Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@WoomyNNYes I'm inclined to agree - TotK is amazing but after 80 hours I'm not feeling the same excitement to keep playing it that I was to begin with. Traditional Zelda games are generally very well paced so you're always pushing the story forward and discovering new abilities, whereas BotW and TotK's abilities are mostly unlocked near the beginning by necessity, and you spend a lot of time just wandering around seeing what you find. And to be fair, they're probably the best ever examples of that kind of gameplay and there is always something new to find, but this time around I'm getting a little tired of the lack of structure, even though I'm still really enjoying the game.

I'm in a bit of a weird position where for a while I thought of BotW as my favourite game ever, and TotK is even better in many ways and I do love it, but it hasn't quite kept me hooked like BotW did (though I think I finished BotW's main story in less time than I've played TotK so far, which I haven't finished yet). It's probably because the world was completely new to me in BotW, or maybe I'm just not as much in the mood for a big open world game at the moment. So would I still say Breath is my favourite game? ...Probably, because exploring that game's Hyrule for the first time was genuinely magical, and even though Tears gave me the same feeling when I first started it, it's worn off a bit after so many hours. Don't get me wrong, it's still a 10/10 game and I'm not disappointed by it, but can the next Zelda game either be shorter or a brand new world please Nintendo?

under-water levels where you are constantly about to drown if you don't find air bubbles or Mario type ones where you are magically breathing water?

I noticed in the Mario Wonder trailer Mario could kill fish under-water by hitting them from above, so the main difficulty of Mario water levels may be gone.

Water levels will never not make my heart lose it lol.

@Matt_Barber I’m not imposing my definition any more than other people have here (by declaring the GameCube to be a retro console and claiming that « 15 years = retro ». I’m proposing one that happens to be more reasonable.

History isn’t always divided into eras « centuries after the dust has been settled ». Modern South Africa vs. Apartheid South Africa is a pretty clear line. Before vs. after Adolf Hitler or the American Civil War are pretty bright lines. Even gradual, secular revolutions (e.g. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and the Republican Revolution that ended the New Deal Coalition) can be recognized as what they are. The history of music, art, and gaming work on even shorter time scales.

According to US trade law, an antique is actually something of value made prior to 1830. This date corresponds to the approximate beginning of mass production (e.g. a major technological/cultural change). I don’t know where Retro Gamer magazine actually defined « Retro », but a quick look at their site suggests it almost entirely consists of 20th Century games (plus a bizarre contemporary review of Red Dead Redemption because they evidently had nothing else to write about that day). The retro gaming subreddit uses the Gen 5/6 cutoff, and they reject all « it’s retro after X years » arguments.

HD is not a reasonable cutoff. It was a pretty modest change, the leading Ninth Generation console can be played without HD, and it’s quite easy to hook up an N64, GameCube, Wii U, and Switch to the same tv using only the cables that came with the consoles. 4th to 5th gen might be a good cutoff if it were only a matter of graphics. But it isn’t. It’s a cumulative case. The 5th to 6th involved better graphics (the last major improvement; Twilight Princess still looks more like a Switch game than an N64 game) + the rise of online gaming and the internet + major target demographic shift + the establishment of the modern three-party console market. No other generation has that many points on the board.

Good, then we can agree to differ. My stance all along has been that there's no hard and fast definition, after all.

I’m proposing one that happens to be more reasonable.

Reasonable to whom? It's not reasonable to me, or presumably anyone else who was playing video games from older systems prior to the release of the Dreamcast, let alone someone arbitrarily deciding that it should form the dividing line. I can assure you that we were using the words first.

What systems I considered retro in the late 80s are very different to the ones that I consider to be retro now, and I'd fully expect that to change further over time.

Retro is just any game system that's no longer supported, and that most kids today will never experience. Stuff that's older than a decade in my eyes.

I think retro loses its meaning after Gen 6 with the exception of Wii and DS because of the impact of closing a digital store when the vast majority of content for the system is digital only.

Nowadays I'd consider retro to be games before like...the Xbox 360 launch. That feels like the biggest turning point and shift in gaming and...all the SD games released afterwards were released afterwards but I refuse to call Gears of War retro until I have grey hair, so Okami is still not retro to me either. (not to mention how weird it would be for NSMB, a game designed to be a return to retro Mario, to itself be retro)

I don’t know how unpopular of an opinion this is, but it sure isn’t one I see at all so I’m just gonna throw it out there.
Good characters are more important than a good story. Story is still really important, don’t get me wrong, but if the characters in the story are written horribly (whatever a “horrible character” is to you), there’s no relatability in the story and no main reason to keep going. The story could be peak fiction, a perfect 10/10, but if the characters are a 3 or 4/10 at best, is it worth continuing the story if the characters acting out the plot suck? If a story’s awful that can wreck it too, but I think there’s more of a grace period if you have a stellar cast of characters. Personally, I’d say if a story has 10/10 characters and like a 7/10 plot, it evens out to a 9/10 overall.
A good example of this is Persona 4 and its spin-offs, a game I can’t stop talking about! P4’s basic plot is a murder mystery, and a pretty good one. Depending on how much you like the genre, I’ve seen people consistently give it somewhere between an 8/10 and a 10/10. But the biggest thing people praise about P4 is the characters. In my case they’re what made the game my favorite game ever. The game is solid and the plot is solid, but I loved the characters so much that they left a noticeable impact on me that’s stuck with me since I finished it. This general idea carried into the spin-offs which have the same cast, but are usually agreed to have lesser plots. They don’t have BAD plots, but they’re generally agreed to be 8/10 at best from what I’ve seen. Personally I’d give the plot of the first spin-off P4 Arena (and Ultimax the updated version) a 7/10 thanks to huge pacing issues. But people still enjoy the stories because the characters they love are still there like they were in the original game, and even the new characters are pretty great too. P4 has helped me realize that a big reason why I love a lot of the stories I do is because the characters are relatable or interesting or just fun, and give the plot more life as a result.
Anyway thanks for coming to my TED Talk! There’s my Persona 4 propaganda for the week! Apologies for the length, I’m typing this on my phone late at night since I can’t fall asleep really. If it’s a bit rambly or incoherent, that’s probably why😅

@Slim_in_Blue I would argue Mario counts for this. He is a 'good character' in some sense (maybe not the sense you mean above but his creators had to have done something right to make him so iconic) and this makes us completely forgive the awful stories in most of his games.

@FishyS Ehhh. I wouldn't count Mario, since Mario itself isn't even a story-based series. You usually don't play them for the characters or the actual narrative, but rather the gameplay.

@FishyS I can understand why Mario might work, it even works to some extent in the games with story like the RPGs, at least in terms of initial impressions. If you only have time/money to play one RPG and you’re picking between say Paper Mario TTYD and a Final Fantasy, you’ve probably heard that the story is great. But even then you might be skeptical of if you’ll like the characters from what you’ve read, so it might be the safer bet to go with TTYD because of Mario’s status as a mascot. Beyond that TTYD has a fantastic story from what I’ve heard so maybe not the greatest example, but still an example.
@VoidofLight also has a good point though with how most Mario games don’t pride themselves on narrative, at least with the non-RPGs. Usually Mario’s stories are just excuses for him to do a bunch of platforming and beat up Bowser at the end. That’s fine since the series prioritizes gameplay, but it makes it harder to say the characters in Mario are more important than the plot when neither are all that important to begin with.

@EaglyPurahfan Don’t you dare say I’m going overboard! YOU BETTER TAKE BACK WHAT YOU SAID RIGHT NOW, IM NOT YELLING YOUR YELLING!

At this rate, the next game in the series will be called The Legend of Purah.

The using too many waifu female characters with seductive looking on anime and or games are really disturbing me.

😁

It's funny, I played Persona 5 first and loved the characters but within a few hours of starting Persona 4 I knew that their cast was a lot better in that game. I dunno what it is about the P4 cast that makes them so endearing (maybe it's the small town-ness or the way they play off each other so well) but it elevated the entire game.

Doesn't hurt that the English VO for Persona 4 is absolutely fantastic too. The actors sounded like they were having so much fun, and the anime's focus on comedy let them shine through even more.

@TheJGG I totally agree with you, the characters in P4 are singlehandedly what shot it up to be my favorite game of all time. P5 has a great cast too and still has my all time favorite Persona character with Sumi and third semester is probably the series' peak arc, but it feels like half the time Joker is the ultimate mutual friend which sucks. You never see Sumi interact with any of the Thieves other than Akechi and it's criminal. I don't think it helps that each arc minus endgame mostly focuses on the villain instead of the new party member and you mostly need to do the character's Confidant for their arc.
P4 though, every character of the Investigation Team interacts with every other character and it's incredible. You'd never expect, say, Rise and Kanji to get along, and they might not get along really, but they at least talk to each other. They feel like a smaller and tighter-knit group which fits with the small-town vibe of the whole game. P4 was the only game in the series to actually make me cry and it was thanks to the Golden ending's epilogue and seeing all the group interact with each other and just being genuinely great friends. I'd love to go into more detail and look at P3 as well, but this thread's probably not the best place for it considering it's not a Persona thread.
One last bit though, will absolutely echo the praise for the cast. Each VA fits perfectly and most of the substitute choices in spin-offs are solid as well with some being on par with the originals like Matthew Mercer as Kanji in Arena Ultimax and Dancing. Really the only cast I had actual problems with was 3's (I have a lot of hot takes about P3 for that matter), but 4 has a near-perfect cast.

@Slim_in_Blue
I have yet to play P4 or P5 but I’d just add in short that good characters cannot do without a good story sometimes, and that ‘good characters’ seems to be a much more subjective thing than when people mention a ‘good story’. I know somebody who stopped playing Persona 4 over its characters, and though it hasn’t stopped me from wanting to play it, relatability is usually something very personal. The amount you’ll connect with a character does not come down to just good writing, though it certainly helps, and sometimes just how a character has been written can get on somebody’s nerves while somebody else loves it. In the same way, I could stick with just a bunch of decent characters if the story is amazing because of wanting to see where it ends up next, where the mystery ends up and such. Horribly written characters hurt but a horribly thought out story does too.

Now, my main point is more so that characters can probably not shine as bright if the story they’re in doesn’t give them the opportunity to. If you create a lovely character but then barely use them story-wise in any major way, well, that kind of wastes their character. If you fail to think up fitting opponents or just some force that the characters move against, if they face no adversity or just get handed their wins on a sliver platter, be it in feats of strength or philosophy, that really cuts down on the value that might have had as a character moment. Good characters and good story go hand-in-hand oftentimes, and though one can be better than the other, as could be the case in P4, I’d not say either is more important. It would be missing the point that both are essentially an act of writing, and that characters fitting into a larger whole, inhabiting a world that was also written in service of plot opportunities, means it’s often more about how the two work together. For example, if a story makes it possible for a character to have some amazing moments that strengthen your view on that character, is that because they’re a good character, or because there’s a good story supporting that character so it turns out good? Like in persona 5, you’ve said Sumi gets little interaction with the other thieves, that would be where they didn’t write a story-scenario for this character to shine in interaction with other characters. Her character could’ve shone more if she got the opportunity, it doesn’t make her character inherently worse but it does take away opportunities for her to grow or show new sides of herself that could have been written if the story-scenario allowed it, be it main plot or not. I have a lot more examples from other games but I’d potentially spoil stuff and can’t have that.
It’s a complex thing, and as a writer myself, I hope I can get it down someday to have good character moments inside an interesting plot. Leaving aside a character-driven narrative versus a story-driven one, there’s just a lot of stuff that feels like characters and ‘story’ are more close to each other than two different parts that have their strengths separately.

Now, to end my lil wall of text, P4 is an interesting one simply because you literally have your real life, character-focused part and your ‘labyrinths’ where the story seems to progress. Having played P3 these two overlap sometimes in cutscenes but gameplay-wise they’re very split, and there I’m pretty sure you could have a point that one part just shines more than the other.
… thank you for coming to my own TED talk this time, hehe. Went a little overboard, but it is an interesting topic.

@Takoda Thanks for the input! I can't say I'm a writer at all and the last time I wrote anything fiction myself was in like 6th grade which was several years ago, so it's nice having input from someone who knows the ins and outs of writing. It's definitely a tricky thing and story and characters are much more intertwined than I made it seem in the original comment, but a lot of people seem to kinda separate characters from story as individual aspects and then when talking about it as a whole call it the plot. I admit that's not a great way to go about critiquing a storyline, but it's kinda tough when it's something of a norm for non-writers and when it's even tricky for a writer like yourself to balance character moments and story moments. It definitely comes down some to personal preference, this is the unpopular opinion thread for a reason, and some people do prioritize storyline over characters. If you take good characters and put them in a bad plot, if the pacing prevents the characters from, well, being actual characters, then everything will suck as a result. In my opinion, since the characters are what generally drive the plot forward, I'd rather the characters be better than the story if one had to be worse than the other. The characters are the emotional core of the overall plot and if someone finds a set of characters they like and relate to, I assume they'd get more out of the story as a result. I can also understand why someone would prefer the story itself since it's the actual makeup of the plot. As important as characters are, characters without a conflict or goal are completely useless so having a good conflict and/or goal is incredibly important. A writer would (and honestly should) go for the best of both sides since characters and storyline are both so crucially important to any piece of media, but that's nearly impossible since it's probably impossible to make a truly perfect story, and as a result the reader/player/viewer would likely prioritize one or the other just based on personal preference. I'd love to go into more detail on this but I know I'd make myself sound silly if I tried to go further since this was already pretty tricky to write as it is.
I will note on the Persona example, P4 is HEAVILY character driven plot-wise, more than P5 and especially P3. In P3 the party members just kinda unlock spontaneously throughout the first few months and their development is almost entirely outside of Tartarus. In P4, trying my best to not spoil anything from either game, every party member is like that one party member you get in P3 where they get lost inside Tartarus and you have to rescue them, resulting in the awakening of their Persona. Although unlike P3, each of P4's dungeons not only features a trapped party member, it is a representation of their "dark side" which is personified in their Shadow self. The character has to accept their Shadow as a part of themself and that's how they awaken to their Persona, and that character development travels into the social sim aspects as each party member's Social Link is pretty much the second half of their arc as a whole. I realize now that all this probably means P4 isn't the greatest example even in regards to the spin-offs, but it was the game that brought this topic to my mind to begin with, and the spin-offs completely cut out Social Links so it still feels like the spin-offs specifically work as decent examples.