I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.
The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.
I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time… Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that “Sonic was never good”, “Sonic had a rough transition to 3D” nonsense.
Breath of the Wild. It is such a good game and I really love it and I only have ever heard possitive things about… but than I met a bunch of old school Zelda fans and they don’t like the game that much. They say it’s a great game but not a Zelda game. Maybe they just wanted to be contrarian but I can also understand where they are comming from.
I ended up replaying Wind Waker and I still haven’t finished Breath of the Wild.
I think BotW is a spectacular game for kids who don’t have access to just about any game they want.
As a long time Zelda fan I never understood any of the hate for BOTW from other long time fans. That being said I haven’t been able to play it since TOTK came out because TOTK is what BOTW was missing for me.
From seeing discussions among those Zelda fans (which to be clear I am not one), the issue is that the mainline games are now a completely different genre, but treated as though it’s the natural progression of the series.
The classic zelda games are primarily puzzle games, with a little bit of combat and intricate hand-crafted exploration to spice it up a bit. The modern zelda games (BOTW & TOTK) are exploration games with puzzles to spice it up. If you were a classic zelda fan, the niche genre you loved used to have regular releases by a major developer and now doesn’t.
Plus, there’s a “all my homies hate skrillex” effect here; the series is massively more popular now, but the newcomers have a different idea of what makes a zelda game a zelda game. By sheer numbers they dominate a community that is now reshaped by their presence. In other words the zelda fan community is itself a different genre.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t played that much of the series. Link to the Past I didn’t care much for, Links Awakening (new one) I honestly hated, and BOTW I liked but had a couple issues with. All I’ve written above is based on passively seeing a bunch of discussion.