You should know, you're officially dead to me now Flying Arrow for hating on Xenogears and not liking giant robots.

This is kind of tough for me actually, cause despite disliking several popular games, I don't necessarily feel I hate them. I would still play them (many I still do) but I still feel the games are flawed, and often don't deserve the praise they receive. Other popular games I don't like has more to do with not liking the genre itself, these I'm omitting.

So I start with this frame of mind, often times the game simply doesn't live up to my expectations and nothing more, some are awful though...

Let's start off with the two big ones for this forum.

FFVII. I've grown to like VII from a mechanical point of view and I do like the world design and mythos, but I feel the game failed to live up to it's grander background and VII still has my least favorite cast in the series ignoring crap like X-2 that is. I still feel the game has many redeeming values, and I do get around to playing it more than I care to admit but I don't really take any pleasure in the narrative or characters.

FFX is mostly a sub-par game. Its not necessarily a terrible game but I feel it backtracks so much from previous installments of the series and does so little to advance the series and genre, either as a game or as a story. It's just disappointing cause it's overwhelmingly mediocre and even good ideas like the combat system are poorly implemented by making the game dirt easy and creating a battle system that requires you to be more repetitive than usual for RPG.

Crisis Core: Solid proof that nostalgia and fandom can make even the most awful of games sells millions of copies and excel it into greatness. CC has a watered down version of KH1's combat system, with a terrible interface for using materia, a useless skill (block) and a broken skill (dodge roll) that either hinder you, is useless to you, or is so overpowered that it sucks away challenge from the game. Missions are incredibly repetitive, usually involving traversing the same five maps for 90% of the missions and only add a few extra for the other 10%. The story mode is criminally easy, requiring little in levels, strategy, planning, or pacing. If you had a hard time with the final boss in CC and you are not playing on Hard mode, you fail at gaming. It is that ridiculously easy. Speaking of hard mode, it goes in the opposite direction and is incredibly difficult unless you spend countless hours in normal mode leveling materia and working on fusions to get max stats.

The story is awful, Genesis is not only annoying but his whole story is a slightly alternate version of Sephiroth's and while the game tries to make him sympathetic, his obnoxious bouts of gnarm inducing poetry and his snarky jack-assery pretty much wants you to smash his goddamn pretty face in every time he is mentioned.

Most of the cast of new characters feel like knockoffs from other characters in VII. This is the games biggest flaw as a narrative, often times the best moments are simply the times the game emulates the original game, from the alternate train opening, to Zack falling through the abandoned church, to randomly running into Yuffie, to the fact the games plot is basically the same themes of VII, from Zack trying to stop a Super SOLDIER elite who was created in an experiment involving gene splicing alien DNA with human DNA. He learns he's a monster, goes crazy, and tries to destroy the world. CC really doesn't try to be original, its just a cheap knockoff of the original with a different cast and lacking all the elements that made the first game great.

Overall the new elements don't add anything new to the VII mythos, Shin-Ra made a few Sephy knockoffs who just cheapen the blow to Sephiroth's fall into insanity. Considering he learns that both his best friends are Shin-Ra experiments, what's the big deal then Sephy? Why would you think you were different. I would have been questioning my origins after you learned the first one was not completely human.

The storyline undermines the original game and tries desperately to force itself into the canon so fans can't just ignore it anymore. The Nibelheim incident is completely ruined thanks to the alterations to the story. Even returning characters feel like shadows of their former selves. Happy an calming Aerith has to be cheered up quite a bit by Zack and her interactions with Zack are so few that it doesn't do much to establish much connection with each other, Cloud is continuing his whiny self-pity rewrite from AC, Sephiroth is keeping up his calm and quiet badass reslove despite being one of the more chatty villains in the series. Hell, the majority of Sephy's dialogue in CC is during the Nibelheim incident.

Even some of the better elements like the last stretch of the game feels like the staff is trying so hard to compensate for some kind of inefficiency in the original. As far as fans knew, Zack was taken out by a small platoon of soldiers that got the jump on him For BoB cause I think he's still playing this In CC, he fights most of the Shin-Ra army and almost wins, literally being killed by the last two survivors of the battle. He get's a gnarm induced final speech to Cloud and then the game breaks out into one of the worst ending themes to grace the FF titles. It's bad enough that Sephy got transformed into a city destroying badass of unstoppability in CC, to have Zack get an equally absurd power boost was ridiculous. This coming from a guy who actually loves Zack.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Good god has this game not aged well, it was acceptable back in the day and even then I still felt that the move to 3D didn't really work out so well for Link. I hate Z targeting cause it seemed like it got in the way more often than not, but the game constantly brings up new scenarios that force you to use it. The best elements of the game are taken straight out of it's predecessor (which never seems to get any kind of credit) and the Time Travel gimmick is barely used in the game, beyond grabbing a few extra hearts and one silly dungeon, hell, it's practically the same thing as the Dark World gimmick in LttP except you get a different character model and it's in 3-D.


Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - As a cinematic experience, this game is great, as an MGS fan whose eaten up the mythos, the game does a decent job tying up most of the loose ends even if some things felt kind of pointless. As a game, I felt MGS4 dropped the ball, it incorporated a third person shooter set-up which destroys the games balance and makes it one of the easier entries imho. There is no point in using stealth, Snake can murder anything but Gekkos (until you get to Shadow Moses that is) that the game throws at him. The boss fights themselves, while still fun and crazy, felt much easier since you can actually just blow them away with ease and access a gun store for any ammo or weapons you need. The 3rd Person Shooting is not even that good cause the game can't put up enough of a good fight to offer a challenge. What's the point in using stealth if its really difficult to be killed? The entire principle of stealth is to avoid conflict cause you can't win. When you're main character has the power of an 80's action movie star, why the hell should you hide? Some would argue the game is great cause it allows you to play it differently but now you're just in the GTA mindset, except everyone seems to fail to forget that GTA is actually pretty awful in all of its gameplay modes, it's an awful shooter, an awful driving game, it's only strength is that it allows you to do multiple things, not any of it very well. No one is waiting for the GTA racing spin-off, nor the action/shooter spin-off either. The same applies here, neither mode is really satisfactory.

GTA series - Just read the part I referenced in MGS4 rant. Except add the fact the game is more engaging as a silly middle school gore fest where you're laughing to yourself everytime you score with a hooker and then beat her to death. The plots are (like everything else in the games) simply just poor knockoffs of actually good crime films. If you really want to watch the story of a crime lord in Miami set in the 80s, just watch Scarface.

Mario Galaxy - I don't know what it is about this game that makes it so unengaged for me. Maybe it's because the levels feel like nothing more than a series of micro puzzles rather than a silly romp through a level where I can shut-off my head. Maybe it's because other plat-formers have come and destroyed my ability to accept the Mario formula of platform gaming. I'm halfway through the game and I am utterly bored, maybe it's just too easy.

Fallout 3 - I love the world and setting, but it's bogged down with too many silly quests that bog down the pacing, it has a rather boring main story with awful pacing, and the game gets pretty easy rather quickly. Basically what most of you people say about FFXII.

Resident Evil series - Its not scary and until RE4, it had awful controls.