I played each Mass Effect as it was new. Waited in line at midnight for 3 (and won a promo display!), carried my save file through all three games, was super engrossed. The ending was fine before they added to it.

Homefront: The Revolution is actually a super fun game. Dare I say…a hidden gem?

It has an atrocious metacritic score for a few reasons. Mainly, some of the enemy AI was broken on release, which is fair, but it’s long since been fixed. The other big issue is that it’s a sequel to a genuinely bad game and most people didn’t bother playing it, and most who did came with the goal of trashing it.

However, this game is fun if you want something kind in the modern Far Cry style vein, but set in urban environments. It run on the Crye Engine and the gunplay is rock solid; the shotgun in this game is fantastic. The guns all have absolutely preposterous alternate fire modes. The assault rifle has its upper swapped out to turn it into landmine launcher.

The story and setting is a complete reset compared to the first game. It isn’t just a lazy “Red Dawn but China North Korea”. There is an elaborate alternate history backstory going back to the 1950s that sees North Korea take the role of the high tech manufacturing hub for the west, eventually becoming what some in the west in the 1970s feared Japan would become- a powerhouse of tech that was rich and had a grip on all western nations because of it. Then this cyberpunk reimagining of North Korea takes over a poor and downtrodden USA after the U.S. had made so many bad choices that NK could plausibly send “international peacekeepers”. Absolutely nuts plot, but so weird and strangely high effort. Also means the bad guys are coded so cyberpunk and have all kinds of drones and stuff.

Most writing and VA in games is embarrassingly bad.

The obviously trans bartender in hogwarts legacy makes no sense in a universe where you can use magic to change everything about yourself. I understand and like that there is trans representation in this game and any other game it is in and as a fuck you to that terf pos jk but in universe it does not make sense to me.

Sonic and Dr. Robotnik are codependent. They don’t actually want to defeat each other. That’s why Robotnik is always building these elaborate bases that, for some reason, have a bunch of perfectly Sonic-sized tubes for getting around in. And it’s why there’s always that moment at the end where Sonic is chasing Robotnik but doesn’t catch him.

• Breath of the Wild was a bad Zelda game. Not bad as a game in general, but terrible as a Zelda game. Apparently, people have told me this is a hot take.

• I actually don’t mind gacha games with microtransactions as long as the gameplay is good and the game is free to play. I really like Super Mecha Champions and Zenless Zone Zero currently.

• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a snoozefest to play. People always tell me to play it and how good it is but the auto-battler combat where the characters have bark lines for literally every action they take in a second is just not for me.

• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour is the best C&C excluding the Red Alert games. No, I won’t argue with you, and no, I won’t change my mind.

• Metroid Other M wasn’t actually that bad. Yes, the cutscenes were long and the game was pretty linear (just like Metroid Fusion and Dread, honestly), and yes, I can see why certain people would be mad about certain plot points, but the game was not literally Hitler. It was a very fun action game, and what is crazy is that the gameplay was equally as fun to watch someone else play it. The pixel hunts were kinda annoying because of the way they were forced, and I do wish it had analog controller support, but at the end of the day I still think it was a pretty fun game to play.

• Call of Duty Infinite actually had a fun campaign. Granted, the last CoD I played before it was World At War, but I actually really liked the campaign. I liked the structure of being in a spaceship and choosing the missions I wanted to do.

Calling your own take a hot take is premature. A take being hot requires it to make other people take notice and agree. If it’s your own take you’re sharing, that hasn’t happened yet.

I think you mean what are your unpopular opinions related to game plots/characters.

Most crafting mechanics suck and feel grafted on. This is especially true if crafting isn’t the main point of the game.

Breath of the Wild was a much needed change in a series that had started to go stale. While I like Zelda games, the formula of go to the dungeon, get item, defeat boss, go to next dungeon and repeat was getting worn out, with exploration taking a backseat.

There are too many Pokemon. I don’t know if that’s a hot take, but I’m including it anyway.

Having parts of the map blocked off at the beginning of GTA games is garbage and the in game explainations even moreso. Part of the fun is walking around doing random stuff, I want to be able to do that from the get go. Thankfully GTA V got it right.

The GameCube controller is overrated. While I like the giant A button and the shoulder triggers, the D-pad is too small, the X and Y buttons are oddly shaped and easy to mix up, and there should’ve been a shoulder on the left side too.

Mass Effect’s universe is doomed to repeat itself forever, doesn’t matter what ending you choose.

Cloud drags Final Fantasy VII (OG) down. He’s the least interesting playable character and his amnesia subplot overstays its welcome.

Also, Cait Sith is the best character.

Dark Souls 2 is a significantly better game than Dark Souls 3

The factory doesn’t always have to grow.
At some point it needs to stop.

Adding ancient eldritch gods into Fallout, with such large and sprawling plot lines was a huge mistake.

People will say, “Yeah but what about the ghost in Fallout 2?” Yes FO2 had one side quest with a ghost. It was a one off, with no huge backstory propping it up, it wasn’t constantly revisited. It didn’t change the whole vibe of the world. It was one side quest that made you go “Huh that was weird.” and was quickly pushed aside.

In comparison, including eldritch horrors in a front and center way, with quests like the Cabot questline being the most egregious. There is also the Dunwich building, the Dunwich mine, the cult and eldritch creature in FO76, and more.

Any one of these, one their own, as a one off isolated thing might be alright. The Dunwich building especially works as a weird unexplained oddity. It is the dose that makes the poison though, and now there is so much Lovecraftian stuff packed into Fallout that it has changed the texture of what Fallout is. The more the Lovecraftian stuff is added, the more of the original “an apocalypse of our own making” 1950s militarist, corporatist setting gets diluted.

Hello Games’s release of No Man’s Sky was a massive gamble that was more likely to fail than not. They shouldn’t have been forgiven for the false advertising and broken promises. Half the gaming industry seems to have gotten the idea that it’s okay to release a half-baked mess for $30-$70 and then maybe fix it later.

People complaining about Fitzroy or racism commentary in BioShock Infinite missed the actual point of the story. I know a YouTuber who complained that you couldn’t aim the baseball, and he super missed the actual point of the story.

Mass Effect 3’s ending was totally fine the first time, especially since its ending wasn’t reduced down to a choice between three things; the entire 25-30 hours prior to that were you wrapping up all of the series plot threads, and they all compose the ending.

Disco Elysium is too info dump-y to be held up as some gold standard of writing, and every character was such an exhaustively shitty person that I didn’t feel much like finishing it.

People who say Hades is a great roguelike have only played one.