What's the most surprising "hot take" opinion from a review of something you liked that a reviewer criticised?

TLDR": What is the hot opinion, the critic, that made you scratch your head in disbelief that someone could come out of playing a game, tv show, movie, album, with an opinion so off base but presented at large cause youtube or the like, where others can and did piggyback on and agree.

@topcyclist:

bit of an explanation: I noticed a trend cruising the insides of "some sites" and imdb's for most popular shows. (clicking for 1/10 to 8/10 star opinions). EVERYTHING IS OVERRATED according to my biased scowering in the worst way. XD. In essence, everything no matter how coveted is the worst trash because listed non-fan or unimpressed person's reasons whatever. That's fine, and I'm learning to accept opinions in the 5-minute intervals between getting angry over a dissenting one, like all of us. Were not hive minds, (should have chosen that deus ex ending)

Anyway, most of the 1/10 takes boil down to the thing didn't do what I wanted so it's bad or I wanted something way more even if it was as good as people said so it's bad...didn't blow my mind even if it was good... it's bad. :P

My question deals with a review you read that seemed negative on the whole but in actuality, it was just a review saying their impressions came out middling...8/10. The type of review that is good yet you wanted better. So you scowered the page to find some arithmetic headcanon and decide the score should have been 9/10 or whatever.

Of those reviews what was the one or so hot take opinions, you know to yourself to be so wrong, wishing you could grab the critic through the screen and tell them so they could adjust their score. (maybe they missed a key plot point, forgot to turn off aim assist, didn't know there were options to do something, their music CD had two sides and the other side had the slow-paced stuff they wanted, etc.)

Much like when a teacher grades your paper you spent weeks on and says meh, you didn't have a good hook....78% when you swear you can't get better than doing exactly what she said she wanted. Note thou this question isn't for people who don't care about reviews or others opinions etc, I'm looking for the real venting surprise that someone would dare think Mario odyssey for example is 2/10 at best cause you never pick up a shotgun and shoot bowser...some review so nuts you just shook your head even as others agreed.

Not necessarily a single review, but the whole Last of Us 2 debacle surprised me. It's like none of these people ever watched a zombie movie or show, or any impactful piece of media. The world sucks and characters you like die, and story/character-wise the scene in question made perfect sense for a sequel. And it's a really well made and effective scene to boot.

The character in question later shows up in so many (playable) flashbacks that they overshadow some of the living characters, so all the complaining about 'treating the character badly' felt way overblown.

@theonewhoplays: I wonder how much of that TLOU2 reaction stemmed from the plot getting leaked beforehand, and People That Are Too Online had a big discussion about the plot at that time where, without the actual context of seeing the finished game, they decided that story was Not Good, and they had already locked into that stance so hard and couldn’t be convinced otherwise no matter how the finished game turned out.

@bisonhero: That definitely played into it, yeah. I did not know about the leak beforehand. Alot of people took what info they had and made an effort to connect the dots in the most toxix way possible as well. I think the story in tlou2 is too overstuffed and a bunch of characters either got sidelined or had less than stellar writing as a result, so I think 1 is a tighter and better narrative. Still light-years ahead in narrative and direction when compared to other AAA-games IMHO. It also gave me the kick in the butt I needed to start practising the guitar again, which no other game has done.

The take that The Incredibles is some sort of nakedly pro-objectivist work always has confused me. While it does have a bit of the "exceptional people dragged down by normies" thing going on, the blindingly obvious, bigger point of the movie is how the "personal edification and individualism above all else" ethos gets you nowhere.

Speaking of The Last of Us, I never understood the argument that you can't play a game about a pandemic during a real-life pandemic. I don't mean to diminish people's feelings and everybody reacts to shit differently, but I believe most people should have the ability to distinguish between an aggressive flu versus a virus that turns people into flesh-eating zombies, between a situation where you are asked to wear a mask when you go shopping versus needing to fight your way through a warzone to get supplies. That argument has been pasted on just about every review of every game, movie or show about zombies or similar stuff about society collapsing and everybody having to fight for their lives.

The general dissapointment from reviewers/fans of the mass effect 3 ending. Anybody that expected them to tie up all the loose ends in a satisfying way to everybody was just exhausting to consume online. Unrealistic expectations. I hadn't played those games at the time but there was so much ambition for a new IP after coming to them more recently there is so much there maybe critics could spin off their own D&D campaigns from what was given. Reddit had just become a thing. Posting from your phone had just become a thing. Shocker things go South as internet access is as easy as a light switch.

The Andromeda bad take.

Anthem bad take. We have been assaulted with PvE for the entirety of the generation. Those flight mechanics are still unmatched and those open world environments were pretty seemless. People were complaining prelaunch and after a month. It was never given the chance R6, Division, Overwatch or any other game that was given a chance made good on. There was story there. I'm super upset that i don't know what a 2 year, 3 year, or 5 year anthem anniversary looks like. Rainbow 6 came out Dec 2015 and i still peep the trailers for operators. This failure was driven by the journalists. Marvel, Back4Blood, and Predator are some recent failures but primarily from fatigue. Some journalists want to be in the board room so bad. Everytime i stumble upon hot takes i have to remind myself that these people either applied for jobs in games development and got rejected or they know they have none of the needed skills and it's easier to backseat drive.

TLDR: Mass Effect 3 Ending witnessed by "humanity."

Whenever MGSV is brought up Quiet's appearance does as well. People will wish he took the Yoko Taro approach and just say he likes hot women instead of the infamous "ashamed of your words and deeds" line. Any past Kojima game will show he is just as shameless if not even more so considering how long his career is about how horny he is. He will get criticized about how he truly had nothing interesting to say about Quiet and they're right and he knows it. What he means is that you should be ashamed for wasting your thoughts and your breath on something that truly was some surface level thing that amused him. For many, myself included, MGSV is considered to have the worst story for a Metal Gear game, but there's still some really fascinating stuff in that game. For example: Skullface's plan to turn the English language into a deadly virus to cripple Western imperialism, the mundanity of war and how easy it is to send the soldiers you collected to far off locations to die for resources in just several clicks on the iDroid, the ambiguity of Huey's trial, or whether the Phantom Pain and the feeling of the game being unfinished was intentional by Kojima or forced by Konami. It's like that meme where the guy stares directly at what's in front of him and all the stuff it's actually about goes over their head. It was the critics who were distracted by the woman with big tits and it seems a lot of them exposed themselves for how dense and horny they really were and would rather put that on Kojima than themselves. At least he was honest about it, the rest should be ashamed.

@uranaltruce: Also: The pursuit of the perfect hamburger!

Everyone seems to hate the prevalence of required material gathering for crafting upgrades in Far Cry: Primal, to the point where it's made out to be the most egregious and awful example of a shitty trend in an increasingly lazy and trend-chasing industry.

I found this game to be an absolute joy as a fan of pre-paleo history, not to mention the fact that a whole-ass language was created for the game!

Maybe it's because the last Far Cry I played was Blood Dragon, or because I have played very few similar survival-type games to Primal outside Subnautica, but none of the crafting stuff really bothered me.

@uranaltruce: Even with Quiet, she has the potential to be compelling because she has the power to destroy so much. She gets inches away from killing The Greatest Soldier Whoever Lived (tm) at the start of the game and then spends the rest of it in his servitude. At any moment, she could open her mouth and let hell out.

Instead she's trusted relatively quickly. It could've been another facet to Miller and Ocelot's private war but that's forgotten for a stupid scene in the rain.

@stealydan: One of the early episodes of the History Respawned podcast is an interview with the people who developed the languages for FC: Primal. It's very interesting (tl;dr - One of the languages is basically Proto-Indo-European, the other an attempt to reconstruct a pre-PIE language.)

I don't know if this was a narrative formed in reviews or by the general gaming crowd, but i remember a lot of positive buzz around MGS4's decision to open up the triggers for the typical aim & shoot gameplay that is standard now. 'Finally, they made metal gear play well!' That never sat well with me, given that those older games were much more about selecting the right tool for the job than having to take out enemies with fast paced gunplay. It was only natural for me that the switching of items & weapons was put on the important buttons up top, while the square button was dedicated to combat.

For the type of game that MGS was, the quick submenu's to select weapons and items made sense and was applied quite nicely. I always enjoyed how a quick tap on the button would equip / unequip the last item/ weapon immediately, while a long press would open up the menu entirely. That was a level of convenience that we didn't see much during the ps1 days, and way more enjoyable than having to leave the game-screen to dive into menu's to select the right options. It felt like the game was put together with great care for the product. I'd even say that MGS's unique control lay-out helped to give that game it's own identity.

Sure, it's a good thing to let people use their own control-schemes in the name of accessibility, and standardized controls that feel immediatly comfortable add to that. Yet, i still think it's a valid choice for a gamedev to default to a certain controller lay-out that makes sense for their game, even if it means that you won't get the standard aim / shoot gunplay on the triggers.

SYNTHESIS FOR LYFE!

FORGET THE HATERS, SYNTHESIS IS THE ENDING PEOPLE OF "CULTURE" PICK!

I'm pretty sure I'd have a field day with journalists reacting to the Senran Kagura games if I cared enough to seek them out.

Trying to avoid mentions of The Last Of Us/other ultra major pieces, because that series is one of the most celebrated video game pieces ever. I think it's utter shite, opportunistic with the topics it tries/fails to deal with, and empty in the most conservative nihilist style that is ultra popular, but I'm a far minority compared to people who state it as a truly powerful piece of media y'know? It's a small fraction of people who dislike it, so it's not a "hot take" that people like it.

I'll go with Hitman Absolution.

I disagreed with the vast majority of 'Absolution is a bad game' takes at the time, and continue to find it baffling that a lot of Hitman fans mention it in the 'good game, bad Hitman game'. I disagree with a lot of criticisms of it, but the biggest one is the story not making sense/being awful.

It's like a lot of people never watched Tony Scott or Brian DePalma films, innit? Just a complete lack of media literacy seemingly causing a feeling that misunderstanding something makes it inherently bad because it's not an imitation of Things Of The The Release Time. You can dislike things you understand, of course, but it's weird that only Alex Navarro and a handful of others understood the one the nose theme/plot/style elements of Hitman Absolution.

It's extra odd in how the incredible Hitman games that came afterwards owe a huge amount to Absolution, far more than they do to any other Hitman game. I get the sandbox style of the game makes them much more appreciable, and they are all far better than Absolution because they are some of the best games ever made, but it still provides a disconnect or logic leap at points when you look at it in context.

Adam Sessler's take on Metroid Dread baffled me. He docked the game because it didn't do enough different from past titles in the franchise when, realistically, the last time we got a brand new 2d entry in the Metroid series (read: not a remake) was literally 20 years ago. It's not like they come out annually. On top of that, he heaped loads of praise on RE: Village for almost the same thing (hearkening back to classic RE). So, just in general, his review left me scratching my head a little.

Maybe it's just because it's so recent, but the discussion around Metroid Dread rubbed me the wrong way. I don't like it when critics hide behind "accessibility" when criticizing a game's difficulty. You know the games that always get brought up, Cuphead, Dark Souls, etc. It's the whole "all games need a difficulty slider" debate. And the thing is these games aren't even that hard; just give me a moderate amount of effort and I'm sure you can get through them.

@hippie_genocide: I can kind of understand that one. When it comes down to it, not everyone has the time or, in some cases, the skill or coordination to put in what you might consider a moderate amount of effort to git gud. I don't have a lot of free time, so if a game is going to require I sink a substantial amount of time in to it to get better than dying repeatedly for a week, I drop it. I would rather play something that's moderately challenging but isn't going to be me beating my head against a wall for days at a time.

Playing Doom Eternal has opened me up to some of the ire that game has received from some critics (and youtube people) and the dumbest take I hear is how there's no ammo. There is ammo. Chainsaw that ammo into existence.

The ideal video game is so hard that only one person on earth can finish it, and then they can tell everyone else how it "just takes practice" or whatever