zeldaring said:
I'm not really seeing how the wii line up is better then wiiu. Botw is considered the goat by many, tropical freeze considered the best 2d platformer ever by many, and mario kart 8 is the best mario kart, just look at the top wiiu games it seems like you are judging the wiiu more on sales then actual great games. I agree with you on xbox though but sony has delivered massively for ps4 compared to ps3 and fromsoft has changed the game and are now massive. capcom as well, they went from being mediocre 7th gen to capkings in the 8th. Japanese developers came back to life with 8th gen consoles and that's why 7th gen was so boring to me as well with Japanese devs having the worst gen they have had. |
I agree with a lot of this.
7th gen was dominated by the EA/Activision/Ubisoft triumvirate. I found most of their games to be boring as hell. BioWare's games never did anything for me, nor did Call of Duty. There were overall too many brown shooters in 7th generation. Japanese developers basically got shat upon by gamers and the gaming press. Capcom kept getting dragged for things like on-disc DLC. Bioshock was okay, but Infinite over-promised and under-delivered. The one Western series I really enjoyed from that time was Fallout. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were amazing.
PS3 started off pretty weak, though it got stronger in its later years and set the stage for PS4's success once they started remembering what made the PS1 and PS2 great, and it wasn't weaker versions of Western third party games.
360 was really only good for a few years, and that was because of Sony's mistakes and because Microsoft moneyhatted a bunch of Japanese exclusives. Once those bombed in sales and the 360 still flopped in Japan, Microsoft stopped, but the damage was done, and a cynical part of me thinks that Microsoft cared more about blocking content from PS3 owners than about building bridges with RPG fans. The RRoD and E74 pretty much soured my experience with the 360, and once the PS3 started getting decent games in 2008, my replacement 360 was pretty much a dust magnet. The Xbox One flopped because Microsoft started going all in on Kinect with the 360 (which is when the 360's sales really took off) and they figured that gravy train would keep rolling with biscuit wheels forever. The consumers ended up punishing them for it in 8th gen. I tried games like Gears and Halo, but they were not for me.
As for Wii and DS, I was glad to see Nintendo doing better after their struggles on the Gamecube, but there was a lot about that era that rubbed me the wrong way. I ended up enjoying games like Fire Emblem and Punch-Out more than Wii Sports or Wii Fit, which lost their novelty fairly quickly. Plus, I wasn't a fan of Reggie Fils-Aime, who preferred to tell people what he thought they should want rather than give them what they were asking for. It's thanks to him that the US almost didn't get Xenoblade Chronicles. Skyward Sword was pretty emblematic of the negative aspects of Nintendo's philosophy during the Wii/DS era. But we did get Dragon Quest 5 and 6 out of it.
PSP was representative of another problem in 7th gen. Japanese developers preferred to develop on PSP rather than PS3 or Wii. There were so many games I would much rather have played on PS3 than on PSP.
7th generation was when I seriously considered hanging up gaming for good.
8th generation was, in my opinion, when the gaming world began to heal itself. Japanese developers were back. At the end of 7th generation, there were blaring headlines saying that Capcom was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and was rife for a buyout. Just a few years later, Capcom pulled off a breathtaking comeback surpassed only by Nintendo's huge comeback with the Switch in 9th generation. RPGs were finally back. I was kind of bummed that Fallout fizzled out somewhat on PS4/X1, but I was having too much fun with other games to care much.
