What is a book, manga, video game, movie, tv-show or anything else that you were really looking forward to, but when it finally happened, you found it lackluster and not meeting your expectations?
Jun '22
Jul '22
Honestly, the Lorax. I love the old animated special so I was looking forward to the new one. The design of the BGs and the Lorax character are quite nice. And I do not mind them turning the Onceler into an emo boy.
My biggest issue is the awful secondary plot with the boy who only wants to save the Truffula Trees so that some weird girl will like him. Also the book never said all trees were dead, only the unique Truffulas. The villain character is stupid with him literally singing about trees dying. I feel like the writers missed the whole point of the books, selling recycled air is not the same as destroying the environment because of hyperconsumerism. We need clean air, no one needed a thneed.
FFVII Remake. Not bad, but not great. I had high expectations, but was upset when they destroyed the battle system. Also, a 6 hour portion somehow turned into a 40 hour one. I liked how they developed some of the characters more, but they added a lot of additional elements and story changes I wasn't a fan of. I won't say what cause spoilers, but yeah.
Dissidia NT Final Fantasy.
I liked and played a lot the PSP versions, and expected to be a lot of time on the NT edition, but... it was horrible. Changed the one on one battle for a 3 on 3, and the resulting chaos was too much to follow whatever was happening, so you end up smashing one button the whole fight and that's it. You can't level your characters anymore (not like before), you can't buy equipment, you can't equip your characters with nothing, summons are less than before, and very unuseful, you can't learn new attacks, just some abilities that are way less than useful.
Basically, you play one fight and you have already played them all. The worse was that it requires a lot of energy to run, so there is a lot of loading screens, and little enjoyment. The only reason why I would play more than the 2 days I played it, it would be for the story mode, but I can see the movie on YouTube and that would be it. The worst thing Square Enix has given me.
Darksiders II. I was so excited - you play as Death, you go around hacking up massive demons like the first game (which was awesome), but now there's Diablo-style RPG elements! I love that kind of game!
Unfortunately, they fucked up the story and worldbuilding by bringing it in the most bizarre directions possible, the RPG elements were very disappointing and had zero depth, the puzzle elements from the first game were much reduced, combat was a dull mashfest, and overall it was much too easy, with my beating sidequests while 10 or more levels underleveled much of the time on the hardest difficulty. It was by no means awful, but there just wasn't much to it, unlike the awesome first game which holds up much better.
I'll also say Arkham City, though to a much lesser extent. The story and main quests were all great, and a lot of the collectibles were interesting and fun, but the sidequests were so bad. Most of them abruptly ended with nothing resolved right when they seemed like they were about to get somewhere really interesting - either blatant sequel bait or Rocksteady ran out of time, I'm not sure which.
For books, the Riftwar Saga. It's the first trilogy in a huge series with some 30-odd books in it, and I hear the second trilogy and the Empire spinoff are the best parts, but this first trilogy was kinda meh. The first book was awesome but each after it got steadily lamer, with the third one almost running on absurd deus ex machina, where bizarre magics that were never mentioned before suddenly threw the heroes into trouble and then even more bizarre things got them out again - often in extremely ridiculous fashion. The author also had a habit of presenting a moral quandary to the characters by putting their goals at odds with each other or with the realm, and then abruptly resolving it without anyone having to grow or make a difficult choice by picking a character and killing them off so that they're no longer an obstacle. "Do I potentially betray my uncle? I know he'll drive the kingdom into ruin if I let him continue, but I'd throw the nation into a war of succession... oh wait he got stabbed to death. Problem solved!"
Trails of Cold Steel, and even to some extent Trails from Zero because people actually uncontroversially think the latter is good, but it was kind of slow starting but didn't imo have the same charm and level of character writing as Trails in the Sky for me to actually enjoy the slow moments. Trails to Azure was excellent though.
Also thus far Elden Ring; I've heard very good things about it, but I'm just not feeling it so far ...
closed Jul 17, '22
