Earthbound. Final Fantasy VII. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. HALO et al.
These games annoy me to no end, and I hate them.
STOP! Please! Put the pitchforks down, and let's talk about this reasonably, okay?
Games come in a wide variety of genres, graphical and gameplay styles, and levels of quality. Some games are known for being so bad they're legendary, while there are some -- perhaps more, perhaps less -- that have earned legend status for how good they are. Nay, not good, but absolute gaming perfection in cartridge or disk form. Games that transcend being mere games and become cultural icons.
But do they deserve it?
My story starts on a chilly Christmas eve in the mid 90's. On this Christmas, I received a PlayStation. With the PlayStation came two games: Crusader: No Remorse (a very UNDERrated game in modern times, but we'll get to that some other article,) and Final Fantasy VII. The console did NOT come with a memory card.
To be fair, this would not be my first experience with the world of Final Fantasy. That had come at the hands of the original a couple of years before thanks to a fiver and a lucky yard sale find. Nevertheless, I booted up both games as soon as I had them attached to a television. The jump from the two-button NES pad to the PlayStation's myriad buttons was overwhelming at first, but I managed to complete the first zone of Crusader eventually, and thanks to its password support I happily closed the game and moved on to the bigger, blander case next to it.
I fought with the controller. I couldn't press the button at the same time as my party members, leaving me stuck on the button puzzle minutes into the game for near a quarter of an hour. The game's pre-rendered backgrounds were fuzzy and oftentimes hard to figure out just where I could go and where I couldn't. The combat was slow-paced and uninteresting, feeling at once too overpowered and too feeble compared to my good old vintage Final Fantasy.
And then I tried to save the game.
Needless to say, my first experiences with FFVII did little to enthuse me. With the eventual acquisition of a memory card I did learn to enjoy the game, but in my mind it sits not as one of the reigning champions of the series, but near the bottom of my personal list.
Imagine my surprise, then, when we eventually gained internet access, and I learned that everyone in the entire world ever completely disagreed with me. Not only that, but should anyone ever so much as suggest that the title was anything other than JRPG perfection whose only competition was Earthbound they would be violently ridiculed until they left, the attitudes of many denizens of the internet being quite poor even in those halcyon days of yore.
That's not to say I truly hate the game. In fact, I do appreciate what it's done for the genre, and the gateway it opened for many western audiences to the world of JRPGs in general, making the genre one of the strongest of the 32- and 128-bit eras. I even enjoy playing it myself nowadays, though it still pales in comparison to other entries even on the PS1. All that said, though, I DO hate seeing the constant praise and nostalgia-blind devotion people lay on the game, because as good as it is, it isn't so great as everyone claims.
My experience with the original Halo was sadly similar. As a player who had grown up with a mixture of console and PC games, by the time the sixth generation of consoles rolled around I was already well versed in the world of FPS gaming, from DOOM to Quake 3. Despite this, I became caught up in the hype for Microsoft's big Killer App as much as anyone else, waiting anxiously for the day I could play it. Not long after it came out one of my friends obtained an Xbox and the game, and when I sat down to experience the godlike vision I was expecting....
I was underwhelmed. What did this do that Half Life hadn't done before it, with better controls? What could this offer that I hadn't already seen in countless other games? My friend sat enthralled by the game, himself a console gamer through and through whose experience with FPSes had previously been limited to Goldeneye and TWINE on the PS1, but I found myself wading through the horrendous be-Duke'd controls and longing to pull out the disk and go back to Tony Hawk 2X instead. Later entries in the series would do little to improve my opinion -- some, such as Halo 2, going so far as to make it much worse. Yet to speak to everyone else the games were masterpieces of the purest kind, fun single- and multi-player and the epitome of what FPS gaming could be.
As for Ocarina of Time? I loved the original Zelda, Link's Awakening, and STILL adore A Link to the Past. Ocarina of Time, while worthy of the Zelda name, just never played well to me (clunky controls with no sense of flow, featureless world, etc.,) and to see people consistently praise it as the series' high-water-mark then bash Wind Waker continues to baffle me.
Earthbound is, and always has been/will be, Earthbound: a rather lackluster JRPG with shite graphics and shallow gameplay wrapped in a quirky-dark storyline that for some reason people can't get enough of.
Let's get the obvious point out of the way first. These are all good games, GREAT even in some cases, especially for the console they were released on. All of them have had a significant impact on games since, and all of them deserve to be played by anyone serious about understanding the development of games so that their impact can be more fully respected. Halo revolutionized console FPSes much like FFVII did for the western interest in JRPGs some five years earlier, and Ocarina of Time changed the very way most people look at action/adventure games. Earthbound is Earthbound; no more, no less. They all deserve respect, and appreciation for what they are.
None of them, however, deserve to be treated as infallible examples of their form.
No game is perfect, which is why Game Academy will never grant a perfect score. (Rumor has it we're reworking things to get rid of numbers, but that might not happen so shhhhhh!) Likewise, opinions are just that: opinions. Good, bad, everyone sees every game differently, and as much as reviews might strive to be objective as possible there will always be some subjectivity contained within.
All that said... look at your games, both your favorites and your least, without nostalgia glasses, and tell me: can you really still say that Final Fantasy VII is the pinnacle of the JRPG when even within its own generation it was up against competition like FF IV, Legend of Dragoon, Dragon Quest VII, and even Paper Mario?
