Positive effects from disagreeable games

This is a list of games which have (typically indirectly) affected my life in an overall positive way despite me either actively disliking them or otherwise disliking what they represent. Many of these were wake-up calls of sorts that incited change in me as a player, as a critic, and as a creator, while others simply gave me the opportunity to better understand what draws me to and repels me from this medium as an artist and as an appreciator. Notes will contain explanations where applicable. I'll update this when I can but my current injury makes it a bad idea to type so I may not have all the notes finished at once.

NEO: The World Ends with You
NEO: The World Ends with You
Hades
Hades
Splatoon 2
Splatoon 2
This and its predecessor along with (new) Fire Emblem's growth and the rise of Xenoblade Chronicles altogether served as a slap in the face for me to leave what I thought was some sort of comfort zone and familiar territory upon realizing that no, it was never anything of the sort. I'm using Splatoon 2 here because that's the first of them that I played, at which point I noticed it was aggressively unimpressive for a shooter after having played a fair few on my computer by the time it released.

The Nintendo fandom as well as that general side of the gaming sphere are incredibly monolithic ever since the internet grew more and more centralized, and that realization hit me like an iron fist. No, that's not actually true as any sweeping generalization wouldn't be, but it was that base concept's weight that snapped me out of where I was. By the time of the mid 2010s when Nintendo's target audiences shifted and they started pumping out games explicitly appealing to the youth culture of the time rather than guiding the culture themselves, I started seeing the fanbase's members, young and old, as being markedly outside of what I was. These things didn't appeal to me. This company's things in general didn't appeal to me. What I liked from them were some coincidentally quality games sprinkled throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s with a couple in the 2010s, too.

I realized I wasn't some consumer of Nintendo content and even despite only having their consoles I still sought out whatever I pleased instead of feeling any sense of loyalty to them. I thought I had, but I realized I hadn't. I hadn't been feeling what their actual fans did. It was these games that told me I didn't fit in and with time I learned I didn't have to. I feel lonely even now, but I know the empty sense of non-community and that sense of lacking I was feeling when trying to fit in where I didn't belong was always going to be worse.
Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight
See Bloodborne.
Persona 5
Persona 5
Undertale
Undertale
A sobering one on here, this game was the first indie darling I had experienced that seemed to truly hit the overall cultural mainstream of the medium; upon release I found it middling and fairly unenjoyable and with time it's just gotten worse in retrospect. I was finally starting to come into my own around when it came out and it serves as one of the first games I stepped back and truly analyzed in a critical way beyond the more simple kinds of tickboxes I had when I was younger. I looked at it and tried to find strengths where there were few to none. I appreciated its cultural significance for a time until it became suffocating and annoying, at which point I stopped trying to give it such respect. Now years later I'm here and even while knowing what people like about it I still fail to see what exactly makes it such an alleged watershed moment for gaming on both the production side and the audience side. This in turn helps me understand more about what games really do have historical significance to whatever sides of this medium I give a shit about, many of which ran circles around this game years before its release.
Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation
Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation
See Splatoon 2.
Bloodborne
Bloodborne
I really hope that soon, "Currently trying to learn how to drop games I'm not enjoying" will no longer be written on my profile here. This game along with Hollow Knight were what convinced me through my friends to try to set that as a goal, and I'm still in pursuit of that now. I had already played Dark Souls 1 by the time I played this one, so it was hardly my first rodeo with this general type of game. While I could at least appreciate some of the clever macro design people like from that game, though, I couldn't find any such positives in Bloodborne. I streamed the majority of the game privately to friends and it was clear I was feeling shitty the entire time; while I didn't actually quit the game, they slowly tried to convince me that I should consider stopping games early if I was having such a shitty time. I realized that yeah, that probably would be better for my overall health and sanity, and so I made that a goal. I used to give games a ton more chances than I should have, but with my friends worrying about me I know it's a better idea to leave some things be even if it doesn't feel entirely fair to the games.
Pokémon Y
Pokémon Y
Pokémon was a major media presence in my young life as it had been for the millions of others who had experienced it in some form over the years. Small as I was, I thought things were only really getting better and better with time. This stopped with Generation VI. While I don't think X and Y are nearly as bad as I originally believed (and as others still do), what they represent and how I reacted to them when they came out are pretty important to this list. They represent a seemingly irrevocable change in the franchise's quality that was entirely for the worse. When I played this game I was finally thrown out of my childhood illusions of what Pokémon was about to become and it saved me a lot of pain as things got worse over time. I took long breaks from the franchise and accepted its death quickly, and even when I still feel shitty seeing it nowadays it doesn't hurt nearly as much as I know it would if Y hadn't stepped into view so long ago.

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