Sure.
People into gaming are typically passionate about their opinions, that’s what you’d expect. I don’t mind if everyone here hates a game I love or vice versa, happens all the time in fact. I just like reading all the discussion to get an idea on what I should check out.
Over the years I’ve become increasingly hard to please, not sure why, but there it is. At this point I’d say I find a game I truly love about once every 3 or 4 years. So needless to say A LOT of games that are loved here I dislike, and I’m more than OK with that. ;)
I’m just surprised at the amount of people here willing to publicly admit to not liking a Zelda game. Back at the launch of the Wii, I really hated that launch Wii Zelda game, and I felt like every time I admitted that, I was losing a little bit of gamer cred or something. I certainly feel that even now when I admit that I didn’t enjoy Ocarina of Time.
I hated that zelda too. Twilight princess or something?
That one, and Zelda 2 (the one with the side scrolling crap and top down map view with random encounters) were the only two zeldas I didn’t like.
Voice acting is poor.
Story is mediocre.
Sidequests generally are uninteresting.
Inventory limits on weapons/shields and item dropping from menu to pickup a new item is cumbersome. Lots of things about the menu design is more cumbersome than it needs to be.
Rain is annoying with basically no in game mitigation or counterplay component.
Rapid weapon degradation
Enemy variety is subpar
Poor rewards to general exploration and lack of incentive to engage in combat. Weapon degradation makes engaging in combat generally more detriment than gain. Only real reason to fight is if grinding and there are far faster ways to earn rupees than selling monster parts.
Combat is passable, but not fun enough to be it’s own driver, Nioh this is not.
World is sparsely populated.
Despite there not being that much to actually mark on your map, the stickers included are somehow inadequate. (apparently somewhat addressed via paid DLC)
Shrines vary wildly in quality, from terrible to excellent, with most being middling.
Combat shrines are cut/paste.
Tilt controls/camera for tilt based shrine puzzles is terrible and virtually unplayable undocked.
Limit on distance to summon your horse makes using one somewhat impractical. (fixed in paid DLC apparently)
Lack of fun upgrades. Most upgrades are about making the world less annoying to deal with.
Don’t feel bad, the last Zelda game I loved was whatever the one on SNES was called. Wind Waker was the last one I played and I made it a few hours in and lost interest. I haven’t played Breath of the Wild, so I can’t comment on it one way or another.
But I’m suffering from massive open-world fatigue syndrome at the moment. This year featured three highly praised and/or hyped open world games (H:ZD, AC:Origins, ME:A) that I found enjoyable enough to finish, but were so inferior to Witcher 3 that it wasn’t even a competition. They all featured beautiful environments and engaging gameplay, but at the end of the day I can say with certainty I’ll never play any of them again.
I feel like I got my moneys worth out of all of them, so outside of being kinda upset with ME:A for butchering a franchise I loved with its mediocrity, I don’t feel strongly about any of them, which I consider to be somewhat unfortunate for the open world genre.
I can’t think of a single thing that Windwaker (generally considered to be among the best of the Zeldas) does better than BoTW.
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Weapon degradation - this a conscious design choice, and I can see how it bothers some people. It leads me to hoard my weapons and fight Lynels with soldier weapons if I see one lying about. However it doesn’t seem to bother the kids or the causal gamers at all, and my wife has pretty much 100%ed the game (minus ~half the Koroks) and she hasn’t lacked for weapons once. So it’s an improvement on the previous Zeldas non-existent loot system without the complexity of crafting, modifiers, etc. The inventory limits tie into this; might as well complain about carry weight limit in Skyrim, Fallout etc.
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Rain and other environmental “annoyances”. Build a fire, sleep until the rain has passed. The other hot/cold climates are similar to the obstacles were you need hookshot/upgrades before you progress, standard Zelda/Metroidvania stuff, except now you have multiple ways of bypassing them (food, clothing, different routes of attack, etc.)
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Story – eh. It’s a Zelda. I’m not sure what you are expecting. I would have liked more story, but again, it’s comparable or better than other Zeldas. I can say the same for sidequests, puzzles, enemy variety, of which are incrementally improved from previous entries. The world though, it’s leaps bounds better, and it’s filled with charming details like the rito kids trudging off to bed in the evening, etc.
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Voice acting - the only point I’d agree with you on. I can’t stand Zelda’s VA, but there wasn’t much of it.
If you don’t like BoTW, it’s most likely that you’ve left the target audience for their games. Can’t expect them to cater equally to the dark souls crowd and casual players.
I’m in agreement here! I don’t begrudge Tom his disappointment in GRW, but as I’m not a Clancy game aficionado, I went in with low expectations. I can’t get enough of rambling across the beautiful countryside and clearing out increasingly more complicated enemy strongholds. There’s not much too it, and it’s repetitive, but I continue to enjoy the heck out of it. My 1080Ti GPU probably makes this game more appealing than it would be if I had to dial down the effects.
Zelda, I only own because the kid’s were keen on the Switch. I was tool old for the original Zelda games (or thought I was when they were originally released) and BotW doesn’t seem at all appealing to me, but hey, glad lots of other people love it.
“embarrassing” animation issues that I either never encountered or never noticed, so not exactly gamebreaking.
Yeah, English voice acting is unbearable. Switch to Japanese, it’s surprisingly less Japanese than the English VO.
I don’t know what it says about me, but I have a real hard time thinking om most diappointing entries.
Or, I had. And then someone mentioned Mass Effect: Andromeda, and woof.
The worst thing is, is that as far as moment to moment combat goes, it’s among the best the series has ever been. The crew has some winners – Vetra, PeeBee and Drax completely won me over by the end. And man, Elaaden is gorgeous. But: all that moment to moment to combat is drowned out by a sea of ubistuff that doesn’t serve it in the slightest. And the characters are adrift in horrible white saviour story. Mass Effect 1 carfully layered in new enticing stuff with every beat of its story; Oh, here’s a new beat: learn about Tali and the Quarians. A twist: the Krogans and the genophage you’ve been learning about? There’s a twist, Wrex is mighty torn up about it, and now you have a dilemma on your hands. Andromeda on the other hand goes to another galaxy only to recreate the entire political equilibrium of the previous series. Welcome to the new world: way more boring than the old.
Ugh. What a wasted opportunity.
With reasons why you like it?
Games are fun. Arguing about why you find a game is fun versus someone who doesnt is also fun, or at least interesting. Its entertainment we are spitballing here, nothing important.
Your appeal to authoritiy or sales numbers is really not much of an argument. It would be the equivalent of me saying “the game would be rated 5/10 if it hadnt had the Zelda name on it”.
If you wanna play, then tell us why you think its awesome. If you don’t want to engage hey thats cool too, I was rather enjoying the discussion though.
Psst… I didn’t like A Link to the Past, because of the slow pacing, the manual that spoiled the whole game trying to explain everything, and the puzzles that were so darn stupid they felt insulting and not rewarding. Also I remember thinking the screen transitions were pretty darn annoying.
I must confess I may have been disappointed then because after years of hearing about the series, it felt, well… childish, for lack of a better word in my limited vocabulary.
Same sort of thing may be happening with that open world “reboot”? Expectations, all that?
Fuck the animation issues. I don’t know how many forum posts I’ve seen from people who decided they didn’t want to play Andromeda because of these very issues. If they’re that shallow, then fuck them too. Along with the dipshits who won’t play a game below an 80% Metacritic score, as if that means anything.
With some notable exceptions it means that the game is pretty good. If you want to dismiss critical reviews then feel free to do so but in my experience they are generally correct when taken in the aggregate.
I also think Dark Souls is awful. But my son has a simple explanation for that one. “You are just an old man who cant do challenging games any more dad.” Which hurts … because its true :)
All the games today are so good i hardly can find significant fault with any but the most shovelware-esque mobile trash games.
Of the games i have actually played, if i had to toss a game into the disappointing pile it would have to be a toss-up between Uncharted: Lost Legacy, Sundered, or Wheels of Aurelia. But i can’t help liking WoA a little bit despite being objectively the worst of the three, Sundered has a bit of a Shadow of the Beast vibe, and Lost Legacy disappoints because of its push forward to explore paradigm and now-tired shoot/strangle all the faceless bad guys narrative mixed up with some amazing if ridiculous parkour-as-tourism level design. LL is a lot like The Force Awakens where everyone finally get the female protagonist they want mixed up with a mediocre, by the numbers plot, leaving you wondering why we can’t have both. But it certainly is an attractive tour through imaginative architecture.
If you’ve found that your enjoyment aligns with the aggregated reviews of a bunch of critics then, I don’t know, you’re lucky? I guess?
Bioware games are historically good writing and cinematics glued by average gameplay. If someone with that opinion hears that the writing is poor and the cinematics (by way of bad animation) are weak, then it’s pretty reasonable to conclude that the total package is going to be subpar.
For many folks, like myself, that’s the main draw of an Uncharted game.