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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
Revlid said:
Aw, you're right, man, I'm sorry.

I should clearly take the high ground of calling people masochists and obnoxious twits.
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It's all right, we all make mistakes. The next time someone complains that every criticism of a game is met with "git good hurhurhur" maybe you won't immediately answer "so git gud" and that way you will have the high ground when people call you out on it. I hope we all learned something today.
 
Revlid said:
Okay, and that's fine, but again – if you go online and complain about not playing a game, you can't expect sympathy. If pickaxe hunting isn't for you, you don't need to play a game where you're expected to hunt for a pickaxe! There are plenty of games where the pickaxe is handed to you right at the start of the game, every problem is solved with this one pickaxe, and tooltips will pop up regarding when and how to use the pickaxe. But there are games without pickaxes – and there are games that expect you to find your pickaxe, which expect that the challenge of discovering and seizing the pickaxe on your own merits will be rewarding to you. Insisting that such games are bad because you couldn't find the pickaxe is profoundly irritating, which is why you get this reception.


I'll admit that point and click adventure games aren't for me, but at the same time, I don't complain about the fact that I had to get through Monkey Island without receiving one automatic shotgun, therefore everyone who thinks it's fun is clearly fooling themselves or just enjoys pain and boredom. And if you tell me otherwise, you're an elitist prick.

You dig?
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I mean, you started out your response in this thread by acting exactly like the sort of person I said made me not like the Dark Souls games and then got surprised when I was hostile in return. If you want to convince people that your fave game is actually good, maybe you shouldn't call them infants or act like they're stupid or spout your dumb in-jokes at them like it's going to convince them that you're right.

There's a video (from a guy who actually likes Dark Souls) that does a really good job of explaining why people new to Dark Souls don't like Dark Souls. The game kills you repeatedly, forcing you to repeat the same section of gameplay over and over again and that's just plain not fun. What makes Dark Souls frustrating to me and makes it bad game design is that it doesn't do a good job of explaining the gameplayjust kind of plops down the expectation of repeated failure on me. That's not fun and that's not (in my opinion) good game design.

I appreciate challenging game play--I really like adventure games and point-and-click adventures with puzzles. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is probably my favorite game of all time and it has some pretty tricky puzzles in it. What I don't appreciate is being shown that I am going to face an exercise in frustration over and over and over.
 
FalaKAISER said:
People should stop bashing SAO's story to bash the games inside the story because I find that topic FAR more fascinating.
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porquenolosdos.jpeg

Is this really an unpopular opinion? The fact that SAO, ALO, and GGO would actually be absolutely awful examples of video game design seems pretty well-accepted – just like the fact that Quidditch is a terrible excuse for a sport with rules that exist solely to provide dramatic peaks and valleys for Our Hero.

Mila said:
I mean, you started out your response in this thread by acting exactly like the sort of person I said made me not like the Dark Souls games and then got surprised when I was hostile in return. If you want to convince people that your fave game is actually good, maybe you shouldn't call them infants or act like they're stupid or spout your dumb in-jokes at them like it's going to convince them that you're right.
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I think you're assuming motives that I don't have.

I'm not here to convince you that Dark Souls is good. I know Dark Souls is good. That's not to say everyone should play Dark Souls, or that everyone will enjoy it, but the quality of Dark Souls does not hinge on your opinion. More to the point, I'm very unlikely to be able to convince you that it's good. You've clearly given the games a college try, and you're clearly aware that your opinion on the matter is unpopular (else why post here?), but you still hold those opinions – so trying to pry them from you with a crowbar and strap you to a dentist's chair with eyedrops on drip until you git gud is unlikely to be productive.

My actual aim was to introduce a perspective you apparently hadn't considered – and only just now have seemed to acknowledge – which was that your bad experience was not universal. That not everyone was having the same awful time you were but somehow pretending otherwise, because they were mentally ill or just trying to look cool. That other people – quite a lot of them, it seems, considering the sheer size of the aforementioned club of elitist jerks – had actually engaged with the game on its own terms and come away with an entirely different experience than you, and found your dismissal of their perspective to be presumptive, ignorant.

Unfortunately, I let myself get sidetracked by the seldom worthwhile pleasures of making up insulting metaphors, so the point was rather diluted.

Omicron said:
It's all right, we all make mistakes. The next time someone complains that every criticism of a game is met with "git good hurhurhur" maybe you won't immediately answer "so git gud" and that way you will have the high ground when people call you out on it. I hope we all learned something today.
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Excuse me while I make the biggest wanking motion ever conceived by man or beast.
 
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Moving off Dark Souls onto a related topic that was brought up, on the origins of "git gud." It's a phrase that metastasized from the fighting game scene where it was generally used in response to someone bitching about "cheapness" and other scrub behavior. It moved to the Monster Hunter scene (I was hearing it back in MHFU) basically as a response to your standard "why isn't there a lifebar! Where's my lock on! Game too hard!" bitching. It's a rote response aimed at meaningless complaints; the game is structured in a certain way for very particular reasons, and complaining about them in a salty rather than actual in depth fashion means that you don't have much to bring to the community, and thus are dismissed with a "git gud." This of course moved to Dark Souls, where a huge point of the game is that it's extremely punishing for mistakes and that's where the fun is at. Your Soulsborne community wants this out of a game, and to complain about said difficulty is akin to complaining that a rhythm game makes you press buttons to the beat or fail.

This has been key to keeping a strong and focused community, as "git gud" acts as a basic rule system no matter where you go. It keeps bitchfests out of the community for the most part and naturally funnels people towards "how do I beat X" rather than "X is cheap." It's an informal rule that comes from the actual media in the center of the community and naturally spreads. And it doesn't actually make for an elitist community; people will write essays on how to beat bosses for and critique video replays of people who are bad at the game but want to get better! The rule isn't "be good" but rather "be willing to git gud." If you aren't going to take steps down the latter path you're not wanted because all you're going to bring are complaints.

Effectively, if this was a Souls focused community, the response to "game is too hard" being "git gud" is fully functional in terms of having a healthy community. It's a barrier to entry sure, but every good community have some sort of formal or informal rules, like an immune system. As this is not a Souls focused community, you probably shouldn't be using it as we don't get much benefit from the lingo and instead go with your followup of "this game is designed for people who like hard games, if you don't like it then that's fine too, nobody expected you to."
 
I think the best candidates for romance are Miranda, Garrus, Thane and Kelly (in descending order). There, my unpopular opinion.
 
vicky_molokh said:
I think the best candidates for romance are Miranda, Garrus, Thane and Kelly (in descending order). There, my unpopular opinion.
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Garrus actually forced Bioware to write some entertaining dialogue because for a mainline romance option he needed to be likable even to people who don't have a thing for iguana bird aliens.
 
Triggerhappy said:
Garrus actually forced Bioware to write some entertaining dialogue because for a mainline romance option he needed to be likable even to people who don't have a thing for iguana bird aliens.
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It's marketed as an RPG. As in, role-playing game. Roleplaying involves playing characters who are unlike you. That includes different political affiliation, species, sex and yes, even sexuality. So . . . shrug.
 
vicky_molokh said:
It's marketed as an RPG. As in, role-playing game. Roleplaying involves playing characters who are unlike you. That includes different political affiliation, species, sex and yes, even sexuality. So . . . shrug.
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Yeah, but you still have to basically appeal to what the players want to roll play.
 
Triggerhappy said:
Yeah, but you still have to basically appeal to what the players want to roll play.
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Well, everything in an RPG is supposed to be made fun in order to be fun. I just don't see why it would apply to Garrus more than to other characters. I mean, it's not as if me finding the romance branches of Kelly, Thane and Miranda has anything to do with being romantically attracted as a player to them - I don't think there'd be a chance of an actual constructive romance with anyone of them IRL for assorted reasons, from both sides.
 
Triggerhappy said:
Didn't Noin eventually bitch slap that out of him a bit?
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Don't think so. He mainly just interacted with Sally Po after the incident where he murdered all of Noin's troops. He and Sally were war buddies and probably the closest thing he has to a friend but that's it.


vicky_molokh said:
Well, everything in an RPG is supposed to be made fun in order to be fun. I just don't see why it would apply to Garrus more than to other characters. I mean, it's not as if me finding the romance branches of Kelly, Thane and Miranda has anything to do with being romantically attracted as a player to them - I don't think there'd be a chance of an actual constructive romance with anyone of them IRL for assorted reasons, from both sides.
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Yep. That's one reason I get irritated when people criticize BW's romances on the grounds that they are "unhealthy" or "unrealistic."

Nobody likes Romeo and Juliet because they think it's a great guide to teenage dating. People such as myself don't enjoy the Anders romance because we think it's going to have a happy ending. I think the first flirtation line you have with Anders is something like "oh, I love the "I'm so tortured thing" you got going."

Tragic romances that end in double suicide or you and your partner on the run are not things I hope anyone aspires to. That's why these are fantasies and that's why criticizing them on some bullshit moral ground is laughable.


Also since we're now just rattling off our fave romances, Zevran is the best Husbando. When I first recruited him in Origins? I chatted him up for fucking ever. His personality is so much fun, his voice is hypnotic and he looks pretty damn nice too. (love dark-skinned blondes)

Getting the threesome with him and Isabela is a high point of DA2, if for no other reason than you three blithely announce your desire to fuck then march off to do the deed while leaving your other companions standing there, Aveline in particular feeling nauseous and I can only imagine what's going through the head of Anders and Fenris if you leave them alone.
 
Nikkolas said:
Don't think so. He mainly just interacted with Sally Po after the incident where he murdered all of Noin's troops. He and Sally were war buddies and probably the closest thing he has to a friend but that's it.
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Ah yeah, that's the one I was thinking about. And bitch slap probably isn't the right word. But I do believe he actually mellowed out a bit over the course of the series.
 
vicky_molokh said:
It's marketed as an RPG. As in, role-playing game. Roleplaying involves playing characters who are unlike you. That includes different political affiliation, species, sex and yes, even sexuality. So . . . shrug.
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Which again, is something Bioware is absolutely terrible at. And has drawn the whole rest of the genre (and even genre adjacent games like Bioshock and inFamous) into their Red and Blue morality vortex.

Which still not as bad a transgression to game design as bringing over the dojin-game "romance" bullshit to a western audience.
 
Triggerhappy said:
Garrus actually forced Bioware to write some entertaining dialogue because for a mainline romance option he needed to be likable even to people who don't have a thing for iguana bird aliens.
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Bioware male romances for female protagonists (and the one gay romance maybe?) tend to be at least a bit less awkward than their waifu and Yuri counterparts for this reason. They're not writing something that's easy wish fulfillment for the player so I they have to pull double duty to get them invested.

I mean, this is pretty much the reason why Merrill is a bizarre moe weirdo who barely seems like she can function when you're not babysitting her, and Isabella borders on being a Dragon Age porn parody character, while Aveline is a relatively normal-ass person with a clear personal ethos and a life outside of your protagonist orbit.

Or why I ploughed through Dorian's entire dialogue run hanging on his every word because he had so much interesting shit to say while I basically skipped through most of Sera's base dialogue.

Or why I felt like I got to know Wrex in the first game while all I got out of Kiara is the fact that she's socially awkward and has sexual hangups, which I know because I constantly pestered her about the subject alone in a cramped poorly lit room with her back to the wall which apparently she's actually into.

That's not to say that Merrill and Isabella are that bad characters, but fuck man, why can't they have been written more like actual human beings?
 
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Leila Hann said:
Sure. But saying "I know its flawed, but I still like it" is very different from saying "the rules of good storytelling don't apply here because of the loooooooooreeee."
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Okay, yeah, I thought we were just talking about base quality v. popularity. Lore (or did you actually mean love?) shouldn't factor into that.

Actually on that note. Everybody who keeps talking about world building for a story. Please stahp and start writing your story. You only really need a rough skeleton to start.
 
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