Guilty Gear Strive.

Plus R is my favorite fighting game. Xrd I hated because they fucked with my character (Zato/Eddie) but I could tell it's a fun game…

Strive just fucking sucks. The irony is I did vibe a little more with Zato in Strive than I did in Xrd, but WTF was everything else in this damn game… they just kinda ripped away anything that made characters unique in favor standardized systemic depth and breadth.

Less unique moves, less unique combos, even animations feel too samey compared to Plus R or Xrd… I hate it. Everything just feels needlessly homogeneous.

Even the game's ideas suck. Like, WTF is Zabubu…

Every time I give it a shot all I'm thinking of is: why the fuck am I not playing Plus R instead?

The paper Mario where you had to play cards to attack

Life is Strange Double Exposure. Why did Max's powers change wtf?!

Metal Gear Solid 5.

How can you just ditch your main character's voice actor? As a Metal Gear completionist, how do I even play this traditionally linear game now that it's open world and packed with repetitive side missions? Why am I building a strut base and hiring staff that I magically airlift to a chopper out on the battlefield? Overall a disappointment, not because of bad graphics or bad controls or bad gameplay, just a hodgepodge of content that was too much of a departure from the format of the first 4 linear games. I never finished it and probably never will. I know Konami threw multiple wrenches in Kojima's gears during development but I feel the overall direction was still flawed from the onset. Open World was just so popular at that time and maybe they forced it on Kojima, who knows. I know he didn't want to make a 5th game anyway so I'm gonna just pretend it never happened and be happy with the first 4 and the PSP titles.

God of War III. Good gameplay, but what the hell was that story? Kratos kills everyone in an unneccessarily sadistic way, turns the whole world into chaos and ruin and then offs himself with his own sword.

That felt like reading a school shooter fanfiction.

Fun fact: He also pushes a helpless nude woman into a door mechanism that kills her. Just...why?

No wonder they made a prequel after that and then rebooted the series.

This isn't from personal experience because its reputation is so bad I avoided it entirely, but apparently Mass Effect 3. The fan backlash was so strong they apparently had to retcon the ending, LOL!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect_3_ending_controversy

(You know it's bad when it's infamous enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.)

Controversial take: doom 1 is better than doom 2. Doom 2 has a bunch of awful levels.

I didn't really like doom2016 or eternal that much, either. Too much start-and-stop.

Borderlands

• 1: Decent
• 2: Best in the series
• Pre-Sequel: Playable Clap-Trap is the only redeeming factor.
• 3: Solid gameplay, shit narrative
• 4 Shit.

Gauntlet (2014) if you count it as a sequel to Legends and Dark Legacy, is a big disappointment. I think simple games can be fine but this is just too simple. Legends just barely had enough depth to be good, and then they go and make something simpler. I had so much fun with local co-op Gauntlet Legends on Dreamcast.

I liked “Dark Quiet Death” but the sequels were just worse and worse cash grabs. It got worse after the original creator left and they made a child-friendly mascot for the game.

Deus Ex Human Revolution might be the best game that I hate lol

It's just not close to as good as the original and it still gets so much praise. They dropped so much of the strategy and depth of Deus Ex. It doesn't hold up nearly as well on repeat playthroughs.

The last of us 2.

I liked the first game, the twist at the end was a bit iffy, but it was understandable from a character perspective (Joel was never a good guy, and him deciding to kill a bunch of fireflies to save his psuedo-daughter from an iffy medical procedure makes sense to his character).

The second game was fantastic mechanically, and a train wreck everywhere else.

I understood the story they tried to tell, and they might have even told that story decently.

But it was absolutely not what I signed up for, I went from a coming of age (Ellie) / found family (Both) / redemption (Joel) story, and went right into a gritty "the price of revenge" story that was just so emotionally exhausting. Half the story was spent on a character I didnt care about, the timeline was confusing, and most of all, I didnt want to play a game about Ellie (and Joel's brother) descending into emotionally driven monsters who sacrifice everything for revenge.

Its hard to say the game was "bad," since mechanically it was good, and the story had depth. The confusing timeline wasnt great, but was survivable if the game was otherwise good. It was just such a tonal whiplash, and was such a slog to get through that it killed the whole series for me.

Dragon Age 2. Origins was so good. Then... Bleh.

I love Puyo Puyo.

I hate Puyo Puyo Tetris. It's a big step back from previous games, and it's the worst online experience I've ever dealt with in my life. And I honestly think it gives beginners a bad first impression of the series, because by juxtaposing it next to a more popular game I regularly see players get confused when it doesn't click in the first five minutes and decide they'd rather just play Tetris instead.

I utterly loathe and despise Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It's everything I hated about the first game but buggier. And it's all ctrl-c ctrl-v, the only 'new' content is a butchered adaptation of Chronicle's Skill Battle, minus the full JRPG story mode that Skill Battle was built around. It has serious problems competitively, but by splitting the playerbase, it killed Puyo Puyo Champions, the more functional game I kept trying to run tournaments for but could not get players to show up.

The true depth of my hatred really just stems from Sega's decision to rehash a second crossover. It has been ten years since the last proper main series game, Puyo Puyo Chronicle, and that game was Japan-only - the last game to get localized was Fever, 26 years ago.

There was a time when, despite not liking the first game, I had high hopes that this game succeeding in the west would lead to bigger and better things for the series. Surely Sega willl follow it up with a main series game along the lines of the ones I liked, and surely they'll localize it. But that didn't happen, and the tragedy is that I understand exactlly why it didn't. PPT outsold everything else Sega ever tried to do with the franchise by an order of magnitude, and it did so by selling to an audience that only cares about the other game. So Sega realized the most profitable course of action is to keep riding the coattails of a more popular game because that's all anyone cares about. I just want Puyo Puyo to be its own game, but why would Sega ever go back to that when they know that even the most low-effort ctrl-c ctrl-v rehash will sell far more copies as long as it has the more popular game attached to it?

Assassin’s Creed III never clicked for me, and I remember buying the Collector’s Edition day 1 - after enjoying the hell out of AC1, 2, Brotherhood and Revelations.

I ended up enjoying both AC4 and Rogue afterwards, so 🤷🏻‍♂️

fear 2 and 3 could never really live up to the original. 2 sort of watered things down, 3 was bizarre plot wise, like a buddy shooter with the primary antagonist?

I almost feel obliged to bring up halo 4 and the rest of the 343 fever dream of games. also tiberian twilight, what kind of shit was that?!

Fallout 4. Fallout was finished. We did it. Nv was a doctoral thesis on everything 'fallout' was or had to say. Even the dlc path literally ended with either 'you can't take the gold with you' and walking away from this beautiful fucked up hauntological horror ruin made out of misguided obsessive love or just nuking shit again and starting from nothing.

Command and Conquer 4. The game that killed the franchise.

Picture things after C&C3. Two factions, GDI (America, basically) and Nod (evil religious dudes) were busy fighting a bunch. The Scrin (aliens) show up and start blowing things up. It is discovered that the aliens are making special structures of unknown purpose. GDI gets to work with blowing them up, but Nod helps the aliens save one of the structures. It is rendered impervious to harm when the game ends.

Then, there's the C&C3 expansion. The fancy alien device under GDI's control is stolen back by Nod, on the orders of their leader, Kane.

Quite a setup for C&C4, right? There was a first person shooter sequel (called Tiberium) on the pipeline, but it was cancelled. Wait some more time, and C&C4 is announced and released.

What did we get?

• The base building system used for every installment is abandoned in favor of a mobile base system. You can zoom around in your mobile base and make units from that. Static structures are gone. Awful.
• The story is incredibly short. Only a few hours.
• One character (James) is a huge pile of shit, and fucks shit up at the end regardless of whether you side with GDI or Nod.
• Nothing on the alien plotline.
• The video at the end looks like it was shot with an extra just outside EA's offices.

Ridiculous. I'm still upset about it to this day.

Overwatch 2

Destiny 2.

Don't get me wrong, Destiny 1s story was really bad. It wasn't originally like that, but thanks to Jason Jones thats how it ended up. Never forgiving him for doing that to Joe Statens work like that.

But literally almost everything else In D1 is better than D2. Gunplay, armor and weapon designs, raids, environment design, art style, etc. The only things D2 has over D1 are graphical fidelity, more than 30 fps, and the original Red War story writing was more coherent (but its not even in the game anymore because lazy developers be lazy).

Marvel Ultimate Alliance was a awesome game! But the second one felt souless

Max Payne 3 was really disappointing compared to 1&2.

Phantasy Star Online 2 never hit me like PSO, maybe it's the pace of the game

This is me pulling from my youth, but at the time it released I really disliked Jak 2 (sequel to Jak & Daxter). The first one was a wonderful open world action platformer, and while there was a bit of that in the sequel, a ton of it was this weird GTA-esque city map complete with a crime star system. I remember really hating those parts and they just went on and on.

The three Spyro the Dragon games on the Playstation were all fantastic. The first Spyro game on the PS2 (notably not made by Insomniac) was terrible.

Saints row 3.

2 had just the right balance of funny and serious.

3 felt cobbled together as a series of lolsorandom ideas without an actual soul in them, cut out fleshed out characters you grew to love in 2 to make space for terribly acted cardboard cutouts voices by meme-famous people like Hulk Hogan and Sasha grey, neither of whom aged particularly well as a casting choice, and didn't really have anything seriously above 2 except for the raw gameplay.