Sengoku Strider wrote:I think what I was going for with the "well intentioned mediocrity" line was stuff which didn't rise above the general gaming din and was by & large soon forgotten.
I really do not like Keiji Inafune, but I also recognize that he doesn't really develop games, "designer" credit be damned. I've never seen Soul Sacrifice as an Inafune game, and I never saw Mighty No.9 as one either; there's no sense in that. One of the greatest crimes in gaming is that Soul Sacrifice has never been ported to anything, despite all the odds. Your description of it just sounds like someone trying to describe God Eater. Now, if you just say the same about God Eater, that'd at least be consistent, but...
White Knight Chronicles is legitimately one of Level-5's best games. It also did fairly well against the bizarre state the game industry's been in for about a decade and a half now, so at the very least people liked the damn thing. Metacritic is a faulty concept, and no number produced by that hell algorithm should ever be taken seriously. When Eurogamer gives a game an 8 and IGN gives that same game a fucking 5, the only thing that's proof of is how dumb "professional" reviewers are and how little respect they deserve. Westerners have this colossally bad understanding of what a "JRPG" is supposed to be, to the point that they do very strange things like... directly compare White Knight Chronicles and Valkyria Chronicles to each other? Please don't tell me you're doing that because they both have "Chronicles" in their localizated names...
"Good but not great" is a dirty phrase. The truth is that you have to accept either that basically every "good but not great" game is actually a potential GOAT, or that there are so few potential GOATs that it's not really worth getting fussy over the concept. The end result is the same. The important thing is that you recognize that calling something like Tokyo Jungle "mediocre" is very strange.
Your description of Puppeteer tells me that you recognize the problem, but deny it.
Good elements and bad elements do not cancel each other out, but instead point towards a work that is far removed from this "mediocrity" concept. People are also often wrong about what is even good or bad. Success is purely due to chance, and the quality of a given work has absolutely no bearing on whether people actually care about it. "mediocrity" barely exists, if it does at all.
Imagine a timeline where DOJ was completely rejected and CAVE as a shooting game developer disappeared overnight. The only difference between that timeline and ours is the
alignment of the stars. I wish more people would understand this, because it's so damned important to understanding at least part of what in the hell is going on with the game industry.