The "Good For Its Time" Defense

[Gors]

And there you go, you're ignoring logistics

If the product is bad and yet it's popular somehow, then mad respect to the logistics/advertisers who made a stellar job.

---

honestly, in the end games are products from a multibillionaire industry. They're made to be sold and keep their devs afloat. Games don't get popular for nothing even if they are bad. They spend millions for advertising and studying demographics to ensure the game's popularity and therefore commercial success.

Taking that Hydlide again as example, it was released on NEC. Part of popularity of a given game or franchise is actually publishing it on a popular hardware. I bet that a huge part of the gaming community doesn't even know about Falcom exactly because of their weird-ass advertising/publishing policies and making animu games on extremely underground consoles. (NES and Genesis? PFFT let's release the game on PC-88)

If you can make great shit but if no one knows about it, then that means you aren't great at all, commercially speaking.

Now, do I agree with this strategy? Not in the slightest, but it's A Thing That Happens.

Also let's not ignore the fact that the praise might as well be justified. Zelda was a solid game at the time and maybe the baby steps of the sandbox genre, hence why it applies in this case.