Board 8 > Games whose reputations have improved over the years

(+) Yeah! (+)

Wind Waker is a decent example but I think the amount its perception has increased is overstated. The game was always strong on GameFAQs, reviewed well, sold well (by Gamecube standards) and won several Game of the Year awards.

I think Wind Waker's reputation was only bad before the game actually came out and then almost immediately rebounded once people actually got their hands on it

There was like maybe a brief window where toon Link wasn't as "cool" (see Cloud/Link 2003) but eh it didn't take long for WW to settle in as a classic

Paper Mario? At the very least it got ridiculed a lot by how it looked when it came out.

Demon's Souls

Most everybody I know who played it before Dark Souls came out thought it was too difficult and a bit of a slog.

I think Dark Souls having great design helped to pull people into the genre in a way that Demon's Souls could not.

KamikazePotato posted...

Wind Waker is a decent example but I think the amount its perception has increased is overstated. The game was always strong on GameFAQs, reviewed well, sold well (by Gamecube standards) and won several Game of the Year awards.

This is also true of MGS2, in fact its the best reviewed and best selling MGS game!

PrinceOfKoopas posted...

But for another answer, Kirby Air Ride. It was treated very poorly in the 2000s. But now everyone wants a remake/remaster/sequel of it. Hm...

Oh, this is a great answer that I forgot about.

Oh the hours I spent in City Trial...

Super Metroid

KamikazePotato posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3462-division-5-round-1-banjo-kazooie-perfect-dark-pokemon-zelda

It just wasn't that great in 2009.

Majora's Mask was the first victim of Pokemon R/B/Y having an absolute monster of a run. Most of us accept Pokemon has strength here now, but in 2009 that was far less certain and we never saw R/B/Y in a match before. MM never should lose that hard to anybody besides Ocarina of Time...but between what we learned about R/B/Y that contest and there being two other N64-classics in that poll, plus not getting to really see MM's arc in strength rising over the years to see its ups and downs, ya know, I can see how that happened a bit better with hindsight. Still a wild beatdown though.

Sonic Adventure 2 seems to have gone through a resurgence in recent years. Its reputation was never terrible, but there was always a camp that saw it as the beginning of the franchise being a joke and now it seems to shine a lot more in comparison to what came next.

Also, just in general, peripheral-based rhythm games like Guitar Hero. Not that they were viewed as bad games at the time, but outside of their living room party game success I remember them quickly becoming sort of an embarrassing thing to have around. Nowadays people are more likely to think it's neat than to say "yeah but can you do that on an actual guitar"

Man, I thought this topic had purged.

Some of the old FromSoft titles like Kings Field. They aren't popular but they were critically panned on release and have been retroactively appreciated by the Souls fanbase

I'm playing it right now so it made me think of this topic - Dragon's Dogma seems to fit pretty well!

I remember pretty clearly back when it came out that everyone kind of just looked at it as this massively janky game that ran like hot goat piss, but it definitely feels like its gotten more and more of a passionate cult following over the years. And now there's even a sequel on the horizon - feels like if that takes all the good ideas here (some of which are REALLY good and wildly ambitious for the time or even today) and shaves off all the rough edges we could have a real hit on our hands that elevates perceptions of the original even more.