I am well documented for disliking Bioshock Infinite the first week it was out. I bought it on day one... I preordered it way early. Thst is why I have to disagree with your "obligatory popular game backlash" thing. I think everyone was blinded by the shiney from when it was new and your "obligatory popular game backlash" was just being being able to finally clear their heads.
Sure, there were always going to be people who liked it... but there were far too many for what kind of story it was, how it was presented and, of course, the bland Halo-esque gameplay.
When I wrote a small review for it (not on the Escapist so I won't plug the link) I brought up that I really liked the riding on a rail thing. But everything else bugged me: the two weapon limit; the copy-paste guns; the sniper rifle was unbalanced. Even the powers are all designed with gunning in mind when the first two bioshocks let you focus on plasmids as an alternative.
As for the story, it's balls. There was a clear case of an M. Night Shyamalan type of setup, with simplistic concepts presented in the most convoluted way. There was even that "what a twist!" moment. And it was presented in that exact way. One of the worst examples of story-telling I've ever seen in a game outside of JRPGs. THEY HAVE YOU WALK THROUGH HALF AN HOUR OF EXPOSITION! No gameplay, no puzzle solving, just you and a physical manifestation of "explaining shit". They, in fact, leave a lot of the information you get throughout the gameplay completely on the ambiguous side to make the non-game part more poignant.
And the story isn't even that good. Buckaroo Bonzai and the Convolution from the Fifth Dimension! The whole thing centers around a Deus Ex Machina pair of siblings causing the whole thing to happen to no reason in the first place. A small spoiler, but they COULD'VE tried to explain why Miss Lutece felt she had to get so involved and all they did was demonstrate how dedicated she was to the meddling.
Sure, you can say that it's the best narrative-driven FPS in 2013... but that's not saying a whole hell of a lot.
And yeah, there's no Ludonarrative Dissonance... I just think that people are trying to define why they didn't like this game. What'd I'd like to see is Jim STOP obsessing on the people who are obviously wrong and START addressing the actually relevant complaints about the game.
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Basically, I don't think the game got ENOUGH hate when it first came out. Everyone is overreacting to the hate it's now getting because they saw too much love at first.