Unpopular games that you love, and vice versa

[Memory]

What are some games that you don't agree with the general consensus on? Something that was critically panned or commercially flopped but you fell in love with; or a game that everyone else loves but you can't stand.

One that I love but nobody else seems to is Metroid Other M. I'm not ignorant of its faults. The voice acting is awful, the story is a convoluted mess, and what they did to Samus's character is downright criminal. She went from being a badass bounty hunter to someone with such severe daddy issues that she would rather let herself burn to death in a molten volcano than disobey her father figure. It's really garbage and I agree with everyone who says it's bad and nearly killed the series.

But the gameplay is awesome! The mix of 2D and 3D level design is brilliant, and works really well with the Wii remote emulating an NES gamepad. The bosses are some of the best in the series, and I loved that it's a prequel to Metroid Fusion and we got to see earlier versions of creatures that were later replicated by the X parasite like Nightmare.

I loved playing it so much that I beat it on the hardest difficulty, which is basically a one-hit-kill mode. The final boss fight against Phantoon is a bullet-hell arena and one of the hardest ordeals I've ever faced in a game, but I did it just to show that 100% completion rating on the hardest difficulty on my save file.

I was really excited for Metroid Dread at the beginning of this year, but ended up unimpressed with it and wishing it was more like Other M. The series feels like it has been going backwards because they're retreating to what worked in the past, with strictly 2D gameplay and level design. But they learned the wrong lesson from Other M. More games with the same gameplay would be great. They only needed to ditch the overwritten story and dialogue and let Samus return to being the silent, lone badass we all know her as.

On the other side of things, a game that everyone loves and I hate is Super Mario Galaxy. I really should love it too. The art direction is great and the level design is cool. It even has a pretty good story compared to most Mario games. But the camera and controls are so bad! The 3D Mario games have never really had the best camera system, but it was serviceable up until that point. Once they threw in the gravity mechanics where you could walk on the underside of objects, it became unbearable. Mario would literally run in the opposite direction I intended and I couldn't move the camera to a position where the controls made sense. Eventually it made the levels totally unplayable and I had to give up. I was dying not because it was hard, but because the controls were doing the opposite of what they logically should because the camera couldn't be oriented in a way where they made sense.

I really tried to keep going, but I couldn't. And I know that other people either didn't have the same problem orienting themselves or at the least, for them, it wasn't a deal breaker. I'm not going to tell anyone they're wrong for liking the game, but I ended up hating it so much that I traded in the disk for the measly $0.50 or whatever EB Games would give me for it at the time.

[Version]

One popular game that I hate is definitely the Trails Of Cold Steel part of the Trails series. It took one of the most interesting jrpgs out there and transformed it into one of the most generic.
They changed it to a high-school setting (and brought along all those shitty anime tropes with it). They down scaled most gameplay mechanics or just outright removed them. It's worth mentioning that Trails has always been a character and world building driven game, but the dialogue writing in this series is abysmal, and feels like it was directly written by the board of directors.
The characters are incredibly shallow, and develop very little. The worldbuilding is the only thing that was still fine I think, even if it depended a lot on what the previous games had already showcased. I found myself getting more invested in the little npc storylines than the actual characters sometimes.
It is a very popular game because it was made to be popular. The gameplay is beginner friendly (hence the downscalling of the more complex gameplay stuff), and the story just feels like it was made to bait anime fans.

I don't think I have a universally disliked game that I really love (then again it is pretty hard to tell, since a lot of "unpopular" games have good reviews on the surface but bad chatter about them), but I do love a lot of niche games.
Maybe Apollo Justice, ace attorney. A lot of people in the AA fandom considered it to be the worst in the series (Until the actual worst in the series, Dual Destinies, came out). But when I played it at like, 14 years old I never found anything that wrong with it. One of the common criticisms is the contradiction design, which I guess I never payed attention to back then.
To me the contradiction design in the newer games is what I dislike. It's WAY too easy compared to the older games. Either I just got older, or they really toned the difficulty way down.

[Memory]

I loved all Watch_Dogs games, and that is exceedingly rare because people either love 1 and hate 2 and Legion, or love 2 and think 1 has aged badly and Legion is dumb.
But I like them all!

Here's my reasoning:

The first one was the start to the series obviously and deserves some credit. It kicked it all off, and despite the downgrades and admittedly cliché'd plot it avoided some of the pitfalls of other games that time, I think. Despite falling into the general visual style of "depressing and drab" as many of that era, it had none of this brown filter over it like GTA IV infamously did. The graphics were still extremely beautiful even on last gen (PS3 et al).
It established all of the lore we hold dear nowadays and I don't think it had aged badly in that regard. Blume is an interesting villain of a sort that hadn't been seen before at that time, Dedsec is a great companion group, and, well, T-Bone with Judas Priest?! 'Nuff said. All the scenes with him were amazing, in my opinion. The vibe of going from beaten down city dude to the country, making allies and coming back stronger than ever to defeat all the old foes really reminded me of GTA San Andreas.

The side content was really good and fun, too; I spent hours completing all the gang attacks because they were all tailored to a specific location and the level design was really interesting, allowing for various different approaches that felt natural regardless of which you take. It was basically all the fun of the main missions with all the noncommittal delight of side missions.
Being a vigilante was a blast if a bit repetitive but the multiplayer was where it would shine. Role-play activities such as grabbing a coffee or even playing chess: check.
AR side games for high scores? Check! Overall a great game though a little bogged down by the story being so... 2013. Everything felt a bit heavy-handed: tragic children, stern gruffy white dude looking into the sunset. But it wasn't terrible; Blume was an engaging antagonist and the game had its cinematic moments, but some other antagonists were less than interesting and felt more mechanical, like Iraq.

The second one is one of my favorite games of all time. The hacking mechanics were expanded wildly for this game and allow for intense strategizing similar to a tactical game like XCOM, the parkour was more fluent than ever, the game world itself was vibrant and although I am miffed at the removal of AR games/digital trips and the town sights and stuff, WD2 also had its fair share of side delight in all its collectibles. Some moments in the story wow-ed me completely as I didn't think they would put this amount of effort in it including sets and cinematic moments, like the Scientology knockoff takedown mission, the intricate sets and worldbuilding for the various companies, or especially the (very accurate) Helter Skelter festival; and I thought it was super funny when one o' my partners was at an actual hacker camp and saw the same kind of fire breathing dragon hacking contest as in-game, in real life. I thought it was made up! In general, I thought the structure of the game of non-linearly operating on taking down various enemies was a great one. It really made every one of them stand out in its own little arc that all culminated in a big finale.

To address the elephant in the room: as opposed to seemingly literally everyone else online, I didn't think the characters were cringy at all. People from the actual hacker subculture in real life do act that way, and that is what I find super funny about people online seething at their teeth about the cast. People think hackers are either antisocial neckbeards or subtle professionals, but most hackers I met were among the wildest people around: punks, queers, constantly moving around in the world, absorbed in online culture and memes, all-around silly and good humored. And they all share the same god damn polycule. I also didn't think there was ludonarrative dissonance between them being generally silly and also going around being violent -- because guess what, violent groups also have fun and aren't stern faces psychopaths. I know people who'd knock out a cop any day of the week and they're a blast to be around, kind and empathetic.

The third one, Legion, is an interesting one. It was universally hated or at least called a disappointment, but I also like it very much. I thought the play-as-anyone feature shined when you put it in permadeath mode, and as a roleplayer by nature I didn't have a problem empathizing with any of the characters. They ceased to be randos when they joined my team and I customized them, so I didn't see the issue. Plus the voice line diversity gave them rather unique personalities that I would embrace.

On the other hand, I thought that the resistance this time around was way less political and even a bit more centrist or right wing, which blew my mind. We are trying to bring back the police because they were the good guys compared to the private army? Our Dedsec posters now defend the British monarchy? Sure, corporate police state bad and all that, but that doesn't mean we have to return to the status quo before all of this happened! Why does Dedsec now defend the current UK, with its monarchy and conservative government? In Watch Dogs 2, we had hammer and sickle t-shirts, queer themed merch, random memes, anti-capitalist over- and undertones literally everywhere, and while it was all somewhat corny, it fit with the hacker vibe. Legion doesn't feel like hacker culture at all. It seems as if Ubisoft saw the right wing backlash against W_D2 and thought "we can make more money by pandering to the rightists this time around". Doesn't surprise me, what do you do, it's a corporation. They even left out all the anti-capitalism and substituted it with cartoon villains.

The side content was greatly dumbed down this time I feel, with the football game not catching me in the same way as chess or the AR games did, but darts was always fun.

But then again, it lifted itself up with the incredible story beats that even turned into existential horror here and there, with a bit of actual horror sprinkled in. The story was much darker this time around, but also a bit further removed from reality: I can't buy the premise oftentimes, and the setting feels a bit artificial and on the nose. I mean, come on, Albion projecting their ads from Buckingham Palace? It had none of the subtlety of the first two. In those games, Blume felt like any other corporation in that they had normal offices, normal people working for them, and felt situated in the 21st century. In Legion, it was all bleak and brutal, and everyone was either a corny freedom fighter with a one dimensional personality or an evil cyberpunk villain. I didn't buy that, it felt unbelievable.

Gameplay-wise, I thought the spiderbot was a fun diversion, although I wish it could climb walls. The hand-to-hand combat was amazing though and I really loved the shooting. The best part of it all was the play-as-anyone feature though, as I thought it gave way to a great deal of variety. I think people complaining about variety and thinking everyone feels same-y are the same ones that minmax their characters and only recruit the same few types of people and play them exactly the same way without even attempting to roleplay a bit. If you roleplay, it suddenly all makes sense.

Generally, I love all of the games, and that seems to be a really rare opinion online.

[manpaint]

When I was a teenager I was really into RuneScape 3, despite it's reputation of being the "tainted" version of RuneScape as opposed to Oldschool RuneScape.

[Version]

I loved all Watch_Dogs games, and that is exceedingly rare because people either love 1 and hate 2 and Legion, or love 2 and think 1 has aged badly and Legion is dumb.
But I like them all!

Here's my reasoning: ...

The only watch dogs game I played was 2, and I remember enjoying it a LOT. So much so in fact, that I 100% the game. Getting every single collectable, buying literally every item, or just overall doing everything there was to do (I had a lot of free time as a kid lol). The gameplay was very cool.
But looking back on it now, I can see how the story very much had that patented ubisoft performative activism. To quote from Umurangi Generation:

[TheFrugalGamer]

Man, I LOVED the first Watchdogs game precisely because of its "blandness." I found it really relaxing and used to play it after I came home from difficult days at work. I 100%-ed that one rather than the second!

My unpopular game though would have to be Deus Ex: Invisible War. It was the first one I played in the series and is almost universally hated because it was so different in gameplay from the first. I had no point of reference, though, because I had never played the first one until much, much later. It was the first time I had played a game that really dealt with the idea of transhumanism, and I was really starting to get into western RPGs at the time, so I ADORED it. I played it on the original XBox, and it got me into the series as a whole, since I've played all the rest since. Haters can hate, but I never would have played the original if I hadn't loved IW so much

I've tried playing it on Steam recently, and I do still love the game, but unfortunately my computer does not. I encountered a game breaking bug about halfway through, and haven't found a fix for it yet, so I may one day have to pick it up for the XBox again.

[xX_irkeneonz_Xx]

(I'm still playing this I just need to yell)

Recently I've been playing Magi Nation for the GBC after playing it years ago in high school and it's actually a lot of fun. I can understand why it was reviewed so poorly because playing this game on real hardware would be a nightmare, there can be over an hour between possible save points and there's a lot of backtracking and times where the games' a little slow, but with save states and turbo features most emulators have it's a nice playthrough.

The sprite work is also really good for a game on the GBC. It has a nice fantasy environment that actually feels more engaging to me than most gameboy games I've played and while the areas are a little long for navigation (and why it needs turbo sometimes) it kind of adds to the immersion of exploring a fantasy world like that. The same goes for the music, which for the technology goes along great with the areas. The sprites for the monsters are also all great and there's quite a few designs that I like. The gameplay is more based on a card game system so it can feel a lot more strategic than Pokemon does since you need to balance your energy with your own attacks and summoning abilities.

The dialogue also isn't as bad as you'd expect, it actually kind of made me laugh a couple times. It really does feel like the main character is a teenager who was plucked from our world and I mean that in a good way. There's also secrets both with characters and with areas.

I'll check out the GBA game at some point since I think there's a translated patch, but I really think the game could have had potential if it were able to continue as a series. A lot of the flaws have to do with hardware limitations or something that just feels like it could use some ironing out. I saw a couple mentions that it feels like the game pushes the hardware to its limits and that might be why it can be slow for loading sometimes.

I'd really recommend it if you like monster games of GC games, just with a tool that has save states. it's really an underrated game.

I've also decided to check out the other media and while I can't afford the cards right now the TV series sure is something. it's not good but my system has some nostalgia for it and it's kind of great for how awkward it is and how hard it's trying in some places to be a Pokemon clone. the game is actually a lot better than you would think if you know the TV series

It's a monster game based on a card game that was the developer's first project and it has no reason to be this good

[Zusk]

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

The entirety of the criticism towards the game is a feedback loop from when old Interplay fans got to play it instead of Fallout 3 back in 2004. I have never seen a game more unfairly get a bad rap as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Its eighteen years later and people still can't get over that initial "Where is Fallout 3" face response.

The game's story is fun, visuals memorable and gameplay fun. Its very similar to other games in the engine that Interplay made back then like Dark Alliance 2!

I especially disagree with people who call it the worst Fallout game. A low-budget Fallout dark alliance clone is always going to be just that. It's never going to be as bad for me as something like Fallout Shelter, which is actively preying on vulnerable people who play it to try to capitalize on them.

[Memory]

But looking back on it now, I can see how the story very much had that patented ubisoft performative activism.

Thing is, I genuinely think that the people working on these games wrote a love letter to hacker culture and unlawful political activism through that, and there are more than a few subtler references to the subculture behind it all. Not just hackers, but the main cast was very reminiscent of who you would meet in a modern, say, somewhat mainstream socialist youth organization in the USA. Of course it's not actually revolutionary theory and practice, but hey, it's a video game and what they did is radical enough especially for 2016.

I sincerely believe the devs and the little guys involved in the work, in that they genuinely wanted this game to have a message. The artists, the writers, the lore people. I bet the weird change in political direction in Legion was 100% a marketing thing after the lukewarm reception of WD_2, and because Ubisoft Montreal made WD_2 while Ubisoft Toronto made WD_L, the latter being more conservative anyway.

[DJoftheCoven]

Easily my favorite unpopular game has to be kingdom hearts: dream drop distance, which for some reason is almost universally hated in the broader kh fandom. Everyone says that the controls were weird, the mechanic of switching randomly between two characters was annoying, and the disney worlds had no real character or appeal to them. It was very weird to find out that this opinion--to hate on kh3d--was actually the popular one, because I had a total blast playing the game! I have very fond memories of playing it while waiting for my turn at high school wrestling tournaments. 3ds games in general hold a very special place in my heart, but kh3d really knocked it out of the park with its neon visuals, beautiful music, fun boss battles, and intriguing plot twists. There's so much about the game that I wish I could experience again for the first time, so it's always a little disheartening to encounter long-time kh fans shitting on the things that I think made the game great.

In a similar vein, a lot of original paper mario fans have made fun of me for enjoying the recent title, origami king. I think they might just be stuck in nostalgia sometimes! Sure, the older games had darker plots, but I thought that origami king was a very beautiful game. Especially the soundtracks and environments... have they SEEN autumn mountain? And the shogun studios theme slaps so hard!!

[Memory]

I'm surprised nobody has batted an eye at me saying I hate Mario Galaxy, so here's one I'm sure you'll have lots to disagree with.

I hate the writing in Rockstar games. I like the worlds and gameplay they create, but the stories and characters are insufferable. The last game that I played all the way through was GTA3, and I only managed that because the player character is silent and most of the story and dialogue is delivered in cutscenes that only last a few seconds.

I loved driving around in Vice City, but I hated triggering any missions because then I'd have to listen to Tommy Vercetti or one of the other awful people in the game speak. None of them have any redeeming qualities so I didn't have a single character I could rally behind.

In San Andreas, I like CJ but every other character is an awfully written stereotype. CJ is so minimally written that most of the story is conveyed through interactions with everyone else, and I couldn't stand them.

Franklin and Michael in GTA5 are okay. They are complex characters with enough reason behind their actions that I can sympathize with them. But Trevor is such a psychopath that I never wanted to play as him. I get that these are crime games and the whole point is that these aren't supposed to be good people, but they also aren't Tarantino films where you're just a passive observer. You're an active participant. I'm also aware that games are fiction, but I just can't dissociate myself from the characters enough to play as them (I also can't play as Jerk Shepard in Mass Effect). I prefer games where the player character is either a good/complex person or a blank slate because they're not just a character to me. They're the avatar for my actions in the game's world. Rockstar, however, seems to want to write movie characters and expects the player to act out their scenes. I'm not saying that's inherently bad, but it makes the games very difficult for me to get through when I can't sympathize with the characters and especially when I don't find the movies they're trying to write very good to begin with. They rely way too much on cliché, drawing inspiration from great crime films but in most cases only managing to emulate the surface level and missing all of the depth.

The Red Dead Redemption games are a lot better. The protagonists are generally pretty good, being former bad guys now seeking a way to leave that life behind; or they are motivated by a pretty understandable desire for revenge. There are also a lot of NPCs that I like as well. Old Man Jones, Marshal Davies and Mrs. LeClerk in Red Dead Online are a few of my favourite characters ever. However, there are a lot of other characters that I hate interacting with because they're so annoying. They all talk in the most bloviated way possible. That's why I preferred to play Red Dead Online instead of the story mode, but even in RDO there are NPCs who never shut up and you can't skip their dialogue when they're giving you a mission. I actually had to mute the TV sometimes because it's so annoying. I'm sure some of the dialogue is so long because they're using it to mask loading times for the missions, but I would genuinely prefer to sit through a blank screen instead.

In a similar vein, a lot of original paper mario fans have made fun of me for enjoying the recent title, origami king. I think they might just be stuck in nostalgia sometimes! Sure, the older games had darker plots, but I thought that origami king was a very beautiful game. Especially the soundtracks and environments... have they SEEN autumn mountain? And the shogun studios theme slaps so hard!!

I really liked The Thousand Year Door and have tried to get into the other games in the series. I've played the original, Color Splash and Origami King, and they all felt like they offered the same quality, but for some reason I wasn't motivated to keep playing past the opening areas. I'm not sure what the difference is, but none of them captured my attention like TTYD.

[Memory]

Okay your GTA take I have to disagree with.

I think GTA V had terrible writing overall, including Micheal and Franklin, but at least the two were likeable. It felt like Trevor was only there to appeal to people who still think random and edgy equals funny. Michael and Franklin both didn't really feel like they had any story worth telling though, or at least it wasn't pulled through all the way. Franklin's story for example was getting out of the hood and into the high life, but it kind of happened a fifth into the game and after that he was basically only the son of Michael without any character development or purpose. I wish they explored more of his hood life, also as a nod to San Andreas fans like me. Franklin was the most likable of all characters, though.

Michael had a decent backstory but I thought he was an abusive dad and husband in a way that was clearly intended to be funny to the gamers playing it. He was written as a misogynist aggressive and abusive wife beater, but not as a troubled protagonist of a crime drama, but as a way to point and say "wow, finally someone showed that bitch!" when he did something fucked up. Overall, the entire game has a very mean spirited and unrelatable way of handling narratives and "satire", which only culminated in the bigotry.

Apologists online always say that the GTA games have always been satire and made fun of everyone, but they either did that in a way of poking fun at things that deserve to be poked fun at (NRA parodies, police brutality, Scientology, American nationalist fanaticism), are entirely harmless (69 jokes, the anime parodies, the entire GTA 4 internet jokes), or are clearly written to be the opinion of a character who is wrong (sexism or racism from various characters throughout the series). GTA V however wrote their satire very obviously to make people agree with it, albeit through exaggeration. They wrote trans women as tall hairy crossdressing sex-obsessed men, not as an isolated opinion of a character but as a statement by the devs "hey, laugh at them". They wrote Michael being abusive to his daughter and favoring his son not as a way of showing he is a bitter old man who hates his family but for you to agree with him that his daughter deserved being physically assaulted for... participating in a TV show and having a boyfriend. And when she is upset, it is played for laughs. Even in a game where you go around committing felonies and murdering people left and right, there is a difference between pandering to gamers who want to see their bigoted world view confirmed in their games, and portraying things no rational human being has a different opinion over (e.g. murder).
And the less said about Trevor the better.

The story was meh. You spent most of your time obsessing over things the three-letter-agencies did, without you ever feeling like a criminal building a criminal empire. You always felt like the lackey of some FIB or CAA dude, not in control of your own narrative. In general, it was far too clean and upper class for my taste. Where's the mafia? Where's gangs? Where's any kind of organized crime beyond one or two forgettable antagonists who only showed up for like two missions? All of the game was fetching favors for government agencies, doing some heists, and in the end killing off everyone as if we remembered any of the people. The entire game kind of felt soulless like that to me. The layout of the map made it so every single area had some highway through it, so you never truly felt lost or in the wilderness. The "rural" towns felt like afterthoughts, which I hated. It felt unfinished, the satire bleak, and none of the characters felt like real people; all felt like caricatures. Hated the game. They even dumbed down the driving, ragdoll and shooting physics!

GTA IV however was a masterpiece. It was a classic GTA story the way it should be: starting off with nothing, working your way up the ladder, betraying and being betrayed, until you're the kingpin of the criminal world. Niko felt like a real person in that he struggled with emotions, anxiety, family. He starts off wearing trashy clothing working for a sexist mid-tier Russian mob and ends up in a suit with a machine gun in his hand running the town. The car designs weren't as clean and sterilized like in V, instead we had the real dirt and grime of Liberty City right at our fingertips. Throwing in windows, picking up trash and bricks, smoking packs. I only wish the game had a bit more of a rural area, a slightly bigger map, less muddy graphics and some side activities like in San Andreas.
IV was, in my opinion, only rivalled by said San Andreas.

San Andreas had a lovable cast of characters and I'm just a sucker for gang related narratives. I thought the map was absolutely beautiful with its art style, and it was absolutely amazing how it was constructed that despite being smaller than just GTA V's Los Santos, you felt like you were MILES away from civilization when you were out in Red County. The tiny towns with the backwater places were a wonderful contrast to Los Santos' detailed streets. They let me down a bit in San Fierro and Las Venturas, but those are details. The atmosphere -- again, beautiful. You had the trashy areas with all their grime and dirt, the rundown fast food places, but you also had towns like Palomino Creek or Montgomery, where you felt like you were in backwater OC. I spent days just exploring the map when I was young, role-playing being a sheriff in Bone County, feeling so far away from civilization. What they did with forced perspective and road layouts was absolutely insane.
I thought it was extremely satisfying to get expelled from the city, work your way up in the country and become a completely different person, and then coming back and systematically taking back the entire metropolis block by block. I felt like I was actually part of a movement in that game, even if it was "only" a gang. I cared for the Grove St. crews and CJ. You could genuinely feel your increase in power from the beginning where you just got a little piece off Emmet's to the end where you literally got a jetpack and rocket launchers and whatnot sporting a suit and a pimped out sports car killing off the people who supply your streets with dope. It was really, really fun.

[Memory]

Okay your GTA take I have to disagree with.

...

Hahah, I'm glad I got such a visceral reaction.

You clearly played more of GTA 5 than I did. My take on the protagonists is based on the really early game because I quickly ditched it for GTA Online and never went back. GTAO eventually became its own mess of terrible people, but this time they were actual people who exist in the real world and seem to be motivated solely by ruining your enjoyment of the game. I can't help but think Rockstar's story and character writing influenced the way these people play the online mode, feeling the game justifies their griefing because the characters in the story mode are also a-holes.

As a result, it's practically impossible for a new player to get into the game now. It's not just pay-to-win, because even if you use real money to buy the same equipment that the griefers use in order to stand a chance against them, you can't level up enough to be allowed to actually use it. When I tried to get back into it with a new character a few years ago, I couldn't even complete the first night club mission without someone in a flying car chasing me around and preventing me from completing a single task.

I never really played GTA 4, except for one brief time when my cousin handed me the controller to drive around for a bit. I found the cars felt really heavy and unfun to drive compared to the older games, so I kind of formed my opinion of the game based on that alone. That's the point where I realized the series was trying to be more realistic and less arcadey and started to lose my attention, so I migrated over to Saints Row.

[Zusk]

GTA 4 is weird for me. I think most of the people that played it and got into it ( Re: Teenagers with Xbox 360's back in 2008 ) only really played it as a ragdoll sandbox game. The driving in that game was very fun! The proprietary physics engine they had was absolutely stellar.

One of the most notable aspects of games that has actually reduced in quality since 2010 for me is actually ragdolls. Fortnite not even having ragdolls on death and just having enemies vanish in a puddle of glowy light is super disappointing to me. GTA 5 kept a lot of the physics of 4.. but it felt like it was toned down a bit? It kind of felt like the move from Oblivion to Skyrim, where the novelty of the inter-gen release's mechanics were fined tuned and wittled away with the subsequent release.

...San Andreas had a lovable cast of characters and I'm just a sucker for gang related narratives. I thought the map was absolutely beautiful with its art style, and it was absolutely amazing how it was constructed that despite being smaller than just GTA V's Los Santos, you felt like you were MILES away from civilization when you were out in Red County. The tiny towns with the backwater places were a wonderful contrast to Los Santos' detailed streets. They let me down a bit in San Fierro and Las Venturas, but those are details. The atmosphere -- again, beautiful. You had the trashy areas with all their grime and dirt, the rundown fast food places, but you also had towns like Palomino Creek or Montgomery, where you felt like you were in backwater OC. I spent days just exploring the map when I was young, role-playing being a sheriff in Bone County, feeling so far away from civilization. What they did with forced perspective and road layouts was absolutely insane.

100% agree. Especially on the art style. Playing the original game nowaday's feels a bit like you are jumping into a bucket of wet paint - the goopy-surreal look of most things giving the game a inherently nostalgia-baiting visual design.

[Zusk]

Easily my favorite unpopular game has to be kingdom hearts: dream drop distance, which for some reason is almost universally hated in the broader kh fandom. Everyone says that the controls were weird, the mechanic of switching randomly between two characters was annoying, and the disney worlds had no real character or appeal to them. It was very weird to find out that this opinion--to hate on kh3d--was actually the popular one, because I had a total blast playing the game! I have very fond memories of playing it while waiting for my turn at high school wrestling tournaments. 3ds games in general hold a very special place in my heart, but kh3d really knocked it out of the park with its neon visuals, beautiful music, fun boss battles, and intriguing plot twists. There's so much about the game that I wish I could experience again for the first time, so it's always a little disheartening to encounter long-time kh fans shitting on the things that I think made the game great.

I think for a lot of people, a part of the hate of KH2 was that it was a Osaka studio game, i.e. same studio that made Birth By Sleep and the other spin-off games. People elevate the Tokyo team's games - Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2 - super highly.
Like, if you look at Dream Drop Distance by itself its pretty fun! The music and visuals are neat, the game is fun. When you release a sequel to a game you have to compare it with the other games in that series, this can make games that are actually relatively good appear worse then they are.
Dream Drop does have its issues, mind. Its the point for a lot of people where Kingdom Hearts plot started to fall apart. I think most of it is just dissapointment for what the game could have been rather then disparagement over the game's actual quality. ( I have fond memories of getting the little frog guy in that game and leveling him up.. )

In a similar vein, a lot of original paper mario fans have made fun of me for enjoying the recent title, origami king. I think they might just be stuck in nostalgia sometimes! Sure, the older games had darker plots, but I thought that origami king was a very beautiful game. Especially the soundtracks and environments... have they SEEN autumn mountain? And the shogun studios theme slaps so hard!!

Same thing, I think! By itself Origami King is a fine little game. In relation to the series its in and the expectations of fans of those titles its very much the opposite of what a lot of Paper Mario fans want out of the series. Fandoms be like that.