Games

Sonic and Dr. Robotnik are codependent. They don't actually want to defeat each other. That's why Robotnik is always building these elaborate bases that, for some reason, have a bunch of perfectly Sonic-sized tubes for getting around in. And it's why there's always that moment at the end where Sonic is chasing Robotnik but doesn't catch him.

The obviously trans bartender in hogwarts legacy makes no sense in a universe where you can use magic to change everything about yourself. I understand and like that there is trans representation in this game and any other game it is in and as a fuck you to that terf pos jk but in universe it does not make sense to me.

Most games have a terrible story that merely serve as plot points to give context to what's happening. The lore and world building is usually pretty good but story rarely is better than 'ok'

The dark souls games aren't as hard as people think they are. Or they're differently hard than people think.

I'm not saying they're easy. But I think people think they're all lightning fast twitch or die. A lot of the game is more "you took a corner at high speed and fell into a hole in the ground, and then rats ate you while you panicked".

Sometimes there's speed, but a lot of it is staying calm and aware.

The factory doesn't always have to grow.
At some point it needs to stop.

Ghost of Tsushima is one of the most overrated games of all time. It's a perfectly fine experience carried by solid combat and high polish, but far from being one of the best games of all time. The writing and acting is monotonously dour and the quest design is uninspiring, which wears you out because the game is also way too long for what little variety it offers. The open world is also your bland, boring, garden variety Ubisoft style.

Romances in BG3 are poorly written and realized and detract from the quality of the game. BG3 in general is merely "fine for a video game" in terms of writing. People also let the game get away with murder in terms of how much it falls apart in the third act.

Cyberpunk 2077 - despite all its flaws - is CDPR's best game.

Like for example. I genuinely like Wakka from Final Fantasy X and think he's a great character with a lot of development. He has a genuine albeit misguided reason to hate the people he does given his situation, his firm beliefs in Yevon and to not spoil an over a decade old game his brother's death.

Plus he has a great character development point throughout the game that lessens his hate towards the Al bhed and even sees him developing a genuine friendship with Rikku and the other Al Bhed to some degree

Dark Souls 2 is a significantly better game than Dark Souls 3

Miyazaki hasn't really innovated since Demon Souls. The other games are slight variations on the same gameplay and design. Sekiro is the biggest change, but the overall design is still very similar. The rest are just "more aggressive / faster" or "open world/metroidvania" in comparison. There are other differences, but the core experience is basically the same.

Fumito Ueda, while similarly iterating on similar ideas, was far more ambitious in his game design between Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. Ico was very different to mainstream gaming at the time. SOTC pushed animation and scale to the limits of the hardware while doubling down on "design by subtraction". Guardian, while similar in concept to Ico, was a bold move in relying on a "true to life" creature and developing your relationship with that creature as gameplay design. Each were far less mainstream than Miyazaki's design which is why, as acclaimed as they are, you will find more division about them from so called "core" gamers.

He's the more important auteur in the medium. You don't get Dark Souls without Ico.

Most crafting mechanics suck and feel grafted on. This is especially true if crafting isn't the main point of the game.

Breath of the Wild was a much needed change in a series that had started to go stale. While I like Zelda games, the formula of go to the dungeon, get item, defeat boss, go to next dungeon and repeat was getting worn out, with exploration taking a backseat.

There are too many Pokemon. I don't know if that's a hot take, but I'm including it anyway.

Having parts of the map blocked off at the beginning of GTA games is garbage and the in game explainations even moreso. Part of the fun is walking around doing random stuff, I want to be able to do that from the get go. Thankfully GTA V got it right.

The GameCube controller is overrated. While I like the giant A button and the shoulder triggers, the D-pad is too small, the X and Y buttons are oddly shaped and easy to mix up, and there should've been a shoulder on the left side too.

• Breath of the Wild was a bad Zelda game. Not bad as a game in general, but terrible as a Zelda game. Apparently, people have told me this is a hot take.

• I actually don't mind gacha games with microtransactions as long as the gameplay is good and the game is free to play. I really like Super Mecha Champions and Zenless Zone Zero currently.

• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a snoozefest to play. People always tell me to play it and how good it is but the auto-battler combat where the characters have bark lines for literally every action they take in a second is just not for me.

• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour is the best C&C excluding the Red Alert games. No, I won't argue with you, and no, I won't change my mind.

• Metroid Other M wasn't actually that bad. Yes, the cutscenes were long and the game was pretty linear (just like Metroid Fusion and Dread, honestly), and yes, I can see why certain people would be mad about certain plot points, but the game was not literally Hitler. It was a very fun action game, and what is crazy is that the gameplay was equally as fun to watch someone else play it. The pixel hunts were kinda annoying because of the way they were forced, and I do wish it had analog controller support, but at the end of the day I still think it was a pretty fun game to play.

• Call of Duty Infinite actually had a fun campaign. Granted, the last CoD I played before it was World At War, but I actually really liked the campaign. I liked the structure of being in a spaceship and choosing the missions I wanted to do.

Homefront: The Revolution is actually a super fun game. Dare I say...a hidden gem?

It has an atrocious metacritic score for a few reasons. Mainly, some of the enemy AI was broken on release, which is fair, but it's long since been fixed. The other big issue is that it's a sequel to a genuinely bad game and most people didn't bother playing it, and most who did came with the goal of trashing it.

However, this game is fun if you want something kind in the modern Far Cry style vein, but set in urban environments. It run on the Crye Engine and the gunplay is rock solid; the shotgun in this game is fantastic. The guns all have absolutely preposterous alternate fire modes. The assault rifle has its upper swapped out to turn it into landmine launcher.

The story and setting is a complete reset compared to the first game. It isn't just a lazy "Red Dawn but ~~China~~ North Korea". There is an elaborate alternate history backstory going back to the 1950s that sees North Korea take the role of the high tech manufacturing hub for the west, eventually becoming what some in the west in the 1970s feared Japan would become- a powerhouse of tech that was rich and had a grip on all western nations because of it. Then this cyberpunk reimagining of North Korea takes over a poor and downtrodden USA after the U.S. had made so many bad choices that NK could plausibly send "international peacekeepers". Absolutely nuts plot, but so weird and strangely high effort. Also means the bad guys are coded so cyberpunk and have all kinds of drones and stuff.

Most writing and VA in games is embarrassingly bad.

FFXV, while flawed, is a good game and it's the only one that feels like an actual journey.

Lies of P is better than From's souls games.

People complaining about Fitzroy or racism commentary in BioShock Infinite missed the actual point of the story. I know a YouTuber who complained that you couldn't aim the baseball, and he super missed the actual point of the story.

Mass Effect 3's ending was totally fine the first time, especially since its ending wasn't reduced down to a choice between three things; the entire 25-30 hours prior to that were you wrapping up all of the series plot threads, and they all compose the ending.

Disco Elysium is too info dump-y to be held up as some gold standard of writing, and every character was such an exhaustively shitty person that I didn't feel much like finishing it.

People who say Hades is a great roguelike have only played one.

Cloud drags Final Fantasy VII (OG) down. He's the least interesting playable character and his amnesia subplot overstays its welcome.

Also, Cait Sith is the best character.

Pixel graphics is not a selling point. I will tolerate pixel graphics if the gameplay is good (Deadcells, Stardew Valley, The Last Spell), but if I see pixel graphics that is already a mark against the game.

Hello Games's release of No Man's Sky was a massive gamble that was more likely to fail than not. They shouldn't have been forgiven for the false advertising and broken promises. Half the gaming industry seems to have gotten the idea that it's okay to release a half-baked mess for $30-$70 and then maybe fix it later.

I think Gears of War would have been better if the Locust had turned out to be humans mutated through imulsion exposure.

It would make sense to me because the Lambent are imulsion-infused Locust, and they look more Locust than the Locust. Anyway, that's what I thought Gears2 hinted at, at the time

Mass Effect's universe is doomed to repeat itself forever, doesn't matter what ending you choose.

Starfield is actually a good game.

Starfield has excellent gunplay. Difficulty levels get unbalanced in late game without mods. If you enjoy feeling like a superhero cool, otherwise download a simple mod to rebalance things. It has weapon customization too. The only other space game that has weapon and spacesuit customization that I know of is No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky's ship combat is half decent, it's ground combat isn't for me. There's like 1 "gun" in the entire game and there's not enough diversity in what little ground combat there is. I want to have to infiltrate a station full of bad guys not shoot at an occasional angry girrafe or flying drone.

Elite Dangerous has excellent ship combat but that is it's only strength. It's a compete grindfest, they regularly patch every new way of making fast money, and I cannot fucking stand it. Maybe the lower playerbase has forced them to be more generous recently but I'm not booting up the game to find out. Starfield's ship combat is basically the same, maybe a little better balanced, or at least balanced in a way that's more enjoyable.

The rpg elements of Starfield are actually enjoyable except for a few dumb quests. Starfield is the only Bethesda game I've completed the main quest in and I thought the multiple universe thing was executed well. Starfield's ship customization is superior even despite the No Man's Sky ship customization update. I think they missed the mark on the different part classes (why is a large reactor 3x as large as a small reactor the same amount of power for example) but that's easily fixable with mods.

Tldr all games of this genre have problems but at least most of my issues with Starfield can be fixed with mods. I just hope theu continue updating Starfield despite the internet constant rage. I'm glad we got Starfield instead of Elder Scrolls 6 and I'm not sorry.

Convenience is a bad thing. Or, at the very least, convenience isn't useful while inconvenience is.

The most recent discussion about it is about pause buttons; having a pause button isn't bad, but it doesn't add anything while being unable to pause can. Fast travel is a classic, it stomps over gameplay and enables bad design from developers, it's actively detrimental to many games. Weapon degradation is another big point in favor of inconvenience; when done well it gives a steady resource sink and forces you to plan ahead.

The obsessive need for everything to be quick and convenient is down right counter to the very idea of a video game and over stimmed children need to chill out.

Adding ancient eldritch gods into Fallout, with such large and sprawling plot lines was a huge mistake.

People will say, "Yeah but what about the ghost in Fallout 2?" Yes FO2 had one side quest with a ghost. It was a one off, with no huge backstory propping it up, it wasn't constantly revisited. It didn't change the whole vibe of the world. It was one side quest that made you go "Huh that was weird." and was quickly pushed aside.

In comparison, including eldritch horrors in a front and center way, with quests like the Cabot questline being the most egregious. There is also the Dunwich building, the Dunwich mine, the cult and eldritch creature in FO76, and more.

Any one of these, one their own, as a one off isolated thing might be alright. The Dunwich building especially works as a weird unexplained oddity. It is the dose that makes the poison though, and now there is so much Lovecraftian stuff packed into Fallout that it has changed the texture of what Fallout is. The more the Lovecraftian stuff is added, the more of the original "an apocalypse of our own making" 1950s militarist, corporatist setting gets diluted.