Most writing and VA in games is embarrassingly bad.

Like for example. I genuinely like Wakka from Final Fantasy X and think he’s a great character with a lot of development. He has a genuine albeit misguided reason to hate the people he does given his situation, his firm beliefs in Yevon and to not spoil an over a decade old game his brother’s death.

Plus he has a great character development point throughout the game that lessens his hate towards the Al bhed and even sees him developing a genuine friendship with Rikku and the other Al Bhed to some degree

Dark Souls 2 is a significantly better game than Dark Souls 3

The factory doesn’t always have to grow.
At some point it needs to stop.

The obviously trans bartender in hogwarts legacy makes no sense in a universe where you can use magic to change everything about yourself. I understand and like that there is trans representation in this game and any other game it is in and as a fuck you to that terf pos jk but in universe it does not make sense to me.

Homefront: The Revolution is actually a super fun game. Dare I say…a hidden gem?

It has an atrocious metacritic score for a few reasons. Mainly, some of the enemy AI was broken on release, which is fair, but it’s long since been fixed. The other big issue is that it’s a sequel to a genuinely bad game and most people didn’t bother playing it, and most who did came with the goal of trashing it.

However, this game is fun if you want something kind in the modern Far Cry style vein, but set in urban environments. It run on the Crye Engine and the gunplay is rock solid; the shotgun in this game is fantastic. The guns all have absolutely preposterous alternate fire modes. The assault rifle has its upper swapped out to turn it into landmine launcher.

The story and setting is a complete reset compared to the first game. It isn’t just a lazy “Red Dawn but China North Korea”. There is an elaborate alternate history backstory going back to the 1950s that sees North Korea take the role of the high tech manufacturing hub for the west, eventually becoming what some in the west in the 1970s feared Japan would become- a powerhouse of tech that was rich and had a grip on all western nations because of it. Then this cyberpunk reimagining of North Korea takes over a poor and downtrodden USA after the U.S. had made so many bad choices that NK could plausibly send “international peacekeepers”. Absolutely nuts plot, but so weird and strangely high effort. Also means the bad guys are coded so cyberpunk and have all kinds of drones and stuff.

Most crafting mechanics suck and feel grafted on. This is especially true if crafting isn’t the main point of the game.

Breath of the Wild was a much needed change in a series that had started to go stale. While I like Zelda games, the formula of go to the dungeon, get item, defeat boss, go to next dungeon and repeat was getting worn out, with exploration taking a backseat.

There are too many Pokemon. I don’t know if that’s a hot take, but I’m including it anyway.

Having parts of the map blocked off at the beginning of GTA games is garbage and the in game explainations even moreso. Part of the fun is walking around doing random stuff, I want to be able to do that from the get go. Thankfully GTA V got it right.

The GameCube controller is overrated. While I like the giant A button and the shoulder triggers, the D-pad is too small, the X and Y buttons are oddly shaped and easy to mix up, and there should’ve been a shoulder on the left side too.

Most games have a terrible story that merely serve as plot points to give context to what’s happening. The lore and world building is usually pretty good but story rarely is better than ‘ok’

The dark souls games aren’t as hard as people think they are. Or they’re differently hard than people think.

I’m not saying they’re easy. But I think people think they’re all lightning fast twitch or die. A lot of the game is more “you took a corner at high speed and fell into a hole in the ground, and then rats ate you while you panicked”.

Sometimes there’s speed, but a lot of it is staying calm and aware.

Miyazaki hasn’t really innovated since Demon Souls. The other games are slight variations on the same gameplay and design. Sekiro is the biggest change, but the overall design is still very similar. The rest are just “more aggressive / faster” or “open world/metroidvania” in comparison. There are other differences, but the core experience is basically the same.

Fumito Ueda, while similarly iterating on similar ideas, was far more ambitious in his game design between Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. Ico was very different to mainstream gaming at the time. SOTC pushed animation and scale to the limits of the hardware while doubling down on “design by subtraction”. Guardian, while similar in concept to Ico, was a bold move in relying on a “true to life” creature and developing your relationship with that creature as gameplay design. Each were far less mainstream than Miyazaki’s design which is why, as acclaimed as they are, you will find more division about them from so called “core” gamers.

He’s the more important auteur in the medium. You don’t get Dark Souls without Ico.

• Breath of the Wild was a bad Zelda game. Not bad as a game in general, but terrible as a Zelda game. Apparently, people have told me this is a hot take.

• I actually don’t mind gacha games with microtransactions as long as the gameplay is good and the game is free to play. I really like Super Mecha Champions and Zenless Zone Zero currently.

• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a snoozefest to play. People always tell me to play it and how good it is but the auto-battler combat where the characters have bark lines for literally every action they take in a second is just not for me.

• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour is the best C&C excluding the Red Alert games. No, I won’t argue with you, and no, I won’t change my mind.

• Metroid Other M wasn’t actually that bad. Yes, the cutscenes were long and the game was pretty linear (just like Metroid Fusion and Dread, honestly), and yes, I can see why certain people would be mad about certain plot points, but the game was not literally Hitler. It was a very fun action game, and what is crazy is that the gameplay was equally as fun to watch someone else play it. The pixel hunts were kinda annoying because of the way they were forced, and I do wish it had analog controller support, but at the end of the day I still think it was a pretty fun game to play.

• Call of Duty Infinite actually had a fun campaign. Granted, the last CoD I played before it was World At War, but I actually really liked the campaign. I liked the structure of being in a spaceship and choosing the missions I wanted to do.

Hello Games’s release of No Man’s Sky was a massive gamble that was more likely to fail than not. They shouldn’t have been forgiven for the false advertising and broken promises. Half the gaming industry seems to have gotten the idea that it’s okay to release a half-baked mess for $30-$70 and then maybe fix it later.

I think Gears of War would have been better if the Locust had turned out to be humans mutated through imulsion exposure.

It would make sense to me because the Lambent are imulsion-infused Locust, and they look more Locust than the Locust. Anyway, that’s what I thought Gears2 hinted at, at the time

Cloud drags Final Fantasy VII (OG) down. He’s the least interesting playable character and his amnesia subplot overstays its welcome.

Also, Cait Sith is the best character.

Calling your own take a hot take is premature. A take being hot requires it to make other people take notice and agree. If it’s your own take you’re sharing, that hasn’t happened yet.

I think you mean what are your unpopular opinions related to game plots/characters.