The weird difficulty curve was what desincentivase me to play further. The game seems to be balanced for co-op or, at least, having a respawn mechanic makes dying in the longer dungeons far more tolerable.
I must preface by saying that I tried twice (once on launch and once with the latest update), but the game never ran on me. White screen at the start and straight to windows. I read forums and the solutions they gave me varied from reinstalling it to format the PC and start over fresh. Needless to say, I never went for it and ended up asking for a refund.
I might try again in a few years, when it is heavily discounted on some sale.
If it is the first or second sequel, they should focus on refining and improving. Most of the times, the first game is solid, but there is a lot of things that have to be scraped or half baked to put the game through the door. With more time, it comes the hindsight and the opportunity to fix what was wrong, add what was missing and improve on what works...
Beyond that, a franchise becomes stale, and there needs to have a mayor redesign of the game to justify it.
The Helena Taylor mess was ugly because of how she tried to weaponize mob mentality for her selfish reasons. Something that is not new, at all, but few times has been overblown and died out in much the same way. It will poison the conversation for years, and some of that poison is well earned. News media, opinionated people on youtube and twitter and the public in general will (and should) think thrice before jumping in the latest wagon of outrage and wonder "Are they trying to pull a taylor at me?"
If we are going with the original idea of the category, the best options for this year are the "Helena Taylor vs Bayonetta" and "Juji Naka vs Japan legal system". Either had the combination of "high profile", "what were they thinking" and showmanship that started and burned this year.
All other categories have the caveat that are older than 2022, or haven't been decided yet. For all we know, MS+Activision is on par with big acquisitions, and could be resolved in January; Stadia and Amico run ended in 2022, but the ship was sinking since long before that; FIFA/EA has some time coming, and we still haven't even seen anything officially FIFA branded, or EA Sports new title released (also, it could easily be retitled as "EA cuts ties with FIFA").
Studios are buying rights for IPs and getting preproduction of franchises that never see the light of day, all the time. They spend years in development hell and, if they are unlucky, execs will forget they have them the moment they turn the corner. If they are lucky, someone will remember several years down the line, buy the rights back and start this unholy cycle over again.
The has "stuck in preproduction hell" written all over its face, and good for them. The IP exist as a weird pure 90s attitude vehicle, that I don't think it works outside those very specific parameters. Its like someone tried to make a "Nickelodeon's Real Monsters" adaptation
What a roundabout way to ask for "my overrated game"
But, anyways...
Grand Theft Auto 4
It was a perfect 10 on metacritic for some weeks after release, everyone was going head to toes bananas for it. When I played it, I lasted maybe a couple hours. The movement is a slug, the shooting is clumsy, the driving is not much better and most missions were a variety of "go to this corner of the map, drive to this other corner", the only length being defined by the distance between the corners, and I was driving an aforementioned slug of a car in a street filled with other dumb, sluggish drivers that would make me instafail if I didn't dodge them doing dumb, sluggish stunts.
And the writing... the writing was just exhausting. It was the constant bombardment of the variety of "edgy" and "clever" that a 14 years old think its edgy and clever. Its the garden variety of dark that filled Liefeld comics in the 90s. Its sarcasm with nothing interesting to say. Its moody and introspective the same way a sad teenage goth kid school grade poems are moody and introspective. It straight up lifts tropes from movies and other media without any of the context or subtlety.
Out of those options, Miyamoto is the most consistently great... Although secretive Nintendo makes it hard to know how much involvement he actually has on those titles.
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