind, and that was it. Booted up the game once since to check out Heresy, activity was the same shit as always, loot was dogshit, so I checked out right away.
And that’s just the gameplay gripes. Bungie as a studio is toxic as fuck in so many ways and I can never in good conscience support them again.
It took a few years but I finally understand what people were telling me way back when I started.
