Underhated games

[Ikagura]

"Underhated" is an interesting term...

I agree but in the same way it's like shooting at the ambulance if the game is already being hated or sounding like a contrarian if it's a loved one.

 

[Big Finger Jim]

Skyrim, gta, skyrim, Minecraft. Elderts Scroll 5, Breath of the wild, ESV.
Did I mention skyrim?

I don't hate open world games, really. I actually like Morrowind a lot, and games like Tears of the Kingdom, palworld, even oblivion. So it's not like the game isn't for me. I've tried gears of war 1 a couple of times, I've never finished it, but I don't like shooting games that much, so when someone says GoW1 is a great game, my mind doesn't wonder -But, why?

Skyrim however, I've tried it after every re-release, or major fan patch, and can't remember what happens after Whiterun.

Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but I seriously can't remember the name of any npc or city, but I can draw a Morrowind map from memory, with towns, intended progression path, and enemy zones. Gosh, I love those weird towns.

You know what's great? I tried another run of Skyrim, and there's a bug that will make it impossible complete the Stormcloak questline, and possibly lock you out of Whiterun entirely, depending where and when you saved. The Stormcloak questline, one of the most important ones in the whole game. Also, P.S., just for your information, THIS WAS HALF A FUCKING YEAR AGO ON THE ANNIVERSARY EDITION. A nearly 14 year old game that's been re-released like three times and they refuse to fix it, and don't even get me started on Fallout 4's instability. God, I hate Bethesda, and EAT SHIT, Todd Howard.

 

[Ian Naxieas]

I spent a long time thinking about this and ended up with like 20 games to mention. I don't have the energy to rant about all of them though. x) Most of them were more overrated than underhated too.

The 3rd Birthday gets my vote for an underhated game. It already has a mixed reception as is, but it deserves worse. The gameplay, music and graphics were all solid, but the story and characters just took a gigantic shit over everything. I do feel gameplay is generally more important than story (unless the story is exceptional or at least very solid) in video games, but The 3rd Birthday's story was just insulting garbage to an overwhelming degree. Time travel stories are tricky to get right in general, but the devs did an exceptionally bad job at it. It's just a gigantic confusing and convoluted mess of pure garbage. Did the devs think it was deep or something? That happens a lot in plots, the tendency to think something is complex, but is just a convoluted mess in reality. Final Fantasy Tactics has a complex story, The 3rd Birthday has a convoluted story. Big difference.

The overall entire assassination of Aya as a character is the worst part. Yeah, I know it's Eve in her head and that's who you play as the whole game, that only makes things worse. So it's a really bad time travel story, a really bad Freaky Friday story and a really bad amnesiac story. Three strikes and all. Really great to have to, literally, kill Aya at the end as well. Why the fuck did any of this happen in the first place? The whole lynchpin of the story is Aya and Kyle getting gunned down at their wedding by SWAT members. Okay, I still don't know why that happened. If anyone has any idea, please tell me. I don't want headcanon or anything like that though, I want an actual verifiable reason. As far as I know, there is none.

I'm just gonna stop there. I have other complaints, but I think I got my feelings across well enough. I don't know who is to blame, Motomu Toriyama, Hajime Tabata or Yoshinori Kitase. In reality, all of them I suppose. They work together a lot and they don't tend to make good products. It's a shame that Hironobu Sakaguchi isn't around to keep them in check. At least Tabata isn't at Squeenix anymore, that's one less shit covered finger in the pie.

Elden Ring goes against several fundamental ideals of what made Souls so beloved and endangers the formula going forward. It heavily favors really precise mechanical execution and super high-end difficulty over well thought out methodical level and boss design. Souls in particular shines in terms of level layout and world design, and overwhelmingly the BEST parts of ER are when it's doing precisely those things... it just almost never does it in favor of a fairly bland open world with almost no sense of structure. I think Elden Ring is FAAAAAAAR from a bad game, but it kind of... bastardizes what Souls IS.

A bad game would be Breath of the Wild. An incredibly derivative game that does absolutely NOTHING new to a very (at that point) overdone and stale game design while also completely throwing everything its own series was built around out the window. It's so repetitive and monotonous, and pulls from so many different things that ALL do what it borrows better than it does.

It's clearly a nod to the original, but the original constantly makes the world varied and interesting while remaining challenging and really making you use your brain. You never "just find another shrine", even every dungeon is totally different. But it's not a particularly good open world game because it's a super cookie cutter, basic version of what came before it without doing anything interesting beyond that other than "having Zelda characters." And I haven't even mentioned the durability system. It's just so unbelievably bad. It barely even evolves the combat, and in several ways I'd say it actually takes steps back from Wind Waker and Twilight Princess! It's a bad open world game, a bad Zelda game, and I'll admit I genuinely hate how much love it gets. If you like it I'm totally cool with that and happy for you, but it got SO obsessed over just saying you didn't think it was GREAT got you harassed. THIS game? This? Really? -_-

These two were on my list as well. Don't have much to add other than well put, both here and in your subsequent posts about them. You have become more than my HM slave, I am proud of you. I would also put Tears of the Kingdom next to Breath of the Wild. I'd actually put it below, honestly. I played BotW enough to climb all the Far Cry towers, visit all the villages and take on two of the Divine Beasts, but I only sunk like 10 hours into TotK before I was done for good. Glad I didn't buy any of them in the end. x)

I guess I'm feeling a little spicy, so I'll do a couple rapid fire ones.

Skyrim is mid to bad in almost every metric. They've even re-released it 500 times and never fixed any of the numerous bugs the game has. I will never fathom how it's considered one of the greatest games of all time. Even mods aren't enough to salvage it.

I'll give it a point for being really ambitious for it's time, but Omikron was not a good start for David Cage's career. He started off near the bottom and has taken about half a step up with every subsequent game. Detroit was even tolerable, though that was mostly because of Connor. I know David Bowie and some of his music is in it, so people seem to feel it should be treasured because he's gone now, but a bad game is a bad game and Omikron is somehow the worst of Quantic Dream's rather stinky library.

 

[Graw]

I think a lot of popular jrpgs are underhated. Chrono Trigger's really not that great. I've beaten it once and played through it to various points of completion 3 or 4 times trying to figure out why everyone enjoys it so much. The intro is a massive drag. Like everything from the beginning all the way through the future until you get the Epoch just drags and then it just feels aimless.

The combat's kind of meh. I didn't really find the technique combo system very interesting and apart from that there's really not much else to it. It just felt like a dumbed down version of Final Fantasy's combat that tried to look fancy by having enemies move a little bit during combat to affect your combo timing.

The music and artwork are fantastic, I will give it that but I don't find the story to be all that special. Yeah it was somewhat unique for a jrpg of the time but a lot of video game stories are pretty crazy and out there so I didn't really find that it stood out to me particularly even back in the day.

I feel similarly about Earthbound. Yeah it's got a unique setting, a wacky story and some crazy dialog but the game's not very fun. It's super tedious in a lot of ways even compared to other old school jrpgs and the one gameplay gimmick it has with the rolling health bars doesn't really add much and it's just kind of annoying sometimes. Parts of Earthbound just feel like they're designed intentionally to be annoying and unfun. Just saving the game is annoying and tedious. It's also really linear without much exploring or anything. It's just going from one town to the next having wacky adventures in each one that's guaranteed to have at least one tedious and annoying part to it. By the time I got to the end of it I was so glad to be done with it.

 

[Neopolitan]

I wouldn't say I hated the game (I liked it to start with), but I was really disappointed when I got to the big reveal in 999 (the sudoku bit, for those who have played it) when I played it a couple of months ago, especially after reading so many posts over the years extolling how brilliant and clever it was. It felt like the writer decided on the "twist" from the start and clumsily wrote the rest of the game around it, but in such a way that left the game up to that point a mess of plot holes, and made everything that had happened prior to that moment feel altogether pointless.

I haven't played the sequels, but given that the consensus seems to be that 999 is the best of the series and the sequels went a bit off the rails, I can't imagine I'd like them either, lol

Definitely agreed about 999. Was also bugged by several puzzles that disregarded their own rules in order to be solved, with me having to cheat and look up the answers online in order to progress. Thing is, I loved the second game - VLR, so I went back to play 999 and really did not enjoy it at all. I would actually rate VLR as the best of the three, with ZTD as not bad (I enjoyed it at least), but 999 I really did not like at all.

Other games I'd list include Undertale (I don't get the appeal, and was sick of hearing about it when it came out), Half-Life 2, and the Persona games. Persona because they are MASSIVELY popular, even by gamers I genuinely respect, yet those games have some really shitty transphobia and homophobia that folks like to ignore because they love the games so much. I can't ignore it, and hearing some of my favourite gamers gush over how much they love those games really makes me despise them more.

 

[Toppis]

Nah this shit goes hard

this is banger

 

[Graw]

Skyrim is mid to bad in almost every metric. They've even re-released it 500 times and never fixed any of the numerous bugs the game has. I will never fathom how it's considered one of the greatest games of all time. Even mods aren't enough to salvage it.

Skyrim was better than Oblivion but that's about all it really has going for it. The dungeon design is a huge step back from Oblivion's though. Every dungeon in Skyrim is a tunnel with some monsters and some treasure chests at the end with probably useless trash in it with a convenient shortcut back to the beginning. Literally every dungeon is that. I remember the day I dropped Skyrim and never touched it again. I'd been playing for something like 3 hours and I realized all I'd done was organize my inventory and craft a bunch of items. For three hours straight. I turned it off and never played it again.

 

[Ain_Gamer]

I know this is a hot take but I think Final Fantasy tatics deserves more hate.

The gameplay isn't strategy or hard, it's Grindy, Job system and SRPG don't go well tougher.

The story has some interesting concepts but it's poorly told and devolves into something more generic in the end, bonus points for the fact that you can easily softlock yourself in that game.

Post automatically merged: Feb 27, 2025

I spent a long time thinking about this and ended up with like 20 games to mention. I don't have the energy to rant about all of them though. x) Most of them were more overrated than underhated too.

The 3rd Birthday gets my vote for an underhated game. It already has a mixed reception as is, but it deserves worse. The gameplay, music and graphics were all solid, but the story and characters just took a gigantic shit over everything. I do feel gameplay is generally more important than story (unless the story is exceptional or at least very solid) in video games, but The 3rd Birthday's story was just insulting garbage to an overwhelming degree. Time travel stories are tricky to get right in general, but the devs did an exceptionally bad job at it. It's just a gigantic confusing and convoluted mess of pure garbage. Did the devs think it was deep or something? That happens a lot in plots, the tendency to think something is complex, but is just a convoluted mess in reality. Final Fantasy Tactics has a complex story, The 3rd Birthday has a convoluted story. Big difference.

The overall entire assassination of Aya as a character is the worst part. Yeah, I know it's Eve in her head and that's who you play as the whole game, that only makes things worse. So it's a really bad time travel story, a really bad Freaky Friday story and a really bad amnesiac story. Three strikes and all. Really great to have to, literally, kill Aya at the end as well. Why the fuck did any of this happen in the first place? The whole lynchpin of the story is Aya and Kyle getting gunned down at their wedding by SWAT members. Okay, I still don't know why that happened. If anyone has any idea, please tell me. I don't want headcanon or anything like that though, I want an actual verifiable reason. As far as I know, there is none.

I'm just gonna stop there. I have other complaints, but I think I got my feelings across well enough. I don't know who is to blame, Motomu Toriyama, Hajime Tabata or Yoshinori Kitase. In reality, all of them I suppose. They work together a lot and they don't tend to make good products. It's a shame that Hironobu Sakaguchi isn't around to keep them in check. At least Tabata isn't at Squeenix anymore, that's one less shit covered finger in the pie.



These two were on my list as well. Don't have much to add other than well put, both here and in your subsequent posts about them. You have become more than my HM slave, I am proud of you. I would also put Tears of the Kingdom next to Breath of the Wild. I'd actually put it below, honestly. I played BotW enough to climb all the Far Cry towers, visit all the villages and take on two of the Divine Beasts, but I only sunk like 10 hours into TotK before I was done for good. Glad I didn't buy any of them in the end. x)

I guess I'm feeling a little spicy, so I'll do a couple rapid fire ones.

Skyrim is mid to bad in almost every metric. They've even re-released it 500 times and never fixed any of the numerous bugs the game has. I will never fathom how it's considered one of the greatest games of all time. Even mods aren't enough to salvage it.

I'll give it a point for being really ambitious for it's time, but Omikron was not a good start for David Cage's career. He started off near the bottom and has taken about half a step up with every subsequent game. Detroit was even tolerable, though that was mostly because of Connor. I know David Bowie and some of his music is in it, so people seem to feel it should be treasured because he's gone now, but a bad game is a bad game and Omikron is somehow the worst of Quantic Dream's rather stinky library.

I actually like the 3rd birthday but I can easily say it's one of the worst story in Gaming, what's impressive it in a bad way is that, it manage to make a relative simple story into a convoluted mess, After I beat it I didn't undertood the story so I went to gameFAQ to read a guide explain it, after reading I realized the story was actually very simple but the writers made a impressive job of making it impossible to understand.

 

[Graw]

I know this is a hot take but I think Final Fantasy tatics deserves more hate.

The gameplay isn't strategy or hard, it's Grindy, Job system and SRPG don't go well tougher.

The story has some interesting concepts but it's poorly told and devolves into something more generic in the end, bonus points for the fact that you can easily softlock yourself in that game.

Final Fantasy Tactics turned me off of SRPGs altogether. I've always liked strategy and tactical games and I found Tactics Advanced and FF Tactics Advanced and got pretty into them. I read the ps1 FFT was better so I gave it a try and just hated it and I've been put off by those kinds of games ever since.

 

[Ain_Gamer]

Also I'm gonna say Devil Survivor. I went in after hearing every Megaten fan praise it like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread and what I got was one of the grindiest, most tedious games in the franchise. The first boss is grossly over levelled for where you are in the game and to beat it, you'll be subjected to hours worth of replaying the same map to get duplicates until you have enough to withstand it. Battles afterwards weren't much better either.

After that is Kirby's Adventure/Nightmare in Dreamland. It's the second game in the franchise and all but it is boring. I don't hate it though. Only reason I'm talking about that game is because everyone already hates Dream Land 2 and Squeak Squad, so anything more becomes redundant.

Every Sonic game on Wii sucks ass. Secret Rings and Black Knight are 90% mission bloat and 10% Sonic game (and controls are terrible), Sonic Unleashed's motion controls make the werehog a nightmare to use since the same input for grabs is the attack, also the mission bloat for day stages. Last but not least is Sonic Colors, where the level design is godawful and completely inconsistent. Doesn't even make use of the Wisps most of the time, always astounds me that this game still has fans yet Sonic Adventure 1 has taken a beating in fan reception. Haven't played the Wii version of Sonic Riders ZG though.

I agree with Devil Survivor, it has a lot of things I don't like about FFT for example, however I don't hate it, because I really like it's story and it's philosophical debate, maybe I just had played the right game at the right time (July of 2022) but I really enjoy for what it's, but I had to use cheats to beat the final boss because I didn't feel like Grind for hours.

I remember in the Discord server I was playing it I gave it a 7.5/10 , the same score I gave Left Alive which I also had played around the same time, a game that I also played at the right time, at the right moment, because of word events that had started around early 2022.

Post automatically merged: Feb 27, 2025

Final Fantasy Tactics turned me off of SRPGs altogether. I've always liked strategy and tactical games and I found Tactics Advanced and FF Tactics Advanced and got pretty into them. I read the ps1 FFT was better so I gave it a try and just hated it and I've been put off by those kinds of games ever since.

Don't Try the Fire Emblem series. Unlike the FFT they aren't Grindy (in fact you can't grind in them) so they are generally well balanced in my opinion.

Post automatically merged: Feb 27, 2025

Skyrim, gta, skyrim, Minecraft. Elderts Scroll 5, Breath of the wild, ESV.
Did I mention skyrim?

I don't hate open world games, really. I actually like Morrowind a lot, and games like Tears of the Kingdom, palworld, even oblivion. So it's not like the game isn't for me. I've tried gears of war 1 a couple of times, I've never finished it, but I don't like shooting games that much, so when someone says GoW1 is a great game, my mind doesn't wonder -But, why?

Skyrim however, I've tried it after every re-release, or major fan patch, and can't remember what happens after Whiterun.

Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but I seriously can't remember the name of any npc or city, but I can draw a Morrowind map from memory, with towns, intended progression path, and enemy zones. Gosh, I love those weird towns.

GTA was one of the worst things in the gaming industry , many game devs were forced to change their game because executives wanted to emulate GTA success just look at Skate or Die reboot story for example.

Not only that but it made games more entitled specially on stuff like content and detail, not only that but it created the horrible trend of games being open world,also GTA popularised the whole game as services thing.

Post automatically merged: Feb 27, 2025

I haven't beaten either game, and while Castlevania definitely is a chore right of the bat, I feel like Metroid, with a bit more varied basic combat and the opressive horror atmosphere makes the backtracking thing work. I never felt bored cause I was always too afraid of what horrible alien abomination is gonna randomly jump out at me next and what if I run out of rockets when I need them most ahhh! Then again I'm a whimp and am afraid of a lot of games that are supposed to be just action.
tldr Metroid > Castlevania, don't ya pile em together imma cut you ?

With that out of the way it's my day job to hate games everyone likes:
Mario - like what's even good about it if you are not like 3?
Sonic - they so busy making it fast, they didn't stop to think if it's any fun
Pokemon - let us demonstrate everything that is wrong with jrpg gameplay
Final Fantasy - can you be more incoherent? ... ah, yeah, SMT, right...
Earthbound - does it have a good story? I don't know cause gameplay is so boring my brain shuts off before I can get anywhere
Zelda - there was one good game on a gameboy, for a gameboy game... that's it...
Doom - cheap wolfenstein reskin, made it worse and introduced and popularized some of the worst FPS mechanics
Diablo 2 - has anybody played the 1st? are yall blind? lizzard is what it is now cause you gobbled this shit up, smh
Metal Gear - more like mid gear
God of War - press button - watch cartoon, lets adventure game fans pretend they like hack and slash
Dark Souls - From Software just can't make a hack and slash if their lives depended on it, it's so bad buyers remorse be like "no, this can't be, it must be intentional", so they just doubled down on it so hard there is no going back, everyone will have to pretend it's a thing now forever to save face
The Witcher 3 - ok, we have officially gone off rails, point of no return, this is proof the industry is just hopelessly fucked, to anyone who thinks this is good - you are the reason we can't have nice things anymore

I am more curious to what you like ?

Post automatically merged: Feb 27, 2025

I dunno how they handle projects there but I believe you can tell they always do something very experimental with the gameplay, yet instead of refining the mechanics in the next series, they scrapped it and go with something else.

This is why I love Square Enix, if more people in the gaming industry had that mentality we wouldn't had annual COD or all AAA games being the same.

Square Enix has courage and I respect every game they made even the ones I don't like (FFT , FF12 even Balan wornderland)

 

[spectresfrommercury]

omori its nothing but uwu shit.

 

[Big Finger Jim]

I know this is a hot take but I think Final Fantasy tatics deserves more hate.

The gameplay isn't strategy or hard, it's Grindy, Job system and SRPG don't go well tougher.

The story has some interesting concepts but it's poorly told and devolves into something more generic in the end, bonus points for the fact that you can easily softlock yourself in that game.

Post automatically merged: Feb 27, 2025

I actually like the 3rd birthday but I can easily say it's one of the worst story in Gaming, what's impressive it in a bad way is that, it manage to make a relative simple story into a convoluted mess, After I beat it I didn't undertood the story so I went to gameFAQ to read a guide explain it, after reading I realized the story was actually very simple but the writers made a impressive job of making it impossible to understand.

Just the PS1 version or the entire game in general?

 

[FreshDinoBone]

Bubsy 3D. There's never enough hate for Bubsy 3D...

What could Pawsibly go wrong?

 

[Neopolitan]

I forgot to include Alien Isolation. I know how much everyone loves it, but I never even got to face the Alien - I couldn't get past a gang of human bandits with guns. Try to sneak past them, they spot me and gun me down. Sneak up on one and knock em out so I can steal their gun and shoot back? Can't pick up their gun for no damn reason, get gunned down. In a game that includes an invincible titular alien that can one-hit KO you, my 100% death rate should not be getting gunned down by humans before I even meet the alien in question. F*ck Alien Isolation.