SFW:
1. Monster Hunter series. First I watched my cousin play the games and I thought it's uninteresting. Later I saw so many people praising World, I watched it on youtube and thought it is bad. Then I bought a bundle of of World + Rise + all DLCs together with two other friends and we all dropped World after 1h or 2h because we decided game sucks. I tried to like it and tried to understand why so many people love the games but no, they are just bad.
2. I often preferred 3D Sonic games than 2D. Both Adventure games, Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog had more serious story and it worked for me. 2D games are too "kid friendly".
3. I think Marvel Rivals is more of a social experiment than a game. Giving you bot matches in pvp mods so you want rage quit after losing few games in a row. Rigging ranked matchmaking balancing things not to your skill but to make you play as long as possible. Chinese censorship on the west - you can talk about 9/11 or how much USA sucks but you can't type "1989" or "fuck China".
NSFW:
1. In general, I think eastern porn games are way above western ones. I am not talking here about art or direction differences, I am thinking about overall quality and management. I hate how most of western games are about supporting creator on patreon and similar, making the development lasting many years more than it should and devs rarely finishing the games because it is more profitable to not finish them, and if they finish it is obvious many ideas the dev had at the start got abandoned midway (by some side content cutting off out of nowhere" or that the ending was rushed and came out of nowhere.
2. "The Guardian" was average at best, but I heard so many people praising it as one of the best here. As for reasons why I think that you can check my review of it.
3. I believe there is no point in playing abandoned/mid development games. I always wait for a game to get "completed" prefix before checking it out.
I'm seeing I agree with a lot of opinions here... which is funny in a way.
For #1, I am/ was a big fan of Monster Hunter on the psp and 3ds. Monster Hunter World was a disappointment to me. Yeah, I played some 50 hours and got to the end, but I think that was more because I was a fan of the earlier games and really trying to like it. The gameplay changed in a way that just wasn't what it used to be. Also end game felt just plain unfair. In earlier games, I could solo every boss, it was very hard and took almost the entire 50 minutes allowed in the hunt but it was doable. it really didn't feel like that in world. maybe that was fixed when the Iceborn DLC was added, but I was already done with the game at that point.
I pretty much agree with all your NSFW points.
I know people love the Guardian, but that story was convoluted and messy, also he's either creepily sweet in his tone to them or a cruel asshole, unless I messed up somewhere and I missed the chance him have a semi normal tone.
West game dev is weird and basically a subscription. not doing well enough financially? the service/ game is canceled. Whats weirder about it is how expensive each game is with these subscriptions, $10 for the mid tier, 4 months for an update, so $40 dollars and you don't even own the game, and that just continues until the game either hasn't updated for a year, is canceled and billing is paused, or they actually complete the game.
Only reason I'd check abandoned games was if the renders/ art is phenomenal. That rf if it was abandoned due to circumstances outside of the author's choice. Say they passed, I'll check out their game if it's well-known to be good.