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”