A Random Collection of Annoying Tired Internet Opinions, Volume 1
Welcome to my new series where I call out a bunch of Internet opinions I’ve read a million times yet people continue to post as if they’re as fresh as ever. Actually, this may not end up being a real series anytime soon, but I’m going to act as if it will be for the time being.
Today I’m going to talk about “Thing Overrated!” opinions. What better way to show what an independent thinker you are than to say that a thing people seem to love is not actually as good as they say it is? You will truly awaken millions from slumber with your truth bombs.
Breath of the Wild Overrated Waits for applause/rage
Congratulations, you’re the first person in this entire world who doesn’t think Breath of the Wild is as good as many critics did.
It is sort of amazing that after seven years, I still see people taking a tone of “I’m unique” when writing comments about Breath of the Wild. You do realize we’ve all seen thousands of comments like that over the years, right? Have some more self-awareness!
Regardless, what criticisms do most of these people have?
The weapons break quickly
In most action RPGs, once you find a few weapons you really like, you’re going to use them pretty much forever. Breath of the Wild eschews this way of thinking by making all weapons very short-lived. The purpose of this is to encourage you to engage with the game’s sandbox mechanics! It gives you reasons to be creative and improvise in a fight, which also makes every fight more suspenseful! For example, you may not have a sword in a fight, but what if you were to use your magnet power to drop a metal box on your enemies? There are so many possibilities! Yet some players simply refuse to embrace this way of thinking.
I gotta say, it took me a while to adjust my way of thinking too. I didn’t like how the weapons broke and I longed for a permanent one. But once I realized the weapons in the game were truly “easy come, easy go” (little high, little low) I stopped worrying so much and started to have more fun.
Not everyone’s going to like this system, but some players don’t seem to even make an attempt to understand what Nintendo was going for with it. So of course they can’t understand the praise for the game.
The world is empty
If you view the game world as merely a vessel for delivering items, friendly NPCs, or enemies to the player, then sure, it’s empty. But the land itself is such a huge part of the discovery to me. There were so many interesting and surprising areas I discovered long after beating Ganon. I’ve heard that some people just don’t find the mere experience of seeing a new place on its own all that interesting, so I guess there’s not much you can do about that. But to me, it’s why I love this game so much. I wanted to climb every mountain (and you gotta remember, I am a Coloradan). I wanted to soak in the atmosphere of the wild.
Enemy variety
This is an issue that again speaks to the existence of different types of players. The relatively small number of different types of enemies never really bothered me, perhaps because the combat is not what lures me to Zelda. I can’t really dispute this as a criticism, but it’s not one I personally would make.
Boring dungeons and bosses
This one I somewhat agree with, but somehow I feel like I see it less often in these types of comments (though I could be wrong about that).
The story is bad
Now this one is pretty much true. The story was my main complaint about the game when I first beat Ganon. I think when I saw the epic trailer for the game at the beginning of 2017, which showcased voice acting in Zelda for the first time, I really expected this game to have a dramatic story that would pull me in the way Twilight Princess did when I was 13. That’s not what we got.
Not a TRUE Zelda game
This is the most annoying one.
Have you actually played the first Zelda game? The gameplay consists of wandering in any direction you wish until you find a cave. Now what do you do in Breath of the Wild?
Series producer Eiji Aonuma stated way back in 2013 that the goal for the next Zelda game was to rethink series conventions and return to the essence of the franchise. (As opposed to just following the same formula the series has had since A Link to the Past).
When the first Zelda game was in development, creator Shigeru Miyamoto drew on childhood memories of exploring woods and caves near his home in Kyoto. The game also was designed with a non-linear structure, in contrast to the other game the team at Nintendo was developing at the time, Super Mario Bros.
Zelda II was similar to the first Zelda in concept, but it introduced an RPG-like leveling system, and non-overworld segments were done in a side-scrolling style instead of the normal top-down perspective.
A Link to the Past abandoned those particular new ideas, however, and it was the game that would set the mold for every Zelda to follow.
A couple years after Twilight Princess’ release, however, there was a sense apparently shared among Zelda’s fans and developers that simply adding a couple new gimmicks to a familiar formula wasn’t resulting in the most exciting, fresh experience anymore. This led to Skyward Sword, which opted for some more significant twists to the formula: pre-dungeon overworld segments were no longer simply a matter of exploring until you found a way into the dungeon, but involved more puzzles of their own, and the game had parts where you would need to return to a dungeon you’d already completed. But the game was so hand-hold-y that I couldn’t really feel the thrill of exploration anymore.
So with Breath of the Wild, the Zelda team didn’t build off the traditional formula. They looked at the very basics of what makes a Zelda game a Zelda game.
And now after so many fans clamored for changes to the Zelda formula in 2010, a bunch of fans want the formula back. Well, you can’t please everyone.
I can definitely sympathize with people who want a nostalgic Ocarina of Time-like game, because I would buy that in a heartbeat. But once you start getting all uppity and saying “Breath of the Wild isn’t a good Zelda game!” then you’ve ticked me off. I don’t respect that sentiment at all, because Zelda has always largely been about the exploration. The feeling of discovery. And Breath of the Wild nails that aspect better than any Zelda before it.
I get that there are many aspects to the series, and some of them will appeal to you more than others. But people trying to kick Breath of the Wild out of the club for letting them down on their favorite aspect are ignoring the parts of it that are very Zelda.
I mean, you don’t see me going around saying “Skyward Sword isn’t a real Zelda game because it’s too linear!” Or “Skyward Sword isn’t a real Zelda game because they put puzzles in the sections that are supposed to be the field parts!” But oh, wait, Skyward Sword mainly follows the classic Zelda formula, so it has to be a Zelda game!
Yeah well the classic Zelda formula didn’t get fully established until the third game in the series, so I guess Zelda 1 and 2 aren’t real Zelda games either by that criteria.
In conclusion, you can like the game or not, but if your argument is “They didn’t follow the rules of Zelda but it says Zelda on the box so I’m mad” I think that’s a really stupid argument.
In-N-Out Overrated
The first time I had In-N-Out I didn’t understand why this was a brand whose T-shirts people wore proudly. Is it simply because it’s a California icon?
While I think that is a big part of the hype—that plus the ever unchanging aesthetics that give it big nostalgic appeal—I think the food is actually good, and I will go to bat for it.
See, I think people who say the food is overrated misunderstand its appeal. It’s not because it’s the best burger you can buy period, and I don’t know if anyone ever said it was. It is one of the best burgers you can buy in that price range. It’s not competing with the upscale places. It’s competing with McDonalds.
And it’s consistent. Every time I go, I know that Double-Double is gonna be as good as it always is.
I think the fries are really good if you eat them hot and fresh, but they are weak after that. But I dunno, I feel like now that I’ve got a taste for them, I still enjoy them even if they’ve cooled.
Now, does all this mean you should wait in line all day once the company opens up a restaurant in your state? Absolutely not. But yeah, calling In-N-Out overrated is something I’m gonna push back against.
The Beatles Overrated
Not liking The Beatles is another opinion where people feel super unique for expressing it online. “You know that band all the old people say are the greatest ever? Well, they’re actually… NOT GOOD.” And all the person’s followers are there like “OHHHHHHHHHHH”
Objectively, you can’t deny they’re a band that influenced popular music massively. That’s just music history, plain and simple. But obviously that doesn’t mean you have to like their music.
When people want to make a case for why the music isn’t good, they usually just sound like they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m not interested in forcing people to like what I like; but I suppose I am motivated by asserting that I’m not stupid because I like them. I’m stupid for entirely unrelated reasons.
“Yellow Submarine?” And they say this is the greatest band ever, smh
When people bring up “Yellow Submarine” as an argument, it really feels like they have no idea it’s not meant to be a serious song. And furthermore it’s like the notion that a good band can make a non-serious song has never occurred to them. The Beatles recorded a lot of silly songs, really. So is the implicit argument that critically acclaimed artists only make serious songs?
Well, that does seem to be the atmosphere of today, honestly. Not enough songs that are just funny.
Just a boy band
A popular comment I used to see is “They were just a boy band” and what does that actually mean? Isn’t this just the “music that girls like sucks” argument?
You sometimes will even see Beatles fans clarifying that they don’t really like the band’s music until their more experimental later phases. I get this on some level, but I also think it’s weak.
Like do we also think the early rock and roll that preceded The Beatles also sucked? Really? Really?
Nah man, early Beatles had some excellent tunes.
But yeah I don’t know how anyone is supposed to take this argument seriously, because it’s just lazy, ignorant of music history, and is trying to say “The Backstreet Boys suck and The Beatles are kind of like them in some way so they also suck.”
I wasn’t an instant fan either
I’m gonna be honest, I only got into The Beatles because society at large claimed they were important. Apple hyped them up when they finally managed to get their music on iTunes, and I was like, “I should buy an album from them now.” (I guess this was before I had ever considered buying a CD; yes I did things very backwards). I bought Abbey Road because it looked familiar, and it was the most popular of their albums on iTunes. When I listened to it, I… wasn’t crazy about it.
Now I was around 15 at the time. I was into rock generally, but Abbey Road didn’t seem to have a whole lot of loud electric guitars like I thought any old rock album would. The weird, dreamy songs like “Because” were off-putting to me.
There were moments I liked, though, so I wasn’t gonna give up right there. A couple more listens, and I started to like the album. And from there, my enjoyment only grew.
The lesson is, you can’t immediately dismiss something just because you don’t like it the first try. I mean you can, but you’d be refusing the possibility of expanding your music taste.
Here’s the thing about our brains and music: it’s all based on familiarity. The scale of notes that all western music is built on is not inherent in our DNA or anything like that. But we have all heard it since we were young. It’s familiar to us, and it’s what sounds good to us. Other cultures throughout history produced music that would sound not so good to us because it’s not built on that scale. Were they just stupid? Of course not! That’s the kind of arrogant “it’s different, so it must be stupid/evil” thinking that has divided mankind for ages.
The point is, if music doesn’t immediately grab you, that doesn’t mean you’ll never get a taste for it. The human mind is meant to be flexible. And sometimes when you really give something a chance even though it sounded strange at first, you end up loving it.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of music that sounds too familiar to the point of being unappealing but that’s a whole other topic.
Conclusion
I’m all for having whatever opinion you want to have on these innocuous subjects, but I get tired of people posting as if they want recognition for going against the crowd. It feels like in the land of Internet discourse we just regurgitate thoughts again and again and again…. Couldn’t I be less tired of it if I spent less time reading stuff online? To that I say: Make me! No seriously, could someone make me? I lack that level of self control