WulfeLuer
03-05-2017, 07:49 PM
I've been wandering up and down the interwebs, deciding on what to add to my glorious backlog of games, and came across something of a personal conundrum. I'd like some feedback, up to and including "WulfeLuer's a dumbass" if it's applicable.
Way back in the day, Squaresoft was releasing a battery of "B-list" games, and being nerdy lemmings, most of the local gamer crowd ate them up. A lot them were strange but enjoyable, or flawed but fun (oh Legend of Mana how I loved thee) but there was one that everybody seemed to hate.
That game was Threads of Fate. Nobody liked it around here, and anyone who had a copy dumped it at the earliest opportunity. I wandered into an EB about a week after release and found stacks of used complete copies for $6.99. I nabbed one and fired it up. I don't remember all that much (itself kinda damning) but I was bored and then frustrated. I banished it to the trade fodder drawer and never looked at it again. I asked some buddies for their opinions and...well I've rarely encountered that kind of bile in real life over anything. Yes, I knew people that would bash anything if they thought it'd make them look cool, and a couple of people that hated EVERYTHING that wasn't labeled Final Fantasy, but this is the only game that ever became persona non grata in the local crowd. To the best of my knowledge outside opinion wasn't all that different; internet fora either bashed it or didn't discuss it all, prices on eBay and others were consistently under $15, often $10 or less. I eventually forgot all about it.
But then I stumbled across Threads in various places online, and everybody seems to like it just fine these days. The game regularly fetches comparable prices to other releases of the time ($25 plus, with $35 plus being common), and I have yet to find a used copy in real life for the last year or so. There's not much discussion about it, but what's there is actually pretty positive.
So what's changed? Was the local crowd (and I) being soulless minions of orthodoxy and hating the game because we thought we should? Was the game genuinely bad until some point in the storyline nobody bothered to get to? Did something come to light that proved that it wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it was?
Way back in the day, Squaresoft was releasing a battery of "B-list" games, and being nerdy lemmings, most of the local gamer crowd ate them up. A lot them were strange but enjoyable, or flawed but fun (oh Legend of Mana how I loved thee) but there was one that everybody seemed to hate.
That game was Threads of Fate. Nobody liked it around here, and anyone who had a copy dumped it at the earliest opportunity. I wandered into an EB about a week after release and found stacks of used complete copies for $6.99. I nabbed one and fired it up. I don't remember all that much (itself kinda damning) but I was bored and then frustrated. I banished it to the trade fodder drawer and never looked at it again. I asked some buddies for their opinions and...well I've rarely encountered that kind of bile in real life over anything. Yes, I knew people that would bash anything if they thought it'd make them look cool, and a couple of people that hated EVERYTHING that wasn't labeled Final Fantasy, but this is the only game that ever became persona non grata in the local crowd. To the best of my knowledge outside opinion wasn't all that different; internet fora either bashed it or didn't discuss it all, prices on eBay and others were consistently under $15, often $10 or less. I eventually forgot all about it.
But then I stumbled across Threads in various places online, and everybody seems to like it just fine these days. The game regularly fetches comparable prices to other releases of the time ($25 plus, with $35 plus being common), and I have yet to find a used copy in real life for the last year or so. There's not much discussion about it, but what's there is actually pretty positive.
So what's changed? Was the local crowd (and I) being soulless minions of orthodoxy and hating the game because we thought we should? Was the game genuinely bad until some point in the storyline nobody bothered to get to? Did something come to light that proved that it wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it was?