I don’t think anyone hated either any of these games, but they don’t seem to have gained as much traction as they deserve.

Secret of Mana for the SNES is my all time favorite game.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is also a great game that few people remember.

Star Wars: Rebellion was possibly the first 4X game I played, before they were called 4X. Totally unbalanced in favor of the empire, and building a death star was just stupid, but it was still a fun game.

I still think about Battlerite from time to time. Very fair high skill arena fighting game that’s faster and more to the point than MOBAs that were dominating the PvP scene at the time. It had a great launch then everyone stopped playing it.

X-Com: The Bureau Declassified

Its fatal flaw was simply that the A.I. squadmates would far to often make suicidal decisions unless you micro-managed then, which made winning far more about luck than skill.

But the setting, the writing, the story were all super interesting to me. And the graphics hold a special charm for me (I still say the facial animations were better than LA Noire)

Evolve. Even just against bots without any DLC characters is still a ton of fun. I recently replayed it on PlayStation and had a blast getting all the base game hunters and monsters.

I don’t know what the reception was at the time, but people seem to hate Stuntman, at least in retrospect. I loved it though. It’s a driving game in which you play the part of a movie stuntman, driving through a movie set as the director barks orders at you, telling you live how to drive the scene. It has a nice variety of movies, and the scenes are actually cool to drive and to watch.

It tickles a part of my brain that loves repeating a task until I perfect it… and boy, you get to do a lot of repetition.

The one thing I don’t like is that you suffer a PS2 load time with each failed attempt. We’re talking minutes between attempts. Loved it apart from that though.

Heroes of Might and Magic IV - Diverted from the series’ standards with a new traversal mechanic. Most people hated it and was immediately dropped for Heroes V. But it added unique ways to get around, rewarded having small squads of fast units. Still had incredible music.

Phantasy Star Universe, Phantasy Star Zero - Weird entries in a franchise that pretty much only gets discussed for PSO and PSO2. PSU had a weird spell mechanic where your wand had PP instead of your character having PP, so Cast characters could use photon arts. And the Beast race that was forgotten. PSZ is more story-based, but I mostly feel that people don’t know about it rather than dislike it.

Back in the day: Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Taz Wanted and Aladdin.

Oni.

In my most unpopular opinion, the only good thing Bungie ever made. Way more satisfying than console-friendly auto-aim shooting aliens without gore.

Oni has some great sci-fi details, even when missing a deep overarching story. And breaking people’s necks with a cool 360 swing with proper sound effects of the neck bones being chipped is sooo satisfying. And that was an unfinished project by the way: you can notice there was no environment work done.

I play a lot of Helldivers 2, whether people like it or not depends on what the devs just did on the latest patch lol

I really enjoyed Cities Skylines 2 even at launch.

I love all 3 main series Fable games. I know many people like 1 or 2, but usually I see a lot of people shitting on 3. Each one is good in different ways, but I will admit that 1 and 2 are definitely better than 3.

Alley Cat

So, I had an snes, which I loved, but my taste in games wasn’t great and my parents objected to violence, which means my collection is a bit weird.

One game I loved which wasn’t universally acknowledged to be great, was Clayfighter. It was essentially a Street Fighter clone, but the assets were all modelled in clay and animated using stop motion technique.

I think it got a lot of flak for being not well balanced and a little slow, so it kind of just didn’t stand out beyond the obvious classics of that genre, but man, I loved it. I couldn’t get Street Fighter because of my parents, but they were fine with clayfighter’s look and more humorous approach. At the same time, it still was a good beat em up, so I spent hours with it. Also, it kind of gave me an edge as SF2 was just the game everybody had, so at least I had a fun game to spend an hour with that people hadn’t played to death already.

The samples will remain burned into my memories forever. “The Blob Wins!!” Good times.

My games are less “nobody liked it” and more “a lot of people have never heard of or tried it”:

Ori and the Blind Forest

and

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

They’re absolute masterpieces. It’s like playing a video game version of a beautiful oil painting with incredibly tight movement controls. And the soundtrack…MY GOD is it good.

It’s one of those game series that I wish I could memory wipe to replay again. Sure, the story is a bit simplistic, but it hits the notes it needs to without dragging.

It’s one of the best Metroidvania games ever made, but it kind of fell into obscurity similar to other masterpieces like Titanfall 2.