Hot takes

Mega Man 5 is one of the worst Mega Man games to ever exist and Mega Man 6 is better than it in every single way.

Here, I said it.
Hmm? this is a hot take? from where I'm standing it's objective fact, haha.
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And here's a few of my hot takes:

- PS2 Castlevanias are good.

- Crossover fighting games like MVC2 and 3 are all flash and no substance.

- Sonic 3 is better than Sonic 2 despite the latter being more famous.

- Streets of Rage is better than Final Fight.

- Top Gear/Racer 1 is the only good one.

- The Megadrive/Genesis fightpad is much better than the SNES controller.

- Mainline SMT is better than Persona. (I'm getting flamed for this but I'll never change my mind).

- The 3D push during the 5th console generation was a mistake.

- Very few 3D Mario games are actually fun.

- 3D Sonic games never got it right, some just fail slightly less hard.

- Without Rare, the N64 would be nowhere as beloved as it ended up becoming.

- Character action games like Bayonetta are formulaic and boring, and lease their life on wow factor, protagonist charisma or both.
 
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I agree. I considered FF9 to be a great homage to the 16-bit era Final Fantasy games, which I also love. I do agree with ObscureJigglypuff that the franchise has lost its way in later installments once Square went all in on action and ditched the turn based systems entirely.
I think that Final Fantasy declining popularity hasn't much to do with gameplay changes. This sounds insane, I know, but the popularity of FF-Games from FF7 onwards was always rooted in two other things:

1. Its technical spectacle like its CGI sequences
2. Its coming of age story about teenagers characters discovering themselves, falling in love and saving the world
3. FF7 specific the huge marketing push that Sony made for Square, which Square could not and still cannot do on its own

If you go back and look at how Sony marketed FF7 in the west be it in trailers, magazine adverts or even on the back of the game box they always show scenes from the CGI trailers or impressive background renders iE technical spectacle. The most you ever see of gameplay is a 5 second clip that shows a summon attack which is also just technical spectacle.
Beyond that technical spectacle used to lure in customers what then made people actually fall in love with the game were its story and characters but again not its gameplay.

Now why is FF popularity in decline?

To go back to Point 1 remember how, in the 1990s, Square would create a new graphical benchmark with every FF game. Back then no one could even come close to Squares CGI-cutscenes.
That really isn't the case nowadays, a lot of companies are as good or even better when it comes to creating beatufiul grahpics, and technical spectacle in general is a far less of good lure just based on how similarly good graphics from 10 years ago look to good graphics today. Compare that to how much graphics improved in the 2 years between FF7 and FF8 and then again 2 years later with FF10.

Without that technical spectacle and huge marketing push made possible by Sony to help lure in younger customers and make them long term fans, FF is mostly stuck with the remnants of its millennial fanbase that FF7 created. That fanbase has been and will only continue to lose members just from people aging out (FF7 is 28 years old after all thou I would say that process already started with FF12 and accelerated hard with FF13) and losing interested in FFs coming of age stories which most people have already experienced multiple times by now just via the FF franchise and cannot relate to as well anymore since they themselves are middle aged adults by now.

Obviously a new break out hit ala Persona 5 could create a younger hardcore following and I think that FF 16 producer had the right idea when he said that: ‘‘it would be good to look to the future and bring in a younger generation, with more youthful sensibilities, to make a new [Final Fantasy] with challenges that suit todays world’’.
 
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i would agree with this but in the early to mid 2000s devs were actually making some very imaginative and creative online multiplayer modes for their singleplayer games, one that comes to mind is the spies vs mercs mode in the older splinter cell games as it was really cool and properly integrated stealth into a multiplayer environment... sadly ubisoft had to pull out the "noobifier" for later entries!
That's why is a hot take ?
Altough The Multiplayer in Pandora Tomorrow was fun as hell!
 
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My hottest retro-gaming hot take would probably be my tendency to draw a line in the sand between the SNES and all prior platforms as a boundary line between "modern games" and "premodern games," owing to a number of factors (most notably the capacity for saving, sufficient memory to tell more complex narratives, and the ability to render far more colorful images). Related: this is the biggest factor in why I think most NES and older games simply do not hold up to modern scrutiny.

My hottest take, a little more specifically, for a video game series in general, would be that the Sonic games are not good, and have never been good.

My hottest take for an individual game would be that Ace Combat Zero's story is pretty bad, actually, despite playing with some cool ideas and moments.

My hottest take, down to the most granular level of specific game systems and mechanics.... is that HP and MP are ultimately redundant concepts, as both are meant to quantifying the same abstract concept of "life energy" (or chi or ki or mana or chakra or what have you). And that I think this redundancy is often to the detriment of the games that use these systems, as combining the two creates an interesting risk/reward dynamic that otherwise would not be exist. If every attack, or at least every special attack, in an RPG came with some disadvantage like losing HP, it'd make combat a lot more tense and force players to think a *lot* more strategically.
 
Huge 90’s Sega fan here, and an unapologetic Sega Saturn appreciator. That’s going to make what I’m about to say very unexpected but here we go!

Nights into Dreams was an overhyped, glorified tech-demo with very little depth that got upstaged by its own demo disc. The main character looks like a Tumblr Sexyman and the sequel for the Wii is even worse. It’s a prime example of ‘style over substance’, with very colourful visuals and creative character design but ultra simplistic gameplay and very little content as the game only had seven (short) levels.

It became an unworthy rallying point for what was at the time an increasingly angry and unhinged console fanbase with a huge victim complex (just like modern Xbox fans today), desperate to be able to hold up something… ANYTHING and say “Look at this! It’s just as good as anything you have over there on the PlayStation or N64!” Many old Sega fans to this day still cling to this fantasy, unwilling to accept the truth; like a strange form of 90’s console war PTSD.

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Join me next time, when I brutally shove Burning Rangers onto the ground and kick it hard in the ribs a dozen times like some kind of stereotypical 80’s bully.
 
BioWare was NEVER good. Same w/ Obshitian.
For the horrifying consequences of its success alone the original FF7 may be one of the worst good games to ever be released.
you are not going to get a lot of eye candy out of Pong or Tetris.
Tetris Effect would like to have a word with you.
There are roughly two dozen or less western-developed games worth playing, and the culture of western videogame development is a malformed cultural backwater that should be reformed or dissolved.
If you appended "made after the dotcom crash" to that first statement I'd be right there with you, at the very least the American industry was killed by the crash and replaced w/ marketing sociopaths and Hollywood rejects etc. etc.
Oh yeah, when that list is drawn up, Half-Life 2 and its sequels are not finding themselves on it. In fact none of the Valve games (HL2 on) are.
 
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final fantasy 7 is bad
gameplay - boring
story - nonsense
world - forgettable
characters - unrelatable
artstyle - incoherent
sound - jarring
music - infantile
no redeeming qualities, better watch advent children
Final Fantasy 7 is bad? Hoooooooooooooo boy, if you say that, alongside 'Tifa Lockhart is an overrated whore', prepare to be proverbially beheaded
 
The PS2 era of Crash Bandicoot is cool as hell, the experimentation that everyone did to try and make it appeal were pretty good efforts, only held back by bad scheduling and jumping developers every two games.
I think there are only like 3 or 4 objectively bad Sonic games, Unleashed might be my favorite 3D title.
FromSoft's Souls games except for Sekiro are hot garbage that are only hard because of how clunky they are to control.
Call of Duty was good up until Black Ops 1, everything after that I don't particularly care for.
Dead Rising 3 isn't that bad, not as good as 1 and 2 but still good.
Mega Man 11 should've went on the chopping block.
Majora's Mask is better than Ocarina of Time, and Tears of the Kingdom sucks.
I probably got more in the back of my brain but ran out of ideas.
 
The PS2 era of Crash Bandicoot is cool as hell, the experimentation that everyone did to try and make it appeal were pretty good efforts, only held back by bad scheduling and jumping developers every two games.
I think there are only like 3 or 4 objectively bad Sonic games, Unleashed might be my favorite 3D title.
FromSoft's Souls games except for Sekiro are hot garbage that are only hard because of how clunky they are to control.
Call of Duty was good up until Black Ops 1, everything after that I don't particularly care for.
Dead Rising 3 isn't that bad, not as good as 1 and 2 but still good.
Mega Man 11 should've went on the chopping block.
Majora's Mask is better than Ocarina of Time, and Tears of the Kingdom sucks.
I probably got more in the back of my brain but ran out of ideas.
what part of tears of the kingdom did you not like? there's quite a bit to select from.
 
Okay, I've got a hot take on this thread as a whole: there's a difference between having a "hot take" and just having a shitty opinion. The former is something you can reasonably justify and defend, the latter is not.
 
what was the last good zelda game?
Minish Cap

Twilight Princess was bogged down by having to collect those light bugs as wolf Link. Combat as the wolf was really boring too. Bosses were way too easy and somehow Ganon has returned.

Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, and Skyward Sword. Content of the games don't matter much when the controls suck.

Breath of the Wild removed classic dungeons and put little puzzle and combat rooms in an almost empty world map that was boring to traverse. Their inspiration was Skyrim so I guess they nailed it.
Tears of the Kingdom I haven't played but from what I saw it was more of the same with more junk tacked on.

Echos of Wisdom had alot of it's gimmick ruined when most things could be solved with beds. UI didn't help it either.

A Link Between Worlds I haven't played yet so my opinion may change.
 
what part of tears of the kingdom did you not like? there's quite a bit to select from.
I didn't really like the world that much, the way everything is split off I feel ruins the exploration aspect that Breath of the Wild had, and I was hooked to that game. I also don't like that it runs at freakin 20fps on real hardware. I did like how they added new ways to move around and the puzzles seemed cool. I'm actually planning on playing that on an emulator to see if I like it better. I only really played about 12 hours of it.
 
Minish Cap

Twilight Princess was bogged down by having to collect those light bugs as wolf Link. Combat as the wolf was really boring too. Bosses were way too easy and somehow Ganon has returned.

Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, and Skyward Sword. Content of the games don't matter much when the controls suck.

Breath of the Wild removed classic dungeons and put little puzzle and combat rooms in an almost empty world map that was boring to traverse. Their inspiration was Skyrim so I guess they nailed it.
Tears of the Kingdom I haven't played but from what I saw it was more of the same with more junk tacked on.

Echos of Wisdom had alot of it's gimmick ruined when most things could be solved with beds. UI didn't help it either.

A Link Between Worlds I haven't played yet so my opinion may change.
yeah, i didn't like the light bugs either. twilight princess is still my favorite zelda though.

i didn't have a first good impression of wind waker, so i never had interest in phantom hourglass and spirit track since they share the smae art style.

the lack of dungeons did hurt breath of the wild. i spent about 80+ hours exploring before finishing the game. totk is like botw, exploring is fun in the depths for a while, but it ties with botw for 5th worst zelda game. i continued a challenge that i started in botw, so everything had added difficulty to it, but that was out of boredom, not a challenge. so, you're pretty much spot on with the sequel game.

pointcrow solved like half the shrines in totk with log bridges. echoes of wisdom seems like the developers took inspiration from those videos.

i haven't played a link between worlds. so no comment on that one.
 
I didn't really like the world that much, the way everything is split off I feel ruins the exploration aspect that Breath of the Wild had, and I was hooked to that game. I also don't like that it runs at freakin 20fps on real hardware. I did like how they added new ways to move around and the puzzles seemed cool. I'm actually planning on playing that on an emulator to see if I like it better. I only really played about 12 hours of it.
you should probably add some mods. there are some balancing mods and an expanded cooking one. i saw some mods to make zelda replace one of the sage spirits and purah had a spicy costume mod too.

botw had a good sense of exploration and mystery to it, but totk removed a lot of that and only covered the removal of the ancient shrines and divine beasts with a singular line of text in purah's journal and i think most people missed that completely. i learned about it in a video and i had completed all of the shrines and lightroots.
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A link between worlds is worth a play. It's familiar but at the same time kind of new with it's mechanics.
a link between worlds is a sequel to a link to the past, right?
 
Huge 90’s Sega fan here, and an unapologetic Sega Saturn appreciator. That’s going to make what I’m about to say very unexpected but here we go!

Nights into Dreams was an overhyped, glorified tech-demo with very little depth that got upstaged by its own demo disc. The main character looks like a Tumblr Sexyman and the sequel for the Wii is even worse. It’s a prime example of ‘style over substance’, with very colourful visuals and creative character design but ultra simplistic gameplay and very little content as the game only had seven (short) levels.

It became an unworthy rallying point for what was at the time an increasingly angry and unhinged console fanbase with a huge victim complex (just like modern Xbox fans today), desperate to be able to hold up something… ANYTHING and say “Look at this! It’s just as good as anything you have over there on the PlayStation or N64!” Many old Sega fans to this day still cling to this fantasy, unwilling to accept the truth; like a strange form of 90’s console war PTSD.

View attachment 8524

Join me next time, when I brutally shove Burning Rangers onto the ground and kick it hard in the ribs a dozen times like some kind of stereotypical 80’s bully.
Some hard truths there, but I agree. Being a Sega fan was a thankless endeavor after the 16 bit era.
 
Some hard truths there, but I agree. Being a Sega fan was a thankless endeavor after the 16 bit era.
Only if you didn't go or like arcades (and if you didn't then you weren't a real Sega fan anyway). 1990s to early 2000s was Sega's Arcade golden Age.

Another hot take:
Arcade gaming was vastly superior to console gaming up until the Arcades died in the early 2000s.
If anything Arcade gaming back then is even more superior to console gaming now since back then home consoles at least got quality Arcade ports.
 
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Only if you didn't go or like arcades (and if you didn't then you weren't a real Sega fan anyway). 1990s to early 2000s was Sega's Arcade golden Age.

Another hot take:
Arcade gaming was vastly superior to console gaming up until the Arcades died in the early 2000s.
If anything Arcade gaming back then is even more superior to console gaming now since back then home consoles at least sometimes got quality Arcade ports.
I never liked going to arcades, but you aren't wrong.
 

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