TheLostSkeleton's post covers my feelings on the Sonic franchise, except I didn't go for Sonic '06, period. When I saw screenshots of SHADOW AGAIN, I already knew it was gonna be bad. One of the things gamers CLAMORED for was for the series to renew its focus on Sonic himself and ditch the extra characters and Sega blatantly ignored that.
Other games that disappointed me...
Sonic and the Secret Rings, unfortunately, was the one I DID buy, foolishly placing faith in--of all the reviewers--IGN's remarking that it was the "best 3D Sonic to date," although not without a few problems. Now, to be perfectly honest, I wasn't amazingly enthused about the idea of Secret Rings in the first place. Something about not being able to control what direction Sonic moves in and helplessly waving a Wiimote around begging him to move left and right in what can only be described as over glorified bonus stages just did not pique my hopes for this game. Still, I got it, I played it, and I found out I was more right than I knew. The game is HARD TO PLAY, one of its biggest mistakes being that it forces you to EARN more responsive controls. The developers weren't UNABLE to make the controls responsive, they CHOSE not to. They CHOSE to make it an aggravating, frustrating, broke-a** junk game. I promptly returned it after beating it, thoroughly disenchanted with Sonic even though I did enjoy a few choice bits of the ending where he really socks it to the bad guy. I'll be looking forward to playing him in Brawl, but Sega can forget about obtaining any more of my dollars.
ESPECIALLY after Phantasy Star Universe. Good lord. Phantasy Star Online was okay. Grindtastic and astoundingly repetetive, but it got the job done and got me wanting to play if only for all the hundreds of really colorful weapons and goodies that there were to obtain. PSU promised to deliver what seemed like a more action-packed style of gameplay with special attacks and the like and even more colorful goodie weapons, not to mention a more robust story, something the previous game completely ignored, so you can imagine that when it came out I was there like a dog waiting for another heaping bowl of meat-flavored compresed dirt pellets. As it turned out it was a much less expertly executed game, with the properties that made weapons unique stripped out entirely, leaving really only one or two unique models to hunt for as opposed to PSO's hundreds; a story excreted from the asses of the worst JRPG writers' brains; blatantly recycled level design setpieces, with the same area repeating over four times per each level with different sets of enemies or lighting; glaring balance issues; narcoleptic bosses; invisible walls; and let's not forget the bloody FURRIES.
So yeah. Sega's not getting any more money out of me.
I'm not done yet, though.
Fable. Yahtzee's already said everything for me so I'll just move on.
Super Paper Mario was another huge, outrageous disappointment, the only reason I haven't sold it to Gamestop being that my girlfriend hasn't played it and won't let me. It's Super Mario Bros. 2 but with annoyingly obscure, unintuitive puzzles and an HP system where Mario would normally either lose a powerup, become smaller, or die, rendering it possibly the easiest Mario game to date.
Cripes, the list goes on.
Kingdom Hearts 2 wowed me at first with a few of its snazzy new options but by the end of the game it had lost my enthusiasm. I was a huge fan of the first game, finding it to be just the right mix of RPG, action, and platforming elements and being enchanted by the wonderfully smooth controls. The second game stripped out a lot of the variety in combat by eliminating Sora's suite of special attacks, de-emphasized party members' strength to the point of near-uselessness, and transformed what was a series of dark, fairly imposing inner-demon type antagonists into a bunch of yammering pricks. Organization XIII seems to have quite a few fans but it's incredibly difficult to take them seriously when in the year or two since Chain of Memories occurred they seem to have made no effort to fill the ranks of their fallen comrades, have committed no real acts of villainy or menace and continue not to do so throughout the rest of the game, are constantly at one another's throats, make only two or three appearances as it goes on, and then still have the gall to say "Do you know who you're dealing with? I'M with organization XIII!" as if it actually meant something after you killed half of them in the previous installment without acknowledging them enough to bloody remember who they were. Okay, so that's not really what happened int he story, but that's the way it FEELS. As if it weren't bad enough, the heartless have been neutered and have lost their scary demonic monstrousness in favor of cartoony, cutesyness. To give you an idea, the most menacing regular enemy in Kingdom Hearts 1 was a large, pitch-black, flying, muscular horned demon with a heart-shaped hole clear through its chest and a huge sword that could turn invisible and bitchslap you at a whim. The most menacing heartless in Kingdom Hearts 2 is a cartoon buggy. Meanwhile the Disney villains have given up their pretense of being respectable, powerful, scheming axis of evil--albeit extremely campy and shortsighted--in favor of ineffectual comic relief villainy. Never mind that the game takes place almost entirely on the horizontal axis with no platforming to break up the monotonous "room full of monsters after room full of monsters" style of play, the biggest disappointment to me was that Square-Enix, famous for generating one of the most infamously badass villains ever made and credited with somehow making the preposterous idea of a Disney-Final Fantasy crossover an awesome success, utterly failed to make Pete into a menacing villain. If you don't believe it's possible, watch "A Disney Christmas Carol" this holiday season and witness him as the Ghost of Christmas Future. He scares small children. When I was four I couldn't watch that movie because I'd wet myself every time he said, "Why it's YOUR grave, Scrooge!" cackled maniacally, and relentlessly shoved Scrooge McDuck into the fiery pits of hell, slamming the coffin shut behind him. Why couldn't they have gone with THAT Pete and not the bumbling used car salesman from Goof Troop?
My list just goes on and on; Gears of War and its repetetiveness; Dead or Alive 4 and its terrible balance and indecipherable controls; Super Mario Galaxy--a completely nonsensical game made especially for people with attention spans of less than 30 seconds; Final Fantasy XII and its boring, pieced-together story and a game that couldn't have taken as long as this did to develop; Halo 2 with its shameless recycling of content from the first game; Knights of the Old Republic and its tendency to reward players no matter HOW they try to solve a problem; Prey and its length and inability to make the most of what it DID have, not to mention its fear of letting the player fail; Jedi Outcast and its BEING Jedi Outcast (there's just too much to go into on that one); Bioshock and those stupid vita-chambers; Psychonauts, which just SUCKS, I don't care how telekinetic that bear is; Monkey Island 4, which also just SUCKS, which is ESPECIALLY disappointing to me since MI1-3 were all favorites of mine; the Prince of Persia series, which seemed to think their "climb on walls and perform astonishing acrobatic maneuvers" malarkey was a good excuse for the ENTIRE GAME to take place on the bloody walls; Lost Planet because it SUCKS...
The only games that HAVEN'T disappointed me lately are Ratchet and Clank 3, the Half-Life series (although admittedly I've only played HL1 and HL2 and not the episodes, thinking them to be a bloody stupid idea), Portal, Beyond Good and Evil, Assassin's Creed--which exceeded my low expectations of it given how much I hated PoP: Warrior Within--and... you know, it's at this point that I wonder why I play video games in the first place...
