Hot, cold, or semi-old, this thread is for you to come in and post your gaming takes. You can talk about specific games, whole genres, music, controls, consoles, or whatever you want, really, as long as it is video-game related. The idea of this thread is that you can come back and create new posts as you come up with new ones, kind of like the gaming purchases or what are you playing threads. This thread relies on users coming back to post, so hopefully it doesn't die. I can get us started: Bosses in shooting games are almost always bad. I've never played a FPS game that had a fun boss in it, and it's rare for 3rdPS games to have good boss fights too, Splatoon aside. Too much of it is running away from the boss, getting a couple shots in, and running away again. Bosses in these games often bog down otherwise great experiences. Games with awful bosses that come to mind are DOOM (1993), DOOM (2016), and Uncharted 2. Although not a pure shooter game, Horizon Forbidden West had a pretty awful one in this style too.
Oh boy. Well if we're going to do this, let's do some bigger ones Gameplay matters more than story: I will sooner finish a game with a shit story and excellent gameplay than a game that tells an amazing story but is an absolute chore to play. The Original Dark Souls is not a good game: I know some people who swear by Soulsborne titles, and while I can't judge the series as a whole, the first Dark Souls I do not understand why people enjoy it. Its sluggish combat that feels both heavy and restrictive and the numerous spots that are so bad with frames that you need mods to make them playable. Smash is a Fighting Game: This one only really comes up with hardcore FG players, but I standby Smash being a Fighting Game. Its in the subgenre of Party Fighter, but Fighter is still part of that, so its a fighting game regardless. This does not apply to the communities for general Fighting Games and Smash though, those are very different, as most Smash players don't overlap into non-Smash fighting games
Graphics are not everything --It boggles my mind to see companies roll out games with nigh on movie-like graphics--yet the game is either boring, or a pain to play. Gameplay comes first, then story, at least to me. Why play something beautiful if it's not fun?
People wanted me to post this soooo most of the main series of Pokémon are very flawed video games. It's honestly very difficult for me to even begin to explain my thoughts on something like this, so I'll just explain my two biggest issues before elaborating on both. A lot of Pokémon's issues center around two things - trying to spread too far too thin with appealing to players of all skill levels and a pretty terrible gameplay loop that's existed throughout the entire series up until Legends Arceus. I feel like this might mean a lot less coming from the Smogon guy, but Pokémon games are fundamentally really easy and always have been. There are definitely harder Pokémon games, like DPP and BW2, but they're all still pretty easy. This is by design. Whether this much is intentional or not, these are games where you're supposed to come up with your own challenges and new ways to play them. So, let's look at this from the perspective of a newer player. You're thrown into a world with minimal type matchup knowledge. A lot of things will make sense at a glance, like Flying being strong against Bug, but there are so many more that you would not be able to guess, especially the younger you are. At this point, the whole games boil down to a player having to try and know what type combination the opposing Pokémon is as well as what moves they're weak to from the type chart. There's at minimum 200+ type matchups you have to learn even with the earliest games and that's on top of keeping track of each Pokémon? You'll be able to guess some parts of it just at a glance, so it's a tiny bit less harsh than it may sound, but that's A LOT of memorization to pin on someone for just entry-level access to a video game. I played through a hack that modified every Pokémon's type and color scheme recently and had to re-memorize all of them, and that alone was fun, but that was with the knowledge of the type chart and I imagine it being way worse if you haven't memorized it. It's not like the games are impossible if you don't know the matchup chart, but it does basically turn the game into trial and error. Okay, so this move didn't work, which move do I have that will? I've admittedly never been at this point, so there may be some pieces to this I'm missing, but that really doesn't sound like much fun to me. The Gyms do exist as a pretty admirable way to help prepare players for certain types of Pokémon, but are not going to be perfect, especially with the Elite Four typically using differing types from the Gym Leaders. Okay, so the games being too much to memorize is an issue. Game Freak did combat this by making it so the newer games told you which moves you had are strong against any given target if you've encountered that species of Pokémon at least once. This absolutely does solve a big chunk of that issue even if not all of it, but also leads directly into another one - Pokémon games become absurdly easy once you do know the type chart. If you boil down the games to their core, the goal for most of them is for you to beat the Elite Four and Champion while completing the Pokédex. In order to progress through the game to do either of these, you need to beat the random trainers in whatever route or dungeon. These are always horribly easy because of how low-leveled they are and yet are the parts that will take up a majority of your time playing through a Pokémon game. This is a pretty big deal. Random trainers are so braindead easy yet take so much of the time of the game that it starts to feel more like something you regretfully need to do in order to get to the interesting parts as opposed to something you actively want to do. This problem gets even worse when you're one step higher than that and even the important fights become easy. At that point the whole game completely loses any strategy, which a game like this badly needs. Without it, there's nothing engaging about the gameplay since all you need to do is walk to a fight, click a button without any difficult execution, then walk to the next fight. Rinse and repeat until the game's over with only the smallest of difficulty curves and it extends even to the hardest games in the series. If you're at that point, you need to harshly limit yourself in some way with some challenge, like a Nuzlocke or something. This is something the Pokémon series should be good at, and I honestly do think this is where the game is at its strongest, but it's something a fair amount of Pokémon players I've spoken to just don't seem interested in doing for one reason or another. And that's also ignoring what happens when you're as deep as I am into the series. I know what basically every Pokémon can do to at any given point, there's exceedingly little that would catch me off guard and the games do very little to combat this. I've had to play through a Pokémon game where the opposing teams' levels got as high as 40 levels above mine in order to see any challenge and that was only because I didn't use any items during the game. Even a Nuzlocke with a level cap and no items during battle is not going to challenge me. The game will see the same problems as if I were just playing normally. Well, what about competitive Pokémon? I think competitive Pokémon has a ton of potential that will never be met. Multiplayer games with any level of depth in general are amazing because of the constant feeling like you have something to learn even for the best player of any given game, and this is no different. You have to learn teambuilding, what makes a metagame work, option coverage, and to just get in a player's head in general. There's so many layers to each of those things that you'll constantly be learning new things at different levels. Despite that though, the RNG element of the game is horrible enough to where I'd rather just play other games, especially when so much of every mainstream part of the Pokémon community is just not fun to deal with on some level. There's a reason I stick to places like this and the Smogon group I'm in, and there's a reason I stick with Smash for competitive games nowadays. Something that I'd understand is if people were to tell me the point where you'd need to do challenge runs or competitive play implies a lot of replay value, which is a point in the games' favor. I could definitely see this argument destroying everything I say in this whole post for a lot of people. But just leading up to this point - you need to get past the ridiculous amount of memorization when you're just starting out the games, either get through some horrible trial and error gameplay or strategy-based gameplay from a game that needs no strategy to win, and then you also need to approve of the idea of Pokémon having permadeath or some other similarly harsh rules taped on for the first time. Only then are you going to have a brief window where the game is genuinely good before getting to where I am. I honestly think these games are carried way harder than any other by nostalgia. Pokémon themselves are genuinely very well designed and it's easy for those to pull kids into trying the games out. Kids don't mind the learning barrier of the type chart because they'll do it with the goal of being able to play around with the cool looking monsters. This extends to most of the rest of what I said. I'm not going to say it's the only reason people play these games, there are still people who got into them at not such a young age of course, but it is what builds up most of the playerbase and hides them from most of the problems. There is a reason you'll see so many people saying "I never really got into Pokémon and feel like I can't," and this whole post has honestly just been me basically elaborating on that after realizing exactly why it's the case on my own. To clarify something as well just in case - I don't think the games being easy is a problem. I find a ton of 2D platformers easy but still love a lot of them. I recently played through Shovel Knight earlier this year and because of how much Mega Man I've been playing lately, I'm very used to this structure of game being built in a more difficult way. I don't think I died a single time in that recent playthrough, but still loved my time with it. There was still some level of execution and focus I needed to keep up in order for that to be the case though, and all of the other details like the music, level design, art direction, and simple but charming story helped elevate the experience. The difference comes where you completely take away that level of execution and focus and spread it across the whole game. A small thing that I think would help a bunch of the games that suffer from this is actually incentivizing completing the Pokédex. Giving the players multiple things to work towards at once just helps add a little bit of depth, and it really feels lacking in every game before Legends Arceus. Gens 5-8 have made an admirable attempt at this with the Shiny Charm and giving you EXP upon catching a Pokémon, but it still ends up feeling like something you do at the end of the game because of all of the things you can't feasibly get without sitting down and specifically trading for things to complete the dex. Despite all of this, I think Pokémon Scarlet and Violet genuinely did a very good job at fixing a lot of the problems. The "choose your adventure" aspect really shines through with Pokémon's versatility as a series. It's great being able to take on challenges you shouldn't be ready for and you don't even need to fight the random trainers to do so. You can choose at any point between battling random trainers to get more money, catching overleveled Pokémon to get adequate EXP at the cost of having less money to throw around, and going to raid crystals for something you can do with friends to get EXP relative to how difficult of a challenge you want to tackle. I went through the whole game basically battling no trainers except for the important ones and it put a lot more emphasis on the ones I did fight, making those battles feel actually special even if the order I took did end up being pretty easy. Those games still have their own problems but I genuinely enjoyed my time with them and could easily see myself revisiting them soon. I mentioned Legends Arceus before, and that game took a very different, but still great approach. That game pushes emphasis away from trainer battles entirely as opposed to resource management and multitasking. This game forces you to take steps at completing your Pokédex as you play the game, and you need to keep track of what you've already caught while also being on the lookout for both new Pokémon and items in the overworld to collect. It's all very quick and seamless, and it's not difficult but still is a weirdly enjoyable gameplay loop in a way I can't explain otherwise. You don't battle trainers very often, and that part is honestly the weakest point in the game for me because of poorly thought out mechanics, but the Noble Pokémon fights are a nice change of pace. The postgame superboss is also the first battle where I've felt forced to use items during a battle in a long time and that's pretty admirable even if it's because of botched mechanics. Even something like Pokémon Colosseum I think does an amazing job at this. It's not a main series game but it's very close. A whole game centered around double battles is something I thought I'd hate, but it really enhances the experience. The fact that the NPCs have varied teams makes it so it's significantly harder to find a truly safe situation for any given Pokémon in most cases, and it really makes you consider how you weigh your options. The game is very rough around the edges, especially with a lot of the difficulty coming from a horrible level curve, but the bottom line is that the game does bypass this issue. This all isn't really an issue I hear people talk about, but I'm not going to discount the chance that the developers end up sticking to what Scarlet and Violet did for future games or just trying something else that also tackles the issue. I don't expect anyone to agree with me even after reading all of this, but I hope whoever read through all of this (if anyone lmao) ends up understanding where I'm coming from here. I do not hate these games, and I'm definitely not growing out of them because I'm enjoying games like Smash and Splatoon more than ever, but it's still such a weird fate that appears to be weirdly exclusive to my train of thought.
Edit just in case: This is not in reference to the above. This is just the first take that came to mind cause it’s, admittedly, emotionally charged. I have nothing against competitive scenes as a whole either. You can like/have fun with multiplayer games without delving into competitive stuff. Now I’d like to hope nobody here needs to hear this, but I have personal experience dealing with someone who thought you HAD to be competitive-minded to enjoy all his favorites or you “weren’t enjoying it correctly” and weren’t worth his full respect. So I guess it has to have some kind of presence as a mindset? He also (I’m sure unsurprisingly) made things very unfun, to put it short. I cannot currently play Brawlhalla or Smash — the latter I used to adore — because the thought alone makes my heart race in anxiety. All that to say that believing somebody HAS to be competitive with every multiplayer game they have is legitimately harmful. It can turn people away from games they used to love and/or their communities, and depending on how far it goes it can have lasting effects on them. Many people just want to have fun and lessen stress. Not add stress, man.
Let's keep this going with some more interesting ones Hating a game because its popular or 'cool' to hate doesn't make you cool: You can have genuine problems with games just fine, but if you only dislike a game because other people like it, you have no arguement other than you are being petty. Even if its not your era like Fortnite or Minecraft for a lot of people, or even if its the popular thing to duff on like modern Pokémon, Sonic or anime games like Genshin Impact, if all you got is "Its popular", your arguement is not good. Length of a game does not determine quality, rather what is inside of that length: So many people have preached in recent years that games with short run times are not worth their pricetag. This is such a backwards arguement because they're basing a games entire existence on nothing but time rather than how the actual game is, what its composed of, and often how good what it has is. Not enjoying a game and finding it objectively Bad are two different things: Its perfectly valid to dislike a game that fundamently, is solid. That is not the same as an objectively terrible game. I don't like Majora's Mask, but the game is good, at times great even. I also don't like Mega Man X6, a game that is objectively a glitchy, poorly designed mess.
1000% this^^^^. I actually like Call of Duty, but I see a ton of hate for it in some of my other Nintendo circles from people that I can guarantee have never played any of the series. To build on that: Hating on games that you haven't played is weird: It's totally to fine to dislike a game, but you should at least form an opinion about it based on personal experience. I should clarify that it is totally fine to see a game and be disinterested by what you see. It's totally normal to share that with people too. It's fine to play a popular or unpopular game, decide you don't like it, and discuss it however you'd like. However, I think it's weird when people decide that they hate a game without ever playing it. There is a difference between being uninterested and hating, of course. Some people do this to popular games like Fortnite, Minecraft, or even Call of Duty. In my experience, there is never a surefire way for me to know that I'll love a game before I play it. There is always room for error. As such, it is best to withhold full judgement until I have played the game. The same should go for everybody. The reason I bring this up is because I've seen a huge wave of people talk about how bad the Last of Us Part II is, but none of them have ever played it. A lot of the game's detractors are people who heard it was bad, so they decided it must be bad. I'd just like people to be able to form their own opinions without trusting what other people say. Video games are not getting worse: I've had some discussions with people about if video games are getting worse over time. I just don't think they can be, largely because the video game medium is so large. On the other hand, I'm not sure I can say they are getting better either. These are just too large of blanket statements for me to qualify. Some series decline, but others get better. Some new series pop up and produce extremely exceptional products. Indie games have provided an entire myriad of new options for players. There are genuine criticisms to make, such as there being too many remakes today, but I think the medium is largely in a really good place right now.
This quote reminded me of a take that's developed in me over the past few years. Video games are the best they've ever been. I've never really understood the argument that "retro games are better" older gamers often make. While I found a lot of novelty in them as a kid, a lot of them don't hold up by today's standards. I don't just mean graphically either. Many retro action games have incredibly stiff controls, especially early 3D games or NES games like the original Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. They also tend to be overly punishing for the sake of padding out run time. A game over in many NES games meant you had to start the entire game over. Don't even get me started on quality of life features. Almost every retro JRPG other than Pokémon made you save in incredibly specific places. In Earthbound it was telephones, in Final Fantasy it was crystals, and in Wild Arms it was parrots. God forbid you want to take a break in the middle of a long dungeon. With a lot of modern games you don't have to worry about any of those things. Games that don't let you save everywhere usually put save points in reasonable places. In games with large maps and worlds you can quick travel. Game overs mean going back to a checkpoint or at least being able to keep your save file. Most importantly, you don't have to type in passwords or use save states to save your progress. Don't get me wrong though. There are some great retro games out there. Super Mario Bros 3, Chrono Trigger, the Final Fantasy games, among others still hold up wonderfully. It's just now that video games have been around for a long time, more developers know how to design their games in a way that doesn't inconvenience the player.
Ok this is the third time I'm going to try and write this post before I forget. FF7 was the last truly solid title in the franchise Sure there were good Final Fantasy games in the time since but there has not been a game since FF7 that has been genuinely classic and influential on the scale of what the franchise once was. FF8 and 13 being as bad as they are doesn't help either honestly.
Uhhh...That isn't exactly true. Say what you will about titles like FF VIII or FF XIII but people still tended to adore titles like IX, X, XII and ESPECIALLY XIV. Heck, the arguement that they are no longer influential to the scale of VII isn't accurate at all anymore given that XIV has taken the reigns as the go to MMO for people after the fall of World of Warcraft and its rise to mainstream dominance ever since Realm Reborn. Hell, XIV was so popular they had to deny people from buying more copies of it due to the chip shortage debacle, and thats a first for an MMO. And now back to random takes. The Era of N64, PS1 and Saturn is rough to go back to if one didn't live through it or grow up with it. This was an era of genre defining or breaking the polygon ceiling to enter into the realm of 3D, and given the sheer amount of QoL updates and progression with regards to systems built around 3D, many games made in this era that were once touted as cutting edge for being the first 3D games of the time feel...rough. Doesn't help that since games were doing things no one had mastered at the time, comparatively to what we have today, what was done back then tends to feel rough.This era was before my time and I have always found it rough to go back and explore due to things just feeling off as a result of the times
In that post I was referring exclusively to the Non MMO titles. Also That era of games is certainly not perfect but it has that charm to it going back now. I mean even the generation after it improved a significant amount in mechanics and graphically. Some of the PS1 and N64 era games are damn great to go back to. Remasters of those games coming out is also a massive bonus in this field.
