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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E.T.
Yes really. I played it all the time as a kid and didn’t think it was any more difficult or abstract than the rest of the 2600’s catalogue. Granted, we kept the manual, which made a huge difference in understanding and enjoying its bizarre logic, but still. I had no idea it was so hated until at least a decade later.
it was actually way ahead of its time, for a game. One small bug (the workaround for which was in the manual) ruined its reputation. But I genuinely think it was a good game.
Also written in 6 weeks by one guy. Freaking impressive
What was the bug and workaround? :)
when climbing out of the pit, it was very easy to immediately fall back down (due to the pixel-perfect collision detection).
And here is an excerpt from the manual: “Even experienced extraterrestrials sometimes have difficulty levitating out of wells. Start to levitate E.T. by first pressing the controller button and then pushing your Joystick forward. E.T.'s neck will stretch as he rises to the top of the well (see E.T. levitating in Figure 1). Just when he reaches the top of the well and the scene changes to the planet surface (see Figure 2), STOP! Do not try to keep moving up. Instead, move your Joystick right, left, or to the bottom. Do not try to move up, or E.T. might fall back into the well.”
Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.
A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.
he was forced to release it quickly to coincide with the film’s release. For comparison, it used to take a team of devs a couple of months to make a game. He had 6 weeks.
Also, if you read the manual, this essentially never happened to you. It was easy to avoid.
You also needed to read the manual. The game did stuff that other games at the time didn’t, for example, a contextual button. You couldn’t know what would happen unless you read the manual to learn what the icons meant. A lot of people never did and so decided that the game was bad.
Yeah, I played it as a teenager on emulation and was pretty mystified at why it was considered so much worse than the other things available on the system. Why would people love Adventure but hate this?
i bought an original cartridge and played it on the vcs i iherited from dad
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 favorite 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 criticized for.
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.
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.
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
Probably my favourite gameboy game across all generations
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 and worst tutorials in game history!
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).
Bruh, FFTA is a great game and I will hear no slander of it.
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.
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.
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 just wish they would fix bombers somehow. I wish I could fly my B-17 or B-29 and actually drop bombs.
All I want is high altitude carpet bombing, I know everyone else thinks it’s boring but it’s what I want 😭
I really enjoyed Mass Effect: Andromeda.
I really wish this had been one for me, but I’ve never been able to make it more than halfway through despite a few good faith attempts. I am really glad you had a great time with it, though!
The beginning of the game is really bleak, but it makes the scenario of trying to colonize a lifeless planet feel all the more real IMO. After you meet aliens and start terraforming planets, it starts to be more what people wanted out of it, I think.
I will continue to defend Andromeda. Yes it has its flaws, but no more than the original trilogy. It could’ve been the start of a cool new trilogy.
IMO, I would rate them: ME1 Andromeda ME2 ME3
The original Mass Effect was great, a classic, but 2 and 3 had less and less of what I’d loved about the first game. By the time I got to 3, I was playing because I felt invested in the story and characters, not because I found the gameplay enjoyable. Andromeda wasn’t quite as enjoyable as ME1 to me, mostly because I didn’t connect with the characters as much, but the story was surprising and original, fights were exciting, and the gameplay had a lot of interesting new elements that made the scenario feel immersive. It’s really too bad that so many people didn’t like it.
I rented Superman 64 as a kid, never knowing it was a universally hated game. We had fun with the weird multiplayer mode where you fly around in weird pod things. I remember flying through the rings too. The whole game makes zero sense in hindsight.
The game became that shitshow because Warner Bros execs got pissed that a “no-name” yuropeean company got the rights to make a licensed Superman game (because they were the only company that bothered to bid), so they did a lot of time-wasting requests to the developers.
https://www.retrojunk.com/a/C1CKNP9rjC/the-story-behind-superman-64
This. Check out the leaked beta on YouTube. It’s looks significantly better than the finished product
That looks fun.
I know right?? What a damn shame WB fucked Titus over like that
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.
Edit: oh yeah and that original $60 campaign was removed from the game by the time I went back to check out what was new. There was straight up less content available for me after not playing for a year. I felt so ripped off that I wrote the game off.
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 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.
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.
A lot of people didn’t like Assassins Creed Odyssey, but I loved it. Only AC I’ve played since 2.
I think that might be part of it. For a lot of people, it was that the formula was old and tired. I know Odyssey did fairly well, but it’s still just an AC game
Odyssey was the second entry in the new batch of games in the series, where they completely reinvented what that series is. There are a lot of us who find it to be a poor substitution for what came before.
Super Mario Sunshine. I thought it was just hard as a kid. Come to learn it’s fucking broken.
Wait, people hate it? I still do nostalgia playthroughs occasionally, one of my favs for GC.
There were so many issues
- Final boss was lame and level leading to it was slow and tedious completely killing the momentum
- Camera system was wonky
- Rocket nozzle barely got any play
- Jet nozzle was too difficult to control to be useful outside of specific racing segments
- Pachinko machine physics were fucked
- The lily pad level was unfairly difficult
- There was no way to track which blue coins you found. Like even a grey coin marker for already collected coins would have been super helpful.
- The reward for getting blue coins was pathetic
- Yoshi was criminally underutilized. The whole juice mechanic was used like twice.
The whole thing just felt rushed. Like there was another third of the game that they didn’t get to make.
If I remember right, both Legend of Zelda Windwaker and Mario Sunshine were either rushed to an end or released early, leading both to come out unfinished. I the details on why are hazy, but I think they were pushed to try and make up for poor sales of the Gamecube at large or to make up for other gaps in the schedule.
Windwaker had a ton of content cut. The ice island and fire island were both supposed to be full dungeons. Both of those incomplete dungeons later ended up being used in Twilight Princess.
Tap for spoiler
Hyrule Castle was supposed to be a full dungeon.
The tower of the gods was supposed to be longer.
Personally the movement mechanics and the tropical overworld were amazing in this game.
While the water jetpack may seem like a gimmick, I thought it really changed the platforming in a good way.
Additionally, I’m a sucker for a good overworld and the amount of things you can unlock or discover in delphino plaza turns it into its own sort of level.
There is definitely some jank and padding (blue coins) in the game, but it holds up better than Mario 64 in my opinion (just due to the camera issues IN Mario 64).
Camera issues in Mario 64 are fixed by playing the decomp / homebrew versions that have free camera control. It’s how I first played and 100%d it.
I’ve just learned about it right now. I loved it but I thought that it was a skill issue, I’m not a great player overall.
Every Ubisoft game since Assassin’s Creed 2
To be fair to Ubisoft, the newest Prince of Persia game was a great metroidvania game.
To be fair-er to Ubisoft, they can go fuck themselves for closing down the studio that made said game only a few months later.
They can make good games. They just clearly would rather rehash the same tired formula that they’ve been running with for the past decade while unreasonably expecting to make more money each time.
To be even more fair-er still, They didn’t fire everyone who worked on their best game in decades, they remain with Ubisoft just moved to separate projects. Still a shame, but you know, could always be
like everyone else nowadaysworse
I enjoyed Outer Worlds. Tons of criticism online, but I liked it.
I had the opposite for this one, heard it was good and really didn’t like it when I gave it a try.
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.
It still has a 9/10 on Steam despite all the flak it took. I think it’s a classic. To me it’s similar to the backlash to Fallout 4 from purists, which I also feel is a classic game
Sonic Adventure 1. I love the hub worlds and how the stories of the different characters intertwine in the shared areas. And I love the variety of characters and being able to freely choose which one to advance (unlike Sonic Adventure 2…)
Ah, a comrade SA1 enjoyer 🤝
and off topic, but why the hell do the SA2 treasure hunting stages only do radar for the “next piece”?? SA1 has the radar active for all 3 pieces, so there’s way less back and forth
I bet it was to artificially increase the difficulty of those levels, if not, I can’t explain why. It is the single detail that makes the Knuckles/Rouge levels less enjoyable.
Yeah, it definitely seems like it was to just make it take longer.
Same here, I always liked SA1 more than SA2. I remember being so amazed that you could pick any character to play next and then you’d find out, in any order you chose, how their stories would intersect with one another. SA2 felt like a downgrade without that. I also liked the art style of the first game over the second one.
SA2 just wasn’t as satisfying for me. There was too much rail grinding, which isn’t much fun when overused, because you’re barely controlling anything.
A literal “on-rails” experience
I didn’t know this one wasn’t well received until just now. To me it’s one of the few good 3D sonics. The plot, stage design, intersecting stories with varied play styles. All of that made it feel like playing in a full world.
That being said, I’m hit or miss on sonic in general, so maybe I like it for not being a traditional sonic game.
Final Fantasy 8. I loved it but apparently I was in the minority.
Another FF8 enjoyer here! My husband and I got married on Halloween, so for the reception, I was Rinoa and he was Squall!
10/10 fantastic game!
I also loved FF8. I’d be more interested in a remake of that one than 7 tbh.
I still love it.
FF8 has been going through a bit of a resurgence lately where it does seem to be getting a fair amount of praise. It used to get slated though.
It still feels fresh.
8 is a very solid game. The issue is that it was always compared to 7 and 9
Which is funny since I’ve played all three of those for the first time recently, and FF7 doesn’t hold up in comparison to 8 and 9. But I can see at the time how 8 could be seen poorly in comparison to 7 and 9.
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.
I’ve been curious about this recently after seeing all the reviews for MindsEye. I’d never heard of it until a few days ago, yet all the reviewers I pay attention to are talking about how it’s the worst game ever, while the footage they show makes it look fine. I haven’t played it, so I can’t disagree with them, but the vitriol for something that appears to be completely average is surprising.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey apparently, according to reddit a few years ago, was looked at as being shitty I guess? Not the best one?
It’s the only one I played, and I played it 3 times with ~240 hours. Kassandra is my favorite character ever, in any video game. I loved the world, its beauty, the ships and sea, and shooting arrows through rocks as a demo god.
I’ve still not touched any other assassins game.
Odyssey was really good in a vacuum. Ive heard it described best as that it was a good action RPG set in Greece, but not a good Assassins Creed game. The main issue being that stealth was usually a huge focus in previous titles, but this one seemed to favor general combat and didnt even have the signature wrist blade until the DLC. Also a bunch of the story seemed to return pieces of previous lore, some setup in just the previous game that came out a year prior. Overall though I did enjoy the game!
Yeah I think you’re right with it being good in a vacuum. That makes complete sense because it was different than the other games.
I have panic disorder, so most games with combat overwhelm me as I’m just constantly afraid. I never got that with this game. Just give me a bow so i can stand hella far away and clear the area before entering it. Thats how I did stealth. I’d take an hour slowly picking off everyone from the fort. Plus, it was really beautiful and emersive. Exploring the map was super fun.
I am willing to bet that people who chose the female main character enjoyed this game more.
Too human. I loved it so much I don’t know why people hate it
Same, as a kid i had no idea if the controversy to and was still waiting on a sequel for some time after. I thought it was a novel idea and it was my first proper foray into Norse mythology.
