going by metacritic, so obviously nothing before the early 00s: murakumo has a 48, baroque has a 50 for wii and a 60 for ps2, bullet witch has a 51, flower, sun and rain has a 54, kuon has a 57, king’s field 4 has a 60, armored core: for answer has a 62 on ps3 and 64 on xbox 360, drakengard 1 has a 63, lost planet 2 has a 63 on pc and a 68 on ps3/xbox 360, fragile dreams: farewell ruins of the moon has a 67, deracine has a 68, killer7 has a 70 on ps2 and 74 on gamecube, siren has a 72. earlier personal favorites like shadow tower and serial experiments lain (psx) were received poorly at the time, and retrospective opinion on sb favorites like zelda 2 and metroid 2 have been comparatively negative. unsurprisingly non-souls-etc. fromsoftware titles are a running theme here (i have a friend who really stans steel battalion which is honestly one of the most impressive videogame takes i’ve ever encountered and i want to get behind it but can’t currently comment).
I’m not hating on XIII but I’m curious to know if there’s any specific reasons why?
i think Castlevania 64 became more hated as early low-poly 3d stuff got older and SotN solidified the all-encompassing, ever-popular thing it is now. isn’t there an angry videogame nerd on it also? that has defined the legacy of a lot of misunderstood games. i feel like i’ve seen some more Castlevania 64 defenders in the few years pop up though.
it’s a game that made me think about how videogames function. the way the combat system acknowledges that you already know how jrpg combat works, the fact the story beats are based off the way videogame characters talk. it just feels like a pure encapsulation of the form to me.
How could I take this long to mention Elemental Gimmick Gear?!
One of the most beautiful games on the Dreamcast, it’s an expansive zelda-like with incredible art and level design. Aside from a few small areas, the main area of play is a massive interconnected dungeon lurking just underneath the overworld. Dreamy dying earth atmosphere and a wonderful sense of place and character. Bossfights are distinctly inferior to the rest of the game but I like this more than any actual Zelda besides Link’s Awakening.
It has an amazing soundtrack as well.
I have no idea why it wasn’t well received
Its only flaws are so mild that I feel like I’m from another universe when I look at these reviews
Sad to hear FSR got a 54 
Splatoon 2 got an 83 which seems kinda low to me 
would rather not let this thread get derailed talking about scores thanks
I think folks are coming around on it now, but Opoona
millennia of fictional art history! Integrating into a socialist utopian community! Gorgeous visuals! Charming writing throughout! I can’t think of any better game on the Wii
this kinda encapsulates my feeling of about how a lot of the enthusiast press can only interface with those things in the context of whatever the immediate trends of the present were. the early 2000’s was when gaming really solidified as a mainstream thing, and the press began to serve more of a function of defining what was acceptable in the mainstream consciousness rather than any other metric. in the 80’s and 90’s more niche publications directed at particular subsets of gaming would have an often totally different sense of quality than the ideas that started to become more broadly accepted as “the one true way you should make games now” in the 2000’s and beyond.
also a lot of those games are Japanese also and often directed at audiences of non-westerners in general. a lot of people in the games press grew up with Mario and all of that and just thought everything should be Mario because that’s what they were inundated with culturally, and so was the thing they assumed was universal. even when people in the videogames press might have been more knowledgeable and liked more niche stuff, they still sort of were forced reviewed them towards the biases of “general audience” that i think they often assumed weren’t prepared to interface with a lot of stuff that didn’t look like a blockbuster.
but of course now that’s been stripped away and a lot of that stuff dates really well because it seems to exist in its own universe outside the most mainstream garish excesses of its far more high budget contemporaries that have been essentially replaced and become hollow husks of cultural ephemera. FromSoftware getting really popular also helped people retroactively go back and decide a lot of their games were masterpieces, which is kind of funny to think about a lot of people who would have said that stuff was garbage before doing, but i guess that’s how it happens.
but yeah, i dunno. when i look back at review scores like these ones it kind of solidifies to me why i don’t trust the gaming press at all about anything remotely indie/niche seeming that comes out now.
The storytelling in Dreamweb that you get from the aesthetics of the avatar’s apartment, and that of his girlfriend’s, as well as the junk you find dropped on top of counters and inside drawers, is excellent. As is opening the game with spending your last paycheck on an illegal gun.
I made a similar Galaxy Oddity thread that will have some good games for this topic I think.
In my case, I adore Operation Darkness, a completely-overlooked X360 WW2 tactics RPG where you and your squad of werewolves, pyrokinetics, and horror literature icons take on Vampire Hitler.
There’s two super-notable things about it:
- When you miss, it calculates a new hit spot. Bullets don’t just completely whiff, they fly off and hit something. This means you can shoot a rocket at a guy, whiff completely, and instead blow up the guard tower behind him.
- The “Cover” system, which is basically Overwatch from nuXCOM if it pumped up at the gym. You can do a traditional Overwatch - Cover Attack I believe - but also you can “Cover Move” (move to specified location when the trigger condition is met) and “Cover Assist” (join with a teammate to shoot at the same target when they do). It creates these intricate levels where you’re setting up your soldiers to do proper reactions, so instead of centering “what can I do”, you’re thinking “what’s the AI going to do.” Really good stuff.
I’ll never forget all the folks who said Demons’s Souls was a roguelike and had permanent death just because people were so unused to a game having friction in 2009. It took until Dark Souls before it got a mainstream reappraisal and even then, Demons’s barely gets recognized now compared to Dark.
Now we’re so on the other side I’ve seen people rail on Dark Souls as being a horrible commercially driven game catering too much to mainstream gamers, which is extremely funny to me in actual historical context.
Demon’s Souls got almost universal 9’s in the American press and was issued as a Greatest Hit before Dark Souls was even released. It was a big critical and commercial hit over here! I don’t think there was any real reappraisal.
(This is because of all the positive word of mouth from the Asian release. There is no way would it have gotten so much positive Western press had it been a simultaneous worldwide release.)
I think being a PS3 exclusive has hurt Demon’s more than anything in the longrun. I evangelise the game a lot and the token response is ‘sounds cool but I don’t have a PS3’. Maybe the rumoured remake will change things.
Fair enough! The stuff I was exposed to, and it’s entirely possible I was only seeing a limited selection of reviews, were pretty universally negative. But like I said, my perspective is limited, and it’s probably another case of me at 18-19 being out of touch with game press.
for sure, those shifting metrics are so interesting. like i wonder how people would feel about lightning returns now that it’s become one of the roots for the development of systems in the well-received vii remake and out of the context of xiii series fatigue, and i wonder how the mainstream western public became receptive to stuff like souls games or difficult roguelikes and how that shifted the metrics for whether a game is considered narratively or mechanically arcane and inaccessible. obviously those games present some specific refinements and developments to enable that receptivity, but based on initial industry responses to demon’s souls it certainly wasn’t a given. like i’d hope that a game like baroque would be better understood in a contemporary western climate trained to accept a different “normal” in terms of e.g. oblique storytelling or roguelike gameplay than 2007’s (or 1998’s for that matter), though i’m probably too optimistic there lol.
Resin. A game now sadly delisted because its creator was unhappy with it.
One look and you can probably figure out why this appeals to me on an aesthetic level. But the twist that really sold me about this one is defeating bosses incrementally restricts your ability, you’re out to destroy your own power source in a bid to put a dying world to rest. I was taken by how it ends up playing, as beyond affecting your health and stamina bar, this also impacts your movement and attack animations, and how much it managed to pull off with so little and being so short. I found it a lot more accomplished than the developer seemed to, but I understand how that can be for a creative. Good nocturnal game, often revisited.
Far Cry 2 I think got a resounding meh from the critics, but sold enough I guess (or didn’t tarnish the brand too badly) so the sequels happened.
But I feel like I’ve seen a few thinkpieces in the last few years that have basically said there was something there despite the game’s flaws. Which is how I feel about it.
i feel like i say this a lot but: i have completed mega drive altered beast hundreds of times, and i will complete it hundreds more times in the future
