| 1 | Franchise/{{Pokemon}} has [[TheArtifact/{{Pokemon}} its own page]]. |
| 2 | |
| 3 | * The Start and Select buttons, in their original forms. At first, you'd use Select to change the position of a cursor in the game's main menu, and Start to confirm your choice. However, developers figured out fairly quickly that it was more intuitive to navigate menu screens using the same controls as in gameplay (D-Pad to move the cursor, the A/B/etc. buttons to confirm or cancel your selection). Since then, Start and Select are almost exclusively used to pause the game or open the menu screen, rather than to start your game or select anything (with practically every StartScreen responding to any button rather than Start specifically), and while many controllers maintain the existence of two central buttons, it's anyone's guess whether they'll still be called Start and Select or not. Nintendo kept the names Start and Select up to and including the Platform/Nintendo3DS on handhelds, but from the Platform/{{Wii}} onwards they're now labeled plus and minus on their consoles. Sony, similarly, used the same names for their two central buttons up until the Platform/PlayStation4, when the Start button was relabeled "Options", while the function of the Select button was transferred onto the new touchpad (and the traditional position of the Select button was given to the Share button, a new standard button that emerged around the same time). Microsoft as well relabeled their "Start" and "Back" buttons with icons (officially named the "Menu" and "View" buttons respectively). Some have taken to using the generic terms Menu and Sub-menu as each platform now has unique terms for each one, with Menu invariably on the right and Sub-menu on the left. |
| 4 | * The symbols on the Platform/PlayStation controller's face buttons originally represented the functions that the console's creators had in mind for each one. The circle button represented confirm, the X button represented cancel, the Triangle button represented a point of view, and the Square button represented a menu or map. The Circle and X buttons have been consistently used for their original purpose...in Japan. In the rest of the world, Sony decided to switch their functionalities for some reason, until the Platform/PlayStation5, which uses X for Confirm and Circle for Cancel in all countries, [[DamnYouMuscleMemory much to the consternation of Japanese gamers]]. While the Triangle button was used to activate a first person view in some [=PS1=] and [=PS2=] games, once the [=DualShock=] became the standard controller this was largely phased out in favor of simply having a freely rotating camera or pressing R3 (pressing down on the right control stick). Meanwhile, Square was never really used for menus, as developers were loathe to dedicate valuable face buttons to ancillary actions that were much more at home with the central "menu" buttons (with the exception of {{Eastern RPG}}s, but even they kept using Triangle out of tradition). However, even if the symbols don't really have any relation to their button's function anymore, they've become a trademark of the [=PlayStation=] brand, and thus are here to stay. |
| 5 | * The 'One' in the name of the Platform/XboxOne was initially meant to reference the system's ambition of being an 'all-in-one' entertainment platform, able to support television and movie viewing just as well as games. After initial sales and reception struggles from gamers who didn't care about anything other than its gaming capabilities ([[TechnologyMarchesOn as well as these features increasingly being built directly into televisions]], rendering them redundant and unremarkable to those who ''did'' like them) this aspect was heavily toned back under Phil Spencer's leadership, who reoriented Xbox back towards being a gaming platform. |
| 6 | * Due to the latter game going out of its way to avert BagOfSpilling, some of the learned moves from ''VideoGame/BanjoKazooie'' became rather outdated and unnecessary in ''VideoGame/BanjoTooie''. The Wading Boots are only used twice, there's not much purpose to the [[DashAttack Beak Barge]] move when you get much better attacks in the sequel and the [[GroundPound Beak Buster]] is nearly useless since the new Bill Drill attack is stronger and can smash grounded targets just as well, in addition to most grounded switches (the move's original purpose) now requiring weighted objects rather than force. The Wonderwing was perhaps hit hardest with this, only being required once in the entire game, to get behind a hot waterfall. You can use it to attack enemies, but it's unwieldy and most enemies will flee on sight. If anything, you're more likely to activate Wonderwing by accident if you're playing one of the Xbox versions, due to it being mapped to the right stick. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | * ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresII'': |
| 9 | ** ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresI'' was set between the stone and the iron ages, with its ExpansionPack adding in the rise of the Roman Empire. The initial pitch for ''Age of Empires II'' was that it would pick up from where the first game left off, starting in the dark ages after Rome's collapse and going all the way up to the dawn of the renaissance. Thus, the classic game contained a number of civilisations intended to represent the early part of that period, such as the Goths, Vikings, and to a lesser extent the Celts, Byzantines and Saracens. However, the finished game ended up focusing on later periods of the Middle Ages, with some campaigns even taking place beyond that (such as Montezuma's), with virtually every new civilisation introduced in future expansions (the Huns being the sole exception) seeing their genesis be no earlier than the end of the dark ages, but those distinctly 'post-Roman' civs still remain as an artifact of the classic game's original focus. This also extends to some of the original civilisations themselves: The English and the French, for example, are called "Britons" and "Franks" instead, despite those terms already being outdated after the early Middle Ages. |
| 10 | ** In development, there were ideas to allow for "building ships" that could create sea-based versions of walls, doors, towers and docks. This was quickly scrapped [[GameplayDerailment because playtesters used them in an offensive manner]], e.g. by walling off enemy docks to make them useless rather than shoring up defenses around their own, but due to an oversight fishing ships can still help finish buildings that are already in the midst of construction. |
| 11 | ** ''The Forgotten'' has several, due in part to originating as ''Forgotten Empires'', a GameMod for the original game that [[AscendedFanon became an official expansion]] with the ''HD Edition''. For instance, the Indians originally shared the Middle Eastern build set that was replaced with a more appropriate building style in ''Rise of the Rajas'', but they still use Middle Eastern kings and ship sails. The Italians also share dialogue with the Byzantines, meaning they speak Latin rather than a more appropriate language for the period, even in spite of the later-added Sicilians getting their own lines. |
| 12 | ** Kings in the base game, ''The Conquerors'', and ''The Forgotten'' share the same set of lines as their respective civilization's monks. ''The African Kingdoms'' gave unique lines for the kings of its new civilizations, but so far the only civs before that point to get the same are the Slavs, Indians and Incas, since their lines were initially taken from ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresIII''. |
| 13 | ** War elephants were not introduced until ''Rise of the Rajas''; as such, the Indians from ''The Forgotten'' and Ethiopians from ''The African Kingdoms'' lack them, despite historically having fielded large elephant armies in the Middle Ages. Fans have asked for them to receive the units, but since this would require rebalancing them around the addition, so far this only happened with the Indians when ''Dynasties of India'' gave them an excuse to do just that by [[DecompositeCharacter splitting them into four different civilizations]]. |
| 14 | * ''Franchise/AssassinsCreed'': |
| 15 | ** The Hidden Blade originally was the ultimate assassination tool, with the ability to one-hit counter kill even bosses. Its boss instakill abilities in combat were removed in the sequel, and from ''ACII'' onwards, it became just another weapon among others, being weak in combat and not mandatory in stealth any longer. From ''Unity'' onwards, it's become an assassination-only weapon, being unavailable for combat altogether. With the addition of more and more weapons to the games, its assassination abilities are often no match to anything that has any sort of range. |
| 16 | ** The conflict between the Assassins and the Templars has fallen into this a fair bit. It made perfect sense in the first game, which was set in the Crusades, and still flowed naturally in ''II'''s Renaissance-era subseries (considering the Pope was the BigBad and all) - less so games taking place in Victorian England, the French and American Revolutions, or the Golden Age of Piracy, and even less so in ancient Egypt or Greece, a good thousand years before the actual historical organizations existed. Nonetheless, every game still attempts to hook its overall conflict into the Assassins and Templars, with varying degrees of sensibility or plot-relevance. |
| 17 | ** In the first game, Altair's hooded white outfit [[LostInACrowd helped him to blend in with the local scholars]], who wore similar garb. After that point, it became the IconicOutfit of the series, leading many assassins in something similar, despite it [[HighlyVisibleNinja no longer making sense as something used to blend in.]] After ''II'', the ability to hide in a crowd became something you could do anywhere with any group of civilians, creating the question of why the pursuing guards can't pick out the only guy wearing a bright white CoatCape with [[InTheHood the hood drawn up]]. This was at least partially justified in the Renaissance games by giving the player the option to dye their coat however they felt. |
| 18 | * Some artifacts of early versions survive through different iterations of the ''Franchise/BaldursGate'' saga: |
| 19 | ** In the original first game of 1998, you can meet a character named Centeol, who might reveal that she was cursed by the mage John Icarus after she killed his wife, Lady Tanova. This was intended to be a foreshadowing of the sequel, but the details later changed during development. In ''VideoGame/BaldursGateII'', we meet the powerful mage Jon Irenicus, who among his allies has vampires (including one named Tanova, who is never mentioned of having been his former wife). In the ''Enhanced Edition'' of 2012, Centeol is corrected into mentioning Jon Irenicus, and still referencing his wife Lady Tanova. |
| 20 | ** In the original game, it is curious that the Imoen you meet in the prologue and the one you meet at the start of chapter 1 are, technically speaking, two different "characters", that is, they correspond to two different character files. If you cheat in the party the prologue Imoen, you will discover that she is a mage and not a thief. This is a leftover, as before being rewritten into a potential companion, she was intended to be just one of the random folks you can meet in Candlekeep. |
| 21 | ** Directly related to this, Imoen does not have any interaction with other characters, she even uses the same voice lines for some interjections. This is because as a potential companion she was a late-addition to fill the role of a good thief at the beginning of a playthrough, and her voice lines were assembled from scratch with some demo leftovers and materials from cut content, thus there wasn't time to add interactions like those of the other companions. |
| 22 | ** This happens in the sequel too, as in the original plans she wasn't supposed to be a party member except for the initial dungeon. When she was turned into a full companion, there wasn't time left to write banters with the other companions, so she is much more silent than them (until the expansion). |
| 23 | ** Again in the sequel, Imoen can die and be resurrected just like any character, but [[spoiler:she is also revealed to be one of the Bhaalspawn, children of the god of murder who turn into dust when they die and their souls go to feed the resurrection of their father]]. This is a leftover from the first game, where her background story was not yet conceived, so she mechanically played like any other recruitable character. This is also [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] in the expansion in a banter with the new recruitable companion. |
| 24 | ** The notoriously infamous and reviled novels are based on very early drafts of the story of the games, thus they display a lot of discarded or later changed ideas. For example, the aforementioned Imoen does not appear in the first novel, despite being central to the series, as she was written way after those drafts. |
| 25 | * A common occurrence in many an {{MMORPG}}, as new content, released via patches or expansion packs [[PowerCreep frequently leaves older content of less importance]]. Some examples include: |
| 26 | ** ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft's'' pre-expansion content had hints of this. Quest design was much more varied and interesting in Northrend, Outlands, or even the Bloodelf and Draenei starting areas. Blizzard attempted to fix this with the ''Cataclysm'' expansion pack, which changed the pre-expansion content (even for players who didn't purchase the expansion pack) to clear up any remaining artifacts and grant the older continents some of the smoother gameplay aspects developed in the expansion worlds. |
| 27 | *** ''Cataclysm''[='=]s changes to Azeroth are a mixed bag between new content you'd see in the Cataclysm era and the Artifact content seen from original ''[=WoW=]'', because of zones that barely had any changes or were just completely ignored. This is extremely apparent in areas such as Silithus and Arathi Highlands, which were left virtually untouched and left out of Cataclysm's current Azeroth timeframe, or taking part in the odd mix of Cataclysm and vanilla content seen in the Horde's Northern Barrens, where you start off in the Catalysm timeline to escort Kodo supply caravans to the Crossroads, but then get sent back to the vanilla quest-line to clear out the Kolkar centaurs and leaders amongst the three Barren oases. The fact that you're killing the same centaur leaders and ending with the same centaur ''Counterattack!'' on the bunkers west of the Crossroads makes the switch between the timelines even more confusing. |
| 28 | *** Azeroth's starting Draenei/Blood Elf zones added in ''The Burning Crusade'' also received no changes, because of Blizzard choosing to leave ''The Burning Crusade'' and ''Wrath of the Lich King'' content independent from ''Cataclysm''. The outdated feeling when you're leveling in these starting areas compared to ''Cataclysm's'' updated Durotar and Elwynn Forest starter zones is painfully obvious. |
| 29 | *** Not surprisingly, ''The Burning Crusade'' races also suffered a fair bit of this from a narrative perspective after their introductory expansion. The draenei got the worst of it, what with their entire story arc being tied directly to their old homeland of Draenor and the Burning Legion and both of those plot threads falling OutOfFocus for entire expansions. Until the reveal of ''Warlords of Draenor'', it was clear the writers had no idea what to do with them in the interim. The Blood Elves didn't get it as bad and had a few factions and quest chains included for them, but a lot of debate centered around why they continued to ally with the Horde post-Outland. It took until ''Mists of Pandaria'' to give them a solid reason to continue working with the Horde. |
| 30 | *** ''Cataclysm'' itself has caused an entire ''expansion pack'' to practically define the term The Artifact. When originally released, ''Burning Crusade''[='=]s content and mechanics were seen as an improvement upon Vanilla's. With ''Cataclysm'' modifying 'Old World' content to modern specifications[[note]]And Wrath of the Lich King's content being close to 'modern' for this discussion[[/note]], Burning Crusade's content is now the chronologically oldest content in the game, and it shows - filled with {{Fetch Quest}}s, group quests, and {{Plot Coupon}}s that few players will bother using because there's better, easier-to-get stuff in later expansion content. |
| 31 | *** Even its art over the course of new expansion releases began to show Artifact material. By ''Wrath of the Lich King'', the art had been improving to the point where you can actually see the improvement in the world environments. [=WoW=]'s two jungle like environments, vanilla's Un'goro Crater and WOTLK's Sholozar Basin are a fine example of this. Today, Un'goro still, even after its make-shift Cataclysm makeover, looks like it was made from flat cardboard cutouts. Sholozar on the other hand, is seen to be more thickly detailed and natural looking. Un'goro ends up looking completely outdated in comparison. And it's not just the zones either. Cataclysm's Goblin/Worgen factions are, flatout, greatly more detailed than the playable vanilla/BC races. The older races, in return, are made into artifacts due to their plain, outdated look. |
| 32 | *** Class trainers. Originally, players would go to them to purchase new abilities, change their specialization, and be sent on class-specific quests like the quests for Warlock minions or Shaman totems. But the game eventually changed things so that you automatically learn new abilities upon leveling up (including the ones that previously required quest chains), and you can now re-spec yourself for free in any rest area. The intention was to get more players to reach the endgame content, but the unintended side-effect is that all the class trainer NPC's are left standing around in the capital cities and starting areas with no purpose other than adding flavor. |
| 33 | *** Class-specific vendors. The game no longer requires players to buy class-specific consumables like spell reagents, poisons, or ammo, but the vendors are still there even though they sell nothing useful. |
| 34 | *** Weapon/armor vendors were obsolete pretty much from the game's start. With quests giving gear with attribute bonuses, there is no reason to buy common gear that has only armor or damage value (sometimes they could be used to put something in the shoulder or head slot in early levels). But their ''real'' purpose is their ability to repair damaged gear. |
| 35 | *** One Dalaran vendor sold items that Priests and Paladins could equip in their ranged weapon slot, since those classes didn't use ranged weapons, throwing weapons or wands. After a gameplay change resulted in that slot being removed, and Hunters being the only ones who could use bows and guns, she lamented that she was now out of a job. |
| 36 | ** Pre-issue 6 content in ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' is in many ways quite lacking in comparison to what came afterwards. While the newer content that has been added since (including all of ''VideoGame/CityOfVillains'') shows many of the lessons that the development team learned, especially in terms of writing and avoidance of FakeLongevity, they have done little to go back and fix the old content. As of 2010 only one zone, Faultline, has been revamped and brought up to the post-issue 6 standard back in issue 9. The main issues that the old content has are: |
| 37 | *** Sloppy, contrived writing. |
| 38 | *** Old contacts that require you to run to a mission, often several zones away, and back to them to get the next mission as much as ten times before giving you their cell phone number. Contacts added since issue 6 give their cell number by the 2nd mission at the latest. |
| 39 | *** Old contacts sending the player all over the city while newer contacts focus their missions inside the zone that they operate from. |
| 40 | *** Old story arcs being much, much longer than they need to be with redundant missions and overkill objectives (you only need to question the gang leader but still are required to defeat every gangmember, even if you stealthed past them all). |
| 41 | *** Old contacts sharing identical missions and story arcs rather than having unique content. That guy in Independence Port is likely to give you the exact same missions as that girl over in Talos Island, and chances are many of the missions will end up being over in Talos Island anyway. |
| 42 | ** This pops up in ''VideoGame/DungeonFighterOnline'' particularly with later season 3 and season 4 content: |
| 43 | *** Legendary weapons and ancient dungeons. In 60-70 cap (seen in old DFO) they were more revelant than they are now as the questing/grinding needed for them outweighs the boost compared to the level you'd end up at when you're done. This is even after tweaking them to be beyond 70. Future content/current korean content promises a way to make them lv85 |
| 44 | *** Various feat quests that give accessories (mainly requiring a large amount of a certain material from dailies) and one title have become this as the game content has exceeded the point where a player would have to stick around for those quests. |
| 45 | *** The skill trainers are still in the game but with the ability to adjust your skills at any time and the removal of some of the subplots of pre-metastatis Arad, they mainly hang around and occasionally give subquests and provide random chatter. GSD got hit pretty hard as he doesn't see any action anymore while Pungin the Fighter trainer has the practice room. |
| 46 | *** Chronicle gear subverts this as despite being lv60 to lv70 gear a bit better than Rare quality gear of the same level, their effects are THAT useful to make them still pretty revelant and to boot a future update promises a way to level them to lv85. |
| 47 | *** A notable subversion are the crew of the St. Horn, originally support characters in Female Slayer's subplot that was in S3 (never seen in the west), they've become {{Non Player Character}}s for Otherverse and Ancient dungeon related stuff. |
| 48 | ** This is very prominent in ''VideoGame/EverQuest''. As the expansion packs mount up, old world content is increasingly useless - it's now possible to get armor dropped from random monsters better than the stuff you had to go through extensive questing to get back in the old days. Many zones, especially dungeons, lie abandoned for various reasons. Sometimes Sony reworks a dungeon to increase the level (this was notably done to Splitpaw and Cazic-Thule). However, since Everquest isn't designed well for solo play, people all [[ComplacentGamingSyndrome hunt in the same few zones]] since all the other players are there, rendering most of the ''game'' an artifact. |
| 49 | *** ''VideoGame/EverQuestII'' doesn't have it quite as bad. For one thing, there are fewer outdoor zones, and thus nothing to be "reliced". Also, Sony frequently "de-heroics" zones - a "heroic" zone being geared for groups, while a non-heroic zone can be handled by a solo player. Still, some formerly high end dungeons like Solusek's Eye now have little point to them. Also, [[LevelGrinding leveling]] is so easy now that the low end dungeons just aren't necessary anymore, as a player could gain five levels in less time than it would take him to find a group. |
| 50 | ** ''VideoGame/{{Runescape}}'' has been fixing this one: they eventually removed an ancient quest based on ''Theatre/RomeoAndJuliet'' and replaced it with a quest that, while not entirely original, at least is more than ''Romeo & Juliet'' via FetchQuest. |
| 51 | ** It is, however, thoroughly averted when it comes to bosses: the two earliest bosses (the Kalphite Queen and King Black Dragon) offer pitiful drops, with the average value being around 20k gold per kill, and mostly due to rarer drops making up for the absence of value most of the normal ones have. This used to be normal, as the rare drops were insanely valuable. Now, however, it’s the norm for bosses to drop a valuable amount of supplies in addition to the rare items. While this has other issues, it at least means it won’t be outclassed by normal monsters that lack that (often devalued) rare drop, but have a consistent profit per kill. |
| 52 | ** In the first decade of the game, ''VideoGame/Wizard101'' had a guard named Private Stillson who granted the player access to Unicorn Way, the very first area in the game to have enemies in it. The 2019 updates completely revamped Unicorn Way's questline to benefit new players (and because technical limitations 2009 prevented them from doing anything more ambitious), and now Merle Ambrose himself simply teleports you to Unicorn Way after you complete/skip the tutorial and speak to him in his office. Private Stillson still stands in front of the entrance to this day but serves no purpose other than decoration. |
| 53 | ** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'' has managed to avert this for the most part. The original series of missions, despite technically being the easiest, is still the most important lore wise. Many of the missions intended to be difficult are level capped low enough that you cannot out level them. Some of them can be soloed by some classes, but it isn't substantially easier for a high level player to do so then a character actually at the level cap. |
| 54 | ** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' zig zags with keeping old content relevant. To entice players that are at the endgame, the daily roulette will reward players gil, EXP, and tomestones currency while doing a randomly selected duty. However, there are skip potions that can be bought with real money that can allow a player to reach the level cap from the previous expansion on any job (and obtain the appropriate gear for it) or skip huge chunks of the main story. |
| 55 | %% DO NOT add further examples of The Artifact from ''Final Fantasy XI'' or ''XIV'' here. These sets of examples are specifically regarding [=MMOs=] in general and whether they manage to keep old content relevant. If you're going to add an example regarding an artifact specific to one of these games, look further down to the example set for ''Final Fantasy'', because it's probably already there. |
| 56 | * Fighting games do use this trope every now and then. ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters'' is one of the bigger offenders -- any character from series such as ''VideoGame/FatalFury'' and ''VideoGame/ArtOfFighting'' that weren't DemotedToExtra got this. Terry Bogard, despite his iconic reputation, has been accused of being "just there" lately over the years just to appease older fans (and some think that's the real reason why the ShipTease with him and Blue Mary isn't done so much anymore). There is also Mai Shiranui, who remains one of the most popular characters of the series, but nowadays only even has an excuse to show up because of her eternally-unrequited love for Andy Bogard. |
| 57 | ** The inclusion of ''Fatal Fury'' and ''Art of Fighting'' characters was made as something extra for them, since they were still in their own respective series (as ''King of Fighters'' is an AlternateContinuity to those games). However, over the course of the 2000s, due to certain issues such as their financial status, SNK focused almost entirely on ''King of Fighters'' (with an occasional ''VideoGame/SamuraiShodown'' or crossover fighting game), which ended up being a reason why some of these characters were starting to feel like artifacts. |
| 58 | ** Characters whom originated in the series were not always excluded, though after the ''[=NESTs=]'' saga for a while Kyo and Iori were in danger of becoming this. Fortunately SNK averted it by giving them bigger roles again. |
| 59 | ** On the subject of ''Videogame/SamuraiShodown'', Genan Shiranui has a somewhat incongruous appearance, being the only visibly non-human fighter in the original cast. His design was a holdover from very early on in development, when the game was actually going to star various monsters rather than feudal warriors. This may have contributed to Genan eventually being DemotedToExtra after the second installment, save for a return in the non-canonical ''Samurai Showdown VI''. |
| 60 | * Speaking of fighting games, the ubiquitous 99-second timer is this for the genre as a whole, at least outside of the competitive scene. It was an arcade feature intended to keep the game moving along if players were taking too long or walked away. It serves no purpose in casual matches (especially if the game was never released in arcades in the first place), and most will have the option to turn it off. This is, however, averted in competitive matches, as the timer prevents characters with a strong camping game, such as [[VideoGame/BlazBlue Hakumen]], from doing so and giving themselves a strong advantage. That said, there are some games where either matches are too fast for the timer to matter, or the timer is too long to realistically hit zero more than once a blue moon. It is telling that pro wrestling games, while falling under the fighting game umbrella (albeit more on the technical side), aren't timed, as they originated on the home systems. While boxing and MMA games do have a timer, this is because the actual sports do. |
| 61 | * ''Franchise/StreetFighter'': |
| 62 | ** Of the cast of ''VideoGame/StreetFighterII'', the one character who's never really broken out is E. Honda, the sumo wrestler. While he's by no means unpopular, he has essentially nothing to do with the series' overall metaplot, has never reached the status of BreakoutCharacter like the other fighters have, and his overall character and concept has fallen far into the background. But he can't really be dropped from the series, strictly because he's one of the original twelve fighters (and among the initial eight playable World Warriors) from the series' most iconic game, and fans don't find the roster complete without him. |
| 63 | ** The premise of ''VideoGame/StreetFighter1'' involved Ryu or Ken travelling the world to fight a diverse cast of martial artists. In ''VideoGame/StreetFighterII'', Ryu and Ken returned to take on a whole new set of fighters, with a new twist that the other characters were playable too (essentially inventing the FightingGame genre). After several years of {{Updated Rerelease}}s and the prequel series ''VideoGame/StreetFighterAlpha'', 1997 saw the release of ''VideoGame/StreetFighterIII'', returning to the original premise of the series in which Ryu and Ken would take on a brand new set of characters. But by that point, the fighters introduced in ''II'' had become iconic in their own right (Chun-Li, Guile, E. Honda, etc.), and their absence caused an outcry. It didn't help that ''II'' had ''vastly'' overshadowed ''1'' in popularity and most people didn't know that ''II'' itself had a different cast from the original, with only Ryu, Ken, and former FinalBoss Sagat returning. As a result, Creator/{{Capcom}} brought back some of the older characters for ''III's'' own updated rereleases, and future sequels would have a combination of new characters, franchise staples, and less iconic characters that are rotated in and out. |
| 64 | ** In spin-off game ''Super Puzzle Fighter II'', there are various comedic cutscenes in the game. One of them involves Ken throwing a Shoryuken at Ryu, only to fall into a hole, to both their surprise. In the original game, Ken's stage was based on his back-alley stage from ''Street Fighter Alpha'', and the hole he stepped in was a manhole. However, the HD remake gives Ken a new stage set on a beach, but the cutscene is otherwise unchanged, meaning Ken falls into a circular hole in the middle of a beach for no evident reason. |
| 65 | * The first ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena Elder Scrolls]]'' game was subtitled "Arena" due to its initial design focusing on a gladiatorial arena, which quickly fell by the wayside as the game developed into a wide-open fantasy RPG world instead; the subtitle was justified as saying "the Arena" was a nickname for Tamriel's violent atmosphere, yet none of the future games have ever referred to Tamriel as "the Arena". |
| 66 | * ''Franchise/SonicTheHedgehog'': |
| 67 | ** The series as a whole was meant to be Sega's answer and antithesis to Nintendo's ''[[Franchise/SuperMarioBros Super Mario]]'' series, during a time when Nintendo was ''the'' dominant name in the industry. With Sega retiring from creating competing hardware and due to a change in target demographics in gaming, the series and character mostly remain as Sega's flagship series and a reminder how iconic both the series and the company once was. |
| 68 | ** As the franchise develops Sonic's world and fills out his supporting cast, it inadvertently manages to render many of its existing characters completely redundant. |
| 69 | *** [[VideoGame/SegaSonicTheHedgehog Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel]] fit the same exact niche that Knuckles the Echidna and Miles "Tails" Prower have occupied since ''VideoGame/SonicHeroes'', which has only contributed to their obscurity and lack of use in the franchise. They vanished for real-world decades until ''VideoGame/SonicMania Plus'' (Mighty's third playable appearance after ''VideoGame/KnucklesChaotix'' and Ray's ''second'') finally [[TheBusCameBack brought them back]]. |
| 70 | *** A similar case exists for [[VideoGame/SonicTripleTrouble Nack the Weasel/Fang the Sniper]]. Rouge the Bat already fills the "WildCard that seeks the Chaos Emeralds for reasons other than their power" niche, plus has other advantages over Nack/Fang such as more depth to her character, interesting relationships with other characters such as Knuckles and Shadow, and being [[TheSmurfettePrinciple one of the few female characters]] in a franchise with a predominantly male cast. |
| 71 | *** Many games have introduced new rivals for Sonic, but these rivalries never manage to stick. No less than three characters have been TheRival--the serious, stoic, solitary rival--for Sonic: Knuckles the Echidna, Shadow the Hedgehog, and Blaze the Cat. Each rivalry wound up being resolved or cast aside within a few games if not the first game it appeared[[note]]Knuckles in particular has been an ally if not outright {{Sidekick}} of Sonic's since ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2''[[/note]], only to return in spinoffs if ever again. ''VideoGame/SonicGenerations'' highlights this by excluding Knuckles and Blaze from the rival battles, which are restricted to fellow hedgehogs Shadow and Silver (and Metal Sonic). |
| 72 | *** The E-100 series, and in particular E-102 Gamma, was outmoded by the introduction of a SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute, E-123 Omega. The last time Gamma appeared in the franchise, it was ''via'' his replacement Chaos Gamma in ''VideoGame/SonicBattle'', who Omega has also made largely redundant. |
| 73 | *** The Babylon Rogues from the ''VideoGame/SonicRiders'' series have also become artifacts, even within their own spinoff. Much of their story revolved around their connection with the FloatingContinent Babylon Garden, but since Babylon Garden's story appears to have been concluded, they've been reduced to token opposition in the Extreme Gear competitions of ''VideoGame/SonicFreeRiders''. |
| 74 | *** Cream the Rabbit was originally designed to be Amy Rose's sidekick, but this relationship was shoved aside in ''VideoGame/SonicRush'' to make way for Cream playing sidekick to newcomer Blaze the Cat. Naturally, the sequel game ''VideoGame/SonicRushAdventure'' introduces Marine the Raccoon, a rival candidate for the position of Blaze's sidekick, which out-dates Cream's relationship with Blaze as well. After ''Sonic Rush Adventure'', however, both Cream and especially Marine have fallen OutOfFocus. |
| 75 | *** The Eggrobo {{Elite Mook}}s of ''VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles'' have been outmoded several times over, not only by the E-series robots that originated in ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure'' but also by the Eggpawn series and its myriad variants introduced by ''VideoGame/SonicHeroes''. |
| 76 | ** The games, most of which are only given an ExcusePlot, have not particularly gone out of their way to develop or even use franchise lore, which leaves major plot devices in the margins--often this includes powerful items or devices like the Master Emerald on Angel Island with Knuckles, the Space Colony ARK and its Eclipse Cannon, or the Jeweled Scepter of Blaze's world. |
| 77 | ** Starting with ''VideoGame/SonicAndTheSecretRings'', the franchise began to streamline the games to focus on Sonic the Hedgehog alone--which nudged the franchise's huge cast into being mere supporting cast members if not completely OutOfFocus. Admittedly, there are audiences for both games featuring the expanded cast and for Sonic-specific games, but the franchise is in a hard spot to cater to both at once. |
| 78 | ** ''VideoGame/SonicColors'' featured the Wisps as a major plot element and an aspect of the game's powerups, and they were rather clearly written into the plot in that game. ''Colors'' also ended with the Wisps leaving Earth, putting a pretty hard cap on their usability. However, they've featured in several later games, with only a mild handwave to explain their existence, even though their presence opens up a pretty massive plothole for why Eggman hasn't tried to harness them again. |
| 79 | ** The franchise's attempts to break its history down into distinct eras are prone to being rapidly outdated or retconned, especially since "Modern Sonic" became official terminology circa ''VideoGame/SonicGenerations''. Sonic himself comes in three major design phases -- pre-''VideoGame/SonicAdventure'', post-''Adventure'', and ''VideoGame/SonicBoom'', but there have been various attempts to break up the post-''Adventure'' Sonic into multiple phases. ''Sonic Generations'' chose the descriptors of Classic Era for the [[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog1 original]] [[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2 Genesis]] [[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog3AndKnuckles trilogy]], the Dreamcast Era for ''Sonic Adventure'', ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2'', and ''VideoGame/SonicHeroes'' (which is definitely ''not'' a Dreamcast title), and the Modern Era for ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2006'', ''VideoGame/SonicUnleashed'', and ''VideoGame/SonicColors''. This is disputed by ''VideoGame/SegaHeroes'', which behaves as though Modern Sonic starts with ''Sonic Heroes'', and everything prior to that is Classic. |
| 80 | ** ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2'' originally featured a time travel mechanic where certain zones would have counterparts in other time periods. Although this aspect was shelved ''very'' early in development, Hill Top Zone's origin as a prehistoric version of Emerald Hill Zone is still visible in-game, with its [[PaletteSwap palette-swapped]] ground tiles and dinosaur Badniks. While all the other "past" versions of zones were removed, Hill Top was close to completion and remained. |
| 81 | * ''Franchise/{{Castlevania}}'': |
| 82 | ** Flying medusa heads in the ''Franchise/{{Castlevania}}'' series are somewhat an example. In the first game, Medusa herself was a giant severed head, and was fought in the stage that introduced the heads. Since then, Medusa has almost always appeared with a body, and is even absent in most games - but the flying heads remain. |
| 83 | ** The subweapon-heart system in the early NES games was useful because the whip was a rather limited weapon in combat: it isn't very long, it only covers the area right in front of its wielder, its attack speed is lackluster, and due to the slight wind-up animation, there's also a slight delay on it. The Axe could hit enemies diagonally up, the Holy Water could hit enemies too low to attack, and the Boomerang killed everything horizontally. Even the infamous Dagger was a cut above the whip, with its better range and less delay. ''VideoGame/SuperCastlevaniaIV'' massively upgraded the whip in range, power, speed, and versatility, becoming easily the best weapon in the game. However, the subweapons and heart drops remained, leaving many a player with a massive pile of unused hearts. This is one reason that the later games nerfed the whip, as well as introducing Item Crashes to make the subweapons more useful. |
| 84 | ** ''[[VideoGame/CastlevaniaSymphonyOfTheNight Symphony of the Night]]'' featured corridors that connected the different areas of the castle used [[DynamicLoading to mask loading times]]. They were gone in both ''[[VideoGame/CastlevaniaCircleOfTheMoon Circle of the Moon]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/CastlevaniaHarmonyOfDissonance Harmony Of Dissonance]]'' as those games were on cartridges that have much faster load times. They did return to stay starting with ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaAriaOfSorrow'' though, simply because abruptly moving from one area to the next was deemed to be rather jarring. |
| 85 | * ''VideoGame/MetalGear'': |
| 86 | ** The eponymous Metal Gear tanks were somewhat unimportant to the plot of ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid4GunsOfThePatriots'', aside from one boss battle where the player controls Metal Gear REX in order to destroy Metal Gear RAY, and even then the railgun that was attached ''to'' Metal Gear REX is more important to the plot than the Metal Gear itself. The closest thing to a new Metal Gear model in ''[=MGS4=]'' were the AI-controlled Gekko mechs, which are not officially considered to be Metal Gear tanks as they do not use nuclear weapons.[[note]]Although, by being what are essentially walking tanks, they ''are'' pretty close to the original idea for what a Metal Gear would be as Granin outlined in the prequel ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid3SnakeEater''; in ''Revengeance'', the in-universe term for AI-controlled weapons like the Gekko is "Unmanned (Metal) Gear", and calling Boris during the fight against [[spoiler:Metal Gear Excelsus]] has him and Raiden discuss how the original concept of the Metal Gear has fallen out of fashion since the end of the Cold War, resulting in the term "Metal Gear" becoming an ArtifactTitle only still used for marketing purposes[[/note]]. While the final act does revolve around an Arsenal Gear, those are also not at all similar to earlier Metal Gear models. |
| 87 | ** The Platform/NintendoGameCube remake of ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'' carries over many of the features from [[VideoGame/MetalGearSolid2SonsOfLiberty its sequel]]. This includes the ability to hold guards up and steal dogtags from them, with separate sets of tags across every difficulty - minus any non-{{bragging rights|reward}}- or [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential cruelty-related]] incentive to actually do so, since the unlockable pieces of equipment (stealth camo, infinite-ammo bandanna and alternate costumes) are still unlocked simply by beating the game with a specific ending regardless of how many tags you grab. |
| 88 | ** Most of the well-known elements of the Metal Gear saga become this in ''VideoGame/MetalGearRisingRevengeance''. The game retains the manual save system of its predecessors along with introducing an auto-save system. However, loading a manually-saved game will still put you at your latest checkpoint, making manual saving redundant. It also gives you the possibility of using long-ranged guns and grenades like in every game, but since the game is so focused on close combat with a sword, the use of these weapons would more times than not feel redundant and even useless, as the game itself seems to note by limiting your options to grenades and rocket launchers, without a hint of the regular guns Raiden swore by for 95% of his first outing. The game also gives you many of the classic elements for stealth play, like the cardboard box, and even variations of the magazines for dealing with cyborgs. But since this game is way more focused on hack-n-slash gameplay, stealth becomes unnecessary and even a burden at some points (if you manage to go through an area without activating an alarm, the game will never initiate the fighting scenario, therefore you won't be awarded any rank for the battle, which is necessary to gain some bonuses and achievements). |
| 89 | ** Solid Snake himself hasn't canonically appeared in a game since ''Metal Gear Solid 4'', stated by WordOfGod to "absolutely end the Solid saga" and all but confirmed to have died of old age shortly afterwards. New entries to the franchise have all focused on either [[GenerationXerox Big Boss]] (in prequels) or [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap Raiden]] (in sequels). Big Boss (Naked Snake) is even starting to eclipse Solid Snake as the series' main protagonist, despite having been the BigBad of the [=MSX2=] games and several of those prequels promising to demonstrate how he got that way. |
| 90 | ** The infamous cardboard box becomes one in ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolidVThePhantomPain''. It's there, and even has new features, but it doesn't really mesh well at all with the game's DarkerAndEdgier tone. The fact that you can complete the whole game without ever using it - and the fact that it was even cut from ''[[VideoGame/MetalGearSolidVGroundZeroes Ground Zeroes]]'' and only returned because of fan outcry - further cements its status as this. Ocelot even lampshades this. |
| 91 | ** Most of Snake's appearances, especially in [[GaidenGame spinoffs]], feature him wearing his [[IconicOutfit Sneaking Suit]] from the first ''Metal Gear Solid'', a skintight but padded outfit which is designed to look like a mixture of military gear, cold weather gear and a wetsuit, and is light blue and grey in colour. This is perfectly suitable for a game which requires Snake to swim in the seas of Alaska, and even makes plenty of sense when he wears it without the thick thermal vest to infiltrate aquatic vessels in the prologue and finale of ''Metal Gear Solid 2'', but begins to look a bit strange when he's running around in a Central African jungle in ''VideoGame/MetalGearGhostBabel'' or a southern African island in ''VideoGame/MetalGearAcid''. |
| 92 | ** The camo index, and wearing the right outfit to blend in with your surroundings to keep it as close to 100% as possible, was an integral part of the stealth for ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid3SnakeEater'', since the vast majority of the gameplay involved sneaking through jungles, mountaintops, and other wide-open outdoor areas where using camouflage to hide in plain sight was often the only option (or at least the only one that wouldn't be more conspicuous; see the aforementioned cardboard box, which is only good for a very small handful of areas in the entire game). It remained useful for ''Metal Gear Solid 4'', and was in fact significantly streamlined with the [=OctoCamo=] suit that let you automatically blend in to whatever you're pressed up against rather than having to manually set a matching camo as in ''3''. The system also returned for ''[[VideoGame/MetalGearSolidPeaceWalker Peace Walker]]'', but by then there's really no point - you can't change outfits mid-mission if you picked the wrong outfit for the area your mission actually takes place in (so it's generally better to choose your outfit based on the number of primary or secondary weapon slots it gets rather than how well it blends in), and perhaps more importantly, simply hiding around corners or in boxes and the like as in the earlier games is your main means of avoiding detection again. The uselessness of proper camouflage is probably best exemplified by the fact that it is almost impossible to get your camo index to go above [[BrokeTheRatingScale -30%]] in regular gameplay conditions, short of utilizing a special co-op laser system that turns whoever you paint with the laser invisible outright. |
| 93 | ** ''Snake Eater'' itself suffered from another artifact. The game featured wide-open jungles, mountains and swamps as its playable areas, with long sightlines requiring the use of proper camouflage to hide yourself - and you still had a top-down view over everything which artificially restricted your ability to look over these wide-open areas and plan your movements, made worse by the fact that the game's 1964 setting meant the [[EnemyDetectingRadar Soliton radar]] wasn't available to compensate. The game tried to alleviate this by making the camera more dynamic, allowing you to move the camera around slightly to look further in another direction and viewing some areas from a different angle than the traditional slightly-tilted top-down, but it was still clear that any sort of fixed view over the action this time, barring a ''very'' small handful of areas, was nothing but a hindrance, and the ''Subsistence'' rerelease would add the option of a proper third-person camera that would go on to be the main manner of viewing the action for the rest of the series. |
| 94 | * ''Franchise/{{Metroid}}'' |
| 95 | ** Throughout the series, doors serve the purpose of [[DynamicLoading disguising load times,]] the fact that they are opened via ''gunshot'' doesn't make a whole lot of sense even with the in-universe HandWave (why would the protective force fields need to be deactivated by being shot? [[Webcomic/AwkwardZombie And why would the pirates install doors that only Samus can open?]]). Nevertheless, they were in the first game, so they're in ''all'' the games. |
| 96 | *** The doors get varying forms of hand-waves in some games, particularly the ''[[VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy Prime]]'' series. In some cases, they're not designed ''to'' be shot; rather, by shooting them, you're ''overloading'' their defenses, and different doors have different strengths and properties that make their defensive fields vulnerable to different exploits, e.g. a red door requiring a missile whereas a blue door simply needs a single blast from your basic beam. In other cases, they were only meant to keep out the local wildlife. |
| 97 | *** Taken to absurd levels in ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption'' where the first part of the game takes place on a friendly Galactic Federation ship, and Samus still opens the doors by shooting them. You'd think the Federation would want to discourage such RecklessGunUsage. |
| 98 | *** Howver, it's worth noting that the doors are only artifactual from a [[WatsonianVersusDoylist Watsonian perspective]]; the Doylist reason for the doors opening through weapon fire (aside from the aforementioned loading) is so that the player needs to hunt down certain weapon upgrades in order to access new areas, an integral part of {{Metroidvania}} genre for which the series is one of the {{Trope Namer}}s and [[TropeCodifier Codifiers]]. |
| 99 | ** The Metroids themselves have fallen by the wayside, thanks to the [[VideoGame/MetroidIIReturnOfSamus second game]] being all about the player hunting them to near-extinction. It got to the point where the ''Prime'' trilogy featured severely weakened Metroids in the Pirate bases even though it might have made more sense in terms of plot if they had been absent. ''VideoGame/MetroidOtherM'' reverses this trend. ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeHunters'' plays the trope straight by having no Metroids at all in the full game (they were in the ''First Hunt'' demo, however), despite having their name in the title. ''[[VideoGame/MetroidDread Dread]]'' looks to finally tie this off [[GrandFinale once and for all]], being billed as the conclusion of the Metroids' involvement in the series lore. [[spoiler: The game ends with the Metroid DNA implanted into Samus in ''Fusion'' activating and turning her into a humanoid Metroid, ensuring that the series' title will remain relevant as long as Samus is around.]] |
| 100 | ** The Varia Suit for the ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy''. In the first game, it was a standard upgrade that boosted Samus's defense and allowed her to travel through superheated rooms without being roasted. In the next two games, she has the Varia Suit from the start, but it's her basic suit and doesn't offer anything compared to the suit upgrades she obtains later on. It's likely that she starts with the Varia Suit since it's her iconic design. |
| 101 | * ''Franchise/AceAttorney'': |
| 102 | ** The three day trial system initially served as a time limit of sorts to the plot at the beginning of the series. However, when it became clear that a two-day trial was more than enough to keep the plot moving without the case [[ArcFatigue dragging on for too long]], subsequent games have never attempted another three day trial anymore. Strangely, [[BonusDungeon Rise From the Ashes]] lasts three days despite having been released after the original trilogy, presumably because it's a bonus for a rerelease of the original game, and moving from a game full of three-day trials to one that was only two would have made things even more jarring. |
| 103 | ** The main character facing a lousy prosecutor who can only win against rookies whose last name is Payne has become a staple for the series, despite the main attorneys being anything but rookies in later entries. Sometimes the games have an actual reason for this (such as having the first case being taken by the new character of the game) but in other cases, the trial just ends up becoming a battle between the main attorney and the actual culprit, leaving the Payne prosecutor as a side note comedic relief. |
| 104 | ** Phoenix's rival and one of the most popular characters of the series, Miles Edgeworth, became Chief Prosecutor during the Apollo Justice era, thus he no longer had any reason to involve himself in regular trials with the main cast. This was true for the fourth game, but for the next two, he reappeared and got heavily involved in at least one case per game. |
| 105 | ** The localization shifting the setting to California rather than Japan was pretty reasonable in the first game, which was vague enough to fit in either country. As the series has progressed and more obviously-Japanese elements have been introduced, the series's setting has officially moved from "California" to "AlternateHistory version of California that has heavy Japanese culture influence and a completely different law system." |
| 106 | ** The Psyche-Lock system, first introduced in ''VisualNovel/PhoenixWrightAceAttorneyJusticeForAll'', would have your life meter decrease if you screwed up and any mistakes during those sections were carried over to the court trials. ''VisualNovel/ApolloJusticeAceAttorney'' kept the Psyche-Locks, but no longer linked the life meter to the court system so that players wouldn't have to [[SaveScumming repeatedly save]] before and after every question. Nothing would change if the Psyche-Locks were removed, but it was likely kept in so that Phoenix had a "power" comparable to Apollo's percieve and Athena's mood reader abilities. |
| 107 | * Creator/{{Valve|Software}}'s Source Engine is a heavy/complete modification of the licensed Quake engine, to the point of having none of the original's code. Most of the console commands, however, remain the same as the various id Tech engines. Same for ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'''s IW Engine, built from the ''VideoGame/QuakeIIIArena'' engine used in the first game and used in essentially the same form for every game afterwards until being rewritten from the ground up for ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyAdvancedWarfare''. |
| 108 | ** This may or may not have been why ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps'' runs on a modified version of ''VideoGame/{{Call of Duty 4|ModernWarfare}}'''s engine, which was three years old at ''Black Ops''[='=] release, rather than the much younger version of the engine from ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyModernWarfare2 Modern Warfare 2]]'' (on top of the overlapping development meaning that a completed version of that engine iteration simply wasn't available until they were already a third of the way through development) - [=MW2=] took out leaning and dedicated servers from the PC version, Treyarch wanted those in their game, and they probably figured it would be easier to make the engine they already had on hand and which already had those features look better than it would be to add those features back to a newer engine that they would only get full access to partway through development. This was also the catalyst for them rewriting the engine with ''Advanced Warfare'', and then again for the 2019 ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyModernWarfare2019 Modern Warfare]]'', since even with yearly improvements to the engine's rendering abilities, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the games were still running on an engine from 2005 - the ''Black Ops'' series especially suffered from this, as they've been universally running on heavily-updated versions of the engine used in the original ''Black Ops'' instead of directly using the newer versions of the engine. |
| 109 | ** Similarly, the Dunia Engine that runs ''VideoGame/FarCry2'' contains something like 1%-5% of the original source code from the [=CryEngine=] that powered the first game. |
| 110 | ** ''VideoGame/DukeNukemForever'' is an interesting case. Rather than scrap the project or update it for modern engines, as had already been done multiple times when 3D Realms was still working on it (and was responsible in part for its [[DevelopmentHell infamously-protracted development time of 15 years]]), the entire game runs on the relatively ancient VideoGame/{{Unreal}} Engine 1. They just added enough graphics modifications to make it look pretty on-par with contemporary releases on Unreal Engine 3. This also has the side-effect of its recommended system requirements being much lower than contemporary games - about on par with the recommended requirements for ''VideoGame/{{Crysis}}'', infamous in 2007 for being essentially a supercomputer, [[TechnologyMarchesOn but having quickly become old-hat]] by ''DNF''[='=]s release in 2011. |
| 111 | * ''Duke Nukem Forever'' itself has a lot of this in its gameplay--by some accounts, the staff actively tried to stop the game's director from playing other games, for fear that he might demand on a whim that [[FollowTheLeader they implement ideas from them]]. Go through the game level-by-level and [[UnintentionalPeriodPiece you can practically count the years when certain features and levels got added in]] - one level will have [[VideoGame/{{SiN}} interactive objects every five feet]], another will have [[VideoGame/HalfLife2 driving sections where you have to get out every couple of minutes to clear the road]], another one will [[VideoGame/{{Doom 3}} send you into a pitch-black cavern]], the next will [[VideoGame/Halo2 make you hold the line for several minutes as you wait for something important to happen]], yet another will [[VideoGame/{{Killzone}} suddenly try to play everything dead-serious]], and so on. Conversely, this leads to a lot of stuff that ended up being oddly unfitting in the finished product, like the rather limited ammo supplies and several gimmicky weapons that definitely seem like they weren't made with a [[LimitedLoadout two-slot limit]] in mind, or those attempts at seriousness [[MoodWhiplash being immediately undercut by Duke's usual attempts at wit]]. Even the game's title is a joke on the similarly unusual title of ''Film/BatmanForever'', which had completely fallen out of relevance by the 2000s alone. |
| 112 | * The ''VideoGame/{{Turok}}'' games [[InNameOnly take their name]], and a few other aspects, from [[ComicBook/{{Turok}} a series of comic books]] about a Native American who finds a LostWorld valley of dinosaurs. In the games, the main storyline has to do with the job of an ancient warrior trying to keep [[TheMultiverse The Omniverse]] from collapsing and using his ancient wisdom to survive in a dark, alien land. They could just have easily have come up with some pretty strange creatures for the Lost Lands, and they did in later games, but solely because the Turok name is associated with dinosaurs, there are bio-mechanical dinosaurs for no reason. Then again, [[RuleOfCool maybe dinosaurs don't need a reason]]. |
| 113 | * A small handful of perks in ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' suffer from being this. |
| 114 | ** Tag! is one of the more obvious examples. A tagged skill in ''VideoGame/{{Fallout|1}}'' and ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 2}}'' leveled up twice as fast as a normal skill. This skill also became available around the same point in the game where Energy Weapons and Big Guns started to legitimately be useful weapons. Instead of the ignorable +15 skill points, the old version was +20 skill points and it now progressed twice as fast as normal like the other tagged skills. On top of that, it worked retroactively with skill points already spent in the skill, doubling whatever points you'd already put into it except for those added by another perk. Taking this skill allowed you to almost instantly turn a skill too low to be useful to being essentially mastered. |
| 115 | ** Swift Learner used to make at least some sense to take. You didn't normally hit the level cap in the old games unless you intentionally farmed random encounters for experience for a long time. In the newer games, hitting the level cap is easy even with all of the [=DLCs=] increasing it, which makes taking this perk completely useless. |
| 116 | ** Life Giver was a much better perk in the older games. Even enemy mooks could potentially one-hit-kill you in the early stages of the game, and you weren't guaranteed more health on a level-up, so extra health by any means possible was a legitimately useful thing to have. Now, you always gain a little extra health when you level up, so Life Giver has been changed into a one-time boost of 30 HP - a noticeable boost, to be sure (about equivalent to how much you'd get from six levels), but still small enough that any enemy capable of killing you will usually have no trouble going through the perk's extra health. |
| 117 | ** Pyromaniac is an interesting example. The Perk itself has remained useful, to the point of being a key component of the highest melee-DPS build in ''Fallout 3'', but the requirements to take it have reached this status. Originally, it required a certain number of ranks in Big Guns to take -- this made sense, as the primary source of fire damage in the original games were Flamers, which were classed as Big Guns. For ''Fallout 3'', it was moved to Explosives, despite flame damage being found in Big Guns and Melee Weapons. By ''Fallout: New Vegas'', Pyromaniac's requirement remained in Explosives. However, Big Guns had been removed as skill, putting flamethrowing weapons in Energy Weapons (the perk [[http://new.spring.me/#!/JESawyer/q/420745289532466503 was actually meant to be attainable]] with either Explosives ''or'' Energy Weapons, but because of a glitch this didn't work). Later DLC added the mighty Flare Gun (Guns), Dragon's Breath ammo (Guns), Shishkebab (Melee Weapons), Superheated Saturnite Fist (Unarmed), and the weak Molotov Cocktail (Explosives), meaning that Pyromaniac requires the character to have ranks in ''the least relevant combat skill''. |
| 118 | ** Fast Shot used to be an amazing trait. You gave up the Aimed Shot skill, which is mostly useless anyway (by the time you can reliably hit specific body parts, you should have little trouble just killing enemies), to reduce the AP needed per shot by 1. Depending on your weapon and Agility, this could very well mean you were shooting twice per round rather than once, meaning it doubled your damage output from the get-go, making it ''the'' trait to have (alongside Gifted) - and that's not getting into some of the more amazing things you could do with it later on, such as having 10AP per round and getting the .223 Pistol (the most powerful Small Gun in the game) to 2AP per shot (five shots, aka dumping the entire mag in one round), or the Super Sledge (the most powerful Melee weapon) to 1AP per hit (''ten'' swings per round). Due to the 3D games not ''needing'' the Aimed Shot skill since they're shooters, in which controlling where your shots hit a target is an inherent mechanic, the new version simply reduces VATS accuracy (which it already suffers at in engagements further than melee distance) for a minor AP reduction. |
| 119 | ** Skilled, meanwhile, is something of an inversion. In the first two games, it gave you a rather negligible boost to your skills in exchange for only getting perks every ''four'' levels instead of three like normal. Come ''New Vegas'' (or rather, the ''Old World Blues'' DLC), you get a +5 boost to all skills for a small reduction in exp gain (which can easily be negated by taking the aforementioned Swift Learner, if you feel so inclined), with skill points being harder to come by in this game than the first two. For added fun, you can abuse some GoodBadBugs in character creation or with the Auto-Doc in ''Old World Blues'' to get the bonus multiple times and then "lose" the penalty from it for good measure. |
| 120 | ** On a non-perk front, it's clear that the ''NV'' designers didn't really have any use for the KarmaMeter, focusing much more heavily on {{Alliance Meter}}s (where, for instance, openly evil factions won't like you just for having bad Karma yourself if your every interaction with them has involved murdering them), and keeping it solely because the ''Fallout'' series was the TropeCodifier. It affects whether one companion will stay with you (everybody else that can turn down your offer will do so based on your reputation with a specific faction, e.g. Boone hates Caesar's Legion and will leave if you get too close to them), and determined which of three Level 50 perks you could get (if you had all the DLC to raise the level cap that high, that is)... and that's pretty much it. For added uselessness, all three of those Level 50 perks gave essentially the same set of bonuses, and either require or ''reset'' your Karma to be neutral. ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' noted this and responded, as part of a general overhaul of the series' gameplay, by ditching the mechanic entirely. |
| 121 | ** One consistent mechanic in the series is that the games track in-game time, as far as determining the exact day, month and even year your character has made it to depending on how long you've played. The first game had a valid purpose for this, because [[TimedMission your entire goal was on a time limit]] of 150 days to get a new water chip for Vault 13, then 500 days to [[spoiler:stop a super mutant army before they found the Vault and killed everyone]]. You could even affect that timer by directing water merchants to sell to Vault 13, which gave them 100 days' worth of extra water but in turn subtracted 100 days from [[spoiler:how long it takes the mutants to find them now that knowledge of the Vault's location is out in the wastes]]. Later games almost universally subscribe to the idea of letting you TakeYourTime instead - ''Fallout 2'' only has a hard time limit of 13 years before [[spoiler:a nuke is randomly dropped on the wasteland]] because of technical limitations that make it impossible for the engine to handle the game running any longer than that, and later games don't have any time limit to consider at all - in fact, ''Fallout 3'' with DLC lets you casually spend full months traveling between the Capital Wasteland and Point Lookout. |
| 122 | * In the ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto'' series, most titles have money that you can earn from doing missions, sidequests and the like that often [[MoneyForNothing doesn't get much use in terms of buying things.]] This is in part because it was originally used in lieu of a point and high-score system in the [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoClassic the first]] [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto2 two]] games ([[ContinuingIsPainful more or less]] in the case of the second), and was in fact required that you rack up a really big sum of money (with the help of score multipliers earned from completing a mission) in order to complete a chapter by pleasing your boss, and enter your score on the chapter scoreboards. |
| 123 | ** Temporary hospital visits and times busted are this to a lesser extent, as in the first two games, getting wasted would reduce one of your limited lives while getting busted would halve your score multiplier if you didn't have a get-out-of-jail-free card, hindering your ability to reach the target score. Now all it does is take away your weapons (easily recollected if you know where to look) and some of your money (not particularly a problem either), while requiring you to go back to where the mission you were on (if you were in the middle of one) starts to try again. |
| 124 | ** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIII'' codified how the series would play post-[[VideoGame3DLeap 3D leap]], but still had a few holdovers from its top-down predecessors that no longer made sense, such as a camera option for a top-down view (which was less useful when you had enemies that could shoot you or speed up to run you over from beyond the edge of the screen - the only 3D game in the series since to have a top-down view, ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoChinatownWars Chinatown Wars]]'', is explicitly designed with it in mind rather than a nostalgic afterthought) and the fact that you will gain money from nowhere for any sort of carnage wrought nearby, including unrelated vehicles exploding, echoing the gameplay of the original game more than the rest of this one. This is also the case for the Rampages, optional missions done by finding a floating skull icon somewhere in the game world, which task you to kill or destroy some certain number of targets in two minutes, typically with a certain weapon, and don't really jive with a game that has an actual story and a protagonist with an actual goal beyond just [[PsychoForHire killing people for money]] - they're what's left of a set of missions that, along with the insane hobo that would have given them, were cut specifically ''because'' they didn't fit the game's tone. |
| 125 | * ''VideoGame/Persona4'' has a couple of minor details carried over from [[VideoGame/Persona3 its predecessor]] that didn't make a lot of sense. Looking at the source code, it seems that ''4'' was made on NoBudget, thus Atlus [[MissionPackSequel built it off of]] an early copy of ''3'', which would explain the elements from its predecessor that contradict the updated style. |
| 126 | ** Enemies on the map look like the "Maya" enemies from ''3'', which aren't actually present and fightable here. The game as such has to make it clear that shadows transform when you get into a fight with them. |
| 127 | ** Maxing out a social link triggers a note that you have forged an unbreakable bond. This was an important point in ''3'', where social links that weren't maxed would break if they were neglected for a certain amount of time. In ''4'', only one Social Link can break, under very specific circumstances (Ai's, if you ask her out midway through and choose not to stay friends with her when she breaks up with you), so now it's just congratulatory. |
| 128 | ** To some extent, the TarotMotifs of the game can come across as this. ''Persona 3'' had a large emphasis on mysticism and had a character that would routinely explain various esoteric subjects, such as the history of magic and the summoning of spirits. One memorable instance has him expounding on the meaning of the Tarot itself which gives a good understanding of the link between the cards and the characters they are paired with. Without this addition, people coming into ''Persona 4'' may wonder why the tarot cards are connected to the various social links at all. Tellingly, when it does come time to explain a more mystical element of ''Persona 4''[='=]s plot, this same character makes a short [[TheCameo cameo]] just to do it. |
| 129 | ** There's a surprisingly large number of Physical skills in the game, and while some are unique in that they deal multiple hits or can inflict status ailments, others are practically identical to each other. For example, Bash, Skewer and Cleave are all low-level skills that do roughly the same amount of damage, while Brave Blade and God's Hand are powerful endgame single-target skills of comparable strength. The reason for this was that in the previous game, physical attacks were divided into Strike, Pierce or Slash damage depending on one's weapon or the skill. |
| 130 | ** The ability to have the AI control party members. In the original Persona 3 and FES, this option couldn't be turned off, but 4 has the option to turn all party members manual, one that most players activate at the first opportunity. In fact, Teddie strongly encourages you to turn Yosuke to "Direct Commands" before the fight with Shadow Chie. |
| 131 | ** The Reaper remains as an optional {{Superboss}} in both ''Persona 4'' and ''Persona 5''. It made sense in ''Persona 3'' due to that game's CentralTheme of death, but less so in the latter two games. |
| 132 | * ''VideoGame/Persona5'' created a few in its UpdatedRerelease ''Royal''. |
| 133 | ** "Life Will Change" is a TriumphantReprise of the vanilla game's opening theme "Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There". It loses a bit of impact because ''Royal'' replaced "Wake Up" entirely with a new opening in "Colors Flying High." In ''Royal'', the original opening can only be found in the [[MuseumGame Thieves Den]]. |
| 134 | ** The piano remix of the vanilla game's credits theme, "Hoshi To Bokura To," still plays in the anime cutscene near the end of the game where [[spoiler:Morgana seemingly vanishes]]. It's entirely possible the player won't ever actually hear the full version of "Hoshi To Bokura To," because ''Royal'' has an entirely new credits theme for the new ending. |
| 135 | ** [[spoiler:Satanael]], still PurposefullyOverpowered as ever, is still restricted to being fused in NewGamePlus, despite ''Royal'' adding an entirely new arc that takes place after the original ending wherein [[spoiler:Satanael was summoned]]. No explanation is ever given for why Joker can't use [[spoiler:Satanael]] during this period of the game, though it can be inferred that it was just a one time surge of power created by the [[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve public's belief]]. |
| 136 | ** ''Royal'''s new ending still eventually leads to [[spoiler:Joker being locked away in juvie, and his Confidants bounding together to save him]], just as in the vanilla game. In both endings, [[spoiler:Joker is freed]] in mid-February. While in the original game it, rather realistically, takes months of campaigning to free him, because ''Royal'' extends the game's playable calendar to early February, it takes barely over a ''week''. |
| 137 | * ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'': |
| 138 | ** [[VideoGameLives Extra lives]] became [[MeaninglessLives completely pointless]] since ''VideoGame/SuperMario64'', where you have the option to save your progress after collecting every new Star and key; reaching Game Over has no negative effect besides forcing you to reload your last save, which doesn't matter much since you are given the chance to save every time you collect a star (and there's no reason not to). [[BreakingOldTrends Lives were finally abolished]] in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioOdyssey'' so the only penalty for dying is the loss of 10 coins and, if you were fighting a boss, restarting the fight from the beginning. |
| 139 | ** You get points for doing things in the original ''Super Mario Bros.'' These have absolutely no impact on gameplay (even players in the 80s noticed this), but it was a VideoGame, and [[ScoringPoints video games have points]]! ''VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld'' and the ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBros'' series still have points, despite the fact the game doesn't keep track and the way it's designed, the ''worse'' you do, the ''higher'' your score will be. The 3D games up to and including ''VideoGame/SuperMario3DLand'' merge them with Coins so you'll be [[Every10000Points rewarded with a 1-Up if you do well enough]] and most of them also add high scores, adding incentive, but later games, including the sequel ''VideoGame/SuperMario3DWorld'' restore them while still keeping the high scores for incentive. Points were finally abolished after so many years in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBrosWonder'', where they were replaced with short compliment texts like "Good!" and "Great!" whenever you beat enemies. |
| 140 | ** The NES ''Mario'' games all mapped "attack" and "run" to the B-button. This owed to the fact that the NES only had A and B to work with, and a combination like down+B would go against the intended accessible style. This control style of mapping "attack" and "run" to the same button has been maintained for every game that includes a run button, even though most succeeding controllers have a lot more buttons to work with. This means Mario essentially has to make an attack every time he wants to start running (problematic when dealing with, say, the builder suit in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioMaker2'' and its very slow hammer swing). |
| 141 | ** Coins, at least, are often re-purposed as restoring Mario's HitPoints. Of course, he probably only has about 3-6 of those, so littering the levels with hundreds of coins is rather pointless, unless the player is just not any good at the game or [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential deliberately injuring Mario]]. |
| 142 | ** The first ''Super Mario Advance'' game included remakes of both ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros2'' and ''VideoGame/MarioBros''. To tie the games together, a few of Mario's abilities from ''[=SMB2=]'' were included in the ''Mario Bros.'' game, such as the charged crouch jump and the ability to pick up and throw POW blocks. Later ''Super Mario Advance'' games plus ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiSuperstarSaga'' also include the same ''Mario Bros.'' game, including the ''[=SMB2=]'' abilities, even though Mario plays differently in the other games or [[VideoGame/YoshisIsland is not the player character at all]]. |
| 143 | ** Mario's status as a plumber has become this. His first games took place in semi-realistic industrial environments, casting him as a blue-collar worker, and the first game to treat him as a plumber (''VideoGame/MarioBros'') took place in what appeared to be a sewer, which would make perfect sense for a plumber. ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'' was therefore something of a GenreShift focusing on that same plumber adventuring through an ''Literature/AliceInWonderland''-esque fantasy world. But due to SequelDisplacement, pretty much every game since then has taken place in the Mushroom Kingdom, making Mario seem a little out of place, with the only hint of his plumbing past being the large, bright green pipes that show up occasionally--to the point that ''VideoGame/SuperMarioOdyssey'' bringing back a semi-realistic modern city setting (implied to be the same one as in those early games, even) was seen as very unusual. |
| 144 | ** Half of the original concept of the "world" as a collection of stages is beginning to become an artifact with more recent games in the series. A world is still a grouping of levels that end with a major boss fight, but unlike in older ''Mario'' games, the levels in a world are mostly no longer thematically related to the world map itself -- you can be in the desert world and still end up playing grassland stages. |
| 145 | ** Luigi himself was starting to become this in The90s, especially when it came to the main platformers. His role as a PaletteSwap of Mario for the second player didn't give him much opportunity to be showcased when games like ''VideoGame/SuperMario64'' and ''VideoGame/SuperMarioRPG'' were single-player adventures. Even Luigi's voice clips in this period tended to just be the same clips of Creator/CharlesMartinet's Mario voice digitally pitch shifted. It wasn't until ''VideoGame/PaperMario64'' and ''VideoGame/LuigisMansion'' ramped up the DivergentCharacterEvolution that he became a much more integral part of the franchise. |
| 146 | ** The Yume Kōjō '87 festival had an "around the world" motif that incorporate elements of different cultures. Italian masks were particularly prominent, and were featured heavily in ''VideoGame/DokiDokiPanic'', the game Nintendo created to promote the festival. When Nintendo converted ''Doki Doki Panic'' into ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros2'' for Western markets, much of the mask motif remained intact despite the game no longer being affiliated with the Yume Kōjō festival. This is most evident with Shy Guys, who continue to wear the masks to this day despite the masks being totally divorced from their original context. |
| 147 | ** Princess Daisy was hit with this the moment she came back in ''Mario Tennis''. While she was a princess in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioLand'', all of her later appearances relegated her to just being a selectable character in spin off games. Her background as a princess has been completely ignored, even though she's still called a princess officially. |
| 148 | ** Daisy is hardly alone in this category; plenty of characters nowadays exist only to pad the roster in spinoff games. Waluigi is probably the most famous of this crew; he was created basically solely so Wario could have a doubles partner in ''Mario Tennis'', and sticks around in spinoffs largely due to popularity despite having essentially no presence in the series proper. |
| 149 | ** During the N64 era, starting with ''VideoGame/SuperMario64'', Piranha Plants started being depicted with green lips rather than the more familiar white lips. One of the last games to do this was ''VideoGame/SuperMarioSunshine'', which introduced Petey Piranha. The Piranha Plants have since reverted to white lips, but Petey's lips are still green to this day. Even the Petey {{exp|y}}ies in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'' and ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy2'' have green lips rather than white. |
| 150 | ** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros3'', particularly with the remakes, has a couple of these: |
| 151 | *** The title sequence shows Raccoon Mario shrink when hit with a Koopa shell despite being no longer on par within the actual gameplay for most releases. In the original Japanese release, as with the first two games, players shrunk down to Mini Mario upon damage regardless of their power-ups. The international NES release introduced a more lenient mechanic where damage in any form above Super only brings the player one step down to Super Mario before shrinking with the next hit. The remakes (both international and Japanese) have retained the more lenient game mechanic, but the demo title sequence has remained unchanged with every game release ever since. |
| 152 | *** In the ''Videogame/SuperMarioAllStars'' version you clearly see both brothers' in-game sprites ''without'' their now-iconic "white" gloves. This is due to following the original 8-bit design where, like all the other 8-bit games, this was excusably justified due to the early console's palette limitation. Their designs weren't changed for ''All-Stars'' despite the game running on a strong enough engine that there was no technical limitation to force it, as seen in that the other two games in the collection give them their gloves. |
| 153 | * ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigi'' series: |
| 154 | ** Bean collecting. Every game has the player dig up beans from specially marked spots in the ground, either to consume directly or use as currency for a special sub-quest shop. This made perfect sense in the first game, since it was in a kingdom that was bean-themed to the same extreme as the Mushroom Kingdom's mushroom theme, and it worked well in the second as an excuse for a cameo from the first, but as the series has gone on the beans have been further and further removed from the overall theme of things. |
| 155 | ** The first three games featured [[SavePoint Save Blocks]] which were the only points at which the game could be saved. ''[[VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiDreamTeam Dream Team]]'' added in the ability to save anywhere, at any time... but keeps Save Blocks around for some reason. Apparently the developers wanted to clearly mark where you ''[[SuspiciousVideoGameGenerosity should]]'' be saving, like right before a major boss fight. ''[[VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiPaperJam Paper Jam]]'' does away with Save Blocks altogether, usually having Starlow directly warn you when a boss is coming up. |
| 156 | ** In ''[[VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiPartnersInTime Partners in Time]]'', instead of using BP to perform powerful Bros. Attacks, the party collected single-use Bros. Items that served as special attacks. After ''Partners in Time'', the series switched to special attacks that cost SP/BP like in the first game; each one features a brother pulling out an item to perform the attack, even though Bros. Items no longer exist (a few of the Bros. Items were even converted into regular attacks). |
| 157 | ** When Starlow first appeared in ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiBowsersInsideStory'', she was as much an ExpositionFairy as she was in later games, but had some mild plot relevance, showing up at Peach's castle as a representative of the Star Sprites and ultimately getting dragged into the main adventure. She has less of a reason to be around in ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiDreamTeam'', especially given the presence of Prince Dreambert, but she at least gets some character development. By the time of ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiPaperJam'', Starlow is seemingly only around because it would be weird to get rid of her at this point (a fact which she lampshades when she calls herself the "de facto leader" of the group). Notably, she's the only character to appear in said game who doesn't also appear in a main-line Mario platformer. |
| 158 | * ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'': |
| 159 | ** The presence of the ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' characters. Initially, ''Kingdom Hearts'' was marketed on the basis of being a crossover between Creator/{{Disney}} and ''Final Fantasy'', but with each new game, the latter's role gets [[DemotedToExtra smaller and smaller]]. In fact, in ''[[VideoGame/KingdomHeartsBirthBySleep Birth by Sleep]]'', [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII Zack]] was the only character featured from a ''Final Fantasy'' game ([[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII Laguna]] was intended to have a role at the Mirage Arena, only for that to be axed when he was inserted into the ''[[VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy Dissidia 012]]'' roster)... and in ''[[VideoGame/KingdomHearts3DDreamDropDistance Dream Drop Distance]]'', there were '''no''' ''Final Fantasy'' characters at all, replaced by the cast of ''VideoGame/TheWorldEndsWithYou''! ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsIII'' only has Moogles and a few cameos like a giant Cactuar toy. [[WordOfGod According to Tetsuya Nomura]], this was intentional, as he felt that Kingdom Hearts didn't need to lean on Final Fantasy to get noticed any more, and favored focusing on the series' original elements - and was surprised when ''KHIII'' was criticized for barely having any Final Fantasy elements at all. Tellingly, the ''Re:Mind'' DLC for ''KHIII'' has actual characters make an appearance ([[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII Aerith, Cid Highwind, Yuffie]] and [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII Leon]]), albeit in brief scenes, indicating that Kingdom Hearts might start steering back towards using Final Fantasy more prominently. |
| 160 | ** Maleficent, once a BigBad, has lost relevance since [[VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI the first game]]. From ''[[VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII KHII]]'' onward, she appears to do evil... just because. It doesn't help that nearly every appearance of hers involves the OriginalGeneration villains [[HijackedByGanon pulling the rug out]] [[EvilerThanThou from under her]]. The sole exception is ''Birth by Sleep'', which gives some background to her rise to being the primary villain of the original game. However, her role in ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsX'' and the ''extremely'' slow (but consistent) build up of her working on her own mysterious plan in the background means that she might become a much bigger threat in the future. |
| 161 | ** The Disney elements have ''also'' taken ever more of a backseat to the series' own original mythology and plotlines. By this point, the worlds' plots and characterizations are lifted directly from the movies, and the Disney villains are almost never more than {{Miniboss}}es, who understand the metaplot even less than the heroes, and exist only to be manipulated by the real bad guys ([[ItMakesSenseInContext who are all the same person]]). The only Disney character to maintain a consistently major role is WesternAnimation/MickeyMouse. With Donald and Goofy back to being party members and actual reasons getting given for going to the Disney worlds, the Disney elements returned to a level of prominence in ''Kingdom Hearts III'', though to a somewhat lesser degree when compared to the first game. |
| 162 | ** As a side-effect of this, Kairi, the supposed female lead of the series, also became an artifact from ''Kingdom Hearts II'' and onward, since her main role as a Princess of Heart meant squat, since the other Princesses of Heart were all Disney characters and thus the whole lot of them fell OutOfFocus. However, [[spoiler:the end of ''Dream Drop Distance'' doubly reverses this by bringing the Princesses back into play in the metaplot AND finally paying off on the {{Foreshadowing}} of Kairi as a Keyblade wielder from ''KHII''.]] |
| 163 | ** Both the openings of ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsBirthBySleep'' and ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts02BirthBySleepAFragmentaryPassage'' show clips from the secret ending of ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII'' which is odd because the Keyblade Armors of Terra, Aqua and Ventus no longer have capes in the game proper (they were removed due to frame rate issues). |
| 164 | *** Terra's armor bounces back and forth on if it's this trope or not. While his cape didn't appear in ''BBS'' due to the aforementioned issues, it did appear in the HD ''II.5 Remix'' port of the ''[[UpdatedRerelease Final Mix]]'' version as at the very end of the game, where the cape suddenly sprouts from the armor--thus explaining why the Lingering Will in ''KHII Final Mix'' has one and maintaining internal consistency between games. |
| 165 | ** ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsX'': |
| 166 | *** Certain avatar parts carry benefits known as "raid boss perk" or "raid boss omega perk." These are supposed to increase the chance that a raid boss or a more powerful raid boss omega will appear after completing a quest. However, in 2019, at least for the Global version, the game was altered so that raid bosses no longer appear outside of raid boss events, which were made to always be available. As such, these particular perks no longer have any effect whatsoever. If Creator/SquareEnix wanted, they could just change them to do something else, but apparently it isn't a priority. |
| 167 | *** Nova was created as a powerful special attack which can be activated once per quest, with a level that increases each time you max out the Special Attack Bonus (or "Guilt") on a medal. For ages, however, the amount of damage done by other medals, even outdated medals, is so high compared to it that the amount of damage it does against the typical enemy faced is for all intents and purposes ScratchDamage. Despite this, it continues to remain available, sitting above the button which is used to activate the truly powerful Supernova attacks. Furthermore, if the player has auto-Supernovas active, then the regular nova will activate before the final medal on the first turn, essentially just serving as a time-waster. |
| 168 | * [[StuckItems Cursed equipment]] in the ''VideoGame/DragonQuest'' series. In the early games, you had to be careful what equipment you put on. If you equipped something cursed, you'd suffer from ill effects and had to go to a church to remove it. However, later games have descriptions of items available in the menu, and all cursed equipment include not-very-subtle warnings that they're evil. No player will ever accidentally equip something cursed anymore, making their inclusion as traps pointless. Also related is the ability to examine items in the menu. It no longer appears in newer games, but remakes of older games will still include it even though it won't give you any information that isn't already in the item's description. |
| 169 | * The Colossal Coffer in ''VideoGame/DragonQuestBuilders'' was a major AntiFrustrationFeature, essentially being a massive storage space that could be accessed from anywhere on the map. ''VideoGame/DragonQuestBuilders2'' gave the player a greatly expanded inventory from the beginning, so the Coffer is reduced to being a giant decoration. |
| 170 | * Score-keeping and lives (in a game with a drop-in save feature) in ''VideoGame/Wolfenstein3D'' engine titles is an artifact. According to [[Creator/IdSoftware id]], they kept the arcade feel because early '90s gamers wanted an arcade feel. Unfortunately, the later titles using the engine had to keep the score and lives intact, leaving them with a dated element when ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' came out just a year later and removed lives and scores entirely. |
| 171 | * ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'': |
| 172 | ** Link is a HeroicMime because... well, he's always been a heroic mime. This was justifiable with the earlier games which had {{excuse plot}}s, and the developers have defended keeping him that way because he's an EscapistCharacter. However, over time the series has grown more story-driven, and Link's role in the plots have become more defined and personal than SaveThePrincess BecauseDestinySaysSo. He's given closer relationships to other characters, shows more emotion and occasionally reacts in ways the player may not agree with. Despite this, he's been a silent protagonist in every game so far and there's no indication that's ever going to change, because most fans just can't imagine him with a voice (or are ''afraid'' to imagine such, between the [[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaCDIGames CD-i games]] and the [[WesternAnimation/TheLegendOfZelda1989 cartoon]]). ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'' introduced voice acting again and it's miles better than the infamous CD-i games, but Link is still silent and the game does provide an explanation for it. [[spoiler:With Link being Zelda's appointed knight, he chose to stay quiet in order to maintain his image as a professional and also avoiding saying anything that could tarnish his image.]] |
| 173 | ** The games traditionally [[HelloInsertNameHere let you rename Link to whatever the character limit would let you]]. In the beginning, he was a straightforward fantasy hero intended to be a surrogate for the audience. As time went on, Link gained more agency in the mainline games and developed his own personal character traits that push him away from being an audience insert, but the ability to choose his name as if he still were stuck around since that's what the games always did. ''Breath of the Wild'' finally did away with the renaming feature so that the voice acting could refer to Link by name. |
| 174 | ** ''VideoGame/HyruleWarriors'': The Song Stones found on the Grand Travels map become redundant in the ''Definitive Edition''. In ''Legends'', they were a helpful way of earning more Item Cards without having to grind on previous missions for them, but the advent of the Item Card Shop in the Definitive Edition means there's no real reason to use them. |
| 175 | ** The Platform/NintendoSwitch remake of ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaLinksAwakening Link's Awakening]]'' has a few of these. Most notably is the Color Dungeon brought over from the Platform/GameBoyColor ''Deluxe'' version, whose entire purpose of being a {{tech demo|Game}} for the ability to display the game in color was much more impressive twenty years prior, when handheld design before that point had to choose between either displaying in color (the Platform/AtariLynx and Platform/GameGear) [[AwesomeButImpractical or]] having a minimum battery life of more than two hours (the earlier Platform/GameBoy models); on top of this, the dungeon's color theme is mostly abandoned in favor of other visual cues to make the dungeon more accessible to colorblind players. The guardians of the dungeon don't even bother with the ExcuseQuestion of asking you which color robes they're wearing (an apparent security measure to make absolutely sure you weren't somehow running on an original Game Boy) anymore, and are instead repurposed to sell you Magic Powder, which is required to actually beat the dungeon. Also, during the portion where you lead Marin around the island, if you take her to the Trendy Game store, she will still accidentally pick up the owner with the game's crane, even though the revamped controls should make it impossible to move the crane down to him. |
| 176 | ** Tingle's [[AmericansHateTingle abysmal reputation in the West]] was brought about in part by this effect. He's always been a weird and creepy ManChild, but [[FranchiseOriginalSin it was tolerated in his debut]] in ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaMajorasMask Majora's Mask]]'' because ''everything'' in that game [[SurrealHorror was weird and creepy]], so he fit in perfectly. The problem was when [[BreakoutCharacter he started showing up in more games]] like ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOracleGames Oracle of Ages]]'' and especially ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTheWindWaker The Wind Waker]]'', where his brand of weird creepiness didn't fit in anymore even before it was {{flanderiz|ation}}ed to ridiculous proportions - for instance, while he optionally sold you maps at reasonable prices in ''Majora's Mask'', ''The Wind Waker forces'' you to buy maps from him for exorbitant prices at several points of the game, along with other points forcing the story to focus on him instead of anything actually important, such as breaking him out of prison for stealing. |
| 177 | * The pipe-based hacking system in ''VideoGame/BioShock1'' is a holdover [[WhatCouldHaveBeen from when the vending machines had human operators]] on a drip-feed of ADAM, and he'd spot you some goodies for increasing the flow to him. However, considering the vending machines are now purely mechanical, this makes no sense. |
| 178 | ** The vending machines themselves in ''VideoGame/BioShockInfinite'' are a relic of Rapture's obsessively open market. Columbia's overly-controlling government would want to put a check on weapons being sold, given the looming threat of the Vox Populi. Amusingly, despite the presence of these vending machines around every corner, [[GameplayAndStorySegregation a major plot point]] about halfway through the game revolves around the Vox Populi's apparent ''inability'' to get their hands on weapons without the player's help. |
| 179 | ** Taking things a step further, the ability to hack ''[=BioShock=]'''s vending machines in order to make other items available is carried over from ''VideoGame/SystemShock2'', in which the vending machines assemble items on a nano-scale using nanites, the game's currency. Hacking thus allowed items such as guns and ammo to be replicated when the machine was originally only designed for basic vending machine fare. While this is somewhat justified in ''[=BioShock=]'' with the idea that [[spoiler:Frank Fontaine]] keeps some products away from the general public, it does not mesh quite as well with the setting. ''Infinite'' took steps to lessen this, by changing the mechanic into simply messing with the vending machines with the "Possession" vigor, which does nothing more than making them drop some cash. |
| 180 | ** The cameras are another example of this; hacking them to change their targeting parameters makes much more sense in a {{cyberpunk}} setting than a 1960s {{dieselpunk}} world, but their presence was a major enough part of the feel of ''System Shock 2'''s gameplay to keep it as a part of its SpiritualSuccessor. |
| 181 | ** ''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'' argued that the "vigors" in ''Infinite'' are this, as they serve the same function as the plasmids in the previous ''[=BioShock=]'' games, but little in-universe justification is given for their presence aside from a HandWave until ''[[DownloadableContent Burial at Sea]]'' reveals [[spoiler:the technology actually was taken straight from Rapture]]. |
| 182 | *** Of course, in the same manner as the cameras, plasmids themselves were this. Why do stem cells from sea slugs let you see ghosts and shoot ice, fire and lightning from your hands? Because ''System Shock 2'' had psi powers that let you do the same things. |
| 183 | * In ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty4ModernWarfare'', a collectible was added in the form of intelligence laptops, which unlocked cheats for you to use when replaying the game. The various other games since then have kept them or equivalent collectibles relevant in various ways - ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyWorldAtWar World at War]]'' replaced them with "Death Cards", which unlock bonus options for co-op modes which generally made the game harder. ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps Black Ops]]'' lets you actually ''read'' the intelligence after you've collected it. ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyGhosts Ghosts]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyAdvancedWarfare Advanced Warfare]]'' followed suit, the former replacing intel with "Rorke Files" that you can listen to once found which give some background on the antagonist in question, and the latter bringing back intel pickups which give a recorded message from Jonathan Irons when you collect all the pickups in a level. ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsII Black Ops II]]'' added a set of ten challenges to every level that allow you to unlock extra weapons and items for the campaign, with one of the universal challenges for each level being picking up all the intel; ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsIII Black Ops III]]'' similarly replaced them with new collectibles that are unique to the level (e.g. a bottle of wine from the bar of a hover-train, a dud ExplosiveLeash from an area where an enemy faction makes extensive use of them) and go towards the player's singleplayer experience, thus giving more sense for why they're there and a real incentive to pick them up again. In ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyModernWarfare2 Modern Warfare 2]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyModernWarfare3 3]]'', however, the same intel as in ''[=CoD4=]'' is there just to have something to collect, and confers no sort of bonus or unlock for doing so other than achievements. |
| 184 | ** ''Modern Warfare 3'' added the "Hybrid Sight" and "HAMR Scope" attachments, both of which are essentially dual-purpose scopes for respectively assault rifles and submachine guns. The version for assault rifles cannot be attached to a weapon which also has a GrenadeLauncher, because the key to switch zoom modes is the same for switching between the rifle and its launcher. ''Black Ops II'' switched to a combined "Hybrid Optic" for assault rifles and light machine guns, which switches modes by pressing the sprint key while aiming instead, but nevertheless cannot be combined with either a grenade launcher or the new Select Fire attachment (which shares its control with the launcher), simply because the original version couldn't. This in spite of Strike Force missions still allowing the use of grenade launchers and select-fire, despite the fact that the control for using them is used as part of the squad controls. The control for switching optics also makes no distinction between the console versions, where left trigger or L1 is invariably held to aim down the sights, and the PC version, where the right mouse button is set by default to toggle aiming, so unless you set the game to hold the right mouse button to aim, switching modes on the hybrid optic on PC requires pulling out of aiming just to go back in and hold the button for a second to switch before letting go. |
| 185 | ** Similarly, the M14 in [[VideoGame/CallOfDutyZombies Zombies mode]] consistently gets only 8 shots per magazine, rather than the 20 it holds in the other modes of Treyarch's games, because it's using code recycled from its predecessor, ''World at War''[='=]s similar M1 Garand, mated to animations borrowed from ''Modern Warfare 2''[='=]s M14 EBR. |
| 186 | ** Gunsmith in its entirety is something of an artifact in ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyVanguard''. It was introduced in the 2019 ''Modern Warfare'' reboot, where it fit both mechanically (it's an evolution of the attachment systems in use in the series since ''Call of Duty 4'' 12 years prior) and in-universe (real militaries of the modern day do frequently allow or even standardize different attachments for specific mission profiles). It was kept for ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsColdWar Black Ops Cold War]]'', which skirted by primarily because the ''Black Ops'' series has mostly been about the kinds of high-speed low-drag spec ops types that would be using heavily-customized guns even during the Cold War, and with a few exceptions the attachment options still reflected things which existed at the time (optics options simply look more primitive than the ones from the previous game) and/or were at least related to their parent firearm (e.g. the "C58" is based on the CETME rifle, so many of its barrel and stock options are based on more obscure CETME variants or the G3, which was based on it in reality). By ''Vanguard'', however, there was no real precedent for it - customizing weapons for specific purposes in reality almost entirely consisted of sticking scopes onto rifles, assuming one wasn't issued with a separate rifle that had the scope directly attached to it, and personal modifications would typically at best consist of something like carving a word into the stock of one's gun; as a result, many of the attachment options [[AnachronismStew don't fit for the 1940s]], either because they simply didn't exist yet (using stock designs taken from guns that did not exist until after the war, like a Romanian AIMR stock on the Browning Automatic Rifle, two weapons with nothing in common; offering red-dot sights by taking aircraft-mounted reflector sights and arbitrarily scaling them down to fit on small arms - with the result looking more compact and advanced than what was available even in ''[=CoD4=]'', which released 60 years after the war; or converting weapons to calibers that didn't exist during the war, like a 5.7mm conversion for the Thompson) or they reflect tactical doctrine from several decades in the future (such as having both a primary telescopic sight on top of a gun and an unmagnified one canted 45 degrees to the right, the earliest documented cases of which date to The80s; changing animations to grab a new magazine then swap the old one out for it in one quick motion, which was proposed by Jeff Cooper in 1960; or wrapping tape around magazines for easier grip to speed up reloads, which didn't become common until the 21st century). |
| 187 | * ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry1'' had bananas scattered throughout every level because the Kremlings stole Donkey Kong's banana hoard and dropped them as they ran along. All ''Franchise/DonkeyKong'' games after that had bananas just exist for the sole purpose of LawOfOneHundred and [[FollowTheMoney Follow the Bananas]]. Except for ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountryReturns'', where the villains ''do'' actually steal the bananas. |
| 188 | * Stan's jacket in ''VideoGame/MonkeyIsland'' has a [[UnmovingPlaid checkered pattern that always remains stationary]]. This was because of technical restrictions in the first game, however it has since become his signature and remains in all games; the devs even replicated it with great difficulty in ''VideoGame/EscapeFromMonkeyIsland'', the first 3D game in the series, simply because of its association with him. |
| 189 | * The input for Jump Kicks in the original arcade ''VideoGame/{{Double Dragon|1}}'' is different depending on the direction the player is facing. Pressing the kick button while jumping only does jump kicks to the left and in order to do a jump kick to the right, the player must use the punch button instead. This is actually a leftover mechanic from when the game was conceived as a sequel to ''[[VideoGame/KunioKun Renegade]]'', which used direction-based attack buttons. |
| 190 | * ''VideoGame/{{Tekken}}'' has Paul Phoenix, who was once TheRival to icon Kazuya but has now been DemotedToExtra and is little more than a running gag in the story. Still, he appears in every game because he's a popular fighter and people expect him to be there. |
| 191 | * The illustrations on the side of the original ''VideoGame/{{Tempest}}'' cabinet show actual monsters rather than the abstract squiggles that serve as the enemies/targets in the actual game. This was because they were designed and printed at a time when the plan was for them to look like that. By the time the developers threw in the towel on making credible-looking monsters with the game's vector graphics, it was too late to change the art. |
| 192 | * Power in ''Franchise/TouhouProject''. In ''VideoGame/TouhouFuumarokuTheStoryOfEasternWonderland'' getting to and maintaining max power was both reasonably difficult and fairly important. Immediately after that regaining lost power from dying became easy and the drop in damage fairly small besides. Since then ''VideoGame/TouhouFuujinrokuMountainOfFaith'' and ''VideoGame/TouhouChireidenSubterraneanAnimism'' brought it back to relevance by tying it to bombs, but then that went away and now collecting power is back to just being something to do during the first stage. |
| 193 | * In ''VideoGame/KillingFloor'', one of the bonuses the Field Medic perk gets as it levels up is increased capacity for its submachine guns. Initially, the only Medic-specific weapon was the [[GunsOfFiction/SubmachineGuns H&K MP7]], which in reality can use both 20- and 40-round magazines - hence, the in-game weapon uses 20-round mags, and the Field Medic's capacity bonus allows for up to double their weapon's mag capacity. This ends up working in the player's favor for later Medic weapons added through patches, all of which ''start'' with close to their highest real-world capacities and then can double that to absurd levels - players that had fully-leveled the perk by the time the first alternate weapon for it was added were greeted with the ability to somehow stuff 64 bullets into the magazines of their new [=MP5s=]. |
| 194 | ** Weapon bonuses from perks in general, especially in ''VideoGame/KillingFloor2'', have become this. Originally the weapon pool was so small that giving certain perks bonuses to certain weapon types was more like specializing in a specific weapon, but still being able to use other weapons. However, as the weapon pool grew larger, this became less relevant, especially due to the price reductions for perk-specific weapons. Very few weapons could feasibly be used off-perk, most notably weapons that were already absurdly strong and cheap, such as the double-barreled shotgun. While ''Killing Floor 2'' ditched the pricing discounts in favor of pricing weapons entirely based on their tier, making it once again possible for any perk to afford any weapon, the perk-specific bonuses were amped up thanks to the new perk Skill trees, meaning using weapons that your perk doesn't specialize in is at best inefficient, and at worst actively hampering the gameplay experience, as you don't deal enough damage to kill even the weakest Zed types. This was somewhat mitigated by the band-aid Survivalist perk, implemented after Tripwire couldn't find a way to make the 10th "Martial Artist" perk fit into gameplay properly, which gets a generic damage bonus from levelling up, and whose generalist skill tree allows for marginally more flexibility when it comes to weapon loadouts. |
| 195 | ** Some weapons have mounted flashlights to allow you to light the way through the game's selection of dark and cramped maps. For the purpose of adding a challenge and some horror, however, not every weapon has a light attached; players are often forced to choose between using a weaker weapon not suited to taking out the approaching enemies, but which has a light to let you actually aim at them, or using a stronger weapon that will do a better job but forgoing a light and having to let the enemy get closer to ensure a hit. In the initial release of ''Killing Floor 2'' it worked the same way, with only a couple weapons having mounted lights. Eventually, however, the game was modified to mount flashlights on the chests of the various player characters like in ''Franchise/SilentHill'', letting you keep a light active regardless of equipped weapon. Nevertheless, the weapons that already had lights mounted to them never had their models changed to remove the lights, even as players lost the ability or need to use them, or as more and more weapons without attached lights are added to the game. |
| 196 | * Many video games impose a limit on how many save files a single user can have, usually around 3. This goes back to when games came on cartridges, so each game had its own fixed amount of save storage, and limited the number of saves to whatever could fit. However, from MediaNotes/TheFifthGenerationOfConsoleVideoGames onward, most game systems have saved data on media shared between software (such as memory cards or hard drives), and while some games take advantage of this by allowing users to make as many save files as they have room for, others still maintain caps on the number of save files. ''VideoGame/MetalGearSurvive'' infamously gave you only one and made you shell out SV Coins for additional save slots: in other words, you had to [[{{Microtransactions}} pay real money]] to circumvent an imaginary limitation inspired by obsolete technology. |
| 197 | * The name of a game mode in the ''VideoGame/{{Battlefield}}'' series suffers a bit from this. While PC players of modern Battlefield games will know of the game mode Rush, where one team tries to plant explosives on two computer-looking M-COM stations in an area while the other team defends them, they may not understand what the name has to do with a standard bomb planting and defusal mode. The game mode originated in the console-exclusive ''VideoGame/BattlefieldBadCompany'', where it was called "Gold Rush", and the objective was to plant a bomb on an enemy team's metal crate containing gold bullion to break open the casing, befitting the game's primary single-player theme of stealing gold. When ''Bad Company 2'' came to PC as well as consoles while ignoring just about anything regarding the first game's story, it removed all of the gold references and instead substituted a generic "destroy an enemy team's communications" objective, even though in ''Bad Company 2'' the objectives were still the same metal crates from the previous game, just with some electronics added on them. |
| 198 | ** To a lesser extent are some of the [[NostalgiaLevel returning maps]] repeatedly brought over from previous games, mostly due to wildly different time frames and belligerents between games. This is probably most prominent in ''VideoGame/Battlefield2142'', where the fighting is between the European Union and a fictional alliance of Russia and several Asian nations - the maps in question may be fan-favorites, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a ground war between geographical neighbors to randomly pull south into Kuwait (Strike at Karkand) or find a random island out in the middle of the Pacific ocean (Wake Island). |
| 199 | * ''VideoGame/{{Neptunia}}'': The [=CPUs=] being a bunch of {{Lazy Bum}}s. While this does allow the story to satirize gamer culture more easily, which is the point of the franchise, one might think that it's unbecoming of a group of goddesses. Which it is. The [[VideoGame/HyperdimensionNeptunia original game]] ended with [[spoiler: the four deciding they weren't suited to being goddesses and bestowing their power on a single goddess who took their place.]] When they decided to make the game a franchise, they were forced to discard that ending, and [[VideoGame/HyperdimensionNeptuniaRebirth1 the remake]] ended on an entirely different note. ''VideoGame/MegaDimensionNeptuniaVII'' was dedicated to ReimaginingTheArtifact by [[spoiler: having a group of usurpers take the place of the [=CPUs=] and make a mess of things for no real reason other than HanlonsRazor]], recasting the [=CPUs=] as {{Bunny Ears Lawyer}}s so that the audience isn't left wondering why they [[ProtagonistCenteredMorality still have their job]]. |
| 200 | * The ''VideoGame/SoulSeries'': |
| 201 | ** Mitsurugi became this later on. He was one of ''Soul'''s icons and has remained in every game to date. He was most prominent in ''Soul Edge'' but hasn't had any relevancy to the plot whatsoever since ''Soulcalibur'', yet he remains because he's expected to be there. He even survived the roster cut of ''V'', whereas other more plot-relevant characters like his rival Taki got replaced by [[ReplacementScrappy less-liked successors]]. He did get a bigger role in ''VideoGame/SoulcaliburVI'', but that's a reboot set at the time when he was most relevant, so it remains to be seen if he can avert this later on. |
| 202 | ** ''Soulcalibur V'' featured Nightmare continuing to use his signature OneHandedZweihander style. Problem is, this version is a LegacyCharacter when the original was Siegfried, thus his style was based on Siegfried's own. Even when they were separated, he maintained that style without a host because he retained his most recent memories of Siegfried. It makes less sense here, as not only is this a different host, but that host is Raphael, a [[RoyalRapier fencer]]. Logically, Nightmare should be using the rapier style rather than the zweihander. A justification was that Soul Edge ''preferred'' this form, but it doesn't really explain it as Soul Edge is a weapon beyond mortal understanding and unlikely to prefer one shape over another. It also had no problem adapting to Pyrrha's shield and sword style when she claimed it. The ''real'' reason is that Nightmare is the SeriesMascot who was made famous for that style, and thus changing it wouldn't be right. |
| 203 | * ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' has several cases. |
| 204 | ** In the early stages of post-release content, Valve released class-specific updates that awarded players new weapons for reaching milestones by completing a specific amount of achievements that were released for that class. Nowadays, items are gathered instead through the in-game Mann Co. store, random drops, and trading with other players, leaving the process to get items through attaining achievements in the dust. The process to get the original weapons through achievement milestones are still in the game, but it is an example of an obsolete mechanic that will most likely never be used again. |
| 205 | ** Even within the class-specific updates, the first one for the Medic is an artifact for two reasons: one, getting all three of his new weapons originally required completing ''[[HundredPercentCompletion all]]'' of the new achievements, and two, the vast majority of those achievements ranged from [[GuideDangIt counterintuitive]] to [[DidntThinkThisThrough outright counterproductive]], the worst of them requiring [[ComicallyMissingThePoint cooperation with opposing team members and ignoring or even sabotaging your own team]]. Later class-specific updates before the milestone system was abandoned not only lowered the thresholds that unlocked specific weapons to more reasonable levels (the threshold for getting all three of the Engineer's new weapons was still lower than the threshold for just ''two'' of the Medic's), but also had the achievements more in-line with actual teamwork and [[BoringButPractical what the class in question was meant to be doing]] rather than [[AwesomeButImpractical weird things the class could theoretically do under controlled circumstances]]. |
| 206 | ** The map cp_fastlane. Due to the poor layout of the final cap, balanced match-ups would turn into a turtle fest that could never be pushed through when the defending team is forced to hold the line. Nowadays, the map lives down in the depths of never being played anymore, and has been left untouched. |
| 207 | ** Several game-modes are this: |
| 208 | *** The primary example is "Territory Control," which was only ever created for one map, tc_hydro, at the initial release of the game. This game-mode, and obviously the map it was used for, was so hated for its constant stalemates that it has become non-existent in the gaming community, and has never been touched upon again. The reason it is an artifact? The map is still in the game, and serves as a reminder as to how not to design a map, or one based on this game mode. |
| 209 | *** Another example of a game mode that has nowadays become this, is "Arena". Arena was an attempt to implement a mode similar to ''VideoGame/CounterStrike'' to appease said demographic where the players get one life, and must kill off the other team before the three-minute round ends. The problem was that ''Team Fortress'' players just wanted to come back and continue playing (and ''Counter-Strike'' players just kept playing ''Counter-Strike''), and having to wait for two-plus minutes half the time before being able to respawn for the next round was a ''major'' turn off for a lot of players. Over time, people went away from it, and Arena has since become a dead game-mode living down in the depths with the Territory Control mode. As evidence of this, since the Classless Update in August 2009, Valve has added more than 100 new maps to the game and only ''three'' new maps for Arena mode, most ''years'' apart (one in 2015, another for the 2021 Scream Fortress event, and a third in 2023). However, like before, it is still possible to play the maps designed for Arena. You'll just be lucky if you find a server that wants to run them. However, it since got a second life as the base game mode of fan mods like ''VideoGame/PropHunt'', ''Deathrun'' or even ''VS Saxton Hale Mode'', which was [[AscendedFanon made an official game mode]] with the Summer 2023 update. |
| 210 | ** The first all-class melee weapon, the Saxxy, was basically a solid [[AppliedPhlebotinum Australium]] award trophy [[ImprovisedWeapon used as a bludgeon]]. Because it was held by its wide base, the characters gripped it differently from their normal weapons. The all-class melee weapons since then have had more conventional handles (a cartoon mallet, a picket sign, a ham held by the bone, a frying pan), but due to the reuse of the animations, they're all held in a pretty oddly loose grip, often with a pinky extended where it once wrapped around the base. The Saxxy is basically the only thing the grip looks right on, but it hasn't been updated. |
| 211 | ** Some weapons have models inaccurate to their statistics (most often clip size), usually because they had their stats altered at some point while the model wasn't changed. The most famous is the grenade launcher, which appears to hold six shots but has held four since the game left beta. |
| 212 | *** A new player unlocking the [[https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Soda_Popper Soda Popper]] for the first time may wonder why it has a can of [[https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Crit-a-Cola Crit-a-Cola]] attached to the barrels when none of its effects have anything to do with {{Critical Hit}}s. It made sense when the weapon was introduced, as its SuperMode gave the Scout guaranteed mini-crits for a few seconds; not so much after it was reworked in the Smissmas 2013 update to allow him to [[DoubleJump jump repeatedly in midair]] instead, which has been the way it's worked ever since. |
| 213 | ** A lot of promo items have stayed in rotation long after their games vanished from memory. Though they still serve their purpose of making the character look cool or occasionally affecting gameplay in the case of a weapon, it can still be pretty surreal to see, say, a Sniper wearing a ''VideoGame/SamAndMax'' hat and a ''VideoGame/{{Brink}}'' hoodie, and wielding a rifle from ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'' and a ham shank from ''VideoGame/DontStarve''. |
| 214 | ** Early map design at launch was sloppy by modern standards, with several maps having chokepoints and poor balancing that arose from them being either reskins of or designed with the same mentality as the maps of the previous game, which originally released more than a decade before ''[=TF2=]''. One such notable example is the basement area of CTF_2fort; at launch the basement had no health or ammo packs, with only defenders able to heal/resupply with a resupply room near the basement stairs. This resulted in extreme balancing issues, so a short time after launch Valve added a medium health and ammo pack, usable by both defenders and attackers, to the basement area. Despite it now being largely pointless, the basement resupply room is still there, though it is hardly ever used in regular play. |
| 215 | * In ''Mutant League Football'', a number of players are named after famous football players of the late 80s to the early-mid 90s -- for instance, Bones Jackson (after Bo Jackson), and Reggie Fright (Reggie White). The sequel, ''Mutant League Hockey'', featured many of the best players from ''MLF'', but with the game now being about ''hockey'', the ones named after football players are out of place. This also extends to a team name: in ''MLF'', the Deathskin Razors parody the Oakland Raiders, but they keep their name in ''Mutant League Hockey''. |
| 216 | * In ''VideoGame/Rayman2TheGreatEscape'', Rayman must collect the yellow lums that are the fragments of the [[CosmicKeystone Heart of the World]] destroyed by the space pirates when they invaded the Glade of Dream. Since the Heart of the World was restored at the end of ''Rayman 2'', yellow lums no longer have a role in the plot, and yet they still appear as the basic collectible in later games to unlock levels or for 100% completion. |
| 217 | * A few once basic and useful items in ''VideoGame/TheSims'' have become artifacts much like their real life counterparts. In the [[VideoGame/TheSims3 third game]] (released in 2009), walled phones were rendered useless once the game was updated with smart phones to match real life (around 2012 or so) and the newspapers were also no longer necessary once seeking jobs became a basic function of the smart phone. In fact, in ''VideoGame/TheSims4'', even computers have taken a small backseat to tablets. |
| 218 | * ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'': |
| 219 | ** [[Franchise/SuperMarioBros Bowser]], [[Franchise/DonkeyKong Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong]] having realistic animal sounds as voices is an artifact from the N64 era. Early Mario games with voice acting usually had Bowser and Donkey Kong voices clips made with stock animal sounds, so ''Smash 64'' and ''Melee'' [[note]]''Super Smash Bros. Melee'' was one of the earliest Gamecube games ever released[[/note]] would as well. As time went, they would win proper voice acting; series like ''VideoGame/MarioKart'' and ''VideoGame/MarioParty'' would update these characters with their respective voice actors, but for some unknown reason, these characters still retained their realistic animal sounds instead of using their voices from their respective home series. It somewhat still worked in ''Brawl'' since ''Brawl'' tried to invoke a [[RealIsBrown realistic aesthetic]], but from ''3DS/[=WiiU=]'' and onwards this no longer works, and makes them stick out from later additions like Bowser Jr., the Koopalings and Banjo and Kazooie, who retained their usual cartoony voices when they were added, and Bowser himself [[TruerToTheText looking and moving far more like he does in his home series]] (as opposed to his more feral stance and movements in ''Melee'' and ''Brawl''). |
| 220 | *** A similar case, since the first ''VideoGame/{{Super Smash Bros|64}}'', [[VideoGame/YoshisIsland Yoshi]] has the exact same set of StockSoundEffects originating in ''VideoGame/YoshisStory'', even though as early as pre-''Brawl'', there have been games where he has received new voice clips. |
| 221 | ** Ganondorf didn't use a sword in his default moveset, despite in ''Brawl'' being based on his more aged appearance in [[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess the Era of Twilight]], until ''Ultimate'' finally retooled him to do so[[note]]there is, however, a custom move in ''Wii U[=/=]3DS'' where he uses it[[/note]]. Originally, his [[CastingAShadow elemental]] hand-to-hand style was due to him being a last-minute addition to ''Melee'' and thus needing to be a clone character, chosen to be one of Captain Falcon because the two shared the same powerful, streamlined, athletic body type [[CharacterizationMarchesOn at that time]], and also due to the fact that in [[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime the game]] his ''Melee'' incarnation was based upon, he doesn't personally wield any weapon, instead opting for magic blasts (albeit the Ganon form uses two swords instead of its signature trident). After the release of ''Melee'', Ganondorf appeared in a more mature version of his human form in two timelines: in ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTheWindWaker The Wind Waker]]'', he wielded twin katana, and in ''Twilight Princess'', upon which his ''Brawl'' and ''Wii U[=/=]3DS'' appearances are visually based, he used the Sages' Sword, a memento from a failed execution. ''Smash Bros.'' reflects none of this, nor his paralytic orbs of magic from ''Ocarina'', instead retaining his [[MightyGlacier more powerful but laggier and slower version]] of Captain Falcon's moveset, with slightly different animations to reflect his less flashy, less nimble style. However, other characters like Bowser and Pit have received heavy moveset changes between installments to more accurately reflect their games, yet Ganondorf's moveset was changed little between ''Melee'' and ''Brawl'' and only had a few animation revamps between ''Brawl'' and ''Wii U[=/=]3DS'', despite being based on a much older Ganondorf with a vastly different appearance and fighting style from both his first appearance and his ''Smash'' appearance. Due to all this, and the fact that even his reworked moveset is still fairly similar, many suspected that the only reason for keeping Ganondorf a semi-clone of Falcon is Sakurai's [[AuthorAppeal personal preference]]. Fortunately he got to revert to his ''Ocarina of Time'' appearance in Ultimate, and while his moveset never really changed much, the animations are reworked to bring out his sword more often. |
| 222 | ** For that matter, a number of characters who debuted early had mostly made-up movesets. Captain Falcon and Fox, whose games at the time never featured them fighting outside of a cockpit[[note]]Though Fox in the first game was based on his ''VideoGame/StarFox64'' incarnation, who ''could'' fight outside a cockpit, but only in that game's multiplayer mode, and many of his moves in the ''Super Smash Bros.'' series are inspired by the moves of his Arwing[[/note]], suddenly gained [[PlayingWithFire fire-based powers,]] for instance. They maintain these movesets even after later fighters have debuted with nearly ''every'' move being a reference to something in their games, even characters like [[VideoGame/AnimalCrossing Villager]] and VideoGame/DuckHunt Dog. In Fox's case, this also comes after games like ''VideoGame/StarFoxAdventures'' and ''VideoGame/StarFoxAssault'', which feature Fox fighting on the ground and being nothing at all like his ''Smash'' counterpart. In their case, it generally comes from them simply being too well-liked to revamp. [[Franchise/{{Metroid}} Samus]] is a weird case, as her moveset at the time of the first game and ''[[VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosMelee Melee]]'' was reasonably accurate to what she could do in ''VideoGame/SuperMetroid'', her then-most recent solo outing - but then her series came back with several new games between ''Melee'' and ''[[VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosBrawl Brawl]]'' (''VideoGame/MetroidFusion'', ''VideoGame/MetroidZeroMission'', and the ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy''), giving her several new weapons and abilities and the like... none of which was ever reflected in future ''Smash Bros.'' games, barring {{palette swap}}s based on later suit designs. The closest we got was splitting off a version of her in her Zero Suit from ''Zero Mission'' as a new character, who also got an entirely new made-up moveset (most obviously flipping her [[TheParalyzer stun gun]] open to reveal a theretofore-never-hinted-at laser whip mode) rather than reflecting how she played in the Zero Suit portion of ''Zero Mission''. |
| 223 | ** The addition of Echo Fighters in ''Ultimate'' effectively consolidated the more blatant MovesetClone characters, such as Lucina and Dark Pit, as more alternates than solo fighters in their own right. However, some other {{Decomposite Character}}s who had varying attempts at DivergentCharacterEvolution remain in their own slot - most notably, VideoGame/DrMario, who would ''never'' warrant his own slot were he added in ''Ultimate'' (and even him being an Echo would be questionable), [[GrandfatherClause but, being introduced to the series way back]] in ''Melee'', had developed just enough differences in his moveset (largely due to regular Mario changing) by then to not easily fit under the label. |
| 224 | ** The Boxing Ring stage is based on the ''VideoGame/PunchOut'' series, but it has an alternate version that replaces all of the ''Punch-Out'' logos and graphics with generic ''Smash Bros'' graphics. This was so the stage could be used in [[VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosForNintendo3DSAndWiiU the fourth game's]] first official trailer without spoiling Little Mac as a new character, as he wasn't revealed until months later (although the nature of the stage led to a lot of [[IKnewIt correct fan guesses]]). The ''Smash Bros'' version of the stage is therefore completely unnecessary now that the game has been released, but it still returns as an option for ''Ultimate''. |
| 225 | ** When ''Brawl'' introduced Assist Trophies, it made sense due to the conceit that the fighters are trophies brought to life, and you collect trophies based on various characters. In ''Ultimate'', the trophies were replaced with Spirits, complete with a story premise explaining this. Assistant characters, however, are still summoned through trophies for no reason. |
| 226 | ** When a CPU character is set to Level 9, [[AttackAttackAttack they will come at the other players with all they have]]; however, their behavior patterns are reminiscent of the original ''Smash'' on N64. They don't always try to stay on the platform and they don't put much effort into trying to dodge the stage's gimmicks. This wasn't a problem in the original, as most of the gimmicks were easy to dodge, and some stages didn't even ''have'' gimmicks that needed to be dodged (such as Yoshi's Story and Congo Jungle). There were narrow platforms, but there was usually a stage under it, so if they fell off, they wouldn't die. These behavior patterns have been in every game since, with stages that have narrower platforms above nothing and far more dangerous gimmicks, which [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMGY23AleHs allows for the CPUs to be defeated]] [[WinsByDoingAbsolutelyNothing by doing absolutely nothing]]. |
| 227 | ** The logos for the ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' and ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles'' series have become this. |
| 228 | *** When ''Fire Emblem'' debuted in ''Melee'', only Marth was in the original plans, so the logo of the series was his signature sword the Falchion, and even though Roy was added as a late-development clone, prominence to Marth's games was notable by how the scrapped ''Fire Emblem'' stage would be based on his continent Archanea. Over time, more fighters from the series were introduced, some from games where the Falchion isn't featured at all (Ike, Byleth), looks radically different (the ''Awakening'' trio) or is at most minor content (Corrin). |
| 229 | *** When ''Xenoblade Chronicles'' debuted in the fourth title, there was only one game, thus the logo was the Monado, Shulk's sword that plays a pivotal role in the plot. By ''Ultimate'' however, two more games in the series were released, one which doesn't have the Monado at all and the last where it only appears with Shulk as DLC, making Pyra and Mythra's inclusion to the roster turn the logo into this. |
| 230 | ** Three characters from the first game would probably not be included in the roster if ''Super Smash Bros.'' were a more recently released franchise. Jigglypuff was a popular Franchise/{{Pokemon}} back when the series was new, and was a major recurring character in the anime, but has since largely fallen out of prominence within the ''Pokémon'' fandom. [[VideoGame/FZero Captain Falcon's series]] didn't get any games between 2004 and 2023, having largely been overtaken by ''Mario Kart'' as Nintendo's premier racing franchise, and all but his first two games have gone out of print. Ness has it even worse: ''Mother'' hasn't seen a release since the Japan-only ''VideoGame/Mother3'' in 2006[[note]]and even then, Ness himself only appears as a dialogue-free cameo[[/note]], and the last game before that released [[VideoGame/EarthBound1994 in 1994]]. GrandfatherClause is about the only thing keeping them in the series at this point, with all three having been around since the start as the original secret characters (plus Luigi, who has, if anything, ''flourished'' in the years since then). |
| 231 | ** Talking of the ''Pokémon'' anime, one of the running gags of the series is taken straight from there. The Poké Ball item can release a Goldeen as a [[JokeItem dud pick]], where the Goldeen does nothing but flop around helplessly using Splash. In [[Anime/PokemonTheSeries the anime]], this was a joke introduced in the second episode of the series where Misty's Goldeen, being a fish, was completely ineffective out of water. However, given that limitation, Goldeen was never a prominent Pokémon in the anime, appearing in only a handful of episodes and [[PutOnABus vanishing when Misty did]]. Within the games, meanwhile, Goldeen has been similarly lacking in presence since its debut, and it's possibly one of ''the'' least remembered Kanto Pokémon - at best, it's remembered as the Pokémon that evolves into Seaking, which has since become memetic [[MemeticBadass just for being Seaking]]. What's more, the games ''also'' have a fish Pokémon that's iconic in the fanbase for [[JokeCharacter being useless and using Splash]] -- Magikarp -- and neither of those traits are associated with Goldeen, which is fairly ordinary statistically and can't learn Splash. Because of this, many fans who don't remember or never saw the early episodes of the anime are very confused why Goldeen in ''Smash'' seems to be stealing Magikarp's schtick.[[note]]That reason being that Sakurai likes Goldeen's voice better than Magikarp's.[[/note]] |
| 232 | * Creator/McLeodGaming's fangame ''VideoGame/SuperSmashFlash'' and its sequel initially had anime and manga characters such as [[Manga/{{Bleach}} Ichigo]], [[Manga/DragonBallZ Goku]] and Manga/{{Naruto}}, simply due to AuthorAppeal. The decision was made early on in the latter's development to take the game more seriously, and therefore jettison away the anime representation. However, as they had already been implemented by then, the aforementioned 3 (as well as [[Manga/OnePiece Luffy]] later on) were retooled to try and make them fit with the overall ''Smash'' atmosphere. |
| 233 | * The clown job in ''VideoGame/SpaceStation13''. In the early days of the game it was intended as a "punishment" role, humiliating and removing disruptive players while letting everyone else continue enjoying the game. Somewhere along the line it was decided to elevate the job to a regular random job for the sake of [[RuleOfFunny humor]]. The job is comically useless and [[TheScrappy hated by pretty much everyone except regular clown players]] (clowns tend to be notoriously disruptive and annoying, especially in roleplay servers, where they wreck the mood/immersion [[MoodDissonance just by existing]]). So why's it still around? Because the clown has inadvertently become a MascotMook for the game, to the point that art and homages to it almost always include them in some way, so it's virtually unthinkable to ditch them now. Note though that due to the rather wide variety and fractured nature of [=SS13=], this isn't always the case. Some servers have gone ahead and removed the clown completely. |
| 234 | * ''Franchise/ResidentEvil'': |
| 235 | ** ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil1'': |
| 236 | *** Typewriters in this game served to fit the motif and setting of the creepy mansion, as ''everything'' in that building seemed to be an antique, so finding a typewriter from the '20s (especially one using the incredibly common style of the Underwood No. 5) wasn't too surprising, not to mention it gave a reasonable enough excuse to [[SaveGameLimits limit saving]] by requiring an ink ribbon for each save. It made less sense for typewriters to pop up all around the police station, the sewers, the park, [[BreadEggsMilkSquick and the hidden futuristic laboratories]] of Raccoon City in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2'' and ''[[VideoGame/ResidentEvil3Nemesis 3]]'', or the vaguely Spanish village, medieval castle, and Umbrella-esque futuristic laboratory in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'' (which made them even less necessary by segmenting the game into explicit chapters and letting you save every time you finished one), but these weren't abandoned until the more mission-based / episodic nature of ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil5'', which did away with them altogether in favor of autosaving between chapters. ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil7Biohazard'' brought them back [[ReimaginingTheArtifact in spirit]] in the form of cassette recorders which, like the typewriters in the mansion, are an archaic media system that fits the creepy motif of the environment, and of course ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2Remake'' brought them back because fans would have ''revolted'' if the remake didn't have the typewriters. |
| 237 | *** The first game was also loaded with SolveTheSoupCans puzzles, with the justification that the mansion's architect was a very eccentric man fixated with old spy films, so he designed said house full of bizarre traps, hidden switches that open secret rooms, and stuff like that. However, while a puzzle involving pushing a statue into a tile to press a hidden switch that opens a secret door on a library made some sense then, said puzzles made ''far'' less sense in the sequels, which had you traverse police stations, hospitals, military bases or futuristic labs. However, those kind of puzzles became so iconic, they ''had'' to be carried over. ''Resident Evil 2'' had to explain that the police station was housed in a building that was originally an art museum (to explain its rather strange layout) and that Chief Irons collects weird artifacts [[spoiler:and is also in Umbrella's pocket, intentionally scattering important gear and items as far as humanly possible to make survival difficult]] (to explain all the weird-ass puzzles). |
| 238 | *** The game had a separate inventory slot for a "personal item", with Chris being able to put the lighter in that slot and Jill receiving a lockpick. ''Resident Evil 2'' followed on by giving the same respective items to Leon and Claire, and promptly demonstrated that they were artifacts not only by having the characters simply start with the items in their personal slots (raising the question of why a college student visiting from out of town has a lockpicking kit) but also by having, respectively, only two situations where a lighter is necessary and three doors you can open with a lockpick. Later games expanded the concept of personal items into things other than lighters for guys and lockpicks for girls, up to and including one character's personal item being a stronger handgun with a unique ammo type in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvilOutbreak'', and when ''Resident Evil 4'' finally did away with the concept entirely (or reimagined it, with the knife that doesn't take up inventory space and can be [[QuickMelee brought up for use with one button]]), it had to imply several times that Leon was a smoker who had quit prior to ''[=RE2=]'' to justify why he even had a lighter on him back then. |
| 239 | *** The name of the franchise itself in the West qualifies; "Biohazard" was too generic to properly trademark, so they went with a name that fit the setting of the game, that being a residence filled with danger. This, as with the typewriters, quickly stopped making sense with later games set in a variety of locales - ''[=RE3=]'' alone has you traverse a police station, a hospital, a clock tower, and several other industrial buildings with all the side-streets in between. As per RevisitingTheRoots, and also much like with the typewriters, ''Resident Evil 7'' takes place primarily in a residence again, and even [[TranslationNod points out the title discrepancy]] by using one region's main title as its subtitle in the other (e.g. its full title in Japan is ''Biohazard 7: Resident Evil''). |
| 240 | ** The gigantic mutated SewerGator in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2'' may have fit the tone of the original (though not without being something of a BigLippedAlligatorMoment, pun notwithstanding), but when the darker and more grounded ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2Remake'' came along it no longer made ''any'' sense whatsoever and yet there it was. The developers actually spoke about it in an interview how they struggled immensely to make the thing fit in the remake and even took extra steps to properly foreshadow it, explaining how the only reason they even bothered was it was such a memorable moment in the original and knew not including it would have been a disservice to fans. |
| 241 | * ''VideoGame/SaintsRowIV'', as part of a series that started as a ''GTA'' knockoff, features a pretty extensive system of driveable vehicles, just as much as the prior games. The problem? ''IV'''s biggest new mechanic is superpowers, similar to ''VideoGame/{{Crackdown}}'', and those don't play well with driveable vehicles. Put a couple points into SuperSpeed and [[InASingleBound jumping]], and you're faster and more mobile than literally every vehicle in the game. There are multiple missions that force you to use vehicles (which can usually be completed by picking them up and carrying them) and/or take away your powers, however, and accessing vehicles has also been made easier, by simply letting you scan whatever you're driving then call a number to teleport it to you for free, rather than having to physically store it in a garage then take it back out or call a guy to deliver it to you. It's probably not a coincidence that it's the first game in the series to let you listen to its radio while you're not driving, since otherwise you'd almost never hear it. |
| 242 | * Video games for [=PlayStation=] systems still list support for [=DualShock=] controllers as a special feature. This made sense back in the time of the original Platform/PlayStation, because the [=DualShock=] was a special enhanced controller for that system that came out just shy of three years into the system's life, so not all games supported it. Starting with the Platform/PlayStation2, however, the [=DualShock=], or controllers that look and function almost identically to it like the early Platform/PlayStation3's Sixaxis, has been the standard controller for all [=PlayStation=] consoles, making it pointless for games to point out that they specifically support it on the box. |
| 243 | ** Finally un-artifacted for Platform/PlayStation4 as of 2016, which can have games with a mix of input methods due to [=PlayStation VR=] support. Some games such as ''VideoGame/IronManVR'' outright do not support the [=DualShock 4=] and therefore that indicator is not on the back of the box. |
| 244 | ** Related to this was the third Analog button in the center of the [=DualShock=] and [=DualShock 2=]. On its predecessor, the Dual Analog Controller, this served a valid purpose, since it had ''three'' modes: Digital, which disabled the analog sticks, represented by the light in the center being off; Analog, which let the sticks be used, represented by the light being red; and Analog Flightstick, a mode which emulated the [=PlayStation=] Analog Joystick peripheral, represented by the light being green. The [=DualShock=], released about half a year later, removed the third mode in favor of making the button a simple on-off switch for the analog sticks, since it was clear even after only a couple months that the lack of games which even ''supported'' the Analog Joystick made a mode to emulate it superfluous, and in turn made the analog button itself mostly pointless in practice for [=PS1=] games and completely pointless for [=PS2=] ones: analog mode turns itself on on startup with the original hardware, which is what the player would want if the game supports analog controls and isn't harming anything if the game doesn't because analog mode doesn't arbitrarily turn off the D-pad. If anything, it only served to highlight its own weirdness later on, as [=PlayStation=] Classic releases on the [=PS3=] onwards and emulating the [=PS1=] both require the player to manually go into the menu or press a function key to turn on analog mode for no reason whatsoever. |
| 245 | * ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'': |
| 246 | ** The Crystals were very important in the Creator/HironobuSakaguchi-directed games. They were part of the founding myth of the series in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasy'', were highly important in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII'', ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIV'' and ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyV'', and had a less important but still notable role in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyII''. One of the series' main {{Leitmotif}}s is even called "The Crystal Theme". When Creator/YoshinoriKitase took over directing and established a new DarkerAndEdgier tone, the Crystals got the boot, with ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'', ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' and ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'' all involving Crystal-like objects of power (Magicite, Materia, and Spheres), and ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII'' not including any crystal-like objects whatsoever. Crystals do appear in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'', but the intent was that it was RevisitingTheRoots, and not that including crystals was really relevant to the series as it had now become. An attempt was made to rehabilitate the crystals for the series's new edgy tone in the ''Franchise/FabulaNovaCrystallisFinalFantasy'' arc, and is semi-successful, although the TroubledProduction kind of garbled any real coherent vision for it. |
| 247 | ** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'' letting you [[HelloInsertNameHere rename the protagonist]] was probably the last holdover of the classic, pre-voice acting era where the player could choose to rename the entire party. Since voice acting was introduced, the ability to rename all of the party members was removed except for Tidus, who could still be renamed. This resulted in the writing having to dodge saying his name, resulting in very awkward dialogue where he'd just be called "You" or similar informalities even in scenes where it would absolutely be called for to address him by name, while the subtitles still used it correctly. This was the last time that players would get to choose any of the cast's names barring the two MMO installments, which worked around by it by giving your character [[TryToFitThatOnABusinessCard a laundry-list of titles and nicknames]] they're referred to by to keep the word flow more natural. |
| 248 | ** In a meta example, ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'' was made to work in conjunction with [[https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/PlayOnline PlayOnline]], an online hub that supported other online-capable Square games, such as ''Front Mission Online'', ''VideoGame/DirgeOfCerberus'' (which had online multiplayer [[NoExportForYou in the Japanese version]]), and an online version of Tetra Master from ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'', in addition to chat rooms and other social media functions. As of 2013, ''FFXI'' is the only game that still uses [=PlayOnline=]. With most of its other functions going unused, [=PlayOnline=] has now been relegated to little more than a glorified launcher for ''FFXI''. |
| 249 | ** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' has a ''lot'' of gameplay elements which were highly used in the old versions of the game and have been either made less important or ignored entirely: |
| 250 | *** Elemental resistances played a big role in 1.0 as well as the ElementalRockPaperScissors, but they were heavily downplayed in later versions; elemental resistances are mainly used as mechanics for specific boss fights and the elemental weaknesses were completely removed so that casters wouldn't be screwed in certain fights. Elemental resistance potions and materia still existed, but no one ever used them before patch 4.2 removed elemental resistances entirely. |
| 251 | *** Certain stats were redone or removed entirely by the ''Stormblood'' update. Parry was a main stat for Paladins, though it could also be used by anyone. The parry stat was seen as useless for Paladins due to the block stat on shields making parry redundant. Parry was eventually removed as a stat, but all jobs can still parry attacks naturally with a random chance. |
| 252 | *** The [[JobSystem system of Classes advancing into Jobs]] by way of Soul Crystals once they reach level 30 has become this, with producer Naoki Yoshida going on record stating that he ''hates'' the system for being, even at its least disruptive, a completely unnecessary stepping stone to leveling the starting classes, which allows you to play as a class or its associated Job and then gives no incentives whatsoever to continue playing as the class. This is probably best exemplified by the fact that of all the classes added post-2.0 release, only the first one, Rogue, doesn't ''start'' as a full Job. The initial ''Stormblood'' update removed the secondary requirement of getting ''another'' unrelated class up to level 15 before you could advance the level 30 one to a full Job, but the system is otherwise still in place, the only reason being that removing it and having characters start as their selected Job would require massive changes to the class/job stories (since every job advancement involves learning a more specialized form of the class, e.g. moving onto a new style of fist-fighting in advancing from Pugilist to Monk) and the leveling system itself. |
| 253 | *** On that subject was the initial addition of role actions. Replacing the cross-class skills of ''ARR'' and ''Heavensward'', role actions are a "universal" set of skills learned by every class in a given role (e.g. every Tank gets [[IShallTauntYou Provoke]] at level 15) that, once unlocked, can be used at any time, even when the player is level-synced below the point where they initially learned it (e.g. a Healer learns Rescue at level 48, then can go back and use it in dungeons that bring them down to level 18). When they were first added, as the last desperate attempt to give ''some'' incentive to playing a class over its job, a class could have every role action active at once, while a job was arbitrarily restricted to just two. It took just that one patch cycle for everyone to realize it was pointlessly complicated and did nothing to endear classes over their jobs (not having all your role actions is far easier to deal with than not having all your upgraded weaponskills)), and with ''Shadowbringers'' the job restrictions on role actions were removed, making them another set of skills you learn as you level up a class that are differentiated only by the fact you can use always them when level-synced. |
| 254 | *** Attribute points in ''A Realm Reborn'' through to the end of ''Heavensward'' were a holdover from 1.0, where advancing to a level past 10 would give you a single attribute point to increase one of your attributes - a bonus which was ultimately irrelevant, not just because your gear gives greater bonuses than your inherent attributes, but also because, barring Vitality determining your total health, what the classes are primarily focused on doing [[OneStatToRuleThemAll only ever works off of one stat]] - e.g. a Black Mage's magic attacks run entirely off of their Intelligence, and so they have absolutely no use for Strength (damage dealt with most physical melee attacks) - and so putting the bonus point into any stat other than that one would be a waste of that point. The Summoner and Scholar jobs had it even worse due to sharing a base in the Arcanist class (another instance of this trope, as it's the only class to have two different associated jobs; the devs have gone on record that working with that is a technical nightmare and they're not doing it again), meaning one would either have to split the points between the Intelligence (offensive magic for Summoner) and Mind (healing magic for Scholar) stats, [[MasterOfNone giving them less of a bonus overall]], or put most of the points into one stat and [[CripplingOverspecialization cripple themselves from adequately performing the other role]]. As of 4.0 with the release of ''Stormblood'', assignable attribute points were removed from the game entirely, the game instead simply giving you bonuses with each level to the stats your class will actually use (including letting Summoner and Scholar have different stat distributions). |
| 255 | *** A similar case comes with stats for crafters, as Disciples of the Hand (crafter classes that actually make things, as opposed to Disciples of the Land which gather the crafting materials) used to work off of one primary stat the same way combat classes do. You can still see hints of the old system, such as the fact that Armorer will gain noticeably more Strength with level-ups than other crafter classes like Weaver because that's the stat they used to work from, but in practice it's totally pointless now since your abilities as a crafter are entirely based around the stats of your crafting gear. |
| 256 | *** One-handed staves and wands used alongside a shield for Conjurer/White Mage and Thaumaturge/Black Mage. They were common in the 1.0 days, but by 2.0 and onward they're little more than a curiosity that only exist for low- to mid-level Conjurers and Thaumaturges; by the time you have either of the classes leveled to the point you can advance to the Job versions, you're almost entirely stuck with the larger and better two-handed staves and wands (and, unless you're going out of your way to collect them, you probably don't have any better shields for those classes than a basic wooden one at level 10 anyway), meaning there are no more shields for you to collect as that class - outside of shields from level-50 Primal trials, you don't even ''get'' any shields that can be used by any class other than Gladiator/Paladin after you've finished the 2.0 content. |
| 257 | *** Similarly but in the opposite direction, there are some pieces of gear for the body or legs that restrict your ability to wear gear for the head or feet while they're equipped, such as long cowls with hoods or heavy armor sets with helmets built in. While their stats compensate for this, such that wearing an outfit which restricts a gear slot will give similar stats to a comparable set with two separate pieces, it's still not optimal either for gameplay purposes (since you can't switch over without losing some potential until you have replacement gear for both slots) or for glamouring (since you'll appear to be wearing nothing in the slot that's restricted), and so by the time you reach the expansions multi-slot gear is almost entirely restricted to certain glamour pieces like a suit of armor mirroring that of optional superboss Odin or a chicken suit. |
| 258 | *** The 2.0 storyline ends with the back-to-back Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, a pair of weird dungeon/trial hybrids that play primarily like dungeons but involve eight-player parties and are much longer than any other dungeon in the game, the Praetorium in particular for its sequential final boss encounters against Nero tol Scaeva, Gaius van Baelsar, Gaius in the Ultima Weapon, Gaius in the Ultima Weapon after it's unleashed its [[FantasticNuke eponymous spell]] and destroyed the Praetorium, and then a Lahabrea-possessed [[spoiler:Thancred]], every one of which is punctuated with a lengthy cutscene that after 4.0 couldn't be skipped. The finales for the later expansions would separate the dungeon and trial portions, having a regular (although longer than normal) 4-player dungeon and then a distinct 8-player trial against the BigBad. The weirdness is even more noticeable because, as of the release of Stormblood, the game actively highlights it with the Main Scenario option in the duty roulette, which is dedicated to sending people to Castrum Meridianum or The Praetorium, and making it (and the now-unskippable cutscenes of the two) more attractive by making that roulette option the simplest and quickest way to grind out a lot of Allagan tomestones for endgame gear before you reach the end of ''Heavensward'' and start unlocking simpler ways to grind for them. Patch 6.1 would finally adjust things, turning Castrum and the Praetorium into more standard 4-player dungeons, with the fights against the Ultima Weapon and Lahabrea separated into respectively a separate 4-player trial and a solo duty, and massively cutting down on the time investment by cutting out extraneous objectives and all but at most two of the cutscenes, though the weirdness of a duty roulette dedicated to sending players to them still remains. |
| 259 | *** The new jobs added with ''Stormblood'', Red Mage and Samurai, only need you to reach level 50 before you can unlock them and can in fact be used for the final stretch of 2.0 content if you're fast enough in getting them, as part of an effort to respond to complaints about how ''Heavensward''[='=]s new jobs (Astrologian, Machinist and Dark Knight) needed you to complete all of the 2.x content (the original game and then a set of post-release quests that stretch almost as long) and reach the expansion itself before they could be unlocked. The problem here is that while the quests don't technically require you to be at the expansions to unlock them, the way they're designed means you most definitely ''do'' need to be to have the gear to stand a chance. Whereas their level 50 quests are glorified tutorials and almost impossible to fail, even by the level 52 quests, if you're still using the starting equipment for those jobs - stuff which is already good enough that even the absolute best gear bought with tomestones at that point is only ''barely'' an improvement - you'll suddenly find yourself pitted against people who paste you in four hits. |
| 260 | *** Zig-zagged with the questlines added after the initial release of any given expansion. Since the story for the initial release and any given expansion requires you to reach its level cap (e.g. 2.0 questline ends at the original level 50 cap, 3.0 at ''Heavensward''[='=]s level 60 cap, etc.), the string of story quests added in patches between expansions do not grant you a whole lot of experience (at best, with the main story, you'll get experience that would have been appropriate for half of what the level cap was at the time, and at worst, with stuff like the Hildibrand quest line, you only get gil), which makes it particularly difficult to level up just from playing the main story at this point. However, as far as weapon rewards from quests go, this is averted, as quests have been updated to add weapons from new classes when appropriate so players switching over to them aren't left out - e.g. Rogue's knives were added to the 2.0 through 2.3 quests after their introduction in 2.4, the aforementioned Red Mage and Samurai can get weapons from 2.1 quests onward, etc. |
| 261 | *** Riding maps, at least before 5.3, were incredibly useful for the areas in ''ARR'', since they increase your mounts' movement speed, allowing for easier and quicker navigation when doing things in those areas, but which were very difficult to acquire (either 250 Allied Seals, when you can only get 60 per day from regular mark bills, or 10 Irregular Tomestones whenever a Moogle Treasure Trove event is running before a major patch). They became significantly less so in the expansions, which introduced the ability to fly once you attune to all the aether currents in an area, which is easier to do than grinding out the requisite seals to purchase a riding map (simply seek out aether currents and complete sidequests and the story in that area up to the point where the game sends you to the next zone) and allows for even faster movement, both in pure speed and in the ability to surmount obstacles by just flying over them. ''Shadowbringers'' even ended up removing the regular mount-speed increases from story progression, because learning to fly in the area in question was never far behind that point. Despite this, the expansions still include riding maps for their new areas, with only minor attempts to make them worth the cost (mostly by way of having a few areas which you gain access to early on but can't learn to fly in until near the end of their respective stories, or in one case a zone that's simply so ''gigantic'' that it's a good investment). Patch 5.3 backported the ability to fly into the ''ARR'' areas, making even their riding maps redundant, even moreso than later ones since grinding out Allied Seals is even slower than the later Centurio Seals and Sacks of Nuts (due to only having one stack of mark bills for ''ARR'' hunts, and two of the five marks require waiting for specific [=FATEs=] so you might not even get them on a given day). |
| 262 | *** Guildleves are small, instanced quests that were, in the original version of the game, intended to be the primary way to gain experience between quests and dungeons that required you to be at a specific level. They remained with the launch of ''A Realm Reborn'', but have gradually dropped off in usefulness as patches have balanced how much experience players get from just doing quests or going through dungeons. By the time one reaches the ''Heavensward'' content, they're barely worth the time and effort, and even the increased reward with large-scale temple leves aren't high enough to justify the cost of ten leves to start one of them. By ''Stormblood'' there aren't even leves of any variety for the combat classes anymore, with post-level 60 leves only existing for crafters and gatherers, where they remain much more relevant by granting much more experience to the crafters and gatherers (you're all but guaranteed to gain a full level from just one crafting or gathering leve, especially if it lets you turn in multiples of the requested item, while battle leves are barely a fraction of the experience needed to level a combat class). |
| 263 | *** Belts were an armor piece that, unlike other armor pieces, do not appear on your character: another holdover from 1.0, where they were actually visible on your character model, but were turned into InformedEquipment with 2.0 because the newer team had trouble getting them to look right without heavily clipping into a lot of different armor options. As of the 6.0 update and the launch of ''Endwalker'', they were removed entirely as part of another mechanics rebalance. |
| 264 | *** The armoire is a piece of furniture in the player's inn room that allows them to store pieces of gear they no longer need, which has almost entirely been superseded by the glamour dresser, which does everything it does better. The glamour dresser lets you store basically anything, with a limit that's so high you have to be actively trying to fill it completely (initially stored 200 pieces of gear, that limit was doubled for patch 5.0 to 400 and then again with 6.2 to 800), and though it costs a glamour prism to store an item, once it's in there you can freely glamour its appearance over any compatible piece of gear you're wearing, whether through the dresser directly or by putting it in a glamour plate to quickly change outfits anywhere the game counts as a sanctuary. The armoire meanwhile, though it has no limit on the number of items you can put in it and no costs to store an item, has such arbitrary restrictions on what it ''can'' store that it has no possible way to compete: all it can store is artifact gear (''specifically'' non-augmented artifact gear from ''ARR'', not from the expansions), event glamours, and gear unlocked through Veteran Rewards, achievements, preordering an expansion or buying specific real-world merchandise. Patch 6.4 finally gave it ''some'' use by letting you glamour items stored in it over a compatible item you're wearing, but since this still requires a glamour prism to do so and you can ''only'' do so in an inn room, without the ability to use them in glamour plates, it still falls short of the glamour dresser in just about every way. |
| 265 | *** In another meta example like [=PlayOnline=] for ''XI'', many websites list minimum/recommended system requirements for the PC version of ''XIV'' that are much higher than they actually are, because they're actually the requirements for the 1.0 launch and patch cycle, which infamously had terrible optimization and [[TechDemoGame an obsession with graphical fidelity]] (such that, most infamously, a potted plant had the same number of polygons as a player character's model). The ''A Realm Reborn'' relaunch would drastically scale back the requirements to make the game more accessible to people who couldn't run it before and easier on the hardware for people who could (not to mention making console ports more feasible; a port to [=PS3=] was planned from the beginning but never happened until early 2014), but several third-party websites haven't updated the listed requirements for it since. |
| 266 | ** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXV'' ends with the reveal that Luna is the woman in the game's logo, showing [[spoiler:Noctis flashing into place alongside her]]. This is pretty baffling, as [[AdvertisedExtra Luna's really not a particularly major character]] (she appears for about a half hour in cutscenes [[spoiler:and she's dead in some of them]]), and [[StrangledByTheRedString her romance with Noctis is reserved to a few short scenes that don't exactly sell them as a love for the ages]]. Compare that to ''VIII'', where Rinoa and Squall embracing is the logo, but their love story is the focus of a good chunk of the game, so it makes sense. But when the game started life as ''Versus XIII'' and part of the Franchise/FabulaNovaCrystallisFinalFantasy series, Amano and Tabata stated the woman would be a goddess called "Goddess of the Dawn" and important to the plot, though [[CommonKnowledge many still believe]] that she is Etro, the Goddess of Death and the deity the Lucians would worship. Since the series was rewritten and divorced from the ''FNC'' franchise so the deities like Etro are gone, Luna was used as a substitute for the removed goddess on the logo. |
| 267 | ** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIIRemake'': Despite Cloud starting the trend for [[AnimeHair spiky-haired]] JRPG protagonists and subsequent games moving away from the trope to more realistic hairstyles (look at Noctis from ''FFXV'', Joker from ''VideoGame/{{Persona 5}}'', or Yuri from ''Tales of Vesperia''), Cloud in the new game retains his bizarre gravity-defying locks because they are so iconic to his character. |
| 268 | ** For English ''Final Fantasy'' games, calling the DragonKnight class "Dragoons" - as noted under NonIndicativeName, ''Final Fantasy'' dragoons have almost nothing in common with historical dragoons (wearing heavy armor is just about the only similarity the two have). The name was originally chosen because it was evocative of dragons when ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIV'' had to deal with CharacterNameLimits. However, the class and its abilities have become so iconic that the series keeps using the name "Dragoons" for them even in later releases and remakes where there is enough room to translate "Dragon Knight" (the Japanese name for the class) properly. |
| 269 | * ''VideoGame/GranblueFantasy'' has an entire character class that is this: [[ComMons the lowest rarity of characters, R.]] In the early days, they were still mostly outclassed by the elusive [=SSRs=], but had niches and were decent for early-mid game teams, even competing with some [=SRs=]. Back then, they saw use in f2p teams, as [=SSRs=] weren't nearly as easy to pull. Cygames stopped adding new Rs to the summon pool after 2016 and the only new Rs have been gimmick or event characters since. Additionally, the first pull after the tutorial is guaranteed to give one of six fairly decent [=SSRs=], who can easily carry you through the early game where an R might at least be relevant. Even f2p players often pull the entire cast of Rs in a few months, since they're so far outnumbered now. All that is to say nothing of how generous the modern game is with with its free pulls. |
| 270 | ** The most infamous example of this is Richard. Poor, poor Richard. He was one of the stars of the very first ingame event, Festival of Falling Flame. His stats are a joke, and his skills are based on gambling, so they rely on RNG and was one of the few characters who can outright buff ''the enemy''. He has the honor of his own 3.0 tier placing on the wiki, the lowest possible. The most blatant artifact of all was that his old skill had a damage bonus against "Divine Birds." This had practically zero use outside of his event where the boss was a Phoenix, and was eventually removed. Oh, and he wasn't the event freebie - he's a Premium Draw. |
| 271 | * A lot of things in ''VideoGame/HarvestMoonBackToNature'' and its related games are artifacts from ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon64'' (which it began as a straight port of): |
| 272 | ** Ann has a "rural" look with her overalls and sneakers. This is because she was originally a {{tomboy}}ish farmer's daughter, not an innkeeper's daughter. |
| 273 | ** Ann, Gray, and Rick all have red hair. In ''64'' Ann and Gray are siblings, and Rick is their cousin; they all get their red hair from their grandmother Ann of [[VideoGame/HarvestMoon1 the first game]]. In ''BTN'', Rick is siblings with Popuri and the son of Lillia (two ''pink'' haired characters, though his father is a redhead), while Ann and Gray have no relationship to either each other or Rick. |
| 274 | ** Elli wears an apron, despite being a nurse, because she was a baker in ''64''. |
| 275 | ** HardDrinkingPartyGirl Karen was originally the daughter of ''Gotz'' and Sasha, not Jeff and Sasha. Karen's parents lived on a vineyard that they inherited from Eve of the first game. Karen also worked at the local bar at night. Karen in ''64'' was more depressed and angry, making her more of an [[TheAlcoholic alcoholic]] character, but ''FOMT'' removed that. She still keeps her love of wine as a character quirk nevertheless. |
| 276 | ** Cousins Cliff and Karen in ''64'' received their blonde highlights from Eve of the original SNES game, who was their grandmother. This isn't referenced in future games. |
| 277 | ** Popuri, Basil, and Lillia are a family of chicken farmers. Their FloralThemeNaming made more sense in ''64'' when they owned the local ''flower shop'' instead. |
| 278 | ** Gray's look isn't exactly odd for a blacksmith's apprentice, but it makes more sense for a farmer, which he was in ''64''. |
| 279 | * The adult flash game ''Trials in Tainted Space'' has this with its very name. Originally, it was intended to be similar in plot to the author's previous game, ''Corruption of Champions'' InSpace, but the corruption idea was dropped early in the game's development in favor of making the game about space exploration. The name was retained only because [[FunWithAcronyms the creator couldn't think of a better acronym]]. |
| 280 | * ''VideoGame/MegaMan'': |
| 281 | ** In many games and spinoffs, especially the later ''VideoGame/MegaManX'' games, this happened to [[PowerCopying acquiring new weapons from bosses]]. In the early classic series, it made a lot of sense, because the Mega Buster was a pretty piddly weapon and it was really all you had with its only boon being [[RangedEmergencyWeapon infinite ammo]], so anything else was much appreciated. But when the charge shot was added, the ''X'' series introduced armor upgrades, and the overall toolbox became a lot bigger, the boss weapons gradually became a lot less important, and not really useful for much besides [[SituationalSword exploiting weaknesses]] or the occasional [[NotCompletelyUseless random utility]] in comparison to the BoringButPractical buster. But, of course, it would be hard to justify a ''Mega Man'' game without this feature. Needless to say, this seesaws a fair bit, depending on the game and how useful the boss weapons are. |
| 282 | ** Many games had some issues with the transition from arcades to home consoles rendering ScoringPoints largely irrelevant, and the original ''VideoGame/MegaMan1'' is a prime example. There was absolutely no purpose to the point-scoring function: the points serve no purpose ingame, the game is rather difficult to begin with, so beating the game is a more significant challenge, losing all your lives resets your score, so you'll probably get reset to 0 anyway, and most pointedly, ''Mega Man'' has both infinitely RespawningEnemies and no time limit. If you cared that much about points, you could get the same result by just farming Helis for an hour. The only reason it has a scoring system is because in those days, games had to have scores. Every game since has dropped the idea. |
| 283 | ** In the older games, enemies would respawn when the player moved in a fashion that put their spawn point offscreen. This was due to hardware limitations causing the game to reload its spawn points. Every game since then has kept the feature, despite them being made on far more advanced hardware that could easily track whether the player has killed an enemy. This does have a minor practical purpose (it gives the player the ability to farm them for energy), but it mostly just persists due to having been a part of the games for so long. |
| 284 | ** This is also the case in some games with a limit on how many projectiles the player can fire before having to wait for them to hit something or move offscreen before they can fire again; this was a legitimate limit set by what the hardware could handle in the NES days, but has no reason to continue existing in more modern games on much more advanced hardware. Some even play around with this, like ''VideoGame/MegaMan8'' that allows you to buy an upgrade to shoot five at a time (essentially enough to fire non-stop, unless you use rapid-fire), and ''VideoGame/MegaManZero'' games only letting you have three shots from the Buster on-screen at a time, but with different per-game upgrades (simply killing enough enemies with it in the first game, unlocking the Buster-focused X Form in the second, etc) that let you shoot four at a time. |
| 285 | * The ''VideoGame/{{Homefront}}'' games were originally intended to use the People's Republic of China as the antagonist, but changed it to the DPRK due to fears of upsetting the Chinese government. Needless to say, a lot of ''Homefront'' material certainly seems like it was originally intended to have the massively-populated and economically-booming powerhouse of China rather than the notoriously backward and ramshackle North Korea posing an invasion- and occupation-level threat to the United States. Both games ended up having to construct rather elaborate AlternateHistory scenarios where [[AlternateHistoryWank several improbable twists of fate]] effectively turn North Korea into a SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute of China. |
| 286 | * ''Franchise/FateSeries'': |
| 287 | ** When the series was in its infancy, it was established that TheBerserker class's Mad Enhancement also made its user inarticulate, mindlessly violent, and unable to talk beyond grunting and growling. Understandably, past ''VisualNovel/FateStayNight'', this turned out to be rather inconvenient for characterization when at least one member of your cast would inevitably be mute and mindless. This was downplayed to Berserkers indeed being able to talk and show distinct personalities, typically by using their strong will to power through the Mad Enhancement, by the Mad Enhancement manifesting in a different fashion such as obsessive love or ChronicHeroSyndrome, or by the Mad Enhancement itself having a low rank (enough just to make them violent and impulsive). Nonetheless, earlier Berserkers like Heracles, Lancelot, and Lu Bu who were established as mute tend to still be written as such, even though they're now the exception rather than the rule. |
| 288 | ** Sasaki Kojiro is stated to be a fake, who was only allowed to become an Assassin by virtue of Medea having screwed with the system, and therefore also one of the weakest Servants around (more of a human with some magical enhancements and moderate CharlesAtlasSuperpower). At the time, this was because it was canon that only members of an actual historical assassin order could be Assassins. Understandably, this was a bit limiting, so later installments tend to treat the qualification for being an Assassin as simply "is sneaky and killed someone", with only a handful since meeting the original benchmark. But Kojiro is still regarded as a relative weakling (he's a one-star in ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'', for instance, one out of only three in the Assassin class and of eleven in total), even though there now isn't much of a reason for him to be one. Ostensibly, this is because the historical record on Kojiro is vague enough that he was most likely fictional, but this is a bit of an odd place to draw the line when ''Fate'' normally takes the AllMythsAreTrue approach with Servants--for comparison, fellow canonical Assassins have included [[Literature/TheStrangeCaseOfDrJekyllAndMrHyde Doctor Jekyll]] and Theatre/ThePhantomOfTheOpera. One storyline even featured an alternate universe involving his famous rival Miyamoto Musashi--there's a Kojiro in that universe, and he is ''exactly'' like the "fake" one. The Musashi from said storyline is playable, and isn't remotely weak. |
| 289 | ** On the topic of Assassins, Hassan of the Cursed Arm has been listed as LawfulEvil since the days of the original visual novel and shows no signs of changing. In those days, it made a lot of sense, since he was mostly just a PunchClockVillain for the monstrously-cruel Zouken Matou and didn't show any redeeming qualities. But ever since then, especially when the Camelot singularity of ''Grand Order'' [[AdaptationExpansion gave him an actual backstory and personality]], he's ''never'' been a villainous character, and has consistently been shown as [[DarkIsNotEvil heroic, kind, and goodhearted.]] Nonetheless, his alignment has yet to be changed. |
| 290 | ** Jeanne d'Arc Alter, when introduced initially, was established as an EvilDoppelganger to the real Jeanne, and in gameplay, her skillset was basically [[PoorMansSubstitute "Jeanne, but worse"]] (Jeanne is a five-star [[StoneWall Ruler]], Jeanne Alter a four-star). This informed a lot of her characterization, with her having [[AlwaysSecondBest a massive inferiority complex]] and considering herself a pale shadow of the original. But when Jalter became a BreakoutCharacter and was PromotedToPlayable, the designers took note of her popularity and [[PopularityPower raised her power considerably]]--going from four-star to five-star, [[DivergentCharacterEvolution switching class from Ruler to Avenger]], being given an extraordinarily high rarity, and possessing [[GlassCannon the highest offensive stats in the game]], to the point of having been a top-tier Servant at some points. Her inferiority complex now makes very little sense in gameplay terms, but it's such an important part of her character and her relationship with her "sister" that it's stuck around. |
| 291 | ** The original heroine of the franchise, Saber Artoria Pendragon, has fallen into this. She is the poster girl of the game, prominently featuring in just about every bit of promo material and even being its icon on any given app store. When the game had just launched, Artoria was still considered the "main heroine" of the franchise due to her prominence in ''VisualNovel/FateStayNight'' and ''Literature/FateZero'', so leading with her made sense, especially since ''Grand Order'' was seen as a side project then. However, ''Grand Order'' [[AdvertisedExtra largely avoided developing Artoria]] (whether out of tentativeness with handling an iconic character or out of a sense that there wasn't much to be done with her after her many prior starring roles), instead focusing on characters from ''[[Literature/FateApocrypha Apocrypha]]'', ''[[VideoGame/FateEXTRA EXTRA]]'', its own OriginalGeneration, or lesser lights from ''FSN'' and ''Zero.'' Ask a fan who the main or most popular heroine of ''Grand Order'' is, and Saber Artoria probably wouldn't even make the top twenty, and as ''Grand Order'' has increasingly become the franchise's cash cow, you could probably argue that those characters are more central to the franchise at this point. It's particularly funny because her iconic status has led to her getting [[OverusedCopycatCharacter tons of alternate versions]] or characters who [[OnlySixFaces share her design]], some who exist [[BetterThanABareBulb only to poke fun at the franchise's overuse of her design]], and nearly every single one of them has had more significant showings than her -- even the gag BeachEpisode variant! Nonetheless, the sheer inertia of her prior appearances mean that she isn't going to be taken out of the middle of group shots anytime soon. |
| 292 | ** When ''Grand Order'' started out, it was perceived as a low-budget side project, and a lot of the character animations reflected that. Most Casters, for instance, had their animations consisting of standing in place and tossing generic energy balls of varying size. When the game's budget went up and technology advanced, the animation quality vastly improved... but a lot of characters were still stuck with their basic launch animations. The game does tend to roll out "renewals" on a semi-regular basis that see older characters brought up to par, but you still tend to see less popular sorts like Mata Hari or Darius shooting off their generic orbs or having their showstopping LimitBreak consist of a static image menacing the enemy while the screen shakes. |
| 293 | * The ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom'' games have the Sentinel, who first appeared in ''VideoGame/XMenChildrenOfTheAtom'' as one of the playable villains. This made a lot of sense in an X-Men fighting game, and it made equal sense to add him to ''MVC'' when the games were already [[MissionPackSequel recycling so much]], especially with ''2'' being a DreamMatchGame featuring ''everyone'' from series history (thus also explaining the inclusion of Spiral, Silver Samurai, and Omega Red, other villains from ''COTA'' that are obscure outside the X-Men titles). It's a lot stranger in ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom3'', where the [[VideoGame3DLeap presentation upgrade]] meant that the Sentinel had to be recreated wholecloth. In the comics, Sentinels are MechaMooks designed to hunt mutants, meaning they have no relevance outside the X-Men titles and have nothing even resembling the star power to get a fighting game appearance on their own merits. Even an UnexpectedCharacter angle would fall flat by virtue of not really being a character at all. Even the one featured in-game is a design that [[CanonForeigner seems to have been created for the series]], rather than being based on a specific model used in the comics. It's also notable considering ''3'' greatly lessened the focus on ''X-Men'' after they were a SpotlightStealingCrossover beforehand, with only 7 reps in total including Sentinel, and there being many more popular characters that ''could'' have been carried over from ''2'' such as Cyclops, Iceman, Psylocke, Rogue, Gambit, Juggernaut, Colossus, or Sabretooth, but were passed in favor of him. The reason was simply that Sentinel was one of the more popular characters in ''2'', as he was a ''very'' popular tournament pick who slotted into many of the game's best competitive teams, and therefore had enough of a history with the series that he warranted inclusion over other ''X-Men'' reps. Had ''3'' been the first game in the series, it's hard to imagine Capcom even considering Sentinel for it. |
| 294 | * The original ''VideoGame/RatchetAndClank2002'' had a clunky, mechanical, UsedFuture aesthetic. This defined a lot of aspects of the series, from the names of the main characters, to the signature weapon ([[WrenchWhack an oversized sci-fi spanner wrench]]) to the main currency (bolts). [[VideoGame/RatchetAndClank2016 The 2016 reboot]] goes for [[EverythingIsAnIpodInTheFuture a more traditionally sleek and futuristic look]], but as all the above aspects are kind of core to the series, they stuck around, leading to [[MoneySpider smooth, deco-designed robots disgorging rusty bolts]] when killed. |
| 295 | * In the original ''VideoGame/StarCraftI'', there's a small artifact in the first mission of the Zerg campaign. Daggoth serves as the Zerg tutorial advisor to help new players get a handle on how to play the faction, which at one point, it will order the player to build a Spawning Pool once they've banked up 150 minerals. This is a leftover from a very early version of the game before a later update increased the cost of building a Spawning Pool to 200 minerals. |
| 296 | * ''VideoGame/StarCraftII'' has several examples: |
| 297 | ** The first is regarding the campaign achievements. When playing through the first campaign for ''VideoGame/StarcraftIIWingsOfLiberty'', there's hidden achievements the player could come across called "Feats of Strength" that they will complete after pulling off something amazing, such as destroying an enemy base that's not part of the mission objectives. This was changed by the time of the ''VideoGame/StarCraftIIHeartOfTheSwarm'' campaign and beyond where Feats of Strength are instead updated to become "Mastery Achivements" where each mission has a tough mastery achievement that the player can go about completing. Despite this change, the ''Wings of Liberty'' campaign still lacks its own version of Mastery Achievements to this very day, and is the only campaign that still uses hidden Feat of Strength achievements. |
| 298 | ** Also from ''Wings Of Liberty'', the "Heir Apparent" cinematic is somewhat of a mess due to being a mix of the original rough draft idea, and what it was eventually rewritten as in the final product. |
| 299 | *** Originally, the cinematic was supposed to be a meeting gone bad between Raynor's Raiders and Valerian's Dominion forces. This would of course lead into a fire-fight between the two sides until the two finally come to terms with one another, and decide that their common enemy is Kerrigan and her Zerg Swarm. |
| 300 | *** In the final product however, the meeting portion of the cinematic is gone. Instead, Raynor and Tychus go in guns ablazing boarding Valerian's ship, and disposing of the Dominion soldiers until Raynor reaches Valerian, which the latter reveals his plan to deinfest Kerrigan, and results in the team-up. This of course brings about a bunch of plot issues, like how confusing it is that Raynor and Tychus are suddenly aboard Valerian's ship unopposed as if they were just let in, and weren't told the moment they entered what was up. Or why Valerian's men were firing upon Raynor and Tychus when their goal from the start was to team-up. In the end, what you're left with is a cinematic showing off Valerian getting his soldiers killed for no justifiable reason whatsoever. All because ''[[Creator/BlizzardEntertainment Blizzard]]'' thought they could cut corners by reusing clips that no longer make sense for the rewritten cinematic. |
| 301 | * ''Franchise/MortalKombat'': |
| 302 | ** Fatalities might be the centerpiece of the entire franchise, but the later games have placed more emphasis on the story and relationships between the characters. With ''VideoGame/MortalKombatX'' having a 25-year TimeSkip, you now have active romantic partners squaring off, and parents fighting their children, leading to heavy GameplayAndStorySegregation when you have Johnny Cage brutally killing his own daughter at the end of a fight. |
| 303 | ** Kitana in ''VideoGame/MortalKombat1''. Despite being one of the central heroines of the franchise, Kitana has virtually nothing to do in ''Mortal Kombat 1's'' new timeline. Mileena is now her biological twin rather than a twisted clone, and much of the story focuses on ''her'': being the older twin makes her the Crown Princess, she's secretly afflicted with the Tarkat disease, and she's having a forbidden affair with Tanya. Even Kitana's role as Liu Kang's girlfriend is filled by the ''[[VideoGame/MortalKombat11 previous]]'' Kitana, who still exists in her own timeline where she was the one who defeated [[BigBad Kronika]]. As a result, the current Kitana has nothing going on other than supporting her sister and fighting off flirtations from Kung Lao and Johnny Cage. [[spoiler: And her ending, where she becomes the new General of Outworld's army after Shao's defection, isn't as noteworthy as it should be, since Tanya and Li Mei ''also'' become leaders of government factions]]. |
| 304 | * Many elements of ''Monster Girl Quest'' become this in the sequel ''Monster Girl Quest: Paradox''. |
| 305 | ** The various skills that Luka picks up throughout the story. In the original ''MGQ'', these were extremely important since Luka was the only character fighting for the vast majority of the game. However, ''Paradox'' is an RPG that allows you to form a party of multiple characters, and Luka doesn't need to be in the (active) party so his skills are now largely irrelevant. This is best illustrated through the Meditation skill: in the original ''MGQ'' it's the primary way for Luka to regain HP during battles, but in ''Paradox'' it's obsoleted by the many other healing skills. |
| 306 | ** Luka's goal to form contracts with the four Spirits also falls under this. In the original game, the four Spirits granted extraordinary power, using their skills was a key part of the gameplay, and their assistance was the only reason Luka was able to keep up with the higher-tier opponents in the story. In ''Paradox'', the Spirits contribute some minor elemental bonuses at best when summoned, and will probably be overlooked in favor of more effective abilities. And with the existence of the "Spirit Summoner" job, ''any'' character can summon them, not just Luka. The only real reason Luka is bothering with the Spirits in ''Paradox'' is simply because that's what Luka did in the first game. |
| 307 | * ''VideoGame/CrashBandicoot'': Crash's origin in the first game is that he's a UpliftedAnimal who was transformed by Neo Cortex. This became an artifact after his sister Coco was introduced in the sequel. It's never mentioned that she was also changed by Cortex. The series began introducing more and more FunnyAnimal characters without question to the point where the series now takes place in a LionsAndTigersAndHumansOhMy setting. |
| 308 | ** ''VideoGame/CrashBandicoot4ItsAboutTime'' attempts to rectify this with the flashback levels revealing that Coco is a fellow mutant created by Cortex. [[spoiler: The final act of the game revisits Crash' origins via time travel.]] |
| 309 | * The original ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' turned out to have a lot of axed content that was discovered to still be on the disk, such as cut quests or game mechanics that never made it into the final product. What got affected by this the most was one of the [=NPCs=] in Tristram named Gillian the Barmaid, who was originally designed to offer the player two world quests. However, both were cut from the game. Gillian ended up making it to the game, but what she's left as is a pointless NPC that simply stands in front of her house and provides a bit of gossip about the townsfolk or other people's quests. To put it simply, she's a leftover from cut content. |
| 310 | * ''Franchise/FireEmblem'': |
| 311 | ** "Child Units" were a feature introduced in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGenealogyOfTheHolyWar'', which made them the primary focus: about halfway through the game, all the characters die, a TimeSkip occurs, and now you're playing as their kids, whose stats and abilities vary depending on who you've managed to pair up before that point. The mechanic was brought back for ''VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening'', this time having the kids travel back in time at a certain point in the plot--a bit clumsier of a way to go about it, but still clearly something the story was written around. However, it was definitely this by ''VideoGame/FireEmblemFates'', where the child units weren't particularly plot-relevant and the method of introducing them (all the kids are raised in a YearInsideHourOutside pocket dimension) was a lot less plausible; they were pretty clearly just around because pairing units up to breed superpowered kids was a popular part of ''Awakening''. Thankfully, ''Three Houses'' recognized that the feature wouldn't fit, and dropped it. |
| 312 | ** The "Catria Archetype" gets some remarks for this--a semi-common RecurringElement in the series where a character's defining trait is their feelings for a character, usually the main Lord, whom they can't actually get together with. The original example was, naturally, Catria, and it made sense in those games because Marth and Caeda are the OfficialCouple and there's no other romance option in the game; the only way to make Marth/Caeda not happen [[MurderTheHypotenuse is to kill Caeda off]], and Marth doesn't exactly use the opportunity to hook up with Catria. But when the later games instituted RelationshipValues and made it practically a selling point that the Lord can hook up with a ton of different people in the army, the archetype ended up being a bit notorious for how nonsensical it could often shake out to be. Cordelia in ''Awakening'' is one of the sillier cases, because there is essentially no in-story reason for why she can't get together with Chrom; he has a lot of potential romances, so true love isn't an issue, one of them includes someone from Cordelia's country and in the same military unit as her, meaning social class isn't a problem, and he will even marry a random offscreen villager if somehow all his prospective mates died, yet Cordelia still can't get together with him. |
| 313 | ** The original NES game, which, while mostly a StandardFantasySetting, had something of an AncientGrome theme going--Marth is wearing a toga in early artwork and his name [[SpellMyNameWithAnS can be read as Mars]], there are weapons named after Mercury, Gradivus, and Parthia, and so on. Pretty much every future game, including the original's sequel and the Archanea remakes, dropped the Greco-Roman stuff entirely and leaned into the medieval-fantasy style, but the one thing that couldn't be dropped easily was the {{Pegasus}} Knight unit, which has featured in just about every game since. While pegasi are fairly common in fantasy settings, ''Fire Emblem'' is probably the only one where they're as prominent as they are. |
| 314 | ** The remake of ''VideoGame/FireEmblemShadowDragon'' has a number of cases of this--it would be surprising if it wasn't, as it's a remake of an NES game. |
| 315 | *** At one point, a villager gives Marth a silver sword and tells him that it belongs to Hardin. In the original, there was one stat that determined how powerful the weapons you could use were, which was Weapon Level--Hardin has a 9 in it, which is sufficient to use both the silver lance in his base inventory and the silver sword the villager gives you. The remake, on the other hand, uses Weapon Rank, which is tracked differently among a number of weapons, and gave Hardin a B-rank in Lances (sufficient to use that aforementioned lance), but only a D-rank in Swords, meaning he needs a lot of training to use that sword of his. |
| 316 | *** Wolf and Sedgar are rather famous and infamous among ''Shadow Dragon'' fans for their very unusual builds, being prepromoted characters who have stats and weapon ranks lower than their unpromoted boss Hardin, but also bizarrely high growth rates. In the original game, their class (Horseman) wasn't the promoted form of Hunter; it was just its own classline, so a level 3 Horseman and a level 3 Cavalier having the same stats wouldn't be seen as unusual. Wolf and Sedgar's vastly buffed growths were essentially an attempt to make them not-useless without needing to buff their base stats to DiscOneNuke levels. |
| 317 | *** A downplayed example of this is the game's habit of giving you massive amounts of gold on a regular basis. In the original game, the inventory system was notoriously borked and weird, and the large gold supply was meant to alleviate the issue by letting you buy and discard items much more freely. The remake uses a significantly improved inventory that made this unnecessary. This is downplayed, though, because the remake of ''Shadow Dragon'' is also a game where you really like having a lot of money, since forged weapons (the easiest way to break the game) go for a pretty penny. |
| 318 | *** The game's notoriously lance-focused enemy catalog is an artifact of the original game, which lacked [[TacticalRockPaperScissors the now-signature weapon triangle.]] As a result, the designers then didn't see much point in varying enemy weapons, which became a bit of an issue in the remake, which ''does'' have the weapon triangle. |
| 319 | *** In the original game, there was no way to counterbalance a weapon's weight; the weight was simply deducted from your Speed. The remake uses the same system introduced in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance'', where a unit's Strength is deducted from weight, meaning a strong character isn't impeded at all. However, it also uses weights similar to the original game, which were much lower compared to ''Path of Radiance'', which has the effect of making weight essentially a nonfactor outside of the very early game: you need 10 Strength to not lose Speed from an Iron Axe in ''Path of Radiance'', but only 6 in ''Shadow Dragon''. |
| 320 | ** {{Permadeath}} as a concept was clearly part of the design assumptions of older games: you had large rosters that usually left multiple characters who could fulfill any given role, and relatively weak enemies that made it possible for nearly any character to contribute at their join time, both of which meant that losing a unit wasn't too much of a setback. Plots were clearly written around the assumption that any recruitable unit could be dead at any given moment, and final bosses could reasonably be killed by the protagonist alone. Later on, the casts got smaller and the enemies on higher difficulties got stronger, which made losing a unit a significantly bigger loss; it can take hours to raise an untrained character to fit their class properly in ''Three Houses'', and many characters in ''New Mystery'' straight-up cannot survive their join chapter on high difficulties. Additionally, since the plots became significantly more character-driven, this meant that plot-relevant characters now need to have PlotArmor that degrades hits that would kill less important people to a NonLethalKO to let them still participate in cutscenes, creating a rather wonky bit of GameplayAndStorySegregation. Even the idea that [[SaveScumming resetting the chapter because a unit died]] would make it more tedious lost its edge when ''VideoGame/FireEmblemEchoesShadowsOfValentia'' introduced the Turnwheel, allowing players to simply rewind and save their units that way, pretty much strictly reserving it to a SelfImposedChallenge. For the most part, the concept sticks around because more hardcore fans prefer treating a lost unit as a failstate, which, even then, is a considerable deviation from the original intent of it being something you'd accept and move on from.[[note]]A few hardcore fans still keep the idea of accepting and moving on from a unit's death through the "iron man" SelfImposedChallenge, though even these fans admit that certain games are better-designed for this sort of run than others[[/note]] |
| 321 | * ''VideoGame/{{Mother}}'': |
| 322 | ** ''VideoGame/EarthBound1994'' introduced the ATM system, where money earned from fights is deposited in your bank account and you must withdraw it later as you need it, keeping in mind that you lose half the money you're ''holding'' when you die. This means you had to balance carrying enough money to buy things you anticipated you needed as well as paying for hotels, but never too much so you wouldn't lose all your hard-saved money upon death. ''VideoGame/{{Mother 3}}'' continued this mechanic, except now it's through the game's save points which appear much more frequently than phones did in the previous game and ''always'' right beside any shop. Furthermore, you restore health for free in hot springs and instant revitalizers rather than hotels, meaning it is ''entirely'' pointless to ever carry money: take out all your money, buy your stuff, redeposit all the money, repeat as necessary. The only possible reason this mechanic continues is it was in the previous game. |
| 323 | ** ''VideoGame/Mother3'' keeps the distinctive music motif that the first two games used: the "attack" button is represented by a musical note, the player can perform combos by hitting the attack button in time with the game's music, there are a handful of moments where the player finds songs in present boxes, and a rock band plays a prominent supporting role. Despite this, the ''story'' doesn't actually have anything to do with music: it's about an idyllic town that's corrupted by the rise of an authoritarian government, and about a conflict between two brothers coping with the death of their mother. The first two games used the motif because they were about characters collecting a series of melodies to learn a song, while the third installment just preserves it for the sake of tradition. |
| 324 | * ''VideoGame/Action52'' was originally going to have its final game be a FinalExamFinale, with "the Action Game Master" being TrappedInTVLand and having to battle his way through opponents from all the other games. Somewhat late in development, the game's producer instead decided to create the Cheetahmen as a mascot for the collection and have them be the main stars of the last game. This happened so late that their intro still includes about half the cutscene that was clearly going to lead into the earlier concept (the Action Game Master gets pulled into the TV, then the Cheetahmen show up, meet the Action Game Master, say "we will fight for you", and the latter is never seen again), the boxart clearly depicts that cutscene, and the later levels still include enemies from the other games. |
| 325 | * Several first-party games for the Nintendo Platform/WiiU system included unlockable stamps that could be used on Nintendo's Miiverse social network for drawing images. After the Miiverse service was discontinued, the stamps in the games were rendered entirely useless beyond OneHundredPercentCompletion. One of the games with stamps, ''VideoGame/SuperMario3DWorld'', received a port to the Platform/NintendoSwitch, which addresses the issue of the stamps by keeping them as they were but changing their function--the port adds a photo mode that the collected stamps can be used in to put them on top of the image. |
| 326 | * ''VideoGame/DukeNukem3D'''s {{Bowdlerised}} Nintendo 64 port has occasional encounters with "Alien Beasts", who in the original version were the spawn of the now AdaptedOut [[FinalBoss Queen Alien]]. |
| 327 | * Miis are player created avatars that were first introduced with the Platform/{{Wii}}. Miis were heavily featured in many of Nintendo's games as playable characters, which was appealing for people that wanted to play a caricature of themselves or another person in the games. Miis were downplayed in the Platform/WiiU and Platform/Nintendo3DS where they weren't as heavily advertised or featured. Miis were pretty much thrown to the wayside in the Platform/NintendoSwitch where their only use[[note]]outside of Switch ports of Wii U and 3DS games, ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosUltimate'' (which included every previous playable character in the series including the Mii Fighters), and ''[[VideoGame/MarioGolf Mario Golf: Super Rush]]'' (where the player character in the story mode is a Mii)[[/note]] are avatars for different user account profiles. |
| 328 | * ''VideoGame/MaxPayne3'' changes the run-and-gun, PC-optimized game style of the first two games to a more console-friendly, ''VideoGame/GearsOfWar''-influenced style, which turned some of the most notable features of the franchise into artifacts: |
| 329 | ** The first two games channeled HeroicBloodshed films to allow Max to use "BulletTime" to maneuver and shoot in a badass ballet of bullets. The third game, however, uses a TakeCover system. Bullet time is much less exciting and useful when you're simply popping out from behind cover to shoot at a guy you already put your crosshair over while staying safe behind that cover. |
| 330 | ** In spite of the different gameplay, which involves more episodic confrontations rather than the continuous battle of the first two games, Max still uses painkillers as {{Health Potion}}s rather than receiving the now more industry-standard AfterCombatRecovery. Using a bunch of painkillers in one confrontation makes it too easy, so the game limits your supply, but this also makes it common to run out of painkillers and start some combat sections with low health, [[UnintentionallyUnwinnable making the confrontation impossible]]. The game does start [[AntiFrustrationFeatures giving the player more painkillers with each restart]], but this still effectively forces the player to die a few times to get back to a winnable state. Avoiding this sort of issue was the whole reason after-combat recovery became standard in the decade between the second and third ''Max Payne'' games. |
| 331 | * When ''VideoGame/{{Portal}}'' was in its early development, it [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEbmtllS8GI made use of a lot of assets]] from ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'', with things like the portal gun being a modified Gravity Gun, similar graphics used for forcefields, and all manner of shared props. [[SerendipityWritesThePlot To explain this,]] it was suggested that the two games occupied a SharedUniverse. However, by the time of its release, almost no assets are shared (the sole significant exception being the energy orbs), which makes the two games sharing a universe rather incongruous when they're very different tonally and don't particularly connect to one another. |
| 332 | * ''VideoGame/Progressbar95'': You start a game with a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive, which gets a few upgrades and becomes a 1 GB zip drive, and it stays in your computer for good but stops being important as other components keep getting upgrades (though considering that you have a CD-ROM which can use better discs later on and people don't use floppies after the 1990s, it was bound to happen anyway). |
| 333 | * ''Franchise/ShinMegamiTensei'': |
| 334 | ** The games [[VideoGame/LastBible and]] [[VideoGame/DevilSurvivor its]] [[VideoGame/DevilSurvivor2 many]] [[Franchise/{{Persona}} spin]] [[VideoGame/DigitalDevilSaga offs]] have always featured [[HeroicMime silent protagonists]] because it's tradition that the protagonist is meant to be a stand-in for the player. Most of the time what can be inferred about the main character's personality is limited to options that might or might not have any influence on the plot and most of the time they do not give a clear picture of what the character is like. Despite this, there's been some exceptions: the protagonist of ''VideoGame/DevilSurvivor2'' is [[MemeticMutation infamous]] for always having [[CloudCuckoolander the option to give a joke answer]] to just about every situation he's put in. The game itself points this out, with Io commenting multiple times that the protagonist is saying something funny ''again''. The protagonist from ''VideoGame/Persona5'' is a weird example... While he does have significantly more battle lines than the previous main characters and can actually be heard speaking in some cutscenes, he isn't fleshed out to the point of having a character of his own. Effectively, this makes him someone who has enough personality to not be a featureless blank slate but not enough to be much more than a FlatCharacter. |
| 335 | ** The first ''VideoGame/DevilSurvivor'' had a TheBadGuysAreCops plot later in the game, and so the generic police officer mugshot sports {{red eyes|TakeWarning}} and a SlasherSmile. ''VideoGame/DevilSurvivor2'' re-uses portraits from the first game for its generic [=NPCs=], which means cops still look ObviouslyEvil even though they're not antagonistic this time. |
| 336 | * ''VideoGame/StoryOfSeasonsAWonderfulLife'' has two that no longer apply from [[VideoGame/HarvestMoonAWonderfulLife the game it was remade from]]. |
| 337 | ** The Mountain Pass. In the older game, this path was used to link up with ''Friends of Mineral Town'' (via the GBA link cable) for some exclusive bonuses, and otherwise was blocked off by the Harvest Sprites. In the new version, it's basically an in-game time killer; go up the path and your character will travel to another town off screen, spending six hours of the day out of the valley. |
| 338 | ** Since you can see how many hearts each marriage candidate has and how friendly you are with the townsfolk by going to the character happiness chart--accessed through the rucksack along with reward requests and items in the bag--the diaries are no longer needed to see any candidate's heart levels. But they're still present where they were in the original games for each canidate, showing hearts on a 1-5 scale about how they feel for you. (Gordy also has one, [[PromotedToLoveInterest being a new bachelor]].) |
| 339 | * In the ''Yakuza''/''VideoGame/LikeADragon'' series. |
| 340 | ** The Mach Bowl bowling alley in Kamurocho first appeared in ''[[VideoGame/Yakuza2 2]]'', and has reappeared in several games since. In ''[[VideoGame/Yakuza6 6]]'', the space was turned into the RIZAP Gym, in ''[[VideoGameRemake Kiwami 2]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/YakuzaLikeADragon Like A Dragon]]'' it became a generic inaccessible restaurant, and in ''VideoGame/{{Judgment}}'' it is now the Paradise VR salon. No matter the incarnation of the venue, however, the building has always prominently featured a large neon sign depicting bowling pins on its side. |
| 341 | ** The series' Western name became this as time went on, as the series added plenty of spinoffs that don't necessarily involve the Yakuza, or at least don't center around Yakuza as the main characters like ''VideoGame/YakuzaDeadSouls'' (a zombie game), ''VideoGame/RyuGaGotokuKenzan'' (a feudal Japanese spinoff), and ''VideoGame/{{Judgment}}'' (starring a detective on the other side of the law). After the success of ''VideoGame/YakuzaLikeADragon'' helped the series re-invent itself, the developers seized on this opportunity and wholesale rebranded the franchise under the ''Like A Dragon'' title, starting with ''VideoGame/LikeADragonIshin'' and ''Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name'', future-proofing the franchise to break away from just being seen as a crime drama about modern Japanese gangsters. |
| 342 | ** The continued presence of Club Sega in all of the games. Back in 2005, having Club Sega appear was a nice and immersive bit of cross-promotion, helped by later games expanding its role by introducing genuine classic SEGA arcade games to play in it. In 2022, Club Sega would be rebranded to [=GiGO=] after Genda, the company who previously handled SEGA's arcade operations, bought out the rights completely. Despite this, Club Sega will remain in the ''Like a Dragon'' series as a tribute to the company's past. |
| 343 | * ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'': |
| 344 | ** After the 2014 ContinuityReboot, [[ArtifactTitle the title "League of Legends"]] no longer makes sense, since the titular League of Legends is no longer a thing. For related reasons, Summoner's Rift no longer exists, the few voice lines that refer to "summoners" make no sense, etc. This ''may'' be changing with some hints of a {{Multiverse}} in a couple of variant audio lines from specific skin universes, most notably Psi-Ops, but for now ''League of Legends'' is a game that rendered its own gameplay non-canonical. |
| 345 | ** Due to the large amount of revisions to the worldbuilding and character writing the series has seen over the years, there are several Champions, especially among the older ones, whose in-game aspects either no longer accurately represent their current lore self or no longer fit within the current status of the Runeterra setting. |
| 346 | *** Ashe has worn the same black-colored, skin-revealing and cloth-heavy outfit since the game's launch, which nowadays looks extremely out of place in the context of both the cold and icy Freljord region and the blue-colored, fur heavy fashion of the Avarosan tribe, to the point that her updated voiceover gives her dialogue that [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] the fact. This is particularly notable when compared to her ''Wild Rift'' and especially her ''VideoGame/LegendsOfRuneterra'' designs, which give her an outfit more in line with the aesthetic you'd expect from her character. |
| 347 | *** Cho'gath is so old that not only does he lack any definitive lore since the 2014 reboot, but his design is also so archaic that not only has the design aesthetic of the Void's Champions moved on, it's moved on ''again'' from the things it moved on ''to'', evolving from Cho'gath's aesthetic borrowing heavily from the Violator from ''ComicBook/{{Spawn}}'' to a more buglike aesthetic with Kog'maw and Kha'zix to an ''alien'' buglike aesthetic with Rek'sai to more straight-up EldritchAbomination stuff with Vel'koz... and Cho'gath's model has not been updated at all in that time. His gameplay is a similar matter, being an oddly-structured [[MechanicallyUnusualFighter Specialist]] who has the fortitude of a tank, but also having high snowballing potential and lacking reliable crowd control, fitting him into a niche that other tanks have grown out of. |
| 348 | *** Corki's tiny, gremlin-esque old man design doesn't make much sense anymore since he's been retconned into a yordle. Similarly, his flying machine does not have a firm place in the Bandle City lore. While his appearance in ''WebAnimation/TalesOfRuneterra'' would give him a redesign to make him look more like a yordle, both ''League of Legends'' and ''Wild Rift'' continue to retain his old design. |
| 349 | *** Garen and Katarina's FoeRomanceSubtext is a [[ZigZaggingTrope zigzagged]] example. It started out thanks to a joke in the Journal of Justice, an in-universe publication from prior to the 2014 lore reboot, and despite the fact that the relationship is still referenced within the game itself by several characters, both of their bios do not make any mention of each other, the same going for any flavor story involving the two in the current lore. However, this would end up being [[SubvertedTrope subverted]] after the release of ''Legends of Runeterra'', where their relationship would be established in the current lore as a SecretRelationship that [[EveryoneCanSeeIt everyone can see]], as well as the ''ComicBook/{{Katarina}}'' comic detailing how they first met. |
| 350 | *** Graves' characterization in his base skin casts him with a rather dour personality, despite this characterization no longer making sense for him due to retcons combined with the CharacterDevelopment he received in the Burning Tides event. It wouldn't be until the release of his [[ThePaladin Sentinel skin]] that Graves would receive the BoisterousBruiser personality in the game that he's portrayed with in other media. On a similar note, the voice of Graves' base skin is performed by Creator/KyleHebert, while all subsequent media, as well as the Sentinel skin, have his voice provided by Creator/FredTatasciore. |
| 351 | *** While Janna herself hasn't really fallen victim to this, her [[IntrepidReporter Forecast skin]] suffers from this somewhat, specifically due to a voice line in which she states that she expects "a spawn of dragons every 6 minutes." While this made sense back when dragons actually did spawn every 6 minutes of a game, it's now been rendered rather outdated now that dragons' spawn times have been reduced to 5 minutes. |
| 352 | *** Jarvan IV's gold and black armour with weird spikes and Spartan-esque design looks nothing like Demacia's overwhelmingly austere and white, silver and blue aesthetic. Even in gameplay, Riot themselves have noted that Jarvan's bulky design does not fit with the diver gameplay style he's meant to be played with. In spite of all this, Jarvan's design has remained nearly unchanged throughout all of his appearances, presumably a combination of it being iconic and to give him a [[BlingOfWar unique look as king of Demacia]]. On another note regarding Jarvan, his voiceover is notably out of date with his lore, most notably his "For my father, the king!" line, which is incompatible with the current lore where his father, Jarvan III, is dead and he is now king. |
| 353 | *** Kassadin's voice lines are a paltry amount compared to the sheer number of lines modern champions get, on top of being noticeably short and not going anything beyond generic command confirmation lines, as well as having only a single taunt and joke line (which in of itself is case of this trope, as Kassadin's joke about "silencing" his mother no longer makes sense now that his ''[[AntiMagic Null Sphere]]'' ability no longer causes silence). He's also this from a gameplay perspective, having a BoringButPractical kit that hasn't received much of an overhaul beyond some minor additions, apparently the result of him being hard to balance thanks to his iconic [[WeaponizedTeleportation ultimate]]. The result is a champion who feels completely obsolete by modern standards, with even the splash art update he received in 2022 only making everything else about him feel even more dated. |
| 354 | *** Kennen has remained virtually unchanged gameplay-wise since he first released near the start of the game. Even from a lore perspective, Kennen has had very few updates and is notably absent from both the ''Zed'' comic and ''Tales of Runeterra'''s "The Lesson" short, despite the fact that he's supposed to be a major member of the Kinkou Order and even more of a father figure to Akali than Shen was. |
| 355 | *** Kog'Maw had a tenuous role in the lore even before the 2014 reboot, with his one notable trait of being a guardian for Malzahar being an InformedAttribute at best. After the reboot, he's lacked any canon appearances, leaving it up in the air as to what his current role in the world actually is. It wouldn't be until Bel'Veth's release in 2022 that he'd finally begin to get some modern lore progression, even if only a small amount. |
| 356 | *** Lissandra's evil sounding voiceover made sense when she was a GenericDoomsdayVillain, but after her 2018 lore update retconned her into an AntiVillain, they now sound notably out of place. By far the most notable one is her threatening sounding "The Watchers will return" line, which made sense when her goal was to help the Watchers bring about the apocalypse, but now makes no sense when her goal is now to ''stop'' the Watchers. |
| 357 | *** Lux has retained the same model and animations since her debut in 2010, even when other Champions of that era have since received visual updates. As a result, her appearance looks rather out of place, especially in comparison to her appearances in other media like ''Legends of Runeterra'' and ''Wild Rift'', where she's been modernized to match Demacia's current aesthetic. On another note regarding Lux, her ability, ''Light Binding'', is something of an odd spot among her abilities within the current lore. Previously, the ability was Lux's adaption of Morgana's ''[[SupernormalBindings Dark Binding]]'' ability, back when Morgana was an ally of Noxus and Lux was spying on them for Demacia. Since then, however, Morgana has been retconned as a fallen protector of Demacia who's only known vaguely by most via legend, while Lux has to hide her magic due to Demacia's prejudice against mages. While the idea that Lux copied a power of Morgana's isn't an impossibility, the current lore's lack of address regarding the subject leaves it as an anomaly. |
| 358 | *** In spite of being a highly advertised Champion, Malphite's in-game model remains one of the oldest in the game, barely even resembling the higher quality design of his current splash art and ''Legends of Runeterra'' art or his high fidelity model in ''Wild Rift''. |
| 359 | *** Ironically, in spite of having some of greatest amounts of CharacterDevelopment of any Champion and receiving an in-lore [[CostumeEvolution outfit update]], Miss Fortune retains the same model and voice lines since her debut in 2010, the latter of which featuring lines that still reference things like Summoners and the Institute of War (despite both of those having been de-canonized years before the Burning Tides event and ''VideoGame/RuinedKing'' established Miss Fortune's new design and characterization). All of this gets [[LampshadeHanging acknowledged]] by a voice line from Jhin when he encounters her. |
| 360 | ---->'''Jhin:''' While you're here, consider a wardrobe upgrade. |
| 361 | *** Nocturne has retained the same design and model since his debut in 2011, resulting in a rather aged aesthetic in comparison to the design of the other demon Champions to have released since. While ''Legends of Runeterra'' would clean up his design a bit, it's still overall rooted in a visual direction the series has long since moved on from. |
| 362 | *** Orianna's creepy aspects, such as her voice lines and animations, made more sense when her lore casted her as an unfeeling robot created as a ReplacementGoldfish for a MadScientist's dead daughter, rather than the [[WasOnceAMan formerly human]] girl who underwent an EmergencyTransformation and suffers from a case of CyberneticsEatYourSoul that her current lore casts her as. On a similar note, beyond the base lore and color story given to her after the reboot, Orianna has received no development since then, not even getting any interactions with other Champions. However, this may be changing, thanks to a moment in ''WesternAnimation/{{Arcane}}'' that implies that [[spoiler:Singed may be Orianna's father]], giving the potential to finally further her narrative. |
| 363 | *** Shaco is quite possibly the most ignored Champion in the game, having received next to no lore since the reboot beyond an obligatory character blurb on the Universe website (not even a full biography) and a visual cameo of his mask in the [[https://i.imgur.com/5e7S6mW.png Black Market Merchant's artwork]] in ''Legends of Runeterra'', otherwise having nothing to tie him in to the current Runeterra lore. |
| 364 | *** While Shyvana has remained an important character in the lore and has continued to appear in other works, her design and kit haven't particularly aged well, the former suffering from being left behind in terms of visuals in comparison to the game as it is now, and the latter the result of the constant back-and-forth effort to balance her abilities, resulting in her specialization becoming inconsistent over time. It's likely for these reason that she's been a candidate for 3 [[ArtEvolution VGU]] votings in a row. |
| 365 | *** Prior to his VGU, Sion had managed to become this by having his passive be the only chance based element in the game besides critical damage after the trait had been otherwise phased out of the game entirely. As the developers at Riot had stated that removing RNG mechanics from the game besides critical damage was a goal of their's, it's very likely that this trait was the first thing to go when Sion got his VGU. |
| 366 | *** When the game first released, Soraka had a kit that was entirely dedicated to healing, the result of which made it hard to balance her as the game evolved without making her either extremely overpowered or downright useless. This would eventually be fixed in her 2014 rework, which altered her healing abilities to make it so that [[CastFromHitPoints she now has to sacrifice health in order to heal]], while also giving her the damaging ''[[StarPower Starcall]]'' ability, which heals her if it hits an enemy. |
| 367 | *** While Trundle as a whole has managed to avoid falling into this thanks to the VGU he received, said VGU would end up causing his [[BaseballEpisode Lil' Slugger skin]] to become a bit outdated. The skin made sense when Trundle was still a PintSizedPowerhouse, but now doesn't make much sense after being changed to a giant. However, the skin's lore blurb would manage to rectify this by establishing that he only joined little league after being rejected for major and minor league and then [[BlatantLies lying about his age]]. |
| 368 | *** Tryndamere's gameplay is particularly outdated, having an extremely straightforward kit with next to no mechanical skill involved, and unlike other Champions released around the same time as him, which have largely received adjustments to keep them at least somewhat up to date, Tryndamere has received nothing besides some damage increases and increasing his crit chance via his passive. He also has an extremely small amount of voice lines and a large amount of visually outdated skins, including his legendary [[VideoGame/{{Soulcalibur}} Demonblade skin]]. It's likely for these reasons that he's ended up on the voting for a VGU. |
| 369 | *** Varus' LongHairedPrettyBoy design made a lot more sense for him back when he was just a normal human corrupted by the Pit of Pallas, unlike his current lore where he's been retconned into being a Darkin. Now, the design just causes him to look out of place among other Darkin, who range anywhere from BigRedDevil style designs to straight up {{Eldritch Abomination}}s. Similarly, because he was retconned into being a Darkin rather than starting out as one, [[OddNameOut his name lacks the double-A theming other Darkin have]]. This particular part gets outright [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] by both fellow Darkin Aatrox in his interaction with Varus and by Varus himself in his updated voiceover. |
| 370 | ---->'''Aatrox:''' "Varus." V-A-R-U-S, your name should have an A and then another A, Varus. There was a memo, Varus, ''there was a memo''.\ |
| 371 | '''Varus:''' Aatrox, brother, the double-A thing is absurd and you know it. |
| 372 | *** Vayne's design has long since become outdated with the direction the series has decided to go in, with her comic book AntiHero inspired aesthetic looking completely out of place within the style of Demacia, let alone Runeterra as a whole. It's pretty obvious that Riot is aware of this, as they've taken some obvious efforts to abandon the look, starting with the Sentinels of Light event giving her a [[ThePaladin Sentinel skin]] that gives her new animations, voicework, and effects, then having her retain the Sentinel design in the lore, and having her appearance in ''Legends of Runeterra'' depict her in her post-Sentinels of Light design and characterization, essentially abandoning her original design entirely and establishing her Sentinel skin as a semi-VGU. |
| 373 | *** Viktor's voice lines made a lot more sense when he was still a villainous MadScientist rather than the morally grey figure he's been retconned into being. His EvilLaugh in particular is extremely out of character. |
| 374 | *** Xin Zhao's design in the game is ''extremely'' outdated, thanks to rewrites in the lore establishing that he first came to Demacia when Garen and Jarvan IV were still young. While he should be within his early 40s in the present lore (with the "[[https://universe.leagueoflegends.com/en_AU/story/xinzhao-aftermath-story/ Aftermath]]" short story establishing that his hair is beginning to gray), his design in the game depicts him as looking no older than someone in their 20s. |
| 375 | ** Beyond the Champions, there are even some lore [=NPCs=] both in the game and out that have fallen into a case of this trope. |
| 376 | *** Greyor, the southern shopkeeper of the Howling Abyss, is established as having been bound to the Howling Abyss by Avarosa after the Watchers' defeat, tasked by her with blowing a magic horn when they should return. However, retcons to the Freljord's lore have since established that Avarosa died during the final battle with the Watchers, making it impossible for Greyor's lore to make sense baring a potential revision. On another note, Greyor's exclusive interactions with Volibear made sense back when Volibear's lore placed him as a heroic, mortal warrior, but now make no sense with the self-centered and morally grey at best demigod he's been established as since his rework. This is especially notable with his "The Ursine have always been our allies" line, which worked when the Ursine were a race of humanoid bear people, but doesn't work now that they've been retconned into a group of Spirit Walkers corrupted by Volibear's influence and have no intent of allying with mankind. |
| 377 | *** The northern shopkeeper of the Howling Abyss has fallen into a strange situation of this. He was originally established as Lyte, Ezreal's uncle, then in 2016, [[SuddenNameChange had his name changed to Lymere]] after the [[{{Tuckerization}} Riot employee he was named after]] left the company. After allegations regarding said employee came about, Riot took this one step further and removed the name of the shopkeeper outright, seemingly retconning him into not be Ezreal's uncle Lymere at all. While this works from a lore standpoint, as Ezreal's lore establishes that Lymere has raised him since his parents' disappearance when he was a child, while the shopkeeper claims to have been excavating the Abyss for the past 20 years, it causes his line regarding Ezreal, in which he regards him with a familial fondness, to call into question over whether the shopkeeper actually is still Lymere or not. |
| 378 | *** The Vilemaw was originally a monster from the now defunct Twisted Treeline map. However, because of his connection to Elise, it's existence in the canon lore has been preserved, making him the sole holdover from Twisted Treeline. |
| 379 | * ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'': |
| 380 | ** The muck root, rat weed and prickle berry were once the only plants harvestable outside, entirely fictional and intended to be an inferior substitute to what you could find in [[BeneathTheEarth the caverns]]. This is no longer the case, since later updates added plenty of realistic vegetation, no longer undervalued, but the three plants were left in the way they are. |
| 381 | ** The caverns themselves are split into two biomes coded-in as "subterranean water" and "subterranean chasm". This comes from the 2D era when the cave river and the chasm were still a thing, but now even the divide between wet and dry caverns seems rather arbitrary. |
| 382 | ** Purring maggots currently seem more like WeirdWorldWeirdFood than the intended source of dwarven milk they provide. Not only can ordinary livestock now be milked proper, the maggots have been retconned to live so deep underground that ''the dwarven civilization itself'' has no access to them. |
| 383 | * The ''WesternAnimation/TotalDrama'' game "The Big Picture" was released during the beginning of the second season's run and remained online for several years. One mechanic awards extra points for taking photos of characters who are canonically dating. However, this became dated as the series progressed, as by the end of the third season, only one of the couples ([[spoiler:Bridgette and Geoff]]) was still intact, with one of the couples ([[spoiler:Gwen and Trent]]) breaking up not long after the game was released. |
| 384 | * Due to the nature of the titular ''Franchise/SilentHill'', the EldritchLocation crafts itself in a way that acts as a personal hell for whomever it summoned. Often, it creates monsters from the guilt-ridden and damaged psyche of those trapped within. The problem with this, however, is when a certain monster becomes popular, such as the nurses or especially Pyramid Head from ''VideoGame/SilentHill2'', who has become something of a MascotMook to the franchise. While quite poignant and powerful additions in their original outing (the nurses represented James Sunderland's sexual frustration, while Pyramid Head represented his guilt and corrupted masculinity), further use of them just turned them into standard monster mooks. |
| 385 | * ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert2'' has this with the Giant Squid unit for the Soviets in the ''Yuri's Revenge'' expansion. In the original game, anything connected to Yuri, such as his mind-control mechanics, were a part of the Soviet arsenal, but by the time of the expansion, Yuri broke away from the Soviets to make his own unique faction, and took all his creations that were within the Soviet army with him. Despite that however, the Giant Squids remained as a part of the Soviet tech-tree, even though it's known within the game's lore that it takes mind-control devices attached to the squids' head for the Soviets to control them as part of their naval fleet. This results in the Soviets still uncharacteristically having a unit that revolves around mind-control when it would have made ''a lot'' more sense for the Giant Squid to become another part of Yuri's unique faction. The most educated guess is that the game developers wanted the Giant Squids to remain the Soviets' counter-part to the Allies' Dolphins instead of creating a new navy animal unit for the Soviets. |
| 386 | * Serge being a HeroicMime in ''VideoGame/ChronoCross'', the sequel / SpiritualSuccessor to ''Chrono Trigger''. Like most silent protagonists, the central character of ''Chrono Trigger'' was mute and a blank slate so that players could more easily project themselves onto him, but Serge turns out to actually have a fairly complex backstory, which defeats the whole purpose. It gets even more awkward and purpose-defeating when [[spoiler:Serge and Lynx switch bodies]] and now the "silent" protagonist is suddenly ''talking'', with none of the other characters finding this unusual in the slightest. |
| 387 | * ''VideoGame/Doom3'' features gameplay tips in its loading screens, which include hints for the multiplayer mode. These tips are still present in the ''BFG Edition'' and later releases, which don't have the original's multiplayer. |
| 388 | * ''VideoGame/RiseOfTheTriad'': |
| 389 | ** The game was [[DivorcedInstallment supposed to be an installment]] of the ''VideoGame/{{Wolfenstein}}'' series, specifically a sequel to ''VideoGame/Wolfenstein3D''. The original plot was that [[{{Ghostapo}} the Triad was an ancient evil cult that had been involved with the Nazis]], and after World War II, they built a hideout in the Channel Islands with the intend of destroying American cities, forcing the United Nations to send a team called HUNT, led by B.J. Blazcowitz, to stop them. After it was turned into its own game, all the parts of the plot referencing ''Wolfenstein'' and the Nazis were removed: B.J. became Taradino Cassatt, and the Triad became simply an ancient evil cult with no Nazi connections. However, this happened too late to make any real changes to the enemies, and so they retained all the signs that clearly suggest they were meant to be Nazis--they wear military uniforms (claimed to be surplus ''Korean'' uniforms), [[PuttingOnTheReich about half of them are in coal-scuttle helmets and the other half are wearing black dress caps]], and their most common weapon drop is an [=MP40=], a submachine gun associated heavily with the regime. |
| 390 | ** The 2023 ''Ludicrous Edition'' remaster retains the original game's "Engine-Killing Gibs" cheat code. At the time of it's 1994 release, the game's signature LudicrousGibs could already push [=CPUs=] of the age to the limit, and said cheat made every enemy death animation use the bloody explosions complete with gib effects. As the name suggests, this could very easily lag the hell out of the game or even crash it out right. Years after its release though, stronger processors have come about and PC hardware has evolved considerably, and a basic 2010s rig can likely run ten instances of the original game all at once with the cheat turned on. The remaster runs on a new, much stronger engine that renders the "Engine-Killing" part of the cheat's name a complete misnomer, but it keeps the cheat for nostalgia purposes. |
| 391 | * Cookies in ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}''. They were always a low-effectiveness food item ''and'' they needed to be crafted from multiple ingredients, but this was balanced out by them being the only food item that could be carried in stacks up to 16 rather than taking up one inventory slot each. With the overhaul to the food mechanic (when hunger was introduced) ''all'' foods were made stackable up to 64 which left cookies utterly useless and left far in the dust, but they remain because why bother to take them out? |
| 392 | * ''VideoGame/WarThunder'': |
| 393 | ** Many vehicles that were initially part of the technological tree of a nation, but were later discontinued for several reasons. In most cases, this happened when these vehicles were representatives of a different country that later got its own tree, but there are also some instances of vehicles from the same nation. Players who unlocked them back in the day [[GrandfatherClause could keep them]] and even today they can appear in battle. Some examples: |
| 394 | *** The Tiger II 10.5 cm, the Panther II, or the Coelian, which were part of the game since 2012 but were later dismissed in 2017 as being not historically based and because meanwhile other vehicles were added to the German tree to replace their roles. |
| 395 | *** Several low tier Italian aircraft were too part of the German tree until Italy got its own tree. Then, those vehicles were removed from the German tree (except for those players who already unlocked them and who can still play them in battle). |
| 396 | *** Similarly, many premium vehicles representing other nations could not be purchased anymore after their trees were introduced. Some were directly transfered to the new tree: for example, the Israeli F-84F was initially a premium in the French tree, and now is only purchaseable as a premium in the Israeli tree. But you can still meet French players who can deploy some Israeli aircraft. |
| 397 | *** Romanian and Hungarian vehicles were initially part of the German tree and later officially transferred into the Italian tree. |
| 398 | *** With event vehicles things are more complicated because they can still be purchased in the marketplace. Thus, you can still get certain Merkava tank variants for the US tree or the French DB-7 for the UK tree, despite there are now Israel and France as fully playable countries. The French DB-7 is a curious case: it was added as a reward for the UK tree during the 2014 anniversary event, then appeared again during 2018 in the warbond shop and in the 2022 for the 10th anniversary event, but still for the UK tree despite France being available on its own since 2017. |
| 399 | ** AI controlled aircraft bots in air battles follow predefined paths where they roam near enemy ground targets and sometimes dive to fire a random burst and then pull up to a certain altitude. For a long time it was not uncommon to see jet bots randomly crash into the ground, this because they used leftover scripts for piston aircraft bots, dating to when bots beyond the very early ww2 jets were not yet introduced. Those scripts didn't take into account the superior velocity of more modern jets - so occasionally they simply couldn't pull up from a dive in time. |
| 400 | ** The memetic "attack the D point" radio message is a leftover for certain ground battles maps, where during early versions of the game there was the possibility for a new strategic zone appearing - that is the D point, named after the usual A, B and C points. It was later removed because either it spawned too close to one of the teams, leading to unbalance, or it turned into a turkey shot with all the people trying to mindlessly rush it. |
| 401 | ** The single player operations are artifacts of the previous game of the developer studio, Birds of Steel. |
| 402 | * ''VideoGame/{{Gradius}}'': As stated [[https://shmuplations.com/gpg-gradius here]], the original game was meant to have several different power-ups in the last slot on the bar, which is why it was denoted with a question mark. However, the developers were unable to implement all of their planned ideas, so in the final game it invariably gives you a shield. Subsequent games keep the "?" while still never deviating from variations on the shield power-up. |
| 403 | * ''VideoGame/{{Subnautica}}'': While exploring the Inactive Lava Zone, you can find the skeletons of Reaper Leviathans in some locations, with the heavy implication that [[spoiler:they were killed by the Sea Dragon Leviathans and dragged down here to be eaten]]. The problem is that there is no way to access this location from the surface, as they're a remnant from the time a tunnel connecting the Dunes to the Inactive Lava Zone was present in the game, before being removed to prevent SequenceBreaking. {{Downplayed|Trope}} compared to other examples on this page, though, as there is a corridor allowing you to access the Inactive Lava Zone from the Lost Rover in the Northern Blood Kelp Forest, which is located near the Mountains biome where several Reapers can be found. |
| 404 | * The ''Truck Simulator'' games, being something that has been incrementally updated and expanded for over a decade now, is bound to have some standout traits that reflect its development history. |
| 405 | ** In ''[[VideoGame/EuroTruckSimulator Euro Truck Simulator 2]]'', you may notice that many cities, particularly older ones, have a bus station in them; these are accessible, but serve absolutely no purpose. This was a holdover from a very early development roadmap: The intent was that, after the game's release, SCS Software would reuse the game's map and assets to create an intercity coach driving simulator, and the bus stations were a bit of future-proofing for that. Instead, ''Euro Truck Simulator 2'' became a big surprise hit, and it was decided to focus on updating and improving that instead. The bus stations would still stick around for a surprisingly long time, continuing to be present in many cities added in DLC expansions as late as 2021's ''Iberia''. It wouldn't be until 2023's ''West Balkans'' DLC that cities finally stopped having bus stations by default, seemingly after SCS realised that, a decade on, a coach simulator wasn't happening anytime soon. |
| 406 | ** One marked city in ''VideoGame/AmericanTruckSimulator'' is the minuscule settlement of Hilt, whose only noteworthy feature in real life is that it's the last exit off the I-5 in California before reaching the Oregon border. Fans broadly agree that Hilt would never be featured in the game had it been created today, and the only reason it is present is because, in the base game before Oregon was added, Hilt would've allowed players to drive to California's northern edge. |
| 407 | *** Somewhat similarly, Huron, a very small city in California's San Joaquin Valley, is also featured despite many players believing that a much larger and more noteworthy Central Valley city like Hanford or Visalia could've taken its place. This is usually chalked up to the developers not being very experienced with American geography that early in the game's development, and Huron has stuck around even when California was remade several years later, as the city does at least still represent the Central Valley's agricultural industry quite well. |
| 408 | * ''VideoGame/StardewValley'': |
| 409 | ** Emily and Shane were originally not marriage candidates - as a result their heart events prior to "Dating" are very much platonic (at best). While Shane has a defined story arc, Emily's heart events are largely "Emily does something weird and the player watches/reacts". The player isn't even ''in'' Emily's earlier heart events! |
| 410 | ** After Emily was added as a marriage candidate in version 1.1, the subplot involving Clint's crush on her remains unchanged, even if you marry her. Although her 10-heart event seems to suggest that he's accepted your relationship and given up on her, his heart events still show him pursuing her (Even ''if you married her'' originally!). As of version 1.4, Clint's 6-heart event where he asks Emily on a date no longer plays if you've seen Emily's 8-heart event or married her. |
| 411 | ** Many of the overworld sprites for the villagers are based on earlier appearances of the characters. Harvey is missing his moustache, Maru doesn't have glasses, Abigail wears a ribbon not seen in her portrait, Elliott's hair is significantly shorter, and Sebastian wears a t-shirt instead of a hoodie. While Haley's sprite matches her portraits, the photos in her 8-heart event use an earlier sprite where her dress was green instead of blue. Outside of the winter outfits added to version 1.6, these sprites have remained mostly unchanged. |
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