Games you weren't expecting to be so good!

So someone's recommended you this game you're still not sold on. Or perhaps you got it dirt-cheap second hand because someone else disliked it. Maybe you just buy random stuff. Either way, you've got it, but you're not feeling it. It's going to be clunky, or the story is just atrocious. Even the box art appears to be embarrassed.

But, brave gamer you are, you plug it in regardless... and actually, the game's not bad! Good, even! My thoughts on this game has done a complete U-turn.

There are some games that we know will be good, because we've played other games in the series, or we've read copious reviews or seen videos. These are not those games. These are the games in our library that we were expecting to be a bit crap, but completely slapped us upside the head for assuming such things.

What are those games that you thought would be crap, but turned out to be gems in your gaming collection?

Honestly, I don't have many myself, primarily because I don't own many games, and the games I do own tend to be games from existing series or I've done research on. Probably the closest I think I can muster is probably Persona Q, funnily enough. I got into the Persona series from Fynn and Pumpkin, and after played P3P and P4 Golden, PQ was up next. I asked Fynn about it and I don't remember him giving a glowing review. I don't think he disliked it, but he wasn't raving about it either. This made me a tad cautious about starting it up, but I actually think it is one of the best games in the series.

Umineko. I don't think anyone ever expects the spanish inquisition a new game to end up being the best and single most influential literary work you've ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

To give a more recent example, Symphonic Rain. I expected a standard galge, I got a psychologically rather fascinating tale. With a good rhythm minigame on top of that!

Oh, also G-senjou no Maou. It was my first real foray into the world of visual novels that wasn't just treading along companies and writers I'd already known of and liked beforehand, so I had no idea what to expect, and well, it single-handedly became one of my all-time favorites.

Edit: Damnit me, read the opening post before you write a reply. I'll edit this a bit later with some more fitting answers.

Editra: On second thought, I don't remember ever having the experience described in the opening post. Guess I'll just leave it as it is after all.

Probably Digital Devil Saga. I got it one Christmas and was having a very hard time with it. But then I restarted it and fell in love with it. Sam E with SMTIV, but that was mostly because a) people online weren't kind to it and b) I was angry it was overshadowing Strange Journey, but it turned out to be one of my favorite games of all time.

Persona 1 was the complete opposite of this, though :p

Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Digimon games have a habit of being not that good. World 1, Dusk, and Data Squad are the three good ones and they're kind of mediocre. But Cyber Sleuth is excellent. You tell it was inspired by MegaTen. The character designer is the same one from Devil Survivor. And about halfway through it drops all pretenses and is like, yeah we're a MegaTen game but with Digimon instead of Demons. And at that point you start getting Megas so it's entirely possible to have a MegaTen-esque team like Minerva, Lucifer, and Lilith. And the cast is great. Except for the main character, all she does during cutscenes is make funny faces and nod stoically. And on characters and this topic, there's Rina. Everyone talks about how much they hate her, but of course I ended up loving her. She couldn't get parallel world right and said things like parasol world and caramel world (which sounds awesome). And her introductory chapter has (SPOILER)her kicking Barbamon in the face. One of the Seven Great Demon Lords. The representation of Greed in Digimon Lore and she kicked him in the face.

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Originally Posted by Fynn

Persona 1 was the complete opposite of this, though :p

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Same, I went in knowing it wasn't P3/P4 and more like mainstream MegaTen. But I just didn't enjoy it that much.

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Originally Posted by Formalhaut

What are those games that you thought would be crap, but turned out to be gems in your gaming collection?

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Originally Posted by Pike

every single Dragon Age game

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Originally Posted by Pike

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Originally Posted by Formalhaut

What are those games that you thought would be crap, but turned out to be gems in your gaming collection?

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Originally Posted by Pike

every single Dragon Age game

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Really, you thought they'd be terrible? I'm surprised at you, Pike.

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Originally Posted by Vermachtnis

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Originally Posted by Fynn

Persona 1 was the complete opposite of this, though :p

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Same, I went in knowing it wasn't P3/P4 and more like mainstream MegaTen. But I just didn't enjoy it that much.

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Hell, I came in as a MegaTen fan as well. It's amazing how the original Shin Megami Tensei has aged so much better than that piece of crap.

This is hard to answer since I only buy and play games I expect to be good! Who would buy a bad game on purpose?

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Originally Posted by Formalhaut

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Originally Posted by Pike

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Originally Posted by Formalhaut

What are those games that you thought would be crap, but turned out to be gems in your gaming collection?

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Originally Posted by Pike

every single Dragon Age game

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Really, you thought they'd be terrible? I'm surprised at you, Pike.

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It isn't that I thought they would be crap so much as I thought I would be underwhelmed. Bioware style games were never really my "thing" but DA converted me. xD

I played Mass Effect first and enjoyed it. I then played Dragon Age (Origins through to Inquisition) and loved it and kept replaying it. So yeah, I get what you mean!

FF VI.

thought id give up at the start.

guess i was wrong

I, like pretty much everyone else, bought the orange box for some Half-Life and TF2. Then holy trout Portal.

Wolfenstein: The New Order.

This was just supposed to be a lazy cash-in on the Wolfenstein name. Where the hell did one of the most enjoyable and affecting FPS games of the last decade come from?

"Silver Surfer" for the NES.
Almost everyone seems to hate that game, but I actually found it pretty fun!
Yes, it is extremely ridiculously brutal in a lot of places and the game has a few problems, like the huge sprite of Silver Surfer himself and the ambiguous foregrounds and backgrounds ("can I cross this?", "is that an obstacle?" etc), and of course also the complete lack of extra protection, but in essence it is a lot like any other fast-paced space shooter.
It involves a lot of memorisation and fast reflexes, and it's a great feeling when you actually do legitimately beat the game.

It's nowhere near a "great" space shooter, but at least it's got a lot of action going on;
it's definitely more fun than games like "Dragon's Lair", "Conan" and "Little Red Hood"!

Overall, I would rate it 5/10.

Portal
Dragon Age
Atom Zombie Smasher
Divinity: Original Sin
King's Bounty
Saints Row whatever
Valkyria Chronicles

I've been trying to branch out from just RPG's so I've been trying lots of new games, some of which I expected not to like.

Mass Effect. Sci-fi isn't my setting of choice and shooters aren't my genre of choice, but I heard it had some RPG elements so I gave it a try and I quite liked it. The gameplay still isn't top drawer for me but I liked it much more than expected.

Dead or Alive 5. Just a buncha fan service I thought. But the game plays extremely well, it's smooth, it's fun. There's outfit changes, there's personalized team attacks and level attacks. It's one of the best fighting games I've ever played, go figure.

Fallout: New Vegas. I tried a bit of 3 but it didn't... I dunno, it didn't capture me. Again, it seemed a bit shooter-y for my tastes and everything is so... brown. But I liked how much you can personalize your game with your choices when watching sharky play so I gave it a go, and it was really good! It made me want to play Fallout 4 as well, which I also quite like.

Until Dawn. I like horror but can't play it. That was still kind of the case, but I couldn't wait to see sharky play and see LP's of it. I just loved the branching stories and the ham of it and everything. Plus I did find it terrifying, which is kind of the point.

Bloody Roar 3. I thought it would be super gimmicky with the beast transformations but it had some good depth and was actually super fun to play.

Emily is Away. I'm usually pretty suspicious of free to play stuff that isn't like... dress up flash games, but this managed to hit me in the feels.

Tomb Raider. Also not my genre, but it was very approachable and I had fun with it. Same with Super Mario Galaxy.

Ape Escape 3. I'm not much for platformers and you catch monkeys? Weird. But actually very cute and very fun. Katamari forever also sounds dumb in concept. You roll things in to a ball and get verbally berated. But very fun!

Dragon Quest V. I had tried VIII and found it pretty meh, but I fell in love with V. Chrono Trigger I thought might be a bit old and unpolished and I'd tried Cross and disliked it, but I fell in love with Trigger.

Record of Agarest War. Oh the fanservice. But the characters had surprising depth and I got to matchmaker.

Wind Waker. The art style turned me off but toon Link is favourite Link now and I love the aesthetics.

A few games I'm playing right now:
Saints Row -The Third-. Figured it would be too crude for my taste but it's super fun and goofy.

Dungeon Travelers 2 and Senran Kagura Estival Versus. Both are super fanservicy to an annoying degree, but they both have large casts of female characters and outfit changes and they're very fun time wasters for when I just want to decompress with something less heavy.

I guess a game that surprised me was The World Ends With You. I'd already heard good things about it but the description of it sounded dubious. It ended up being one of the best games on DS.

Probably FFVI, I had not played a turn based RPG since Battletech on PC, and by that time in my life, I was pretty hardcore into fighting and action games. I hated it initially, though I was interested in the story, but it wasn't until Secret of Mana made me want to expand my horizons into the RPG genre that I came back to it and fell in love.

Threads of Fate was another one, the demo I had for it was cute but not really "must buy" but a friend bought it for me for my birthday and getting far into t made me realize how it was the spiritual successor to Brave Fencer Musashi.

Suikoden was another, while a review made me intrigued by it enough to borrow it from a friend, the first half hour of the game isn't exactly "amazing", but I muscled through and came to fall in love with the game and the series as a whole.

I can't think of anything other than that, most of the time I'm usually surprised by finally playing a game that has a lot of hype only to be pleasantly surprised it lives up to it.

Thought of another one: Awesomenauts. Got it in some bundle somewhere, ended up dumping HOURS into it. Still my favorite MOBA, hands down.

Probably Stardew Valley.

I heard it was good, and I bought it just as a little farming sim game to piss about with. Didn't expect how amazing it would be, and how it's so much more than just a 'farming sim'. Probably one of my favourite games of all time tbh.

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Originally Posted by Night Fury

Probably Stardew Valley.

I heard it was good, and I bought it just as a little farming sim game to piss about with. Didn't expect how amazing it would be, and how it's so much more than just a 'farming sim'. Probably one of my favourite games of all time tbh.

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Speaking of farm games, harvest moon on the playstation. Not only did i play the trout out of it, my sister played the trout out of it and my parents would sit on the couch and watch is play the trout out of it. They wouldn't watch is play anything else ever.

Final Fantasy X-2
I literally picked this game up to do a negative review as a rite of passage back in 2013, but goddammit the thing was good and I couldn't say anything but nice things about it. That opening was hot I don't care what anyone says.

Resident Evil 6 is a more recent example. Frankly, I don't like anything RE 4 and beyond, but I got 6 along with 5 dirt cheap, so I figured why not? They let you play as an adult Sherry, and I kinda liked the look of an adult Sherry, so I just went with it. Honestly had a lot of fun. Felt like something me and my friends would've done in one of our old role-playing forums.

DmC. I wasn't expecting much given the fan hate, but I enjoyed it. I thought Dante and Vergil were both fleshed out the best they've ever been. A shame the director was a complete dick and their marketing campaign was trout.

Primal, of course!
I bought it because the illustration on the box was gorgeous (I know, that's a weird reason) and the salesman said I should give it a try.
It was a great game (although it should be longer)! Jen and Scree are one of my favorite duos and their adventures were amazing! :love:
I'd play it again if I had a chance. :D

I thought of another one - The Talos Principle. I actually thought this would be a good game, and I was looking forward to it, but it turned out to be one of my favorite games of all time.

I guess I can add the new Zelda game to my list now because the trailer looks AMAZING!

Mass Effect 2.

It literally was as good as the hype said. That is a very rare thing.