Contrarian's Catharsis: The Bad Video Game Opinion Thread

SaGa Frontier is criminally underappreciated these days and SaGa Frontier 2’s graphics are incredible and I wish they’d do something hand-painted like that again.

Okay, here’s my bad opinion.

I don’t get Pokemon. I really want to, but I don’t.

I think a good part of it is that the two levels of time commitment and challenge in the game miss me completely. I find the normal, just-play-through-the-story stuff easy to the point that it’s boring, and while I could do something like a Nuzlocke run, I think that would harm the one thing I do like about it, which is catching 'em all. But when I look at the amount of catching, breeding, and grinding required to take part in the online battling without getting repeatedly smashed into dust, I know there’s no way I’d ever have the patience to do anything other than lose over and over.

So somehow it just goes right under my feet and over my head at the same time and I’m just in the middle not liking Pokemon.

I can get behind the simplicity of Pokemon, but each battle is painstakingly long, especially in the later generations. Maybe I’m spoiled by Shin Megami Tensei games having each attack play out usually around five seconds, but an attack takes around 15 seconds as it tells you the attack used, plays the animation, subtracts the HP/plays the animation for the status effect, and then the next person goes. It’s worse once you introduce status conditions, because the game feels the need to waste my time telling me that a status condition went into effect, then playing the lengthy animation for that.

It’s obviously for padding purposes, and it frustrates me that Pokemon is so keen on wasting my time.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, a lot of the pokemen have issues with pointless padding, but I’m pretty sure Pokemon has had the option to turn off battle animations for a while.

Sun/Moon also seems largely happy not to be full of boring bullshit, but the quick google I did to make sure I was right about the first point also tells me that there are some battle animations you can’t skip so :iiam:

I’m glad you brought up SMT, because that’s basically what I want from Pokemon, which is why I just play SMT games instead. Let me run into cool monsters, make them my buddies, and use them to fight other monsters, but also with enough challenge and an involving enough story that I’m hooked and pay attention the whole way through. SMT owns.

Apparently they’re making new ones.

All animations can be turned off. Unless you’re playing against another player, in which case they’re forced to stay on.

I really, really enjoyed Breath of the Wild. HOWEVER, it’s size means I’ll probably not replay it for a really long time, and I’m really hoping that Nintendo makes more Zelda games that follow the traditional Zelda formula. I know people like to call the formula stale, and I encourage the series to play around with it, but I like getting new items and going through dungeons. I think linearity can actually be a strength in design; it allows for stronger pacing and a more cohesive narrative, as well as allowing for more complex and interesting dungeon design as the game ramps up its difficulty.

Skyward Sword is my favorite Zelda game, btw, so what I’m looking for in a Zelda game is probably not what its detractors look for in a Zelda game.

It’s weird, maybe, because while I absolutely agree that linearity can be a strength (like, Uncharted would not benefit from being open world or nonlinear in the least), I don’t like it when it’s applied to Zelda. Why that’s weird, though, is because the series has more games that are fairly linear than games that are nonlinear by a pretty huge margin. I see nonlinearity and unguided exploration as core to the Zelda series, but aside from the first game and Breath of the Wild, I have just about nothing to back that up.

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Oh, I have another one.

I hated the little I played of Super Mario Galaxy.

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Zelda, from adventure of Link to skyward sword, has been very good at providing a completely linear experience while making the player feel like they’re in control of where they can go.

For what it’s worth, I suspect BotW will have a singular critical path that ~60% of players follow their first time through

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I think if a player was just going to follow the main quests in Breath of the Wild, eventually it still feels pretty nonlinear, because at a certain point they just say “do these four things, don’t really care what order” and set you loose. At that point you’re closer to one than the other three, but after that, there isn’t really anything directing you to one or the other.

And even then all that stuff is technically optional, up to and including getting the Master Sword so I’d say it’s about as nonlinear as a game can be while still having any sort of structure at all.

I think you’re right about your first point, but the cracks start to show at Wind Waker, if you ask me. To be fair, that’s also the first one that at no point lets you decide which dungeon to do next–there’s always a set order. While Ocarina and Majora’s Mask did have sort of a dungeon order, there were some points at which you could decide which of two dungeons to do first. You never get that in Wind Waker (a game I otherwise adore) which means it ends up being much less veiled in its linearity.

I eventually gave up on Type-0 and just looked up a plot synopsis out of morbid curiosity and discovered to my horror that A: I was almost done when I gave up and B: The plot begins to make even less sense the more you play and seems to have spawned an almost Silent Hill 2 following for analyzing what it all means. Which is good for a psychological thriller, not so much for a war drama!

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War drama that swerves into AUGH THE WORLDS ENDING in the 20 minutes of the game.

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as long as they’re not analyzing the status of the main characters’ foreskins, any theories are fine by me

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I like Metroid Prime: Federation Force. It’s a fun little co-op shooter that never got a fair chance because people were too mad it wasn’t the next big Metroid title.

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Same. Federation Force is actually really fun if people give it the chance.

Speaking of, and I mentioned this before in brief with my thoughts on Skyward Sword, but I don’t think motion controls are bad. They’ve never really worked badly for me, and the very few times they did. it was because the game was bad. Even without motion controls the game would still be trash.

Regarding motion controls in Skyward Sword: I also really liked the motion and was secretly hoping that BOTW would have motion options for swinging weapons around.

Could you elaborate?

Both big first-party Wii games I found either frustrating (Galaxy) or so intensely boring (twilight princess). I hated the camera angle in Galaxy, which made it hard for me to platform, which made the death pits super frustrating. I’m not all that good at 3d Mario games, which is part of why I ADORE Sunshine: F.L.U.D.D. made the platforming not just tolerable, but really enjoyable, and the instant side-somersaults were so incredibly useful. The fact that doing instant side-somersaults isn’t really possible in Galaxy meant all my favorite movement options weren’t available.