Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@Link-Hero No worries. Items having limited use after the dungeon designed around them is a pretty common feature in Zelda (look at the slingshot in Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword).

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a better party game than Smash Bros. Ok here is my point: Ultimate Chicken horse is so easy to pick up and play, like after one round you instantly know what you are doing. But for Smash bros, you have to had played the game before to fully understand what your supposed to do. Also, Ultimate Chicken Horse has cheat codes, so if you are playing it at a friends house and you want to play your favorite stage, or character, you can just tell them the cheat code (that is Y Y X X Y Y R) and they immediately unlock everything, but with Smash Bros, you have to unlock everything manually and there is DLC that makes it harder to just buy, than pick up and play. And Ultimate Chicken Horse is always on sale (As I am typing this it is on a sale for 8.99) While smash bros is always going to be 59.99. I do think Smash Bros is the better game overall, but Ultimate Chicken Horse is a better party game!

@baller98

Unpopular opinion: Haunted Castle is an awesome game

I've seen a few discussions talking about Haunted Castle and how it's bad, clunky, and just not very fun to play. I personally disagree. I love Haunted Castle and will even go as far to call it one of my favorite Castlevania titles. Why? Well, the graphics are excellent for starters. Great use of colors and the sprites look terrific. Some people say that they look chunky, but I don't know. They kind of work for this game for some reason. Easily looks a million times better than the NES entries. The controls are also great and feel way better than most of the console games. You can also move forward a bit while doing a still jump, not possible in the NES games. And of course, the music is fantastic, like in most Castlevania games. My only problem with the game, is that some parts feel pretty difficult and require memorization. But hey, the NES games had moments where you needed to memorize parts also. There's no reason to slam this game for requiring the player to memorize sections when the other games also had parts like this. It just feels unfair. Just like the hate this game receives from players. While it's no masterpiece, it's a great Castlevania game and deserves more recognition, along with Castlevania: The Adventure (another awesome Castlevania game that gets a lot of unfair hate). Say what you want, but I give Haunted Castle a 8/10.

@adamman12345 Agree. People say it has bad graphics but it came out in 1987 and the sprites look amazing. Also the soundtrack is a killer!

The only bad thing I can think of is the terrible Dracula fight at the end.

Stal is the best piece of music in a video game

@1ofUs Jazzy. Doesn't fit in Minecraft at all in my opinion but jazzy.

@Euler Giving us the Hero's Bow in the second dungeon of Twilight Princess was always going to make the slingshot obsolete. Just get rid of the slingshot and give us the bow right off the bat. Or just make it a standard item like in Breath of the Wild.

I was just thinking about Fire Emblem and how permadeath is a mechanic that doesn't quite work in this series if you ask me. It's a great idea in theory: it stops you from just using brute force and sacrificing units, it adds tension and emotional weight to every decision you make, and it makes your playthrough of the game different from most other people's. But in reality, only the first of these points is completely true.

Most players, even hardcore fans of the series, just reset or load a save state when a character dies. This makes perfect sense to do, because losing a character is strategically and emotionally devastating, and can easily happen due to a single mistake. Nintendo knows this, which is why they've been making it easier to reset in recent games, particularly with the Divine Pulse in Three Houses. But permadeath is supposed to be part of the game. It's supposed to have an impact on the player and their playthrough. Rewinding the game to an earlier point to avoid a death is not only tedious, it defeats the point of the game to an extent.

Three Houses almost seems to be an attempt to steer the series' focus away from permadeath. Not only is there the casual mode, introduced in Awakening, that cuts the mechanic altogether (which is fine if you want to play that way) and the aforementioned Divine Pulse which makes it very easy to avoid deaths, but the game's narrative just isn't designed to accommodate it. This game has a much smaller cast of playable characters than most FE games and most of them show up regularly in cutscenes, so if they 'die' they actually stick around and you just can't use them any more. Previous games do this too with major characters, but in 3H it's barely acknowledged when someone 'dies' iirc.

I think Fire Emblem needs to keep permadeath as a hallmark of the series, but make it more forgiving somehow. I'm not sure how this could be achieved exactly, or how it could be reconciled with Three Houses' increased character focus, but anything that gives the player a chance to think on their feet and recover from mistakes, rather than just rewinding the game and pretending they never happened, would be better in my opinion.

(I should probably clarify that I've only played four Fire Emblem games so far - Blazing Blade, Sacred Stones, Shadow Dragon and Three Houses - and have only done one playthrough in the latter, on normal difficulty. Let me know if any of the other games handle this mechanic differently.)

@DarthNocturnal Ah yeah I vaguely remember that from Shadow Dragon. That would help a bit with making it more forgiving.

Another idea I just thought of: maybe enemies could capture your units instead of killing them immediately, then you'd have to rescue them in a set number of turns otherwise they die. I don't know how well this would work in practice, but it would give you a chance to fix your mistakes instead of just losing someone in a single turn.

I'm not hugely into permadeath in the first place, but it actively annoyed me when I played Sacred Stones, had built up support conversations between this guy and his son, the guy died next to his son, and his son made no reference to this ever happening.

Honestly, I wish permadeath had effects on the game's story, but it would be hard to actually work around something like that.

That's a good point too, the characters who die are usually completely ignored for the rest of the game. Obviously it would be very difficult for the developers to create adaptive dialogue for every situation but the character relationships would be more believable if they actually cared about people dying. (Though I suppose then there's a risk of the game becoming incredibly depressing )

@Dogorilla I mean, the game is about war, and war is depressing.

@Dogorilla I play permadeath but I agree with your point - at least that, as the series goes on, permadeath seems to blend less and less with the story and other gameplay elements. Personally I'm so invested in the characters that the only time I move on if my characters die is if its the final battle.

I was going to suggest what Valkyria Chronicles does, which is similar to what you suggest. When a unit falls they can survive if rescued before either (i) a set number of turns pass, or (ii) an enemy unit approaches and finishes them off.

Although this would be an interesting gameplay mechanic I'm not sure it makes permadeath blend in better with the wider story though. Personally I'm sure I'll still be resetting until a have a no death run.

Personally, I think a consolation would be for deaths to add to the story somehow - e. g. characters acknowledge the death in cutscenes or exclusive interactions.

My unpopular opinion is that the word permadeath has no reason to exist. It's just death. You don't get extra lives, resurrection spells or the ability to re-wind time in the real world. It's only in the skewed media of video games where death is expected to be a minor inconvenience.

So far as Fire Emblem goes, the way to play them has always been to savescum until you get to the last map, then everyone's free to die a hero's death. Divine pulse just speeds that up considerably.

@Matt_Barber The only reason it's called "Permadeath" is to save confusion, since most rpg's call being knocked out "death". Like final fantasy, if your party member faints, they literally die. You need to use a phoenix down to bring them back.

That's my point. It's those other games that should be using a different word for something that's very clearly not death.

@Matt_Barber But they technically stop breathing. They're technically dead, unless you actually revive them with magic. Permadeath is effectively used when Healing Magic only heals, and doesn't revive. Heck, in Fire Emblem's normal mode, it's just being injured.

I don't have a problem with that in gameplay terms, as there's no requirement for mechanics to be realistic. However, I'd think that that's the sort of thing you need a new word for, not dying and not coming back.

Only a few of the recent Fire Emblem games have casual mode too. In the ones prior to Awakening, death is pretty much the end barring some exceptional magic with very limited use.

@Matt_Barber @VoidofLight I think permadeath is a useful word only if there’s a game mode choice between normal mode and this. No Man’s Sky has this, if you die even once you’ll be returned to the main menu and your save will be wiped. Fire Emblem’s way is interesting because in Normal Mode they just retreat.

I do like the idea of making it permadeath only for the final battle though. It can really change the dynamic of the story.

But I remember watching a Game Theory video on Phoenix Downs, I really don’t think you die in Final Fantasy games. For one if phoenix downs did bring people back to life then why couldn’t Cloud use one on Aerith? My theory is that Phoenix Down’s help you regain consciousness. Or that they only work within a specific amount of time for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

@TheJGG That's true.. never actually thought about the instance where characters never really use them in the stories.