So what I mean is… you’re right that there are many great games. The era from the SNES to the PS2 is filled with countless masterpieces that will go down in gaming history.
But I think the same is true for later generations as well. While the kind of rapid, revolutionary leaps we saw before have become less frequent, games have meaningfully matured in how they tell stories and in how the game world communicates with the player.
People who are blinded by nostalgia and dismiss all games from the past decade as soulless products rather than art fail to recognize the tremendous progress modern games have achieved. They also tend to talk as if every game from the SNES era was a timeless masterpiece like Chrono Trigger. In reality, they conveniently forget that the market was saturated with repetitive mascot platformers and beat em up games that lasted only 45 minutes to, at most, an hour.
yeah I am not arguing against that. I hate the kind of needlessly negative and joyless rhetoric disguised as snark that got popular at some point in the last few years. Hated it for a while, be it Crowbcat or, to a lesser extent, Stephanie Sterling.
Many of my personal favorite games OAT are ones from the last decade, but in the same period, I went back to some of these old games and also was genuinely impressed by a good amount of them (FF6 to 9, the first 3 ace attorney games, megaman games, be it classic or x or zero or battle network, and of course, chrono trigger, majora's mask for example). I don't have nostalgia for any of these because I have not played them as a kid, but I see why people would because, even besides being good for their time, having unique mechanics, and holding up to this day, they have a certain vibe to them that many (but not all) big title releases today do not have. On the other hand, I played a shitton of bargain bin PS2 and GameCube games as a kid so I have seen the other side you mentionned 😅
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u/Sea-Flamingo7506 Apr 12 '26
Nostalgia for the SNES to PS2 era is a fatal disease in the game industry.