Saints Row IV - I liked aspects of the earlier games, but I actually really enjoyed the meta silliness of IV. I accept that I don't have a lot of company in having this opinion 🙂

i love starfield, despite its flaws. the public opinion was very.... 😬

Pyre by Supergiant. I have no idea how a mystical basketball slash visual novel with RPG elements clicked with me but WOW did it. Its the first game I ever platinum'd too.

I liked Watch Dogs 1 mainly because I didn't consume any pre-release media about it. Whatever downgrade there may have been, I was unaffected. The game and its story are about as Ubisoft as they come (and I don't mean that in a particularly positive way), but it was great for fucking around.

I also liked Cyberpunk 2077's launch version, but at the same time, I think the people who are trying to memory hole the objectively dogshit launch state of both 2077 and The Witcher 3 are perpetuating the problem.

I don't know if it's my favorite, but Prototype (and its sequel) comes to my mind. It wasn't that badly received, but most people liked Infamous more, in the same generation.

And a game that I really love, my personal best SNES game ever (yes, even beyond Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia, my numbers 2 and 3), is Terranigma, which is a game that many people who've played it don't like (because they get stuck at the beginning in the Underworld or at the fight with Bloody Mary).

Star Wars Outlaws.

I started playing maybe a year after release. I found a lot of negativity about the game. I am pretty sure that it had a really rough launch and by the time I got around to playing it many of the launch issues had been patched. Based on the stuff I read the game was pretty much a disaster until it was patch.

It did get repetitive at times and the stealth system was either a complete mess or completely OP.

Anyway I had a lot of fun with the game and was bummed when I learned their won’t be a sequel.

Also Nix was such a cool companion.

I enjoyed Zelda Skyward Sword upon release, despite having to get the new controller that supporter more motion on the Wii for it. The dungeon on the ship in the desert that involved time travel was a standout level and i really enjoyed it at the time. Granted I haven't played it in 10 years, it's a good game. I am glad though that the backlash resulted in Breath of the Wild, and without Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild would have never happened.

Unreal

The original one. Not tournament.

I have a fear of sentient silver metallic blobs because of that game. Lol

Watch Dogs, the first one specifically. I know Ubisoft has had a pretty bad track record, especially in recent years, but I’ve played through that game a bunch of times and always had a good time with it. Even in its worse parts its still dumb fun.

The story honestly aged really well too for better or worse with how tech companies and governments are mingling now.

Resident evil 5, probably mostly because of coop.

Whether deserved or not Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy is always forgotten compared to its predecessor. But I don't care, it's the best one for me.

In the same vein The Force Unleashed II is the one I remember more fondly. It's worse than the previous one certainly, but the story does have some nice moments and playing it on the hardest difficulty makes you actually have to block correctly and plan your movement right to survive the onslaught of fire by the stormtroopers.

Oni.

In my most unpopular opinion, the only good thing Bungie ever made. Way more satisfying than console-friendly auto-aim shooting aliens without gore.

Oni has some great sci-fi details, even when missing a deep overarching story. And breaking people's necks with a cool 360 swing with proper sound effects of the neck bones being chipped is sooo satisfying. And that was an unfinished project by the way: you can notice there was no environment work done.

Everyone is just saying actually popular games, but ones they don't think are popular enough. If people don't have to look up the game, it's probably not answering this question (with a few infamous exceptions maybe).

Mine would be Stationeers. There's no real action or anything. It's a game about designing, building, managing, and automating a station on another world. Each world has its own issues, be that Luna with a vacuum, Mars (the easiest) with storms, no breathable atmosphere, and cold, Venus with all the Venus issues, or some made up planets with crazy problems. It simulated gasses and liquids, replicating the refrigeration cycle so you can make your own heat pumps for cooling. It's really cool, but complex and potentially boring for most people.

It's made by the studio making Kitten Space Agency. It's a studio created by the DayZ mod creator, and they seem really cool. They're very much not profit motivated, and I think they've said developing Stationeers is costing them money, at least at one point, and KSA is planned to be free and donation supported.

Final Fantasy 8

The Mount and Blade games feel like such a janky mess, and I don't know anyone else that likes or plays them. But I absolutely adore the combat gameplay, nowhere else do I feel that merge between tactical medieval warfare and intense personal combat.

All the strategy/diplomacy/trading/RPG stuff on top is fine, but only as a context for the combat gameplay.

Among hardcore original Monkey Island fans, the third one (Curse of Monkey Island) was pretty disliked when it was new, and the original writer, Ron Gilbert, even kinda disowned the game (he was not involved with it).

It's my single favourite game of all time.

Edited, typo

I don't think anyone hated ~~either~~ any of these games, but they don't seem to have gained as much traction as they deserve.

Secret of Mana for the SNES is my all time favorite game.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is also a great game that few people remember.

Star Wars: Rebellion was possibly the first 4X game I played, before they were called 4X. Totally unbalanced in favor of the empire, and building a death star was just stupid, but it was still a fun game.

I really enjoyed Cities Skylines 2 even at launch.

So, I had an snes, which I loved, but my taste in games wasn't great and my parents objected to violence, which means my collection is a bit weird.

One game I loved which wasn't universally acknowledged to be great, was Clayfighter. It was essentially a Street Fighter clone, but the assets were all modelled in clay and animated using stop motion technique.

I think it got a lot of flak for being not well balanced and a little slow, so it kind of just didn't stand out beyond the obvious classics of that genre, but man, I loved it. I couldn't get Street Fighter because of my parents, but they were fine with clayfighter's look and more humorous approach. At the same time, it still was a good beat em up, so I spent hours with it. Also, it kind of gave me an edge as SF2 was just the game everybody had, so at least I had a fun game to spend an hour with that people hadn't played to death already.

The samples will remain burned into my memories forever. "The Blob Wins!!" Good times.

Star Fox Zero. Sure, the story was a repeat of old game, but the gameplay was not. The controls needed more polish, but ultimately I thought the gameplay was great. I actually didn't mind the motion controls. Most of what people complained about didn't bother me or felt overblown.

Coming in at a 45 rating on Metacritic: Hyperdimension Neptunia.

Is it a bad game? Yes. It's really bad. It's an ugly game for PS3 standards, and the battle mechanics are borderline insane. It's a JRPG where you can't manually heal, but instead set a % chance to heal automatically in battles... which means sometimes you game over because RNG wasn't going to let you heal. But regardless it's one of my favorites. I'm a sucker for the core concept of the schoolyard console wars, with little gaming references everywhere and silly humor. I also love the theme songs for each console nation. It really drives home how different the console cultures are supposed to be as you are traveling around solving their problems.

And I mean, come on... When you first start the game and you are in the tutorial dungeon it plays this song during exploration and this song during battles. Games today would never do something that silly.

The later games polished the gameplay, expanded the character rosters, gave more depth to the story, and dealt with some very dark topics (Gehaburn trauma)... but to me none of them captured the lightning that the first one had.

Dark Souls 2 at its release
(even before the "Scholar of the First Sin" Remake)

I just liked the more fluid combat mechanics compared to Dark Souls 1 and as far as I remember it didn't have this weird Windows Live thing

I liked Duke Nukem Forever, I kept waiting for it to get awful and it never did! Surprisingly fun game.

I suppose a broad reading is a less well-known game. Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Great, great game.

I cant think of any. Im typically the person that hates games that most people like.

I fell for APB: Reloaded and Rogue Company. APB was lauded for it's customization and open world cops and robbers situation, but fell flat graphically after GTA V came out and hasn't offered much new.

Rogue Company, IMO, had legs but it never caught on to the Twitch streamer following they wanted; Dr. Disrespect got into hot water a few years after launch and they had a whole map dedicated to him. Servers are still up but they announced no more updates, sadly.

Bubsy

Vindictus, pre-2015

I was a fan of No Man’s Sky on release. It played a lot like a 3D version of Out There, which was a game that I liked, so I found it fun.

I loved bulletstorm.

Anthem is a goddamn masterpiece, and I will die on this hill. The graphics, the combat, and the traversal were all AAA quality. There just wasn't enough fodder for the internet hate machine that month, so Anthem got tossed into it for some reason.

Final Fantasy II, though from what I talked with people, it suffers more from bad reputation than people actively playing it and not liking.

I wonder if it would still hold up to me, but I really liked True Crime: Streets of LA on the Gamecube. I'm led to believe it was not well received, and is derided as a bad GTA clone

While not hated, most fans of the series prefer Darksiders to Darksiders 2. I personally prefer 2, I love the loot system.

Donkey Kong 64 is a game I see constantly criticised but it was always one of my top N64 games.