Origami King at 80 meta shocks me. Best paper mario game to date. Loved the humor, spinning platform battle system and the puzzle based boss fights were awesome.

I'll never miss a chance to complain about The Last of Us 2. Horrible story, treating its audience like children, cheap unearned moral victories, the trans child stuff, questionable character motivation, the utterly unimaginative gameplay scenarios compared to part one,... Way too bold in some areas, way too timid in others. It does not work as a stand alone game. It only works (a little bit) because of part one. I truly hate most things about it. And I think it left a sour taste in many fans mouths, to the point where Naughty Dog really has to earn a lot of trust back with Intergalactic. The critics did not reflect that whatsoever. Most all reviews coming from actual publications raved about how daring and awesome it is. Strong disconnect between the fans and the critics.

GTA 4. Ranked as one of the best games ever. These days it's not even considered to be the best GTA by many.

GTA 4 gets knocked a lot, but I actually think it is the peak of the franchise, and maybe the best game Rockstar has made. 98 on metacritic is a bit much, I think it is extreme that any game can get that high.
GTA V on the other hand, that is a complete joke that it has a score of 97! I would give it 5/10 probably, it's easily the most generic of the 3D titles, the story is bad, the characters are boring, the World is empty and the missions are the most scripted in the series.
RDR2 at 97 too is also crazy to me, now it does do some incredible things (unlike GTA V), but it still has some very repetitive scripted mission, the pacing is weak and it doesn't control very well either. At least RDR 1 is fun to play, though it does have too little side content for an open World game, 95 is a bit high for that one too.
It's interesting, I would consider some of Rockstars more divisive titles like L.A. Noire and Max Payne 3 to be much more interesting and fun to play than their biggest critical successes post GTA IV.

Mario Kart Wii at 82 is quite generous if anything, I always thought that game was a massive disappointment. It controls worse than most of the other games (yes even without motion control), the balancing is completely off and it is probably the most luck-based game in the series.

As with GTA and RDR, Zelda is another of these series that just get top-scores by default whenever a new game comes out.
Wind Waker at 96 is surely inflated, that game is style over substance in my opinion, the pacing and gameplay leave a lot to be desired and the dungeon design is particularly weak, but it looks and sounds good, that is for sure.

Bioshock Infinite at 94, I will also never understand, that is maybe the biggest offender actually, to me it felt like drained all the suffistication out of the original and instead made this dumb arena-style shooter, but with mediocre gunplay. Out of all the 90+ scoring games on metacritic I have tried, this is probably the one that feels the most painful to actually play.

Doom Eternal is another game, where I don't get the fanfare, despite being a huge fan of the franchise. I just couldn't get into the gameplay loop of that game, too much micro management, too many weaknesses to think about, too hyper-active. Not my thing. But 88 on metacritic.

Finally, Burnout Paradise does not deserve the high scores it got, it is decent at best, but the open world-tidis completely ruined that franchise.

Okay, enough of the negativety. Let's look at the other extremes.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines "only" got 80. That is legitimately one of the greatest games I ever played. To be fair it was released in a pretty poor state, but still deserves much better.

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team got 81, which was significantly lower than the predecessors, but it is actually a really great game and can easily hold it's own against other Mario RPGs.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze only got 83 when it came out! That is crazy, probably one of the finest 2D platformers of all time.

Mirror's Edge only got 79! That game is perfection.

Sonic X Shadow Generations deserves a lot more than 80 imo.

I don't think I've disagreed with a post more in quite some time.

The game is a masterpiece even bigger than the original.

There is nothing on 2 better than Joel and Ellie's relantionship in 1, but there is nothing else better on 1 than on 2.

I would love to know which are those utterly unimaginative gameplay scenarios compared to 1. Both games are really great on that. 2 is even better than 1 tho. There is nothing in 1 like the Rat King fight or the whole seraphites island battle, the first encounter with them and you realizing they are actually communinacting by whistling is also something only 2 have. TLoU2 also have vastly better gameplay so every encounter can turn in something really cool and changing midway depending on how you approach it.

Are you sure you played TLoU2?

As much as I prefer to look at the positive side of things and not cave in to “hate brigades,” I cannot even begin to express how on-the-head this is. It’s a sequel that should’ve never been made, and is one of the only games ever where I dropped midway through due to boredom.

All 3D Castlevania's. Yes I said it even N64. If you don't let the worms in your ear, sit down and play them with no preconceptions you will be shocked.

N64 game was a solid 3D game for it's time and was fairly ambitious with certain aspects that did not become more standard until PS2 era 3D action games. Camera? Most 3D games of that era had a bad camera.  It's biggest crime was releasing after SoTN. 

Lament on PS2 is a Igavania game in 3D and is a good game.Some aspects you can say GoW borrowed from.

Curse of Darkness is a good game as well and the Familiar system is fun. (Castlevania Pokemon anyone) 

Lords of Shadow was great and to me felt as close to a 3D Castlevania IV as one can get. (My fave in the series is CVIV) 

LoS2 got a lot of shit and it does have some issues but after finally trying it a couple years ago. I enjoyed it. It goes back to Metroidvania. It's still solid but not as good as the first one.

In the case of C64, they had a lot of big plans for it. They basically wanted it to be an adventure on the scale of what Nintendo was promising with Ocarina of Time.  But of course, it was their first 3-D attempt at Castlevania, not helped by the fact that Nintendo was notoriously lax at providing development tools to third parties, and given that Konami was the only Japanese third party that supported the N64 in any meaningful way, they really should have gotten white-glove service from Nintendo. It got bogged down in development hell, and the first game was likely the result of Konami managment telling the team they needed to have something ready to ship, soon.  Legacy of Darkness was much closer to what the original vision for C64 was. The original vision of C64 had four main characters (Reinhart, Carrie, Cornell, and a chainsaw-wielding character called Kohler who got demoted to being a regular enemy in Legacy of Darkness).  The graphics had originally been planned to be better than they ended up being.

I'd say the bigger thing working against them was that Ocarina of Time came out only two months before C64 did, and C64 just got dismissed. For my part, I did buy it on launch day.

The 3-D Castlevania games are, nonetheless, good games, and 3D Castlevania deserved better than it got.

I agree with this one. Ken Levine really over-promised and under-delivered with this one. The Boys of Silence were supposed to be these huge menaces that roamed Columbia in the promotional material. In the final game, they were basically security cameras. I also thought Columbia would be more of an open-world exploration. It deserved mid-80s at best. 

SaGa Frontier is another game I felt got dumped on excessively. Yes, it had issues with being non-linear to the point of being confusing, especially when they game didn't drop a lot of hints in the game world about what to do. Lute's scenario was basically wander the world until you happened to stumble across the lady who knew the secret to your past in a bar in some seaside village. Emelia's scenario did do a decent job at guiding you to your next destination. But the neon-infused Magitek/cyberpunk art style was a banger, as was the music, and the battles were genuinely fun.