What are some anticipated games that (drastically?) fell short of your expectations?

Some for me are:

Sonic Shuffle-Not the best example, but a Sonic party game from some of the Hudson devs who worked on the Mario Party games. Sounds too good to fail, right, right? But it somehow did with some bland, forgettable mini-games. It also came out a year or so too early, so no Shadow, another miss.

Duke Nukem Forever-Perfect example of a game setting itself up for failure by taking too long to come out and leaving impossible-to-satisfy expectations (and why I honestly think Half-Life 3 will never come out, besides the fact that Valve doesn’t really make games, anymore and there’s only one reason the ex-writer would leak the whole story outline). 15 years after the last DN and they give us this? Very bland and forgettable.

Lair: Rogue Squadron but with dragons was an awesome pitch, but the final product was a mess.

Halo 3: For all the buildup about "finishing the fight" the campaign was underwhelming and most of it felt like I was just mopping up stragglers after the action had already happened.

Half-Life 2: Heard for years about how it was one of the best games ever made, found it a plodding and listless bore.

It's gotta be Sea of Stars. As a fan of Golden Sun and Chrono Trigger, I was really looking forward to this one. And boy, what a fucking disappointment that was. The soundtrack and the visuals are great, but the combat is incredibly repetitive and boring and the story and characters were just forgettable. I tried very hard to like it, but the thing was just terribly average. It's insane to me that it got an 87 on Metacritic.

Metroid Other M: It was sold as this epic blockbuster but the end product was undermined by dumb controls and even dumber writing.

Majora's Mask: After Ocarina blew my mind I was ready to be wowed all over again, but I just didn't like the Groundhog Day mechanic, it ruined the game for me.

I actually really liked Other M. My only problem with it was it blatantly copying Fusion in so many aspects (and often in inferior ways). Well, that and the terrible localization. But I didn't learn about that until many years later.

One that immediately comes to mind is Dark Souls 3. I was hyped for this as I love the series (yes even DS2) but man does DS3 fucking blow, it’s a weird amalgamation of Dark Souls sluggishness with Bloodbornes fluidness but you’re the sluggish part and it just does not work. It’s my least favourite in the entire Souls franchise.

Ratchet Remake, god I hated it. They completely destroyed Ratchet as a character. He wasn't the smart***, confident funny guy. Just didn't like it at all.

Guess it goes to show huh, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

It's the same as how a lot of people really hated DMC 2013 but I quite enjoyed it.

Hey, I liked DMC 2013 too ^^

I stopped anticipating games to live up to expectations very long time ago, but I admit I had few slip ups over last 2 decades with some of my favourite IPs. In order of appearance:

Fallout 3 - semi-descent RPG, but Bethesda painfully knows nothing (or doesn't care) about actual Fallout that folks at Interplay created.

Tomb Raider Reboot - sort of a disappointment, since from the very first trailer there were big warning signs that it will have nothing to do with actual TR games

LoZ: BotW - I was hoping it will be more like Zelda 1 (non-linear gated open world), that retains 3D Zelda era dungeons, but has overworld and structure like the LoZ1 (since there isn't quite any other Zelda, apart from the original, that does that, and I find that to be best balance between exploration and dungeoneering)...it was sadly something very different.

Baldur's Gate 3 - AKA Divinity: Forgotten Realms...great as megadungeon crawler, average as CRPG, subpar as D&D 5e game and piss poor as Baldur's Gate game.