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Nukid101's Top 10 Disappointments of 2016: 10 - 6

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2016 was a shit year.

We all know it. It's practically became a meme to talk about how awful it's been this year has been. How tempting it was to just put 'Humanity in general' at my number 1 spot for all the stupid shit that's gone on this year. It's been a miserable year for multiple different.

However to keep with tradition I am just gonna keep this to disappointing releases of games, films and TV Shows, which at the end of the day are the far less important letdowns of 2016. Let's use this countdown at a chance to make light of some of this years disappointing releases and poke fun of them. Either that or if you disagree me then call me a shithead or something, I suppose.

For those unfamiliar with how this works, this is NOT a 'Worst' list. Some of the things on this list aren't even 'bad' overall and at least one entry many people regarded as being great. These are however 10 entries that I personally got enthusiastic for to some degree, and the film failed to live up to those expectations by failing in some form. It's a very subjective list and I endeavour to explain exactly why these entries failed to impress me.

With all that bullshit out of the way, let's begin. These are my Top 10 Disappointments of 2016!




Nukid101's Top 10 Disappointments of 2016





10) The Jungle Book



So let's get the controversial one out of the way. I didn't care much for The Jungle Book.

I'll admit, it's not a BAD film at all. In fact for a while I couldn't quite put my finger on why I didn't care for it. I remember being unengaged by it and looking at my watch, which is not a good sign when I'm at the cinema, but it took me a bit to figure out exactly WHY this admittedly impressively made film was not working for me.

Then it hit me. The Jungle Book is basically the 2016 equivalent of James Cameron's Avatar.

So here's the thing: Like Avatar I will completely agree that from a technological standpoint The Jungle Book is VERY impressive. The film looks amazing, and it is one of those rare films that needs to be seen in 3D. Hell, I went to see it in 3D and I have NEVER done that before. From a production standpoint the film is amazing.

Everything else about the film? Not...bad, but so unremarkable that it pains that such a generic film looks this good. It feels like such wasted effort.

At times it felt like the film couldn't decide whether it wanted to be more like the Disney classic or the original novel, so we get a film that's tone is all over the place. At one point animals can be killed off in surprisingly violent ways, and yet in others bits the film suddenly becomes a bloody musical when King Lou suddenly starts singing "I Wan'na Be Like You". The whole film feels like this: indecisive in what it wants to be and at times feel more like a string of vignettes tied into one film as opposed to a flowing story.

Worse a lot of the stuff taken from the original Disney classic felt quite half hearted. The relationship between Mowgli and Baloo felt really abridged and flat, and Shere Khan in this is way less interesting than the animated version despite the films attempt at giving him past trauma to explain his motivations.

I admit that I've never considered the animated film to be one of my favourite Disney flicks, but when this film was getting such positive feedback I had hoped it might win me over to this story. Sadly I ended up liking it even less than the animated classic. It's not a bad film, but honestly because of it I'm actually now more interested in the darker, more true to the original book version Andy Serkis is apparently making.  



9) The Magnificent Seven



Of all the remakes to come out this year the remake of John Sturges Magnificent Seven - it itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai - seemed like the one most likely to be any good. After all it had a killer cast with modern greats like Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, along with a solid director in Antoine Fuqua whose making a career out of making old-fashioned ‘guy’ flicks. Out of all of the classic film remakes this year it was this one that sold us the most with its very solid trailer.

Which makes it all the more shame that this version of The Magnificent Seven is not only just a dumber, less charming version of the story, but a significantly soulless one of that.

I don’t know how that was possible with what is such a great cast, but outside of a few great moments (and Chris Pratt stealing the whole film most of the time) the film fails to gain momentum or any real spark to it. That’s really important because on the surface The Magnificent Seven has a very simple plot so it really needs these characters to bounce of off each other and it needs momentum to function. Unfortunately so much of the film is plodding from point A to point B to point C uninterestingly.

To say nothing of how manufactured and insincere it all feels. Obviously being a film it IS all manufactured, but most of the time the film failed to suck me into its setting, nor did its speeches about righteousness and justice ever succeed in feeling genuine. The film ultimately lacks the charm of the John Sturges version or the depth of the Akira Kurosawa classic, which leaves us with a diet, summer blockbuster friendly version that may make for decent entertainment for a few hours but is ultimately inferior in every way to the film its remaking.

A good remake doesn't have to be better than its predecessors, but it does have to be able to at least add its own variation on that story. Something that helps it stand out. The only thing The Magnificent Seven remake adds is a dumber, shallower version of a story much better told TWICE. Ironically out of all the remakes this year this one arguably ended up being the most pointless and probably the worst.



8) Mighty No. 9



Allow me to explain myself here. It's absolutely fair to say that by the time this game was released, many of us expected it to be disappointing, considering how much went wrong with this game. I was definitely thinking this just before the game got released. That does not make it any less disappointing however, because Mighty No. 9 is disappointing because of what it does to tarnish credibility in Kickstarter.

It's one thing for a game to suck, it's another when said game has been financed and paid for by consumers on the promise of a much better product. Yes, Kickstarter is something of a gambit, even at the best of times. You are placing your money into a product with the trust that they will make something good. I therefore believe that it puts greater emphasis on its creators to make the best product they can and to use that money as efficiently as possible.

But well, we all know what happened next, and if you don't I'm afraid I'm gonna have to be lazy and recommend that you watch Jim Sterling's video on it called "The Might Has Fallen", because the subject of what went wrong is so long and disastrous it's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The point is what we got was a game that was a shell of what was promised. A game that looked nothing like its original promo footage and a game that despite getting more than four times than what they originally asked for looked cheap and was genuinely considered mediocre at best.

And considering this was financed on money based on broken promises and peoples trust, that's pathetic, and worse it de-legitimizes Kickstarter. There are people on Kickstarter who are using their money wisely and are trying to live up to their donators expectations, but when disasters like Mighty No. 9 happen it makes people less inclined to take a chance on possible products, and potentially great Kickstarter campaigns suffer for it.

And that's pretty damn disappointing. So much that it made me cry like an anime fan on prom night.



7) Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE



When Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE was first announced it was initially assumed that it'd be a simple Marvel Vs Capcom affair between Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei, which sounds awesome in of itself. It later became apparent that it would be radically different to that and would be something of a Persona-esque story and gameplay with Fire Emblem characters as Personas.

While some may have been disappointed that we weren't getting a straight up crossover brawler, I was most pleased by this idea. It was different and unexpected, but more importantly it was clearly more aimed at being a more narrative driven game, which is my absolute jam. The fact that it was also centred around Japanese Pop Idols actually made all the more interested, not because I like Pop Idols but because it was just so weird it made me want to try it more.

And it is undeniably weird game. It's also beyond underwhelming.

As a big anime and JRPG nut I like to think that I have quite a bit of tolerance for some of the more...annoying and generic aspects of both. I've become less tolerant of fanservice, but that's not the problem with this game. The problem with this game is that the story is so bland and safe by Shin Megami Tensei standards, and the characters are often annoying and feel like they've literally just came out the 'cliche anime stereotypes' factory.

It's honestly sad to see a company like Atlus churn out such lazily written and by-the-books characters considering their past games. You ain't gonna get any characters remotely as memorable or likeable as the Persona 4 cast or even the Fire Emblem Awakening. You just get stuff like bland JRPG protagonist, shy and overly polite love interest, hot headed best friend to protagonist, you get my drift. No one in this game is remotely engaging and the story does nothing - besides its pop idol stuff - to be remotely interesting.

It does have some nice cameos from both franchises...but then it also turns Tiki from Fire Emblem into lolicon bait and has her constantly call the main lead 'big brother' in a way that would make paedophiles so very erect. Fucking ugh.

The combat of this game is fine I suppose, but the game has dungeons in the same vein of Persona, and they are so lame. Just lacking in any of the imagination of those game and generic as hell. Mechanically it's not a bad game, but it's neither a particularly good game either, and it therefore does little to make up for the shit story and characters.

I'll admit that this is far from the worst JRPG out there, but for a game that has the Shin Megami Tensei AND the Fire Emblem name attached to it, it needed to be so much better than this. What a letdown.



6) No Man's Sky



Well well, fucking No Man's Sky. What is there left to say on this goddamn stinker?

Admittedly I never thought for a second that this game would be remotely as groundbreaking or revolutionary as a lot of people thought it would but I never think that with any game. Regardless it sounded and looked like an intriguing game about space exploration and searching across the unknown for the many wonders of this games universe. I wasn't frothing at the mouth for this game but I was certainly curious to see how it turned out.

Well, we all know how it turned out. The game's just another crafting and survival game that is much less about the wonders of its universe and more about doing the same mundane tasks over and over. Not that there is much wonder to be had since the overall package isn't remotely as satisfying or impressive as what was advertised. Said advertisement was used on the bloody Steam page on release for Christ sakes. THAT opened up some big legal question about whether Studio Hello Games and creator Sean Murray lied about their product.

Do I think they lied? Hell yea. Did they do so with malicious intent to screw over their customers? Doubt it. It's far more likely that Sean Murray and co. fell into the trap of promising too much and when it became apparent that it couldn't deliver on all those promises they didn't have the gut to confess to it. Transparency would've helped here, but not promising and selling the game on intentional and/or unintentional lies helps even more. For those reasons it's hard for me to lay too much criticisms at those who got super excited for this game and were let down way more than I was. They were promised way more than this.

Ultimately the game that was pre-emptively lauded for being revolutionary is ultimately mundane and guilty of so many of modern gaming's biggest sins. It mistakes the scale of a games world for character and personality. It tries to make each planet unique but ultimately makes the experience world to world feel very samey, and it once again a game ultimately soured possibly beyond all redemption by broken promises and outright lies.

Also that ending. Ha ha ha.




That's part one folks. Keep a look out for Part 2, which shouldn't take long because I only have one more entry to write up. And you can expect some of those entries to have very long winded rants!
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ffejgao's avatar

I actually enjoyed 2016 and my adulthood...