This thread has mostly died and gone OT, but I just had to add something since I recently managed to buy two overrated games at the same time. Earlier last month I picked up MGS3 (original, not subsistence) and DQ8, mostly to tide me over until FF12 (I'm in the UK, and was waiting for the price on those games to drop). Neither of them were bad, but they were disappointing.
MGS 3 was almost ruined by the useless camera angle, the overly long durations of alert+evasion+caution modes, and the clumsy food/curing/camo interfaces. It's entirely too easy to alert the enemies unless you have incredible patience to sneak around without making mistakes. OTOH once alert mode is triggered, the enemies often behave like brain-damaged chimps, so it's possible to fight your way out with CQC anyway. In fact if it weren't for this I would just have quit the game out of frustration, but I did manage to get through it.
DQ 8 is just an above-average game that has been grossly overrated (I'm at the Dark Ruins, and have set it aside for FF12). It seems that some nebulous "old-school charm" is supposed make me ignore the stale game mechanics. RPGs should have moved away from 15 year old combat systems and game progression built around generic towns and fetch quests+errand running by now :rolleyes2.