Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Thiletonomics]

I think part of what's happened with entertainment in general is they've decided to go all "arthouse hipster" and decided everything has to be grim and dark and "realistic" because "real life doesn't have happy endings" and so now our entertainment is oversaturated with "realistic" bleak depressing bullshit. I'm sick of it, give me a happy ending, I want some fun escapism, not more crap to bring me down.

This is the thing I don't get. Who wants to be depressed all the time?

One of the most significant disagreements I have with people I personally know over media is that they like depressing endings (exemplified by, say, the ending to the Mist), and I do not. I don't grasp it. Why wouldn't you want to be happy?

Unfortunately, happy endings go against what groups and governments like the CCP, the DPRK, Canada, BlackRock, and the WEF want, because giving people hope would go against what their true plans for the World are. If you keep people depressed and with little to no hope, that would prevent them from rising up. I can see even ESG scores being intentionally tanked, if someone dares to put a happy ending in a video game, TV show, or movie now.

 

[Heddo Eburynyan]

NFS ProStreet was the last good NFS game and I cant be convinced otherwise. The setting was great, official sanctioned race days instead of yet another hurr durr street racing game. The announcer hyped you up and actually made you feel like you started from nowhere and were making a name for yourself. The most unfortunate part is that we'll never get a true sequel, because even if one were to be made it wouldn't live up to the original.

 

[Matt Damon]

One of the most significant disagreements I have with people I personally know over media is that they like depressing endings (exemplified by, say, the ending to the Mist), and I do not. I don't grasp it. Why wouldn't you want to be happy?

I wouldn't say I like depressing endings, but I do think good sad endings can be extremely poignant and memorable in a way happy endings really can't. There's a reason lines like "What's in the box?!" or "Forget it, Jake - it's Chinatown" are so ingrained in modern culture.

 

[skykiii]

This is the thing I don't get. Who wants to be depressed all the time?

One of the most significant disagreements I have with people I personally know over media is that they like depressing endings (exemplified by, say, the ending to the Mist), and I do not. I don't grasp it. Why wouldn't you want to be happy?

To give an answer that isn't a conspiracy theory.... it can be kinda paradoxical.

I personally kinda like bittersweet endings, although I'm not a big fan of straight up fuck-you downers (this being one reason I don't often like horror games). First of all, this can be an emotion you don't feel often in real life. Second of all, sometimes it can legit be... more uplifting in a weird way.

Take the ending to Actraiser on the SNES (which I've seen sources like TV Tropes bitch about). For context, In that game you play as God and are basically taking back the world from Satan. It mixes platforming and city-building during which each region has these little micro-stories unfold. At the end, you revisit all the areas and get one last update on the micro-stories that happen, then revisit one of your temples, where throughout the game you've been talking to the head priests.

But this one last time.... nobody is there.

Again, I've seen people bitch about this, but I honestly think its great. At first, they needed literal divine intervention because the world was just THAT fucked. But... its not fucked anymore, and people are living happily. The game itself even suggests this... that this state of affairs is basically what you wanted in the first place.

And it still tears me up.

And for me its way more significant than, say, the ending to some anime where they just go "Rah rah we beat the villains everything is happy now and all our problems are conveniently solved!"

This is also why Lord of the Rings is such a powerful book and why the Jackson movie trilogy completely botched it, and why The Last Unicorn is one of the best animated movies ever made.

EDIT: On this note, I just remembered one of my favorite video games ever... a freeware game called The Crooked Man (its part of a series, but the sequels honestly kinda suck from what I remember). The entire game is about this kind of stuff, you constantly meet people with some issue, and you're always given a choice of giving them the Hollywood "never give up" answer or letting them down gently... and the whole theme of the game is that being too optimistic and "never give up" can have the problem of creating unrealistically high expectations that can end up just making things worse instead of better, and that sometimes it is okay and even preferable to, as the game puts it, "be okay with living in a house where a lot of things are slightly crooked."

 

[whogoesthere]

This is the thing I don't get. Who wants to be depressed all the time?

One of the most significant disagreements I have with people I personally know over media is that they like depressing endings (exemplified by, say, the ending to the Mist), and I do not. I don't grasp it. Why wouldn't you want to be happy?

Nothing wrong with a negative ending, many books worked that concept very well. Its just about exploring different things, a fantasy in your own head.

Now the reason you see it so much in shitty media is the media is still stuck in its teen phase. It used to be most movies/films had upbeat endings, people were worried a downer might effect the audience too much. People were working with a new technology, so its understandable to show caution. Now, by the time the 60s rolled around, some artsy types decided to try the dark ending for a change. It was somewhat transgressive at the time because everything else seemed to clean and prim all the time. Wholesome to excess. Its why a lot of movies from that era deal with the darkness behind the mask type stories. Like Blue velvet, shit like that, showing the dark underside to normality.

Sadly, we are stuck in that bit. People think dark and depressing means thoughtful and artistic. Same reason people say art must express something political, when art has no such concepts at all and has fought hard avoid that shit.

Games are just an extension of the same problems all media struggles with, unable to move forward in the consumption age. We only consume culture now, we don't make it.

 

[skykiii]

Another thing about dark endings is they can be effective.... particularly if the author is making a point. George Orwell's books work because the good guys DON'T win and fix everything. The Lorax works because you see what happens when the environmentalist fails. (This is not an endorsement of environmentalism, I'm just saying this technique works)

I've seen this come up in, of all things, discussions of the Ace Attorney series. The games were apparently meant to be a commentary on how insane actual Japanese courtrooms really are, and how easy it is for an innocent person to go to jail on bullshit evidence. The problem though is that in the games, Phoenix' client is always exonerated. So it kinda undermines its own message.

 

[Still Exceptional]

This one might get me some hate, buuut....

Telltale Games sucked. They weren't even games, they were movies where you make the occasional choice which usually doesn't really affect anything and might as well not have even been in there. The only reason they got popular was because they became IP whores who glommed onto popular franchises.
And their "seasons" bullshit was infuriating to me. Either sell me a full game or suck a fucking AIDS riddled fag dick.

There's a reason they went bankrupt.

 

[skykiii]

This one might get me some hate, buuut....

Telltale Games sucked. They weren't even games, they were movies where you make the occasional choice which usually doesn't really affect anything and might as well not have even been in there. The only reason they got popular was because they became IP whores who glommed onto popular franchises.
And their "seasons" bullshit was infuriating to me. Either sell me a full game or suck a fucking AIDS riddled fag dick.

There's a reason they went bankrupt.

I only ever played one Telltale game--the first season of Sam and Max. That one was good, but absolutely nothing else they did ever caught my interest.

 

[Articles and Nudes]

Monster Hunter World and Rise could half the HP of its monsters, and I doubt anyone but tryhards would moan. I love the games, but whacking away at a monster for 15 minutes with no appreciable change in its strategy gets really boring.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Monster Hunter World and Rise could half the HP of its monsters, and I doubt anyone but tryhards would moan. I love the games, but whacking away at a monster for 15 minutes with no appreciable change in its strategy gets really boring.

Alternatively if they kept the same HP but didn't flee nearly as much and you could spend more time in combat instead of chasing.

 

[Psyduck]

The worst part was how predictable the plot was. And it was retreading old ground since RDR1 already did the whole 'death of the west' shit already.

Why can't we have a more fun cowboy game? They already built a cool world with lots of great elements. Why's the story gotta be such a fucking downer?

Housers got a hard on for that shit recently, both GTA 4 and 5 with the "Dark Side of the American Dream", and both RDRs with "Death of the West"

i still remember Red Dead Revolver being a typical western revenge story, and earlier GTAs being criminal tales, simpler to digest, didnt overstay their welcome

 

[Shamino]

Monster Hunter World and Rise could half the HP of its monsters, and I doubt anyone but tryhards would moan. I love the games, but whacking away at a monster for 15 minutes with no appreciable change in its strategy gets really boring.

I believe the HP scaling is due to gear powercreep. In older gen mh, reaching 100% critical chance means sacrificing a lot of armor slots that you could've used for other useful skills, now you can max offense skills, slot health regeneration augments, and have room for other options. A low hp monsters will just stagger after every few hits and become a complete joke, as many monsters did after u got fully geared with Fatalis for instance.

 

[X Prime]

And for me its way more significant than, say, the ending to some anime where they just go "Rah rah we beat the villains everything is happy now and all our problems are conveniently solved!"

Actually, funny enough from what I understand a good chunk of anime and Japanese games have the opposite problem nowadays; arbitrarily bittersweet for no particular reason when you have enough power to kill God with your pinky.

As an aside, play Actraiser: Renaissance. To me that game, aside from tower defense bits, is how you do a modern remake. You could tell whoever made that game knew exactly what Actraiser was about.

 

[std::string]

Actually, funny enough from what I understand a good chunk of anime and Japanese games have the opposite problem nowadays; arbitrarily bittersweet for no particular reason when you have enough power to kill God with your pinky.

A lot of JRPGs from the early 90s have strange bittersweet endings so I don't think it's a modern thing.

In G.O.D the final boss out of nowhere is literally God and it's sort of heavily implied that you did a bad thing murking him.

 

[skykiii]

Actually, funny enough from what I understand a good chunk of anime and Japanese games have the opposite problem nowadays; arbitrarily bittersweet for no particular reason when you have enough power to kill God with your pinky.

As an aside, play Actraiser: Renaissance. To me that game, aside from tower defense bits, is how you do a modern remake. You could tell whoever made that game knew exactly what Actraiser was about.

I'm just waiting for Renaissance to go on sale...

But as for the anime and J-media bittersweetness... that strikes me as a case of monkey-see monkey-do, standard issue cases of "people liked other things that did this, so we better do it too!" without understanding why they worked. Japan and America are both really bad about that sort of thing.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Smash Bros Brawl is the best Smash Bros.

I don't care about the competitive side and the Emissary was the shit.

 

[Nick Obre]

Monster Hunter World and Rise could half the HP of its monsters, and I doubt anyone but tryhards would moan. I love the games, but whacking away at a monster for 15 minutes with no appreciable change in its strategy gets really boring.

They're already watered down and casualized enough as it is

 

[Captain Chromosome]

League of Legends is a shit game and MOBAs are inherently not fun.

 

[BikeLock]

Fighting games peaked with Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, its all been a button mashing quicktime event slide ever since.
The Super Smash Bros games are hot garbage, and I would not have sex with them.

 

[Calandrino]

I have two ideas I'd like to see made real:

One, a sequel to Sunset Riders.

Two, a Lucky Luke game. Maybe even one where you play as the Daltons.

Well, I think there are multiple Lucky Luke games, and a ninja-themed spiritual successor to Sunset Riders called Mystic Warriors, and the best part is they're like 30 years old so they're not shit.

I think part of what's happened with entertainment in general is they've decided to go all "arthouse hipster" and decided everything has to be grim and dark and "realistic" because "real life doesn't have happy endings" and so now our entertainment is oversaturated with "realistic" bleak depressing bullshit. I'm sick of it, give me a happy ending, I want some fun escapism, not more crap to bring me down.

It's a Jewish scheme for video games to even have endings at all. It's similar to planned obsolescence. A score based game like Galaga or Dig Dug is infinitely replayable, whereas cucksoomers must buy a fresh round of gay story games each year, each of which becomes worthless upon completion, then buy each additional sequel to find out what gay things happen next. Spoiler alert, Kratos ends up as one of Mohammed's wives, now you don't have to buy God of War Part XXVII.