An opinion you're probably all alone with?

[karaRobert]

GRAND THEFT AUTO V being the most overrated and actually the worst (next to GTA IV) title within the whole franchise, basically more or less useless gameplay-wise while focusing way too much on "great´n funny" characters and its story.

I also stopped playing it at that "Submarine-Mission" where i had to travel for miles (...again!) until anything more interesting could have happened, other than just driving for miles, so in fact that game focusing on "driving for miles from A to B" without actually doing anything else than "just driving" while looking at the scenery in my opinion, and GTA V does making me do this way more often than i remember in any other games of the franchise.

That same problem was already happening with GTA IV but at least they got me that kewl´n fancy "character-switching" with 3 different characters, which at least blew some slightly new wind into the franchise, but still...compared to GTA SAN ANDREAS it was rather a let-down with the franchise rather moving backwards.

I could as well just step into my own car, driving for miles looking at the scenery, that would also be more exciting since a crash would actually cause more trouble than in GTA V.

Now some claim the same with RED DEAD REDEMPTION II, but as even i am surprised by myself...i was enjoying that title way more than that rather "mess" of a "GTA V".

[Rynjin]

I'm fine with driving around and enjoying the scenery in games, and had a lot of fun doing that in GTA 5.

That said, I ALSO stopped playing at the boring submarine mission, so it's not just you.

[factotum]

I really didn't like the GTA5 single player experience. Problem is, the previous two games had the characters you were playing as be somewhat sympathetic and forced into doing horrible things occasionally by circumstance. Of course, they were still generally not nice people but they were at least relatable. What do we have in GTA5? Franklin, who just does anything anyone asks him to because he wants to be a big-time criminal. Michael, whose hobby seems to be shouting at his family. And Trevor, who is a brutal psychotic who will just kill anyone at the drop of a hat. I didn't like any of these people and certainly didn't like being put in their shoes, so I gave up on it.

[Batcathat]

I really didn't like the GTA5 single player experience. Problem is, the previous two games had the characters you were playing as be somewhat sympathetic and forced into doing horrible things occasionally by circumstance. Of course, they were still generally not nice people but they were at least relatable. What do we have in GTA5? Franklin, who just does anything anyone asks him to because he wants to be a big-time criminal. Michael, whose hobby seems to be shouting at his family. And Trevor, who is a brutal psychotic who will just kill anyone at the drop of a hat. I didn't like any of these people and certainly didn't like being put in their shoes, so I gave up on it.

I kind of liked the protagonists for the same reason. At least the disconnect between the cutscenes (where killing someone is a big deal) and the gameplay (where you're likely blowing up cops and running over civilians by the dozens) isn't quite so jarring when you have someone like Trevor.

[Velaryon]

I only played as far into single player in GTA 5 as the game forced me before it allowed me to move into GTA Online. I enjoyed the single-player modes in previous games but I bought GTA5 specifically to play online with friends, so I just never got around to the single player. As such, I have no opinion on the quality there.

As for my own gaming-related opinion that I don't expect many others to share:

I think the Final Fantasy series is massively overrated, with the exception of VI and VII. I don't begrudge others their fun if they do enjoy FF, but it annoys me to no end that so many other series I think are better fell by the wayside as Square Enix bought up so many of the old JRPG studios and others just vanished. I'd trade every Final Fantasy game made in the last 25 years for one more Ogre Battle title.

[veti]

Well, I think the best Final Fantasy game is Chocobo Tales...

[Imbalance]

I prefer my video games offline and solo, my tabletop games in-person and tangible, and never the twain should meet.

[Giggling Ghast]

I'm kinda indifferent to Supergiant Games.

[Yora]

Obviously not alone because the devs also thought the same, but Mass Effect 2 became a much better RPG because it threw out several obnoxious "RPG elements" from the first game.
Applying individual points to a dozen different skills for minor percentage increases and occasionally unlocking new abilities was pointless. Strippng it down to just unlocking abilities was great.
Finding new guns and armor with slighty different protection values every 2 munutes made getting new stuff unmemorable and just created a huge amount of busywork to fine comb through the piles of junk to pick out what's actually good. Having only like four rifles and five pistols is great when each ones handles differently instead of having 240 rifles that are indistinguishable from each other.

When I am looking at a menu screen, I am not playing an RPG. I am interrupting the game to do doing necessary bookkeeping to be allowed to go back to the game.

Also, from a completely different perspective: Stalker and Kenshi are the best RPGs I ever played on computer, and neither is commonly considered an RPG. Open-world and semi-open-world action games are better RPGs than gamified novels. An RPG should be about the experiences of the players, not about a story script.

[veti]

I prefer my video games offline and solo, my tabletop games in-person and tangible, and never the twain should meet.

You're definitely not alone in that one.

[Zevox]

For myself, honestly, I can't think of anything. First thing that comes mind in terms of less-than-popular gaming opinions that I have is my dislike of open-world game design, but I know there are those who share that feeling, we're just a minority. On a related note, I love the Legend of Zelda, but haven't played Breath of the Wild for much that reason - but again, I know there's a minority out there like me in that regard.

I don't know, maybe the fact that I have played Chrono Trigger, enjoyed it, but don't think it's one of the greatest games of all time? Nor even one of the greatest of its genre. It probably was at the time it came out, but it's been surpassed plenty since, IMO. But even that's probably selection bias, since people who share that opinion with me would have little reason to say much about the game, while those who do have that high an opinion of it are the ones likely to bring it up.

As for my own gaming-related opinion that I don't expect many others to share:

I think the Final Fantasy series is massively overrated, with the exception of VI and VII.

I'd have said Final Fantasy 7 Remake for the exception (haven't played 6, so I can't judge that one), but I'm otherwise with you there. I have no idea why Final Fantasy specifically became the most popular JRPG franchise when it honestly strikes me as mostly full of mediocre to bad games, at least of what I've played of it, which is a fair chunk. There's the occasional good-with-caveats one, but prior to FF7R, nothing I had a lot of praise for personally.

Obviously not alone because the devs also thought the same, but Mass Effect 2 became a much better RPG because it threw out several obnoxious "RPG elements" from the first game.
Applying individual points to a dozen different skills for minor percentage increases and occasionally unlocking new abilities was pointless. Strippng it down to just unlocking abilities was great.
Finding new guns and armor with slighty different protection values every 2 munutes made getting new stuff unmemorable and just created a huge amount of busywork to fine comb through the piles of junk to pick out what's actually good. Having only like four rifles and five pistols is great when each ones handles differently instead of having 240 rifles that are indistinguishable from each other.

Yeah, you're not alone on that one either, I was very happy with those changes to ME2 as well. I always thought it was a sad joke that most of Mass Effect 1's skill points only got you a 1-2% increase to something, and some even gave you less than 1%. At that point, I have to ask why I'm even bothering, because the effect will be totally unnoticeable.

[Rynjin]

I think the Final Fantasy series is massively overrated, with the exception of VI and VII. I don't begrudge others their fun if they do enjoy FF, but it annoys me to no end that so many other series I think are better fell by the wayside as Square Enix bought up so many of the old JRPG studios and others just vanished. I'd trade every Final Fantasy game made in the last 25 years for one more Ogre Battle title.

I think the series is overrated except for IV, X, and XII, so the funny thing is I think that opinion is not unpopular it just varies by which games people think are "the good ones". Which are usually the ones people played first lol.

I think one of my biggest video game hot takes is that Dragon Age 2 was pretty good actually. Not perfect, but good. MUCH better than Inquisition, at least.

[Batcathat]

I think one of my biggest video game hot takes is that Dragon Age 2 was pretty good actually. Not perfect, but good. MUCH better than Inquisition, at least.

I agree with this one (well, the first part, I haven't actually played Inquisition), I consider Dragon Age 2 pretty great, despite its flaws. I think it has kind of the opposite strength and weakness to the first game: Origins is a very well made game is most regards but has a fairly unoriginal story (Uniting the people against the literal forces of evil? I've seen it a couple of dozen times before) while Dragon Age 2 has a (in my opinion) much more interesting story but a very flawed execution.

[Zevox]

I think one of my biggest video game hot takes is that Dragon Age 2 was pretty good actually. Not perfect, but good. MUCH better than Inquisition, at least.

I'm with you there. It's actually my favorite of the three, though its flaws and the strong characters of Origins do make it a close call.

[InvisibleBison]

Games don't need to be difficult to be enjoyable. In fact, in many cases making a game more difficult makes it less enjoyable.

[Lord Raziere]

I personally like pokemon fan games and think the well designed ones are better than actual pokemon games

I like Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. I'm alone in this because I'm probably the only one who knows it exists.

I liked Blinx the Time Sweepers's look and thought their game's time control gameplay was fun.

Goombario is useless in Paper Mario once you get any other partner, but Goombella is always good in Thousand Year Door.

I have never seen Persona 5 Royale, but I have seen Persona 5 Strikers and I think its story is pretty good.

the three Xenoblade Chronicles games would be better done as three anime series, each one about 26 episodes or so long.

Kingdom Hearts is just bad and incoherent, there is no sense to be made from it.

Minecraft is just a tech demo for all the games that came after it, that did it better.

The idea that a fixed character is also a blank slate to put yourself into is paradoxical, dumb and should no longer be done. give Mario, Link and so on actual personalities rather than trying to pretend they represent me in any way. you want me to blank slate self insert, give me a character creation screen or don't even try to pretend.

[Mordokai]

Minecraft is just a tech demo for all the games that came after it, that did it better.

I never played Minecraft and know next to nothing about it.

But I imagine reddit in its collectivity had a fit right now

[Lord Raziere]

I never played Minecraft and know next to nothing about it.

But I imagine reddit in its collectivity had a fit right now

Then it will hate what I'm about say next even more:

Fortnite is an advertising platform with shooter gameplay elements.

[Rynjin]

Kingdom Hearts is just bad and incoherent, there is no sense to be made from it.

I've never understood this take. The plots are extremely straightforward, with the exception of KH 3 which is just a mess from top to bottom because they decided the ****ty mobile games needed to be core plot critical.

[Lord Raziere]

I've never understood this take. The plots are extremely straightforward, with the exception of KH 3 which is just a mess from top to bottom because they decided the ****ty mobile games needed to be core plot critical.

The actions of Sora are straightforward.

Its machinations of everyone else that is the problem.

he is kind of just a pawn in everyone's game of time travel-abstract-conceptual-clone-memory-manipulation calvinball.

[Zombimode]

I may be the only person in the world that thinks that Ultima 9 is a good game.

But I really do.
UIX is I think the first 3D open-world* fantasy RPG. It offers great exploration and rewards player creativity in regards of that exploration.
The dungeon design is flavourfull and highly distinct. Dungeon design is probably my main gripe of many RPGs and almost always I wish that more designer would take a note or two from the dungeon design in UIX.
And the music is just perfect. It is without a doubt one of my favorite video game score of all time.


*NOT sandbox - just a seemless open world. And from what I remember there where NO map boundaries. Instead the game was programmed to simulate a globe: sail far enough with your ship to the east and you appear on the western edge of the map.

[Khay]

Undertale is overrated. The gameplay is nearly non-existent and the writing relies heavily on emotional cheap shots. There's very little depth to any of it, and the stuff that's going on around the endings is creepypasta-tier. Deltarune has better gameplay, but the story suffers from the same problems.

I'm not saying it was bad. Far from it, in fact. It's just not the modern classic it's held up to be.

Music's good, though.

[factotum]

I may be the only person in the world that thinks that Ultima 9 is a good game.

If it existed in isolation then that maybe wouldn't be a controversial opinion. U9 was written as if nothing existed before it, so you get ludicrous lines like the main character--one of whose dearest friends happens to be a paladin--asking "What's a paladin?" when the question comes up. If it was written assuming some knowledge of the previous games, and also didn't crap all over a lot of the characters from those games as well, then it would be considered a competent RPG.

[Eldan]

Undertale is overrated. The gameplay is nearly non-existent and the writing relies heavily on emotional cheap shots. There's very little depth to any of it, and the stuff that's going on around the endings is creepypasta-tier. Deltarune has better gameplay, but the story suffers from the same problems.

I'm not saying it was bad. Far from it, in fact. It's just not the modern classic it's held up to be.

Music's good, though.

I remember playing like an hour of Undertale because everyone kept telling me I should and just going "Oh wow, this puzzle is incredibly obvious and uninteresting, oh no, bullet hell, I hate that; I hope these characters get more interesting" and then giving up on it. I just wasn't doing anything I enjoyed. And the meta commentary didn't feel that new or original either.

[Rodin]

I've never understood this take. The plots are extremely straightforward, with the exception of KH 3 which is just a mess from top to bottom because they decided the ****ty mobile games needed to be core plot critical.

They lost me somewhere in the middle of KH 2. I played it all the way through and I still couldn't tell you what the plot was.

I tried out 358/2 Days because the gameplay was still good in KH 2 and I was instantly lost plot-wise. I stuck it out for around 10 hours or so before putting it down and never returning to the series.

Games don't need to be difficult to be enjoyable. In fact, in many cases making a game more difficult makes it less enjoyable.

There's a balance to be had. I'm currently playing a Fire Emblem/Ogre Battle style game called Symphony of War. The core systems are pretty good, and there's a good game down there somewhere.

However, the difficulty is laughable. On the suggestion of the Steam reviews I cranked the difficulty to the max (Hard + Permadeath) in the hopes of getting a good experience out of it...and it's still far too simple. I'm never at risk of losing my main characters, and I rarely lose even the expendable squad units. I'm A or S ranking everything without even trying.

Games don't have to kick your ass. However, they should provide enough of a challenge to make you engage with their systems. If you're playing the game as intended and you have a 0% chance of losing somebody did their job wrong.

And of course, difficulty levels should always be provided. As long as "difficult" actually is difficult and "easy" is actually easy.

[Artanis]

Star Control 3 was not a bad game.

It wasn't a good game by any stretch of the imagination, mind you, but it wasn't the horror-show abomination that it gets reviled as. If it hadn't been named "Star Control", it would've been simply forgotten as a thoroughly "meh" game like so many others from its era.

[MCerberus]

C&C Renegade was brilliant multiplayer, was a decade ahead of the game for hero shooters, and comparing the amount of customization and modding possible to modern platforms makes me weep with rage.

[LibraryOgre]

Finding new guns and armor with slighty different protection values every 2 munutes made getting new stuff unmemorable and just created a huge amount of busywork to fine comb through the piles of junk to pick out what's actually good.

That was actually necessary for story reasons. Not many people know this, but Shepard's secondary MOS is Quartermaster.

[Rodin]

Star Control 3 was not a bad game.

It wasn't a good game by any stretch of the imagination, mind you, but it wasn't the horror-show abomination that it gets reviled as. If it hadn't been named "Star Control", it would've been simply forgotten as a thoroughly "meh" game like so many others from its era.

Apparently there are Masters of Orion 3 fans out there too. I imagine them being people who really like doing their taxes each year.

[Vinyadan]

Also, from a completely different perspective: Stalker and Kenshi are the best RPGs I ever played on computer, and neither is commonly considered an RPG. Open-world and semi-open-world action games are better RPGs than gamified novels. An RPG should be about the experiences of the players, not about a story script.

I think STALKER was exceptional and maybe unparalleled in what it was open to be. For me it was an open-world FPS, for many today it's a survival horror, for you it's an RPG, and its engine does allow for all three. As an FPS, it can be modded to be a ballistics simulator (just to make an example: bullets follow a parable, but it isn't predetermined -- it's based on the speed of the bullet. Some rifles have subsonic bullets, which in original games meant an exaggeratedly quickly descending parable), and it also can differentiate weapons by changing drag. It can be modded to be a survival horror by changing the availability of resources and the strength and speed of monsters, radioactive fields, and anomalies. It has a number of crafting mods. It also has traders and quests, both radiant and fixed (DoctorX, who created the quest system now used in many mods, passed away some time ago). Also, I never really checked how it worked, but I think the rank (rookie to legend) affected how effective you were in combat, although I'm not sure and it's possible that the numbers I saw referred to NPCs.

And of course, atop this engine they added an overactive AI with individual stalkers hunting artefacts and fighting both in the map you are in and in the others, faction wars, and ray tracing (in a 2007 game. Can be activated by console).

After a while, the game starts to resemble those Soviet aeronautical experiments, like, "Vovchik, it's nice we have a bomber, but can we add some fighters to the bomber?", so they chained a couple of fighters to the bomber.

Finally, the setting is one of the best ever seen in a videogame, both in atmosphere and interactivity. The fact that deadly anomalies contain precious artefacts means that you want to get close and risk it (and it's difficult, but bolts make it fair). The dungeons are also memorable.