Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@jump I’m with you. I prefer the 5* rating system too. A 7/10 game to me is a 4* game but to most people it’s a 3* game which is just silly.

And that leads me on to my unpopular opinion.

Breath of the Wild is my least favourite 3D Zelda. Coming in at 7 or 8/10 or 4* if you will.

@jump
I prefer using 100 rating for scoring my games. With 100 as maximum score, i can interpret some games quality in specific reasons.
For example, i rated Portal Knights PS4 = 92/100, The Sims 4 PS4 = 95/100, Dragon Quest Builders 2 PS4 = 96/100, BOTW = 60/100, Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 = 65/100, Ratchet & Clank a Crack in Time PS3 = 80/100, etc.
But if i really love the game so much and really exceeding my expectations, i can give more than 100 scores.

Surely the rating is just meant to be the TL;DR at the end of the review?

If you want to know what caveats there are to any recommendations you get, there's no substitute to reading the review. And while we're at it, reviews shouldn't just be dry breakdowns of how the game fares against a bunch of criteria; I want to read strong opinions, and if the writers can put these forward in an engaging fashion with a narrative that runs the length of the review, a heck of a lot less people would just skip to the scores at the end of them.

Sorting games by review scores, particularly aggregated ones like on Metacritic, seems particularly egregious to me. I'll usually just go on there and read the ones that give it the lowest scores to see if they've got a convincing argument as to why I shouldn't get the game. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes not. Surviving that test is generally going to tell you far more about a game than a swathe of 90%, 5/5, and triple thumbs up scores.

@Anti-Matter you’re actually demonstrating why I dislike how scoring is done in 10/10 just on a bigger scale. You’ve given both Galaxy games 65/100 when there’s literally 99 other options they could have been. They can’t both be exactly 65 as there’s differences between them like Galaxy 1s hub world and Rosalina side story not having an equivalent in Galaxy 2 as well as examples that work the other way. So rather than carefully weighing them up to give an accurate scoring you just lumped both as exactly 65 like how most reviewers also do it. So if it’s not gonna be given careful consideration of using the full scale then just use a simpler scoring method of out of 5 so it’s easier to place.

Just allow decimals. That way everyone wins lol.

@jump I've tried rating games in the past and doing it on a 1-100 scale is absolutely awful. Only way to make that particular system work even marginally well is if that score is an average. I find myself using a 1-5 scale a lot in my life, and that seems to work much better than the traditional video game 1-10 scale.

@Matt_Barber I do the same, strangely. I never thought it was a normal thing to do but I'm glad you do as well, it allows for fascinating points of view. I watch reviews of games I've already beaten but I do look at Metacritic and actively look for criticism. Death Stranding is such a polarising game and I watched and read many reviews for it. I came to the consensus that these reviewers didn't play the entire game, in fact they probably played through less than 20%. It highlights the shortcomings of game journalism.

I don't use it much as a platform to convince myself whether I should get a game or not. Having said that there aren't many games I've had to be truly sold on lately, because of how many ports, sequels remakes, and remasters there are nowadays. Last one I had to extensively research, was, you guessed it, Death Stranding.

@Anti-Matter You aren't the first to dislike Breath of the Wild; Jim Sterling gave it a seven out of ten. Just how bad is that game for you? And... doesn't you giving some games scores over 100 defeat the purpose of a 1-100 scale?

@TheJGG
I neglected my BOTW for 4 years due to being clueless in open world, easily get killed by Bokoblin, breakable weapons, etc. I was still at the beginning part, after get out from the cave.
I realized BOTW wasn't the right game for me since i tend to play casual games.
I still keep the game despite i don't play it anymore.

Btw, if Dance Dance Revolution A20+ get ported to Nintendo Switch with all songs from Arcade including the previous version or Animal Crossing in Dragon Quest Builders 2 style, it will be instant more than 100 score. (200/100)😍😍😍

Percentages in theory give you a greater flexibility to rank the scores of similar games but invariably everything ends up compressed in the 60-90 range with only a very small number of outliers.

Also, if you're going to go down that route, why not just maintain a ranked list of every game you've ever played so people can see where it slots in?

All this talk on reviews, I guess I side with this unpopular opinion about game reviews too. I can't count how many times a critic hated a game, and I ended up pretty much loving it in the end. I stopped really looking at reviews years ago because I didn't find them useful as actually playing games for myself.

Nowadays, I will peek at a review's text if there's particular information I need, but I don't use it as the overall "truth" (for lack of a better phrase) about whether a game is good or not, I leave that up to me if I find it good or not.

Always consider this unpopular because I still see people go to reviews to prove whether a game is good or not, most of the time it's usually people who haven't played said game.

I think scores are meant to be a visual shorthand for summarizing one's experience with a game, and less about categorizing all video games on this one identical scale. Even most reviewers will tell you that the score is a largely meaningless flourish. But it's satisfying to slap on at the end.

Reviews are opinion pieces, but the best ones will discuss the game in enough depth that they help you decide whether it's worth picking up or not. At the end of the day, that's the primary value of a review: helping the customer to make an educated choice when deciding to purchase or not to purchase a product.

I rate games in my head, but I'd never in a million years want to use too specific a grading for a game. Also, I'd probably rate games lower than in my head, because I'm not insulting people's intelligence by saying even the worst Zelda game is still a 7/10.

I like rating things out of 100 too because it’s more specific. I like doing that for basically everything, not just games. I can understand why websites like this might use a less-specific rating system though.

I can't get into Mother 3.

BOTW is pretty much the laziest Zelda game we have gotten, to date.

Nintendo is a disappointing company, lately.

Animal Crossing is terrible.

There, got that off my chest. NINJA APPROVED

BOTW is not the greatest zelda of all time. So sick of top 10 lists always putting BOTW at #1.

Assassin's creed seriously needs a break. We don't need a new game literally every single year.

Single player focused games are not a dying genre. Sad so many developers are convinced otherwise.

Can we stop asking if mature games ported to Nintendo systems will be censored? This isn't 1992.

@zeldafan79 Assassins Creed would be 13,000% better if they ditched the stupid animus thing, or at least just had it as an intro cut scene and then ignored it lol

@BloodNinja
Yeah i mean i like the series, Well the early ones anyway but it's getting to be a major burnout. Imagine if a new zelda came every year. Ugh! New entry's are way more special if they give you time to miss it. Besides I'm so far behind on AC I'll never get caught up!

@Zeldafan79 Totally agree. Admittedly, I haven't played any since the first one though! The annual thing turned me off.

Considering this is the direction of main Zelda titles going forward, it feels like that's gonna age the same way the extreme hype for OOT did. It's reasonable to assume their first attempt at this type of open world wasn't the best one they will ever make like this.

I don’t know how popular this opinion is, but I think that BOTW is a good game, but just not a good Zelda game. I love it’s gameplay, and I love exploring the open world itself, but the dungeons are extremely lacking, and I really don’t like how the story has no actual stakes in it due to everyone being dead already. Hoping BOTW 2 will have a great narrative as well as better dungeons and an even better open world.

I don’t really agree with people who say BOTW is lazy however, since the physics engine and the fact that the game’s structured in the way that it is.. isn’t really what I’d call lazy. Honestly, I think it was a much needed change compared to what happened with Skyward Sword, and I feel like the more they do open world games, the more they’ll improve with it.