Binding of Isaac: a roguelike game

Super Meat Boy: old school 2D platformer with hardcore difficulty. 

Hollow Knight: one of the best Metroidvania games in recent years.

Steamworld Dig: a Metroidvania inspired game with steampunk themes. 

Sonic Mania: made by indie developers and many people claim it's the best Sonic game ever made. Character designs look much better than anything Team Sonic has come up with as of late. 

Shovel Knight: looks and plays better than any game from the 8-bit era.

*facepalm*

I honestly saw this with many a mascot besides just Mario, like with B&K, Conker, Gex, Bubsy and even Sir fortesque (his head being the memorable part since his entire body is covered in average medieval armor).

Marketing the currently popular mascots back in the day certainly helped, more so than the elast popular oens today which are either forgotten or have a small cult following.

The new characters will either hit it big with a specific crowd or just remain small with a cult following (unless you're a F2P mobile game that has some adorable looking mascot like the one from Cut the rope).

No Shantae. ☹️

You must be playing the wrong indies then.

Mass generalization threads like this always make me chuckle.

I'll never really understand why people limit themselves with generalized labels. "I don't like indies!" "I don't like AAA games!" "I don't like modern games!" I don't really give a rat's ass about that. If I see a game that looks fun or entertaining, I'll play it.

There have been some fantastic games made by smaller developers and I'm very glad I didn't miss some of them because of a preconceived bias.

Why can't everything look like Nintendo?: The thread.

The thing about being an indie is you don't have the luxury of focus testing a character over and over until you say "fuck it" and slap some big eyes on it like the AAA overlords. Indies should be focusing on how the game plays over trying to sell characters on lunchboxes.

Blame the designers, not the size of the studio and/or budget of the game.

As someone who loved Persona 5 and has the Take your Heart Edition. Persona 5 has a shit story and some of the least memorable characters in the the series. So it's funny to see a post like this.