Topic: Things You Got Very Wrong

sniff sniff

What’s that smell?

Why, if it isn’t the delicious, nutty aroma of humble pie — fresh from the oven! I’ve baked enough for everyone, so let’s tuck in!

Anyway, what are some things you got very wrong? They can be game-related or otherwise. They can be boldly proclaimed predictions or just things you’ve privately thought that have turned out very wrong. Anything is fine, so long as it’s been roundly pounded into the ground by Mother Time.

I’ll start.

The Great Ace Attorney games will never be localised

I mean, really. Victorian Brits Indulge in Mild Racism Towards Poor Japanese Exchange Student: The Game. Where is the global mass-market appeal? Well, clearly somewhere, as the game has sold over half a million copies (on top of the 3DS originals).

After several years had passed since the second game was released in Japan, and I became damn near convinced that there would never be an official English version. But now there is (albeit on a different console), and it seems the localisation team has done a cracking job, to boot.

Grape jam should not exist

Grapes. They taste sweet. ‘Sweet’ is the prevailing flavour of games. Boiling them with sugar will surely just make them more sweet. Too sweet.

Well, turns out grapes do have a complex enough flavour to make a decent jam/preserve/conserve/whatever. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, given that wine is a thing that is also made from grapes and people use all sorts of whacko adjectives to describe that. But I was surprised (though not upset).

Anyway, here is the humble pie I promised. It’s still warm. Bon appétit!

That TOTK would be a disappointment due to how hyped the game was.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Me believing that that video games were more boring than books.

I thought Tears Of The Kingdom would disappoint me. It is my favourite game of year and the most fun I had with a Zelda game. 100%ed it and played for over 350 hours. Definitely one of the best games ever made. This is the kind of being wrong I can easily live with, expect the worst, get the best.

All these years I'd pronounced "Gerudo" with a soft "G" (like "jelly") but it's actually hard (like "grape"). "Breath of the Wild" proved me wrong that way.

And Arceus is pronounced with a hard C (like "Key") thanks to the RKS System ability in Pokémon Sun & Moon (which allowed certain items to change Silvally's type, similar to the Plates). Someone really should have told Ryan Reynolds this when he said "Sweet mother of Arceus" in Detective Pikachu.

@HenryKibble My most egregious Pokémon faux pas is pronouncing Suicune as “SWI-seen” for years. I don’t know why. My brother pronounced it that way, so I did too.

I still think you can make the case for Arceus with a soft C, so long as you wave your hands and say “that’s the original Japanese pronunciation, you see”.

Apparently the hard C pronunciation became canonical in English because one guy involved in the anime dub was worried British English speakers would hear it as “arse” and giggle. But like, Ryan Reynolds’ performance is also canon (or at least, ‘official media’) and they didn’t correct him there so I think both pronunciations can coexist!

I mean, if people can get away with pronouncing ‘emu’ as ’EE-moo’ then I think ‘ARE-se(e)-us’ is fine.

My biggest wrong predictions I remember was around 2012 when I thought the Wii U would be a success (and believed that to some degree until it became obvious Smash 4 wasn't a game changer) and Halo 4 would underwhelm sales wise (it should have based on how Halo would be treated for the next decade, but oh well). I also remember thinking I was gonna start playing games less starting that gen, which...was true in some way (Nintendo fumbling the ball) but didn't last in the long term. Also, I thought Assassin's Creed 3 would be my 2nd favorite game of the year (since by that time nothing was beating Xenoblade) and not the beginning of the end of my interest in most Ubisoft games in general, so clearly 2012 was a bad year for me to try to be correct. And yes those were all around the same time and I remember so few predictions I've made since tbh.

I’ll agree with the sentiment that in the back of my mind I was worried that TOTK was going to be a disappointment, both for fans and critics. I just didn’t think it could possibly live up to the hype that so many had for it. But yeah, I was wrong and I think the majority of people consider it easy GOTY material, myself included.

Another thing I proved myself wrong about was the notion that I would never get into Fire Emblem and Xenoblade just based on the fact that I generally don’t like JRPGs… oh boy. Three Houses is my favorite strategy game bar none and Xenoblade 3 is my favorite RPG bar none. How the tables have turned…

I don't know if this qualifies as 'very' wrong, or just a bit wrong, but for quite some time I turned a cold shoulder towards Rocket League, basically dismissing it as a game for Jeremy Clarkson fans. I underestimated how much it plays like a soccer-basketball hybrid and so is actually pretty up my street. I've never become really good at it, but must have played nearly 200 hours since it's been on Switch.

Opposite of everyone else here, I was super hyped for TOTK, and it ended up being my least favourite 3D Zelda by a significant margin.

@kkslider5552000 Even now I can kind of sympathise with the Wii U as a… ‘concept’. The Wii and the DS were two of Nintendo’s best selling consoles, and the Wii U is sort of a ‘hybrid’ of the two: a dual screen Wii (or WiiDS, if you will).

The fact I didn’t buy one at launch though (a first for a Nintendo console?) goes so show that I wasn’t 100% sold from Day 1. It wasn’t until Splatoon came out that I really got excited enough to buy one. There were plenty of ‘good’ games released before that, but few that I’d considered ‘must have’ as they simply didn’t feel as ‘fresh’. Even Smash and Mario Kart had perfectly decent entries on the 3DS, so I didn’t feel much necessity to buy a brand new console just to play them again.

I’m still not completely convinced the Wii U was ‘doomed to fail’ had the games (and perhaps marketing) been there earlier on, but I don’t think it has the potential to be anywhere near as successful as the Switch. Probably not a minority opinion, that.

I had firmly believed that I would consistently crush all 98 of my enemies in any given F-Zero 99 race.

I am finishing in the "Top 10" (as they sneeringly put it) far too often.

I am feeling wrathful, not humble.

I had no interest in Splatoon when it was first revealed in Nintendo's E3 2014 Direct. I didn't think it would fail. I just thought it looked kind of cool but wasn't for me. But once I learned more about it in the year since and played the Global Testfire demo, I was finally convinced it was fresh and wasn't surprised to see it take off. It still wouldn't be until Splatoon 2 when I truly became a fan though.

On the flipside, I was interested in ARMS right away and I thought it would be the next Splatoon as a great, new IP for Nintendo.

I thought xenovlade one and two was just going to be a wifu cringfest about freedom and life…..I was so freaking wrong!

Like @gcunit I, too, dismissed Rocket League (and Fortnite) but had nothing to play one day so downloaded both and three years later, I'm still playing both.

I'm not very aerobatic in RL and can't build for pixels in Fn but I enjoy both games and that is what matters.
In fact, I've bought quite a few skins in Fn but only the Knight Rider skin in RL.

Also, I genuinely thought the Switch would fail.

I couldn't see how it could successfully go up against the PS4 and XBO.

I honestly never thought that goldeneye 007 would get a release on NSO due to copyright reasons.
And when they revealed that it would be coming for NSO i was pleasantly surprised that I was wrong and with quest for Camelot on NSO (WHY?!) I honestly want to see a few other licensed games on the service.

@kkslider5552000 @Maxz
I'm on the same page, the Wii U is the thing I think I got the most wrong when predicting. I do remember in 2012 being very sold on the concept and thinking that it was the obvious next move. But even as someone who was enthusiastic about it I do remember post announcement being fairly hesitant about being a day 1 buyer. I did end up getting it on Day 1 but I was far less convinced than I was for Wii, Switch, DS or 3DS (and I waited 6 months for 3DS)

But the core concept of it? It was also basically the only point in the progression of tech where the Wii U concept did make sense. 5 years before the Wii U LCDs were too expensive, WiFi wasn't high bandwidth enough and hardware accelerated video encode/decode just wasn't there. 5 years after the Wii U portables are capable enough to drive a passable HD image. So in that kind of little window you have the Wii U but you also have Steam in-home streaming and Steam Link

I thought it'd be a fairly easy concept to communicate and that people would grab onto it. Home console tier visuals on a portable screen, like we eventually got fully realised with the Switch. Like a beta-test of the Switch. And I thought that Sony and Microsoft would come along and have a go at the same. Yeah, it didn't pan out like that.... and at this point the window has passed....

@AndroidiOS Same - I can't build or aero for **** but still playing both games.