I had a similar reversal on Majora’s Mask. I didn’t think much of it for a while, but somewhere along the way, I realized it was actually amazing. What also helped was the 3DS remake coming out; I forget which review I read it in but someone, somewhere, pointed out that the major theme is forgiveness. That’s some good shit right there.
For that matter, same with DK64. I was so into it when it first came out that I got all collectibles, but I can’t ever imagine touching it or its literal thousands of collectibles ever again.
While I’ve got Zelda on the brain, I wasn’t all that into Wind Waker when it first came out. I got it early on, but it never clicked with me. I don’t think I got very far. Then, one day, I got over my weirdly hostile distaste for the sailing, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s actually really good!
I can’t think of anything else that properly applies, but I feel like Paper Mario Sticker Star deserves a (dis)honorable mention, because I can’t think of any other game where my opinion changed so radically within a single playthrough. I loved it all at the beginning, and I hated pretty much everything about it by the end.
I remember as a kid really liking Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. I mean, come on! It was D&D on a computer, and was using the most modern ruleset! I tried to play it a few years ago and ooohhh boy. It is a D&D game where you don’t get to manually level your characters, you just select what class they take a level in and it makes all the decisions for you. It is a buggy pile of crap that has solutions such as “restart the game.” And, I think my personal favorite, when you try to uninstall the abomination it can wipe your system files for no other reason than spite.
Man, fuck that game.
I used to think that R-Type Final was extremely mediocre at best because the huge ship roster was just a cover up for how bad the stage design was. Went back and played it again and it was actually not bad, in spite of the battleship stage taking forever and the weird “dimension travel” area with the distortion filter on the screen that can mess you up (and is dependent on your ship speed as I’ve found out recently)
Interesting about Fez- we basically had the exact opposite response to it.
Initially I was super into it’s world and puzzles, I marathoned the required amount of cubes to “beat” the game initially and had a blast. However, I was not a fan of how A lot of the anticubes required you to translate the ingame alphabet, find the sequence needed somewhere in the level, and then translate it. I felt like it was a huge drop in quality in puzzles and honestly left a big sour taste in my mouth.
I hear you, I hate in-game alphabets you have to translate yourself. I went so far as to go into Aquaria’s game assets and replace the assets for their alphabet with the actual alphabet (which, thankfully, they had left those assets in there so I didn’t have to photoshop anything).
If a game has a translatable language they should give you an in-game way to translate it automatically. It’s a boring puzzle.
The alphabet actually only gets used in one puzzle, believe it or not, and it’s not even related to an anticube. The majority of anticubes are the input cipher, which is a lot faster to translate, though I do still appreciate the sentiment, especially since the number system does unlock two anticubes.
I have since seen other people love them, but every time I so much as see them played, they stick out to me as completely, utterly awful. The entire collectathon genre, in fact, strikes me as utterly awful and I don’t even understand any more where the nostalgia comes from. I can’t recall why I enjoyed them when I played them, other than that the N64 had so few things to play in general that I was even slightly good at, especially since shooters were not allowed in my home as a kid.
I heard about it a lot from my significant other and just couldn’t understand why he was so excited about it. I wasn’t very big on action games in general and everything I’d heard about the Dark Souls phenomenon (starting with Demons’ Souls) made it sound like a supremely unfun experience.
Then he brought it over on a visit and played it in front of me, and eventually coaxed me into giving it a try. I spent a good 10-25 minutes trying to get past a single guy in the Undead Burg.
Now I’m better at the game than he is and also much more invested in the series as a whole than I ever expected.
I’ve been going through some old PS2 games lately revisiting some stuff I liked and often never finished, JRPGs. One that I got a good 20 hours into before having my free time sucked in by something else was Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, and the only thing I remember was liking the combat and leveling system. I could not for the life of me remember anything else, so I started replaying it the other day and I still like the combat, level system, and soundtrack of the game. But the plot, characters, designs (outside the monsters and main temple), and dungeons where a special kind of bad that I guess I shoved out of my mind. Especially the dungeons, holy shit!
I dunno if this quite counts, but I got Battleborn as a joke to suffer along with the LP and I started playing with a friend who loves it and he’s been making me have a good time with it? I would not call it gold but it’s alright I suppose. I have fun with it.
My partner bought me Final Fantasy XIII when it was new and I couldn’t get into it, but tried several times over the years because… well, my partner bought it to me.
I powered through it late last year and I actually, really, really liked it.
I loved most of the characters, enjoyed the story even if it was pretty basic, and found the combat system really fun when I started to get the hang of it.
I was (and still am) pretty uninterested in Night in the Woods, because narratives about how difficult growing up is tend to just leave me bored and frustrated.
However, my opinion changed somewhat after I saw someone identifying with the main character and using their feelings about the game as an impetus for positive change. I still have absolutely no interest in the game, but at least it doesn’t annoy me half as much.
The Witcher 3. I put 20 hours into that game before burning out, then realizing after I switched to a fun game just how little I was enjoying it. TW3 has a lot of surface level polish, but I found pretty much everything beneath the surface to be janky and really unfun.
I got into Witcher 3 more than I did any of the other Witcher games, but that’s not really saying very much. If you ask me, Witcher 2 has the worst hack-and-slash combat in any game I’ve played, which is a shame because I really wanted to get into the world and characters that Witcher 2 had.
3 was more tolerable for me, enough for me to get to Triss burning down the Church of the Eternal Fire, but the combat was still garbage in comparison to a lot of games. It’s weird, since the game is so focused on hunting down monsters (more so than the other games, perhaps), that the combat is still egregious. It got to the point that any story worth deriding from Witcher 3 isn’t worth the amount of deaths coming from a good portion of combat encounters.
I had the opposite experience with Witcher 3 where I wanted to get into it, but the gigantic open world-ness of it was really overwhelming so I just stopped before I really got anywhere. Came back to it a month later and was really good at it, to the point of needing to play on Death March to get any challenge out of it. Not that the combat is really a selling point of the game at all, but I really did not understand why it got so much hate for it.
I used to really like RPGs when I was younger, but as of recently, I’ve noticed I don’t really have the patience for them anymore. Unless they’re exceptionally good or action-based, like Xenoblade.
Witcher 2 has the worst hack-and-slash combat in any game I’ve played
Honestly that’s pretty much why I’m hesitant to try out 3 because the combat in 2 is just so mindlessly boring, especially in comparison to the otherwise complex narrative. I also couldn’t help but feel like the story was trying to be a sort of Game of Thrones-type “dark fantasy”, but I couldn’t get into it at all. It’s not all that fun having to constantly read up on a bunch of backstory just to get a vague grip of what’s happening at the beginning of the game.
I mean to be fair, the Witcher games are technically sequels to the books, so most references and plot points from the books would be easily lost to people that stuck to the games alone.
On the topic of Witcher 3, for the longest time I was negative towards it for getting recognition over(what I thought at the time, mid 2015) the superior Bloodborne. Then, come October/November 2015, I get a cheap copy of W3 at gamestop and I fell in love. I just love pretty much every character. Yennefer is great, Triss is fun, Ciri is fantastic(I want a Ciri spinoff so bad), and Geralt is just so tired.
I’ve rarely changed my opinion on most games, though. Even bad ones I liked as a kid I still love, like Sonic 06 and Donkey Kong 64.
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