This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: How to handle: From YKTTW
KorvalHow exactly does the title make sense? Polygon Ceiling suggests that the issue is 3D rendering. Yet the very first example, in the main body text, is Viewtiful Joe, a game rendered WITH POLYGONS.
This isn't about a polygonal ceiling; it's about a dimensional ceiling.
Pufflizard: I know this trope is about 2-D series trying to make the transition into 3-D and not working out, but what about the reverse? games that were originally designed and built in 3-D, but then decided to foray into the 2-D enviroment with less then spectacular results? does this deserve a mention or does it deserve it's own trope?
Ethereal Mutation: Probably not really worthy of its own page, but mentions of "inversions" could probably be given.
- Known Unknown: Y'know, I think it would've been smarter to split this off of Sonic Syndrome and have this be a Sub-Trope, given that Sonic Syndrome was encompassed both this and what Pufflizard was talking about, but was a bit more specific than Jumping the Shark
Ethereal Mutation: Here are the remnants of when this trope was little more than "Jumping the Shark for videogames and blaming it on 3D":
- Mega Man X 7 was near-universally regarded as poorly done, too. The next game, Mega Man X8, went back to 2-D sidescrolling but with 3-D graphics and was better received. Mega Man X Command Mission avoided camera problems by being a turn-based RPG.
- Since Capcom's usual response to any of their flagging Mega Man franchises is to kick it to the curb and start another Spin-Off of it, there's a lot of unfinished business littered around the franchise that still irks many long-time fans. Ironically, the main problem fans have with the game's continuity is that the separate franchise are never cohesively connected with one other except in the most general of ways; most glaringly the original series to Mega Man X. Mega Man Battle Network is the only franchise that bothered to wrap up all of its plot threads before starting a new iteration in the Star Force series. The announcement of Mega Man 9 as a "retro" Mega Man game came with a caveat that it still wouldn't tie in to the X series.
- Amusingly enough, the NES-style Mega Man 9 has been collectively hailed as the best game in the series since Mega Man 2 in what seems like a bizarre inversion of this effect.
- Ditto with Tatsunoko vs. Capcom.
- Tomba was a 2-D platformer released by Whoopee Camp for the PSX in the mid-90s. While not a big name, it achieved some small cult success. The sequel was released in 3-D, although retaining a two-dimensional play style; it also brought awful voice acting, crappy controls, and a truly miserable set of game goals. It flopped miserably, and the series died, taking its company with it.
- Although the fact that it's an RPG means the basic style of gameplay was theoretically the same, this happened to Pokémon in its first 3-D story-based game, Pokémon Colosseum. This may be a case where the game's creators went too far as well as not far enough, as the previous console games, the Stadium series on N64, had merely been battle arenas with some extra features, but had been much better received... adding an RPG mode caused people to compare the game more to the previous handheld RPGs than to the Stadiums, to which it didn't measure up.
- Super Robot Wars has occasionally tried using 3-D models for their games. The look generally isn't very well received, as the series' trademark SD style tends to look best in 2-D. A large part of the reason is because one of the major draws of the series is watching some of the player's favorite attacks re-created in a faithful fashion. And since most anime are done in 2-D, making the switch to 3-D actually ends up making the attacks less impressive. They seemed to learn their lesson very quickly, as the newest SRW, Z, is going to be released in 2-D on the Playstation 2. And it looks amazing.
- This has less to do with 3D's drawbacks, and more because Banpresto's SRW team has done nothing but 2D games for fifteen years now. They have done a grand total of two traditional SRW games in the style, and the latest was an interesting largely ignored by the fanbase due to the graphics.
- However, their other crossover Another Century Episode was generally 3D done right.
- This has less to do with 3D's drawbacks, and more because Banpresto's SRW team has done nothing but 2D games for fifteen years now. They have done a grand total of two traditional SRW games in the style, and the latest was an interesting largely ignored by the fanbase due to the graphics.
Pro-Mole: Just a little question... what happened to Sonic Syndrome, then?
Ethereal Mutation: It decayed beyond usability. People were just treating it as either Jumping the Shark or just "I hate Sonic The Hedgehog". Out of the 84 Wicks, around 50 of them had nothing at all to do with the actual topic and were just thinly veiled Take Thats against the franchise. As per the rules against Complaining, it had to be changed.
- Castlevania Judgment, a Genre Shift to a Fighting Game for the Wii, doesn't appear to be doing much better...
- IGN says otherwise - it seems this is more Your Mileage May Vary.
- Your Mileage May Vary on the N64 games too, at least in the troper's opinion.
- Castlevania Judgment, a Genre Shift to a Fighting Game for the Wii, doesn't appear to be doing much better
Conversation In The Main Page.
- 3D Lemmings averted this trope (well, most people would say it did). They took a puzzle game franchise that really couldn't be improved any more in 2D and added a third dimension of strategy to it without totally breaking things. Aside from the somewhat blocky 1995-era 3D graphics, a few camera issues, and some aspects of the controls that could've been refined, it was a success. Well, not a commercial one...
- The PC version worked a lot better than the Playstation version in terms of control. You could use the keyboard for camera control and mouse for selecting and assigning. With a little practice, it worked well, and you could always pause to give yourself time to adjust. Honestly, This Troper can't think of any way an automatic camera could possibly work for that game, and was glad to receive full control.
This seems to be a "sorta-kinda aversion". Not really worth putting on the page.
Andrew Rodland: I have an example here that I don't really think belongs, but this page brings it to mind and I wanted to write it down.
Final Fantasy VII is one of the better entries in the series, no doubt. It was the breakthrough FF game in the US, and it was the first 3D release. But because of that, some portions of the graphical quality (the character and monster models, and the overworld, but not the lovely prerendered backgrounds) were arguably inferior to the sprite graphics of the SNES-era games. It took them until VII (a so-so game in most other respects) to get a good handle on the 3D thing. (And IX does things that I didn't even think the PSX could do, but that's a different matter).
Komodin: The page was fine before. Who decided to give it a rewrite?
lamoxlamae: It was on the Cut List. Rewrite was needed to save the article. Don't revert things.
Prfnoff: Only the redirect was cutlisted, making the rewrite more than a bit gratuitous. I restored a bunch of examples which had been deleted with no more explanation than that they "didn't fit the theme."
...ah, I see. You wanted it to be about this, perhaps going by the discredited redirect title:
- This is a place for failure and series death: please avoid success stories and revivals here. If it came back in 2D or they're making a new one in 2D, please don't mention it here.
And I also removed this asinine comment:
- %Anything added to this entry that has nothing to do with the topic will be deleted%
Ethereal Mutation: That "asinine comment" was put there because people kept writing Natter after the Sonic The Hedgehog example. It seemed like it actually worked from what I could tell. I placed similar comments near other natter draws and they've worked so far, but I'll at least wait to see if the natter machine starts up before I put this one back in.
Auraseer: Does this trope necessarily involve the end of a series? I'm thinking about Prince Of Persia. It started in 2D and had two great games, then there was a horrible train-wreck of a 3D sequel that was thought to have killed the series. But later entries are also 3D and are good again.
Komodin: Sands of Time was bad?
Someguy: He's talking about the obscure Prince of Persia 3D.
Auraseer: Right on. That was the one released in 1999, which nobody remembers because it was so bad. Sands Of Time came about five years later, and showed us what a 3D POP game should have been in the first place.
- How is Okami a 2-D example of art? Neither its gameplay or art are 2d. Its 3D with a specific type of cel-shading.
Ishntknew: Does Sonic really fit here? Prior to Sonic Heroes, Sonic was a respectable franchise, and Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 received favorable reviews. Sonic Heroes started to get mumblings about the series going bad, but it still wasn't the butt of everyone's jokes, and the game was decently received. It wasn't until Shadow - four 3D games in, that Sonic became a punchline. And even then, it took 2K6 to REALLY push it over the edge. This seems to clearly demonstrate that they more or less HAD 3D down well enough. Blaming the decline on 3D just doesn't match up with history. That said, however, the 2D games which are still being released are consistently faring better than the 3D games, but the initial jump to 3D went well enough. The biggest jokes about THOSE games were "boy, this camera sure sucks", not "boy, this game sure sucks". (And yes, I realize I'm asking this question on a trope that was originally named Sonic Syndrome.)
Ganondorfdude11: The request by 67.159.41.120 to cut this has no merit at all.
((Izaak)): Why were all the Nintendo examples deleted?
reinoe : I would like to applaud whomever it was that added the image of Bubsy 3-D. No game could possible exemplify hitting the ceiling as hard as that game. Thanks whomever. —- Gyrobot : On Ion Storm's Polygon Ceiling, I was referring to how bad the sequels were received by fans. Invsible War being the most guilty one
