What's a game that got critically and player acclaimed that you disliked anyway?
What's a game that got critically and player acclaimed that you disliked anyway?
This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Bioshock Infinite is one of the worst games I've ever played in comparison to how well it was received. The gameplay was shit. The enemies are all bullet sponges. The plot is about how Ken Levine doesn't understand the sci-fi concept of parallel universes at all and when slaves violently rebel they are as bad as the people who enslaved them. You can upgrade your weapons but you will use whichever one happens to be nearby since ammo is so scarce except when Elizabeth magically manifests some to throw to you. Songbird is a creature that screams WE WILL HAVE A BIG BOSS FIGHT and it never comes. It's awful.
Baldur's Gate 3. It's just not a fun game: D&D is mechanically bad and doesn't work at all for a video game that doesn't have a GM on hand to paper over all the serious problems with it, the controls and interface are janky as hell and the camera aggressively fights you, and however much detail they put into it I just couldn't care at all because it's all just bland forgotten realms slop.
opening this thread to find my favorite games and getting mad that I found them
RDR 2 is like 3 or 4 great games rolled into one and all negating each other. The story is enjoyable enough with some depth and it's ruined by half of it being told through interactive cutscenes where you have to press W but if you don't magically follow the perfect path it fucks up the pacing.
It has a beautilly crafted open world with mechanics and side-activities, none of which do anything useful for the rest of it or have enough depth to stand on their own and a mission design that straight up fails you if you don't take the 1 path the developers want you to take.
It is a survival game, except set in the big rock candy mountains considering how much loot and money is just laying around.
It's basically The Homer, as a videogame
Dark Souls is too hard for my tastes, as much as I want to just walk around the worlds and see them.
I have 0 interest in BotW, crafting stuff isnt for me. Just lemme find/earn the item.
Street Fighter isn't in my top tier fighting series.
Most point and click/old timey adventure games (like the aforementioned Myst) were boring to me.
The first Dark Souls game felt like torture. I remember running around in the underground poison swamp to farm upgrade material then running up to Andre to upgrade my weapon and it felt like such a chore. In Anor Londo, after fighting a gargoyle, the way forward was so unintuitive I gave up because the game was not for me. I ended up watching some YouTuber play the game after that.
Elden Ring. I really tried, but the complete absence of any serious scenario, world building, story or dialogue just made the game completely uninteresting to me. Mind you I never could get into Dark Souls either.
Also here is a link to the thread from Soros you mentioned
Bethesda games in general. Maybe I will give Morrowind another try eventually (only played like an hour) but my experience with the other ones discourages me greatly. Gameplay is boring, balancing is non existent ( you either steamroll or have to cheese encounters). People always point out the cool quests and lore but they are buried in a mountain of mediocre slop. Aesthetically, apart from Morrowind I find them really dull. I do give them props for the modding support tho, I've started playing the forgotten city and having a blast, and that was originally a Skyrim mod.
Also a link to the past. Maybe it's because it's the most "vanilla" Zelda ever got.
I'm also saying Baldur's Gate 3. The writing is juvenile, the combat is a slog, the characters are cliches, it retcons the story and characters of the game it's supposed to be a sequel to, it has possibly a worse UI than the original Baldur's Gate, and the famed reactivity and choice only works if you do things exactly how the developers intended you to do them. Oh, and the music is just forgettable.
Oh I have OPINIONS.
Undertale is genuinely pretty shit tbh. The humor is okay now and again, the battle system, while I appreciate it trying something different, didn't work for me, and the pseudo-philosophical "u did the thing we designed the game to push you towards doing don't you feel bad u monster lolololol" thing was not remotely as original or deep as people pretended. Genuinely think its just the Homestuck connection that made that game popular. Music is a bop though, can't deny that.
The last 3rd or so of Elden Ring is also shit and I assume all the 10/10 game of the decade reviews never got that far. FromSoft is so far up its own "prepare to die" ass that they forget to make actually fun and fair games anymore.
ghost of tsushima besides being far right bushido propaganda bullshit, isnt that fun or beautiful and the story is not compelling. I dont see how people like this game, it has to just be weebs. my ex best friends conservative boyfrind went off on me for pointing out the historical inaccuracies while playing. elden ring also looked boring but i just watched my friend play also it weird how bad characters look for how hyped it was.
Couldn't get into Elden Ring. I love Dark Souls and Sekiro, but adding the huge world just made things dull to me. It became too much of a grind rather than a cool experience to have. I don't really understand the hype around it.
I never liked CounterStrike. The entire game is walking into a courtyard and getting shot by someone I didn't even see.
I've never liked Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. The writing is incredibly goofy and it's just not as scary as it's hyped up to be. The pacing is dull and the puzzles are just tedious running back and forth. And before it's mentioned it's a game from 2002: it came out a month after the Resident Evil 1 remake, which is a masterpiece to this day. It also came out a year after Silent Hill 2 and the first Fatal Frame, both of which are still very effective at horror.
i've mentioned it before on here, but Final Fantasy 15. no idea how it got 9's and 10's on release. i'm assuming it was just vibes and how much you liked hanging out with the boys. you had to watch a movie and anime series to even understand the plot and characters. combat was egregiously shallow and easy. game just pissed me off. not sure what the royal version changed and if they fixed any of these problems.
Super Mario World. Super Mario Bros 3 perfected 2D Mario platforming movement, then they added a cape that lets you skip most of SMW by flying at the top of the screen. Because of this, and because of other things that the cape makes too easy, speedrunners have created the "No Cape, No Starworld" category that features the parts of the game that would otherwise be skipped.
The spin jump is also BS, the fact that you can now jump on a bunch of things that should cause damage keeps me wishing that they stuck with SMB3 mechanics instead.
My two are Ori and the Blind Forest and also Soma.
I played Ori several years ago, so my disappointment with and rage at that game have cooled. It was bad though. The art style didn't look at all cohesive, but rather like there were assets from two or three different games. The story was generic and boring, but yet somehow confusing at the same time. I played through the Ginso (?) Tree escape, and I hated the movement the whole time. It was too floaty and felt imprecise. (But people speedrun it, so the movement is actually probably plenty precise, it just felt bad to me.) I also absolutely despised how I could never tell whether the environment was safe to land on or would kill me instantly. And this isn't even getting into the combat, which basically everyone agrees is bad. I don't know, I wish I had liked Ori, it feels like it should be right up my alley, but I hated it so, so much.
Soma I played recently, and I'm still seething about how much time I spent on that stupid, shitty game. Its story wasn't deep and I didn't care about the characters. The game pulled the exact same story trick 3 fucking times, and apparently expected you to still be surprised by it the third time? Yeah, no, I'd rather experience a sci fi story that doesn't treat me like I'm too stupid to understand it. The monsters also fucking sucked, they weren't scary, they were just fucking annoying. It was always extremely easy to figure out their gimmick, and once you'd done that, it was just a matter of exploiting it and hoping you didn't fuck up or get lost in the overly dark environment that all looked the fucking same. Also, I hated having to try and find the lever or button or switch or whatever that I needed to interact with. It was very hard to tell what was background non-interactable stuff and what was the tiny little switch that was blocking my progress. If the story had been good, I could have forgiven the gameplay, but it was just like tech bro's first sci fi kind of plot, I fucking hated it.
i just hate all videogames, despite playing them all the time. they pale in comparison to the shit i imagine while i play them. even my favorite games just piss me off with all the ways they could be hypothetically improved upon. this game needs bigger maps, that game could use a prone mechanic, this other game needs leaning around corners... i just can't stop myself. and thats without getting into microtransaction games-as-a-service shit that i can't afford but still want because i am a needy little treat goblin who has to farm any tiny scrap of dopamine out of the world that i can.
I did not care for Mario Odyssey very much.
It might just be because I have little baby hands but I found the primary movement cappy hat bounce maneuver to be extremely unpleasant to pull off, especially having played Mario Galaxy 2 recently before it.
It was a very pretty game but imo there were not nearly enough cool set pieces. But then again I am a Sunshine enjoyer so my opinion can be taken with a grain of salt.
I think World of Warcraft back in 2006 or something. I discovered two things: a) if I'm going to grind, I really have to enjoy the core game play. I did not b) to get the most out of WoW you had to have some friends playing with you, which my friends who had been playing for a while did not want to, or didn't want to explain things to me
The Witcher 3
The game has some pretty graphics at times but all in all the story was a boring slog and the gameplay could be neatly split into "puzzles" where you just press the Witcher sense button to see what to interact with and combat where despite, the large bestiary you fight everything the same way.
There were some alright side quests, but most of the open world felt like an unnecessary hurdle between point A and point B instead of an interesting place to explore.
Imho the best thing about The Witcher 3 being popular is that there were enough fans of the series knocking around that the books got English translations.
Boltgun, it got hyped to hell and back as an epic awesome BOOMER SHOOTER but its literally not a boomer shooter, it's just doom 2016 with pixels.
Just felt really boring to keep being locked into rooms and having a bunch of shit spawn at me until I kill enough for the game to decide to release me. Also the weapon balance felt off, you get an upgrade powerup in almost every level that upgrades a gun for that level, but the only gun worth upgrading seems to be the titular boltgun, the default weapon, cause it gets like doubled mag size, pinpoint accuracy, big damage etc, while other guns just get gimmicks like bouncing shotgun shells.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
The story just did not grab me at all, I found the art style incredibly ugly, and despite liking a lot of games with relatively similar playstyles I did not enjoy that at all.
I feel like people were just really excited to see a cyberpunk game, which at the time was definitely an underserved market.
Sorry Ulysses lol.
Never liked Armored Core, it's not a Mech game to me. Its an FPS arcade shooter with robot skins. Giant robots should not be zoomy-ass evengelion ballerinas engaging in sword combat. They should be unweildy tanks that casually stroll thru one-story buildings and fart artillery.
My first stompy robot game was Mechwarrior 3, and that's set my expectation of the genre ever since.
Did not particularly care for Super Mario Odyssey. It was go here, throw your hat on this, complete a few objectives with the new power, then do it all again with different mechanics in the next place. The game just never built up into anything complex, so it felt boring after a while. It was also very easy so I blew through the main game really fast.
every game that requires realtime input. turn based or, at a stretch, variable speed realtime with pausing is all that can capture me
Horizon Zero Dawn. It felt more like a tech/graphics demo than an actual game. Still haven't finished it and can't see myself doing it. I don't know how they managed to make robot dinosaurs so boring.
Also every call of duty after the original modern warfare 3. Yes, including black ops 2. I actually think black ops 2 was one of the worst call of duty games, the overuse of the three lane cookie cutter map design really screwed up multiplayer FPS games for a good 5 years after its release.
Also another controversial take, skill based matchmaking is good and more games should implement it. It forces you to actually play people at your skill level and prevents pointless pubstomping. If you want to have mindless fun with long killstreaks, just play against the AI/bots.
I know most people don't agree, but I never could get into Skyrim. I'm not much of a gamer, so I don't play a ton of games. I ended up playing Skyrim for the first time in 2021.
The story seemed generic to me, the combat was clunky, and the missions were all repetitive. I stopped playing after about 50 hours.
I should add that I love Fallout though. I'm not sure why I like it and not Skyrim.
Hearts of iron 4 and Victoria 3 are far worse then their predecessors and deeply flawed because of the extremely boring tactics gameplay(frontlines). Victoria 3 economy is also extremely bland and feels like a auto clicker game. But, I only enjoyed vic 2 with pop demand mod which current vic 2 modders/players don't like.
Dark Souls: I played it for like 20 minutes but the controls just felt wrong. The combat just didn't feel good.
Journey: Felt boring and empty to me. Came off as the game equivalent of a pretentious film student's sophomore project.
TUNIC: This is a very weird one to me. Theoretically, I should love it. I like retro games. I like old-school Zelda. I like the conceit that the manual is in a foreign language and you have to use the pictures and diagrams to infer what to do. But for the life of me, I just cannot get into this game, and I have no idea why. I tried to start twice, and each time, I played it for about half an hour before putting it down and never really getting back to it.
As a massive fan of the middle era of Final Fantasy games: Final Fantasy 9
Hear me out.
The combat was really slow and clunky, even for a turn-based RPG (yikes!) and the sheer amount of time you spent waiting for the black swirl to finally disappear and for the camera to pan into the battle got so damn tedious. It was like a full 30s of punishment just to get into making your first action in a fight, I swear, and those fight encounters came thick and fast on the world map.
The soundtrack was thematic but really uninspired and unadventurous for an FF game
The skill development was closed in and didn't really allow for much choice in what skills you could learn and half of the skills you did learn were mostly useless unless you looked ahead in a game guide or you reloaded a save to deploy the relevant skills for the upcoming boss battle.
Plus you basically needed foreknowledge of the game or a game guide to know how many items you'd need for the synthesis mechanics, or otherwise you'd be learning one skill on one character for ages before you could use that single item to teach the next character their skills, often the same ones.
The playable characters were all one note and they felt like they were written as placeholders with the intent that somebody else would develop them from caricatures and cardboard cutouts into something with motivations and character arcs later in the development. Mild spoilers ahead but it's an ancient game by now so deal with it.... Vivi, the soulless facsimile, was ironically one of the only characters who had narrative development but that was mostly plot-driven and he didn't really change from being a naive child who asks babby's first existential questions, and the story just kinda developed around him.
Zidane just wanted to chase girls and... that was about it.
Steiner was just a mild antagonist towards Zidane and whenever he had a place in the story it was "I'll protect you, princess!" or "I am sworn to the Queen, the realm, and to the princess. But how can I uphold these vows when they conflict... yet again? Oh well, never mind."
Garnet/Dagger was just another typical FF love interest trope and for a quarter of the game they just decided that she'd be mute because they were too damn lazy to bother writing any dialogue for her so she was effectively sidelined.
Eiko is an exception to this - she was a developed character with an arc but she came into the game so late that she barely had any time in the spotlight.
Freya was just "I am longing for my long-lost love, Sir Fratley" and then, when Fratley turns up in the first 1/3rd of the game he's just like "Oh, um, I have amnesia. Who are you again? Anyway, I guess I'll be going now. And I'm taking your relevance to the storyline and any opportunity for character development with me. Goodbye!"
Amarant was an antagonist who just swapped sides out of the blue and just shook his head at decisions, and he came into the game way too late to feel involved in the story in any way.
Quina was the typical gag character which is fine but when the rest of the party has less of a story arc than your gag character, you're doing something seriously wrong.
The setting was fine, although not to my tastes, and the world map felt constricted and very railroad-y: you could only visit a couple of places most of the game and often you'd leave a location only for it to become permanently inaccessible which ruined a whole lot of opportunities for development of the setting. A lot of the places you'd get to visit would be closed off/sidelined from the game after the first visit, if not blown up, and this made any investment in the locations feel useless; why would you bother to explore characters in a city when the last few got destroyed and this one is probably 5 minutes away from being blown up next? Even if it survives, you're probably not coming back here anyway so the characters here are probably going to be inconsequential. And by making most locations inaccessible for large parts of the game/the rest of the games, this often creates a lot of missable items (or events).
So much of the setting was one-note, filled with bland architecture and bland characters that were barely indistinguishable from each other.
FF7, by comparison, had the sprawling undercity slums, the furturistic overworld, the hippie canyon that was an uncomfortable pastiche of vaguely Native American-esque tropes, the mysterious village of the main character with the ominous mansion and an even gloomier mountain range that you get to explore, the adventure casino and the downtrodden slum miners' village beneath it, the military installation/city thing, the beach resort, the reactor town with the eco-resistance fighters set up in it, the post-WWII largely-Japanese (but also kinda Chinese) village which was trapped between two worlds...
More than this comparative lack, a lot of the FF9 locations felt really underdeveloped and like one-note variations on vaguely mediaeval themes. Burmecia is the perfect example of this chronic underdevelopment - it was supposed to be an entire city and when you get there it's a couple of streets and a few unoccupied houses that somehow, inexplicably, lead to the courtyard of the throne room/castle. And that's it. An entire setting which is supposed to be one of the biggest cities in the Mist Continent (according to the story) is just... a few empty streets and not even an actual castle or royal residence to explore. Instead of being an opportunity for Freya's character development a couple of the residents who were actually still there just say "Freya, you're back! Protect the king!!" or "Freya, you rescued me. Thank you for returning to Burmecia in its time of need!"
I guess the mini-games were pretty fun though?
All in all idk why FF9 gets the accolades that it does. To this day you'll regularly hear people raving about FF9 as their absolute favourite from the series and they'll wax lyrical about the character development and the setting.
Ask them how a character developed from their introduction to the end of the game, though, and they'll fall silent. Or ask them which locations of the setting were the most compelling and they'll just explain why they loved one of about three locations that were actually more developed than the rest of the mostly-forgettable locations that you're forced to trudge through.
I suspect that it's just a nostalgia kick for people who were in that sweet spot of forming core memories and when they first played FF9 or something.
Red Dead Redemption 2 Online
Yeah I know there were a lot of complaints but there weren't enough. The Player vs Player part of that game could have been fun, but it's literally the worst competitive multiplayer I have ever played in my entire life. Holy God how could it be so bad?? Nothing happens, you just get instantly headshot and thrown back to instantly respawn 100 yards back, forever, and ever. I call it Headshot Sisyphus 2
Honestly can't remember the last time that happened, I think I just know my tastes well enough to let the hype bounce off me.
Don't get me wrong, I have played plenty of games that are shit or mediocre lol, it's just that nobody expected them to be amazing in the first place
Gta V was a downgrade from Gta 4 in all the ways that mattered.
All of the dark souls shit, Steelrising is the only one that looks promising.
I could not get into Terraria no matter how many times I tried.
Path of exile is a bloated, convoluted mess with shoehorned multiplayer elements. The mtx are also awful and do not get nearly enough hate as they should.
half life 2 was a glorified tech demo with so many bloviating "immersive first person cutscenes" that it felt like a parody.
Halo 3's campaign was not good and the multiplayer was just ok. Forge was not revolutionary, it only seemed like it because it was locked to console with no mod tools.
Borderlands, tried two different games over the past 7 years and neither time was it fun. Fps games should not have arpg items.
The mario, zelda, and pokemon series. The little I've seen of them made me never want to play them, like pokemon is literally just cock fighting but with epic wacky monster-pets.
Diablo 2 resurrection, the remaster, does not have a skill bar unless you use a controller. I will never willingly put myself through garbage controls straight from the 2000's when I could just play Grim Dawn instead.
I don’t necessarily dislike them, I quite enjoy the stories, but I just cannot get into Final Fantasy (mainline titles) with turn based combat. It’s def not the problem of the game necessarily, it’s just me
Bastion, the hack and slash is too mechanically simple to be engaging and the narrator shtick gets old real quick.
Papers Please. However, Obra Dinn is one of my favorite games.
Pretty much all Blizzard games if you exclude SC and WC customs.
God of War and COD.
I never liked COD, I thought the first two games were ok, they looked like copies of Medal of Honor but with better graphics. I much preferred the freedom that Battlefield and the original Operation Flashpoint gave the player.
God of War is a very strange game, I don't know why, but it seems boring to me.
HZD. Got it as people were raving about how great it was and I thought the dinos seemed neat. Then got to the point where the game open up and how much of an arrow sponge the bigger ones are, tried to see if I was doing something wrong and then realised that it was actually intended. The combat is way too clunky for that to work for me.
The rest of the game also didn't make up for it, so I just dropped it after I went to the big city to see if there was anything there which would hook me.
Also played FF7 on the PC back in the day and it bores the shit out of me.
I just want to agree. I got so repeatedly told Myst was great, and I just, didn't like it. I even mostly enjoyed Grim Fandango, and the Monkey Islands, because the humor mostly made up for some awful gameplay moments, but Myst I just didn't enjoy.
me when i find another thread to say Yakuza Like a Dragon is badI'd write up all about what I don't like about it if my lunch break wasn't about to end
I thought Yakuza 6 was pretty bad but it's a fucking gem in comparison to LAD
Also I just straight up didn't get Undertale. The whole thing was riffing on a genre I didn't really understand and i just ended up confused as to what the point they were going for was. The game might as well have been in Chinese for what I understood of it
I've been playing Environmental Station Alpha in my desperate search for literally any modern Metroidvainia (I'd give it like a 3-4/10 in terms of having a Metroidvainia structure). Holy shit Overgrowth is the most annoying boss I've have seen in a long time and the game in general is just tedious as shit and full of hitting your head against different walls both figuratively and literally.
I am begging whoever might have this information about where a good Metroidvania other than Hollow Knight is.
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