Sure - it's not a hard and fast rule and there certainly are plenty of unarguably terrible original games like Street Fighter that were later honed into something good. But more often than I'd expect, I find the charm of simplicity to be more appealing than more ambitious, complex iteration on a game concept.
Street fighter is a really bad example isnt it the first of a genre? Its a proto game that came out the same year as the first beat em up. So there really was no blueprint at all for it.
I’ve said this ad nauseam here but there was a crash during The Great Recession. A lot of developers either closed up shop, merged with others, or just started churning out annual or biennial sequels. A lot of developers struggled with the change to high definition and could not sell enough copies of games to make it. Any game that took some risks and failed shut down but annual Call of Duty games sold like gangbusters. As someone who does not like AAA gaming, it was around the era I started losing interest in games.
This also led to gaming becoming more akin to dumb blondes; pretty to look at, less innovative in terms of mechanics or gameplay. It's to the point now where if a AAA game actually is great and does sell well, that's the exception that proves the rule.
It's a fun setting with a good story.
Half-Life is actually a pretty good example of this (although I don't think most people recommend skipping that one) - it was a more self-contained experience that really made the most of its core combat and puzzle gameplay compared to Half-Life 2, which had a much more ambitious scope, but was so focused on set pieces, spectacle, and gimmicks that were technically impressive by 2004 standards that the first-person shooter aspect felt perfunctory.
If you started the series with the original game 1998 you will recognize that Half Life 2 is essentially a soft reboot that reworks the franchise quite a bit. Introducing new factions and characters out of nowhere. Retconning the G-Man almost entirely. Focusing heavily on physics puzzles and on rails shooting and constant one liner style writing from the NPCs. It was also one of those games designed where if you didn't play the previous games you could still get into it because Valve knew that tons of players would be playing Half Life 2 as their first entry into the franchise.
Half Life 2 took the series in its direction of being an engine or hardware showcase that was more about showing the players the abilities of the game engine. To the point where the puzzles and physics are far more important of a focus than the actual story or world. And now the series is more about selling Alyx as a character and VR headsets. Than Freeman and old school FPS gameplay. But most modern Half Life fans seem to prefer the VR game over Half Life 1 if you look at the general discussions around the franchise.
I assume you mean Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals.
My guess is that having a thumbstick on a controller was a new enough concept to where the idea of it being the main method of controlling a game wasn't yet established, so they designed it so the stick could be used with either hand, depending on what the game called for. And then everything just used it with the left hand, anyway.
There are good individual writing moments in all three games, but as an overarching story the first game set up a neat premise that both sequels completely failed to deliver on. To this day, people laser-focus on Mass Effect 3's ending as if it were the whole problem, but it was nothing more than the inevitable outcome of a catastrophic failure to move the plot forward.
