Hot takes

[ATenderLad]

I don't have anything to add to this conversation besides the fact that, on the original-model Switch's screen, Octopath Traveler looked like an absolute lot of muddy shit. I genuinely think it's one of the ugliest professionally-released games I've ever played. I didn't really like the gameplay at all, either.

I think all this HD-2D diorama nonsense looks absolutely abhorrent. It was fine for one single game way back when, but the fact that it's now an art style that they're poisoning otherwise good games with is pretty revolting. I hope AI makes faux-hand-drawn art styles more prominent in the gaming industry, because I can't think of a single recent 2D JRPG that hasn't looked atrocious.

It *is* a little disappointing that HD-2D is shorthand for JRPG's with a depth of field effect, and not something like KOF XIII.

 

[WarpKaiser]

I've thought for a long time that terms like Metroidvania or Souls-like are worthless band-aid terms thought up by people who are bad at naming things and no one should use them. I mean what do you do about people that have never played Metroid, Castlevania or Dark Souls when you use terms like that? Why can't we say labyrinthine platformer or just call Dark Souls a third-person action RPG? I understand trying to make sense to someone who does know what those games are but these terms have no longevity is my point and they're being pushed as official terminology to sell products.

For metroidvania there is already a proper name for that genre: Search-Action from the Japanese: 探索型アクション.
For souls-like. I didn't play them but they look like Action-RPGs. What is the difference between those and games like Diablo or Elder Scrolls beyond the camera perspective (and the mouse movement in the case of Diablo. Although the PS1 port you can control the player with the d-pad)?

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My hot takes: Silent Hill 1-3 have excellent combat, not bad or intentionally bad to make it more scary like some people like to say, and is better than the combat in Resident Evil 1-3.
With SH1 I can understand the complains because is janky. And SH2 lacks enemy variety. But with SH3 there is no excuse, that game is perfect all around.
Also I like to add that in the case of the original PlayStation 2 ports. Silent Hill 2 and 3 uses the pressure sensitive buttons of the Dual-Shock 2 to execute the combos. People who play this games with an emulator forget or ignore this fact and think the combat lacks deep and complexity.

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Another hot take: Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2 are the true 3D Search-Action/Metroidvania games and not the Souls-Born franchise. 1: Both SR1 and SR2 has exploration, back tracking, puzzle-solivg, platforming and unlockable abilities that you need to use to unlock the next area. 2: The first game in LoK franchise, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Is a top down Zelda clone in a dark fantasy setting. And IGA himself said that for Symphony, he took more cues from Zelda rather than Metroid, turn out the map was misleading!

 

[Raziya The Seeker]

Many of the weapons in Elden Ring that weren't lifted from Dark Souls? Yeah, they look designed by an AI. With all that entails.

 

[Elwiwi]

Many of the weapons in Elden Ring that weren't lifted from Dark Souls? Yeah, they look designed by an AI. With all that entails.

That's impossible, they recycled everything from demon souls

 

[Xdqwerty]

KoF>>Street Fighter

 

[fake-kun]

KoF>>Street Fighter

I'd imagine that a lot of South Americans would agree with you.

 

[Xdqwerty]

I'd imagine that a lot of South Americans would agree with you.

Why?

 

[fake-kun]

Why?

I heard the King of Fighters is very popular there.

 

[Xdqwerty]

I heard the King of Fighters is very popular there.

Street Fighter is a bit too complex for me

 

[Elwiwi]

Why?

KOF is very loved in south America for some reason

 

[MasterEn]

Why?

I heard the King of Fighters is very popular there.

KOF is very loved in south America for some reason

because mai > chun li.

 

[Elwiwi]

because mai > chun li.

A very HOT take

 

[miguk]

KOF is very loved in south America for some reason

My guess: older hardware that was used for the majority of the series, so cheaper to get ahold of (compared to Capcom regularly updating the hardware as the series moved along), and regular arcade releases, so only the local business had to buy the hardware for most people to play on the cheap.

 

[AkiraSO4]

My guess: older hardware that was used for the majority of the series, so cheaper to get ahold of (compared to Capcom regularly updating the hardware as the series moved along), and regular arcade releases, so only the local business had to buy the hardware for most people to play on the cheap.

Well, good news, you're all correct.

For every Street Fighter cabinet you'd find in Brazil, there's like 20 for KOF 97, 98 or 2002 (ESPECIALLY 2002).

If you do find a Street Fighter cabinet, odds are it's either Alpha 2 or Alpha 3.

And then there's Mortal Kombat which is a straight up rarity to find in arcades, hence everyone played it on consoles.

SNK used the exact same hardware from the first Fatal Fury game in 1992 all the way to Samsho V Special, which I think came out in 2004, while Capcom had at least 3 different CPS arcade systems, not to mention stuff like NAOMI and whatnot.

Is KOF better than SF? Depends on who you ask. But at least in South America, KOF was the preferred choice simply because it was so easy to find arcade machines with them.

 

[TheSoulWalker]

Raw Thrills deserves more credit than it gets at times, Cruis'n Blast was great

 

[fake-kun]

Not only is there nothing wrong with genre names like "Metroidvania" and "Roguelike", we should have more of them.

 

[Gorse]

Roguelike

If I may offer a counter-argument, as a fan of the genre: If we're absolutely going to stick with the term "Roguelike", we should be using it for games like Rogue, the PC game from 1980. We shouldn't just through it around willy-nilly for any game with permadeath and randomly-generated levels. A roguelike, ideally, should look something like this:

Generally speaking, a roguelike should present the player with a top-down (or at least heavily visible) view of the game world – invariably a randomly-generated "dungeon" – that features on-screen enemies and items scattered across the floor. The game must, except in the absolute most extreme edge-cases, be turn-based, and should let the player accumulate an inventory of randomly-generated items – some of which are not immediately identified – which can affect their stats and other entities in the game world. Every time you play the game, the world, items, enemies, and level geography must be randomized.

It should be... you know... like Rogue. A dungeon-crawling, turn-based adventure with a heavy emphasis on random generation. A game that focuses just as much on careful preparation and item accrual as it does on the frequent necessity for immediate improvisation.

Games like The Binding of Isaac, Hades (1 or 2, take your pick), Diablo, and other action-heavy games absolutely should not be lumped in with what I've described above, because they're not the same at all. They're completely different in terms of gameplay. "Roguelite" is an alright descriptor for them, but when you call those games "roguelikes", it's like me calling a a basketball game a platformer because you run and jump and collect items in it. It's vaguely similar, but it's an extremely poor, inaccurate descriptor.

Action games, even if they have some element of randomness to them, aren't roguelikes, because they aren't like Rogue. I personally dislike the term "roguelike" because it's applied far, far too generally – I think "Dungeon Crawler" is a much better name for the genre, and associates it closely with one of its most immediately-recognizable and -understandable properties (Mystery Dungeon).

 

[TheSoulWalker]

Follow-up:
Breath of the wild sucked and failed to capture the same vibe that Elder Scrolls had figured out years ago to what makes an open world fun to explore. Soft Piano does not make good ambiance and the Ubisoft formula of "Climb a tower, expose more map" is dreadfully boring no matter how you try to spin it with obstacles on the way up.

 

[AkiraSO4]

We are NOT in a golden age of fighting games.

The MVC Collection is unreasonably overpriced, SF6 is back with the throw loops (because everyone liked that about SFV), Tekken 8 exists, Garou is still up in the air but KOF has been the same game for at least three games in a row, MK1 for every attempt of balancing the game they end up making something else more broken, not to mention Khaos Reigns was a disappointment. And oh yeah, once the novelty of the MVCI mod wore off, everyone dropped the game again.

And this is coming from someone who loves fighting games to this day. Sure KOF 14 was ugly and SFV was the dark ages, but it's inaccurate to call this a "golden age" when the bar is already set so low anyway.

 

[moonbits]

there's no such thing at golden/bronze/silver age in entertainment

but I do like SF6

 

[AkiraSO4]

SF6 is far from a bad game, but the time they take to release stuff and some changes are a bit concerning. I'm not sure nowadays but Drive Impacts were just way too much early on. And seeing a bunch of high level people start resorting to the SFV throw loops (which did get removed after a very long time) is quite the red flag.

 

[miguk]

We are NOT in a golden age of fighting games.

The MVC Collection is unreasonably overpriced, SF6 is back with the throw loops (because everyone liked that about SFV), Tekken 8 exists, Garou is still up in the air but KOF has been the same game for at least three games in a row, MK1 for every attempt of balancing the game they end up making something else more broken, not to mention Khaos Reigns was a disappointment. And oh yeah, once the novelty of the MVCI mod wore off, everyone dropped the game again.

And this is coming from someone who loves fighting games to this day. Sure KOF 14 was ugly and SFV was the dark ages, but it's inaccurate to call this a "golden age" when the bar is already set so low anyway.

Agreed. The 90s was the golden age. The 00s was the silver age. And we've gone down ever since.

Numerous series have died, including popular ones, which doesn't happen as often with any other popular genre. Fans demand more Darkstalkers and Soul Calibur, but we get nothing. Retro games get rereleased with no updates that couldn't be done through an emulator yet cost full or near-full price. Even current running series are missing tons of characters from previous entries, whereas in the past they'd have got most of them back on day one or at least the next big update.

To add to some individual games: MK went from being visually funny to being disgusting (and full of cameos instead of, you know, MK characters). MVC went from being a fun mismash to a cynical marketing ploy for Gisnep. SNK feels defiled even when they do well now. Capcom does there "hey guys, remember this" act, then gives us at most one character from the game they reminded us they won't make more of. Sega talks about doing more, but has yet to commit to anything but a new Virtua Fighter.

Side note: Every time I heard that MK title, I can't help but think of this:

 

[Mr. Daddy]

I have a few that I know are pretty big ones for people, so I'll just stick to two:

First, the easy one.​

Believe it or not, I don’t care for Undertale.​

Kinda just this. I have a lot of problems with this game in general, particularly with its combat. I think the combat really hurts the game and what it wants to try to do with encouraging you to not genocide everything. Dealing with enemies is often very annoying without a guide, because you pretty much just have to constantly guess at what will make them go away if you want to be peaceful. Once you know though, then combat with that enemy ill be the same every time with no variation ever, which on its own wouldn't be an issue, but having to go through a series of menus and dialogue options just to work on getting an enemy to leave you alone sure is just annoying. Coupled with how annoying (and occasionally actually unfair) some of the enemy combinations are when avoiding their attacks in the bullet hell portion of combat, and you just get a made me groan any time I found a random encounter. Doing the opposite and killing everything is, quite frankly, much simpler, less annoying, and more fun, but the problem is that since the game wants you to get attached to everything in it, it also wants to make you feel bad for playing that way and treat you like a monster the whole time. And if you choose to go all the way and really commit to that playthrough, then you're forever tainted now (unless you edit your steam files). The only saving graces in this game are a small, small handful of its characters and the music.

My second opinion though I know is the hotter take, but I need to stress this before I say anything else, I absolutely think this game is a good game. I just don't personally enjoy it.

I don't like Chrono Trigger. It's actually really close to something I could find myself enjoying, but every time I found something I liked, it got balanced by something I didn't (outside of its plot and characters, which I have no gripes with and think are good). I think the combat is way too easy for how interesting it could be. Characters having group attacks is awesome, but when the majority of them hit specific angles in a game where none of your characters can move mid-combat, it makes me wish it was real-time instead of turn based so I could actually take advantage of it. I think partially to compensate, a lot of the best moves hit everything on screen so positioning doesn't matter, but then those are often the best moves to use, and you end up with the usual "just spam your strongest move" problem that a lot of games have. I think battles transitioning smoothly from interacting with enemies in the world is neat, but why do so many of them have to be psychic and force encounters that you otherwise perfectly avoided? At that point why not just have random battles where the enemies come in from off-screen or something? The time travel is a neat aspect of the game, but I really don't like that there's just not much that's done with it in the side content, at least, not in a substantial way. I think overall the best way to really describe what I mean is, I just find the game kinda... tedious, I think would be the right word.​

 

[ObscureJigglypuff]

-The last of us is unoriginal and shitty.

- Skirym gives me diarrhea

- Final Fantasy since 13 deserve death.

 

[MasterEn]

-The last of us is unoriginal and shitty.

- Skirym gives me diarrhea

- Final Fantasy since 13 deserve death.

these aren't hot takes. these are facts. good warm up though.