Games that greatly exceeded your expectations

[HoloDust]

First Fallout in '97.

A friend of mine recommend this to me, knowing that I like RPGs. Fallout's intro played, Overseer, in first person view, told me what to do, and then the game switched to isometric perspective. Oh boy, was I disappointed. At the time I already played a fair share of first person open world RPGs and while I've played iso-CRPGs in the past and loved them, it's not what I expected for Fallout to be and not what I wanted to play at the time. But I kept playing...

Little did I know that, after an hour or two of playing it, I'd be completely hooked and go on later to consider it one of my favourite games of all time.