It should have been better.

Have you ever bought a game you were *really* excited for, only to find that it wasn't what you hoped it was going to be? Ever had your expectations betray you, or a trailer/review/advertisement/friend/whatever mislead you? Has the experience deterred you from making other purchases?

...I've got a whole list of games like this. I'll type them out later.

This happens basically every time I play a game someone says is the "Best game of all time," or other similar claims. Regarding the quality of a particular game.

This is what we call "Setting yourself up for disappointment."

Paper Mario Sticker Star

I made the mistake of thinking it would be like the original games.

I'm gonna have to go with Breath of the Wild on this one. Although I did enjoy playing the game, this particular trailer had me excited for a whole lot more. I was hoping the game would feel more alive, and that the story would be presented in a breathtaking way. Unfortunately, the game fell short in comparison to that trailer for me, but at least it still managed to keep me addicted for a good amount of time!

Breath of the Wild, the hype was big and people still treat it like the best 10/10 Zelda game when while a good game, it lacked many good qualities that previous Zelda games had, for example:

- Fleshed out or memorable characters, the characterizations of the champions was pretty poor resulting in characters as two dimensional as most of the OOT cast. None of the characters really grew on me on the level of say, Midna or Linebeck.

- And longer, well designed and challenging or fun dungeons (Divine beasts were lacking in atmosphere and shallow in comparison to say: Stone Tower Temple, or Arbiter's Grounds, only Hyrule Castle in BOTW was a decent dungeon), and cool fun items to use and solve puzzles with. I rather have fun with the Spinner in one dungeon even though it becomes obsolete later then drudge through the dullness of the Divine Beasts/Shrines with the same runes from the beginning. Gathering all these cool items in older games also gave a sense of progression and growth as opposed the expendable weapons and the core runes that we are stuck with in BOTW.

I really enjoyed playing BOTW when I first got it and had a blast especailly in the first ten or twenty hours into it but like most open world games, it's kinda shallow. It's not the perfect game that people make it out to be. Many games before it did a lot more things better than it.

- Skyward Sword while ragged on by many, did a lot of things better than BOTW, like story, characters and especially dungeons. SS Link's relationship with Zelda was very heartwarming as well.

- Majora's Mask had a far more memorable worldbuilding, smaller in size, but a tense and gloomy atmosphere and the game shows well how much the lives of Termina are affected by Skull Kid's actions while in BOTW we rarely see the ramifications of Calamity Ganon's actions on the overworld, most NPCs don't even acknowledge it.

The circlejerk for BOTW is still pretty strong, I wish people didn't treat it like the best Zelda game when it's not. I'd get downvoted on reddit if I criticized BOTW.

Good to know I'm not the only player who felt like BotW was disappointing. It's still an excellent open-world game, but it has a lot of flaws. I still feel like the weapon durability detracts a lot from the experience as the only weapon that doesn't break is the Master Sword; I don't feel rewarded when I get a weapon for my troubles because it's going to break which makes it feel worthless to me. I don't want to use the weapons I get because I know they're all going to break if I do. I've heard people claim that it makes you feel like you need to prepare for some challenges, but I've never really felt the need to do much preparation for many moments in the game as I could usually get by with the weapons I picked up off the ground from enemies. Some people have also stated that it makes you experience multiple weapon types, but they all play nearly the same and that isn't freedom, like I hear so many players claim is the big selling point for the game.

Well, I have to say, all this BOTW criticism warms my heart. Although I knew it was never going to be particularly good to begin with, so it's not a game I was thinking of when I made this topic. xD

Two that immediately spring to mind for me are Ni No Kuni and Eternal Sonata. Both are absolutely gorgeous visually, have stunning soundtracks, but have absolutely no soul whatsoever. The cast and plot both are unbearably banal and made them both practically unplayable for me...which was infuriating, because I had hoped they'd both be significantly better.

Nights of Azure would have been so much better if KT had actually bothered to dub it, too. I have this complaint with a lot of their games - none of them live up to their full potential because they keep cutting costs when it comes to the localisation process.