Even the Japs hated Kiss Players (and it was really because they thought Kiss Players would give them a bad rep for being sexual degenerates). Now as for regular people not liking Japanese Transformers, I've heard different things, but the common one I've heard is that the Japanese don't do Transformers the way Hasbro does it (and I've heard several specific reasons for that).
The biggest problem with kiss players aside from the skeevy fucking box art was the fact it was trying to cash in on so many trends of the time (which is why that box art is even a thing at all) when the figures and basic plot premise would have worked better. (G1 unicron movie events causing a chain reaction offscreen where now a bunch of earth vehicles are becoming hordes of extremely destructive malformed zombie clone megatrons + a 3 letter agency working to contain them by artificially creating mass produced transformers called autoroopers made from retrofitted cybertronian shit they found) They were trying to do a "more mature transformers story" but then also trying to tap into the moeshit trends of the time and like a billion other things right before bayformers tried a similar thing of "more mature transformers" like a year or 2 later but without the moeshit slapped on or the direct continuity ties to the G1 cartoon.
It's interesting how when I look up specific figures I get news posts from the time they came out with comments sections basically being sane where they find certain elements skeevy or shitty but say it in a way that's actually genuine and not parroting the "experts" on loop. Some even made fucking jokes about the more fucked up elements. surprised they haven't been DFE'd to try and make the reputation fo the places those are hosted on that are still active more squeaky clean given the attitudes of jannies across the board on the Internet these days.
Speaking of g1 the recent weird shit where people start complaining about either shit not being g1 enough or hating g1 is weird to me. So much transformers media, including the shit called g2 that's why g1 is now called g1, is part of g1. G2? Toys were mostly reissues of g1, plot was direct continuation of g1 in comics, reruns of g1 as the "show" Japanese seasons of g1 and beast wars? g1. Unicron trilogy? first attempt of a reboot, heavily based on g1 with rights issues for some of the names leading to really funny name fuckery. It's like they're trying to apply pokemon "geewunner" talk logic to transformers but also are ignoring the fact the pokemon geewunners are more about "the number going up too much" and "we don't like every fucking game being a world ending plot can we at least have just the mafia again" type of complaints., not literally viewing each extension as a completely separate reboot.
EDIT: Oh my fucking god I just found out something fucking hilarious. I already knew about the basic shit of how the zombie megatrons in kiss players were actually the decepticharge alternators figure, but what I didn't know was that they later repainted decepticharge as arcee later on in the binaltech figures.
It looks like a pink and white megatron in samurai armor I'm fucking losing it
EDITX2 oh my god was this the reason those hacks made arcee "galvatron's twin brother"? HHHHHHH.
I kinda want this thing because it still looks cool (not as an arcee though) but all the listings are scalpers that want like 100 or upwards for it and most are slightly yellowed.
This is the autobot megatron we needed, the autobot megatron we deserved. Pink bastard samurai. Our honor was robbed from us.
