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I always get really disappointed when I see something with really nice potential that just turns out to totally suck. Sometimes it's that the people making it really could do better and got screwed over or lazy, other times it's a really good idea that just got horribly mishandled by incompetent people, or at a time where they just couldn't realize it. So let's just talk about that here, because there's loads of stuff over time that's just had horribly squandered potential. I'm going to kick this off with two video game examples, just because they occurred to me the easiest: First, I think we're genuinely worse off for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric sucking. Other famously bad Sonic games (namely 2006, but Shadow the Hedgehog, Heroes and Unleashed get rightful coppings too) had structural issues that sort of deserved to be knocked down; they were often rushed, bloated, poorly-directed and buggy, flaws that came from Sonic Team getting really complacent with what they were making. 2006 flopping was a wakeup call to jettison as much of the bloated mess of Sonic they'd been going through the motions of as possible, and they've generally been making good games since. Rise of Lyric wasn't bad for those reasons, though. In fact, it failed when doing exactly the thing Sonic should have been doing all this time; trying something big, new and different, giving us a new gameplay style that could still be identifiably 'Sonic', and a writing and aesthetic direction that's more 'Saturday morning cartoon' and less 'melodramatic 90s anime'. All of that coming from a new studio comprised of ex-Naughty Dog devs sounded like not just a recipe for a good game, but exactly the sort of good game Sonic needed to have at the time. Unfortunately, the result was utterly terrible in basically every way. If you aren't familiar with it, ProJared did a pretty good and succinct review of it here. And for a less obvious one, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine. An MMO installment of the JRPG franchise at around the time when a lot of them were trying much the same thing, most of them without a lot of success. Imagine's issues mostly stemmed from the companies working on it being really bad choices, with the developer Atlus collaborated with to make it--CAVE--abandoning it entirely after initial development to focus on their own games (almost entirely arcade shooters), and the international localizing and publishing of it given to Aeria, who barely supported it. Atlus eventually took the reins from both of them and started working on it themselves, but it was too late. Which is a shame, because you could see evidence of a game that could have been fantastic in there. It was made around when Atlus was just going loving nuts with the SMT assets they made for the PS2 games, so it's got the same really neat, unearthly aesthetics as Nocturne or Digital Devil Saga The gameplay itself was a really solidly-inspired combination of a freeform take on MMO character progression and a modified version of SMT's own demon development, and the end result was surprisingly fun; I saw descriptions of it playing like a Pokemon MMO, and that's exactly right. It was ultimately a half-assed MMO, and eventually died like all half-assed MMOs do, but the ingredients of it deserved way better.
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Mar 22, 2016 10:10
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Thwomp posted:The Mass Effect sequels. I guess I agree on this, but I don't know if I'd put them forward myself. I recognize they are good games on objective levels, and a much more solid experience than the first one, but they did that by removing everything I actually liked about the first one. ME1 had really neat if flawed takes on loot and character customization, and the more explorative style really worked for how I felt the game should have been designed. ...And then Mass Effect 2 came around and just replaced it with Gears of War, and Mass Effect 3 deciding what that needed was an unrelated multiplayer mode. So I suppose I'd say the reverse--I wish the first Mass Effect didn't bungle enough of its awesome ideas that they threw them out for 2 and 3.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:14
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