OL wrote:Don't get me wrong, he doesn't suck or anything. He's just overrated.
People hold him up high as some kind of master game dev, but it's kind of silly to think that about someone who only really has a single huge claim to fame (Resident Evil). God Hand is pretty great too, I agree, but it ain't exactly a genius concept; it's a classic beat-em-up formatted for 3D graphics. RE4 is great too, but it's really just building on a series that was already well-established by then (it's not as much of a "reinvention" as people like to pretend).
Other than that, what is there? PN03 is, at the very best, absolutely "meh." And Vanquish, while an okay shooter, is aesthetically boring and has some really bad gameplay choices that bog down what should have been a ton of fun. Dino Crisis is pretty cool, but it's basically just Resident Evil with dinosaurs. And while I do want to play The Evil Within, it really doesn't strike me as "masterpiece" material (which is what a "master" of his medium would be creating, right?).
It's just that general public mindset that he's one of the greatest of the greats... I just don't see it, so the word "overrated" strikes me as pretty apt.
To make it a little clearer, people act like he's a Spielberg, a Kubrick, a Kurosawa... but he strikes me as being more of a Brian de Palma. He's good when he's good, but his work is pretty mixed overall.
Okay, I get that comparison. I also like De Palma more than Spielberg, since I'm weird like that. But I still think that despite the fact that he's only really seemingly made one mediocre game, the rest are well worth playing. I like the fact that Mikami at least tried not to be tied to horror and tried other stuff out. Whereas Kamiya has just stuck to action games after RE2... I also like Mikami more than Kamiya because he at least tries to be more experimental with his game design instead of Kamiya, who seems to try to refine his past work and not really innovate as much. The Evil Within > Bayonetta.
Also, people forget this, but Mikami was co-writer on killer7 alongside Suda, so I just love the guy for that reason too. One of my favourite game scripts ever.
OL wrote:Agreed on Kamiya though. I mean, I love DMC, and he directed what I think is the overall best Resident Evil game (RE2), but he's kind of a dick from what I've read. And I find Bayonetta completely unappealing, while his newest game, Scalebound, looks as ridiculously dumb and hackneyed as can be (I've only seen a cg trailer, but it was dumb enough to turn me right off from it).
I won't write off Scalebound yet, since dragon riding games are a rarity now. I agree the CG trailer was shit though. Oh, and definitely agree on RE2 and DMC, those are
easily his best games and my favourite games in each respective series.
OL wrote:Keep in mind of course, the term "overrated" is defined entirely by one person's (or thing's) level of esteem compared to another. If other people who deserve a ton of respect were held in just as high a regards as the Mikamis and Kamiyas of the world, then neither of them would seem quite so overrated. Like if Yoshiki Okamoto, Yukio Futatsugi, Keiichiro Toyama, Makoto Shibata, and so many others were held up at the same level of acclaim as them (as practically household names and all that) then sure, no problem, Mikami and Kamiya wouldn't really be overrated, because other people who deserve it would be just as respected.
Right, yeah. But regardless Mikami did create RE and popularised horror as a genre in games. I mean, I appreciate what Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower and Sweet Home did too since they were all before Resi Evil, but it wasn't really until RE that we started seeing more and more horror games.
Out of those, the only two I'd say I like more than Mikami would be Shibata for both Deception and Fatal Frame and Toyama for his work on Snatcher and creating Gravity Rush & Siren. Both of those guys created better and incredibly underrated horror games and really fresh concepts in games.
OL wrote:Really? I always got the impression that people loved the first, but thought the second was shit (the move to a stricter level-based setup being one of the chief complaints, and also the fact that everyone hates the Knuckles levels).
Maybe that's just the vibe around here or something.
Yeah, I mean, at least on the game forums that I've personally scoured over the years [experience may be different from yours], people really like to shit on both Sonic Adventure games, but there's always some devout fan of SA2. SA1 is always seen as the start of the era of "bad" Sonic games, which is total bullcrap. I like both Sonic Adventure games, it's just that SA1 left more of an impression on me, since it felt like what Mega Man Legends was to Mega Man - "open-world" feeling whilst retaining that classic SEGA charm and fun stages, but now Sonic was in full 3D. It was also one of my first games on Dreamcast, so there's that nostalgia factor also. Knuckles stages were pretty bad in both games, to be honest.