Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don’t forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Not a bad game per se, but I don’t get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it’s okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame…like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won’t get Dutch because it’s a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I’m now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can’t understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I’m really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion 😂
For games that are in genres that I’d actually play:
Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just… underwhelmed. I didn’t really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.
I’ve since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me… but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don’t really get it because I can’t get over the hump.
The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don’t like the combat, honestly. I’ve tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn’t manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn’t having fun.
Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is ‘going backwards is hard’ in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn’t get the English PSP port… that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn’t resonate with me as much as the other ones did… Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn’t hit the same.
Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn’t do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or ‘walking sims’ or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don’t tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.
Ugh I feel the same way about The Witcher. I tried 2 and 3 and just couldn’t get into it. The combat was not enjoyable and it felt really clunky to me. I actually tried 2 a couple of times because everyone raved and I thought maybe I was just missing something, but it wasn’t for me.
FF6 is my favourite JRPG of all time. I like it more than Chrono Trigger. I loved the characters and the soundtrack.
I’m with you on FF6. The leveling system for abilities was interesting (but slow), but there were too many characters. The previous one on SNES (called 2 in the west but I think it’s 4?) had a better balance with number of characters to story.
FF6 is still my favorite.