What is your unpopular video game opinion?

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Kratos being an irredeemable monster is an opinion reached by Kratos right at the end of the original series, so you'd be 14 years late in arriving at the same conclusion. He was, like so many times before, used by someone he thought he could trust by virtue of the "enemy of my enemy" relationship. When he realized his revenge on the Gods wasn't really his own, he takes his own life, but that didn't work the first time either, did it Kratos? I definitely don't agree with every narrative decision with God of War 3, but there's some obvious creative direction here.

The new series re-examines the question: can someone like Kratos be redeemed? Can he teach his Son to be better? Or is he destined to bring his new home to ruin? I haven't played Ragnarok yet (next month!!), but I think the tentative answers as of the 2018 game are No, Yes, and No. But it's compelling because he's an outsider trying to carve out a life for himself and his family in a world that very much doesn't want him.

Edited August 10 by Zapp Branniglenn

[vanguard333]

A lot of open-world exploration games have leaned heavily into providing players a wide range of traversal mechanics, especially ever since Breath of the Wild, and those traversal mechanics are usually a lot of fun, but part of me does miss more restricted traversal in exploration-heavy games. I miss games where part of the challenge in exploration was figuring out how to get to places that I saw in the distance.

Matthewmatosis, when summing up a point about the traversal mechanics in his review of Breath of the Wild, said, "People think they want complete control over their experience, when what they really want is to cut down trees to cross ravines; something they will never actually do if they have complete control over their experience."

I've been playing Ys 9 recently, and I have found that it strikes a nice middle-ground by having it that the city can be easily traversed while the dungeons are tunnels or mountain paths that must be traversed a specific way.

[Samz707]

Devil May Cry 3 is worse than 2.

It keeps alot of the same flaws of 2 but with a much higher difficulty making every bit of unfair damage, wonky controls or uncooperative camera moments far more frustrating than 2 where it least it generally wasn't bad enough to force you to replay sections over and over again.

It also has moments like the level where you're forced to fight all the bosses again (unless you know the not-at-all hinted at path of minimum bosses!) that would have been utter hell with the American's changed orb system. (where you need consumable orbs to use checkpoints) that far surpass anything from DMC2 in terms of being terrible.

I still think 2 is mediocre but 3 is just outright obnoxious and I am frankly baffled people love it so much yet dunk on 2 so hard when they feel like the same game in many ways. (Especially since I've been called bad at the game for not using exploits to "fix" my issues with it, which isn't the dunk they think it is if you freely admit to constantly using and considering using exploits like how you can cancel specific animations with certain actions "Basic gameplay".)

 

 

Over the shoulder camera is obnoxious and the "PS2 and previous" main "style" of third person with "Neutral or slightly to the right position directly above the player's head" is a far superior camera system, bonus points for the for some reason mostly dead ability of third person games to still switch to a first person POV like in SOCOM or even Driv3r of all games which was perfect.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

4 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Kratos being an irredeemable monster is an opinion reached by Kratos right at the end of the original series, so you'd be 14 years late in arriving at the same conclusion.

Oh, no, I concluded that after the original game. Kratos has been one of my most hated video game characters since...well, since he's been around. Screw him and his games.

[Hrothgar777]

Shenmue is terrible.

 

Don't get me wrong, for the most part it was an extremely impressive technical feat. But consider the way it was designed:

(1). You can only save from your bed. Like, why?

(2). Walking is awkward, and you come to a crashing halt if you get too close to someone.

(3). The city is a huge winding maze, and it's super easy to get lost.

(4). What this adds up to is this: you might take 30 to 40 real-world minutes first to complete a singular and fairly simple objective, like finding and talking to an old man in a park, and then to go back to save so you can turn the game off...only for the game to crash during the loading screen at the front steps of your house, making the last 30 to 40 minutes a waste of your time. In most games you can mitigate this risk by saving frequently, but not in Shenmue. As you venture into deeper parts of the map (which the game requires you to do in order to complete it), you get farther and farther and farther from the one save point you have available.

 

How could they have spent so much money just to overlook something so fundamental as saving?

[Zapp Branniglenn]

2 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

How could they have spent so much money just to overlook something so fundamental as saving?

You're playing on Dreamcast? That's the only version that doesn't let you save anywhere. It has a quick save for when you're ready to stop playing, so the inability to drop a hard save is only inconvenient if you're planning to save scum something.

Since this is the unpopular opinions thread: Shenmue's save system is more convenient than Majora's Mask, the game it inspired. That's especially true if you're comparing to the original Japanese release of Majora's Mask with no owl statue saves.

[Hrothgar777]

2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

You're playing on Dreamcast?

Yeah. I asked for it and Shenmue for my birthday like 8 years ago, played it once, and put it up in my closet. Yesterday I drove to the nearest big city and went to a store where I spent about $11 for cables to make it work. Thankfully the game still runs, though I'm not happy that it just crashes sometimes.

2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

It has a quick save for when you're ready to stop playing,

How do I do this? On Reddit I saw someone mention that it has a "menu". But to my knowledge it doesn't. The start button merely tells you what buttons to press to pull up features like the notebook. I've seen nothing about how to quicksave.

2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

so the inability to drop a hard save is only inconvenient if you're planning to save scum something.

Doesn't a quicksave undo itself as soon as you boot a game up again? In which case a sudden crash before you're able to hard save really would set you back?

 

I will say I was exaggerating when I called it terrible. I was just voicing my frustrations with how incompetently managed this one, crucially important aspect of the game was. On that note it apparently won't save my progress to the disk, and the only reason I'm able to save at all is because I happen to have a memory pack in the controller. Perhaps this was a wider flaw with the Dreamcast and not an issue with Shenmue specifically, but I have no idea what technological limitation could've been at play here. I mean, the SNES had no such problems and it was older.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

10 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

How do I do this? On Reddit I saw someone mention that it has a "menu". But to my knowledge it doesn't. The start button merely tells you what buttons to press to pull up features like the notebook. I've seen nothing about how to quicksave.

It's the Y menu. According to the Manual on page 7, you select Resume. I guess that's pretty ambiguous when they call it that lol

Quote

Doesn't a quicksave undo itself as soon as you boot a game up again? In which case a sudden crash before you're able to hard save really would set you back?

Yes a quicksave is really just what you do when you urgently need to stop playing the game and don't have the time to return to Ryo's house. So you're right that it's a poor defense against crashing. Have you investigated why it's crashing? Some issue with your disc or system perhaps.

[Fabulously Olivier]

On 8/11/2024 at 9:16 AM, Hrothgar777 said:

Shenmue is terrible.

 

Don't get me wrong, for the most part it was an extremely impressive technical feat. But consider the way it was designed:

(1). You can only save from your bed. Like, why?

(2). Walking is awkward, and you come to a crashing halt if you get too close to someone.

(3). The city is a huge winding maze, and it's super easy to get lost.

(4). What this adds up to is this: you might take 30 to 40 real-world minutes first to complete a singular and fairly simple objective, like finding and talking to an old man in a park, and then to go back to save so you can turn the game off...only for the game to crash during the loading screen at the front steps of your house, making the last 30 to 40 minutes a waste of your time. In most games you can mitigate this risk by saving frequently, but not in Shenmue. As you venture into deeper parts of the map (which the game requires you to do in order to complete it), you get farther and farther and farther from the one save point you have available.

 

How could they have spent so much money just to overlook something so fundamental as saving?

Honestly I don't think that's all that unpopular to say these days. We don't even need Shenmue in a post Yakuza world. Hell, we don't need Saints Row anymore either.

[Perkilator]

Quality of the game aside, asset reuse is actually kind of a good thing when making a sequel, since it gets the game done faster. 

[vanguard333]

13 hours ago, Perkilator said:

Quality of the game aside, asset reuse is actually kind of a good thing when making a sequel, since it gets the game done faster. 

I agree. Plus, a lot of work went into making those assets; reusing them in the sequel is a good way to get more use out of those assets.

 

I don't know if this is unpopular opinion, but a game should not have both weapon upgrades/customization and a system where the weapons need to be periodically replaced with weapons with higher numbers. These two systems are in complete opposition to each other; why would I bother using upgrades on anything that isn't the last weapon obtained in the game, since I know I'm going to have to replace the weapon?

I recently started playing Ys: Memories of Celceta, which made me think of this because it has a simple-but-cool weapon customization system where materials can be used to give the weapons various upgrades (in addition to increased damage, they can apply poison, freeze, etc. depending on which upgrades are used), but then it also all but requires the player to regularly replace their characters' weapons with new ones that have higher numbers, so why should I bother? The only time I've used a weapon that applies freeze occurred when I found a set of gauntlets that already had the freeze effect in a treasure chest, and they were replaced about an hour later with gauntlets with higher numbers.

And this is far from unique to Memories of Celceta; I've seen variations of these two systems appear together in lots of different RPGs, including The Witcher 3, Dragon Age, and others.

If a game wants multiple weapons and weapon upgrades, then it should have it that those weapons each have different advantages & disadvantages instead of one being outright superior numerically than another. Games like Monster Hunter and FF7R are good examples of this.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

45 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

I don't know if this is unpopular opinion, but a game should not have both weapon upgrades/customization and a system where the weapons need to be periodically replaced with weapons with higher numbers. These two systems are in complete opposition to each other; why would I bother using upgrades on anything that isn't the last weapon obtained in the game, since I know I'm going to have to replace the weapon?

Not having played any of the games you mentioned, this sounds more like Hoarder syndrome than anything else. 

[vanguard333]

I don't know if it's unpopular, but I really don't like mimics (enemies that pretend to be treasure chests or other mundane projects that the player is inclined to interact with) in video games. I get what their purpose is on paper: an enemy that will catch the player off-guard if they're not observant. But there are plenty of different types of enemies that can do that, and I think there really isn't much point to mimics in specific.

With a trap door or fake floor tile, if the player notices them, then the challenge becomes carefully walking around them or jumping over them. With stuff like the flying tiles and pots in The Legend of Zelda, if the player notices them, then they can raise their shield and the challenge becomes blocking and/or avoiding them all. With the Gohma larvae in Ocarina of Time, if the player is observant, then they can shoot the larvae's cocoons with the slingshot and skip the fight entirely. With mimics, if the player notices them, then what? There's no challenge or reward for noticing a mimic; there is only the tedium of either fighting it or trying to ignore it.

Short version: to an unobservant player, they succeed at being a source of paranoia, but to an observant player, they are just a potential source of annoyance that may as well not be in the game. I personally find them very annoying and pointless.

[Fabulously Olivier]

RPG mechanics make almost any kind of game better. Survival mechanics only make games worse.

[Dark Holy Elf]

On 8/10/2024 at 4:01 PM, Samz707 said:

Devil May Cry 3 is worse than 2.

Oh wow. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I do agree that there's much less daylight between the games to me than there apparently is to many others. I think both games have dreadfully boring enemy design and hit-or-miss boss design. I like DMC3 more than 2 but that's mostly because Dante (the character) is more fun in it; neither are games I'm at all tempted to revisit in 2024. 

I played the DMC trilogy in pretty quick succession (around the time DMC4 came out, iirc) and I always thought 1 was much, much better than the other two (this is unusual for me, I rarely feel that way about first games in a series). When I learned that neither of the two key creative people behind DMC1 had returned for the later games it was the least surprising thing in the world to me. Bayonetta 1-2 (haven't played 3 yet) are probably the only games I've played which really recapture what I think DMC1 did well.

My unpopular opinion is that DmC (ridiculous name aside) is probably the second best game in the series (I haven't played 5), but even it's only decent and I agree with lots of the criticisms about it. 

On 8/21/2024 at 6:41 AM, vanguard333 said:

I don't know if this is unpopular opinion, but a game should not have both weapon upgrades/customization and a system where the weapons need to be periodically replaced with weapons with higher numbers. These two systems are in complete opposition to each other; why would I bother using upgrades on anything that isn't the last weapon obtained in the game, since I know I'm going to have to replace the weapon?

Hard agree with this. I played Chained Echoes last year and while I really like a lot of things about the game's gameplay, it absolutely suffers from exactly this and it's a bad decision.

On 8/10/2024 at 3:07 PM, vanguard333 said:

"People think they want complete control over their experience, when what they really want is to cut down trees to cross ravines"

What a strange statement. I'm probably missing some context for it, but I'm pretty sure I have never actually thought that about a video game, and certainly not about Breath of the Wild.

I think both fully open-world games and more gated-by-upgrades experiences like most Metroids both have value. I gravitate more towards the latter, but I did enjoy Breath of the Wild. I really enjoyed being able to look at a distant mountain, ask myself "can I get there?" and know that the answer was almost surely yes, instead of wasting time trying only to learn "you don't yet have the Boots of Climbing +1" (or, in this case, "the Axe of Treecutting +1").

Edited August 25 by Dark Holy Elf

[vanguard333]

55 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Hard agree with this. I played Chained Echoes last year and while I really like a lot of things about the game's gameplay, it absolutely suffers from exactly this and it's a bad decision.

I have never played Chained Echoes, and, although I had heard the name before, I still had to look it up.

 

57 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

What a strange statement. I'm probably missing some context for it, but I'm pretty sure I have never actually thought that about a video game, and certainly not about Breath of the Wild.

I think both fully open-world games and more gated-by-upgrades experiences like most Metroids both have value. I gravitate more towards the latter, but I did enjoy Breath of the Wild. I really enjoyed being able to look at a distant mountain, ask myself "can I get there?" and know that the answer was almost surely yes, instead of wasting time trying only to learn "you don't yet have the Boots of Climbing +1" (or, in this case, "the Axe of Treecutting +1").

Yeah, in hindsight, I realize that I didn't leave enough context for that quote. The video game reviewer I quoted likes open world games and liked Breath of the Wild. The criticism wasn't of being able to go anywhere; that was something he listed as a strength of the game. His criticism was that he felt that the player rarely has to think about how they're going to get to the place where they need to go. In short, he thinks that the climbing and paragliding are overpowered in Breath of the Wild to the point where the player will rarely do much else to get to where they need to go.

I'm probably not doing a good job explaining it, so here's the video:

Quote

 

 

[Dark Holy Elf]

30 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

His criticism was that he felt that the player rarely has to think about how they're going to get to the place where they need to go. In short, he thinks that the climbing and paragliding are overpowered in Breath of the Wild to the point where the player will rarely do much else to get to where they need to go.

I wouldn't call climbing and paragliding overpowered, they're basically your methods of getting anywhere you can't walk to! That's like saying running and jumping are overpowered in Mario. Climbing already has key limitations on it: there's a stamina limit (though you can work around it with items), there are some places you can't climb due to overhangs or certain types of walls, and finally the real-time issue that it's slow (incentivizing the player to find routes with relatively less climbing). And paragliding has the huge limitation that you can only go down while doing it, and the there's a minimum drop:distance ratio which limits you as well. Figuring out where you can climb to in order to get a good enough paragliding distance is kind to reach the location you want is basically the core of the "moving around the world" gameplay. 

And I was pretty happy with it; I don't think moving around the world needs greater complexity. If I'd had to look for trees to cut down to get places I don't think I'd have enjoyed that much (and not just because it feels awfully wasteful toward the poor trees), but of course this is a big "to each their own". I can certainly understand the mindset of someone who wanted to be tested on more methods of getting around.

[Fabulously Olivier]

45 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

I have never played Chained Echoes, and, although I had heard the name before, I still had to look it up

 

Yeah, Chained Echoes comes highly recommended by pretty much the entire JRPG community. I probably have the most negative opinion on it as someone who didn't exactly love it, and even I think it's decent-to-good. For a 1 developer effort, it's beyond impressive. The lore is fascinating, and it does a lot from a QoL standpoint that the rest of the genre should take notes on (free full heals after every battle, losing battles puts you right next to where you lost with no penalty, etc.)

[vanguard333]

46 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

Yeah, Chained Echoes comes highly recommended by pretty much the entire JRPG community. I probably have the most negative opinion on it as someone who didn't exactly love it, and even I think it's decent-to-good. For a 1 developer effort, it's beyond impressive. The lore is fascinating, and it does a lot from a QoL standpoint that the rest of the genre should take notes on (free full heals after every battle, losing battles puts you right next to where you lost with no penalty, etc.)

That does sound interesting. As an aspiring game developer currently making my own game, it is always interesting to learn about one-person or small group efforts.

What did you think of what I said about weapon upgrades and replacing weapons on a regular basis clashing with each other?

[Fabulously Olivier]

1 minute ago, vanguard333 said:

That does sound interesting. As an aspiring game developer currently making my own game, it is always interesting to learn about one-person or small group efforts.

What did you think of what I said about weapon upgrades and replacing weapons on a regular basis clashing with each other?

I agree, but I would say that the solution to that should be to either let you transfer upgrades, or unlock the upgrade system at endgame.

[vanguard333]

1 minute ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

I agree, but I would say that the solution to that should be to either let you transfer upgrades, or unlock the upgrade system at endgame.

Those methods could work. I personally prefer just not having to replace weapons at regular intervals, but those methods could definitely work.

[Etrurian emperor]

Its not something I feel that strongly about since I'm very satisfied with Persona Strikers and Persona Emblem, but when looking at the spin offs of Persona 3 I can't help but see there was some missed opportunities. 

The Persona 5 spinoffs take place in roughly the same timeframe as the base game with at max a one year difference for Strikers. In general the thieves are in the exact same place where they left us at persona 5. The cast of three change from teenagers to adults however and thus we see them in a new light. Baseball coach Junpei, Power Ranger Yukari and CEO Mitsuru are nice examples of them going from students to working adults. 

Seeing adult Phantom Thieves would be quite interesting. Model Ann, Police girl Makoto or CEO Haru are some obvious jobs for them.

Some crossing over, even if just through easter eggs also wouldn't have been amiss. Mitsuru in particular likely having quite a lot to say about Shido, and the reverse probably also being true. 

[Perkilator]

A gaming franchise becoming as huge as it is (like Mario and Pokémon, just for a couple examples) should be enough of a reason for the companies who own them to be much less protective.

...Just don't go too crazy with it, like with Double Dragon.

[Etrurian emperor]

Since a new Ace Attorney port came out lets do an unpopular opinion for that series.

The dark age of the law is silly. Not because its a bad concept but because the game shows a light age of the law and pretends its the worst its ever been. Throughout all the game you face Blackquil who's pretty clean as far as prosecutors go, and can turn on his witnesses the moments he thinks they're guilty. This in contrast to the prosecutors from the original trilogy who gleefully tried to ruin innocent people just for their record or to bully Phoenix. You do face an evil Payne for the prologue but compared to Von Karma he's an adorable little kitten.

From the prosecutors to the police, about every people in power before the dark age of the law was about the most evil person you could imagine and the guy in power during the dark age is post character development Edgeworth.  

On all accounts the dark age of the law seems a pretty significant improvement compared to where things stood in the original trilogy.