Unpopular Opinions - Video Game Edition

[Leviathan]

I don't know how "unpopular" it is, but Yoshi's Island for the SNES isn't a spinoff, it is a bonafide entry in the Mario series.

If you really play it, it's the true culmination of everything the Miyamoto/EAD team had done with the Mario series up to that point. It builds on so much of what made the earlier games great that designating it a mere spinoff does it a disserve. It's the missing link between Mario World and Mario 64.

I know Mario isn't the player character, there are mainline games where playing as Mario is not only optional, but disadvantageous (both SMB2 games and Mario 3D World).

 

[[classic swim]]

I wish Red Faction as a series had a little more going for it.

Red Faction 1 had its fair share of annoyances, but I still find it better than the general consensus preferred Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Guerilla to me was a borish and mostly forgettable grindfest.

The main takeaway everyone had with Red Faction 1 was its then revolutionary feature of blowing up in-game environments with explosives such as walls.

What I loved about RF1’s campaign was that it played out like a never-ending space adventure. Was cool that there were no dead set missions and you kept steadily progressing from rebelling Mars miner slave to intergalactic espionage. It only became a little more “ugh” in its final stages after Capek was abruptly shafted.

It was nice that Volition gave Ultor a more cunning legacy with Saints Row 2 (greatest of all time), but really with RF1 those pieces for a enjoyable narrative were still there.

RF1, Project Snowblind and Rainbow Six Lockdown are games I wish were remembered more fondly like early Halos. I believe they had strong online communities prior to Call of Duty takeover.

 

[khuddle]

Witcher 3 is a (slightly) overrated game. I found myself enjoying the side game of Gwent more than the actual game itself. I liked the expansion,"Blood and Wine", a lot, but the core game, meh. I thought both Skyrim and even AC Valhalla were superior games.

 

[Pooky]

Late reply, but in the interim I've sampled the games I mention to make sure I stand by my opinion.

Here's another: Double Dragon (NES) is fondly looked back on with nostalgia, but try playing it again. It's terrible. It's only four levels, and two of them are painfully easy, taking about 5 minutes total. The last two stages overcompensate by ramping up the difficulty too much so there isn't a gradual curve, and contain some badly-designed platforming and cheap AI. They're just not fun. The game kinda tricks you with the first two stages in that regard. Oh, and bugs? Yeah, there are two infamous ones: The "climbing the wall" bit on stage 1, and "defeat the boss just by climbing down the ladder" in stage 2.

I think this has become a more common opinion in recent years. There have been some Evercade, "Plug & Play" etc. releases that have used the NES version rather than the Arcade version, which many customers have cited as a regrettable decision.

My opinion? I don't rate either version, nor most of the series. If the original was ever any good, in my estimation it very quickly got surpassed by Bad Dudes Vs Dragon Ninja and Final Fight, even the TMNT and Simpsons games, to say nothing of the Streets of Rage series, and the mainline sequels did not, in my estimation, do enough to catch up. For that matter I even think its predecessor Renegade is a little more fun (especially with the original art style when it was released in Japan as Nekettsu Kouha Kunio-kun).

For me it wasn't until the surprisingly great Game Boy Advance remake (the imaginatively named Double Dragon Advance) that the franchise produced a game that holds up today. It kind of puts the previous games in a blender, the artwork is appealing and it runs wonderfully smooth.

 

[Classic Speedy]

Here's another one. The SNES version of Final Fight has rightfully been criticized for being a poor port, missing many things the arcade had (2-player!), being slower and not allowing as many enemies on-screen due to the SNES's slower hardware, and featuring censorship. Even the music has been panned as not being as gritty as the CPS-1 arcade music. Granted, it doesn't sound the same, but I will defend to this day some of the arrangements in here. It sounds just as appropriately sleazy as the arcade version, just in a different way. Check out the stage 1 theme for just one instance.