ive posted numerous reviews on this website in which i compare relatively mediocre games to minecraft as an excuse to talk shit about the most successful videogame.
there are a LOT of aspects of minecraft that i feel are genuinely badly designed and i have a ton of nitpicks with the game overall, but re-evaluating how I truly feel about this game recently has led me to realize theres a lot of value to minecraft and that in reality i have had a lot of fun with it all things considered.

i'm gonna go over some of my problems with the game real quick to paint a better picture of my full view, and then i'll talk about why it's special to me

-The game itself has a huge emphasis on mindless grinding. for instance in order to get full enchantment levels efficiently youre going to want to spend about half an hour in front of a mob spawner farm with an autoclicker. The fact that this is arguably the best way of farming XP in terms of efficiency and accessibility is downright stupid in my opinion. a game shouldnt have to become a mindless autoclicker grindfest in order for you to make good progress. I legitimately feel like that is just bad game design. Let there be good alternatives at least, there isnt a good alternative to strip mining and that genuinely sucks because strip mining is basically equivalent to mindless grinding. its definitely the kind of thing that is more tolerable if youre listening to youtube in the background or something, but that shouldnt be a necessity for playing the game efficiently. The correlation between grinding and efficient progress is also a big reason why multiplayer servers with my friends have almost always made me feel frustrated, i nearly always fall behind in comparison to everyone else because i do not want to play the game in ways that i genuinely think are monotonous. maybe grinding would feel better if there was more permanence to it but at any moment within the game i could get my ass handed to me by a creeper because i wasnt paying attention for 2 seconds and hours of progress would be lost.
-The developers aren't doing anything to make the game more interesting... or really anything at all. I recall fireflies being a scrapped idea because it was too much for development. Keep in mind that this is THE number 1 most successful game statistically. The developers have piles upon piles of money they could use to hire more people and make the development process flow better, but instead insist on putting more effort into the mob vote animations than the actual mobs themselves. Modders create things for minecraft for free and do it better than the developers. there really isn't any excuse. The content in the updates the developers push out also arent nearly as impactful or memorable as the stuff we already have most of the time. I'll give them a bit of credit by saying the Caves and Cliffs Update and the Nether Update genuinely did a lot of good for the game by shaking things up fundamentally. However we will never get a modern equivalent to something like the creeper because the devs play it way too safe
-i feel like more people should talk about how stupidly obtuse the process for setting up a minecraft server is. for being a game as widely successful as minecraft, going to a random website for aternos or whatever is certainly borderline mandatory for playing with friends. also i genuinely do not ever want to use the realms feature because subscription services are high on the list of things that bother me
(The list of gripes i have with this game goes on but those are my main points)

i am aware this sounds like a lot and this would absolutely explain why i would hate the game, but in reality the game has so much to offer that i can't give it little credit.
Minecraft is genuinely a magical experience sometimes. When you take away the stuff that bothers me i am left with a game that i am genuinely so deeply engrossed with. I struggle to explain exactly why minecraft impacts me the way that it does. To an extent it is likely nostalgia but I really think theres something deeply special and engaging about the fundamentals of this stupid cubes game.
I think if there was a good way of experiencing minecraft with as little of the problems i've mentioned as possible it genuinely would become so much more engaging to me. This is why playing on beta 1.7.3 helps a LOT. It was the last major build of minecraft before the full release which added many many things to the game but also - in my eyes - bogged down the experience with a lot of unnecessary bits. There are some quality of life things for sure, sprinting feels a lot better than normal walking speed when you arent thinking about your player's hunger for example.. but beta minecraft is genuinely minecraft at its best fundamentals in my opinion. You just build things. there's no major end goal or anything, there's not a thousand different game mechanics to keep track of, it's about building towns and fighting creepers. It is genuinely fantastic.

I could go on further elaborating on my thoughts for the next half hour of my life but I'm gonna stop here because this is a singular post on backloggd. Minecraft is a very special game to me that is simultaneously amazing and pisses me off to no end. if youve genuinely read through this whole review go drink some water