Do You Have Any Unpopular Gaming Opinions?

[marurun]

@ElkinFencer10 Yeah, those are pretty solid truths I think. Only point I would make in favor of the PSP and UMDs would be portable full-length movies before streaming was a thing. It at least gives you a glimpse on WHY Sony went that direction. The execution was definitely not ideal though and I think helped drive CFW.

It's just too bad those UMD drives demonstrated typical modern Sony reliability.

[ZRofel]

2. The PSP, despite having a great game library, is a horribly overrated piece of hardware with a shit plastic shell over the screen that scratches way too easily, an obnoxious nub for a control stick, and an asinine decision to put an optical disc drive in a turn of the century battery powered handheld
3. Devil's Third is a Wii U gem that exemplifies "so bad it's good" and all of the hate for it is from people who either never played it or never played more than the first level

I always say to folks that I think the PSP has a genuinely fantastic library of games, but as a piece of hardware, it's always felt like trash. Putting an optical disc drive in a portable unit just doesn't make any sense, particularly one that feels as cheap and flimsy as the typical PSP. The Vita almost completely fixed the problems Sony had with the PSP, it's just that, by that point, no one cared.

And yes, Devil's Third is fantastic. In a lot of ways it's an absolute mess of a game, but (outside of one hair-pullingly cheap moment towards the end) I had more fun playing it than plenty of critically acclaimed titles. Complaints that the shooting is terrible are really overblown. It's totally fine. It's not going to redefine gunplay mechanics in videogames, but it's totally adequate. The bonkers story and totally bizarre world design are absolutely worth the price of admission.

[Ziggy]

Looking back, the UMD drive might seem kind of bonkers. But if you remember Sony's history, they were always pushing their own formats. And when the PSP launched, solid state memory still wasn't very cheap. Without researching, I would assume they developed the UMD drive as a cheaper alternative. You would think that the cost of the drive wouldn't make sense, but I suppose it must have. Sony had a very large space in consumer electronics, the drive manufacturing cost might not have been a big deal to them. And the cost of a UMD disc was probably nothing compared to flash memory at the time. But yeah, Sony and their weird media formats. I think they were pushing UMD hard, I remember seeing movies for sale on UMD in Best Buy. Maybe they had bigger plans for it? I'm surprised they didn't try to break into the car market with UMDs. At that time, it was all the rage to have a DVD player in your car with a screen on the back of a headrest or some such thing.

But yeah, too bad the hardware was kinda shit. My PSP never left my bedroom. Not only did I take very good care of it, but I also didn't game on it a whole lot. And it still developed minor problems with the UMD drive.

[Anapan]

At one point, I owned 3 of them - mostly from pawn shops, and by brother had his own. Then I was gifted dead ones. I bought some 3rd party batteries to keep them running.
In the end, I had about 12 batteries between all the different models. I gave the pile of it all to my friend, and he was able to resuscitate a handful of those batteries over some months of charging and checking. He has a large collection now. He has refurbished a lot of the consoles and accessories. He only uses a PSTV for everything PSP or Vita related. When I realized that Vita firmware can be modified to do everything the PSP can, but better, I never booted an original PSP again.

[ElkinFencer10]

2. The PSP, despite having a great game library, is a horribly overrated piece of hardware with a shit plastic shell over the screen that scratches way too easily, an obnoxious nub for a control stick, and an asinine decision to put an optical disc drive in a turn of the century battery powered handheld
3. Devil's Third is a Wii U gem that exemplifies "so bad it's good" and all of the hate for it is from people who either never played it or never played more than the first level

I always say to folks that I think the PSP has a genuinely fantastic library of games, but as a piece of hardware, it's always felt like trash.

I agree with literally every word of this sentence. That's actually part of why the PSP pisses me off so much; there are so many amazing games trapped on a piece of shit hardware.

[pierrot]

I finished up almost everything in the 'post-game' of Dragon Quest XI the other day, and I just need a place to rant about it (the whole game) so I can kind of forget about it until maybe one day when the JP text mod for PC gets updated to fix the missing text characters in the Yocchi village/2D mode. I'm assuming these are going to be unpopular opinions just because the internet seems to like DQ XI. Spoilers, I guess.

Basically, it's Dragon Quest, which is generally great, but the game world is like maybe half the size of VIII's; The story drags you through it for three full circuits (one of them is for the true ending, in the interest of fairness, or whatever); Zone is a completely garbage mechanic and all the quests that require the combo specials behind Zone are the absolute shittiest of design (would rather do DQ X quests of 'Fight this monster until it randomly drops this random item I just made up'); The characters are more bland than the characters in DQ VI, which is pretty sad (Sylvia is easily the best character, and I kind of like Martina even though she's not particularly that interesting, but Row is one of the absolute worst fucking characters ever); The equipment is a bloated mess of excessive chaff; Plusses on equipment (+1, +2, +3) is an MMO mechanic that belongs in DQX, and has no place in a single player game like this (I would much rather just wait for the alchemy pot to finish cooking passively than spending the obscene amount of time to forge/reforge equipment--forging stats being tied to the Hero's level instead of story progress is also pretty shitty); The skill panel system ultimately sucks; The story is infected with World of Ruin nonsense that is also completely invalidated by the 'post-game' story.

The world: It just annoys me to no end that while they used UE4 for the game, which should have significantly reduced the development effort required, it's both significantly smaller and somewhat less ecologically diverse than a game built from the ground up 13 years earlier in Dragon Quest VIII. So, okay sure, it looks pretty nice, and there's a bit higher level of detail in the scenery. Counterpoint: Prebuilt engine in UE4. With it being a roughly IX sized world, but still intended to be a big ol' DQ numbered title more like VIII, instead of more varied locations to travel to, the story just jerks the player around through the same areas multiple times under different pretenses, but not different enough to dramatically change those locations in execution. It's pure padding, but narrative driven. It's just that the narrative is pretty worthless.

Zone: So there was this sweet little mechanic added in DQ VIII called Tension, where on any turn you could choose to have a character forego regular turn actions to boost their stats for their next action, and it could be stacked up to four times. Enemies could also build tension. IX and X even kept the Tension system around (with some caveats--X doesn't actually have a "Boost" action and instead you can build tension through skills and equipment), because it was good. DQX also added class specific special moves that would trigger randomly during fights, and after a certain period of time if the special move hasn't been used, that state fizzles out. Since DQ XI is a collection of great design decisions (/s) they chose to get rid of the Tension system completely, and replace it with essentially just the random special move trigger from DQ X. Except, it's the special move mechanic at home, because the specials are now combo attacks between multiple characters in the random Zone condition, but just to make it a little better than slightly worthless, they slapped on some minor, character specific, stat boosts to Zone state as well. Whee! Also Zone can be dispelled, lmao. Oh, but you can get items that put either one character, or the entire party into Zone. Only thing there is they basically aren't available until the 'post-game,' and are exorbitantly expensive to get in numbers. Great job, guys (I guess I lied; Now /s).

Characters: I am so tired of characters in SE games from the last decade or so (looking directly at FF XIV with this statement, and DQ X kind of suffers from it, too) with just ungodly amounts of dialogue to prove themselves to be lifeless stick figures. Veronica, Senya, and Grayg are duller than dishwater. Kamyu's little sister is the only thing good about him. Martina isn't even really interesting, I just kind of like her anyway, but at the same time it really bothers me that the story tries to play it extra coy about who she is when introducing her, even though it's painfully obvious who she is from the opening movie, ffs. Sylvia is just easily the most interesting character in the party, it's just that Sylvia is also not particularly developed during the course of the game, like, at all. Oh, but, Row. Oh, Row! I hate Row. That old bastard is a massive piece of shit. When you meet Row, he basically just seems like Martina's attendant, and looks down on the Hero like a peasant who doesn't belong in the presence of either of them. Spoilers, Row is actually the Hero's maternal grandfather (and a big ol' mother fucker). When he figures this out, he steals something from the Hero and makes the Hero find him at at a place to do a thing. It's absurd, but also, at no point does Row try to make amends for being such a massive bitch. Just tries to take possession of the Hero's letter from his mother (Row's daughter) and cry about it. The parts where the game tries to make the player acknowledge that Row is the Hero's grandfather make me want to vomit. Worse, still, their idea of adding character to him is just to make him a closet pervert. It's disgusting. I actually almost felt bad for him when they introduce his smut magazine, but I already hated him too much to really care.

Equipment: One of the beautiful things about Dragon Quest games is that it's usually balanced around a relatively small pool of equipment that makes pieces meaningful as either direct upgrades in basic stats, or some resistances or special effects that outclass other options. XI has over 500 pieces of weapon and armor equips. Granted, like, 2/5 of these are only available in the 'post-game,' but essentially it tries to give the illusion of choice with a metric assload of different pieces that mostly serve the same function of minor upgrade, yet many of them show up when outright superior options are already available. Really, though, just keeping up with making things from recipes is going to give most of the best options available at any given time. Still, there's just no reason for all of this equipment. Particularly when, unlike IX or X, the armor mostly doesn't change character appearance at all. Adding a quality metric on top of almost every piece is just insanity. Something that generally would extend the "life" of a piece of equipment, or make a piece BiS, there's just no point for it to be in this single player game that already has hundreds of small incremental upgrades.

Skill panel: Why? Skill lines, again, used in VIII, IX, and X with no real signs that it needed an overhaul. What initially seems like a more flexible system with skill panels, very quickly turns into an insanely tedious operation to optimize skill point allocation, because: A) Most technique skills flat out suck; B) Some skills are basically broken at the point they're available (Hustle Dance, Gigaslash, Samidare, Bakuretsu, Dual Cutter, etc); C) You can tech into skills from one discipline to another discipline, then skill reset the initial discipline, leaving the learned skill(s) in the other discipline and learning adjacent skills from there with the refunded skill points, but it's a tedious process, and every new batch of skill points potentially opens new ways to optimize with this method. It's an asinine system because it's not really flexible enough to actually give all that much player agency, and most of the optimization feels like a hack that isn't really intended. It just would've been better if they had balanced around skills available at different skill lines like previous games. Also the locked panels are little more than a pain in the ass, often requiring that you take menu cluttering skills to unlock something decent. I get that they're meant to be harder to acquire, but they could have just appropriately increased the skill points required for them instead. Especially because it's also really annoying to unlock something, realize it's garbage, and have to respec with a bunch more skill resets.

Story (pretty big spoilers):

Inconsequential at best. Complete waste of time at worst. There were times in the first act where I was somewhat getting pulled into the story, but really only in the sense of a shonen manga where the plot keeps rolling along. There are some really minor mysteries set up earlier, and probably one of the main things that had me invested at all was that there were so many references to Dragon Quest III in particular, in combination with this statement I had seen about DQ XI in an article about the 2D mode that the story subverts expectations somehow. So I was really going through the first act thinking, 'Oh, I wonder where this is going. Is it going to be some kind of meta commentary that deconstructs the archetypes established in the original Loto trilogy? The short answer is, 'no.' Basically just some superfluous platitudes tacked on. That was pretty disappointing in its own right, but it's partly my fault for putting any sort of stock into something from a game article online. The really annoying part is it's really just the plot hook from a game I can't stand (World of Ruin) yet somehow executed even more poorly. Generally I have this expectation with numbered Dragon Quests that, at least, the story is going to be better than any numbered FF that isn't III or XI. DQ XI definitely adds an exception to that rule (not that I expect anything from DQ XII, tbf). Anyway it occurred to me somewhere in budget-WoR, 'Oh, "losing" at Yggdrasil is probably what the article meant by subversive.' I find it kind of baffling that anyone could say that these days. Just tell me you haven't really played many JRPGs without literally telling me-- No. Tell me you haven't played DQ VIII, or particularly DQ V without literally telling me. I almost had a visceral, throw my controller, 'I don't want to do this; It's neither fun nor interesting,' reaction to Sylvia's band of merry men collecting segment. I only found out later that the interval chapters were added in the XI S re-release. I actually avoided the game for a few days during those. Should have just left them on the cutting room floor.

They actually had a chance to do something somewhat big in the destroyed Lotozetashia act during the gold castle. They had it set up on a tee, too: If Kamyu actually sacrificed himself to save his sister, and she took Kamyu's place in the party, similar to FFV, oh my god. Instantly a huge difference. Ultimately they decided to kill off Veronica instead. I figured something was going to be amiss with Senya and Veronica, since their skill panels didn't really make sense for that point in the game. Hard for me to really care about that one. Not an interesting character to begin with; Presented very much after the fact. Ultimately doesn't even matter because in the 'post-game' the Hero just decides to take a massive dump all over any progress made in the destroyed world to travel back in time to save Veronica. REEEEEEEEEE! Yoshiyuki Tomino would never. This is actually probably my biggest issue with the story in XI. The "true ending" actually reveals that when the Hero jumped back in time he left those versions of his friends back in the recovering destroyed world, grieving Veronica's death, but also basically the Hero's too since he wouldn't exist in that timeline anymore. Even before seeing the final ending, I was pretty incredulous that the Hero was just going to leave them and everyone in the destroyed world. It's also fucking comical watching the game twist itself into pretzels trying to rectify the different timelines. Grotta in particular is a riot: 'Yeah, we just decided to totally abandon our long standing tradition of colosseum competitions. Why did we do that? 'Cause it's Casino time, bitches! Who cares about our traditions, we're gonna make gambling addicts out of everyone!'

Finally, the weak ass links to the Loto trilogy in the true ending. Barf.

Credit where credit is due: The option in the map to highlight harvesting spots is a very welcome addition. Definitely a feature that DQ IX needed.

I don't necessarily hate DQ XI. I put almost 200 hours into it, which was about 33% more than I put into DQ VIII, but there's just no reason I would ever play it again. I'd just play one of the much better games in the series. Hell, DQ VI is an almost equally fluff story (better premise, but still), but I would absolutely go to it over XI because at least it has a beefed up class system compared to III. Would definitely rather replay III than VI, though. I just don't know that I'll be able to get over how much tighter a package DQ VIII is than XI, and that's not even my favorite Dragon Quest.

At this point, I think it would just be best for everyone involved if SE canceled DQ XII, stopped whatever it is they think they're cooking with FF, sold off the Taito and Eidos rights, and closed up shop. Obviously leave FFXI and DQX servers up, though. >_>

Phew. I feel better. One thing that does kind of take the sting out of it is I actually was given DQ XI S as a gift, so it was free (pain) to me.

[Raging Justice]

2. The PSP, despite having a great game library, is a horribly overrated piece of hardware with a shit plastic shell over the screen that scratches way too easily, an obnoxious nub for a control stick, and an asinine decision to put an optical disc drive in a turn of the century battery powered handheld
3. Devil's Third is a Wii U gem that exemplifies "so bad it's good" and all of the hate for it is from people who either never played it or never played more than the first level

I always say to folks that I think the PSP has a genuinely fantastic library of games, but as a piece of hardware, it's always felt like trash.

I agree with literally every word of this sentence. That's actually part of why the PSP pisses me off so much; there are so many amazing games trapped on a piece of shit hardware.

Quite ironic that the Vita was a great piece of hardware with a completely trash library. Given the choice between the two, I pick the software library. That's why I always say PSP>Vita

[ElkinFencer10]

I always say to folks that I think the PSP has a genuinely fantastic library of games, but as a piece of hardware, it's always felt like trash.

I agree with literally every word of this sentence. That's actually part of why the PSP pisses me off so much; there are so many amazing games trapped on a piece of shit hardware.

Quite ironic that the Vita was a great piece of hardware with a completely trash library. Given the choice between the two, I pick the software library. That's why I always say PSP>Vita

If CFW weren't an option, I'd agree, but with CFW enabling the Vita to play any PSP game, Vita comes out on top for me.

[Raging Justice]

I agree with literally every word of this sentence. That's actually part of why the PSP pisses me off so much; there are so many amazing games trapped on a piece of shit hardware.

Quite ironic that the Vita was a great piece of hardware with a completely trash library. Given the choice between the two, I pick the software library. That's why I always say PSP>Vita

If CFW weren't an option, I'd agree, but with CFW enabling the Vita to play any PSP game, Vita comes out on top for me.

I agree with you, though it feels like cheating when we bring CFW, modding, etc. into the conversation

But yeah, I've got CFW on my Vita too.

[ElkinFencer10]

Quite ironic that the Vita was a great piece of hardware with a completely trash library. Given the choice between the two, I pick the software library. That's why I always say PSP>Vita

If CFW weren't an option, I'd agree, but with CFW enabling the Vita to play any PSP game, Vita comes out on top for me.

I agree with you, though it feels like cheating when we bring CFW, modding, etc. into the conversation

But yeah, I've got CFW on my Vita too.

Yeah, no, that's fair. CFW is kind of playing on god mode. I'd still prefer the Vita because it had so many more fan service weeb trash games in English than the PSP, but while I hate the PSP hardware, I can't deny that it does have a killer library of games.