Author's Note: This post is copied from my Tumblr blog.
It's always tempting after experiencing a bad video game, movie, book, TV series/episode, etc. to race to a sympathetic corner of the Internet to shout "X is the worst Y ever!" As liberating and cathartic as it may be, it's also important to consider what came before and/or after that thing you just ranted about and where they would rank in comparison.
I'll provide two anecdotes for your reading pleasure:
15 years ago, I rented a game (at the end of the Blockbuster era but when GameFly was still popular) called Windy x Windam, a Nintendo DS fighting game by the developers of Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja and guest-starring two of its main characters.
The music and sound effects were lame, the animation was choppy, the fighting was sluggish and buggy, the characters (except for Izuna and Shino) were derivative, the localization was dry and lifeless, and changing the difficulty only adjusts how much damage you and your opponent do and doesn't make them any more aggressive or teach them to, uh...block.
In short, it's a pretty terrible game, not worth seeking out even if you like making fun of bad games.
I figured it would make a good candidate for Matt McMuscles' The Worst Fighting Game review series, so I decided to (poorly) write an episode in his style, ultimately concluding that for all of its faults, Windy is still better than better-known infamously bad fighting games like Criticom, Rise of the Robots and its sequel, and that awful Super NES port of Pit-Fighter.
Coincidentally, all four of the titles I just mentioned were made by teams with no prior experience in fighting games. Although I've only played Windy x Windam (and returned it the same day after only playing it for three hours since I'd seen everything it had to offer and didn't want to play anymore), I'll at least give it some slight credit for the idea of its characters transforming during supers...even though the Bloody Roar games do it much better. It's still never going to beat the "We have Guilty Gear at home" comparisons, though (even when Guilty Gear had its own mediocre Nintendo DS game a few years earlier).
Criticom and Rise of the Robots had the robotic sci-fi vibe going for them, even if everything else surrounding the games sucked. SNES Pit-Fighter, with its grainy sprites, terrible music, and tons of cut content? It never stood a chance.
As I've played way too many video games in the last 40 years, I've experienced more than anyone's share of duds. Comparatively, I've read less fanfiction than the average reader, so my "bad story" senses aren't refined enough to recognize the really bad ones. No, I don't mean stories like My Immortal, which are "bad" by most objective critical measures, but it's hard to tell whether or not they were written as elaborate jokes. I'm talking about serious efforts gone horribly awry, whether from poor spelling, plotting, characterization, or a combination of all of those.
If I were to use Matt's WFG tier list to rank the worst fanfics I've ever read, then the half-finished Fire Emblem Fates fanfic A Brighter Dark, the first truly "bad" fanfic I read more than a few chapters of, would only reach the "Fairly Stinky" tier.
Originally envisioned as a darker, more "serious" rewrite of Fates' "Conquest" route, it fell flat due to its overcorrection on hardening its protagonist Corrin into a crass, spoiled princess with a violent temperament, and failing to adequately accout for plot holes caused by rewriting large chunks of Fates' lore in the name of "realism". Despite that, I liked the fight scenes and some of the parts that pulled away from Corrin to examine the other characters (well, maybe just Sakura). And more importantly than that...making fun of it was fun, which is something I couldn't say of Windy or the fanfic that replaced Dark as the worst I've ever read - a "Grand Trash Master" in the truest sense of the term.
Now, while the Fire Emblem: Three Houses fanfic The Savior King, the Master Tactician, and the Queen of Liberation has ruled the roost on Archive of Our Own for as long as I remember using the site, you'd never count me among one of its many fans. In fact, I've dedicated several Dreamwidth blog posts to criticizing Savior King for, among many other things, the caricaturization of its main cast, overuse of violence and profanity for shock value, nonsensical plot progression and pacing, annoying speeches that read like the author lecturing the audience, and a general sense of the story telling the opposite lessons the game preaches (superpowers alone shouldn't determine a person's worth; one can never have all the answers, and even if you get the ones you want, there may still be some important context missing; etc.).
That downward tumble in quality also reminded me that the bottom of the proverbial barrel is both deeper than you think and harder to find the more garbage gets thrown into it.
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