Topic: What games were you 'late to the party' for?

I think a common aspect for many of us who appreciate the 3DS is that we couldn't afford all the titles when they were new, so we find ourselves going back and picking them up years later.

There are tons of titles for which I still haven't even arrived to the party, but recently:

• Finished Super Mario 3D Land. Very colourful and fun, perfect palette cleanser.
• Finished Kirby Triple Deluxe. It was...alright? Not sure Kirby 'clicks' with me. There wasn't much challenge but I enjoyed my stay well enough.
• Been visiting Picross 3D: Round 2 on and off. Very relaxing on a lazy day with a cup of coffee. There's a staggering amount of content in it for the going rate. Very good value if you like a good puzzle or two (hundred).
• Currently, finally, giving Radiant Historia a go (Perfect Chronology). The battle system is excellent. So simple but so clever. The story confused me at first but now that I understand it more as separate timelines rather than travelling back-and-forth through time (a la Chrono Trigger) it makes more sense.

So, what about you?

Anything and everything. Most times by at least three months and sometimes by years.

• Death Stranding, played during Coronavirus and the realisation this game came before it is powerful. Played it a year late.
• Doki Doki Literature Club, finished a few weeks ago. Not as scary as people think but a powerful experience. Four years late.
• Ocarina of Time, I beat it two years ago, so that's... 21 years, or just 8 depending.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I got it seven months after it came out.
• Stardew Valley, I started my game a few months ago, so five years late.
• Undertale, played it two years late.
• Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X, played five and 1.5 years too late.

At least I don't need to put up with fandoms, for better or for worse. For a game like Undertale I'm so glad I did it late, whereas with games like Stardew and DDLC it would have been better to be early.

How about every switch game, on top of like every popular Indie game you can think of.

@TheJGG The fandom point is a good one. There are plenty of games I enjoyed that ""the crowd"" felt very differently about. Maybe I have bad taste, maybe taste is overrated. ¯\(ツ)/¯

@Snatcher What, you can't keep up with new Switch releases at the low, low price of $60 a pop?

@Maximumbeans Well I got a lot of them, but damn I have a few I still need to get.

Shin Megami Tensei IV. Was very late to the SMT party, and picked up Strange Journey Redux a few years back. Playing the Wii U game Tokyo Mirage Sessions sparked interest, when I found out it had elements of Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei in it, the latter made me really curious.

Pretty much a large chunk of Zelda titles. A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, etc. I know, I know...it's really surprising coming from someone who is a massive Nintendo fan. When I was a kid, my favorite game series were Mario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, F-Zero, and Sonic.

We had an SNES model 2 bundle that came with ALttP, I think we got it at around 1999 or so. That happened to be the first Zelda game I ever played. I didn't play OoT until it came out on the Wii Virtual Console. I played Majora's Mask for the first time when it came out on 3DS, except I made very little progress in it. I did watch my brother play Wind Waker on GameCube, but I didn't play it for myself until it came out on Wii U. I did play a ton of Breath of the Wild the year it came out, however, so that's something to be proud of. lol

Most of them. I'm 20 so a lot of the classic Nintendo games are before my time, though I've caught up with a good number of them now (there's still a few big ones I haven't played like Majora's Mask, Star Fox 64 and the Metroid Prime games, but I'm getting there). Then as a child/teenager I obviously didn't have the money to buy every game I wanted at launch, and even now I often don't buy games until years later because there's so much else to play. As for the 3DS specifically there's still a lot of games I want for it that I don't have yet, including all the 3DS Fire Emblem, Kirby and Dragon Quest games.

Final Fantasy VII

Wasn't even a sperm cell when it came out; X ended up being my first FF game, and then that would get me interested in trying out the other PS1 and NES/SNES entries. When I found out it was on the PSN for PS3 I jumped on it just to see what the hype was about, and eventually did the same for the other games with the exception of I and II, where I played the PSP remakes instead of the Origins versions

FFVII is a great game but I think it's still not as good as IX, X and VI were in terms of main entries. I heard all this high praise about it only to end up really liking it but not really seeing it as this super transcendant masterpiece everyone around me was lauding it as. I guess that's just what happens when it's not your first Final Fantasy

• There is definitely the Witcher series, which i just got around to playing now, especially the third
  Installment.
• I guess i was late for Bayonetta, which i dismissed entirely back at the Wii-U and now after playing the
  first and second later, loved it.
• I also tried FFXV this year, which was a mixed bag. But at least i got a more finished version than the
  ones who played it back in 2016
• Definitely late for the Monster hunter Franchise, trying out World and now waiting for Rise on Pc,
  while i finish up Iceborne.
• Since Doki Doki literature got mentioned before, i was and still am, quite late for all kinds of Visual
  Novels like Steins Gate and Umineko.
• Also anything pre-Wii cause of age reasons and a bunch of other titles i sadly haven't even begin to discover as of yet : )

I like how no one cares this is a 3DS thread.

Another example of me being as late as the white rabbit: Sonic 1, 2, and 3 & Knuckles. Solely because we didn't have a Sega Genesis during my single digit years. We only had the SNES and N64 back in those days. But I did like the character of Sonic - I rented a couple VHS tapes of Sonic SatAM from Blockbuster (or Hollywood Video, can't remember which) and had fun watching the episodes. I even dug the theme song! I wouldn't play Sonic 1 and 2 until I got babysat after school, since they had a Genesis at their house. I wouldn't play Sonic 3 until I got Sonic Mega Collection for the GameCube, alongside all the other games that collection included.

@kkslider5552000 I didn't even notice it was in the 3DS section until you pointed that out. XD

@TheFrenchiestFry Your post reminded me of a funny story that happened. One of my relatives lent down a PlayStation 1 to me, with a bunch of games in that CD zipper case. (It had stuff like Crash Bandicoot 1 and 2, Tekken 2, and Wild Arms. I still have that zipper case with the games intact.) The only game in its original jewel case IIRC was Final Fantasy VII, and I went to try that game out...only for disc 1 to not work! I did eventually get to play the game, though I did have to get another copy at my retro game store. We never had a PS1 back in its heyday, we just had the SNES and N64 in the 90s. So I was especially late to getting to FFVII. lol

@kkslider5552000 it is innit?

Undertale. I played it for the first time on the Switch (in 2018 prolly) so that's 3 years about. I waited because while it was at it's most popular I had no desire to experience it for myself. I think when things like that happen it depersonalizes my experience. I'm no longer building an individual relationship with a game but going through the same motions I read about others having. Even when I finished it (twice) I felt underwhelmed.

Dark Souls/Bloodborne. I started these this year. This was kind of the same thing as with Undertale. I'm glad I waited for these though because the experience has been great and I'm basically playing them blind so it's been full of discoveries and deaths.

Also this thread is terrible for me since I largely stopped keeping up with new releases in the middle of the Wii U/3DS era. I've been late for every officially released video game in the past 5 years except maybe a dozen of them? And a handful of those were free.

I was late to Persona Q. The game is simply excellent, played it many times. But, the advantage to being late to the party is lower used game prices.

@kkslider5552000 For what it's worth, the two games I mentioned are on 3DS.

@MarioLover92 I played Sonic 2 and 3 during their heyday, I was very late to the Sonic 1 party. First played the game on Sega Smash Pack for Dreamcast.

@Sunsy Oh that's cool you got to play Sonic 2 and 3 back then! My parents did have a Genesis with Sonic 1, though they ended up giving them to my would-be uncle before I was even born. (I came to earth in 1992 - one year after Sonic 1 released.) Probably because there weren't that many Genesis games that interested them, they pretty much favored Nintendo over Sega. I guess that's how I got to be a massive Nintendo guy since the day I picked up a controller.

@MarioLover92 Yeah, my brother had a Genesis back then, so I got to experience the Sonic games there. Though I did get a Game Gear one birthday just for the Sonic games there. Mostly the Super NES was my system, so my brother and I had access to both Mario and Sonic games.

@Dogorilla I can't recommend the 3DS Fire Emblem games enough. My favorite of that bunch is Fire Emblem Echoes. All of the 3DS entries add different things.

For me, its Xenoblade Chronicles. I'm currently playing the definitive version on the Switch, but I'd been waiting to play it for so long. My Wii does not reliably read disks anymore and I never got the "new" 3DS, so I was pumped when it came to the Switch. I did play some of Xenoblade 2, but I'm enjoying the original so much more.