Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

Georgio Cocklord said:
Are there any Japanese franchises or properties ruined by Westerners? Since Japanese and Western gameplay styles are wildly different, I figured there must be a ton of examples cause japs pawn off properties a lot. The only example I can think of is dead rising cause the first game was uniquely Japanese in how it played but became standard zombie third person shooter crap.
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Devil May Cry reboot is the best example, but you could argue westernization has poisoned just about every major jap franchise.
 
SSj_Ness said:
Devil May Cry reboot is the best example, but you could argue westernization has poisoned just about every major jap franchise.
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No I don't mean westernisation as in westerners were involved in localisation. I mean a Japanese property which was created by Japanese people which had one or more games outsourced to a western development team. Like how Nintendo pawned metroid to western developers or how dead rising was pawned off to Microsoft.
 
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Georgio Cocklord said:
No I don't mean westernisation as in westerners were involved in localisation. I mean a Japanese property which was created by Japanese people which had one or more games outsourced to a western development team. Like how Nintendo pawned metroid to western developers or how dead rising was pawned off to Microsoft.
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That's exactly what happened with the DMC reboot.
 
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Georgio Cocklord said:
Are there any Japanese franchises or properties ruined by Westerners? Since Japanese and Western gameplay styles are wildly different, I figured there must be a ton of examples cause japs pawn off properties a lot. The only example I can think of is dead rising cause the first game was uniquely Japanese in how it played but became standard zombie third person shooter crap.
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Lost Planet 3
 
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Friendly Primarina said:
Cynthia is the most overrated trainer in the Pokémon franchise and possibly the most overrated character in video game history. If it weren't for the waifu factor and the fact she ambushes you in BW she'd be as forgettable as Unova's champion.
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As @mrs thickness mentioned, a lot of it is because of her waifu design, her battle theme, and her team being oddly good. Her being an absolute menace to battle is the main reason why people remember her. The pokemon games usually just allow you to stroll through the game building a team of shitty pokemon you like because the trainers are usually pushovers and don't have full comps. All the gym leaders in Sinnoh have at most 4 pokemon and the Elite Four have at most 5 pokemon. Even if you do come across the rare trainer with a full comp, it's usually themed around a specific typing so you can sweep most of their team with just 1 pokemon.

Then Cynthia shows up with a team where only 2 share a type (Milotic and Gastrodon) but she has a bunch of other good pokemon with good IVs and moves that provide really good coverage. You brought grass to at least kill her 2 water types? Gastrodon knows a poison move and Milotic knows an ice move to counter. Can't rely on water's other counter of electric because Gastrodon is also a ground type, so its immune to electric. You brought ice to counter her Garchomp? It knows a fighting move, Gastrodon knows a rock move, and she has a Lucario on her team. You brought a dragon type to stop Garchomp? Fighting dragon with dragon is just a shitshow and again, Milotic knows ice beam so it will finish off your dragon type if you win that matchup. Lucario also knows a dragon move, so your dragon is super dead. Spiritomb has zero weaknesses and knows embargo, which prevents you from using items on your pokemon, so you can't overpower it or whittle it down with potion healing spam. Considering a lot of children usually just powerlevel their starter pokemon and rely on it, they'll end up getting rolled. Torterra has a 4x weakness to ice from Milotic or will die to Spiritomb's bug move. Infernape will get destroyed by 2 water types she has and the 3 other pokemon that know a psychic move. Empoleon will get killed by the 3 pokemon that know Earthquake.

Cynthia is meme'd because children casually sweep the game without much of a thought and then suddenly Cynthia appears and slaps them back to the pokemon center. Now Little Timmy is holding his DS with tears in his eyes crying, "but...I was suppose to be the very best! She has a counter for whatever I do!".
 
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Georgio Cocklord said:
Are there any Japanese franchises or properties ruined by Westerners? Since Japanese and Western gameplay styles are wildly different, I figured there must be a ton of examples cause japs pawn off properties a lot. The only example I can think of is dead rising cause the first game was uniquely Japanese in how it played but became standard zombie third person shooter crap.
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Yes, but...

@SSj_Ness mentioned DMC. You mentioned Dead Rising. There's Silent Hill which went from a trio of classics to westerners recreating SH2 but missing the point entirely. Same goes for the expanded material like comics. But...

Then there's Bionic Commando. A natoriously shit XBox 360 game that tried to make it appeal to the west by making it "grim and gritty", which was the fasion at the time. But...

I also know of Bomberman Zero that did a Bionic Commando, but that was a Japanese game made to pander to the west? Unless Hudson has an western branch.



We kind of have to address the elephant in the room. The narrative that "Silent Hill was great until baka gaijin got his hands on it and failed to understand it" doesn't hold up.

The games were already on thin ice. Silent Hill 4 was widely hated, so much so that the Silent Hill fanbase don't consider it a Silent Hill game. The reason given is that the game was originally a stand alone title called "The Room" but had the Silent Hill name slapped onto it at the last minute due to marketting. @capitalBBustard corrected me on that, and I started playing it as a result. I've not finished it yet, but the game is full of Silent Hill references. Famous turds like Silent Hill: The Arcade and Silent Hill Pachinko were 100% Konami.

Bionic Command is somewhat different, but also the same. It's old history now, but the same devs also made Bionic Commando a joke also made Bionic Commando Rearmed, which people like.


I think it's less a westerner problem and more an incompetent dev problem.

Look at Metroid Prime. Most people love Prime. There are people who swear that making Metroid a FPS killed it, but compared to Other M and Federation Force, history proved Prime fans right. There's also Nintendo fans that hate Mario + Rabbids. I remember Moviebob complaining that a westerner gets to make a Mario game, and the first thing they do is give him a gun, but Moviebob is a lolcow.
 
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Georgio Cocklord said:
Are there any Japanese franchises or properties ruined by Westerners? Since Japanese and Western gameplay styles are wildly different, I figured there must be a ton of examples cause japs pawn off properties a lot. The only example I can think of is dead rising cause the first game was uniquely Japanese in how it played but became standard zombie third person shooter crap.
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all of capcom in that era. D.M.C. is the only half decent game they outsourced, lost planet 3 sucked and killed the series. Konami was doing the same with silent hill and castlevania.
 
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Possibly not an unpopular opinion any more, but Iwata was 100% right about chasing better graphics being a dead end. it's such a dead end that the PS4 is now over ten years old and still getting new games, and not minor titles, either. Games like NBA 2K5 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 are on PS4 this year.

Imagine if, when Iwata said this to much mockery and derision in 2005, there were still marquee titles like Madden and Need For Speed releasing on the PS1 and Nintendo 64, with the current-gen releases being barely changed from the last-gen releases. Imagine if Rockstar had continued to milk GTA 2 during the PS2's entire life, and the big announcement for PS3 was...GTA 2 with bilinear filtering and 60 fps. That's what the current generation of gaming.

 
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Georgio Cocklord said:
Are there any Japanese franchises or properties ruined by Westerners? Since Japanese and Western gameplay styles are wildly different, I figured there must be a ton of examples cause japs pawn off properties a lot. The only example I can think of is dead rising cause the first game was uniquely Japanese in how it played but became standard zombie third person shooter crap.
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Off the top of my head is Devil May Cry, but that feels like an easy pick. Most people's issues are related (a bit) less to gameplay and more to story, since Dante just did not act like Dante at all. In terms of gameplay, basically Ninja Theory (the US studio) completely failed to replicate DMC's physics, which to be fair is pretty complex since the game has to accommodate air juggling in 3D and 5 million moves that change your momentum. One absolute positive I can say about the Ninja Theory (US) DMC is that the lock-on being missing ended up being more intuitive than expected as I could still do all command normals without it.

A lot of examples are probably going to be capcom related (much like dead rising) because they tried really hard to license their IPs into the US.

It's pretty hard to think of examples outside of capcom, but I'm trying. It's going in the reverse direction, but that crazy nigress game Forspoken was basically Japanese devs trying to imitate Infamous. It didn't really work out very well at all but this one is a bit complicated since I didn't finish Forspoken. I pirated it just to see how bad it was and I just simply didn't like the controls and deleted the game immediately lol, also ran like hot garbage.
 
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Since I don't think that we will ever return to the heyday of the industry (sixth gen and PC in the early 2000s) where there was proper competition that was to the customers benefit and where state-of-the-art technology and weird passion project could not only coexist but were a normal thing for publishers I am more or less fine with how things are today. Indies and the handful of A and AA studios are releasing fun games, and AAA is almost never worth looking at. Modders are still doing good things. And emulation is also in a decent spot. If the entire video games industry should crash in the next couple of years, who cares.
 
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red_dead_redemption_2.jpg

Graphics stopped progressing after this game. Most games now cant even come close and it was released half a decade ago.
 
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Sneefy said:
View attachment 6408946
Graphics stopped progressing after this game. Most games now cant even come close and it was released half a decade ago.
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RDR2 combined fidelity with good art direction and aesthetics. The end result was a gorgeous cowboy simulator.

But some in this thread will still complain that the FPS isn't high enough.
 
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