Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

This is the truest statement ever said on this game. From a gameplay, visual aesthetics, music, world design perspective, one of the best games ever made. In terms of many aspects of quest design and how they are all paced, combined with the issues and inherent size of being a Xenoblade game, slowly but inevitably the most infuriating game I've ever played.

I'd think that the combat system in XC1 does the job for the main story. It just gets a bit dull once you're into the post game and practically every enemy can either be topple locked or cheesed from behind a rock with Riki's damage-over-time attacks.

XC2 might have a steeper initial learning curve, but gives you a lot more variables to play with and you can't just rinse all the superbosses with exactly the same strategy.

I just prefer 3's combat because it's fast moving like 1's, but more complex. It's also actually explained well as well, where as 2's is just throwing you to the wolves.

While XC3 has my favorite combat in the series. I actually do love XC1s combat and I miss XC1s chain attacks to some degree. I don't miss the RNG part of it but I do miss how quick they were to do. Chain attacks in XC2 and XC3 are a lot of fun and they have more depth, but as a result, they tend to be a little long. If you're in a situation when your party isn't built well, there may be times when you have to do chain attacks multiple times on a boss. With the lengthier chain attacks, it can get tedious.

Granted, this hasn't really been a problem for me in a while but I do remember fighting the final boss of XC3 and being slightly annoyed by it lol.

Yeah, I think XC3 has the best of both its predecessors when it comes to the combat. I liked the way I could take some of what I learned from them forward, but there were still subtleties to be picked up.

Hopefully it wasn't too bewildering for newcomers to the series. That seems to have been the main problem with XC2.

@Matt_Barber XC2 was bewildering for even people who played 1, since it barely built upon 1's foundations unlike X, and the tutorials were just horrible.

I can't believe this is actually unpopular. But here goes. The Switch version of Link's Awakening makes all prior versions objectively obsolete in every conceivable fashion. The remake is one of the best looking games on the switch period. It's art style is absolutely incredible and exactly what a faithful remake of Link's Awakening should look like. Also every person who complains about the frame rate is fine with the drops in BoTW and TotK. Further, having only 2 buttons to work with in the original makes it nearly unplayable in 2023. And being yelled at by an agonizingly slow text box every single time you brush up against a pot without the power bracelet actually makes the original an unbearably tedious game to play. In my view there are only two reasons that anybody makes the delusional claim that they prefer either of the Game Boy versions over the Switch one. Reason 1: They played it back in the 90's as a kid and have a nostalgic soft spot for the original. This makes them more willing to overlook the flaws of the original and ignore the vast improvements in the Switch version. Reason 2: They hate the absolutely perfect clay chibi art style. They're exactly no different from the losers in 2001 who lost their minds when Wind Waker was shown to have a new cartoony look. I absolutely refuse to accept any other reasoning for someone liking the original more, as the Switch one is an objective improvement in almost every aspect.

Almost every songs created by Naoki Maeda from DDR, Beatmania IIDX, DrumMania, Para Para Paradise, Pop'n Music, etc are way much better than the songs from Rhythm Heavens.

@Ultimapunch Agreed, the remake is great. Not liking Chibi art is a totally valid opinion though, just like not liking any other specific art style. Plenty of people don't like pixel art too. Personally I hate the 'hyper-realistic' but weirdly not realistic at all art a lot of PS5 games have. Some people don't like the washed-out art style BotW uses. I find it funny that e.g. Alex at NintendoLife always complains about Chibi art games in his YouTube videos, but he is an example of someone who doesn't dislike Chibi art just because of changes in a remake, he just usually dislikes that type of style in general which is understandable even if you and I have different preferences. I would be a bit annoyed if I had to play Link's Awakening in, like, the Last of Us art style. Honestly, that sounds nightmarish.

@FishyS I get that it's a valid opinion. But I really think it's an incredibly shallow one. I would still argue to the death that the Remake's art style is actually incredibly faithful to the original. But, even if I were to grant that it isn't faithful and that it is a terrible art style, I still think its a shallow opinion to write off the Remake as the lesser version simply because of its look. Especially when it does so much else to improve on the original version. Like, I think Twilight Princess is the worst looking 3d Zelda game by a mile. The realistic art style has aged like a stale donut. But that game still has the best dungeons in the series and arguably the best character in the series. Just because I might not like the look as much as other games in the series doesn't mean I'm gonna write off all the amazing qualities it has. I feel like with the Link's Awakening remake people do that though. And don't even get me started on the Diamond and Pearl remakes. They are objectively the best versions of those games, but people absolutely hate them. Almost entirely, as far as I've been able to gather, due to its Chibi look as well. Just seems incredibly reductionist to me.

@EaglyPurahfan thanks for this. Rock on.

I love the Link's Awakening remake but I have a couple of counterpoints.

1. 100% the game notably hurts the pacing in the remake. Just the Danpe dungeon mode alone has made my playtime probably 33% longer than it would've been otherwise, in order to consistently do rooms I've already done and thus rarely offer that much interesting challenge. Not to mention the overuse of the crane game, that's also rarely any sort of interesting challenge (and I'm being nice when I say it even has that).
2. The charm of Link's Awakening's sprite work and how it adds to the charm of the story and world is a nearly irreplaceable element. If anything, my opinion is that it took considerable work and artistic talent to find an art style that could even come as close as it did. But it got close, it did not magically make every single element as good as the original. Same with the music.
3. The game is clearly a Gameboy game based off of its simplicity and map design, no matter how more impressive it looks and sounds, and that makes it inherently surreal and sometimes awkward. Not bad but different in a way that I don't find it to be a replacement for the original.

Doing an accurate but qol improved Link's Awakening remake with such modern graphics and sound still inherently makes it different, and thus I don't think it replaces it. Beyond the reasons give, if for no other reason than I tend to experience and appreciate Gameboy games from 1993 different than modern HD games from 2019 (this is also basically why I prefer Blaster Master to Blaster Master Zero, despite the new one being objectively better in so many ways).

A new hand touches the beacon.
What would you personally count as the cutoff for retro? The Gamecube as a system has been out of use (in terms of last game being made for it) since 2007. The Wii released nearly a year before.

Would you say there's a set generational cutoff, a strict years-before-present cutoff, or a specific technology being involved? Any era with "bit" in it definitely counts on my book and as I get older, the arguments for 6th and 7th gen consoles being retro start applying, but I'd be most comfortable having standard definition resolution through component cables and the expectation of not having an internet connection as a few hard factor check boxes for retro.

While there's no hard and fast definition of retro, I'd think that a console that's been discontinued for fifteen years now pretty much fits that description.

The same goes for its contemporaries, like the Dreamcast and the original Xbox. The PS2 is a bit more debatable, as it remained on the market for a few years longer, but even that's been discontinued for a decade and the games it was getting in its last 3-4 years weren't much to shout about.

This is not gonna be the most unpopular opinion here but I've been playing Team Kirby Clash Deluxe (which is an unmemorable name for a game, as I've never remembered it), and its the best example I've experienced that everything that even leans in a mobile game direction is just a bad idea for good games.

I've experienced the Gacha mechanics in Xenoblade 2, played one of the Pokemon f2p games on Switch and now with this, my main thought process is I don't believe that an actual human being actually likes this direction for gaming. I absolutely believe it is purely based on addiction rather than sincere enjoyment. Not even about the games as a whole but how these aspects are designed, no its a mistake if the point is to make a fun video game. Which it had to have been for Xenoblade because the gacha isn't monetized there, but it was a mistake based on believing that mobile gaming is popular and thus ideas from it are good for a real video game. They are not, they are bad.

And this Kirby game is blatantly made to make you...at least eventually, want to buy "apples" with real money rather than deal with grinding the same fights forever. It is transparent and pathetic. This makes one positive to the eShop being gone in that I don't have to experience f2p monetization in a paid Kirby game now, but the parts where the game is worse off because of it are still here. Anyway, I'm now gonna do my occasional, sometimes daily, 10+ minutes of this game, which is apparently how games should be played.

@EaglyPurahfan I don't think your opinion about pikmin 3 is necessarily unpopular, but It's interesting that your reasons for liking it most are very similar to mine for not liking it as much. Because Pikmin has gone back and forth on aspects like time management, the fanbase seems to have been a bit split.

@kkslider5552000 Gacha mechanics derive from a line of toys that date back to the 1960s. I believe the original creator was Bandai. You'd pop your money into a vending machine that'd spit out a ball containing a random toy, typically in a series of collectables, that you'd trade with your friends in the hope of completing a set.

As such, I'd think that incorporating those mechanics into video games doesn't necessarily mean that they're buying into the same business model that's been destroying mobile gaming for the past decade. Obviously, to us befuddled Westerners who didn't grow up with actual Gacha machines, and only encountered it as a predatory gambling mechanic first, it's only natural to fear the worst. However, in the case of Xenoblade 2 and more recently Tears of the Kingdom, I'd think it's more of a direct call-back to the toys.

Super Kirby Clash though... Yeah, that's definitely the bad kind.

Even through the RNG bs, I like Pikmin 2. It's a hard game, and sometimes unfair, but at the same time, there's just something about it that I really enjoyed. I think it has to be the caves. 4's caves are good, but i wish they were a bit longer. I get why they aren't, given that the caves in 4 are hand-made, whilst the caves in 2 are randomly generated. However, I feel like 2's caves being made that way give me an active reason to want to go back to the game, given each run is going to be different from the others.

I can buy that for Tears of the Kingdom, but I'd bet actual money Xenoblade 2 is based off of gacha mobile games. Like you mostly get commons from crystals in order to try to eventually get rare waifus. It's actually impossible for me to fathom its influenced by anything else.

@kkslider5552000 That doesn't seem convincing in itself to me, as collecting waifu figurines has long been a staple of actual Gacha machines long before aggressively monetized mobile games took up that banner, and yes, there would always be some very rare ones that most people wouldn't get.

It certainly doesn't seem like they designed it as a pay-to-win game and yanked the monetization out at the last minute for some reason though. Rare blades don't give you a massive advantage until well into the post-game - where you can grind for them - or gate off vast swathes of content; they've all got their skill tree unlocking quests, I suppose, but that's about it.

The one thing I'd say that points to mobile gacha gaming as an influence is that it's got a pity system. They're typically included in mobile games to ensure that whales actually get something even when the RNG would otherwise say no, to keep them spending, but that doesn't really serve a purpose in a game where it's just about randomizing your party a bit.