This might be more a list of twenty games I have something strong to say about than twenty games I think are highly overrated (although I still feel all the games included are overrated in some way). Also, I'm omitting any games that Flying Omelette has on her list, because if I didn't about half our lists would be the same, and I don't have anything to add to anything she included and would like to cover new ground.
This game would be a lot higher, except it's not all that popular. But out of those who have played it I seem to be the only one who's able to maintain bladder control upon hearing its name. Aside from being a lousy game, it's a testament of our times that a game is considered great if it does something new and wacky - in this case, an RPG where the random battles are shmup segments - with complete disregard to what it actually does with that idea - in this case, making you plod endlessly through enemies that basically fly around in pretty patterns completely oblivious to being shot at. It's also a nice reminder that its story style is still around and accepted. The first half of the game seems to have a pseudo-competent plot (mostly hurt by the plot reason the random battles are shmups, as well as that breeding ships line), but towards the end it starts getting slippy and incoherent until it finally lays down a plot twist that renders everything that happened in the rest of the game irrelevent. The Forgotten Planet not only has a crippling glitch that in no way should have gotten past testing, but it was a pleasant throwback to the first GBA games in that it was too dark to even see what the hell was going on. And even worse, because not only was I not forced to finish Circle of the Moon on my Game Boy Player/DS, but even on the DS the Forgotten Planet was a pain in the ass to see. And finally, calling your main villian "The Tyrannical Overlord" is retarded, and so is having his followers act like it's some prestigious honor to be called that.
This might be a strange one to post, and I'll say why in a minute. Soul Calibur 2 had a huge pre-release buzz, and maybe some of it did come from being the sequel to a highly regarded fighter, but most of it seemed to be the different characters in each version, namely Link on the Gamecube. When it was finally released, everyone was hailing it as the be-all and end-all of fighters. I didn't care for it. My main beef was those dungeon mazes where you fought the same guy over and over in the same arena, except maybe he had a different weapon, but it really didn't matter because you can just knock him out of the arena every time. Take a wrong turn in the maze, and you have to fight him as many more times as it takes you to reach the deadend.
Now here's the kicker: when Soul Calibur III was released, the same people who previously gave it perfect scores were calling II a major disappointment. Prerelease hype at its finest, folks.
I would always hear praise of how Mega Man X4 was the greatest Mega Man X game there ever was and ever will be. Maybe the hype got to me, and when I finally played it I wholeheartedly agreed. When I replayed it on X Collection, I realized how dull this game really is. The level design is mostly traveling across kind of uneven terrain and doing stuff, maybe with a little more excitement as Zero since he can't attack from a distance. The only interesting thing in this game is the final boss on X mode, which actually is a good fight. Whether or not it's a real reason to think poorly of the game I still have to mention that there's an X armor upgrade that gives you unlimited use of the uncharged special weapons.
I have to wonder if the reason it's so widely praised is because it's the first game where you can play through the entire game as Zero who everyone seems to think it's cool to like. I also think this is also why X7 gets so much flak. Now, if I've ever said I think X7 is a great game I'm sorry. But I played the game almost entirely as Axl (who the game seems to be primarily designed around) and failed to find anything so broken with it as to peg it the worst game of all time, but since Zero is barely playable that means the game sucks. The only time I've actually gotten into an argument about X7, the person complained about Zero and didn't even say anything about how Axl played, but rather that he was a flaming homosexual (of course, this same person said right afterwards that there was nothing wrong with Sigma.) Other than that, the only thing I ever hear anyone talk about in X7 is the hyena noise, which I admit is pretty bad, but you're only listening to it for about ten minutes and you're hearing X and Zero go "Ho!" and "HA!" and "HooHaaHOH!" throughout all of X4.
I kind of liked this game. What was good was good, and the final boss might be the best of all the IGA-produced Castlevanias (though considering the competition, I'm not sure how much that's saying), but there needed to be a lot more of that kind of inspiration and less of the sloth that fills the rest of the game. As well as several rooms that are mirrors or duplicates of other rooms there's also a bunch of rooms that are completely empty. I also thought it was extremely lame to have the second set of paintings be rehashes of the first set. When the game does try to be original it usually ends up shooting itself. There are two puzzles, one involving a pair of motorcycles and the other a train, where if you screw them up you have to plod your way either out of the room or back to the trigger, which is really annoying. The tag-team idea, the one thing that was supposed to set the game apart from any other Castlevania, wasn't even put to much use and it seems like the only reason there's abilties exclusive to Charlotte is to make you use her once in a while. But I've heard people calling it the greatest handheld Castlevania yet. In a word, no. It's certainly better than Harmony of Dissonance, but it's about equal with Aria and Dawn of Sorrow, and it has nothing on Circle of the Moon. But on the plus side, I didn't hear anyone say it looked like was going to kick Symphony of the Night's ass after looking at some prerelease screenshots.
I don't get this game. People everywhere fawn over it. I have clear memories of a time where it was always on GameFAQs' Top 10 Genesis Forums. I know somebody who has it at #3 on their 100 Favorite Games List. It was deemed important enough to be a Wii Virtual Console launch title. Okay, Seven Force, the boss that's seven robots you fight in a mineshaft with reversible gravity was pretty cool, I'll give it that. Otherwise it's just another beat 'em up with slews of the same one or two guys pouring out, no level design, and some pretty forgettable bosses (aside from the one I just mentioned, the only other enemy I remember is the one that looks like a cartoon M.Bison), and don't get me started on that stupid board game level.
Do the people who think this is the greatest RPG ever really think it has anything on the likes of Final Fantasy 2/4 or 3/6, or Chrono Trigger, or Super Mario RPG, or even Phantasy Star IV? I could even go into action RPGs, but I don't feel like belaboring my point. Paper Mario feels like a beginner's RPG. I got one Game Over in the entire game against Huff 'n Puff, and after that the only danger I felt was the final boss because of that healing spell he spammed (but I still beat him on my first try). I honestly thought the game looked pretty bad, and if the goal was to make everything look like drawings on paper then they only succeeded if they also wanted it look like somebody colored everything with markers that bled into each other. Paper Mario also has one of the most annoying soundtracks I've ever heard, and whoever wrote that Wikipedia snippet (which was thankfully removed) comparing Yuka Tsujiyoko to Yoko Shimomura needs to be drop kicked. I'm sure it's the best N64 turn-based RPG ever, and that's pretty damn sad.
Sonic Heroes is a lot like Yoshi's Story, in that just knowing anyone would defend it to the death is enough to make it overrated, even moreso as many people as there are. Both games have levels that are huge unstructured messes that consist of the same menial tasks over and over that even a child could beat if the controls worked, instead of at times controlling like everyone's wearing lead weights and at other times like everyone's running on butter. Many of Sonic Heroes' stages drag on for about three times as long as they should and are made all the more irritating by a bad camera, massively disorienting motion that leaves you not knowing what the hell is even going on most of the time, and characters with obnoxious voices that don't shut up. You'll often get a break from the bad controls and camera in the form of a cart, gutter, tube, or some other object you hop in or on and sit there as the game automatically takes you to your destination. The only reason it isn't higher is that even though I've heard many people call it out as the greatest thing Sega/video games/life has put out, I've heard just as many people call it out as the turd it is.
At a forum I used to go to there used to be a game where somebody was asked ten questions about themselves, and to each one they posted three answers but only one of them was right. It was then everyone else's job to figure out what the correct answer was. A few years ago I was asked when the last time I played Smash Brothers Melee was. My responses were "Earlier today", "About a week ago" and "At least two years ago". It seems nobody could fathom somebody POSSIBLY going a week without playing this game, much less two years. This was a few years ago, I still haven't played SSB:M (not even for this screen; I just had four CPUs tear into each other), and I have the feeling the same thing would still happen.
I liked the first Smash Brothers, and it was all I played for a month or two after it came out, although it could just have been my immaturity and lack of anything else to play. I may have played Melee nonstop for three days, then on and off for a week. Everything about this game just feels lazy. The arenas are designed to be pretty instead of functional, the level design of Adventure mode is mostly platforming that might excite a ten year old, it was really lame to see every character enter the arena the same way after the first game's custom intros, and how the hell did Dr. Mario and Pichu get in the character roster? (Young Link may have a purpose.) It's an okay enough game, but it isn't the second coming, and in fact really isn't anything more than the world's second biggest fan service (I hope I don't have to say what the first is).
I think I've made it clear that I really hate this game, and it's about time I say why. Before Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega bundled the Genesis with Altered Beast, which amounted to an admittedly decent graphics demo for the system - not even the sound had anything going for it. Sure, there was voice, but all anyone says about it is that Zeus sounds like Elmer Fudd. Aside from the beast transformations which are only used to beat the stage boss, it's just another monotonous beat-em-up with gameplay that amounts to "Punch, kick, die. Punch, kick, die. Punch, kick, die.", and it's even worse here because when you pick up one of those powerup orbs, the centurion becomes a sitting duck while the steroids go to work and I can't count the times an enemy was pounding on me when I regained control. How this got ten ports is beyond me.
At the time of this game's release there wasn't anything like it before in America, so its new game design is probably what won people over. That made me more forgiving. But beyond that is a strategy game without any real strategy, what with bad balance which renders many of the more interesting characters worthless (and at the end of the game I get a Lv. 10 mage and a Lv.10 cleric when I already have Zylo at the promoted equivelent of Lv. 30 and many other characters that aren't far behind), arenas that weren't designed to make you use your head but rather to look nice (one arena is a big, open field with some trees), and terrible enemy AI. It all leads up to a final boss that isn't all that hard, he just takes forever to kill, all while listening to music that sounds like a circus act.
Then there's two characters that seem to have something going for them, but they come out of nowhere and are killed off and forgotten before anything can be done with them. The first is essentially the General Leo of this game (for those of you who haven't played Final Fantasy 6, the general who's only your enemy becaue he's serving the opposing side out of loyalty, but is really a pretty decent guy), the other is some legendary hero who got possessed by evil, yet despite his legendary status we never heard anything about it before we freed him of his curse. I guess the makers really didn't care about making the best out of what they had, plot, gameplay, or otherwise.
The hype around this one may be that it was the first console MMORPG (or maybe just the first anyone knew about) as well as being related to a popular Sega RPG series. I have never played this game online, but offline it sucks. It's plodding through hordes of the same few enemies over and over again (okay, sometimes they look different, but the classic Boomas, the giant Boomas, the mutant Boomas, and the La Dimenians/evil Boomas are all the exact same thing!), and basically button mashing them to death, healing when necessary, and picking up the crap they occasionally drop. Episode 2 is even worse, because there's no Hunter Guild missions, the first half of the game is fighting enemies from the first game again as if you hadn't already gotten sick of them, and the Sealab takes forever and a day to get through and feels like it takes even longer because all the rooms look the same. If the only difference between Off and Online is being able to make teams and exchange Photon Drops, I can't imagine how Online is all that much better.
I think the only reason I bothered with this game as long as I did and thought it was any kind of acceptable on the first playthrough was because I got a kick out of making a HUmar that looked like the Blaster Master: Blasting Again version of Jason (except for that stupid ponytail), and even made a profile card saying he wasn't killed but transported across the galaxy. Fewer character creation options meant I couldn't do that on the Dreamcast version, so that version was even less able to hold my interest.
The first game moves like molasses and every damn city looked the same. World Tour was exactly like the first one except faster and more colorful, which is nice and all, but I'm still punching down the same three buildings in 100+ cities that all look the same. I've never played Universal Tour, but it sounds like I'd "only" have to go through 99 levels of punching down the same three buildings before going out into space to punch down three different buildings for another 99 levels. Total Destruction added some fresh ideas to the series, like 30 monsters to chose from (after unlocking 24), some variety in the buildings and cities (meaning Las Vegas and London actually look different), they toned it down to 42 areas to destroy instead of 100+, and bosses at the end. But it still suffers from many of the same problems as the others, has the added annoyance of being 3D so the controls don't always work right, there isn't a lot of difference between the monsters, almost all of the "challenges" amount to "hope you stumble upon some items hidden in the buildings before you do enough damage that it collapses, taking the item with it", and after you earn the Jump-Smash move for a monster you can knock down all the buildings by climbing to the top and Jump-Smashing them over and over. It's a cute tribute to King Kong, Godzilla, and werewolves, and that's about it.
When this game was first released, people left and right were calling it THE reason to get a DS. It probably was the best game to do something with the touch screen that couldn't have been done with the control pad at the time, which is pathetic. Canvas Curse is like Sigma Star, in that it seemed like people gushed over it for the idea of drawing little bridges to move Kirby around instead of what it did with the idea which was nothing. The bosses suck, King Dedede is almost impossible to lose to, one boss is playing Connect the Dots, and then there's that dumbass pinball one where all the difficulty comes from trying to draw lines to get Kirby to bounce where you want him to. The final boss is the kind that starts out sort of tricky, but once you figure out how to hurt her she's ridiculously easy, and her second phase looks kinda creepy but is easy as hell and takes forever to kill. Really, the best part of the entire game was the third part of the second to last stage, which still wasn't all that great.
Does anyone else remember that episode of The Simpsons where Marge wanted Bart and Lisa to do some lawn work and they refuse, then when the fair comes to town the first thing they do is get on the VR Gardening Simulator and call it the most fun they ever had? That's the feeling I get whenever I hear anyone talk about this game.
Some consider this a salute to the classics. A middle finger at is more like it. The classics did not have sloppy level design with the excuse of "find a bunch of worthless optional crap", nor did they have so many 1-Ups that it was very much possible to beat the game with 100 extra lives, nor did they have items like the Mega Mushroom that would let you mow down half the stage or that damn shell item that would send you flying off the stage if you ran for two seconds with it. The people hailing this as on par with with Super Mario Bros. 3 have either never played Super Mario Bros. 3, or have played it and have completely forgotten what it's like or didn't realize what made it great.
Wario Ware was made by people without an attention span for people without an attention span. Let me make something clear before I go on; I'm tolerant of the first one. It got me off Pokemon Ruby which I was actually neglecting school and house work because of, it got me into some of the other Wario games, and perhaps the novelty got to me some. But it still felt broken and meaningless, leaving me yearning for something more structured and fleshed out which is probably why I went searching for other Wario games. Touched and Twisted were the same deal except the novelty was gone and everything felt even more meaningless. Touched amounted to a demo of all the crap you could do with the DS touch screen, and I have little reason to doubt the same is true for Smooth Moves and the Wii. Twisted never really used the motion sensor for anything that couldn't be done with the control pad and I'd like to mention that the Wario de Mambo final boss minigame, which you'll be looking at a lot because of how hard it is, is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in a video game. Then there's the "Go beat all the microgames twenty times in a row to unlock some junk" that essentially crashed and burned all three games for me (and the best part about Twisted is the reward for that is the option to reset the game. I'm not kidding). That Nintendo chose the Wario Ware version of Wario for Smash Brothers Brawl disgusts me, not just because I hate that version of Wario, but that it's a sign of what the rest of the world thinks of these games.
I was hoping most people would have finally gotten on with their lives, but alas, there's still people on the Internet who buzz about this as much as the day it was released. Yes, it's a quirky oddity full of random Japanese insanity, but under that thin candy shell is a big lump of nothing with some pretty bad controls. When We ♥ Katamari and Me and My Katamari were released nobody really said anything about them, although I'm sure it had more to do with them being identical to the first and price increases than people realizing the games were a bunch of nothing. It should be noted that the series creator Keita Takahashi said himself that he doesn't like video games and would rather work on child's playgrounds. Go for it man, you'd be doing a favor for more than yourself.
I've never played this two-player, but the one-player game was unplayable. The main problem is your characters are too busy getting their groove on to move at a reasonable pace, which not only means it takes forever to get around the game, but of course there's enemies that move around much faster than you, especially that invisible boogeyman that occassionally blinks black who swiftly comes up to you then proceeds to attack you until you're dead. If you can't get around them, surely you can shoot them or destroy them in some other way, right? Wrong! Toe Jam and Earl have no built in attacks and the ammo in this game is so limited you're almost always defenseless. In the event you do have some tomatos to lob at people, they never seem to be able to hit anything. There's lot of presents scattered around, but they're always filled with some useless junk, and the only way to tell what's inside without opening them and having your character fall asleep or lose a chunk of their health is to pay some man in a carrot costume some money, except there's barely any money in the game, which is also why you can't just buy some ammo. It doesn't help to memorize the packaging, because everything's randomized each play - items in presents, object and enemy placement, and the stages themselves. But since said stages consist of "flat plane with some holes in it" every floor of the game looks and pretty much plays the same and I never would have guessed if the manual didn't say so.
I get the feeling this game was made for people who like Star Wars and LEGOs, and especially Star Wars LEGOs, but the concept of a "vee-dee-ohh gaaame" perplexes them. Now I was one of those people who could never make anything with LEGOs except a big mess, which is exactly what this game is. The battle system is clunky beat-em-up button mashing, the controls are stiff and buggy, the physics system is awkward, and you have no control over the camera which likes to align itself in ways where you can't tell how close you are to a ledge (and this game seems really strict on how far off a ledge you can be) or if a ledge and a wall even meet. And how about those vehicle segments, like the pod racer with the dumbass controls, or that floaty ship you fly on the assault on Dooku's fort in Ep.2, or the dogfight at the beginning of Ep.3 where you can't tell which lasers are cosmetic and which are actually being fired at you? On the other hand, there's no level design (all of the puzzles are solved by using the Force on everything that glows until something significant happens, or shooting things that don't glow), each episode can be beaten in about an hour, and it's literally impossible to get a game over; when you die you either respawn in the exact spot you died less a few studs, or you have to redo some simpleton task which would be laughable in a game with working controls. This game's final boss is one of the most retarded ever, and it seems you win even if he kills you. The graphics may appeal to people who like LEGOs, but I found them ugly and often disturbing, like how Padme's eyes move in the Ep.1 ending.
I've heard people defend this by saying "Well, it wasn't meant to be challenging, really, just a fun parody!" So, we aimed for crap, and we got crap, hooray. And while I'm no fan of the prequels, what humor isn't desecration such as turning Qui-Gon and Padme's deaths into jokes just doesn't work; the only time I laughed at the game's humor instead of at the game was when Obi-Wan was fighting to turn his lightsaber on at the beginning. Almost all the plot was removed because they figured everyone knows what's happening from seeing the movies and tweaked stuff around to make it more lighthearted, but it's to the point that even having seen all three prequels I can't make rhyme or reasons out of what's going on here, and I'd love to see the face on somebody who hasn't seen the movies. I'm not kidding when I say the ending to Ep. 2 is just Palpatine and Dooku chuckling.
And then there's the classic Yoshi's Story defense for the lack of challenge; "But it's a REAL challenge trying to get all the useless trinkets!" How does finding a bunch of optional crap fix a main game that totally sucks? If the main game sucks, why would I even want to go through and search every nook and cranny for some junk, fighting a horrid battle system, a bad camera, and sloppy controls the entire way? Wouldn't straining my patience like that just make me hate the game even more?
Why yes, this truly IS God's gift to gaming! Sure, virtually all of the difficulty comes from a broken camera, and any legit challenge there could have been is negated by the wanderer having Wolverine's healing powers, and the controls for both the horse and the wanderer totally suck (if I had a nickel for every time I tried to mount the horse only to have the wanderer jump instead, or wall jumped in a completely wrong direction, or couldn't get the wanderer to jump off a wall at all...), and overall the colossi are some of the worst and most tedious bosses I've ever had the pleasure of beating the majority of on my first try and pissing away thirteen hours of my life on, like the catfish where you have to plod around in this huge lake trying to get on its tail when it briefly surfaces without getting shocked by the spines that surface before the tail but the wanderer swims so damn slow and the camera and depth perception throw you off so much that it takes forever to actually accomplish this and even then if the catfish decides to submerge (and it will at least once) you have no choice but to let go and DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN, or the salamander where you have to spend two minutes flipping it over every time you want to get in one of the ten hits it takes to kill it, or the dragon where all the difficulty is in trying to see the damn thing through all the bloom and dust and the game makes you shoot it down at least three times for no reason, and out of sixteen bosses only one had any intelligence beyond a robot set to either "DEE-STROY" or "Bumble around oblivious to everything around you", and one colossus is hyped by screenshots and the cover of the manual as a dynamic chase across the desert by a giant bull with a toothy, menacing grin but is really a lumbering ox with a snowplow on its face that might as well not move at all and doesn't even require the horse, and the swordsman colossus is one of the most unintentionally retarded looking bosses I have seen in my life, and the final boss is an immobile giant in a dress and flaming pants that's little more than a testament to how awful the camera and controls are and how much of the game is fluff and bluff, and there's no reason to care about the wanderer's plight because not only are the colossi about as intimidating as a basket of puppies he has all the personality of a dial tone, and the plot is so vague it's meaningless and the girl's death amounts to an excuse to fight the world's largest bosses ever (which they're not), and the ending feels like some kind of sick joke, and the music sounds like Otani was passing off his free writing exercises as his finished work, and the wanderer animates like he has Downs Syndrome and looks like he's fisting himself when he runs with the sword, and I'm not sure what game Scott had in mind when he made this but it almost nails Colossus, and by "almost" I mean "he didn't put in a bunch of fog and dust", but who cares about trivial stuff like that? All those nitpicks aside it's not only the greatest game ever made, but the only one that's art because game's own creator said so.
As if the game didn't have enough problems on its own, why is it I only ever see people defend it...
... by declaring "It's amazing!" and nothing more, as if that's an elaboration rather than a thesis? Some go as far as "It's the most amazing game [I've] ever [played]!" which says more about the game experience of those making that claim than the actual game. There's also "It's [one of] the most original game[s] [I've] ever [played]!" Nothing about this game is original. Whatever plot elements weren't stolen from Vagrant Story or Threads of Fate were recycled from ICO (which I also would have put on this list, except I didn't feel it necessary to have both on here and ICO is the lesser of two evils). Huge bosses are nothing new, and as for the few colossi that actually are as big as this game was hyped over, the first boss of MDK2 could eat the biggest one whole and as a spiffy bonus, the MDK2 boss has color, actually moves, and the framerate doesn't go to hell while fighting it. The final bosses of Bionic Commando, Mega Man X, and Strider 2 required you to climb around on the actual bosses to get at their weak point(s). As well as nigh every Tournament Fighter ever, there's a popular NES game that's nothing but bosses, and anyone who doesn't know what it is needs to get out from whatever rock they're living under, but just in case somebody knows what it is but just can't recall it think "Rocky" or "Captain N" or "Mike Tyson". I think everyone complained about the sailing in Wind Waker, so why they happily do the exact same thing through a bunch of dirt and haze and glare and rock with grid patterns on it and call it atmosphere is beyond me.
... by justifying/trivializing the flaws? "It's great that this game has barely any music because then it's all the more amazing when it IS there!" That's the only reason it's amazing because the actual stuff is really cheap. "The horse controls are stiff and awkward, but that's okay because it's like you're really riding a horse!" And hey, if you're ever playing a space shooter with sluggish controls, that's how a ship actually controls in the vacuum of space! "The game is SUPPOSED to look like shit! That's the genius and beauty of it!" Once again, it great that we aimed for crap and got it. I also love how when a movie is greasy and grainy and sunwashed it gets ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but here it's "style". "Sure, the camera isn't perfect, but what game's camera is?" Okay, there's "not perfect", and then there's fucking ridiculous. And the thing with Colossus' camera is that it doesn't just run itself into the stupidest places, it's the kind that drifts right back to where it was as soon as you release the right analog stick. I'm just waiting for somebody to come say the camera wasn't bad programming, but some metaphor for how life bullshits you by hiding whatever's coming after you no matter how hard you try to find it, and if you focus on your troubles you won't be able to see where you're going.
... with strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks, and the same thought terminating cliches that are used to defend webcomics like Dominic Deegan, Pastel Defender Heliotrope, and Hookie Dookie Panic?
And when people feel it necessary to make claims like Colossus' fluffy soundtrack being the greatest music ever written - not just ever in a video game but EVER PERIOD - I think that says more about the game than I ever could.
By the way, if anybody's still wondering if He-Man and the Colossus was me playfully parodying this game or spitefully mocking it... I really don't know what to say...
