10/10 Video Games The Public REJECTED

Much like that old adage about thumbs and fingers, all critics are people but not all people are critics and inevitably the two groups will disagree from time to time.

Whether illustrated by a commercial flop, a wild disparity in review scores granted by critics versus those submitted by the public, or a genuinely great game that came off a little too niche or was poorly marketed, these games may have taken home some stellar scores from certain critics, but weren’t taken home by the public. Mostly. Because they didn’t buy it.

Some of these games are very good and it just so happens that nobody picked them up while some were critically praised but gamers were like, no, this is kind of bad and elected not to trade their dollars for the experience. In either case, the fact of the matter remains, the general masses didn’t take to these ones.

Sporting a 10/10 on Steam and a sea of perfect and near perfect scores, you’d be forgiven for assuming that 2023 JRPG Octopath Traveler II was a slam dunk commercially given the game was even bigger critical success than its predecessor.

Not only that, Octopath Traveler II is one of the entries on this list that gamers loved as well, which begs the question why not that many people went out and bought it.

In its release week, the game only shifted 78,000 units, getting absolutely stomped by Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe which launched on the same day and sold 190,000 copies. Though Team Asano would go on to announce that in just under four months on sale, the game had sold one million units across all platforms and including both digital and physical sales, Octopath Traveler the first sold the same amount of units after less than a month on shelves, and at that point the game was only available on Switch. Exactly why more fans didn’t return to the sequel despite stellar review scores is hard to say. It’s possible that the second game launched in a far busier release window as opposed to the first game which landed in the middle of July in 2018, only seriously competing with the beefed up version of Sonic Mania and the Xbox release of Nier: Automata.

To be fair, there’s likely not a lot of audience overlap between Octopath and Sonic Mania fans, and there was no pulling Nier diehards out of that hundred hour experience just to throw them into another one, anyway.

There was also an attractive shiny new aesthetic and quirkiness to what Octopath Traveler offered back in 2018 that has since become well-trodden ground, likely resulting in the sequel pulling in fewer new fans.