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What popular or critically acclaimed games do you dislike?


twilit
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19 hours ago, Rose482 said:

Truly the only reason I believe this series is even still going and is so popular is becasue people are SO obsessed with Disney and Final fantasy.

Actually it's because the gameplay is usually stellar. KH knows how to make a challenge and make it interesting, which appeals to a lot of people.

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For me, it always raises an eyebrow when a game's good graphics or story are taken as an excuse for mediocre/shallow gameplay and in some cases comparing games from one series with double standards.
Vide Final Fantasy X, whose Cloisters of Trails are just as bas as chapter 13 in FFXV, and the linearity and main characters deserve the same flak as FFXIII received. In general, it's hard for me to understand the phenomenon of Final Fantasy and I explain it to myself with the high production qualities of the series and a bit more realistic art-style than other, strongly anime inspired mainstream jRPGs. 

Same story with Ni No Kuni, which suffers from terrible pacing, a weak combat system encased around familiars and too simple adventure elements. However, the game has gained cult status in some circles. I'd extend my accusation to the whole of Level-5, because all these Yokai, LBX or Inazuma games are at most solid craftsmanship, that is packed pretty. Even the Layton games, which I like very much.

Since I've switched from single titles to developers, Vanillaware cannot be missed. I do not hate them, because I like to occasionally go for some Muramasa or Odin Sphere, but those are still beautiful shells that lack the depth to be taken seriously by me. Okay-ish time wasters at best. 

Then, combining all the sentiments above, I have my qualms with artistic indie titles that the western trade press is most impressed with. Inside, which got so many GOTY nominations, is for me disappointing, because it's not developing any of the potentially quite good ideas introduced in the first few minutes. Journey, whose innovative 'multiplayer' I do not feel at all and I just got completely bored by my adventure. Brothers, which was supposed to be such a tear squeezer I also yawned at and apart from the twin-stick for sibling control it had nothing interesting going on. Good counter examples here are Undertale, The Swapper or even Hyper Light Drifter, which I also didn't fully enjoy, but all of them had a much better thought out concept and more importantly did something with it during the game. Nowadays I'm not even considering playing titles like Gris, because I know it's style over substance. 

Next, let me get to some AAA blockbusters. It's hard to believe that Bioshock Infinite is a game whose origins are the spiritual inheritance of System Shock. Assassin's Creed and God of War (minus the recent entry) are imo very overrated series. Pokemon never reached the highs of Black/White again. Uncharted 4 also falls into this category. Here marketing does a good job shoving those down the gamer's throat. 

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Having been completely blind to the video game industry for several years, I cannot express how fortunate I am to have hacked consoles where I can try all games before I buy them. You would honestly not believe the amount of disappointments that I have experienced in recent years. And I only download the games whose reviews I already liked, and of genres that I am familiar with! 🙃
For me, it is as if the inverse were true: How many popular or critically acclaimed games did I actually like?

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"Critically acclaimed" might be a bit of a stretch, but I could never really get into Secret of Mana (SNES version). Played it for a couple of hours and got up to the witch forest, but died and couldn't be bothered picking it up again.

The combat in that game was really boring, to be honest. It was just "stand around and wait for your gauge to build", which is probably even worse than "spam the attack button". The menu controls (the ring command thing) felt clunky and I was always pressing the wrong button. And the story... well, it just felt like a scrambled bunch of ideas thrown together with no coherent narrative. I didn't even enjoy the music, which is something a lot of people seem to particularly like.

Then again, I did play Final Fantasy Adventure and enjoyed that game. Maybe it was the charm of being an original Game Boy game? Or maybe I'm just weird.

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Xenoblade Chronicles would probably be the big one. I don't hate it, but regard it as rather mediocre aside from a few good characters. The combat wasn't particularly great and a lot of the games questing can be phrased to be like an offline MMO - which is not really appealing after playing years of actual MMOs. I never played X or Xenoblade 2 but the latter appeals to me even less with it's overly 'anime' tropes.

Edited by Tryhard
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I think I'll have to divide into categories; you see, I try not to say I dislike something if I recognize its merits but it simply isn't something I enjoy. I save, "I dislike this" for things that I genuinely think have problems. For that reason, I'm going to split my answers between "Not My Cup of Tea" and "Games I Dislike". 

Not My Cup of Tea:

2D Mario Bros. Games: I can easily see why these games are well loved. I'm just not a fan of 2D platformers. 

The Spider-Man Game: I tried it, and there were plenty of aspects I enjoyed, so I can see why it was a big hit. But I disliked certain aspects of the combat and the game overall wasn't my cup of tea at all. 

 

Games I Dislike/Am Torn On:

Xenoblade Chronicles 1: I don't so much dislike the game as much as I am torn on it. I played it once. I loved the story, the characters and the worldbuilding. But I did not enjoy the gameplay at all. Exploration was a pain, the camera was a nightmare when fighting anything larger than the main cast, I don't like combat that relies on abilities that run on cooldowns, and who thought spike damage was a good idea?! If you aren't aware, spike damage was a system where you took damage whenever you attacked certain opponents without any way of knowing which enemies cause spike damage and no way to avoid it except by equipping spike-damage resistance upgrades to your item slots. 

Super Mario Odyssey: As much as 2D Mario games are not my cup of tea, 3D Mario games are something I enjoy a lot. I really enjoyed Sunshine and Galaxy as well as the DS remake of Mario 64. I got Odyssey on sale and, at first, I really enjoyed it: Mario's movement is absolutely fantastic. However, as I played through it, I became increasingly torn on it. There are just so many moons, and a lot of them are obtained by going through tedium rather than by completing a fun challenge. I got tired of collecting so many moons for doing things that weren't a lot of effort. 

I also don't like how the game's idea of progression within each Kingdom is simply dumping more moons that weren't there before into areas you had already been. Why not unlock new areas within the Kingdom as you progress; areas that bring in new challenges or expand on the challenges you had already seen? It especially doesn't help that certain kingdoms, such as the Cloud Kingdom and the Ruined Kingdom, are nothing more than a boss room with some extra moons scattered about, when they could've been so much more. 

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I don't know if every game I'm about to be listed can be considered to be "critically acclaimed", but here we go:

 

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia: It looks great. It sounds great. But my praise ends there. I found it boring to play. Cantors were really annoying to deal with, and swamp and desert maps were a total slog. Sure, movement was always limited in these types of maps in previous and future Fire Emblem games, but not to this extent. Overall I did not have fun while playing this game, and if I'm not having fun with a game, then not even a good story can save it.

...speaking of the story, I cannot say many good things about it, anyway. In fact, I would say it irritated me. I hated how perfect Alm was, and how only Celica was allowed to make mistakes. Alm's mission and how much he accomplished massively overshadowed what Celica did, and in the end it kind of felt like it was more of Alm's game and not Alm and Celica's game.

 

Pokemon Heartgold: ...maybe it's because I played Pokemon White first, but battles took so long in this game I felt; battle speed was so slow. That and from what I remember, level scaling was rather poor? So by the end of the game, I found it difficult to level up my Pokemon to a decent level. I don't know, I just found this game to be rather boring.

 

Tales of Vesperia: While I don't dislike this game necessarily, I was let down by it. It was hyped up to be one of the best Tales of games ever made, but I personally didn't find that here. I enjoyed the gameplay enough, it was about as good as Tales of Abyss (one of my favorite Tales of games, personally). It is also the prettiest Tales of games in my opinion, or at least one of the prettiest. But the story never really went anywhere, and the final arc felt rather tacked on. I really liked Yuri, but Estelle annoyed me with how indecisive she was. Over all I enjoyed the game and I can see myself playing it again in the future, but I don't think it's the best.

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Ever since Smash came out, I stopped liking the Mario games. Not least because, Peach is a retard and a sissy bitch for not using her Smash moves against Bowser. Seriously, fuck her.

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Undertale. Awesome music, funny writing, but I completely failed to find almost any of the characters as sympathetic as the game expected me to, and I found the game's attempts to paint me as a bastard for defending myself to be complete nonsense.

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I think I can safely say I don't like Three Houses.

3 hours in and only 3 short battles in a strategy game is not a good sign to me.

The actual teaching boils down to "Press A to praise" which manages to feel incredibly underwhelming (since there's all these subsystems yet the actual teaching is just "Press A to teach" and I'm not a fan of basically any change to the combat. (Thunder being nerfed, spells are no tomes/drain health anymore, weapon arts are now boring direct upgrades that just take more weapon durability that literally everyone has so they're just objectively better than regular attacks most of the time.)

While the actual monestary is basic mess, most people can't move, people constantly fade in/out of existence (I load my save, spawn in the cafetria, talk to someone there then mid conversation 3 people phase into existance at the tables.) and it's just a pain to move around because it's basically designed to pad out how long it takes to actually get anywhere, it feels like incredibly blatant padding the game out with how often Byleth has to stop running so the game can load, it feels almost like it was intentionally designed to pad out the game by taking as much time as possible to do basically anything while adding none of the potential postives that an explorable homebase location would have.

For a game where motivation is a mechanic, I ironically just feel less and less motivated to actually continue playing each time I play the game as it takes too long to actually play the combat part that I enjoy and when I do get to do it, well it just feels worse than the other games.

I just simply enjoy basically enjoy nothing that the game actually tries to do and the more I play the more I wish I was just playing any other FE game instead.

The game doesn't even have visuals going for it since the lightning effect looks bad (Because Skin and Metal totally reflect light the exact same way) and the outlines on people's faces just look godawful most of the time. 

It's even worse since the game skips over almost all of the actual teaching then tries to bring up stuff that I never actually saw to try to establish a "relationship" with characters, such as Bernie describing herself "covering her face in the corner" which would probably have an impact if I actually saw any of that...which I didn't so I don't care about the students since all the game does is just describe everything with them second-hand rather than actually showing it and then the game makes me say I "Saw her in the green house singing" when I never actually saw anything like that, it's honestly some of the worst "Tell, don't show" writing I've ever seen in fiction involving a self-insert character I've seen.

Edited by Samz707
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