This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
i've mentioned it before on here, but Final Fantasy 15. no idea how it got 9's and 10's on release. i'm assuming it was just vibes and how much you liked hanging out with the boys. you had to watch a movie and anime series to even understand the plot and characters. combat was egregiously shallow and easy. game just pissed me off. not sure what the royal version changed and if they fixed any of these problems.
can confirm
i liked going on a road trip with the gay j-pop band
also the fishing was fun
I feel that way about XVI. It's been a colorful series with horse-birds and over the top summoned demigods and party members with wacky names for a very long time and the attempt to grimdark it up just fell flat for me. It doesn't help that the main inspiration for XVI according to Yoshi-P was Game of Thrones, which I've never liked.
FF15 is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played because it's the most mediocre game I've ever played that's so close to being great.