Both for good or bad, when it comes to the general consensus opinion. I was thinking about this topic because I was playing Soldier Blade on PC Engine recently, and it got a very “eh” reception at the time but when it was reevaluated on Wii VC, it was thought more of as a true classic, and I think that game rocks. Maybe the most famous example I can think of is Earthbound, a game that didn’t garner a lot of positive praise at the time and is now widely considered one of the greatest games of all-time. Suikoden got very okay to mildly positive reviews when it came out and is also considered a classic now and one of my personal favorites. In terms of opinion souring, BioShock Infinite feels like the most noteworthy example, although I feel like the backlash happened pretty quickly IIRC. Metal Gear Solid 4 was critically praised at its release but I think people don’t care for it now, and I have pretty strong negative feelings on that game outside the first couple of chapters, and I went in wanting to like it and did for the first two chapters. I’m using critics as the original basis for a lot of these opinions, but it can be critically, within the Internet on large scale, or within a specific fanbase or community. I remember The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword being critically praised at release and at least in my Nintendo bubbles online was also beloved, but that seems to be the most disliked main entry in the series these days. What are some other examples?
I will forever be absolutely baffled by the complete turnaround on Sonic Unleashed. I got it for like 10€ in the bargain bin half a year after release and had a decently good time with it. For many years I felt like I was that game’s greatest unapologetic defender by simply saying that it’s actually pretty okay, that Sonic becoming a werewolf is stupid and funny, that the daytime stages are a great spectacle, etc.
Nowadays people who grew up with Sonic Unleashed swear that it’s some legendary high watermark for the series, the best Sonic game ever made, and that it all was downhill after that. In contrast, my originally positive takes look overly critical. I have gone from a Sonic Unleashed lover to a Sonic Unleashed hater by holding the same opinion!
I always talk about Castlevania 64 (and Legacy of Darkness). People are coming around on them finally. I got it for Christmas one year and really loved it. Its not the best game or even the best 3d representation of Castlevania that would be possible, but it has great atmosphere, great music, the story is alright, gameplay is legitimately fun imo.
It has some trappings of early 3d platformwr but i think it works well still.
Anyways, the past few years I’ve seen more people defend the game and it’s no longer the butt end of a joke for people. I’m happy for it.
There’s been a 180 on the critical reception to the Tellius Fire Emblem games and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn in particular. I remember Nintendo Power giving Radiant Dawn a 7/10, which was kinda unheard of for a first-party Nintendo game. It was early in the lifecycle of the Wii and it got criticized for being “old-fashioned” and not utilizing motion controls. Across the board, the game got a pretty lukewarm reception, made worse by the way the game translated the difficulty settings (Japanese Normal - Hard - Maniac became English Easy - Normal - Hard, so a lot of people booted up “Normal,” found the game too punishing and wrote lame reviews).
For the people who stuck it out, Radiant Dawn has become the cult classic, and the high watermark of the series. Ike is the most popular Fire Emblem character to this day, and if you go on Serenes Forest, the main Fire Emblem forum, it’s Radiant Dawn, not Awakening or Three Houses that’s the most popular. Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn go for like $500 USD on ebay now because no one bought them at release but the hype around them now is real.
The one coming to mind right now is Town of Salem. It had good numbers for years after release as a great Werewolf/Mafia game, and it seemed to do fine even though (a) its chat moderation was trash [lots of bigotry and incivility] and (b) its data was hacked in 2018. But where its live player count was in the thousands for years, it was consistently in the hundreds only a year after its Overwatch 2-like upgrade Town of Salem 2 (2023).
@Hunter The best gift an ex-girlfriend got me was Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. The franchise, and especially the Tellius entries, would not have been on my radar if she hadn’t gotten me that. I bought Radiant Dawn out of faith it’d be as good as PoR, and it was. Otherwise, I’d have never played them and might still be ignorant of them.
Each new The Legend of Zelda entry used to be the poster child of this phenomenon, with each new game being heavily criticized by fans until the next one came out and got people to revise their judgement on the previous entry. Skyward Sword → BOTW kinda broke that pattern but instead fostered a new argument about the (previously “tired”) OOT formula now getting “unfairly” abandoned.
At a much, much smaller scale of online discussions, I remember observing the same phenomenon with Castlevania among French fans on early Internet message boards and chat rooms, with people (even me) claiming SOTN unjustly overshadowed the better PC Engine entry. I eventually came around to it, just like I expect old-school Zelda fans will reluctantly accept BOTW’s brillance once another era of Zelda games gets older fans pissy again.
I never wavered but just so you know, I am on New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is better than Super Mario Bros. Wonder island patiently waiting for y’all to swim back here eventually. I am spending the time trying to convince Wilson the Volley-Ball that House of Gucci is a hidden gem of a movie.
My entry here is simply the Sega Saturn, as a platform and a concept. Much maligned in its time, it is now the “2D beast” and held in high regard by many.
I’m seeing people souring on Tears of the Kingdom after letting it rest. Time for me to come in and say I called it while everyone was still praising it!
A lot of the time it’s a generational thing. The GameFAQs or IGN gamer bro groupthink talked mad shit on games that 30 year olds in 2024 love deeply. Final fantasy tactics advance and Yoshi’s Story always come to mind for me.
From Software is started to feel overrated even for me at this point, but you gotta admit they’re the ultimate underdog / comeback story. Kings Field was bargain bin stuff and now it’s dummy expensive.
I think people have done a 180 on the Magypsies in Mother 3. Back in 2006 it was like, Nintendo would never bring this over because it has gay characters in it. But now it’s like, Nintendo would never bring this over because the game treats transgender people with an otherness that is incredibly insensitive.
I think Shigesato Itoi still has his finger on the pulse of modern Japanese society, and would rewrite it completely it if he was making the game today.
Was just thinking this. As a kid with Sega stuff other kids saw it more as novelty, but as a teen in the early 2000s the Nerd Culture at the time was so Nintendo and PlayStation brained that online and offline people would basically act like they pitied me for having a Mega Drive/Saturn/Dreamcast
Nowadays what used to set me apart in a bad way is seen as some kind of like nerd cachet or something—it’s kinda wild
I’m gonna throw out FF 13–I read more or less unanimous dog piling back when it came out (with dashes of misogyny thrown in there to boot) and for a long long while it seemed like Lightning and Pals were cast aside as “the bad Final Fantasy” but I see more and more people coming around
I wonder if these sorts of reevaluations come about because people are removed from the zeitgeist or never were in the zeitgeist of the time at all? It’s hard to express the way popular opinion impacts things contemporarily, and when we’re 10-20-30 years removed, it just feels less like swimming upstream to say “the Saturn is really good, actually”
I was going to mention this one, too. I don’t think the game’s quite to the turning point yet, as I still get angry responses elsewhere when I mention that FFXIII is my favorite in the series, but I think it’s getting there. A remaster of the games is probably inevitable, even if Square Enix is dragging their feet about it, at which point I wouldn’t be surprised to see the game getting a general critical re-evaluation. This is especially true in the wake of Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is almost as much a riff on FFXIII’s gameplay and structure as it is a retelling of VII’s Midgar
Oh wow, I had no idea about this. Solder Blade rocks, absolutely one of my favorite shooting games.
The two games I think of when I think of this sort of thing are both so old that I now doubt my memory when thinking about them, but:
Majora’s Mask saw a big critical re-evaluation maybe 20 years ago. It’s everyone’s favorite Zelda now, but there was a time when it was just the weird, disappointing sequel to Ocarina of Time.
Final Fantasy 9 went through a similar critical re-evaluation around the same time. It was disliked for being old-fashioned at the time (particularly, it didn’t allow for the bananas character customization that 6, 7, and 8 did). Nowadays, I would say it wouldn’t be strange at all to have 9 as a top 3 Final Fantasy.
No Man’s Sky comes to mind. It’s hard to overstate the barrage of hate it received at launch because it wasn’t literally a whole new universe as the marketing had suggested. Nine years and many substantial patches later, they are still actively working on it, despite it probably not being profitable anymore, and popular opinion on it has turned around, which would have been unthinkable at launch. I still have zero interest in playing it but hey, good on em.
Uncharted 3 reviewed well but is now thought of as a retread, and everything it tried, 4 did better. In general all AAAAA games like this get thought of less positively over time, due to the rising level of writing and quality in these games. I think people have Last of Us fatigue and are soured on them as well.
A more esoteric example is that arcades were extremely popular, then their popularity / profitably declined so they disappeared, and then they reappeared as being with paired with alcohol as the more profitable Barcade. Most large cities now have a barcade for better or for worse, and at least the ones I’ve been to are always extremely popular. That said I think they focus on 80s games too much due to proliferation, normie popularity / recognizability, and simpler repairability. I want to play Chaos Heat while drinking a beer goddamit!
I have a lot of thoughts but nothing too cohesive!
But to elaborate on your examples:
MGS4 was hotly anticipated (by me) because the previous 3 were so interesting and exciting. I gobbled it up and eagerly stayed up til 4 in the morning rolling credits. And then I tried to play around in it in a little more and I thought this ain’t a game for replaying. It’s a bow on top of the series.
And I found this review of Suikoden 2 recently in a gamepro on internet archive. I can only assume this person did not actually play it for more than 10 minutes because this is insane.
“Fun-Free Zone”? Holy Guacamole.
Also the writer is credited as E. Coli and reviewed a bunch of RPGs. Was this a staff writer’s nickname or a catch all for many people?
My perception as far as ffxiii is that it has been reevaluated as the last “traditional” final fantasy - they haven’t made a simple turn based final fantasy since then.
As for whether they were part of the original discussion, I see a lot of folks saying they were always fans of xiii, so either they were quiet then or they’re liars (also possibly they were some of the voices of dissent) but it feels like people want to say they were in the zeitgeist, regardless of whether they were
For my part, I wasn’t yet active on social media (and my old forum haunts were largely gone) at the time, so I suppose I was one of the quiet ones. I was deeply frustrated by much of the criticism leveled at the game, though (much of which felt and still feels disingenuous). I’ve been nursing a one-sided grudge against anyone who called it a hallway-simulator ever since
It is (possibly: it was) an extremely common phenomenon that someone’s first FF is also their favorite, especially back when FF was a beacon of technology and innovative character design for the industry.
So at the very least, there was an entire generation of kids who grew up with FF13 as their first FF and did not have access to online discussions back in 2009 (fifteen years ago) and are now young adults who can voice and oppose their opinion. Especially young girls who had few options for female lead characters in that era (despite JRPG in the PlayStation era being often more appealing to a female audience). The same thing is famously happening with the Star Wars prequel trilogy in cinema. It is pretty much what @treefroggy described with the generational argument.
FFX-2 is another famous example of a game getting widely scorned as an unserious spin-off at launch and then getting widely reevaluated when a younger generation of girls and/or LGBTQ players could voice their opinions, as well as some maturing heterosexual male players who could reevaluate the game past their own previous insecurities.
The real problem is when people defend FF16. Fortunately this will never happen on Insert Credit.
My hot take is that PoR was pretty meh, and after the failure of RD (didn’t play because I didn’t really enjoy PoR, the beast characters repulsed me gameplay-wise, but I did watch my brother play it; seemed similar enough), they desperately started trying to find new mechanics that would stick, and that they were unjustly rewarded for it by the good sales of the 3DS games which were also pretty meh (which I’m guilty of buying on release just to support the ‘rebirth’ of the series). After suffering through the abomination that was 3 Houses, I’ve lost faith in the FE series and begun to question if it was ever really that good (Not to be too much of a hater; I’ve enjoyed the FE’s prior to PoR, 7 was my first like probably most people’s was, even liked Shadow Dragon).
Sorry to be a pessimist, I want the series to be good again; I just want them to innovate in a non mobile game/gimmicky kind of way (please no more hub world with cringey tacked on social sim elements and stat management bs)
I almost mentioned this in my own post, but anecdotally, FFXIII-likers do seem to be disproportionately women and/or queer as well. Even older such folks wouldn’t have been part of the conversation then as much as they might be today—both in terms of gaming press and general gaming-spaces—since the perception of video games being for white straight men had only just begun to shift in the 2000s