I often find myself replaying games out of nostalgia or to give another chance to a game I remember being bad out of a morbid curiosity. Sometimes I end up loving a game I hated after learning the mechanics of it or just taking another perspective. Other times I go back to one I remember fondly only to question why I’d ever love playing such a crappy game, and I’m not talking about guilty pleasure games I mean going from one of my favorites to thrown in the garbage. These radical changes in opinion are rare and entertaining to me and I hope to hear more of them.
Some thread rules:
1)Don’t be a jerk by insulting folks for loving or hating a game. They are just video games.
2)Don’t try changing others opinions by backseating, writing/linking a guide, or "well actually"ing every post about a game. They are just video games.
Guess I should start with an example. I played the first Resident Evil when I was really young (too young really) and didn’t get “tank controls”, conserving items, or avoiding fights so I thought it was a bad game.
A few years past and I saw my brother playing Resident Evil 4 and wanted to try it, fucking loved it and figured I should try out the old games again since we still owned them. Well that time around I got the controls and conserving items, but was way too conservative with items since I was so used to RE4’s system of giving you tons of items from fighting enemies. Which lead to me being really overstressed over ever bullet shot and health item used, got out of hand and I gave up on the game.
About a year later, I decided to play through Resident Evil 4 again doing a weird self imposed challenge of never going to the merchant for items. It was a very odd experience having such weak weapons and a tiny amount of space to hold items, but since I never had a need for money I usually ran from fights that I could avoid and using mostly ammo found in the levels. I eventually used the same mentality playing through the older Resident Evil games and it just clicked properly and suddenly the game is good out of nowhere.
Golden Sun. As a kid I loved it, I liked it’s puzzles I like the secrets you could find and I liked the combat.
I tried to play it again a year ago and it was really damn wordy for a kinda bland plot, some of the secrets/djinns were missable, combat and classes were neat but every class was just really just damage dealing with different visual effects and my god too many block pushing puzzles.
When I first played Fez, I thought it was okay, but not worth the hype of its development time. Even seeing all of the puzzles and secrets it didn’t feel like the result of four years to me. Now I think it’s one of the most serene, beautiful games I’ve ever played.
I also thought for sure Croc was great when I was a kid; it was a 3D platformer where you play a crocodile that goes “Kaboom! Shazam! Kersplat!” and fights embiggened animals and bugs. But it’s, like, really bad.
Yeah I had the same issue. I actually played it before Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and ho boy was that a mistake cause even simple things like movement feel awful in comparison.
Pokemon red and blue, the Pokemon games keep getting better with sun/moon being my favorite and even though I grew up with red and blue it’s a clunky mess. I can barley bring myself to play it that game feels awful to play.
I remember getting Majora’s Mask around the time it was new. While I played through most of the game, I never quite felt the vibe the game was giving me. Less dungeons, more open-ended, more focus on sidequests, the time-limit, and the general oppressive atmosphere. And then I messed up both the Anju/Kafei sidequest at the last possible moment and got stuck on the mini-boss in the Anceint Ikana Castle (or whatever the place before Stone Tower was called). Annoyed, I pretty much left the game there for a good while.
A decade later, I decided to revisit the game, and suddenly things just clicked for me. The whole oppressive atmosphere and the time-limit wasn’t a negative, it greatly enhanced the hopelessness and misery Termina was going through in its final days. The dungeons, while less of them, felt more complex and interestingly designed compared to Ocarina of Time (personally speaking, naitch). A lot of the NPCs and sidequests felt better written than OoT too. And MM has some creepy-ass shit to it, which I always adore in otherwise “intended-for-all-ages” media.
Majora’s Mask went from one of my least favorite Zelda games to becoming one of my top ones after replaying it.
Beyond the Beyond. It was my first PS1 game and I LOVED it back in the day. It was also one of my first real JRPGs; before that all I had played was Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest 1 and parts of Breath of Fire 1 and 2. Going back to that years later I realized how aggressively mediocre/bad the game is. The character faces in dialogue are this really creepy art style that I now find really unsettling, the encounter rate is about five times too high, the game LOVES obnoxious mazes and puzzles, the plot is incredibly generic, the strongest character in the game is made useless almost immediately and you don’t cure him until like 2/3rds of the way through, the gameplay and mechanics are extremely simplistic…
I mean, it’s not an awful game, unless the encounter rate drives you to break the disc in half. It’s just not…good. It’s the kind of game that, today, you’d have to play with some cheat codes and a walkthrough to really enjoy at all, and the story/setting/characters aren’t really worth the trouble.
It wasn’t until I started a second playthrough of Heavy Rain that I realized it was smoldering garbo. Up until, like, my senior year of high school I just enjoyed movies by default and they would have to be pretty dire to get me to notice while I was still watching them, and I guess it played into that same reaction.
[quote=“frozentreasure, post:4, topic:1626”]
When I first played Fez, I thought it was okay, but not worth the hype of its development time. Even seeing all of the puzzles and secrets it didn’t feel like the result of four years to me. Now I think it’s one of the most serene, beautiful games I’ve ever played.
[/quote]I really want to like Fez but it gave me really bad motion sickness. Everything is spinning in that game constantly.
In addition to seconding GoldenGoat’s Golden Sun sentiments above, I’m going to go with Donkey Kong 64. Someway, somehow, I was able and willing to sit through the endless collectibles and finish the (incredibly tedious and entirely too long) fight with K. Rool. How I managed that sort of patience as a child I simply don’t know. (Honestly, most 3D platformers of the N64/PS1 era that weren’t Mario 64 hold up extraordinarily poorly; Glover, in particular, comes to mind as it was also a fairly big part of my childhood. Still, Donkey Kong 64 is arguably the most infamous of those for good reason.)
I’m not gonna lie, I fell for the David Cage trap early in my video game life for both Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls.
I think its a given for most of David Cage’s work, because while I think they work from visuals and music standpoint, the story/writing is flaming hot garbage. When a story based game has a bad story/writing (On top of several other things, depending on the game), it doesn’t matter how everything else works, it still qualifies for being bad.
Except for Omikron. That was an absolute trainwreck from start to finish.
It was 2005, my family went on vacation, and the condo we rented had a PS2 and several games in one of the rooms(specifically, the one I slept in) including MGS2. I decided to give it a try, and I thought the game was unplayable because of how long the cutscenes were and how “wrong” the controls felt. This was after the 360 had come out, and the “standard” for games with guns was basically “RT/R2 = shoot, LT/L2/Click one of the thumbsticks = zoom,” mind you. It also didn’t help that there were no instruction manuals in the boxes and that my time to actually try it was limited since we were on vacation and all(and further limited because the condos didn’t have power for 3 of the days, thanks to Katrina) but I left thinking the games were just garbage.
Anyway, many years later I came across Chip & Ironicus’ LPs of the series, and I decided to use some of my Christmas money to buy the MGS HD Collection specifically because I wanted to try Peace Walker for myself. I eventually gave MGS2 and MGS3 a go and decided “Wow, now that I have time to get used to them these games actually rule.”
I thought Metal Gear Solid 2 was the worst one (according to everyone who ever told me), but when I played MGS1-3 back to back a few years ago, 2 ended up being pure genius and I loved it.
Also thought Dark Souls 1 was massive overrated garbage and I bounced off of it quite badly (didn’t even get to the Taurus Demon fight). Then I tried it again under peer pressure and it turned out quite good.
As far as the other way around goes, I thought Heavy Rain was amazing when I first played it. Then on my second playthrough a few years later, I realized it was massive garbage.
I just want to add a +1 to Donkey Kong 64. I remember when that came out and myself and every other kid I knew thought it was the best.
Well I bought a copy for myself a few years back and almost immediately couldn’t stand it. Collecting things just to unlock another character to go back to previous areas to collect more things just to progress to the next area to do the same thing all over again, ugh. That boss fight with K. Rool might be my least favorite boss fight in any video game and I’ll just leave it at that.
Whole heartedly in on the Donkey Kong 64 turn around, in retrospect I’m not sure why I ever liked it. Guess I just wanted a game that killed time, DK64 is really good at that.
I remember when I was a kid I thought Bioshock was a “masterpiece” of video game storytelling. But when Bioshock Infinite came out and presented me with a $60 burning dumpster fire of “racism is bad, but protesters can be bad too” bullshit and I kinda started feeling a bit… weird about all of the things I remembered being good about Bioshock. Cut to me finishing a replay of it and finding out that it’s pretty much the exact same package: empty symbolism presenting wishy-washy morals. Sure the gameplay feels good, but story-wise I think it sucks just as bad as Infinite. I can’t even play it anymore without getting bored
For over a decade I could not get into Super Metroid. I enjoyed the Prime series a lot but I would try every other year or so to play Super Metroid and just get either bored or frustrated or both. Then a couple years I got bored, tried again and it just clicked. I beat the whole game in a couple of sittings without even using a walkthrough.
It’s still not my favorite game in the series, but I can at least finally get why other people might say it’s theirs.
