Most Overrated Game

[Dr3Daemon]

Apples and oranges. FFVII is a story, Goldeneye is a game. You can rate a game quite quickly by either playing it and seeing if it was fun, or by watching someone playing it and seeing if they are having fun. To tell if a story is great you need to really get into it. And if you don't get it even that doesn't make it "not great" it could just not be for you. I never really got Dickens - that doesn't mean his work isn't great, just that I'm not a fan.

So, FFVII is straight up awesome. I played it when it came out, I've played tons of RPGs since and I played it again recently and it was every bit as good as I remember, and better. The game mechanics are now outdated and yeah there are some things that aren't perfect, but if you are playing an RPG for the game mechanics you are never going to be having fun, stop wasting your time!

FFVII presents an epic story of love and tragedy in a whimsical fantastic world. It doesn't explain everything and not everything makes sense, but that is the point - it is fantasy. And not Lord of The Rings, everything mapped out and detailed to the Nth degree fantasy, but Alice in Wonderland, Narnia or Grimm's Fairytales fantasy where weird stuff happens and you just deal with it and see where the story goes.

So no, FFVII doesn't give you a detailed and consistent world filled with fleshed out mock-realistic / gritty characters like many other RPGs. But what it does do is evoke emotions and entertain and excite (if you are the right kind of person) and it does that better than pretty much any other game I can think of.

The answer is all there in the fact that one of the playable characters is a remote-controlled robot cat / giant moogle combo that uses a megaphone as a weapon and is also a spy. Either you are the kind of person who wants their game designers coming up with stuff like that, or who wants them balancing the multi-player maps to the nth degree or writing back-story for the shopkeeper in uninteresting town No10. I want more cat-robots.

 

[Zefar]

I'm surprised that you guys were surprised at Half-Life 2 being considered overrated.

But HL2 isn't overrated either. It made game developers realize that you can be in your character all the time while still telling the story. It did that very well too. They introduced one the most fun weapon in a game, The Gravity gun. This baby could make you save ammo like mad and it's kinda game breaking in way. BUT when you can throw Saw blades at zombies such points get nullified.


As for the two other game. Neither Golden Eye or Final Fantasy 7 are overrated.

They deserve the praise they get.

FF7 pretty much kicked off the whole jRPG thing and super sized swords. It was also quite fun to play when you first played it back when it was released.
Having bosses with 1 million HP was also a new thing. Made the last bosses look like kittens.
Random encounter isn't a thing I'm bothered by but this was generally because of hardware limitation. Still some people enjoy this random encounter system.

The story at the time was rather new what I can remember. You also had the last boss character in your party just being awesome and killing enemies in one hit which is rare for newer games to do. Actually I don't think any of them do it.

It had at least 40 to 60 hours of gameplay. It just isn't a bad game and neither is it overrated. The music was also very well done and at the time had the best boss battle music to exist. Very few games comes close to making such a good boss battle music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVBM3bX7xdw THIS is how you do a boss battle music. For the last boss you got Sephiroth theme which just really show that it's the last fight.

Not to mention the game spawned some of the most impressive fight scenes for gamers to view in their newer titles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM1gmDMQ1YY
Also the Advent Children movie. Unreal? Damn right. Fun? Damn right.


For Golden Eye we got the first good Console FPS game that was actually a lot of fun to play. It's also arguably one the best Movie game out there. Had TONS of weapons too. This was a nice thing because you had the chance to play around.

Aiming was also pretty neat. I often felt more at home with a N64 gamepad than a 360 or PS3 gamepad when aiming in a console game.
The game itself as a console shooter is still good. While the AI can't shoot unless you're in sight without cover it's because to make the game somewhat easier. Without it they would shoot you all the time.

So it's there due to balance. It's also really really hard on those later stages.

They wouldn't be so highly talked about if they wasn't that good. They both set the bar for their genre something which should be respected.

 

[Atmos Duality]

FF7 is immensely overrated today. Goldeneye was just forgettable after a time because FAR SUPERIOR shooters arrived after them, and perhaps more relevant, is that the market is positively flooded with them now.

JRPGs? They've fallen on hard times.
But FF7 was a catalyst of not only Sony's meteoric rise above Nintendo (altering gaming history as we know it quite profoundly), but also one of the pillars in nerd culture that would later devolve into full-blown "Japanophilia".

Really, even just a decade ago, JRPGs were HUGE games to watch for. Even niche' titles like .Hack, Suikoden, Xenosaga, and "Tales-of" (niche outside of Japan, mind you) had solid followings despite living in the shadow of Squaresoft/Square-Enix.

But by today's standards, FF7 is a very fractured, convoluted storyline made immensely worse by the shameless pandering Squeenix did.

Spoiler: The FF7 Compilation

-Advent Children was basically a love-letter to fan-fiction writers and featured absolutely nothing of note in terms of plot, characters, or anything beyond the amazing CGI, really.
-Dirge of Cerberus plays like a terrible, un-finished clone of Devil May Cry, and has a story so hackeyed and convoluted that it must have been inspired by fan-fiction.
-Crisis Core was...actually not half-bad. Zack Fair was a likeable protagonist with a good, albeit simple story arc and a tragic fate.
Of course, most of the game has him chasing a pretentious, useless retconned character who contributes nothing other than a brilliantly cool, but pointless cutscene involving Sephiroth some cannon fodder for Zack to beat up for gameplay purposes.

Though we've moved beyond FF7, it's still the foremost example of "overrated" in my mind today.