The Most Divisive Games Of 2023

I think there's no denying that 2023 was an outstanding year in terms of game releases. Not only did we get to play a wide selection of stellar games in all sorts of genres, we even got to experience some comically bad ones! But while those kinds of games are fun to play, they aren't as fun to talk about. No, what I care about more are the less definitively good or bad games, the 7/10s, the games people are still arguing about months after their release. Let's look back on the most divisive games of this year!

Now, before we begin, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: None of the games in this list are outright bad, but whether you enjoy them largely depends on what you value most in a video game. If any of these games sound interesting to you, it might just be worth your time to pick them up in a sale and see for yourself whether you'll gel with them.

But enough preamble, let's get started already!

Final Fantasy 16

At this point, none of us should be surprised that the latest Final Fantasy game shows up in this sort of list again. As a rule of thumb, in general gaming discourse the most recent FF game is usually considered bad and a break from the series' identity, the one before it was underrated and the best Final Fantasy game is the one that whoever you're talking to grew up with.

It's a shame though, Final Fantasy 16 seemed like it might be able to break this trend at first! When fans heard that the game was being developed by Creative Business Unit 3, the team behind the revival of FF14, they had every reason to be optimistic. Early trailers looked promising, the Game of Thrones-inspired narrative tone and world building was an interesting direction for the series to take, and the first demo was so spectacular it even sold many skeptics on the game!

So what went wrong? Well, I think the issue lies in the game having a lot of very neat ideas that aren't expanded on properly. The combat is flashy and fun, but takes a while to get going and gets stale long before the finish line. The sidequests are mostly fetch quests padded out with far too much dialogue. And the plot has pacing issues and gradually shifts from being refreshingly Game of Thrones to being painfully Final Fantasy, with most of the side characters and complex political machinations getting shuffled off the stage.

But despite all that, the game still has many loyal fans, and for good reason! There is plenty of fun to be had on the journey Final Fantasy 16 takes you on, and the Eikon battles are unlike anything we'd ever experienced in a video game before. I have a feeling that this game will age better than most FF titles, but unfortunately it wasn't the series' grand comeback fans were hoping for.

Lords of the Fallen (2023)

Hey, remember Lords of the Fallen? No, not the 2023 game (though we'll get to that in a moment), the 2014 game with the same name and publisher. It was one of, if not the first Soulslike not developed by FromSoftware! Unfortunately for CI Games, they missed their mark by a fair amount back then. However, apparently they decided that "Lords of the Fallen" was just too good a name to give up on and revived it in 2023 with a new game!

Is this new Lords of the Fallen, now only published by CI Games and developed by HEXWORKS instead, the triumphant comeback they were hoping for?

No.

But at least opinions are a bit more split on it this time! Especially after a string of patches that mitigated the performance issues that torpedoed the game's Steam review average at first, and also addressed some design nitpicks on the side.

On the whole, Lords of the Fallen (2023) is a lot more solid and competent than Lords of the Fallen (2014), and its dimension-swapping mechanic injects some much-needed novelty and complexity into its exploration gameplay. Plus, even critics who ended up disliking the game had to concede that its boss fights are some of the best in the genre!

Yet many people who played the game still felt that HEXWORKS don't quite understand what makes Dark Souls so compelling for so many people. And with so much stiff competition in the genre these days (especially the outstanding Lies of P, which released just weeks earlier) a Soulslike that only gets it right some of the time is a hard sell even for enthusiasts of the genre.

Still, Lords of the Fallen's exploration gimmick does make it stand out from its less inspired peers and just might be worth a look for people who are looking for something different.

Forspoken

Forspoken is a game that few people were actually looking forward to, despite it being one of the first truly "next-gen" games on the market. It already started off on the wrong foot when trailers and clips featuring its dialogue popped up online ahead of its launch. "Surely it can't be that bad, right?" I thought to myself at the time, but. Well. Actually, why don't you have a listen yourself?

I present to you *actual* dialogue from Forspoken pic.twitter.com/IzygNHHM2T

— MrMattyPlays (@G27Status) January 23, 2023

Much has been said about Marvel-style irony-poisoned dialogue and quips already, so I won't bother with adding my opinion to the pile. Either way, unfortunately for Forspoken this kind of dialogue went out of style in the time it took to develop the game (There's a conversation to be had here about long development cycles damaging the industry, but I'll spare you for now). Then again, you could argue that leaning into the trend this hard wouldn't have gone over well even at the height of the MCU.

So the dialogue is bad, but what about the game itself? In short, the magic system is extremely solid and enough to carry the experience for some, but the open world and story are just too bland and repetitive for others to tolerate. It also commits the cardinal writing sin of having unlikable main characters that stay unlikable over the course of the game and sabotage any attempt to actually take the narrative seriously.

Forspoken was such a massive critical and commercial failure that it ultimately sank the studio that developed it. Still, some people who played it swear that it's not nearly as bad as others make it out to be! Whether you believe them or not, the game goes on deep sales pretty often these days, so you can just give it a shot yourself for cheap if you feel like it.

Sonic Frontiers

Oh boy, where do I even start with this one. The Sonic franchise has become a bit of a meme at this point for crushing the hopes of its most loyal fans over and over again, with every new release promising a return to form in its lead up only to turn out to be a broken mess filled with questionable design decisions.

Sonic Frontiers started off strong in its initial marketing, promising a new direction for the series with a shift to Open World gameplay and a fan-favorite scriptwriter at the helm. But even in early gameplay footage, people started to notice that the game world looked like a generic fantasy landscape that someone emptied a Marble Run kit over, with extremely noticeable pop-in to boot. Even fans of the series went in with tempered expectations this time around.

So, did it crash and burn like so many of its predecessors? Well, not quite. The pop-in building blocks and questionable design decisions are still very much there, but most of the time they're drowned out by a core gameplay experience that's just plain fun! Open World plus Sonic is just as good of a match as you'd expect, and no amount of janky level design can overpower that.

Not for lack of trying, though: The further you progress in the game, the more its problems rear their ugly heads, and by the time the credits rolled on my screen I wasn't really sure how I felt about it anymore. It's kind of a Pokémon Legends situation: The game itself is pretty rough around the edges and hard to recommend, but just imagine what its followup could be like!

Diablo 4

This is probably going to be the most controversial game on this list, which actually makes it perfect for it as well! Blizzard's latest top-down ARPG released to a generally positive reception at first, but as the weeks went by and more and more people reached the end of the game, public perception of it soured a lot.

The main reason seems to be that it's a game trapped between genre conventions from 2012 and audience expectations in 2023. The aggressive monetization and less than revolutionary gameplay are a turn-off for series veterans, while the endgame's seasonal format and repetitive grind disappointed newcomers who were lured in by promises of live service-style infinite content only to have to wait months in between content drops.

The situation was only made worse by Diablo IV's first major update, which nerfed classes across the board, slowed down the leveling grind significantly and exacerbated many of the game's other issues. Players who'd already been dissatisfied with it saw this as the final nail in the coffin.

There is one thing most people can agree on, however: The main campaign of Diablo IV is extremely solid! Whether 20 to 30 hours of quality ARPG gameplay are worth the steep asking price of $70 is a call you'll have to make for yourself, but maybe a sale could change your mind.