There’s no worse feeling as an aficionado of something than when a work is either completely misunderstood or just plain rejected by both the fanbase and critics. Usually, the fans will love it even though it’s panned by critics, or the critics will love it but the fans won’t be on board, or often both the die-hards and the critics will embrace it with open arms. But occasionally, both totally miss the boat.
My votes:
REM’s record Up. To this day, many/most fans hate the record, and critics doo-dooed all over it. I think that it’s one of their strongest recordings; instead of just bringing in hired hands to fill departing drummer Bill Berry’s (gigantic) shoes and continue jangling along, they instead took their sound sideways, embracing ancient drum machines and ambient textures. Half of the tracks don’t even feature drum kit, instead opting for sleigh bells, tympani, or no drums at all. It’s one of their most interesting records, but the songwriting is still so great that it’s one of their best.
Final Fantasy XII, specifically its battle system. The entire game has now become shorthand for “ur doing it wrong” in the world of console games, with the accepted critical and fan attitude being that it was a major misstep. I think it was, instead, the most refreshing battle system in any console RPG in at least a decade, and the realtime/no transition nature of it made grinding through 100+ hours an actual pleasure. Setting up the gambits was a real art - you’re not “letting the computer play the game for you,” but are instead artfully automating all of the same options, in the same order, that you’d just be manually clicking in each and every battle!
Need for Speed 2 was considered the worst of the series at one point. I haven’t kept up with it since it started pandering to the Fast and Furious crowd, so there may be one considered worse by this point. However, I think NFS2 was the best and still enjoy playing it.
I agree with the OP about Final Fantasy 12. I quite enjoyed “debugging” my party so that they did everything the way I wanted. I thought some of the espers (or whatever the summoned monsters in that game were called), were kind of stupid looking, but all in all it was a cool game.
Almost everyone I knew except for a couple hated Hannibal. I really liked it, though. Sure the ending may have bothered some but I thought it was cool–disturbing, fun, all that great stuff.
And I agree with the OP about Up, with the caveat that I though the first half was very strong, while the 2nd half was meh. But by that time it had become fashionable to dis REM, and as one reviewer pointed out no US radio format would play it (tho it became the soundtrack to my South Africa vacation, and they played “Imitation of Life” constantly on their radio down there).
The game Uncharted got a tremendous reception, whereas I found it to be a clumsy Tomb Raider knockoff duct-taped to a clumsy Gears knockoff, and the whole thing overlaid with incredibly annoying voice acting. The production values are great, but I think the game as a whole is really unsatisfying and played everything way too safe.
Bioshock has received tons of acclaim for it’s great “storytelling.” I personally think it’s a great game, but I think the storytelling is lousy. You get a disjointed, fairly predictable story about internal conflicts in an isolated society with one cool twist. Big whoop. It’s REAL triumph was in providing great atmosphere and excellent “texture” and some great level designs and art.
In film, I personally think Dark Knight was a lousy movie and significantly worse than Batman Begins (which was a B, maybe B+ in my book). It ruined my suspension of disbelief by trying to be “gritty” without being remotely realistic, and the whole thing felt really out of whack. And, believe me, this isn’t an iconoclastic reaction – I went to the theater expecting to really like it.
I disagree here. While the fundamental concepts employed in the FF12 battle system were sound, the implementation was arse. Like gambits needing to be bought at stores? Lame. “I’d like to tell my guy to heal me if I get below 50% health, but I don’t have the ‘health less than 50%’ condition gambit yet.” And yeah, the battle system was realtime and “seamless” but the pacing was slow (Frankly, battles would’ve resolved faster with a transition and me hitting “Attack” four times really fast than they would with the whole “party walks slowly into position and swings occasionally at the monster” method FF12 used), the balance of gear and spells was poor, and the seamless aspect really added nothing.
What they ended up doing was looking at the oldschool turn based battles and instead of of thinking “how can we change this and make it fun” they thought “how can we make this require less effort.” The problem is that that’s not fixing the problem most people have with the genre. FF12 does nothing to fix the fact that random battles are tedious and unchallenging and generally not any fun to play (though it does make it a little easier to run away from them.) and in fact actually managed to suck some of the fun out of boss fights for me too. Consider, as an alternative, a game like Grandia 3, which was really pretty BAD overall, but boy the battle system was a lot of fun. That’s how you take battles and make them an interesting part of the game. Automation with the gambit system just seems like they’re admitting “this battle system is boring as hell, so we’re going to build a system to minimize the interaction you actually have with it.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with the gambit system as a concept - I’d have been really excited to have it in a game with an engaging combat system like Tales of the Abyss where the AI doesn’t always do what I want it to do, but the combination of the way gambit options are introduced and the sluggish pace of combat overall, it just doesn’t add anything.
My personal offering for the something fans and critics were wrong about is FFX, which I found to be unpleasant in nearly every possible respect, but which seems to be adored by the vast majority of people for reasons I simply cannot comprehend.
Speilberg’s ending of A.I.
Critics hated it, fans hated it. They all thought the movie should have ended with him on the ocean floor.
I thought it made the movie and jolted you back into the “he’s a robot, not a boy” and made you question your sentimentality over a robot.
I liked the found by future mechas ending if it had ended with the line “from him we will learn about humanity”
That’s a down ending since David has only seen the worst aspects of humanity. A mother who abandons him, a rabid group of humans bent on his destruction, etc etc.
I thought Dragonball Evolution, the movie, was a fun and enjoyable movie.
Sure they shot canon in the ass with an elephant gun.
Sure there was no explanation of the characters or character developement.
Sure the ending fight was way too short and silly.
Sure Goku learning the kamehameha wave so fast was stupid.
Sure Shenron was way too small.
Sure the plot was rushed and made little sense.
Sure Goku being Oozaru was stupid and predictable.
Sure Oozaru being only a few inches taller than Goku was stupid.
Sure Yamcha being played as a surfer dude was stupid.
Sure the lava pit scene and the monster bridge was stupid and made no sense and was totally pointless.
But Chow playing Master Roshi was brilliant even though he wasn’t bald and didn’t have a goatee.
Despite all its stupidness I enjoyed the movie and had a fun time watching it and the extras.
I agree in hindsight that Up was a much better album than I’d originally thought - “Suspicion”, “Lotus”, “Daysleeper” and “At My Most Beautiful” are strong songs - but I do think Berry’s departure was almost fatal for them. Up had all the elements of their slide into mediocrity in place (a slide that culminated in Around The Sun, easily their nadir). Reveal had some OK Pet Sounds-ish moments, but even “Imitation of Life” was just a limp rewrite of “The Great Beyond”. I had some hope when “Bad Day” and “Animal” were released on the Best Of album, and Accelerate at least had a pulse, but I do think Bill Berry was irreplaceable.
It works within the framework, though. If you are going to declare certain opinions to be “WROOOOONG”, you pretty much have to go with the ones held by the least amount of people.
I don’t have an answer for the OP at the moment, unfortunately, as I usually don’t know what the “official” opinion is.
I’m probably the only one to think this, but Ang Lee’s version of Hulk. Reviled by comic book geeks for deigning to address the inherent pathos of the title character instead of mindlessly blowing shit up, and passed over by critics for, essentially, trying to pass off a comic book as high art, it just couldn’t win.
Bullshit, I say. Ang Lee’s movie was in all ways superior to the piece of crap Edward Norton vehicle. Better and more elegant character CGI that didn’t look like a video game or some anatomy lesson run amok, beautiful cinematography (those long desert shots!), more thoughtful dialogue, a more realistic dynamic between the General and Betty Ross. It’s not a perfect movie - it could be a tad shorter, and Nick Nolte could have been reined in a little.
But it did justice to its source material, whereas the reboot did not.
I’ll toss in the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request. Most fans dislike it, and I’m pretty sure the press* panned it as a Sgt. Pepper wannabe, but it still has some great songs on it – better than any post-1981 Stones album, for starters.
(*Not that there was much of a serious rock ‘press’ in 1967, but you know what I mean.)
