Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

I'm glad you don't suffer from motion sickness, playing these choppy, unlocked, frame games on Switch make me feel physically sick if I play for an extended session. And it isn't all Switch games, either, to make it clear and that is also kind of my point.

But yeah, gameplay is more important than visuals, but technical performance at least to me is the most important thing of all. Great gameplay is meaningless if it runs like arse.

But again, the circumstances are different here. Rating a game made in 1991, by 2022's standards, would of course be foolish. But that isn't the same as releasing a game in 2022, which runs like a game made in 2006 but reviewing it like it came out in 2006.

I guess indie games do muddy the water a bit, as do intentionally retro titles, but there is a difference between loving homage and just intentionally running like crap. There is also a reality around indie titles having smaller budgets but taking that context in mind again the difference is obvious. A small several person team making a game that runs at a target of 30 fps is not the same as trillion dollar plus Nintendo doing the same thing. Any rational person can see the difference.

But I agree that review scores, while offering some utility and convenience, are ultimately more harmful than they are helpful and deserve to go in the bin.

Your problems are a minority issue, at the end of the day. Phenomenons like Pokemon Go and PUBG just a few years ago made that abundantly clear. If those are deal breakers for you, that's fine. But they clearly are not for many people.

Though I do think you could make the case that the vast majority of Switch exclusive games (particularly nowadays when everyone has a handle on what the Switch can and cannot do) with significant performance issues have those issues because they decided making the game graphically more impressive in one way or another was more important. You can blame the console but people still knew what the console could do and specifically chose not to make games with great performance.

To me the real issue is that more non-PC games should (to a reasonable degree) have the ability to make the game look worse so it plays better. The moment "performance mode" for console games became a thing it should've become one of the most normalized aspects in AAA console games. Or that time Xenoblade X improved things like draw distance via a large but ultimately optional download. A thing that if its happened a second time in a console game, I don't remember it.

The Switch may be sold as a home console, but it's running on mobile tech, hence the different standards. Regarding reviews, I suspect most folks aren't that sensitive to some frame dips or lower resolution, I know I'm not.

I view it differently, getting these console scale game running on mobile hardware is impressive to me. Before the Switch came out, the best looking games on handheld were 240p 3DS and whatever Vita games ran at, which is still far weaker than the Switch.

But yeah, I don't see it as "Nintendo bias" just people adjusting their standards accordingly. I don't think people would have a problem with a weaker Xbox as longer as it could play games natively on the go like the Switch.

The issue is that normal people don't know what any of those numbers mean, and are more interested in whether or not a game is actually good. Minecraft is the most popular game around, yet it's not known for its brilliant graphics. The same concept applies to Nintendo exclusives.

@KryptoniteKrunch Agreed. Unless it's actually much inferior and it bothers me, I'll prefer to have the game on the go as it enhances gameplay for me so much more than smoother frame rate or better graphics. Switch stopped that horrible tendency of previous handhelds of sometimes getting their own inferior version of a bigger game (at least most of the time) and while it sometimes fall short, it rarely is as problematic as people try to make it out to be in my opinion. Also, reviewers constantly talk about this matter so the Switch is hardly receiving a pass, it's just that from the start, this console isn't trying to appeal to people that prefer their game on the highest settings so this points will usually lose importance unless it's big performance issues.

I think it's still considered an unpopular opinion in this day and age that visual novels are worth their price tag. A lot of people simply dismiss them and say, "I'll buy them on sale" like they're something less valuable or worth paying attention to in the same space as your average video games, but I just feel like a lot of effort was devoted to writing the story (texts that often last 50 hours or more of reading) and drawing the visual sprites, not to mention the soundtracks that accompany the reading and sprites to offer that unique experience.

It's hard to make a solid argument why visual novels deserve more attention because I was one of those people who got bored by the idea of reading something for 50 hours, but I couldn't be more appreciative of discovering the joy of the storytelling format in VNs, how their length means that they could develop characters over more time than a movie or even a TV show at times (many TV adaptations of visual novels fall short, for example). It gets worse when people simply dismiss them as a "weeb game" or something that only the basement-dwelling Japanese-obsessed (which I'm not since I love American shows as well) would appreciate, but thankfully, such unfair criticisms have diminished to a vocal minority over the past few years.

Since JRPGs are getting their spotlight nowadays much more than ten years ago, hopefully visual novels would someday get their due too.

I guess it's time this thread returns.

The Rabbid games on the Wii are way better than they should be.

The Persona games are fun for what they are, but the whole "power of friendship" schtick gets old pretty fast for me.

Yup.
That's why I played Rabbids games on Wii

Digimon Cyber Sleuth is not that memorable and kinda overrated.

I do not know if this can be called as an "unpopular opinion" (surely someone has said it already) but I didn't like The Last of Us. I played it on PS3 to found out what was all the fuss about.

Sure, it was impressive from a technical view, but the story, characters, gameplay...pretty standard stuff.

Anyway, many people love it, and I certainly respect that. It just didn't resonate with me.

Skyrim was just ok.

@HarmanSmith
I liked the story but I didn't think it was a masterpiece. I liked Telltale Games' The Walking Dead and Mass Effect 2 more than The Last of Us.

Unpopular opinion: I liked Pokémon Yellow more than Pokémon Red/Blue because it had references to the anime, which I liked more than the games.

Unpopular Opinion, Dark Souls I is the best Dark Souls.
2 is hot garbage, not even a Miyazaki made game
and 3 is a lot more of the same, done rather well but still lacks oomph

Unpopular opinion: The Witcher 1 bored me with its lore/codex entries that the game tried to get me to read, and this is coming from someone who loves visual novels, so the reading is clearly not the problem, but the presentation of said text in an uninteresting manner. I dropped it immediately when that happened. Doesn't help that I hate medieval-ish settings, I guess... Might have explained why Skyrim never hooked me either...

Dropped The Witcher 2 too because the opening battle was too difficult with its complicated battle system, requiring me to block with the shield spell and attack at the same time or I'd die.

I'm kinda at the point where genuinely, some games need to be shorter. I understand people love having lots of content in their games, but when its entirely there to waste more time at some point, its not more content, its just draining from the great parts of a game and wasting your life.

And like if people want that...ok, but between Xenoblade 2's time wasting mechanics and Arkham Knight's interesting sidequests bogged down by doing the same things over and over again (when the true ending is hidden behind doing all of them), these are perfectly worthwhile, complete, 60 dollar games, that were just extended even more than that so they could be worse. Even though the games, for any sane human being, are already filled to the brim with content, some of was already there for those people who want to have an absolutely absurd amount of content. Are you telling me that a already longer Arkham game with all the extras always in these games still wasn't enough? Are you telling me you needed gacha randomness and mission timers and affinity grinding for dozens of blades because a Xenoblade game needed to be longer? Are you nuts? Both of these games even have new game plus modes. Like...cmon.

@kkslider5552000
Some games do need to be shorter, yeah, especially if they just pad that game-time with unnecessary grinding, but in my experience, a lot of the longer RPGs I've played were meant to build the atmosphere and just served world-building purposes in general. Could SMT IV be shorter by cutting out all the NPC side quests that didn't contribute anything to the main plot? Sure, but then we wouldn't really care as much about protecting the demon world since we haven't interacted that much with the people living in said world.

I think that's why I prefer games that value "the journey" over the destination. Give me a memorable experience discovering new worlds, characters, and more importantly, their values, principles and philosophies. Broaden my perspectives with that journey rather than just give me a simple straightforward story that ends quickly once the bad guy is defeated.

@kkslider5552000 I wholeheartedly agree. There are games that I love but am procrastinating on finishing because they're too long (or because I'm lazy). I still haven't finished the Spider-Man PS4 DLC since I already finished the main game so I don't have as much willpower to finish the additional content. Also the story is absolute poopoo.

Oh sure, that's fine or at least understandable. Time wasting itself is not automatically bad, considering my fondness for Hyrule Warriors. But in Arkham Knight its almost certainly because more content is assumed to be better by default (especially in a sequel), and with Xenoblade 2 it was time wasting mechanics taken from mobile games that specifically exist in those games (and thankfully not in Xenoblade) to convince you to give them more of your money to get the things you want quicker.

Yeah, Atlus is also notorious for similar profiting tactics with their SMT/Persona games, adding on paid DLCs that would reduce the need for grinding. Definitely very annoying, but I think I've come to accept that most JRPGs just have that kind of grinding system, going as far as Pokémon games even (which is essentially a glorified SRPG).