I happen to love FFXII, but everyone I talk to hates it. I understand it more with the Zodiac Age version since they made a few unnecessary changes, but the original was fun.
Zelda Twilight Princess may not have been exactly hated, but nobody really seems to love it. They all go gaga over Ocarina of Time instead, which just feels like a worse Twilight Princess in just about every way. Nostalgia I guess!
Also, you know, Twilight Princess has you be a wolf (in sections for part of the game, and then later you get unrestricted wolf mode (but it keeps kicking you out of it grrr!)). Huge therian feels. That’s a big part of why I love it.
– Frost
I liked and finished Unlimited SaGa twice. The soundtrack is phenominal and the graphics are all hand-painted watercolors. The combat system is a bit opaque but with tinkering, can be figured out.
And yet, it’s regarded as one of the worst titles on the PkayStation 2.
I still use the track “DG mixture” when I need a consistent sound to set my soundboard for my shows.
Saints Row IV - I liked aspects of the earlier games, but I actually really enjoyed the meta silliness of IV. I accept that I don’t have a lot of company in having this opinion 🙂
EDIT: I guess I was wrong! I swear every time I’ve seen SRIV mentioned, I’ve seen tons of hate directed at it. Glad to see there are a bunch of us! Dozens even 😄
I’m a bit late to the party but dude! It’s like one of my all time favorite games. It’s unapologetically aware of how ridiculous it is, my favorite parts are the dialogues in the Enter the Dominatrix DLC. JB Blanc as Zyniak is one of the best over the top villain in video games IMHO, you can just hear he and the whole cast were having so much fun.
For a long time, SRIV was probably the best superhero game around.
I LOVE Saints Row IV! It’s my favorite of the entire franchise. Yes, it’s extra campy and over-the-top, but that just makes it more enjoyable.
Probably my favorite mission of Saints Row III was where you took an experimental drug and it gave you super-speed for a little while, so you could sprint across the city faster than if you were driving a car.
Saints Row IV just gives that to you as a permanent upgrade at some point. You don’t need cars later in the game, you can just run ridiculously fast and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.
I can’t remember if you can fly too, but I wanna say you can. It’s been quite a long time since I played that game.
I had so much fun in Saints Row IV, most of my playtime is just running all over the map and dicking around with NPCs once I was too OP for them to do anything to me. It’s hard for me to go back to the other games after that.
Im glad Im not alone here! I loved the shit outta Saints Row IV
Underneath the silliness, SR4 had a good story and great performances. I remember tearing up a bit during the car segment of the final mission.
It is one of the few open-world sidequestapaloozas I have ever beaten because the story and insanity kept me coming back.
Legitimately, SR4 was my introduction to the series and I absolutely adored the shit out of it.
If you haven’t checked it out yet - The Gat Out of Hell expansion had a very similar super-powered play-style.
Definitely not alone! It was the first one I played, and I had some genuine laugh out loud moments in the intro alone. Flawed but so much fun.
Got to love it just for a giant robot fight to The Touch, or Roddy Piper fighting Keith David. Or the Biz Markie singalong.
I think 2 was the pinnacle and a spiritual successor to Vice City, but 4 has its moments.
i love starfield, despite its flaws. the public opinion was very… 😬
Starfield is one of the best frameworks for a game I have ever played, I just really really wish they had remembered to put an actual game inside it
I saw that the modding community is working REALLY hard to turn it into a Star Wars game. There are all kinds of mods for visuals and graphics. Just need to match the audio and text to the renamed planets because it gets very confusing
I wish there was equal fervor for Firefly, which I think fits the tone and aesthetic of the universe much better
I have been meaning to go back and give it another chance. I played it on launch and got to some place like 30 minutes in that they clearly wanted to be some big “ooo, ahh” moment but I just felt bored. I shut it off and never played again. I do enjoy Bethesda games though so it’s possible I would like it if I pushed through.
if you treat more of a meditative exploration rather than dungeon crawler (like skyrim or fallout excelled at) you may like it
I really enjoyed my first playthrough. Never felt the need to play again, but I got a solid 65 ish hours in and enjoyed it the whole time. I haven’t played it for a while now, maybe I should do another playthrough.
I like it as well… The mix between all these different game genres is very interesting. Idea is great, execution is lacking a bit, but it is good that they tried… Just sad that it didn’t work out so well… Hope they try again and improve on the concept.
I put a ton of time into starfield, still consider it one of my favorites. But I put it down and have tried to pick it back up a few times and just couldn’t get into it again.
One thing I thought would be a simple fix to add more interest to the game would have been to randomize the “play sets” you find on the planets. There are maybe a dozen different kinds of sites you can find on planets and I still remember the first time I wandered off the storyline and found some pirates in a base. It was fun and exciting. But the 50th time you enter the same identical base with the exact same floor plan, exact same enemy placement, etc, it gets boring.
I thought it would be easy for them to make some building segments that could be mixed and matched procedurally to make new base designs. Even if the segments were kinda chunky, entire floors, you could still get a lot of different layout combinations with a handful of each. Even if you just had 3 floors in a base and 5 of each, that’s 5 X 5 X 5 = 125 different combinations.
Sure you’d still know every floor, but it would make exploring the little side play sets more interesting and rewarding.
I still think though that the first time I had a zero-G gunfight on the casino ship was one of the most fun gaming sessions I’ve had.
the free lanes update recently fixed some of those issues. a lot of people never even saw most of the POIs because they would just never spawn. they changed it to where it’s more on a rotation so you are a lot less likely to see repeats so often
Good to know, I haven’t picked it back up since free lanes landed. Might be time to give it another go.
Thanks!
I liked it too. At least I didn’t hate it as much as everyone else. It’s not a perfect game but whatever I still had fun.
Same! Played around 500 hours when ut first released. Haven’t played any of the DLC, definitely replaying from scratch with those sometime soon.
Legitimately it’s amazing. I love it.
You may like it, fair enough. But it’s not by any stretch of the imagination amazing. If that were the case, it wouldn’t have been a dud, and more people would be playing it.
It’s dull, the characters awkward, and the mechanics outdated. Bethesda is just a shell of its former glory.
I want my money back.
Right, I disagree on all of those points.
There’s always more for me to find and explore. I can make entirely different stories with different characters and have playthroughs that feel unique. I sympathize with the npc characters and their plights and found them interesting and compelling. My current character is basically Zer0 from Borderlands and I have a lot of fun with summoning a body double and teleporting around with a futuristic sword and slicing people. Or just putting everyone who shoots at me into a brig on my ship and then selling them to the authorities.
I understand a lot of people were disappointed. It’s just rather subjective.
The setting is by far the weakest point, imo. 300 years in the future and instant communication seems exclusive for ship-to-ship. People on the floor don’t have phones, radios, nothing. The two major faction cities are 300m² blocks in the middle of fucking nowhere. “A big war happened some time ago” - over one of the most stupid reasons about where to settle and that did fuck all, with random settlements around random worlds pledging allegiance to no one anyway.
There’s also the general disregard of npcs to anything going on around them. If you shoot up in the air while the city, people will just stare blankly at you. Same if you use space magic. “Don’t go around showing it off” - pfft.
Not to mention that they managed to make the most boring multiverse in fiction, which is much closer to a groundhog day time-repetition if you look into it.
Pyre by Supergiant. I have no idea how a mystical basketball slash visual novel with RPG elements clicked with me but WOW did it. Its the first game I ever platinum’d too.
I was just about to say this too!! Seriously so good. The gameplay is an understandable turnoff, personally I love it but RPG NBA Jam probably won’t do it for everyone. but WOW the story is incredible. The personal stakes of each liberation rite make each feel like a must-win; the fact that the story continues if you lose makes it all the more nerve-wracking.
And that’s not even considering the revolutionary bent of the whole thing, too, or the beautifully realized world with deeply strange history, or one of the best goddamn soundtracks I’ve ever heard… deserves some more love as a cult classic imo.
I’m a fan of most of Supergiant’s work but Pyre just felt so boring and repetitive to me
I love Supergiant games, but Pyre really didn’t click for me either. The presentation was great, but after Bastion and Transistor, the gameplay just fell flat. I’m glad to see people enjoyed it though.
I love Hades and Hades II, however I’m hoping the studio will try something new for their next game.
Pyre was really unique and fun! I‘m not sure if it‘s something people actually dislike, though. It‘s more so that nobody knows about it, I think.
I liked Watch Dogs 1 mainly because I didn’t consume any pre-release media about it. Whatever downgrade there may have been, I was unaffected. The game and its story are about as Ubisoft as they come (and I don’t mean that in a particularly positive way), but it was great for fucking around.
I also liked Cyberpunk 2077’s launch version, but at the same time, I think the people who are trying to memory hole the objectively dogshit launch state of both 2077 and The Witcher 3 are perpetuating the problem.
I also liked Watch Dogs, I enjoyed the darker tone and it’s more serious setting. Good game play, story was good enough, a bit janky with some optimization issues. But overall it was good.
I don’t think I really cared about the downgrade either. But it really was around when my trust in what Devs and publishers were saying about their games was the lowest. So many games were bullshots and rendered trailers so you took the idea and if it was interesting you just waited to see the actual product.
Cyberpunk was also my game of the year, I had immense fun with the launch version and I was lucky enough to have minimal bugs and most were dumb shit. I think I had 2 which were gameplay and caused issues. It launched in a terrible state and I expect it as well, CDPR don’t have a great history of releasing bug free games. But, they do have a history of patching and fixing the broken bits. It also should not have been anywhere near the old gen consoles, that was stupid.
I adored Watch Dogs 2 because, in an era discovering “partial multiplayer”, in the case of Dark Souls, WD2 really refined that formula, even if it didn’t quite nail the rest the way people wanted. You would be randomly driving around and get an option to disrupt or assist someone else’s singleplayer game, without any loading screens.
I also admit I enjoy the way they promote stealth by making it the main way to keep things nonlethal, and stop bullets from flying. The series has an interesting bit of guidance against violent escalation; don’t escalate to guns against bad guys, and they likely won’t do the same to you. And thanks to all the hacker tools, an enemy that brings heavy artillery and turrets to a fist fight may find themselves facing their own weapons.
I had a blast with WD2. It was just fun. Unlike the first game, if wasn’t taking itself too seriously and it came out at a time where Ubi was still sorta developing what would become their open world formula, so it still felt fresher than similar titles do now.
still sorta developing what would become their open world formula
The formula was already fully developed when AC2 was released in 2009. You didn’t have to literally climb radio towers, but WD2 was still the same map marker collect-a-thon with a slightly different, slightly gay coat of paint.
I loved WD2, and I purposefully never bought/got the lethal weapons if I could help it. You probably get a couple as a matter of course in the game (I don’t remember), but I always just used the stun gun or melee - though hitting someone with an 8-ball on a rope is probably going to do some damage.
I don’t think any game since has made it as fun to pilot a little drones like this game. I loved being able to casually sit outside and sneak into places with the drones.
Here in coming with a super unpopular take. I was a day one purchaser of cyberpunk 2077, and even on a $30 rebuilt ps4 slim I had almost no issues. My first playthrough had one fixer mission that was bugged that kept me from completing that one side mission, and that’s it. No t posing, and maybe 2-3 crashes over 30-40 hours.
There are tens of us! Tens!
I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but Prototype (and its sequel) comes to my mind. It wasn’t that badly received, but most people liked Infamous more, in the same generation.
And a game that I really love, my personal best SNES game ever (yes, even beyond Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia, my numbers 2 and 3), is Terranigma, which is a game that many people who’ve played it don’t like (because they get stuck at the beginning in the Underworld or at the fight with Bloody Mary).
I loved prototype so much. I couldn’t wait for the sequel. I felt like firever until it came out. Like i moved twice or something. And when it finally came out, i couldn’t wait to play it, but kinda didn’t care anymore. I still don’t know if prototype was a let down, or i just stopped caring.
I played both of them way way past release, and I felt like 2 was a really good, really fun gameplay experience. I would rate 2’s gameplay higher but 1’s story higher.
How is Terranigma mentioned here? It’s one of the most beloved Action Adventure RPGs on the system and to my knowledge, most people who have played it liked it. I also had the game back then, purchased it randomly because Lufia 2 wasn’t released yet (in Germany). Honestly, I think Terranigma is one of those universally loved games, never heard anyone disliking it.
I personally know two JRPG gamers that played it (recommended by me) and didn’t like it, because they never advanced beyond the underworld. And some other people online with a similar experience. Of course, that was in the '90s, when I played it for the first time.
In the 30 years since, the game has become a lot more popular and gained a cult following, but at release time it wasn’t like that (not helped by the fact that the 2 previous games in the trilogy were kind of obscure too).
It’s always fascinating to read other experiences and cultures. In my experience, from what I read back then and from personal experience with friends opinion, plus all the aftermath of internet culture I never had the impression that this game is not liked by “most”. So seeing the game here was surprising to me. I am in Germany, just for reference.
Terranigma’s not disliked, it just never got a North American release so it’s more obscure than it should have been.
I love the movement etc. in Prototype 2! 100%ed it more than once, it’s just too fun. Surely we’ll get the sequel any day now 🥲
If you like Prototype and JRPGs you should check out Forspoken, which would be my pick for this thread. The bad reviews and memes were just gamergate bullshit. Despite its flaws, it’s the ultimate wizard power fantasy, with movement and combat that to me felt like a refined and even more fun/complete version of what we got from games like Prototype, Crackdown and Saints Row 4. Once you begin unlocking multiple magic types and get into the flow of switching them around on the fly it really provides some of the best and most satisfying gameplay I remember in my 30+ years of gaming.
Star Wars Outlaws.
I started playing maybe a year after release. I found a lot of negativity about the game. I am pretty sure that it had a really rough launch and by the time I got around to playing it many of the launch issues had been patched. Based on the stuff I read the game was pretty much a disaster until it was patch.
It did get repetitive at times and the stealth system was either a complete mess or completely OP.
Anyway I had a lot of fun with the game and was bummed when I learned their won’t be a sequel.
Also Nix was such a cool companion.
Honestly, it was my favorite SW game I ever played. Yes, better even than KotR. I felt like I was IN the Star wars universe. Not as a mystical space wizard, but just like… A person. And I loved every second of it. The world felt so alive, especially the cities. There were so many small elements that didn’t need to be there but I appreciated nonetheless, like the street food mini game. Did I need a weird QuickTime event mini game to eat food? No. Did I enjoy the fact that you would get served a big dish of alien cuisine and then actually get to see your character eat it? Like bite-by-bite and could watch it disappear with incredible detail? Sure! There’s a lot of points like that where you can see a lot of love and passion for the game shine through.
It makes me so sad to hear how poorly received the game was. Coming on the heels of Andor, it felt like it was supposed to be a big push in trying to move the SW franchise away from the constant Jedi/Sith space wizard conflict and focus more on the universe itself. Hell, even the rebellion/empire conflict took a back seat in favor of exploring the criminal underworld. I would LOVE more of that (and yes I know about the Maul show and have been enjoying it, but it too leans heavy on the space wizards).
You make such great points!
I love games that have an over all “main” mission but also offer heaps of random side quests that you can just do.
I am bummed that the sequel is scrapped as well.
Launching in a workable state is criminally underated by publishers. A bad game can eventually be patched after launch, sure, but a botched first impression takes decades to switch in the public eye. Look at cyberpunk and witcher games. Beloved after decades of bug fixes, but not everyone has the good will of CD projekt red to burn through. A bad first impression can turn a good if unimaginative game into “that ugly game that was broken at launch” forever. And let’s be real, 90% of a game’s lifetime profit comes during the launch window.
Absolutely!!
I’m surprised how much hate it got. I can barely think of any Star Wars games that give you a ship, full planet travel ability, and open world within those locations, letting you experience the vibe of Star Wars environments. Even if the fights were lack luster, that’s pretty impressive.
Some games come close, but prioritize fights (so Cal only sees a quarantined part of Coruscant filled with stormtroopers) or MMORPG design.
This game is really good. I enjoyed the hell out of it and wish we’d get more Star Wars about being a regular person in the world.
I played this on PS5 at launch, and while I maybe hit a few bugs through the whole game, nothing was game-breaking for me. Maybe I got lucky, who knows.
But I also really enjoyed the game. I’m sad we probably won’t see these characters again any time soon.
There wasn’t really much of anything broken at launch. The updates added a couple of QOL changes but the gameplay was much the same. The „insta-fail“ stealth sections were trivial, not really instantly failable and low consequence but I get that the broader market doesn’t really want stealth games with any real consequences (there were similar complaints with a trivial stealth section in FFXIV).
Resident evil 5, probably mostly because of coop.
Yes! I don’t love the RE games ( just not my type of game) but I loved RE5 when playing with a friend
5 and 6 are top notch couch co-op games. I think the only people that hate them are ones that tried to play them solo
5 was the only one i ever tried, and the camera angle was too much. couldn’t see shit. very narrow fov and can’t see past the character…
Gimme an egg!
Unreal
The original one. Not tournament.
I have a fear of sentient silver metallic blobs because of that game. Lol
What? Who didn’t like Unreal? It was groundbreaking, a milestone of its time. In my area and peergroup, everybody loved it.
Yeah. Over time it got seriously overshadowed by Half Life, but back in the day? It was mind-blowing.
true. But in hindsight, both were awesome with different aspects. Half-Life had a much more long-lasting experience through its modding capabilities - and an outstanding story. Unreal was visually and technically beautiful and had a mind-blowing athmosphere - but of course a single player game isn’t as longlasting as Half-Life was. (I know it had multiplayer, but at least in my perspective this was not Unreal’s focus - which changed dramatically with Unreal Tournament)
I thought it was awful. The graphics and the 2d textures looked weird and the movement was absurd. It was unplayable. UT, on the other hand, was fantastic.
Interesting, how different people can look at things. But, calling it unplayable is really odd.
I have very vivid memories of my brother purchasing a new graphics card, installing it and running this game. He hyped it up so much. The intro cinematic blew our minds. The game even more so.
To think I blindly bought it at a convention… I still have the amazing box it came in.
Final Fantasy 8
It’s my favourite one actually.
It was unforgettable the way it released but it would’ve been even better if the devs had more time to complete the whole story. We didn’t get enough of Laguna because of it.
It’d be nice if they put more into the world of FF8 like they keep shoving into FF7, truthfully.
Same for 9. I agree that 7 and 10 have been fleshed out enough.
I thought 8 was good. It came out at a time in my life when grinding for spells to boost stats wasn’t offensive to me.
Never went back and replayed it. It’s in the uncanny valley of instead of using blobby, well designed yet simple graphics it was trying to look good realistically but not quite nailing it, and the controls are clunky.
Wouldn’t say I loved it but it came after 7 and I mean, huge shoes to fill. But I did NOT like 9 at all so I still remember it as good, all things considered.
I enjoyed Zelda Skyward Sword upon release, despite having to get the new controller that supporter more motion on the Wii for it. The dungeon on the ship in the desert that involved time travel was a standout level and i really enjoyed it at the time. Granted I haven’t played it in 10 years, it’s a good game. I am glad though that the backlash resulted in Breath of the Wild, and without Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild would have never happened.
I enjoyed the game but it frankly proved that motion controls create a constant hindrance to smooth play sessions.
I never want to recalibrate my controller when I’m playing. I want to play and not be the console’s tech support.
Riding in that boat in the desert and being in that “time bubble” where there was only water around you is still one of the coolest things Zelda has done, I think. And the music in that spot was very good.
Of all the things in that game, I remember that area the most.
Yes exactly the same feeling for me. That was so cool and unique, there were also amazing puzzles with that mechanic.
Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!
And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.
If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.
Of course shippers are always going to do their thing but really Skyward Sword is basically the only game in the series with actual hints of those two being in love.
Some others have them at most good friends, and in a few they barely meet at all. Including one with a way more credible potential love interest.
The first Hyrule Warriors is based on the premise that all Links and Zeldas through time and space (being basically reincarnations) are destined to be together, but, it’s not canon and written like an insufferable fan fiction, original Mary-Sue character very much included.
Skyward Sword is basically the only game in the series with actual hints of those two being in love.
I would argue that Breath of the Wild strongly hints at a loving relationship developing.
I must admit that its been too long since I played Skyward Sword to usefully compare the two though.
The first Hyrule Warriors is based on the premise that all Links and Zeldas through time and space (being basically reincarnations) are destined to be together
I don’t recall any romantic spin of this in HW, they are tied to each other and will pop up at the same time, but not to fall in love. This is just the continuation of the OoT/SS curse of Demise / Ganondorf, “I’ll follow you both every time you show up”.
While there is no direct romantic interaction between Link and Zelda, the whole motivation for Cia to turn evil is because she wants Link for herself, but it’s just not meant to be because all Links (sharing the same soul, that part is indeed canon) already have a universally appointed “soulmate”.
What that soulmate deal could actually mean might be debatable (it’s kind of loaded already), but anyway, Cia is only interested romantically. She’s got a literal fucking temple full of roses and statues dedicated to the guy.
Also her slightly saner alter-ego comes to the same conclusion, and just drops the case instead because she’s nice. They’re basically supposed to be omniscient.
This shit is awful.
The Link-Zelda ship problem is that all Zeldas are each other’s blood daughters, and all Links are the same “soul of the hero” despite being different people. So they don’t want to have any incest story baked in this reincarnation stuff, and it stays platonic most of the time. This was a retcon (kinda) introduced Skyward Sword, probably to justify why they’d been avoiding it the whole time, previous games like LttP and OoT would only say that the various Links were just from some royal knight families or “the last of the families of knights”.
Skyward Sword is the very first incarnation of both of these characters (Zelda being the first human incarnation of Hylia, and we don’t know about Link), so they can be in love - it goes out of focus, but it’s assumed to still be there at the end. And then BotW is the very end of the timeline, tens of thousands of years later, so that’s fine, they’re very clearly in love there by the end, and live together in TotK.
There’s also some hints in the Wind Water timeline (I think in Spirit Tracks but I never played it), because that timeline insists that this is a new hero unrelated to the previous soul of the hero.
Oh, I’ll piggyback on this one and say: Spirit Tracks and Phantom Hourglass.
I feel like I’m the only person who didn’t struggle with the touch controls at all, and I love both games dearly.
Maybe Switch 2 would be the perfect time to remake them, so you can use mouse controls to write on the map and stuff. 🤔
I like that one too and never really got the hate. The bosses made good use of the motion control upgrade and the final boss sequence might be my favorite of any Zelda game.
I didn’t play Skyward Sword on release, but I did play the Switch remake a few years ago and had a blast. With full motion controls
Oni.
In my most unpopular opinion, the only good thing Bungie ever made. Way more satisfying than console-friendly auto-aim shooting aliens without gore.
Oni has some great sci-fi details, even when missing a deep overarching story. And breaking people’s necks with a cool 360 swing with proper sound effects of the neck bones being chipped is sooo satisfying. And that was an unfinished project by the way: you can notice there was no environment work done.
Oni was awesome but I will not take this Marathon slander sitting down!
Not being an Apple user, I can only talk having experienced it by proxy, but it seems to me that the game technically didn’t have at all the finesse that could be found in titles from the same years that pioneered FPS.
A lot of talk about the lore, but having tried more than once to stay awake through one of the many videos going through it, it seems the same boring space opera stuff seen in Halo.
I love the Graphic Realism style of the new one though, but as expected it’s just another bombing live service.
To me it was something about the setting, I was like 13 at the time and compared to Quake that was an excellent multiplayer game, the vibe and story really attracted me at the time.
The main difference to halo is that the master chief feels like an unstoppable war machine but marathon made me feel scared, running around in vents and panicking at the sight of a bug.
Ok but Marathon is earlier than Quake. One should compared it to Doom.
And compared to Doom, Marathon had more to offer from what I recall. Att least I remember it more fondly but I might mix it up with the sequels.
Watch Dogs, the first one specifically. I know Ubisoft has had a pretty bad track record, especially in recent years, but I’ve played through that game a bunch of times and always had a good time with it. Even in its worse parts its still dumb fun.
The story honestly aged really well too for better or worse with how tech companies and governments are mingling now.
