Criticize Something You Love

[shirkbot]

Media: This might sound incredibly vague but hear me out. I love media, virtually all of it (even the occasional advert) to the point that analyzing it is a huge part of my study and future research. That said the business side of media production makes me so indescribably angry that there are no words.

Internet: You bring me so much joy... but you're so freaking petty.

Seconded.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Netrunner. Why u no reprint faster that old datapack I'm missing!?

 

[The Wykydtron]

Here's where I would criticise Persona 4 but as anyone should know, Persona 4 is perfection incarnate so i'll have to move onto the next few things on the list.

Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. The original VNs are fucking brilliant but they dropped the ball on the anime, holy shit. As someone who watched the anime first then got hold of the actual VNs years later, after comparing the two at even the base level you can see how much shit they left out. That and the anime didn't get a second season so I hope you got hold of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni Chiru or you can eat shit cuz nothing in the anime will give you a clue as to what the cliffhanger was about.

Ok and as much as I adore Umineko, the ending was... not bad but kinda weird and almost underwhelming but still made some sense even if "sense" is really weird once you get fully into Episodes 5-8. I wasn't expecting a traditional ending anyway because that's not Umineko's style yo'

I do love the choice at the end. I'm sure the choice does nothing to change the ending (i've not checked though) but it's there as a form of closure for you as a player. I'm not spoiling anything but perspective changes drastically by the end. Thanks Erika. You fucking *****.

[sub][sub]I hate her so much but she's such a good character and completely necessary for the plot to be a good as it is, it's honestly aggravating[/sub][/sub]

Another quick one, I would have loved for Monster Girl Quest to have had some proper CGs for the really important story parts. Yes I want an eroge game to have less porn CGs and more plot CGs, that's how good MGQ is. I mean really, did we need like 5 separate images for goddamn Chimera Bug? All in a horrific art style no less? Give me a CG of the part where Luka goes fucking ham on those dickhead plants in Plansect and seals 50 of them on his own. That was fucking hype. Hell if I could draw, i'd draw the scene directly after winning the fight with the Monster Lord myself. Hype overdrive.

 

[Rylot]

In Scott Pilgrim the main romance between the title character and Ramona never really made a lot of sense. It just seems like a few scenes of them enjoying some hobbies together would have helped prove why they should be fighting so much to be together.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Mad Max: Fury Road - Those lines Max utters when he's strapped to the front of Nux's car sound obviously dubbed, and barely have any reason to be there. Max is not a talker, and he would've expressed more just being silent and annoyed.

Also...

Spoiler

...Max didn't get to kill the Doof Warrior, which I found quite disappointing. That guy screamed for a unique and awesome death by Max's hand and we didn't get it.

Berserk - While I like (pre-Eclipse) Caska, she's really just a love interest. And it's also weird how before Guts' 'hundred man slaying' she was a fully disciplined soldier, and afterward she becomes all girly and fragile.

And ofcourse the quality of the manga drops significantly after the Tower of Conviction arc.

Rick and Morty - It sports the same tired old family dynamic we've seen millions of times already. Man-child/slightly cowardice father? Check. A mother constantly shaking her head at her husband's behaviour? Check. Self-absorbed, bratty teenaged sister? Check. Young male protagonist who's a loser and in love with the prettiest girl in school? Check.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

Mass Effect 3: I love you, but my God the hour or so between leaving Earth and going to Menae was frustrating as balls because regardless of difficulty level it's still a damn hand-holding exercise.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: you were fan-fucking-tastic up until the writers or the execs realised no one had the balls to call "REBOOT" the one time it would have fucking helped so we weren't lumbered with the Endingtron 3000.

James Cameron: I can forgive almost anything you do or have done, but would you shit or get off the pot with Battle Angel Alita's movie rights.

 

[FPLOON]

Snickers: Why the fuck do you not sell the Big Size in stores anymore? That's some bullshit right there!Haikus: There are times where you think you're clever, but you're not... You're simple as fuck!Tales of Symphonia (PS3): I get that you're the PS2 version upscaled to HD, but you couldn't have upscaled the framerate back to 60 like in the fucking OG GameCupe version? Fuck your "30 fps" shit!Brony Music: I sometime can't feel the "MLP:FiM/pony" that supposedly inspired the piece of Brony Music...The High School Musical trilogy: The first one's a fluke (kinda), the second one shouldn't have existed plot-wise, and the third really didn't need a full theatrical release...

 

[sonicneedslovetoo]

Planetside 2, I've played this game more than almost anything in recent history but its very hard to convince people that the starting weapons are some of the better ones in the game(tf2 style, everything is a sidegrade) and despite the weapons costing 7$ you only really need to every buy one per class(and most of the better ones cost less than 5$). So the game ends up looking like a bit of a money hole.

Skyrim, I love this game, its about a 1000x easier to mod(and keep stable) than any game Bethesda has ever made, but its also very dumbed down and you have to install something like SPERG in order to make perks interesting. Since its so dumbed down its also much harder to implement more rpg-like features into the game outside of say "Requiem" which is so incompatible with everything else you pretty much have to chose between it and other mods.

Android Tablets, I had a Galaxy Tab S and it kicked ass, except for the storage for a premium 400$ tablet 16gb of storage is disappointing especially since you can buy a 128gb microsd card for 60-70$. Also while lots of people are saying that "mobile games are the future" it was INCREDIBLY hard to find any that were worth playing at all. However it did allow me to play "monument valley" and that kicked ass.

Steam, I love you steam but greenlight is mostly a bucket of trash and I no longer even look at the front page anymore since its so filled with garbage.

Tutorials, tutorials these days have taken a major que from pop up ads in that they've decided to become the most annoying thing ever. Somehow these days its acceptable to have tutorials that stop EVERYTHING pop up on the screen and vomit text on you like those ads telling you about those "sexy" mmos. It is unimaginably frustrating to be fighting somebody when I'm just starting a game and it stops everything mid sword swing and interrupt my literal first impression of the game to tutorialize things in the worst possible way.

Nintendo, their mob extortion mentality for youtubers seems to be part of a strategy to gradually implement worse and worse things slowly so nobody really makes a stink about it.

 

[Hoplon]

Star Trek - Space travel is a neat idea until you go and bugger it up by changing the warp factor scale just so you can make Warp 10 be transwarp speed. There is no valid excuse for that, none, especially after changing the concept of what transwarp is supposed to be.

Seems perfectly reasonable. The numbers prior to the change were completely arbitrary and gave no sense of scale. The current system, on the other hand, is not arbitrary and gives a sense of scale. I'm not sure how this "buggers" space travel.

nah, the warp system is deliberate fudge to allow writers to cover their arse in the case of not knowing how far or near something is.

on the subject of Star trek, oh dearly beloved, if you can beam something you can replicate it you toss rags. the two systems are very close to being identical and why they are different comes down to "because the writers don't want that short cut other wise their story is even stupider than normal" and it drives me up the frigging wall.

 

[Charli]

Ugh MMO's ...the grind, the shallow quests, the repetitive tasks. World of Warcraft being one of the worst offenders of bad story telling at the moment.

[sub]But I love them.[/sub]

 

[Eddie the head]

Farscape got kind of wired near the end. It feels like they where like fuck it we're out of ideas at this point. Although it was funny seeing Crichton speaking Klingon to a butch of aliens that can't understand him. The later seasons just had a general feeling of uneasiness to them I don't know.

Doctor Who and Star Trek have a tendency to make aliens that are "humans but better." Time Lords and Vulcans being the biggest offenders. Although I guess that's something that Enterprise got right, and that's not a phrase that's used often. I mean look at Sebaceans form Farscape. They look exactly like humans, but to say they are "better" isn't true. Sebaceans much more specialized, and there are more then a few times where being human is a good thing.

The Mistbourn books kinda had a slow middle. The first book there was a clear bad guy and a clear objective. The second book kind of slowed down with the whole siege thing going on. And the third one ended with some sort of metaphysical bull shit. That felt out of place.

The Wheel of Time books spend way too much time describing women's clothing. Also slow in the middle.

 

[Skatologist]

Bioshock Series: You always have shitty final boss battles that are anti-climatic, you know that right?

Many love/sex songs: Can we please lay off the emphasis on a woman's physical appearance and maybe demonstrate she has some agency and opinions. At least have her as entity greater than simply being your object of desire. At least give her a name.

TF2: Needs a whole bunch of stuff. Like why after 30 minutes of playing, why I usually get booted out of servers for a few hours? Why did we abandon MVM? When the hell are those maps getting out of beta? Why do all those paint jobs look unappealing? Is there any possibility of introducing female skins for the mercs too? Please.

 

[Strazdas]

you probably never heard of it, but there is a fun little strategy game called War and Peace. I LOVED the attention to economy it paid. you have to send workers with food to feed your soldiers for example. The combat is utterly broken, though. i quickly found an exploit where i could kill half of their army while sacrificing only 1-3 soldiers of my own.

 

[ClockworkAngel]

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate: I really wish the game made better use of all the 3DS controls.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Making a single criticism against this game is hard, so I'll just say that it's a hot mess.

Final Fantasy XIV: Easily the stupidest implementation of housing and vanity gear in a MMO. (Also the expansion having the exact same grind as before really sucks.)

Mario Kart 8: The Blue Shell needs to be reworked if it's going to be anything but a spiteful item.

Natsume, or Neverland: Where is Lufia!?

Nintendo: Stop holding my hand!

 

[Queen Michael]

I love the Harry Potter books, but J.K. Rowling loves the adverb "darkly" way more than she should.

 

[Something Amyss]

nah, the warp system is deliberate fudge to allow writers to cover their arse in the case of not knowing how far or near something is.

But in one way or another, it was always that. I'm not really saying otherwise, either. It's just that the redefinition of warp speed made things more consistent. Or rather, was intended to. You don't really need to have a sense of scale or distance for that.

Hm. That reminds me.

Stargate: The coordinate system is dumb. The explanation is dumb. The attempts to retcon it are dumb.

Franchse's freaking awesome, though.

Many love/sex songs: Can we please lay off the emphasis on a woman's physical appearance and maybe demonstrate she has some agency and opinions. At least have her as entity greater than simply being your object of desire. At least give her a name.

"Girl" is the most common name for women in the world. Kind of like the prevalence of "Mohammed."

Farscape got kind of wired near the end. It feels like they where like fuck it we're out of ideas at this point. Although it was funny seeing Crichton speaking Klingon to a butch of aliens that can't understand him. The later seasons just had a general feeling of uneasiness to them I don't know.

In fairness, wasn't Farscape pretty much under the threat of cancellation for like two seasons? That's not to say it's a good thing that they did it as they did, but cancellation threats screw up a lot of shows (Babylon 5 and Stargate (pick one) both come to mind).

Haikus: There are times where you think you're clever, but you're not... You're simple as fuck!

Okay, that deserves props.

 

[Poetic Nova]

The sound of wailing sirens in Carmageddon as soon as a police unit has spotted you drives me crazy at times.

 

[09philj]

Bravely Default: Florem. Sage Yulyana. Yeah, that.

Fire Emblem Awakening: The plot wanders aimlessly in the second act and doesn't do much interesting, and also wastes it's antagonist rather.

Katawa Shoujo: I often wanted to seize Hisao by the lapels and shout at him what he should do in this situation instead of the fuck up he's about to make.

 

[happyninja42]

The Mistbourn books kinda had a slow middle. The first book there was a clear bad guy and a clear objective. The second book kind of slowed down with the whole siege thing going on. And the third one ended with some sort of metaphysical bull shit. That felt out of place.

Omg someone else who didn't like those books! *glomp!* Yeah, that book series really ticked me off, especially the end, where Brandon basically used one of the most paper thin religious reactions to having your faith lost, that it made me sick. Especially when you consider that the

Spoiler

The character who had the crisis of faith didn't actually believe any of those religions, he was just a repository of them. He even made a point to SAY he didn't believe them, but kept them for posterity. Then he learns they are wrong, and suddenly can't find the drive to do anything?!? Nothing means anything, so why should I bother? Yeah, that's the bullshit reasoning that a religious person has, how they THINK we atheists see the world. Total crap.

I love the Stormlight Archive, but the Mistbourn series can just die in a fire.

RUSH: Love this band, but they can be a very niche thing. Their music can be odd at times, and only enjoyable because you are a RUSH fan, but trying to get someone to enjoy it is near impossible.

John Scalzi: I love him as a writer, but he uses "He said, she said" WAAAY too much in his conversations. Listening to his audiobooks makes this really apparent.

 

[Fallow]

We all have our favourite things, but we should be willing to recognize their faults. Some don't seem able to (looking at you, Star Wars OT fans), but I thought it'd be a fun exercise. I'll get the ball rolling:

Dragon Age Inquisition can be a slog to go through. So much stuff to do, I feel I should do it, but sometimes it gets tedious.

Ode to my penis,
Why are you so shy, dear friend of mine?
Is it the cold winter breeze, preceding Santa's sleigh?
Perhaps it is the internet, crushing your imagination, reducing your ability to the lowest possible function?
Oh penis dear, where is the strength of youth that once was in your step?

Thank you.