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.
Everyone is just saying actually popular games, but ones they don’t think are popular enough. If people don’t have to look up the game, it’s probably not answering this question (with a few infamous exceptions maybe).
Mine would be Stationeers. There’s no real action or anything. It’s a game about designing, building, managing, and automating a station on another world. Each world has its own issues, be that Luna with a vacuum, Mars (the easiest) with storms, no breathable atmosphere, and cold, Venus with all the Venus issues, or some made up planets with crazy problems. It simulated gasses and liquids, replicating the refrigeration cycle so you can make your own heat pumps for cooling. It’s really cool, but complex and potentially boring for most people.
It’s made by the studio making Kitten Space Agency. It’s a studio created by the DayZ mod creator, and they seem really cool. They’re very much not profit motivated, and I think they’ve said developing Stationeers is costing them money, at least at one point, and KSA is planned to be free and donation supported.
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!
Whether deserved or not Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy is always forgotten compared to its predecessor. But I don’t care, it’s the best one for me.
In the same vein The Force Unleashed II is the one I remember more fondly. It’s worse than the previous one certainly, but the story does have some nice moments and playing it on the hardest difficulty makes you actually have to block correctly and plan your movement right to survive the onslaught of fire by the stormtroopers.
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).
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.
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.
I loved bulletstorm.
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.
The Mount and Blade games feel like such a janky mess, and I don’t know anyone else that likes or plays them. But I absolutely adore the combat gameplay, nowhere else do I feel that merge between tactical medieval warfare and intense personal combat.
All the strategy/diplomacy/trading/RPG stuff on top is fine, but only as a context for the combat gameplay.
Bubsy
I don’t want to go back into the depths of time to try to remember an obscure game I played decades ago. So I’ll do a recent one that people didn’t necessarily hate, but didn’t like as much as its predecessor and were pretty open about it.
Doom: The Dark Ages
I ended up liking it more than Eternal. It wasn’t as fast paced, even though it was still fast, but you could FEEL the combat more in Dark Ages. The devs made the movement and hits FEEL more substantial. I was skeptical about the shield, but ended up loving it. Chaining together the shield attack, melee attack, and gunplay felt great. I liked the levels more than Eternal too. And they added a lot of lore to deepen the Doom universe. Main story was whatever, but that’s typical for the Doom franchise.
Forspoken has one of the best battle and movement gameplay systems in gaming, or at the very least in the “power fantasy sandbox” genre. Its story and dialogue are also a very cute, earnest take on Isekai that didn’t deserve the backlash they got. It has its flaws but it’s absolutely nowhere close to being the utter cringe-fest and terrible game that people like Asmongold successfully convinced the rest of the internet it was (because it has a female POC protagonist, basically). Personally, as someone who wanted to live the ultimate elemental wizard power-fantasy in a game since I was a child, Forspoken gave me everything I wanted and more (like cats! Lots of adorable cats).
