I don't Battle Network 4 is underrated though, I played 3 bright before it and it was by a certain point that i realized i wasn't having as much fun so ilooked it up and i still don't get why they wanted people to finish the game 3 times to get the actual full ending or and the villain was a step down from Wily
It's a somewhat common thing in jrpgs to make the game really long and then force you to play it again to experience everything.
I think that Devil May Cry 1 is still a fun game, but its mechanics are aging kinda badly. The camera is especially bad, and the controls feel somewhat clunky, especially jumping.
The game very much was a product of its time. Like it released extremely early into the PS2's lifespan long before developers figured out dual stick cameras (Even Grand Theft Auto still stumbled with this until 2004) and started out as a Resident Evil game. It's also not particularly long and was a surprise hit with people because the main character could taunt and like every hour said a joke. It wasn't until DMC3 when they exaggerated Dante's personality to an absurd extent the franchise became what it is now.
Fallout 4 is actually a pretty good game. It seems a lot worse than it is because Fallout New Vegas came out first and is so good it would be almost impossible for any game to succeed it and not be criticized.
>voiced protagonist
>4 dialogue options (if you think this was defendable it really isn't. If you play with a mod that just lists what the four dialogue options actually say you'll often find that almost EVERY dialogue option only has 1 or 2 responses and the other two either say the same thing or say something that ends up going to the same result anyway. Most of the time dialogue just happens and you agree to do something or you don't. It was clearly done to simplify dialogue and cut down on the amount of voice lines they'd need to record and they just hoped people wouldn't notice. Todd even admitted it was a mistake in interviews after it was widely hated.
>None of the characters are interesting
>the game starts with a bizarre prologue that'll age very poorly in a decade or two where the main character is in 2077 and then experiences the Post Apocalypse for the first time. It makes little sense to include this because it feels like it's there for new players and we've already had F3/FNV now. Also no Ron Pearlman narration at the start. Which has been a staple of the series since the original game but isn't here. It was a reference to Mad Max 2 which did the same thing but this seems lost on the new developers.
>Typical Bethesda game design like how the first hour of the game is genuinely very boring to play and there are mods to skip it
>They REALLY wanted you to invest heavily in the settlement building mechanic to the point where if you're uninterested in it a lot of elements of the game start to fall apart. Like you don't make that much money off quests and you need to craft new weapons and parts constantly
>crafting already feels dated and games have started moving away from it in general because players just see it as busywork. In 10 years Fallout 4's crafting system will just be seen as an awkward tedious aspect of it you'll want to mod out. It's a problem Fallout 3 doesn't have by comparison. I would've genuinely preferred if weapon upgrades and parts were found at the end of quests rather than force you to run around looking for a random trinket so you can make a scope for your gun. Then I would've been a lot more focused on what I was supposed to do in the quest and not focused on just rummaging around the area looking for junk
>perk based progression really limits what kind of character you'll make, every one ends up feeling the same as a result
>skills aren't balanced because of the new focus on gunplay. Melee isn't worth building a character around and laser weapons/big weapons aren't viable to build a character around anymore. You essentially play the same sort of character every playthrough
>The game does very little new with it's storyline and is surprisingly derivative. Like the "synths" aspect to the story is borrowed so blatantly from Blade Runner. It also doesn't tie very well with the main character. You're just told that the Institute made Shaun the leader because he was a prime normal entirely because Fallout 1 did it with the player. Only there it made more sense and here it feels arbitrary like the developers wrote "the villain is the main character's son as an old man" long before they wrote the prologue or how the two were going to be connected.
>No ending slides
>none of the factions feel interesting or do anything new. They also make you do a lot of very repetitive quests where you either just follow someone or go to some place on the map and shoot things
>because of the huge focus on just shooting things the game's plot and quests feel simplified as a result. Like all you do is just go to a place, shoot some enemies, talk with an npc once or twice then collect some sort of reward. There's no genuinely interesting quests in the game like Arizona Killer in Fallout New Vegas. This feels more like Borderlands where the quest is often some arbitrary task, but at least there you're meant to play it with some friends. Hour 10 of Fallout 4 feels identical to hour 60. I'm still just crafting upgrades for my guns, running around the map doing errands and mostly just shooting dudes that mostly stand still and building settlements.
>the player is given a suit of power armor at the start of the game, a minigun and you're supposed to kill a deathclaw. This is one of the earliest combat encounters in the game and you're already doing something you didn't get to do until mid-late game in the other games. This genuinely feels like bad design and makes it so that Power armor isn't a rare piece of endgame armor that makes you unstoppable it feels like just an optional powerup that you acquire early on and in my case forget is even there. The only reason this was done was because this entire first quest was massively featured in the game's trailers and they wanted to show off the power armor/deathclaw.
>despite having a lot of ex Bungie employees that worked on the game to make its gunplay better, the combat never feels all that compelling. Like the enemies aren't as varied as something like Halo 2 where there are different kinds of enemies that all do different stuff and the devs play around with this in unique ways with the level design. Enemies either just run at you and melee you or they mostly stand still and soaks up bullets. Fallout 3/NV also did this but there the combat wasn't the only focus of the game. Here if you're not settlement building you're shooting stuff. If they made the combat more fun rather than just focused on gunplay it would've made the repetitive quests a lot more bearable.
In every way Fallout 4 really just encapsulates typical Bethesda game design almost to the point where it feels like a stereotype. And it's unlike Fallout 3 where there were tiny elements that fleshed the game out more like all the more tucked away areas like the Republic of Dave and Tenpenny Tower. With Fallout 4 it genuinely feels like a soulless game the developers didn't really have an idea for or particularly wanted to make but had to do it anyway. To illustrate this further most of the OST is recycled from Fallout 3 (which is surprising as hell to me because there's so much 50s music you can use, and you can even make original music like Fallout New Vegas did in that style).
Then there's also how former Fallout developers have proposed amazing ideas for Fallout games we'll never see because Bethesda is seemingly afraid to take risks. Like Tim Cain proposed a Fallout game in China. Which would be amazing because China has some of the most visually striking and surreal architecture/landscapes and we could actually see a different aspect of the Fallout lore that's only lightly touched upon in the previous games. It could actually move the setting in a different direction rather than just constantly retread like Bethesda does now.
Not to mention mod authors seemingly come up with way more interesting ideas and premises for Fallout games than Bethesda does. Like Fallout Miami looks really cool and the trailer to it even got more attention than Fallout 76's.
Bethesda has some genuinely talented game devs working for it. Like the lead dev of Skyrim worked on Thief 2 the Metal Age. But it feels like their games are decided upon by committee and there's no unified vision or focus anywhere to be found. They just want to make a bland "everything" game. Whereas what Fallout New Vegas showed was if you just narrowed your focus just a little the story turns out way better and the characters feel more interesting.
