Powerpuff Girls managed to be bad enough to have several bad reboots until I stopped caring or paying attention to them.
Transformers started as a glorified toy commercial and even at its best didn't wander far from that, but the Michael Bay era almost killed my fondness for the setting and its characters. Almost. The Bumblebee movie seemed like a sincere apology attempt.
The bloated and unnecessary Hobbit film trilogy. :why-angel: Check out the short and beautiful Rankin Bass animated movie instead.
Most Disney live-action remakes of animated films sucked, but the Mulan one was especially insulting and utterly missed the point of both the literary original and the animated film that was a lot more respectful to it.
Legend of Korra. Really was just the Star Wars prequels all over again. Overexplaining shit that doesn't need to be explained in ways that make the world feel smaller and less interesting. Not to mention the severe :brainworms: which were present in ATLA as well but to a lesser extent.
That's gotta be there weirdest criticism of korra I've ever seen. I hate it to but mostly because none of what happens makes any sense. Like, the fire nation is evil because they are taking very the world, which obviously benefits them. What was unalok's goal in freeing the evil spirit?
Why is it a weird criticism? Fantasy stories' sequels often suffer from this same problem. Writers failing to understand that mysteries are good and that allowing people to speculate and infer is okay. The biggest failing of Legend of Korra as a fantasy series is that very problem.
Of course it fails in many other ways as well, but I had to start somewhere, and that's the part about it I dislike most.
Other than explaining where the avatar spirit came from, it didn't explain much else in my opinion. It sorta retconned how bending came to be in humans and expanded on the spirit turtle a bit, but I don't think we knew more answers to questions aside from those. It raises some weird questions of its own, like why is lava bending rare, why is platinum immune to metal bending, how could tarlok and amon bloodbend in the opposite lunar cycle to what was established, why is the world westernizing when there is no west to adapt to?
Whoever keeps greenlighting live action anime adaptations on Netflix needs to be stopped.
The bloated and unnecessary Hobbit film trilogy
oh my god yes LOTR is soooooo fucking good and they massacred the hobbit with like, 80% of the same people involved:sicko-wistful:
The Hobbit films made me suspect that Jackson's wife and Del Toro were the real reasons why the original LOTR film trilogy was actually great.
I really don't like knights of the old republic 2
It's too pro-kreia, IMO the events of the game conveniently transpire to show that she's correct, most infamously the beggar on nar shadda. And you have to go out of your way to squeeze information out of her just to make sense of what's actually going on in the main plot. Whether intentional or not, the main message of the game feels like it's encouraging people to be :libertarian-approaching: :ancrap:
I also hate atton the creep (his backstory is just :what-the-hell:)
And I don't like the excessively drab environmental color palette (e.g. dantooine reminds me of vomit green) or comparatively bland music compared to kotor 1. I hate darths sion and nihilus, I don't think they fit into SW. Excessively edgy and stupidly overpowered.
Gimme the classic SW cheese that Kotor 1 did so brilliantly dammit
These are fundamental issues so even if the game wasn't rushed and was actually finished I still wouldn't like it
I sincerely admire the boldness of your take. For a very long time, KOTOR 2's been sacrosanct, both because it was darker and more morally ambiguous (which automatically labeled it as objectively superior at the time) and because of the contrarian fortune cookie wisdom of the main villain who of course has a massive fan backing that often talks about how profound her Rick and Mortyisms were even though she admits at the end that pretty much all her "advice" was deliberately distracting nonsense to keep you from actually getting in her way.
Yes, people are allowed to like KOTOR 2. My issue is the dogmatic "if you don't like it clearly you don't understand it unlike me" takes, implying that liking it means completely understanding it and not liking it means not understanding it. Similar defenses were made for Bioshock Infinite, but the luster wore off more quickly there.
Jurassic World retconned the 2nd and 3rd movies which were retrospectively far superior to any of the the new franchise.
They're also loaded with misogynistic :jordan-eboy-peterson: propaganda and I really hate the recurring protagonist. His actor is a total fundie douche.
Most of them lol, but specifically:
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Fallout: This hurts the most. It was my gateway into CRPGs when I was too young to be playing them. My favorite part was the atmosphere. The world felt hopeless and like the survivors' hanging on was futile. Fast forward to Bethesda and everything now is quirky and funny and retro!! It sucks the mood right out of the game. 76 dialed that up to 11.
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Mass Effect 3: That was the last time I was really excited for a game. I loved BioWare's work at the time and was ready for the end of the trilogy which turned out like ass.
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Diablo 3: I spent a lot of time in Diablo 2 and was very hyped for the sequel. Visuals aside, what I disliked the most was the writing. IMO once they got into WoW where they had to write more than an RTS cutscene's worth of dialogue, they fall into this campy way of writing that just kills it for me.
Aside from video games, the new Star Trek stuff is awful. The sequel trilogy for Star Wars was a disaster. I could probably think of a lot more shit, but it's getting depressing enough lol.
EDIT: I'll fucking say it, Chrono Cross. Trigger was another extremely formative game for me and Cross should've been called anything but a sequel to it.
Fallout: This hurts the most. It was my gateway into CRPGs when I was too young to be playing them. My favorite part was the atmosphere. The world felt hopeless and like the survivors’ hanging on was futile. Fast forward to Bethesda and everything now is quirky and funny and retro!! It sucks the mood right out of the game. 76 dialed that up to 11.
FO: Atomic weapons are frightening to the point of religious significance. The Glow is a genuinely terrifying place.
FO76: Use le nukes to spawn epic bosses to loot epic loot! :so-true:
Mass Effect 3: That was the last time I was really excited for a game. I loved BioWare’s work at the time and was ready for the end of the trilogy which turned out like ass.
I retroactively disliked the previous games a lot more after ME3 and started seeing the reeking liberalism as well. Fuck Great Man Theory and fuck above the law black ops tacticools being glorified by the narrative.
Diablo 3: I spent a lot of time in Diablo 2 and was very hyped for the sequel. Visuals aside, what I disliked the most was the writing. IMO once they got into WoW where they had to write more than an RTS cutscene’s worth of dialogue, they fall into this campy way of writing that just kills it for me.
I'm glad I stopped with Diablo 2 and moved on to Torchlight. Somehow, Torchlight maintained the mood better without the le edgy demonology aspects. It helps that one of Diablo's actual founding devs was behind it, someone that the rapey fratboy chuds at NuBlizzard said "fuck that loser" to on Twitter when he criticized the auction house grifting in Diablo 3.
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never read a book series, or watched a movie trilogy? no judgment, just curious
I also liked how the down-south good’ol’boy 'Murican on the show was not some blundering gun-nut toxic-masculinity-incarnate asshole, but instead was a brilliant engineer with a kind heart and an open mind who just wanted to see the wonders of the universe. Trip was easily my favourite character.
The final episode of the show must have been pure :troll: to you, then.
Wise choice. It doesn't spoil much to say that it both does Trip dirty and does a Dallas-esque "and it was all a dream" twist but somehow worse.
They're both horrible to me, but I found Picard more directly offensive with its targeted nostalgia assassinations and "we said a naughty word, we are so mature" and gore-related P R E S T I G E T V gimmicks. Do elaborate on your own take if you like, though.
Lorca was a painfully standard P R E S T I G E T V "gets shit done" sociopath edgelord character and he name-boosts fucking :my-hero: . The only saving grace was the clumsy retcon that said he was actually the mirror universe version of himself pretending to be the prime universe version, which implies that :my-hero: is praised in the mirror universe which kind of checks out.
Didn't he adlib that line to try and get a tesla or did I dream that?
Command and Conquer 4: Absolute garbage that completely failed to capitalize on the sequel hooks left behind by Tiberium Wars and Kane's Wrath
Halloween Kills: Michael Myers is supposed to be an ambush predator, not a Terminator. He's hard to put down, sure, but he wins because he gets the drop on vulnerable targets (and even then he doesn't always win, as seen in the original Halloween). Having him leisurely wade through armed mobs Dynasty Warriors style completely misses the point of the character.
XCOM Enemy Unknown: This one was painful because it did make a lot of decisions that genuinely improved on the original, such as tossing much of the useless research options and redundant equipment along with providing a much friendlier UI and better tutorial. On the other hand, though, it was disappointing to me in a lot of ways:
- Making individual soldiers much less versatile. They get automatically assigned a random class, something over which you have no input, and that class is fairly locked into its role. You don't look at a soldier's stats and judge for yourself whether they'd make a better sniper, scout, or heavy, and you can't, for example, give a Heavy a sidearm and have him help sweep a UFO's interior.
- Severely restricted action economy. In the original game, you could have up to 14 soldiers in the starting Skyranger. In the remake, squad size maxes out at 6. A single lucky enemy crit dropping one of your soldiers, ora rookie panicking because they got shot at, can be crippling.
- Strategic decisions feel much less organic. There is no question of balancing saving money and space vs. having more soldiers, fighters, and transports so you can respond to more events at once. No more deciding when and where to build new bases, radars, and hangars so you can better detect and intercept UFOs. No weighing your performance and deciding whether that battleship you raided earlier this month will offset the reputation hit you'll take from passing up this hellish-looking terror mission. Instead, you get explicit binary choices between different missions, UFOs that show up whenever they feel like it with no real way to improve your interception rate.
- Proper reconnaissance feels much less important. Not only does the limited action economy make dedicating soldiers to recon much less appealing, but enemies tend to appear in discrete groups, then move out of turn in ways that let you see where they're going. It makes encounters feel less tense and organic and more video gamey.
- The presence of civilians in terror missions feels a lot less meaningful. In the original game, they were a constant concern. You didn't know how many there were or where they were, and it forced you to weigh the risk vs. reward of every full auto shot and use of explosives. Knowing exactly how many there are and being able to move a soldier next to them to have them instantly vacate the battlefield makes them much less impactful.
I spent so many hours with XCOM EW and I used to love that game, but these days I deeply resent it. It was certainly the first game that created the "losing is fun" trend which people now try to force down your throat.
And it wasn't even the devs fault, but the whole community around that game, the insufferable amount of elitism around playing Impossible/Ironman, like people literaly believe that this was the "only" way to play.
It was never about skill, for which at least you could make this argument in favor of some PvP games, no it was all to justify their addiction to gambling, and not exciting or intresting gambling either, but literal dice rolls where a 5% or a 1% could ruin a campaign. Why would you ever accept this is a good thing if not because you are addicted to gambling.
And this inevitably lead to so many games trying to copy this masochistic formula, mainly Darkest Dungeon(another love hate). Maybe losing is fun sometimes, but wasting 50-100h of progress isn't fun, its self-harm. But people wont admit that because then you are not a real Gamer.
Your points are all valid too, things like the random soldier class eventualy got fixed with mods, realy the Long war mod is such a much better experience because they straight up fixed so much bullshit.
If you haven't played LW I realy recommend it.
Command and Conquer 4: Absolute garbage that completely failed to capitalize on the sequel hooks left behind by Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wrath
i remember pirating this shit awhile back and being so damn excited only to make it like 20 minutes being like wtf? i can't build a base? i just have one giant unit spitting out other units? god damn wtf?
Most Disney live-action remakes
Is the remake of The Lion King a "live action" remake, or a "3D animation" remake? :soviet-hmm:
But yeah they're so garbage. I remember watching the Aladdin one in theaters (my family was going and I didn't want to be a killjoy) and it was like watching the original film on fast forward with random scenes from bad romantic comedies intercut with it. Then there's how they really tried to do girlboss feminism with Jasmine, only to have her get completely sidelined and rescued in the final scene by a man anyway! Like jfc have any of the higher ups at Disney actually done the reading because it seems like their brand of feminism completely cynical and out of touch. :astronaut-1:
All the Dune 'prequels' and 'sequels' by Brian.
The Crystal Chronicles remake removing all the shit that made the game great. No local coop? No fully co-op campaign? No caravan stuff? Glad emulators can get the OG running now.
I don't really watch movies or TV, so mo opinion there.
The Crystal Chronicles remake removing all the shit that made the game great. No local coop? No fully co-op campaign? No caravan stuff?
:( What's even left in the game?
Yeah, they made it prettier, and of course made it playable online without the cumbersone GBA setup thing, but its more of a drop-in, drop-out style, where your friends can join you on your campaign, rather than the OG, where it really felt like you all were on the caravan together, and the mostly got rid of the village, letters, and backstory stuff
