Good Games With Shitty Sequels - How did they mess it up so bad?

[Dysnomia]

Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly. Holy cow was that a mess. I loved the first three games. So when I got a Gamecube I also bought Enter The Dragonfly. Wish I had gotten something else.

While I enjoyed the game on a surface level it was so buggy that it was almost unplayable in some areas. The platform detection is horrible. You think you landed on the platform you had to glide to? Hell no. You slip right off. Into the void you go Spyro.

The level where you have to help the farmer whose cows are being abducted by UFO's doesn't load properly. So eventually you hit a green void and can't see what's going on. You can still finish the level. But since part of it doesn't load it's much harder.

It's playable. But it's the worst Spyro I played. I'm sure there are worse ones. But I had high hopes for a next gen Spyro game and ended up really disappointed.

 

[Saint Agustin]

Mass Effect. It went from a dynamic, exciting game that encouraged movement, to a tedious slog of a cover shooter (on Insanity, which is the only difficulty I have played since 2007).

Spoiler

• You lose most of your skills, and it's even worse for your companions, most of whom require you to assume direct control over their positioning and ability use
• If you're playing as Adept, Sentinel or Engineer you're stuck with SMGs and Pistols for the first half of the game. And Sentinel is probably the best class, which just goes to show how awful the rest of the game is.
• The plot is mostly filler dealing with your squad's family trauma, and listening to them all quickly just becomes an annoyance
• Everything is smaller and less explorable
• You spend most of the time fighting mercenaries, not collectors, not reapers, not geth. The suicide mission seems a victory to you, but the collectors are barely linked to the reapers in the grand scheme of things
• The level design is atrocious and everything is in a straight line. You rarely get the opportunity to find another way to your objective. Shout out here to the Reaper IFF mission in particular, but they're all pretty unexciting.
• Harbinger is a dull antagonist
• The Paragon / Renegade system has never been good, but it's the worst in 2.

Really? I played Mass Effect on the hardest difficulty and it wasn't tactical at all. It was just positioning using skills and patience.

Maybe I'm God Tier Gamer, but never understood difficulty in games.

 

[babadook]

getting Crash Bash after Crash Team Racing was unneeded child abuse

 

[TheHarbinger]

Really? I played Mass Effect on the hardest difficulty and it wasn't tactical at all. It was just positioning using skills and patience.

Maybe I'm God Tier Gamer, but never understood difficulty in games.

The Mass Effect games are like Bethesda Fallout or Elder Scrolls style RPGs. You, the player, are not meant to lose in combat. Enemies are mostly bullet sponges. Your companions act like they have brain damage and barely respond to commands. They still want death as a possibility, to give some semblance of actual combat, and not just have the player realize that they were essentially placed into 'god mode' level cheat codes by the developer. But the entire story of those games is that the player is 'god' and has the fate of the world in his hands and cannot lose.

If you want a Mass Effect style setting purely oriented towards combat then play something like Vanquish or Metal Gear Rising. Or maybe something horror themed like the Dead Space Series. Or just get into first person shooters like Unreal Tournament or Doom or whatever. But Mass Effect is like the shooter equivalent of Chrono Trigger style combat where you just spam 'attack' or your most powerful magic spell over and over mindlessly then proceed to the next corridor of drone level enemies.

If people were constantly dying in combat in Mass Effect like Vanquish on its highly difficulty settings the games would probably be hated. They are designed for Fornite level idiots that want simple combat and reddit quip filled dialog. Not Quake fanatics or CRPG enthusiasts.

 

[Asian tech support]

Dark Souls 2. Everyone knows it.

Spoiler: autism

I have a decade worth of salt.

Downgraded gameplay mechanics:

• The movement is incredibly sluggish and janky. DS1 was crisp and deliberate even if it is slow compared to contemporary titles. The best way to describe DS2 movement is like the player is perpetually in about four inches of mud.
• I-frame distribution is a mess and agility is an abortion of a stat.
• Hitboxes are bizarre and enemy AI is all over the place. This can lead to funny outcomes such as the turtle knights spinning around like ballerinas once they've locked on to you.
• Movesets were downgraded. Attacks don't chain together well at all. Weapon designs were more fantastic and outlandish but the most movesets per weapon class were identical.
• Poise went from being poise to being hyper armor with a value and even then it didn't work very well. Toggling was also removed. This led to pvp being boring as shit (remember helixodons?). DS2 tech isn't all that interesting.
• All of the above issues led to the game guiding the player in the direction of trading rather than getting in clean hits. In other words, less skillful play.
• Broken scaling. Scaling didn't provide much value, leading to players going for either elemental weapons with minimum stats, or "robflynn" builds that used the Ring of Blades (adds flat physical damage, lessened when used with weapons that have a non-physical damage component) and Flynn's Ring (adds physical damage scaling inversely with equip weight) to compensate for low AR.
• Trading a boss soul for boss weapons/magic instead of ascending specific weapons. This was the beginning of the trend we see in these games to this very day. I enjoyed the DeS spreadsheet ascension autism.
• NPCs that do nothing. Most NPCs didn't have a questline, instead heading back to the hub area as soon as they're found. Most acted as merchants but almost every NPC, merchant or otherwise, had a questline in DS1, even if they were short and ended in the NPC's demise. DS3 did this same shit.
• Fun sized items. Rings especially were cut down to size with the increase in slots from two to four. No more big chunky FAP rings or big dick hornet ring crits.

Dumb gameplay mechanics:

• Soul memory. In an effort to combat "twinking," (invading with a low level character that had maxed gear), matchmaking wasn't based on level but rather how many souls the player had collected in total. The bandaid workaround was a ring that was eventually added that prevented the acquisition of souls. Completely retarded.
• Spices. There were items that could be used to reduce the stat requirements for spells one at a time down to a minimum of 10. This resulted in builds with the bare minimum stat investment being able to output damage nearly comparable to gouge builds with only extremely high level builds able to noticeably surpass them. Eventually this was slightly nerfed and buff duration now scales with stats but it's still retarded.
• Limited enemy respawns. Unfortunately, this ties into bonfire ascetics being a good, if awkward mechanic but it's really that they're cool in spite of this, not because of it. Without becoming part of the Company of Champions covenant, enemies respawn ~15 times before ceasing to do so. Bonfire ascetics reset the area, including the boss, at the detriment of advancing the particular area tied to the specific bonfire to the next NG difficulty. The only thing people liked about it was being able to respawn the boss. For everything else, it was simply tedium.

Downgraded world design:

• Nonsensical area design. The big ones people talk about are the Earthen Peak elevator up to Iron Keep (elevator goes up from the tippy top of a fortress to a volcanic castle in a crater or some shit), and the pile of rubbish blocking the Shrine of Winter (the Shrine remains closed until all four primal flames are activated or 1,000,000 soul memory is acquired) that could easily be walked around. Most areas are either linear or a loop leading to another loop (DS3 is guilty of this too).
• Many areas are visually unappealing. DS1 was drab but DS2 takes the cake when it comes to visually unappealing areas. There's something about the lighting and the texture work that makes loads of areas look like they're from the previous gen. When the most visually interesting area is a pitch black pit, you know something went wrong. This was coming off of a reveal trailer that had one hell of a lighting system which was eventually scrapped for unknown reasons.
• A billion armor knight bosses. You know what I mean.

Improvements/welcome additions:

• Power stancing premiered in DS2 and was streamlined in Elden Ring. DS3 did away with it in favor of paired weapons.
• Hexes/dark magic may have made their first appearance in AotA but DS2 made them their own class of spells. Unfortunately, making them scale with the lower stat was a jank decision which was also rectified in DS3, though hexes as a school of magic was abolished, instead integrating dark magic into the three preexisting schools.
• A proper NG+ cycle with new items, enemies, and boss abilities. For whatever reason, even after receiving deserved praise for this inclusion, From has stubbornly refused to build upon this success in subsequent titles.
• DS2 perfected arenas imo. None of the jank from DS1 and none of the launch-from-a-menu nonsense from DS3. The Elden Ring ones are similar but there sadly aren't covenants tied to those.
• Interesting/outlandish equipment. There's never been another item like Gower's Ring of Protection.

Dark Souls 3 had a lot of the same problems.

 

[Pinball 2000]

Nobody's mentioned Hitman: Absolution yet. To be completely fair, Absolution on its own merits isn't a terrible game. If you ignore the fact that it's a Hitman game, it's a mostly solid, albeit generic stealth-action game with a greater focus on smaller, more linear levels compared to the open-ended structure of the older games. However, it doesn’t hold a candle to the other Hitman titles, primarily due to that decision to reduce the scope.

You could say a similar situation occurred with the Tomb Raider reboot (or at least the first game in the reboot series). If you ignore the fact that it's a Tomb Raider game, it's a decent experience, but it doesn't really honor the series' legacy.

 

[BetterFuckChuck]

Nobody's mentioned Hitman: Absolution yet. To be completely fair, Absolution on its own merits isn't a terrible game. If you ignore the fact that it's a Hitman game, it's a mostly solid, albeit generic stealth-action game with a greater focus on smaller, more linear levels compared to the open-ended structure of the older games. However, it doesn’t hold a candle to the other Hitman titles, primarily due to that decision to reduce the scope.

You could say a similar situation occurred with the Tomb Raider reboot (or at least the first game in the reboot series). If you ignore the fact that it's a Tomb Raider game, it's a decent experience, but it doesn't really honor the series' legacy.

Abso gets too much hate for just not being Blood Money, imo. Like the elephant in the room is the series didnt start off good, so Abso isnt even the worst Hitman it's just the one that betrays the series' philosophy in order to chase trends and also didnt improve on the prior games like every other entry

For my option I'd say Spiderman Ps4. the original game isnt well liked here because it's a Sony movie game, but as a spiderman simulator it had decent swinging and decent combat cribbed from Arkham and because it's adapting a medium known for interesting storylines it had an interesting enough story. Then Spiderman 2 doubles down on the story, makes it worse, then makes the combat worse and only improves in the swinging before then adding a wingsuit which makes swinging entirely optional. What a disaster

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Every woke game.

Super Mario Bros. 2 comes to mind. It's really not a good game, let alone sequel to a legendary game like SMB1.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl, easily the worst game in the franchise. It has some redeeming values but is very disappointing.

Finally Fantasies after Final Fantasy X.

 

[Incompetent]

Master of Orion 3. Horrible when first released, playable years later with mods. But its radical difference in tone and design compared to 1 & 2 prevent it from feeling like a true MoO game.

 

[Thiletonomics]

When it comes to Koei Tecmo's Musou games, Dynasty Warriors 6, Dynasty Warriors 9, and Samurai Warriors 5 are the bad sequels.

Dynasty Warriors 6 removed some characters from the previous games (i.e. Daqiao, Xingcai, and Zuo Ci), and replaced their old button combo combat with the Renbu system, where you just mash one button to attack. It was hated to the point that the old button combos were re-added back into Dynasty Warriors 7 and 8. The game also introduced cloned movesets, where some character share the same weapons, and some characters lost weapons that they were famous for, i.e. Sun Shangxiang's Wheels being replaced with a Bow.

And while DW6 was the original low point of the franchise, Dynasty Warriors 9 set a new record low, by implementing an open world map that is way too big (it takes like an hour to get from one edge of the map to the other), to the point that most of the gameplay is riding on horseback to get to your next mission, and is way too empty with very little to do. The button combo combat was one again replaced by parts of the Renbu system by pressing one set of buttons, with QTE button prompts and using shoulder button + a button to do trigger attacks. Cloned character movesets appear again, and more characters lost their famous weapons from the previous game, for "realism". Some notable removed weapons include Zhang He's Claws, Huang Zhong's Bow, Cao Ren's Arm Shield, and Zhenji's Flute. KT later then re-sold some of the removed unique weapons, i.e. Zhenji's Flute, as paid DLCs, but didn't bother to re-add all the removed unique weapons. The English Voice Acting also suffered a MASSIVE drop in quality, as KT re-casted all of the voice actors because they chose to go with another company for unknown reasons, and they also apparently provided poor direction for the English voice acting, as the actors weren't given the context of the characters they were voicing, and weren't allowed to do re-recordings.

Samurai Warriors 5 was said to be a "reimaging" of the franchise, but the game felt like it was made with a cost-cut budget. Over half the characters from the previous games were removed. (Samurai Warriors 4 had 55 characters, and 5 had only 20 returning characters and 39 characters total) The storyline was also narrowed to focus more on Nobunaga Oda, and it was said that was the justification to remove most of the old characters. Cloned movesets would also appear in SW5, and some characters also lost their unique weapons from previous games, i.e. Oichi's hula hoop wheels and Nō's Claws. The game also decided to use cel-style artwork that feels out of place for a Musou game, and makes the game feel cheap.

 

[Caligura]

I'll always stand by this opinion but Bioshock Infinite fucking sucks!

Only 1 & 2 are canon and are the only true Bioshock games.

Infinite was just a straight-up downgrade in terms of worldbuilding, story, characters, and gameplay.

Columbia was a somewhat decent concept as a contrast to Rapture. It actually would have been a cool game to make a Bioshock spin-off around and I still remembered loving the pre-2013 previews. After all Columbia is essentially a Proto-Clerical Fascist American splinter and by contrast there's an organized Proto-Communist Guerilla Movement in which the two fight... While atop a floating city in the sky.

That sounds really cool!

Except they aren't actually that fascist and the intersection between the world and gameplay (practically a cornerstone of the previous games given how Rapture's lore was married perfectly with the gameplay) was just not there at all.

Why would an authoritarian state like Columbia allow weapon vending machines where anyone (including would-be rebels) buy a gun? Every authoritarian regime in history was never friendly to gun rights. You'd at most be allowed to own a shitty hunting rifle or shotgun and guess what, Columbia doesn't have any wildlife to hunt.

Why the fuck does Columbia have super progressive rights for women in 1912 (50% of the Columbian Army you fight are women) but they're pretty much chuddy every other policy? This game was made well before DEI became mainstream (like Black Nazis in Battlefield 5) so it's strange how there's plenty of scenes establishing Columbia as being firmly racist yet not even following standard gender norms of 1912? I'm not asking for a rehash of the Handmaiden's Tale but it was legitimately immersion breaking that for a game set before WW1 they have ultra progressive (by 1912 standards) women's rights but pretty much 1850s-tier face relations.

Also how come they voluntarily grabbed a bunch of niggers and chinks as cheap labor and then bitch and moan about how they're starting to revolt? Did they not learn from the slave trade that bringing niggos for cheap labor is not a good idea at all?

How come they're super religious prudes but then they allow sexy demon lady designs on Vigor bottles? And actually why the fuck would they allow a product called Devil's Kiss to be sold? Or Vigors for that matter? Religiously they're basically ultra-fundie WASPs with a personality cult around Comstock, they wouldn't allow anything that changes your God-given-body.

They're supposed to be more strict than 80s Christian soccer moms but then this is fine by them, lol.

All of the Bioshock gameplay hallmarks like the weapon vending machines and plasmids made since in 1&2 because Rapture was basically Ancapistan. In a more well designed game Booker would've been getting his gear from the Vox and/or raiding Columbian Army supplies. Still don't know how Vigors would make sense in Columbia unless it's smuggled in from an outside source.

Doesn't matter though since the real focus of Infinite's lore is the shitty multiverse slop that basically ruins Bioshock 1/2 by retroactively making their worlds be heavily reliant on Ken Levine's Mary Sue OC. I'm sure we all remembered when the Burial At Sea DLC basically screamed at the viewer: "IF IT WEREN'T FOR MY MARY SUE ELIZABETH, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE BIOSHOCK 1! EAT THAT YOU FUCKING CHUDS!" and all that people Infinite for is the porn for said OC, lol.

Also the gameplay was just shit. Two weapon limit, do I even need to say more? It did even help they refused to try to make the guns somewhat themed around the year of 1912.

Again Bioshock 1/2 had Rapture which was basically culturally frozen in the 1930s since that was the time the city was built and construction was hastened by 1945 after the nuclear bomb was revealed and Ryan had a schizo meltdown over how the world was already going to end (it did not). Hence why Tommy Guns, pump action shotguns, etc. were the norm. Alongside a lot of unique guns that could only exist via innovations by innovators unrestrained from government bureaucracy such as the Chemical Thrower and Spear Gun for example.

In Infinite you basically main the generic assault rifle and RPG for the rest of the game. It would've at least been interesting to see what if you had to rely on old bolt action rifles or something, pre-WW1 style.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Why would an authoritarian state like Columbia allow weapon vending machines where anyone (including would-be rebels) buy a gun?

I thought god fearing American types that Columbia is meant to represent loved guns?

 

[Caligura]

I thought god fearing American types that Columbia is meant to represent loved guns?

It would've made more sense if Columbia leaned towards the Constitutionalist angle for that to work and I think in the earlier teasers of the game it was supposed to be that. As you can see here, Columbia was portrayed as way less authoritarian than in the final game.

But the thing is that the Columbia we have in the final release of Infinite is basically just the Nazis from a typical Wolfenstein game. Just reskinned with an Americana paint job and some theocracy elements added in. It's to the point that when Elizabeth does take over (not by her choice) as the new prophet of Columbia, it's basically 1984 with the Boys of Silence being Big Brother.

Besides propaganda nothing they actually do in-game or in the lore actually indicates that whatever they believe in is from the Constitution. They're essentially generic Nazis with a different aesthetic.

 

[Shining Wit]

Ace Attorney, going from Trials and Tribulations to Apollo Justice is rough

I say this as an Apollo Trilogy Enjoyer too, but AA4 is a pretty poor installment. The only things I can give it is:
- It looks really nice and honestly better than the later 3D
- The first trial is great
- Trucy and Kristoph are fun characters, and I like Ema being a dour adult now

It's better on the whole than Dual Destinies, but it deserves full scorn for Turnabout Serenade

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Ace Attorney, going from Trials and Tribulations to Apollo Justice is rough

I say this as an Apollo Trilogy Enjoyer too, but AA4 is a pretty poor installment. The only things I can give it is:
- It looks really nice and honestly better than the later 3D
- The first trial is great
- Trucy and Kristoph are fun characters, and I like Ema being a dour adult now

It's better on the whole than Dual Destinies, but it deserves full scorn for Turnabout Serenade

I've only played two AA games, the first two, but I didn't finish the second one. It wasn't bad but it felt like an immediate drop off in terms of quality, not by a lot, but enough to lose my interest. Might be because I went into them back to back though.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

Perfect Dark 2.
Micro$oft managed to shit all over an IP it paid a lot of money to acquire. And did the same thing with Banjo-Kazooie when it released Nuts & Bolts, a game no-one asked for and no-one wanted.

 

[Shining Wit]

I've only played two AA games, the first two, but I didn't finish the second one. It wasn't bad but it felt like an immediate drop off in terms of quality, not by a lot, but enough to lose my interest. Might be because I went into them back to back though.

Justice for All is the weakest entry in the original trilogy tbf. It shares a lot of weaknesses with Apollo Justice tbf (4 trials only, 3rd trial infamously naff) which is interesting. JfA pulls clear because it has a really good final case in it, while AJ's finale is disjointed and a cop-out

 

[Judge Dredd]

It would've made more sense if Columbia leaned towards the Constitutionalist angle for that to work and I think in the earlier teasers of the game it was supposed to be that. As you can see here, Columbia was portrayed as way less authoritarian than in the final game.

A big issue with Infinite in general is the trailer looked awesome but basically none of that made it into the final game.

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

Here's some from my childhood that I didn't see mentioned yet:

Painkiller and Serious Sam - both are Slavjank horde shooters with an excellent first game and absolute sludge being pumped out after. I will give Serious Sam Second Encounter some slack, it is still fun but it's still a downgrade when it comes to level design compared to the first game.

Caesar 3>4 - I'll be honest, I never really liked the walker system of the Impressions city building games but at the end of it you can still make massive and beautiful-looking cities in all of them. Caesar 4's cities feel tiny and every gameplay aspect is severely downgraded and simplified.

Shenmue - The first two games are classics, the combat that's taken from Virtua Fighter 3tb is what makes the first two games so fun to play. Shenmue 3 replaced it with absolute dogshit. No more throws, the moves look like shit, the combat feels like something out of a 2015 mobile game - boring, slow and takes an insane amount of grinding. Barely any immersion in the environments. Worst of all the story doesn't even move forward at all, it's just a fucking filler episode.

Might&Magic - My earliest vivid gaming memory involves playing Might and Magic VI. VII was even better, VIII was meh but still fun and IX was complete fucking dogshit. Speaking of Might&Magic...

Heroes of Might and Magic - first big downgrade happened from III to IV. While I admit IV had the best music in the series and some interesting ideas, in the end the gameplay was garbage. Then Ubishit somehow brought it back with V, both HOMMV and its expansions are quite fun, I think the plot is bad but I loved playing skirmish scenarios. Then they created a bunch of terrible sequels with no hope of recovery.

Tropico 4>5: Tropico 4 was fucking amazing, one of my favorite city builders. 5 isn't terrible but it's a downgrade in every way. The dynasty system sucks, the era system sucks and everything got dumbed down. Keep in mind that 4 isn't that difficult either, but they still had to dumb it down.

 

[Jace on ice]

I'll second Bioshock Infinite. Not only did it have terrible writing and "satire" that seemed like it was written by someone who had absolutely no idea what satire was but it was also extremely short at like five or six hours long.

Even back when new games were $50 I wouldn't find that amount of content acceptable.