For example here's one of my actual strange opinions:
Pokemon would be a better franchise without battles.

And now the part where I explain this:
In the massive monster media franchise, there's is a lot of going on about the bond between people and Pokemon, but this is alarmingly absent in most of the games. Sure, you have the distractions of the latter series such as campsites but that isn't the primary motivating path.

And putting it bluntly, Game Freak couldn't program a battle system worth playing if they tried. It's a slow strictly turn based affair with limited move slots. So that makes the primary game motivation; conquering all eight gyms in a region a complete slog of an affair. Especially when your party consists of up to 6 members and most battles are in a 1 vs. 1 format.

As such, getting rid of gyms, battles, and the championships would be to the benefit of the franchise in my opinion as a lot of resources could be freed in favor of much better worldbuilding, mechanical depth, and interesting experiments.

So, what's your strange opinion of gaming? Please leave your "Studio X sucks!" at the door.

Here's another free one: I've never quite understood what draws people to FMV games. They're all the inconvenient parts of a movie and a game combined into one package, with the advantages of neither. What's the deal?

So you'd want a game where you run around, no risk anywhere you go, collect pokemon with no challenge? Sounds a bit boring... Maybe you'd prefer Pokemon Snap?

Battles would be based on older RPG games (Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, etc) in which the stronger/more experienced would win. I mean you could just have a 'you have N level, tap A quickly to overcome your opponent' or something, but that sounds... quickly monotonously boring. On the other hand having auto-experience of running into weak enemies and auto-winning would be a way to reduce grind considering you'd run into a lot of weak enemies and not throwing out pokemon all the time to one-hit knockout at 6x the damage vs their hp. Even Pokemon Go you need some way to win/lose, otherwise it would get boring, thus throwing the ball and chance of success has some level of RNG to it.

So my gaming opinion. I think every RPG and other game needs NG+, which you can apply at any time.

Reason? I don't like losing progress. I sometimes want to re-experience the story, especially if i haven't touched the game in a while and need a refresher, and being able to NG+ at any time would let me do that. (Some games inherently allow it without starting over, usually mission based. Bayonetta, MGS Phantom Pain, etc)

Second opinion, Micro-transactions and loot boxes need to die.

Ah, Pokemon. That game for "kids" in which a character who claims to love pokemons, capture and enslave as many as he/she possibly can. And then, the character throws them to battle arenas to fight other enslaved pokemons which have been trained for combat and are subjected to all kind of atrocities and damage.

More or less what druids do, too.

Lovely.

I'm not sure if those are "strange" but they are rather against the trends today

Not every game has to be non-linear and have a big open world. It seems to be taken for granted these days that that's somehow a great thing and what every game should be it's by definition superior to linear games where you progress from one separate level to another, but I think that's bullshit. Sure, a good open world game can be plenty of fun... but it can also end up being bland, empty and boring, with long stretches of nothing but tedious busy work. Old-school linear games are great for keeping a good pace and crafting detailed, interesting places and gameplay.

Games today tend to have players level up too often and simultanously don't offer any substantial rewards for leveling up. Maybe it's because what to me is still "standard" is D&D where level 20 was basically max (expansions for epic adventures nonwithstanding) and meant you were almost a demi-god. Even the difference between level 1 and 4 was freaking huge. But in most games today you'll get to level 30, 40, 50 and nothing will really change that much. Some percentages will improve, which you'll barely really feel, you'll get a new move or new spell, which more then likely you'll realise you could actually do without. You'll hit level 40 and realise you're really playing the game much the same as you did at level 2.

I love grinding

cool
even those lame korean mmos? what is vile anime artwork? cheap, lazy ?

Honestly, what I'd prefer is a game about the research of Pokemon so to get rid of egregrious pokedex errors. Natural observation and immersive environments. Without rails. That second one isn't a strange take. How would you feel about a game with an ingame journal that helps you track what you did recently? Would that help? Alright, why. While I agree, I've got to ask: How do you feel about games that while they don't outright block you, will kill you with monsters that are well above your level but you can still sneak past them with luck?

I don't feel it strange, but many people do: Games should be transparent in their mechanics. So many games complicate things in odd and strange ways, and oftentimes parts of those complications are expanded by lack of understanding of the mechanisms and how they work. I recently saw a post that the 'much beloved by many' Souls games [I haven't played them] are made harder because they outright lie to you. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that is true. I've found other games that do that too. Nioh, in that family, is somewhat overt, but still has plenty of hidden and unexplained mechanisms that break your flow, especially in gear tinkering (which is the #1 use of your time in the game... even more than playing :().

Back in the day, it was hard to document and teach these things with in-game reference. And they were often broken too (see all the various stats in NES and SNES Final Fantasy games that don't do anything or do the opposite of what they are supposed to according to the manual). But nowadays, there's plenty of room for in-game help, contextualization of when something might be useful, "this stat does that" explanation, and so on.

It had gotten way better for a while, but I've noticed it backsliding a bit. Some devs are seeing community documentation/wiki/etc movements as excusing their lack of in-game documentation. I disagree with them, unless they themselves are participating in contributing to that (like making sure the game's wide-open to investigation). And this itself has gotten worse as YouTube, and myriad different wikis on different sites, and all that shit, has made game documentation get worse and fragmented in the last decade. [Aside: A Biblical pox on people who make "YouTube guides" but not written ones!]

This doesn't just apply to RPGs. Strategy and builder games should let you know what does what and when and how. Various randomization rates (including 'drop rates') should be defined at least to some degree.x

...But this is just another layer on accessibility in games that I'm a major proponent of: not just disability settings, but also difficulty settings, the above, et cetera.

Anecdote1: I still remember being wowed by Final Fantasy Tactics' in-game help the first time!
Anecdote2: There's one tech in Stars in Shadow, my current favorite 4x game, that I ignored for a long time because its 'what it does' text is merged in with its flavor/story text in the research screen. It's kind of an important tech once you learn what it really does! There are other parts of the game like this, too. Like some weapons that say something like "rips through shields" but you don't know if it's flavor or mechanical.
Anecdote3: Bloodstained notoriously has people get stuck around 86% because the game is just so opaque about its almost non-existent hint for how to progress past the fake last boss toward the good ending.

EDIT: Counterargument: "What about those who like discovery and exploration? You're one of those players yourself!" Well, it doesn't have to be up front and in your face immediately. Diablo1 was a great example: As you killed more of a monster, it gave you more of its stats. Or building an in-game monsterpedia as you progress. Or simply that it's present in the game, but you have to toggle them on or press a button to get that info. You're a monster!

This is a problem with game design in general. Especially in projects of low or solo-staff; an insular understanding of the game is gained without the breath of others to speak on the issues that the team have gotten used to.

For bigger projects, you simply have to choose how stupid your minimum viable product is going to be.

I actually thought of a game idea that uses game mechanics hiding in an interesting way. The game is an RPG, but the twist is that:
* Some of the people in towns well give you some information on the game mechanics, or advice on how to get through a particular area or boss fight.
* There is, however, in-game misinformation going around. Some people will just tell you things that just aren't true (and the player can determine that they're false by testing).
* There are some patterns to who spouts mis-information versus who spouts true information, and part of the player's job is to figure it out.
* This whole aspect of the game ties into the plot, where it turns out that the main villain(s) of the game are spreading misinformation in order to keep heros from being able to defeat them.
* (Part of the idea behind this is to encourage players to experiment. Other mechanics would be designed to reinforce this, like making sure that the player can't permanently be locked into a bad character build.)

Incidentally, Undertale has a bit of mis-information. The most obvious example of this is the "friendship pellets" that the flower tells you to collect at the start; as soon as you touch one of them, it's very obvious what's going on. (This happens right at the start of the game, so I don't consider this a spoiler.)

Edit: Also worth noting is that, for that game idea I have, the player would be made aware right away that there's mis-information going around, and early in the game it will be very easy to tell that something is false.

Agreed wholeheartedly. There's room and need for all styles. This is, interesting, subverted by some games. WoW famously (or at least used to) have both. A bajillion tiers in its progression treadmills (not just levels, but also gear, etc), but each one also made a big difference. Of course, doing this leads to things like HP going into the hundreds of thousands of hit points in higher levels [characters, not bosses; they go into the many millions!]. There is something to be said for gargantuan numbers like that: It allows for great precision and a lot of tools for balancing without invoking decimal values. But that's a different discussion. [I'm not a fan, personally.]

What you describe is one of the reasons Guild Wars was overall a fun game. (I REALLY wish it'd get local server or a real DRM-free mode. It's too good a game to keep hamstrung forced as an MMO. Oh, regrets from my earlier years...) Going from level 1...20 was basically "tutorial mode" and introducing the plot, then the rest of the game was done at level 20 (including gear stats; all later gear was only a costume change, same stats) and was a game of skill. [This was later ruined when they introduced consumables, and title grinding that affected play, and special PvE-only skills that didn't fit the regular progression model, etc.] That said, a downside of this is that... the game was/is really super challenging (too much so) because there are no tools to help you progress beyond "get better" or "join a party of someone who is better and hope they can carry you and you're forced to play multiplayer with strangers in this way". Especially its last campaign/expansion (Eye of the North) is a notch above everything else in the game and was mercilessly unfun difficult. And end-game content was completely inaccessible the way they set its difficulty.

Timespinner also has a "guide dang it" moment. There's one point where, in order to progress, you need to investigate some bones, and it's not obvious that investigating those bones is a thing (there's no other point in the game where you have to do that).

Not strange, pretty normal except for the dudebrojocks out there. And should absolutely be standard.

This alone makes it fine (and probably even good). Especially if the game is scaled to be more intimate so you'll learn the personality of who is giving what kind of tips as you play. EDIT: This thing works well (and I've used it, to a small degree) in ttRPGs.

Regarding Undertale: It's a game I'll probably never play because it's intentionally done as a troll game through and through. Maybe not as much as that Pony? game that messes with the player even on the main menu.

I'm firmly in the camp that does not think MGS1's "put the controller in the other port" boss fight was a good thing. Novel, creative, out of the box? Yes. But not good game play.

I wish there were more games like the original Dragon Quest/Warrior.

(Just look at how the (non-manipulated) speedrun gets the legendary sword early, sneaking into the final dungeon at a low level in order to save time when leveling up to the level needed to beat the game. Or, look at the RNG-manipulated speedrun (or the TAS) to see how, if you were somehow ludicrously lucky, you could beat the game at level 7 (when 17 is the absolute minimum without manipulation, and you still need incredible luck, including hitting a 1/16 success rate on the first attempt).)


Also, Disgaea. In the first game, the superboss's first form is level 4000 with stats around 200k each. (Note that the main story is meant to be beaten around level 100, probably a bit lower in Disgaea 1. Also worth noting that advancing from level 99 to level 100 takes more XP than other level ups in that neighborhood.)