games you dislike that everyone likes and vice versa

[Goemar]

There is, they're all just Japanese.

There were three Puyo Puyo games on the DS (15th anniversary, 20th anniversary, and Puyo Puyo 7) and Puyo Puyo vs. Tetris on the 3DS.
If you have a flash cart or are willing to import then the DS games are relatively easy to play but PP/T is of course region locked so unless you've got a Japanese 3DS you're out of luck until someone figures out how to break the region locks.

Meh not really a handheld guy. Last one I played was some Online/LAN PC one, but it never got on with my new (at that time) laptop. Puyo is the kind of thing that needs to be on the PSN. Good quick play games seem few and far between.

+ Another game I hate, GTA IV - what a bag of crap.

[Koopaul]

I'm not a fan of Mother 3. It's my least favorite out of all the Mother games.

Why? Well look at it this way: Mother 1-2 is heartwarming. Mother 3 is heartwrenching!

At the end of the first two Mother games you get teary eyed with a sense of love, nostalgia, and hopefulness. By the end of Mother 3 I just felt terrible.

[Pik]

And that's why 2channel likes the first two better, too. also muh dragon quest formula

[Goemar]

Something that makes me sad is always more powerful than something that makes me happy. The Green Mile, Of Mice and Men and The Theory of Everything for example are all things which made me have that "I need 10 minutes to think about this" moment. Yes I loved EarthBound, but I remember it for it's music and wacky humour. Mother 3, I'll remember because after I completed it I just sat there, thinking, I didn't feel like I'd just completed a game, I felt like I had just experienced an important event.

I wanted/needed to know someone who had also completed it (my older brother completed a few days later) not too talk about it, but just so I knew someone else had experienced what I had. Mother 3 is not only one of the best RPGs of all time in my opinion, but also has the greatest narrative and characters in a videogame. Yes in The Last of Us I can see all the emotion, it was moving, I generally cared (hell getting Ellie killed terrified me) but when Flint flipped out when his wife died and of course the final battle came to it's conclusion - those are the moments that moved me the most of any videogame.

And with that it is with great sadness that Nintendo just doesn't do these kind of things anymore (or even much in the past). Mario, Zelda and Metroid etc are all great games but there's no depth to the characters. Nintendo obviously has some talented people and it's a shame we don't see more story/character based games from them. I'd loved to play a Nintendo game and have to take one of those moments again.

[Koh]

If you want top notch story in RPGs, try Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. Superb~

For a bittersweet story, try Lufia II, one of the best SNES RPGs.

For a lolsy story, try Half Minute Hero and Half Minute Hero 2.

[Koopaul]

With Of Mice and Men and The Green Mile and other dramatic stories, they have a powerful message. The message of Mother 3? I don't know. I thought too much about the logic behind putting everyone's memories in an egg, the anti-consumerism, and other things. I guess when it comes to RPGs that try to be too deep I think too much about it. I start poking holes and over analyzing things.

With those other stories you mentioned, The Green Mile, To Kill A Mockingbird and such, it's hard for me to find flaws. They seem perfect and the message clear. Mother 3 makes me go... "Eh? Was that really necessary?"

[Goemar]

Japanese story telling I guess. I think the overall themes and the story of the characters rather than the game's story is more important. It's like in To Kill a Mockingbird the journey of Scout rather than the actual story (the court case) has more impact.

[Koopaul]

Well I guess we just take our drama differently. That's how I feel about Mother 3. And a lot of JRPGs for that matter.

[Kriven]

The Mother franchises has always felt a lot like Brave New World and other similar dystopian scifi novels of the early 20th century. They contain elements which often don't make sense when examined under a microscope, their characters exhibit behaviors that don't really compute. With a lot of those novels, the events can feel too aimed. This character had to do this to this character just to get the message across, not to actually examine the character. Where I think Mother breaks from this is that it has that overly guided narrative style while also being an assessment of one specific character (namely, Itoi) as opposed to serving as warnings for the general populace. I mean, those dystopic warnings are certainly at play (Porky is warning against many of the "sins" himself), but they take a backseat to what is ultimately a story about a confused young boy trying to make his way in a hostile adult world.

I guess it has something in common with The Catcher in the Rye that way.

[Koopaul]

Only Mother 3 has a dystopia narrative.

The other two are very different in their approach and messages. Also I sort of disagree with overall anti-capitalist and anti-consumerism messages in the game. I kind of find it ironic that this message is being made on a video game of all mediums. I'm also somewhat morally opposed to the idea of erasing memories. I consider memories and knowledge of the past to be one of the most important things to humankind and without it we could never progress or learn anything about ourselves.

But, again, that's just me.

[Kriven]

EarthBound didn't take place in a dystopia in the traditional sense, you're right, but it was a world bordering on one if society refused to change. It was a world where cultists could mesmerize an entire village, where skateboarding greasers stabbing little kids at the arcade is an actual concern, where the local police force challenges ten-year-old boys to fistfights. It's a world wearing happy colors and bright smiles to hide the poverty and sick shit going on just beneath the surface.

The anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism ties into a general theme of being fake. Everything is fake, everyone is fake, nothing is genuine and what small glimmering specs of actual virtue there are should be cherished, because the world is going to do everything it can to stomp them out. Even if that means murdering them from the inside with a highly evolved Mewtwo from the future.

[~Axis~]

I've always had this deep hatred for Tetris. Ugh. It's fun and all but it just gets repetetive.

[Koopaul]

I don't know. You might be reading too deep into that. It seemed more or less to me that it was about an evil alien fucking with everyone's minds including wild animals, hippies, hieroglyphs, cavemen.

I really didn't see an anti-capitalist/consumerism message at all. Never once was it implied that all that sick shit beneath the surface was the cause of a society that refused to change. In fact the game took place around the world in various different cultures all facing weird problems.

[Goemar]

See? Discussion! That's what a lot of games don't cause now days. Even if you don't really know exactly what it's trying to say or if you agree with what it's saying it still makes you talk about it.

[Koopaul]

Hm you can have a discussion about most games nowadays. In fact we're on a forums, discussion was innevitable haha!