Criticize Your All-Time Favourite Game
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Because honesty is key to a healthy perspective.
Majora's Mask on the N64 looks like ass. Even accounting for the technical limitations at the time, there are some real oddities, such as very prominent clipping during major cutscenes.
The Zora Egg quest is mechanically tedious, and it's unlikely that most players will have enough bottles to get all the eggs in the Pirate Fortress on their first visit.
The Goron race is seriously flawed, with rubberbanding and random AI that can occasionally be impossible to beat even if you do everything right.
Finding and thawing the Goron elder is pointless trial-and-error nonsense.
It's too easy to lose a ton of progress in Snowhead with one wrong move.
Some of the masks have nowhere near enough indication of how to get them. The All-Night Mask and Stone Mask are probably the worst offenders for this.
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I love Morrowind to death, but it's got some problems. A lot of problems.
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While I personally appreciate the hidden depth of its combat system (as compared to other Elder Scrolls games, at least), making a real time first person game whose combat is based on D&D-style RNG is not a good idea. If they wanted that style combat they should have made the controls and camera angle similar to that of Diablo, rather than first person.
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Stealth is broken. By which I mean that it doesn't work. Light and sound have no effect on it, only your Sneak skill and any magical effects on you matter. And once someone sees you, EVERYONE in the cell sees you. And once they're in combat there's no way to use stealth to get them to break combat and forget you once they've aggro'd; magic is the only way.
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Magic is abusable, overpowered, and clunky. I don't personally have a problem with this, as I love how deep and flexible the magic system is, and it makes magic feel boring in later installments, but I acknowledge that it can be a bit unwieldy and is poorly balanced.
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The theft system doesn't work. The game has no way of telling you if picking something up will count as stealing, and if you do end up stealing something, it won't mark it as stolen in your inventory. On top of that, it marks all items in the game of that type as stolen from that person behind the scenes. For example, say you steal a bonemold helmet from Meldor, the smith in Balmora. If you then later find another bonemold helmet in your adventures and try to sell it to Meldor, he'll say that it belongs to him, confiscate it, and call the guards. Doesn't matter that it's not the same bonemold helmet.
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The default controls haven't aged well. Space to activate and E to jump? Really?
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The base movement speed is abysmally slow. Compound that with the fact that running drains your Fatigue, and your Fatigue levels have a strong influence on, among other things, your chance to hit, your chance to cast spells, and your chance to successfully persuade someone. This means that you'll need to walk everywhere, slowing you down even more until higher levels.
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The wiki-style hyperlink dialogue system, while an interesting idea and pretty innovative at the time, was poorly executed. You quickly wind up with a massive list of topics, most of which aren't actually useful. There are tons of copy-paste lines that just about every NPC has for certain topics, making most NPCs walking around towns little more than walking, generic info kiosks. It also negatively affects the writing, as they have to shoehorn topic titles into the dialogue to work them into the system.
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While I adore the art direction (the game has fantastic designs), even by 2002 standards the graphics aren't very good. The models are low-poly, the textures muddy, and the animations are horrendous.
There are probably more that I can't think of at the moment, but it's 2 in the morning.
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Banjo-Kazooie doesn't keep your notes when leave the world. Super Mario 64 has camera problems. Twilight Princess' bug collecting gets boring. Ocarina of Time is a slug with dialogue. Super Metroid has that one dumb save point at the end and doesn't properly teach you how to use space jump or even what it is.
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Persona 4 is superannuated in gameplay by Persona 5, but even before that point, its combat is more serviceable than good. The QOL improvements given by Golden come at the cost of the destruction of the game's pacing and (limited) difficulty, so while there IS a best version in between the two games, overall they are two inferior products to what could have been. Investigation sequences are needed, but are a vestige of old 'talk to everyone' time-wasting logic and serve to pad out the game more than anything else, limiting your options whilst they occur. And the game's treatment of sexual themes is... problematic behind the scenes, and whilst I found several bits inspiring, I can see how it can be misconstrued easily and that fault is on the script and Yosuke's cut character arc.
Blue-Eyes Toon Dragon isn't in Yu-Gi-Oh: The Falsebound Kingdom. That is its only flaw.
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There was a time when I said Yoshi's Island was flawless, but I clearly hadn't played the game through fully in a while when I said that. I will fully admit that The Very Looooooong Cave was not a good inclusion in Yoshi's Island and is easily the worst level in the entire game. The real twist of the knife is that it probably would be a pretty fun level if it wasn't an autoscroller. It's the simple fact that the autoscrolling is painfully slow and the level isn't particularly challenging when compared to other World 6 levels that it just makes the whole thing turn into a drag. I'll even go so far as to say that I prefer a number of levels from Yoshi's Island DS's final levels to 6-5 from the original.
But Yoshi's Island is still a fantastic game otherwise
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Aw, crap... they already talked about Yoshi's Island... Come on, think of something clever!
I love Team Fortress 2. The classes (at least with their original weapons) have a great sense of balance, the art design is incredible (maybe one of the best int the entire FPS genre) and the characters are really fun to listen. With all of that, the game has a few problems that, while they don't hinder the 2100 hours that I put on that game, are noticeable after a more critical analysis.
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The class balance was hindered by the new weapons: one complain that I usually see is that the default weapons are clearly stronger than the unlockable options, at least on most cases. And while that's true, people forget that the locked weapons are situational, being better than stock on certain situations, but worse on most of them. The problem comes with the fact that certain weapons are amazing at counter most, if not all, styles to play a certain class. Enginner was the most hit. The Enginner of the default game could go toe-to-toe with most classes because, while he's bad at dueling, he compensates by having good map denial and support tools, giving classes without mobility a way to advance to the frontlines quickly. Nowdays, every class has a way to deal with sentries (even Scout and Pyro, two classes that shouldn't be able to take out a good sentry spot, are able to at least bypass it), most classes have mobility tools that makes the teleport obsolete and the dispenser is now just an ammo generator because most classes have ways to self sustain. This made the Enginner focus on either sentry spamming with Mini-Sentries or bunkering down with the "defense toolkit" of Rescue Ranger, Wangler and Jag. But other classes, like Spy and Pyro, were also hit by the unbalanced nature of the situational unlockable weapons.
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The level design was, and still is, really hit-or-miss. Yes, there are levels in TF2 that are amazingly done, like most of the Payload maps (except Dustbowl, that one is poopy), the King of the Hill maps and some 2CP maps like Gorge. But some of the maps are really terrible due to too many small chokepoints. The most famous examples are Turbine and 2fots, two maps that, while they are pretty decent on their neutral options, have defense too facilitated because they only offer two escape routes, and both of them are terrible because they are small, clustered, forcing the offensive to make the perfect plan or else the defense will always win. But that's not a problem that only happens on CTF maps, even if they are predominant there. Maps like Dustbowl and most of CP5 maps have very few ways to enter the combat zone, usually two. That makes defense really easy to do, so unless a team utterly buttstomps the other, the games are going to drag on for a while, with the offense trying to act on those one or two chokepoints and the defense defending those, stalling the game flow.
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They didn't ended the lore. That's probably because Valve is focused on other projects (Dota, CS:GO and Artifact), with the artists being relocated to these projects. But hell, I want to see the last comic, they are on such a cliffhanger that it's driving me nuts.
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And last, the game is nowdays a bloated code. That is also because there are very few people working on TF2 right now, but it's also because they implement new stuff on top of the code they already have, instead of going back and optimizing everything. That hinders the performance of the game, making a 2007 product somewhat hard to run on weaker systems. But I don't think they will repair it because it's way after the game's prime time, so I can only hope...
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I think my list of games that I can't rank higher than each is around 15 currently, so I'll just pick out two that I can criticize a bit more definitively:
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has several balance issues. For every class except maybe Recon (I never played Recon as a proper sniper) there are 2 or 3 guns that see play out of (iirc) 20 or so options per class. This is a pretty common problem in multiplayer shooters, but in BBC2 the superior guns overpower their inferiors by leaps and bounds. This hits the Assault class's progression particularly hard, as one of their best weapons is their starting weapon. A couple of other nitpicks are the damage floor on shotguns (I think that was the technical issue, anyways) that lead to people using them as a flak cannon well through the game's lifespan and weapons gaining or losing bullet drop depending on the sight equipped, which led to some obnoxious sniper rifle usage in close ranges. The most grievous balance issue was probably Magnum Rounds, though: BBC2 has a robust system of perks that allow for all sorts of starnge and wonderful tactics, but many of the potential gunplay interactions were crushed by the necessity of equipping Magnum Rounds as your secondary perk if you were aiming to spearhead infantry combat, which increased your bullet damage by 25%. Luckily this game is at its best when other systems mitigate your incentive to merely be the best infantry killer you can be, but sometimes the game could reach geography where opting out of Magnum Rounds was untenable.
Gotcha Force's insane volume of content largely boils down to strafing around your locked-on opponent and firing at them, or approaching them and mashing a melee button, especially in singleplayer mode. Your main unit is also quite overpowered, and most of the potential utility units simply aren't useful enough to justify rostering. Also Data Crystals are awful. You often unlock rarer Borgs by collecting their set of crystals as random drops, but you need a full set: you don't unlock Gatling Gunner by getting 2 Gatling Gunner A Data Crystals, but by getting Gatling Gunner A and Gatling Gunner B. This is an acceptable loss when the set's only two crystals, but at five crystals it's quite irritating. I think the developers wanted to encourage players to trade Data Crystals between their files by inserting each of their memory cards into the Gamecube's two slots, but that requires many people to own the game such that there's a wide pool of people who may have something you need, and vice versa. Gotcha Force definitely needed to ditch the letter sets and also have a shop where spare Borgs and Data Crystals could be sold for some sort of currency that could be used to purchase Borgs, and perhaps alternate color kits. I recommend Gotcha Force not for its shallow gameplay and sometimes frustrating progression, but for its joyful atmosphere and as a rough draft for a childish dream of mine: the perfect Pokemon game that, among other things, allows Pokemon battles to take place in 3D action combat. Also, I think Gotcha Force makes an okay sort of musuou game!
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Nier: Automata's combat, while better than any other Yoko Taro game out there, is still a bit flawed and repetitive. Healing items are broken on any difficulty besides the hardest one (in which you literally die in one hit anyway) and a lot of the harder enemies you can just grind out if you have enough.
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@Deor I started playing Morrowind like two weeks ago, and the combat's just confusing to me. Sometimes I hit, sometimes I don't, and there's nothing that really indicates why or how. I've been running around everywhere though, so I'll turn that off and see if that helps.
Also fun in my first time Morrowind experience: when I tried to rest at an inn I was woken up by a load noise. Turns out something was trying to kill me, only it was stuck behind a locked door that couldn't be opened. I could hear them, but I couldn't attack them or even get close. I also couldn't sleep to heal up because of this dude. A guard told me later that it was a Dark Broterhood assassin trying to kill me. I have no idea why - I was still level 1 and just started playing. It might just have something to do with me giving a ring to some dude, only to steal that very same ring and all his other priced possessions later. So, yeah, Morrowind is definitely flawed in more ways than one ^.^
(enjoying my time with it so far though, just a bit clunky)
On a different note, I'll probably share my own critique on my all-time without a doubt favourite game when I actually figure out which game that's supposed to be.
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Whether you hit or not is a formula involving your Agility, weapon skill, your current fatigue percentage, any magical effects on you, your luck, their luck, their agility, their defense (which is calculated based on their armor skill and what armor they're wearing), their fatigue percentage, and any musical effects on them. All that together comes you a percent chance to hit, and how long you hold back the swing determines how much damage you'll do.
As for the assassin, that's an oversight with the Tribunal expansion. I recommend getting a mod that makes it so that they only come after you after you pass a certain point in the main quest.
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@Deor I might check out some mods soon. I really don't mind the assasin though. I just thought it was incredibly typical.
Also, thanks for that info! I really was kind of confused about the whole combat thing. I sort of figured it'd be a hitbox issue, and I'm not sure if I should be glad or sad that it's not.
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I love Alan Wake a lot and it easily is my favourite game but it defiantly has some big issues that stop me from going back to it regularly.
#1 It can have this rinse and repeat moments where it just feels like I'm moving from room to room and doing the exact same fights, reload, get batteries, go into the next area, hear a monster voice, start the new fight. Rinse and repeat. It can feel like that sometimes
#2 the bloody fences! There are multiple times in this game where you have to do all this work to open up a wooden gate that a 6-year-old could climb over easily yet it takes two grown men 10 minutes to open it!
#3 Some of the lines can get very corny, sometimes the game seems to be taking itself super seriously and other times its:
"You're CRAZY Al!"
"I'm Crazy...but that's alright"So yeah, I have my problem with the game but I still love it.
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Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate is like my Sonic Mania or Mario Odyssey. I grew up with Monster Hunter all the way back on PS2 and only missed out on the PSP games, so to see all of that content spanning multiple generations (ba-dum-tss) dumped into one gigantic game including a ridiculous and mostly iconic monster list and even new systems like the Hunting Arts and Styles just made me so happy, and it's easily ONE OF my favorite games of all time because of that variety. However, it's got some glaring issues that even I can admit may hinder the experience for both new players and veterans.
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The variety that I praise and say makes the game seep with content leaves any story opportunity with main or side NPC's in total ruins. While most (if not all) of the NPC's are from previous titles, they offer little to nothing to make them stand out to new players aside from a few quips relating to their home game and their design in general. Your hunter in this game doesn't feel like a cohesive character or an integral part to any of the communities available for you to travel to; they feel like some guy or gal that just showed up to bash in a monster's skull and then just leave, and that definitely hurts in homey and comforting locales like Pokke Village and Yukumo Village.
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While I personally love the amount of playstyles that the Arts and Styles system allows, certain builds that you can make will destroy some monster encounters, trivializing them and making them feel like chores rather than the exciting battles they should be. One of the most infamous is the Adept Style, which allows you to dive through a monster's attack and counter attack if you dodge at the very last second. While it sounds good on paper, it makes hyper offensive monsters like Tigrex, Deviljho, and even Elder Dragons like Valstrax and Akantor absolute pushovers. Pair it with a high DPS weapon like the Dual Blades or the Heavy Bowgun and you can drop High Rank, and even some G-Rank, monsters in 5-10 minutes, and that's just ridiculous. If you wanna see some of these builds, just check out Team Darkside's GU videos.
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Almost all of the Fourth Generation maps return in Generations Ultimate, and while that isn't inherently bad for someone who played and got into the series with the Fourth installments they do have a glaring flaw that was even present in their debut game: an emphasis on verticality. Almost every 4 and 4U map has at least one giant cliff face that you're forced to scale to get to a certain area, and in some cases like the Ancestral Steppe there can be two giant cliff faces back to back. This means that it can be tedious as hell to track a monster into an area if you have to spend ~20 seconds wall-jumping (which costs Stamina btw) to even get into. And don't even get me started about areas where you can be knocked off by a monster only to fall all the way to another area that you can't even climb back from (looking at you Frozen Seaway...).
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I believe that, for an anniversary title that's meant to highlight the best in Monster Hunter history, the monster list is a bit baffling with some of its choices. There are flagship monsters like Rathalos and Tigrex, Invasive monsters like Rajang and Deviljho, and even some infamous monsters like Plesioth and Gravios. Those are all fine and dandy, but I can't understand for the life of me why inconsequential or joke monsters like Congalala, Uragaan, and even the Dromes and Kut-Ku were chosen alongside them.
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This may not be the game's fault, but Capcom's choice to release this game overseas after the success of Monster Hunter World hurt it quite a bit in the long run. When I first got the game, even I, a guy who knows old Monster Hunter like the back of my hand, had time adjusting back to the old map structure and control schemes for certain weapons. I could only imagine new players and even converted veteran players hopping over from World, picking up the game, and then dropping it due to that control difference, and the fact that that could've been avoided if Capcom released it in a more timely manner is a huge detriment to me.
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