Lurker > _SJimW_

I can't believe there are RoS defenders, but media opinions are subjective I guess

3D World
Undertale

2000$ on my PC so probably that

Pokemon
VLR

Theatrhythm
Smash Bros.

People definitely feel nostalgic about SS but those people aren't the GameFAQs userbase for the most part

I think we'll probably get multiple of these at the same time (first woman president will either be Kamala Harris or AOC, which would be second black or first hispanic).

Somnium Files
Fire Emblem Awakening

Mario Maker
(Abstain)

Nier Automata
Robobot

I'm actually cooler on Nier than most, I just really didn't care for Overwatch at all

Dragon Quest XI
Pokemon

Tropical Freeze
Obra

I have a list of my 150 favorite games and Tropical Freeze and DanganRonpa 2 are, coincidentally, right next to each other

Resident Evil 7
Doom

Fire Emblem Fates
ALBW

3D World
Kirby

LeonhartFour posted...

it's weird how Takumi knew how to be succinct during his original run through the series but he became just as long-winded as the main series with Layton/AA and the GAA games

My theory is that this has less to do with the writers and more to do with hardware limitations

The original trilogy were crammed onto GBA carts and they basically made the most of what they could do

Longer dev times for the newer games and an industry where the expectation is now that every full-priced non-indie retail game is supposed to last dozens of hours minimum probably didn't help with this either

Probaby one of the most obvious cases of "limitation breeds creativity" I can think of in the industry. Along with stuff the final 3D OoT-style Zelda being Skyward Sword, a bloated as hell game that probably had the developers cram every idea they had into it, whether or not those ideas were good or bad.

I think the factor ya'll are missing with AAI is that DS software sales weren't as hot in general by 2010

LightningStrikes posted...

Yeah I addressed that in an earlier post. They obviously knee-jerked by putting Phoenix so front and centre in DD but by the end of it well, we still got an Apollo trilogy and the series is literally selling better than it ever has. The part I object to is saying that the series never recovered, it seems like the series came back stronger.

I think calling what we got an "Apollo trilogy" is kind of a stretch, even if it was maybe the intention

AA5/6 are very clearly Yamazaki games and have a completely different vibe and tone from AA4. AA5 basically feels like an Athena game and then when AA6 tries to finish off Apollo's arc it ends up just feeling like fanfiction to me

1-5 only feels out of place on replays imo, your first time through AA1 you don't really have any sense for how these games are "supposed" to be structured so it just feels like the game has a weirdly climatic middle point with 1-4

SeabassDebeste posted...

not a hot take!

How isn't it a hot take? I haven't kept up with Ace Attorney discourse as much in the last decade so I dunno if people have turned around on it, but at release it was completely lambasted. And from what I've seen, any fondness that's grown towards AJ has mostly been in a "it's flawed but interesting and the first two cases were really good for the first two cases" kind of way

The Japanifornia localization choice, along with the way the series localizes character names, is incredible, but it's also kinda lightning in a bottle and not something that would work if they tried it for 99% of other things. It just transforms the work the exact right amount to translate the wackiness of the original Japanese script to an American setting. It's exactly the kind of thing so many 90s anime tried and failed to do properly.

colliding posted...

4-2 > 4-1

is this a hot take? 4-2 is pretty much the only case in AJ I enjoyed, despite wesley stickler shenanigans

My insanely hot take is that I think AJ kinda gets better with every case in a way, 4-2 being better than 4-1 is the only one I'm not sure of. 4-1 has probably the best moments in the game but from like an actual gameplay perspective it's very obviously a tutorial still and very much held back by that.

OoT and Super Mario Galaxy are two of the most well-designed games ever made

Thousand Year Door is the best Paper Mario and the ones that came after fail pretty hard to follow it up in notable ways

FF6 is a masterpiece

Halo is one of the best FPS franchises of all-time

Breath of the Wild made exploring an open world fun

The PS2 had one of the most expansive game libraries of all-time

It makes sense that they're mostly gone but I also miss the experience of going to an arcade

andylt posted...

Hm that reminds me, most of these years there was a clear early frontrunner movie with a lot of precursors that fell out of first by the end:
Gravity, Boyhood, The Revenant, La La Land, Three Billboards, Roma, 1917, Power of the Dog. (Nomadland and EEAAO didn't have a clear runner up I think, they both kinda rolled their years.)

Fabelmans was at least sorta the favorite pick before awards season really got started, though it was basically 50/50 between that and EEAAO.

MysteriousStan posted...

Yeah I think the only miss for me is JLC winning. Don't get it at all. Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Brendan Fraser winning are huge for many different reasons and I'm extremely happy they won! And of the BP nominees that I saw this year EEAAO was easily the best, though I really liked Banshees too.

Parasite > EEAAO > Shape of Water > Birdman > 12 Years a Slave > Nomadland

I should watch CODA sometime. Kind of ambivalent on seeing Spotlight and Moonlight. Green Book meh. Probably benefited from a weaker field but guess I can't really judge since I haven't seen it.

There were some solid noms the year of Green Book (A Star is Born, BlacKKKlansman, and The Favourite all would have been memorable picks), they just decided to go with the overly safe, racism explained for white people movie. It's not bad in the context of that, the lead has a good performance and it's also a Peter Farrelly directed road trip movie with some comedic bits and you can see pieces of his other stuff in there, but it was very much an eyerolly pick.

Parasite, which is also a top 3 movie of the last 10 years for me

andylt posted...

Past 10 best picture winners IMO:
Parasite > Moonlight > EEAAO > Nomadland > Spotlight > 12YAS > Shape of Water > Birdman > CODA
(Haven't seen Green Book)

For this year, I've only seen EEAAO, Banshees, Tar, and All Quiet of the BP nominees. I like all 4 and am happy for Everything, but it's a shame that Tar and Banshees got shut out. Jamie Lee Curtis winning is baffling to me, even if they loved the movie that much Stephanie Hsu is right there!

I'd rank the ones I've seen Parasite > Birdman > EEAAO > CODA > Nomadland > Green Book

There's a big drop off after Parasite for me wow

It's okay to be a genwunner and there's a valid argument that the franchise has never captured the same magic, especially if you take into account the cultural context of being a kid in 1999. I'm not a genwunner and I think gen 1 is a low-mid tier gen, but I still have a lot of nostalgia for it and sympathize with the average genwunner more than someone who defends Sword and Shield or whatever.

Sun/Moon are top tier games and head and shoulders above any of the other 3D games

Legends Arceus is terrible and a disaster of an idea for the series to go in that direction. Scarlet and Violet are actually a really good but really flawed games that I'm excited to see iterated upon hopefully.

The initial reaction to gen 5's new Pokemon designs were justified in the context of the original Black and White games, wherein they're the only Pokemon you can catch. They're a good set of mons but they're not good and consistent enough to not allow you to supplement your team with earlier Pokemon.

Gen 4 wasn't too slow, really. Platinum does make Diamond and Pearl hard to go back to, though, not that you really need to now though.

IGN's "too much water complaint" meme from their ORAS review is stupid. Gen 3 does have too much water. That was a common complaint back in like 2003. Zoomers who grew up with the game as their first Pokemon don't understand.

The Pokemon Stadium games are great and console-defining games for the N64.

Mystery Dungeon 1 > Mystery Dungeon 2. PMD2 is technically a better game in a lot of regards and the story is surprisingly really good, but 1 just had a really cozy vibe and really hit home the feeling of actually playing as a Pokemon for once.

FF9 is the worst of the PS1 games, it's still okay but extremely vanilla compared to 7/8 which are both two of the most memorable RPGs I've played and the pacing is kinda really bad

FF13 is good, actually. The combat is a lot of fun and it's refreshing to play a game that hyperlinear.

Type-0 has one of the worst stories. I don't mean in Final Fantasy, I just mean like, ever, in all of published fiction. Legit think the median semi-popular fanfic has a better story than it.

FF8 is extremely flawed but I kinda like that it's that way because I've never played anything else like it and probably never will. I had more fun with it than a good portion of the series.

FF4 is an all-timer, and only just behind 6 as the best game in the series of the 90s.

The SNES games are pretty cleanly a lot better than the PS1 games, but the PS1 trilogy is more memorable and sticks out in my head more. I played 6-9 during the pandemic for the first time so this isn't based out of nostalgia.

FFTA1 and FFTA2 I probably like more than any of the mainline games. The last two Theatrhythm games are also better than the majority of the franchise.

FF7 Remake's combat is good but it's not good enough to overlook the game's other issues, of which there are many. The game's still kinda.....fine, but it's not what I'd want out of an ideal FF7 remake.

TeamRocketElite posted...

The final case of GAA2 is a three day trial.

This reminds me of another one I have: Spirit of Justice has seven cases (counting the DLC). 6-5's first part and its second part should have been different cases, because they basically are.

Super Mario Galaxy

A couple others I forgot

AAI1 is better than GK2, though both are good mid-tier games in the series, GK2 has way higher highs and way lower lows whereas AAI1 is just fine the whole way through

Wright/Maya Fey for life, and anyone who says that their dynamic is a "brother/sister" dynamic has a weird dynamic with their sister (or doesn't have a sister)

Every game after AAI1 is too long. They should have compensated for the games not being small GBA games anymore by making them like 20$ download only games or something, Ace Attorney doesn't really work as well when scaled up. There's so much superfluous text and in the case of the later Yamazaki games the mechanics of the later cases get too convoluted for their own good.

GAA1-4 is not a good case

2-3 and 4-3 are both completely fine cases and most of the problems people have with them are way overstated, their biggest flaw is never having a moment of being mindblowing. In fact the entire "third case curse" is basically hagwash, I can't think of a third case in a series I don't like much aside from maybe GK2-3.

GK2 (I played it in Japanese so it's not AAI2 to me) is terrible at bringing back old characters. Whenever they do so it's painfully obvious it was written by a different team than the original trilogy.

Great Ace Attorney loses a lot from not being set in the modern day.

Spirit of Justice is a worse game than Dual Destinies, mostly because of the aforementioned case length problem which is the worst it's ever been in SoJ, but also Spirit of Justice's background story for Apollo feels unnatural and Dual Destinies doesn't have anything as egregious as 6-4.

Basically everything in the originals aged well except 1-5 which is a big drag with some good ideas

The ending of Apollo Justice makes sense

Despite my grievances with the series, I don't think there's a bad game in it except for the Layton crossover, which was largely ruined by Layton puzzles which are not fun in the least to me

Super Mario Galaxy

Leonhart4 posted...

It Doesn't Matter is the best vocal song from SA1 or 2

This was actually my opinion when I was a kid and I thought I had discovered some extremely underrated song when I heard the whole thing in the sound test, but upon revisiting it the vocals sound kinda corny. I think Open Your Heart and City Escape are the best, but the actual best song from either game is Metal Harbor.

Banjo-Kazooie doesn't have a good OST and a lot of its music sounds like circus music

Mother 1 has the best soundtrack in the series

FF12 has by far the worst soundtrack in the series, I'd take FF2's OST over it, though it's still fine for what it is. Also, FF6's soundtrack is solid as hell, but it's also definitely the weakest of the SNES trilogy. The best games in the series in terms of soundtrack are the 13 Trilogy (especially Lightning Returns) and Mystic Quest.

The Mighty Switch Force games are virt's best work and have some of the best soundtracks since the 2010s.

Super Mario Galaxy

999

Brawl

My two most played games of the gen here lol

Galaxy 2

Trials and Tribulations

The stuff you need to do to just finish the game is pretty onpar with the rest of the series but some of the sidequests have the most esoteric content in the series post-NES

Probably some random city in Hawaii

masterplum posted...

Probably some smallish city nobody is going to think about like Tallahassee Florida or Savannah Georgia or something

Tallahassee is a terrible example, one of my friends lives there and she feels like she lives in hell

As someone who lives in the bay area it's San Francisco, at least as far as west coast cities go (I've never been to the east coast outside of Atlanta for work once)

At least LA has been gentrified by things other than just the tech industry

Super Mario Galaxy

Triangle Strategy > ZTD > 13 Sentinels > Type-0

I've played like the first 30 minutes of Eastward and it seems like something I'd place in between ZTD and 13 Sentinels

It's bad and defeats the purpose of art (human expression)

Portal 2
HGSS

Can't believe I'm voting against 999

Baten Kaitos

Always wanted to play those games but don't wanna pay out the ass for secondhand copies

As someone who's never looked at this, it's fascinating how well non-game media does here. This almost seems like something a side board for movies/TV on a gaming themed site would vote for.

Halo 3
Portal 2

Civ V
MKDS

Kingdom Hearts BBS
(Abstain)