I am revisiting Medievil II for the PS1 and going through it, but I really recall not having liked the sequel. I was okay with the story, which did make comprehensible sense given the time going forward, someone ending up with the pages of Zarok’s spellbook and all. It’s just a rehash of the first game, just time going forward.
Some of the bosses you got to fight were okay, but a lot of them weren’t memorable. It was cool to fight Jack the Ripper in that game and they made him creepy as hell. The levels were annoying and were poorly planned. Winston the Ghost was like Navi to me in that game, but only more bearable because you can skip his ass a lot of the time.
The weapons aren’t that fun to use, only glad they kept the crossbows and a sword, I guess. The cane you get is arguably the worst of them. The characters introduced were forgettable. I mean, I’m finding more setbacks with the sequel than there is to like and I’m struggling.
The original game was more fun with its dark gothic fantasy setting, you went off to some area to get your upgrades and you met characters whose weapons they specialized in which was cool. The talking gargoyle heads had wit to them and I always talked to them wherever they were, loved the voice acting.
The first game was remade twice probably for good reason. Although I probably would have wished that the sequel would’ve been given a remake of its own, just to see what would be taken out and what it’d be replaced with. It probably would’ve been better in that exchange.
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Probably a bit niche of a game series, but Dungeon Defenders. It’s an Action RPG / Tower Defense hybrid that I loved as a kid. And all the sequels kinda sucked for one reason or another. I’ve played all of them a little bit too much, so I’m going to go into way too much detail here lol.
The first game was one of my all-time favorites on the xbox 360 as a kid (which is kinda funny because it has like 100x the content on PC). The game was riddled with cheaters and hacked items, but damn did I have fun anyway. My friends were practically begging me to play anything else when they came over to hang out.
Then they made Dungeon Defenders II and charged $20 for it in early access. I bought the game in a heartbeat because I loved the first one so much. But it just turned into an always-online, live-service game without any actual story, that forces you to buy multiple microtransactions for necessary QoL features in order to play the game in the way it’s intended. Eventually the game went free-to-play and pushed that model even harder. Its a shame, because underneath all the bullshit it looks like a fun enough sequel.
Then Dungeon Defenders: Awakened came out. Half sequel, half remake of the original (time travel shenanigans), it had a lot of potential and it’s one of only two games I’ve ever backed on Kickstarter. The game is basically a modernized Dungeon Defenders, with some new content and a boat load of QoL additions. They even release all future content for free instead of as DLC like the original, so its a one-time purchase (and very strange coming from the same studio that runs DD2). Unfortunately, it was too damn similar to the original and didn’t do enough on its own. DD1 had a community dev team adding new maps and content for over 10 years, so why the hell would you buy the new game who’s original content amounts to like 6 new maps? The game did eventually get more content, and is honestly not a bad purchase at this point imo, but it could never catch up to the original.
Funny enough, the original DD1 started getting new DLC again a few years ago, so all three of these games are being developed simultaneously by different teams despite being sequels to the last.
Guilty Gear Strive.
Plus R is my favorite fighting game. Xrd I hated because they fucked with my character (Zato/Eddie) but I could tell it’s a fun game…
Strive just fucking sucks. The irony is I did vibe a little more with Zato in Strive than I did in Xrd, but WTF was everything else in this damn game… they just kinda ripped away anything that made characters unique in favor standardized systemic depth and breadth.
Less unique moves, less unique combos, even animations feel too samey compared to Plus R or Xrd… I hate it. Everything just feels needlessly homogeneous.
Even the game’s ideas suck. Like, WTF is Zabubu…
Every time I give it a shot all I’m thinking of is: why the fuck am I not playing Plus R instead?
I don’t play very many series-based games, but off the top of my head, I would have to say Subnautica Below Zero is my most hated series game. And if I had to choose the second one, battlefield 1, or whatever battlefield it was that added a bunch of smaller stories instead of having an overarching story.
Metal Gear Solid 5.
How can you just ditch your main character’s voice actor? As a Metal Gear completionist, how do I even play this traditionally linear game now that it’s open world and packed with repetitive side missions? Why am I building a strut base and hiring staff that I magically airlift to a chopper out on the battlefield? Overall a disappointment, not because of bad graphics or bad controls or bad gameplay, just a hodgepodge of content that was too much of a departure from the format of the first 4 linear games. I never finished it and probably never will. I know Konami threw multiple wrenches in Kojima’s gears during development but I feel the overall direction was still flawed from the onset. Open World was just so popular at that time and maybe they forced it on Kojima, who knows. I know he didn’t want to make a 5th game anyway so I’m gonna just pretend it never happened and be happy with the first 4 and the PSP titles.
The paper Mario where you had to play cards to attack
Life is Strange Double Exposure. Why did Max’s powers change wtf?!
God of War III. Good gameplay, but what the hell was that story? Kratos kills everyone (including his own father) in an unneccessarily sadistic way, turns the whole world into chaos and ruin and then offs himself with his own sword.
That felt like reading a school shooter fanfiction.
Fun fact: He also pushes a helpless nude woman into a door mechanism that kills her. Just…why?
No wonder they made a prequel after that and then rebooted the series.
Good gameplay
Massive understatement though. GoW3 is still the best western action game to this day.
This isn’t from personal experience because its reputation is so bad I avoided it entirely, but apparently Mass Effect 3. The fan backlash was so strong they apparently had to retcon the ending, LOL!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect_3_ending_controversy
(You know it’s bad when it’s infamous enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.)
That’s a shame. If you liked the first two or just want a really awesome SciFi rpg, you should give it a go. The reaction to the ending was really overblown imho. And it wasn’t retconned per se, it was expanded and more options were added.
I beat the game before any changes were made to the ending and I didn’t feel nearly at visceral as some people did. The changes they made also helped fill in any real qualms I had. Not to mention, even if it’s as bad as they say, the ending is like 1% of a trilogy spanning SciFi epic. It’s an incredible rpg series, one of the best ever.
Borderlands
- 1: Decent
- 2: Best in the series
- Pre-Sequel: Playable Clap-Trap is the only redeeming factor.
- 3: Solid gameplay, shit narrative
- 4 Shit.
I liked the moon gravity stuff in pre sequel, and the shield lady’s abilities. But did not care at all for the story or humour in that one.
I’ve bought and played them all. Presequel and BL4 are wasted money in my eyes.
After 4, I’ll never buy one again. I am a huge BL3 fan and 4 was just a soulless cash grab.
Controversial take: doom 1 is better than doom 2. Doom 2 has a bunch of awful levels.
I didn’t really like doom2016 or eternal that much, either. Too much start-and-stop.
Doom 2 is a great base for mods but yeah levels that come with it are ahhh a mixed bag.
But when we’re talking about a disappointing sequel, it’s hard not to mention Doom 3. Turning a fun and silly game into a slog with jumpscares is quite a decision!
Doom 3 scared the shit out of 10 year old me.
Deus Ex Human Revolution might be the best game that I hate lol (I guess sort of not an answer to OP, since Invisible War is maybe worse)
It’s just not close to as good as the original and it still gets so much praise and so many more fans. They dropped so much of the strategy and depth of Deus Ex. It doesn’t hold up nearly as well on repeat playthroughs.
Destiny 2.
Don’t get me wrong, Destiny 1s story was really bad. It wasn’t originally like that, but thanks to Jason Jones thats how it ended up. Never forgiving him for doing that to Joe Statens work like that.
But literally almost everything else In D1 is better than D2. Gunplay, armor and weapon designs, raids, environment design, art style, etc. The only things D2 has over D1 are graphical fidelity, more than 30 fps, and the original Red War story writing was more coherent (but its not even in the game anymore because lazy developers be lazy).
The last of us 2.
I liked the first game, the twist at the end was a bit iffy, but it was understandable from a character perspective (Joel was never a good guy, and him deciding to kill a bunch of fireflies to save his psuedo-daughter from an iffy medical procedure makes sense to his character).
The second game was fantastic mechanically, and a train wreck everywhere else.
I understood the story they tried to tell, and they might have even told that story decently.
But it was absolutely not what I signed up for, I went from a coming of age (Ellie) / found family (Both) / redemption (Joel) story, and went right into a gritty “the price of revenge” story that was just so emotionally exhausting. Half the story was spent on a character I didnt care about, the timeline was confusing, and most of all, I didnt want to play a game about Ellie (and Joel’s brother) descending into emotionally driven monsters who sacrifice everything for revenge.
Its hard to say the game was “bad,” since mechanically it was good, and the story had depth. The confusing timeline wasnt great, but was survivable if the game was otherwise good. It was just such a tonal whiplash, and was such a slog to get through that it killed the whole series for me.
Out of all the hate I’ve read about TLOU2, I’ve never seen anyone say the timeline is confusing. I also can’t see the tonal whiplash, personally. Both games are incredibly dark.
Gauntlet (2014) if you count it as a sequel to Legends and Dark Legacy, is a big disappointment. I think simple games can be fine but this is just too simple. Legends just barely had enough depth to be good, and then they go and make something simpler. I had so much fun with local co-op Gauntlet Legends on Dreamcast.
Thoughts on Get Medieval?
I haven’t played it
Dragon Age 2. Origins was so good. Then… Bleh.
Every single game after origins can take a hike, honestly.
