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Fanon Discontinuity / Video Games

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"There's no such thing in the world as absolute reality. Most of what they call real is actually fiction. What you think you see is only as real as your brain tells you it is.... It's not whether you were right or wrong, but how much faith you were willing to have, that decides the future."
— Solid Snake encouraging use of this, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Video games are by and large an interactive medium. If a game fandom plays something and finds that it doesn't add up, it's just as easy to dismiss.

Note 1: Please do not include examples based only on adaptational changes unless Word of God has declared an adaptation canon. For example, the Pokémon anime is not canon to the Pokémon video game series and thus cannot be discontinued, but adaptations of Devil May Cry can.

Note 2: Do not post examples of personal discontinuity. Examples should only be of groups of fandoms.

Video Games with their own pages:

  • Ace Attorney:
  • Despite claims from Gearbox Software that it is official canon, most fans refuse to believe that Aliens: Colonial Marines is a legitimate part of the Alien mythology. Aside from the oft-maligned A.I. issues, glitches and weak storyline, the game is filled with nonsensical explanations and revelations about everything that happened after the events of Aliens, including Weyland-Yutani suddenly discovering and building their own xenomorph harvesting operation in a few short weeks, the Sulaco arriving back in orbit of LV-426 through a complicated and bizarre series of events and Dwayne Hicks suddenly being revealed alive and well (with the explanation regarding his survival reaching Voodoo Shark status). Fans were much more favorable towards the next game, Alien: Isolation.
  • Fans of the Army Men franchise tend to not count anything after Sarge's War, which is justified since most are In Name Only, with no semblance to the 3DO series.
  • Old school fans of the Backyard Sports series think all games after online play was removed did not happen.
  • "The Baldur's Gate series and Planescape: Torment never received novelizations. Ever" is usually considered an iron-clad rule in most fan circles devoted to discussing or modding the Infinity Engine. Heaven help you if you're talking about the Baldur's Gate games and refer to Abdel Adrian (the novels' version of the protagonist) as if the Player Character is canonically him. Eventually it was established by various official materials that the novels were not canon.
  • Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts gets this treatment from fans of the first two games due to changing the traditional platforming action to relying on the use of custom-made vehicles for the bulk of the game. The fact that the game also regularly insulted the fans of the first two games for liking platformer collectathons didn't help either...
  • Batman: Arkham Series:
  • BioShock: Every game past the original is subject to this by portions of the fanbase, creating a large Broken Base in this regard.
  • Supporters of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, the fifth game from Breath of Fire for the PlayStation 2, tend to be strikingly uncommon. It's not unheard of for fans of the series to have written it out of their minds altogether, or treat it strictly as an alternate universe. While its story has received some praise, it presents an incredibly jarring tonal and visual shift from the previous four games that's hard to reconcile; having to reach a certain point late in the game under a stressful time limit doesn't exactly make it better. The franchise was not helped by a decade-long gap between releases and what happened for Breath of Fire 6 (the mobile game) after it was repeatedly delayed and released in 2016: it was a Japan-only release, and its servers shut down in 2017.
  • Even gamers who liked the original Bubsy the Bobcat games, as repetitive and derivative of other mascot platformers as they were, disowned Bubsy 3D for the PlayStation. The major reasons for this abysmal reputation are spectacularly unfortunate timing and just how bad Bubsy 3D is as a platformer. The developers of Accolade decided to take the series in a 3D direction and started production of Bubsy 3D... around the same time as Nintendo started to develop Super Mario 64. Bubsy 3D came out four months after the much better Super Mario 64 had been released, and failed miserably at the genre even by the early standards of lesser 3D games. They also decided to take Bubsy's snarky commentary to a whole new level—which would have been fine, except that rather than hiring Rob Paulsen again, they hired Lani Minella, who provided what may be the most annoying voice possible for the character (think Omochao, but with a Brooklyn accent; it's literally the same voice actress). It honestly made the older Bubsy games look absolutely brilliant in comparison.
  • Many Castlevania fans do a sort of reverse Fanon Discontinuity in that they refuse to accept Koji Igarashi's retcon of Castlevania Legends, and thus count more games than Konami does.
  • Some players of Call of Duty: Black Ops disregard III for its dark, and mind-screwy campaign. And don't even bother with IV's lack of story. Preferring to consider II's Golden Ending as the true ending of Black Ops storyline.
  • Corpse Party fans often like to pretend Blood Drive never happened, due to a variety of Fan-Disliked Explanations that ultimately ended up putting the franchise into a state of dormancy for almost ten years now. There's even a small but notable segment of fans who pretend everything past the first game never happened, due to the Explorer Horror elements being traded for a Visual Novel segment to a story that was closed-and-shut with the first game.
  • Chrono Trigger:
    • Though its gameplay was well-received, the plot of the sequel Chrono Cross irked many fans of the original game by heavily implying the deaths of its three main characters, and resolving the fate of Schala's disappearance by making her clone a blonde with a bad Australian accent and denying her brother Janus/Magus any chance of personal closure by deleting his intended role from the story. On top of that, the entire second half of the game consisted of a number of concepts (Chronopolis, the Dragon Gods, etc.) that were only vaguely explained, if at all, rendering it a Mind Screw by default. Compared to its predecessor, it's often considered a disappointment.
    • Some fans dislike Cross enough to ignore the DS port of Trigger, which includes new content that canonically ties the first game's story to the latter to the outcome seen in the latter game.
    • Many fans were not pleased when the DS port canonized Dalton as the agent for Guardia's destruction.
  • City of Heroes:
    • Players refusing to accept the end of Vivacious Verandi's story arc (After nearly unleashing a demonic plague on St. Martial, the player is informed that they're idiots and forced to clean up the mess, instead of allowing the Wailers to run rampant and destroy the island), players refusing to accept the notion that Epic Archetypes are intended to be Exactly What It Says on the Tin note , a whole level of Fan Dumb for the cooperative zones...
    • A large number of players were not happy with the developer's attempt to explain the five origins available to the player when building their character by tying them all back to Magic. Anyone can see why this irritates players who like to use the Science, Technology, Mutation, and Natural origins. Fortunately this information is quite easy to ignore as it has very little impact on the games content.
    • Many people found the second series of tie-in comics to City of Heroes to be practically Canon Defilement. It basically takes the canon's highest tier heroes and turns them into a bunch of Out of Character bickering kids. Even though the lowest level you can fight any of them in game is at 30 (but only one of them; everybody else is 40+ and always at least an Elite Boss), they're shown to be regularly defeated by mooks intended for lower level players. The sheer level of Idiot Balls, Ass Pulls, Deus ex Machina, and the utter overabundance of cliches and Dead Horse Tropes (one is expected to believe that a powerful psychic like Sister Psyche with a history of years would still not be used to Perverse Sexual Lust and still overreact to it?) rubbed players the wrong way. Sadly, it's still considered canon judging by how many elements were migrated over, but most people will just treat anything not given an in-game reference as having never happened.
    • You have to discard the given backstory for the Mission Architect if you want to use it at all. Either that, or assume your character is stupid enough to allow himself to be disintegrated and uploaded by a machine built by two known supervillain groups (the Evil Overlord's pet Mad Scientist and the local Evil Co.) and let them have read-write access to his brain. Several authors have written MA arcs in which heroes shut down this Incredibly Obvious Trap.
    • The Ouroboros system for re-visiting old content is linked in the canon to Nemesis, which makes employing it an act of dubious intelligence.
  • Command & Conquer:
  • The Appaloosa-developed Contra games Contra: Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure sat very badly with fans; even Konami themselves canceled plans to release them in Japan. The few Contra fans who actually pay attention to the series' storyline tend to ignore the retcons made to the timeline in Contra 4, in which Operation C (originally a solo mission by Bill Rizer against a nameless nation who were cloning the aliens from the first two games) is now revised into a previous mission of "Mad Dog" and "Scorpion" (not Bill and Lance themselves, but the new characters from Contra 4 who inherited their former American nicknames) against the alien Black Viper, which ignores the fact that Operation C was actually a single-player only game and that the stages were clearly set in artificial labs and lacked usual Womb Level seen at the end of other games.
  • Many Crash Bandicoot fans prefer to pretend that any games beyond Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped/Crash Team Racing doesn't exist due to differing developers post-Naughty Dog (although opinions are divided on Crash Bash and Crash Twinsanity in this regard). Also, most fans of the Naughty Dog games (and fans of the series in general) want to pretend that Crash of the Titans and Crash: Mind Over Mutant don't exist due to the numerous characterisation, design and gameplay changes. Activision themselves seem to have caught on, as 2020's Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time picks up right after Warped, though Paul Yan states that the post-ND games simply come after this entry.
    Paul Yan: ...like this joke that's kinda acknowledging the fact that it's ignoring some of the other sequels that are coming after this in its chronological timeline.
  • A lot of people will like to pretend that the mind-shattering revelation revealed during the final trial of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, including the reality television plot and the fake personalities, identities, talents, and backstories, never existed, and that the mastermind was lying about the whole thing.
  • Many Dead Rising fans choose to ignore the existence of the poorly received fourth game or at least pretend that the radically changed version of Frank West isn't actually the beloved protagonist, jokingly dubbing him "Hank East".
  • Dead Space was a highly praised horror game that ends on a major revelation, which is neatly tied up come the end of Dead Space 2; the sequel even ends on a vague And the Adventure Continues teaser, ending on a good note if a sequel never came. Come Dead Space 3, all of Isaac's resolved issues are brought back and piled onto new character Carver, the game starts with a sort of Excuse Plot, and the entry is widely seen as a Trilogy Creep to a two-part story. Of course, this wasn't helped by the game pushing micro-transactions and co-op, Day 1 DLC, moving the series further from Survival Horror, and including the unpopular Ass Pull twist; top it off with a Bittersweet Ending that was undone by a DLC epilogue released just one month after the core game, with said epilogue indicating that humanity is doomed and everything Isaac did was for nothing, and it's unsurprising that numerous critics and fans tore it apart with criticism. If you don't believe fans would be that upset, the Broken Base entry on the YMMV page is several entries long.
  • Devil May Cry:
    • The plot of 2 is so badly written and incomprehensible, even for an Action Game, that fans simply ignore it altogether. Even Capcom has joked about how bad this one was. An indication on how the developers feel about Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3 is a prequel set before the first game and Devil May Cry 4 is a sequel to the first, taking place between 1 and 2 (then, much later, retconned to take place after 2). There is a nod to this in Dante's guest appearance for the PS2 port of Viewtiful Joe: When he confronts Alastor (who is revealed to be the spirit of the blade Dante received in the first game), Dante is verbally eviscerated for not bringing him along to "Somewhere Island" (Dumary Island, the locale where most of 2 takes place). Dante hysterically retorts, "I don't remember that!"
    • The same goes for the Devil May Cry: The Animated Series, despite Word of God declaring it canon. However, some fans say they'll stop ignoring it once it gets properly brought up in-game. The anime's case isn't helped by the fact that in Devil May Cry 4, Dante and Trish are portrayed as partners, while in the anime the two are working independently. (This is actually explained in a drama CD that was released not long after the anime wrapped up, but said drama CD never made it outside of Japan.)
    • Devil May Cry 5 seems to have definitively canonized both the second game and TAS: a prequel novel, Before the Nightmare, features Lucia (and explains where Dante's Balrog Devil Arm comes from), whereas both Morrison and Patty appear in the game proper (the former in person, the latter a brief cameo via phone). Even so, the "History of DMC" featurette included in 5 glosses over 2 during its recap of the series narrative, sparing only a few seconds of time for it and not actually summarizing what happens in-game. note  Incidentally, this has actually saved DMC2 among some fans. Not as a game or the plot itself, but Dante's incredibly out of character behaviour making sense if you consider it depression resulting from him having lost all his known family by that point in time.
    • There are also some fans that refuse to believe that anything after the first Devil May Cry is canon, as all further entries into the series were made by a different development team.
  • Some fans of Deus Ex don't acknowledge the sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, citing that it was "dumbed-down" for a more mainstream audience. To them, the game is little more than a faint echo of the original; it features small stages, few real choices, and almost all of them are subverted by being meaningless or ridiculous. The fact that the plot makes the character from the first game a secondary character and a madman and functionally erased the player's choices from the first game was something of a insult. Apparently, the game's creator really didn't want to do it and kind of shoved Invisible War out the door so he could get on with other kinds of Awesome.
  • Dino Crisis 3 was such an Oddball in the Series and a Franchise Killer that the Dino Crisis fans generally treat it as Fanon Discontinuity, which is especially tempting to do since the game is an extreme case of In Name Only, having zero ties to the first two games and technically not even including actual dinosaurs. It is actually Dino Stalker, a rather obscure light gun shooter spin-off for the PS2 released prior to Dino Crisis 3, that nebulously links together the second and third games (as the Mother Computer at the center of the plot is able to genetically engineer dinosaurs much like the similarly named MTHR computers of 3, suggesting it's their predecessor), despite failing to directly address the cliffhanger of Dino Crisis 2 that fans expected Dino Crisis 3 to resolve (the two imperiled characters at the end of Part 2 are shown to have survived, but no mention is made of how it happened).
  • Donkey Kong:
  • Most DonPachi fans don't acknowledge DoDonPachi II: Bee Storm as part of the series' canon due to being outsourced to a third-party developer and not liking the game. While Call-Backs in later games are mainly limited to DoDonPachi, DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, and DoDonPachi: DaiFukkatsu/DoDonPachi Resurrection (with SaiDaiOuJou serving as the final game in the series), and DonPachi is integral to the canon due to demonstrating just what sort of mental conditioning that DonPachi Squadron pilots must go through, one of the "stage cleared" screens for DaiOuJou refers to the game as "DONPACHI EPISODE 4", meaning that unless CAVE put out yet another DonPachi game between DDP (the second game) and DOJ (not counting the Campaign Version of DDP, which is a Game Mod and Arrange Mode rather than its own game) that nobody knows about, Bee Storm is an official and canon game in the series.
  • Double Dragon:
    • While there isn't much continuity to the franchise, fans only count the first four side-scrolling beat-em-upsnote  (as well the GBA remake of the first one and usually Neon). Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls, a fighting game based on the Animated Adaptation, was made without Technos Japan's involvement, and disliked by players for stiff controls and poor character designs. The Neo Geo fighting game is questionable, depending on whether or not one likes the movie, since some of its characters come from that.
    • And there are some people who wished Double Dragon 3 never existed, more so with the arcade version than the NES adaptation (which is completely different and overall better — but very hard — Reformulated Game).
    • Double Dragon IV, released five years after Neon in 2017, is also contentious due a combination of Once Original, Now Common and Sequelitis, though some fans are more accepting of it, if only because several members of the development team were Technos Japan veterans who worked on the original games.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Infinite World and Dragon Ball Z: Tenkaichi Tag Team are not accepted as being Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 4 and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 4 respectively despite Word of God claiming these are merely Word Sequels and indeed the next installments of the aforementioned series. That the former is a Contested Sequel and the latter suffers from Sequelitis do not help their cases at all.
  • Drakengard 2: Between a fairly middling plot that adds little to the world of the game, an infamous translation error that caused confusion among many Western fans of the series that persists to this day, and the near-total lack of involvement from Yoko Taro, who admitted to creative differences with the person at the head of the project, most fans prefer to pretend the game never happened.
  • For Dwarf Fortress players, things that used to happen in previous versions but have been patched out became so iconic folks occasionally act like they're still an integral part of the game, or at least dwarven psychology. Dwarves, for example, now avoid fire instead of ignoring it, and booze simply boils away rather than exploding spectacularly when exposed to fire, but many players still fondly remember the days of "Being on fire sure makes me thirsty for a good beer-" *BOOM*, and sometimes pretend dwarves still don't know what fire is. Same with elephants not quite being their dwarf-slaughtering past selves or carps now being just another fish instead of utter bloody terrors. All in good fun, of course, but it can confuse the occasional newcomer.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Oblivion's The Shivering Isles expansion carried the series' trend of elevating the player to the absolute top rank over the top by excising a major and distinct fan favorite personality from the continuity so the Player Character could take his place. The implausibility of elevating a mortal to Daedric Prince may have fun post-story perks, but at the time it was considered lame and raised questions about the amount of Retcons required to feature Sheogorath as a character in future titles.
    • Some problems with The Shivering Isles were put to rest in Skyrim, where Sheogorath is just as hilariously mad as ever, albeit a bit kinder (though whether or not that's a good thing is debatable). His appearance implies that he is—or was—the Champion of Cyrodiil (the protagonist of Oblivion). It seems that whoever is Sheogorath simply takes on his appearance and powers eventually, but there's nothing stopping fans from dismissing the references to the previous game as just some more of the Mad God's gibberish.
    • To say that The Elder Scrolls Online is rather divisive within The Elder Scrolls lore community is a polite understatement. It is far from uncommon to find members cherry picking elements of Online which support their already held beliefs while dismissing anything that goes against them. This is made all the easier by the fact Online was written and developed by a different team than the core series of games. One of the most prominent specific examples is Cyrodiil appearing as a temperate forest several centuries before Tiber Septim (upon his ascension as the god Talos) canonically converted in from a Mayincatec-style tropical rainforest. Lore sources in Online dismiss the idea that Cyrodiil was ever a tropical rainforest, blaming that idea on a "transcription error". The lore community acted quickly and came to settle on the idea that Talos' changes were retroactive, making it so that Cyrodiil had always been a temperate forest, to explain the discrepancy.
  • Fallout fans often divide into camps about what is and is not canon.
    • Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (not to be confused with the below-mentioned Brotherhood of Steel), while much liked as a game, is at best Broad Strokes continuity; some things honestly don't mesh.
    • The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance clone with guns/lasers known as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is, unlike the other games in the series, vehemently despised by both camps. Everyone hates it. It's so hated, in fact, that Bethesda outright declared it non-canon when they bought the series.
    • Some, though definitely a hardcore minority, deny Fallout 2 as canon. Either because it had too much lighthearted wackiness, or because it went over the top trying to be Darker and Edgier and/or Hotter and Sexier. Or maybe because the two didn't mix that well. (See New Reno: a huge casino town filled with feuding mob families, gangsters with Tommy guns and pinstripe suits, and porn studios where the player can sign up. WACKY! And EDGY!)
    • Many fans feel that Fallout 3 doesn't count as a Fallout game even if they may like the game by its own merits. Reasons for this stance vary, from the shift to first-person, Oblivion-style gameplay, the exaggerated NPC writing, incoherent world, or the different tone compared to 1/2. Or maybe for trying too hard to imitate the earlier games: Creatures and factions are inserted into the setting where they should not be, and the aforementioned wacky/edgy issues of 2 are all over the side quests. The first post-release review on No Mutants Allowed described the game as an amusement park set in the post-apocalypse, where each sidequest is just a ride with a different theme.
    • Even before its release, Fallout 4 received some negative responses from fans due to its considerable deviation from past games in tone and theme, poor quest design, and design choices that limited roleplaying, such as having a voiced protagonist, a much more limited dialog system, and having the protagonist's past be much more firmly established prior to the plot's opening. These issues all together lead some fans to slot Fallout 4 in the same category as Tactics. Some fans use canon errors (Jet being found in pre-war vaults despite being a drug created in the post-war world, the entirety of the Kid in a Fridge quest, etc) to justify considering the game non-canon.
    • Fallout 76 split the fanbase almost as soon as it was announced, with its Unexpected Gameplay Change from a traditional RPG to an online multiplayer survival-crafting-building game, inclusion of West Virginia cryptids such as Mothman, the Grafton Monster, and more (the series has typically shied away from these topics and stuck to cosmic horror when it decides to get supernatural), a complete lack of (living) human NPCs, and the inclusion (or shoehorning, depending on who you ask) of series staples like the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave, even when the timeline doesn't allow it. When the game was released it turned out to not only be a bug-ridden mess missing everything that made previous Bethesda games enjoyable, but also became a trainwreck of multiple PR failures inside and outside the game. This, ironically, made the two sides of the fanbase come together, because both sides, as well as everyone else, hated it.
    • The TV series Fallout (2024) received praise from fans upon its release, but while few begrudged its overall quality many fans chose to disregard Word of God's assertion of it being canon to the franchise timeline due to a massive Happy Ending Override for the entire West Coast.
  • Various fans of the Far Cry series would prefer to believe that the Resist ending in Far Cry 5 is just a Bliss-induced hallucination, because of the Audience-Alienating Ending — namely, that a nuclear war breaks out, preventing the Deputy from arresting Joseph Seed and forcing them to take shelter in the same bunker, where it's implied that Joseph will end up brainwashing the Deputy into his new Dragon. While the conclusion of the follow-up, Far Cry: New Dawn, has a more positive ending (the majority of the heroic characters in 5 are still alive and rebuilding their home, and Joseph can actually be brought to justice this time), many fans still prefer to go with the hallucination idea. For what it's worth, Ubisoft themselves seem to agree with the fans, as early previews of Far Cry 6 didn't include any mentions of nuclear war, either impending or past.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Many fans of Final Fantasy IV deny that The After Years happened, rejecting the retread of the first game's plot and reuse of most of the first game's dungeons.
    • Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI fans will often pick either the sprite design or the Amano design as the "real" one and totally ignore the other. It's most common with Faris and Celes, whose appearances are radically different, and Terra, depending if they prefer her with blond or green hair. Spin-offs and game FMVs typically go with the Amano designs, although they do get blended in a few cases.
    • Like with Star Wars fans, some fans deny that certain versions of the games happened. This is most common for fans of V and VI denying that the now-discontinued mobile port ever existed.
    • A small but extremely hardcore group of Final Fantasy VII fans refuse to accept the Compilation as canon, for being inconsistent with and retconning a game whose fandom had been around for several years. Some fans don't like it because it threw a lot of Fan Wank out the window by establishing things like the world not being destroyed at the end of the game. Some find that the characters are excessively Flanderized. Some fans don't like it because many of the games are simply low-quality (and even the one game widely agreed to be good in its own right, Crisis Core, is still overshadowed by its massively popular parent). The rest of the fanbase was just glad to have an explanation for some of the vaguer events. Tetsuya Nomura dredged up some of this by announcing that (in light of Final Fantasy VII Remake) the Compilation was no longer canonical except for some Broad Strokes. The Twist Ending of Remake seems to have rendered this moot, however, as the game appears to be a Stealth Sequel to the original (and, by extension, the rest of the Compilation) by means of Alternate Timeline, with the implication that the Sephiroth from the original/Compilation timeline is pulling the strings in order to rewrite history in his favour. Suffice to say, another hardcore minority of fans—even some who liked the Compilation—have refused to accept this new direction as well, believing that it either exacerbates the problem by making the plot even more needlessly convoluted, and/or that the inclusion of such tropes as Time Travel, Screw Destiny and Spared by the Adaptation are inherently at odds with the original's themes of death and tragedy.
    • Others deny that Aerith dies. Parodied nicely in this XKCD comic.
    • A good portion of Final Fantasy X fans deny its sequel Final Fantasy X-2, which is much more lighthearted and silly, and offers the opportunity to undo the first game's Bittersweet Ending by bringing back Tidus. However, this is nothing compared to the loathing towards Final Fantasy X -Will-, an audio drama included with the HD release. While X-2 finished with a Golden Ending, the audio drama undoes everything by having Yuna and Tidus break up, changing Yuna back to her meek summoner persona, introducing a previously unknown character claiming to be Auron's daughter (dangerous Mary Sue territory) and giving everyone new love interests. Oh, and Sin is revived again. The fan disowning is rarely this strong.
    • Final Fantasy X-2.5: ~Eien no Daishō~ (or "Final Fantasy X-2.5: ~Price of Eternity~"), a novel released in late 2013 to coincide with the Japanese release of the X/X-2 remaster for PS3, gets this treatment. The novel contains absurd scenes (spoilers within) of things like Tidus kicking what he thinks is a Blitzball only to blow himself up because it was actually a bomb. It's actually part of a larger story continuation but given how completely screwy this book is, it's doubtful anyone would care.
    • Some fans of Final Fantasy XIII prefer to accept Final Fantasy XIII-2 but disregard the ending of the game (due to its Diabolus ex Machina nature, particularly with Serah's death-inducing vision of the future right after it looked like she and Noel had saved history) and Lightning Returns by proxy. Then there are fans who, similar to X and X-2 above, act as if XIII never had any sequels. Ironically, whereas X-2 was criticized for its lighter tone and negation of X's Bittersweet Ending, XIII-2 was criticized for taking XIII's Earn Your Happy Ending and turning it into a "Shaggy Dog" Story that only goes back to Earn Your Happy Ending with LR's resolution.
    • Some fans of Final Fantasy Tactics deny the sort of sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance because of its radically different tone — going from a dark story of medieval politics, betrayal, and evil gods, to a bunch of modern schoolkids figuring out if they should stay in Narnia or not. There are also people among fans of both games who deny Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for not having much of a story at all, although A2 was considered to vastly improve on the gameplay of both games.
    • There used to be Tactics fans who rejected all other parts of the Ivalice Alliance subseries, but that group is shrinking now that there's been a retranslated remake and more cohesive ties between the games.
  • Final Fight:
    • Many fans of the original Final Fight don't count the 3D games Revenge and Streetwise (which both had problems with their Video Game 3D Leaps), and only consider the sequels that were released for the SNES (Final Fight 2 and 3). Streetwise was also so critically panned that Capcom not only canceled the Japanese localization, the game's failure was rumored to be the cause of Capcom Production Studio 8's closure.
    • Alternatively, for many fans of the original Final Fight, there hasn't been a true sequel yet. Final Fight 2, 3, and especially Streetwise don't exist. Capcom seems to have had a similar mindset for years, as the only character from the sequels to appear in any significant capacity within the Street Fighter verse was Maki from 2, who was ported over from Capcom vs. SNK 2 to the portable versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3. It wouldn't be until almost two decades later (August 2019), during Season 4 of Street Fighter V (and the 20th anniversary of the original Final Fight), that the third game would be acknowledged with the surprise but welcome inclusion of Lucia. It should be noted that SFV also acknowledges Cody's surname which originated from Streetwise (Travers), with the Shadaloo C.R.I. section of the Capcom Fighters Network website giving Kyle (Cody's younger brother) his own profile, suggesting that aspects of Streetwise are canon even if the game itself is not (a similar stance taken with the existence of the Street Fighter EX originals).
    • Mighty Final Fight, a Super-Deformed spin-off for the NES, is similarly disregarded, though not because of its quality — the game, which had a moderately positive reception, is a deliberately comedic retelling of Final Fight that wouldn't mesh well with the actual canon. Same goes for Alpha Cody and Alpha Guy's stories in Final Fight One for the GBA, framed as their Street Fighter Alpha selves somehow reliving the events of the first game.
  • A good majority of F-Zero fans prefer to believe that Maximum Velocity never happened for one reason or another... despite existing in an Alternate Timeline where the Big Accident doesn't seem to have happened and the F-Zero League never implemented the new rules/mechanics first seen in X as a result. GP Legend is no different... despite being a non-canon series to begin with. Nintendo seems to be on a similar wavelength with both series, as all the GBA games aren't even referenced in Super Smash Bros. Brawl or 3DS/Wii U.
  • When Guilty Gear -STRIVE- brought Bridget back to the Guilty Gear series after a long hiatus, one of the things she underwent was a Character Development arc where she comes out as a transgender woman, having previously been the fandom's poster child for crossdressing male characters (with one of the most notable memes of her being "Everybodynote  is gay for Bridget"). While this development was well-received by LGBTQ+ fans, as well as those getting into the series just for the trans rep, many other fans were nonplussed about this, refusing to accept her gender transition and continuing to insist she's a boy (whether due to questioning the quality of her arc's delivery or accusing Arc System Works of Pandering to the Base). A notable example of this non-acknowledgement of canon comes from Image Booru sites, with many of them continuing to mandate that fan art of Bridget use masculine tags; despite Danbooru (one of the largest booru sites) holding discussions about how to handle Bridget fan art going forward, which included a possible compromise of keeping her tagged as a boy in pre--STRIVE- (and thus pre-transition) fan art and using feminine tags for fan art based on her -STRIVE- appearance (as well as in hypothetical future games), that site ultimately went with the decision to go with the majority of booru sites in continuing to classify her as a boy.
  • Halo:
    • Depending on who you ask, the series consists of only the games, only the games and certain novelizations, or the games and all of the novelizations.
    • Most agree the poorly written and character-derailing Halo: Glasslands is by far the worst Halo novel. That it's not only canon, but disregards previously well-defined characters and spends most of its time bashing Dr. Halsey doesn't help. The two subsequent Kilo-Five books, Halo: The Thursday War and Halo: Mortal Dictata, are also widely disliked, with many fans preferring to pretend the entire trilogy never happened (even Halo's main creators have seemingly revised or retconned away many of their most contentious aspects).
    • If you went to Bungie.net on the eve or right after a new episode of Halo Legends comes out, you could have played a game of "Count the number of responses to They Changed It, Now It Sucks! threads that are some permutation of 'It's not like this crap is actually canon, so who cares?'"
    • Halo: Reach has been viewed as discontinuity by fans disappointed that it retconned significant portions of the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach. There's even a fansite called "Halo Reach Is Not Canon" devoted solely to this aspect of the game.
    • And then Bungie left the series to do their own thing again, while Microsoft created 343 Industries to make more Halo. This was the knee-jerk reaction. While Halo 4 ended up being relatively well-received, the story direction of post-Bungie Halo has still been heavily criticized in a number of circles.
    • The above sentiment only worsened once Halo 5: Guardians came out, thanks in large part to it derailing Cortana into a villain and turning Halo into a generic "A.I. rebellion" story while simultaneously abandoning a bunch of much more interesting plot threads (the Forerunner-Flood Myth Arc, the post-Schism Covenant, ONI's shady dealings, etc.). Even many who loved Halo 4's plot were sorely disappointed, while most fanfic writers seem to have ignored 5's plot altogether in favor of other plot threads.
  • Heart of the Alien, the unpolished corporate sequel to Another World, isn't OK even by Eric Chahi, the original author, much less the fanbase. Amusingly, ignoring this game and its extended version of the story is made extremely easy by the fact that while the original game was released on every 16- and 32-bit gaming platform in existence, Heart only had one release, and it was on the Sega CD add-on. The fact that it turns the original game into a "Shaggy Dog" Story by anticlimactically killing Lester (in an optional death scene) probably doesn't help.
  • Almost the entire existence of HeroSmash is disregarded by most people who play AdventureQuest Worlds, albeit for much pettier reasons than other examples (namely, the graphics). It is implicitly encouraged by the developers, who also refuse to make any mention of it in their marketing materials. Said fandom has declared they won't accept it into fan projects that span Artix Entertainment games several times.
  • Hitman: Absolution is often dismissed as non-canon despite the developers confirming it to be canon, due to the linear gameplay, lack of sandboxes, and overall disliked characterization. The fact that the devs were planning to drop the fan-favourite Bateson and replace him with an another actor didn't exactly help.
  • id Software has an odd situation with Quake and Wolfenstein 3-D. Older fans often consider all work after Quake III: Arena non-canon or it is strongly contested. Although the id games never focused much on storylines, the gameplay of their newer games is very different from their older games:
    • Quake is often considered to be a standalone game, because no Quake sequel follows the same graphical setting. Quake II is considered to be a standalone game, followed by Quake IV because they share the same setting, visual style and match somewhat in pacing. Quake III is even weirder, since it can be summed up as "shooting people over and over again."
    • Wolfenstein suffers a lot from the large gaps between releases. The first one is a childhood memory, the second is a modern classic and the third one can't live up to the hype, though the latter did spawn more successful sequels.
  • Portions of the inFamous fanbase disregard Second Son as canon, due to a unlikable protagonist that lacks character development, a shallow "Muggles vs. Metahumans" story, a cheap retcon of the consequences of 2's Good Karma ending and the fact that many fans wanted the Evil Karma ending to be canonical.
  • Try to find a Jak and Daxter fan who likes The Lost Frontier and accepts it as canon. They are far and few between. Reasons most often cited are that it was made by a different developer than Naughty Dog, many events go against what had been established in the previous games, and characters behave completely out of their norm. It also doesn't help it seems the developers just didn't care when they make glaring errors in the booklet (Misty Island is called Mysterious Island; Haven City becomes Heaven City). Some fans see it as an Alternate Universe so they can play it without getting too worked up about the inconsistencies. There are also fans that cut off the canon earlier — some accept nothing after the third game because of the Genre Shift to a combat racer, and others refuse to accept anything but the original game because of the Genre Shift from lighthearted platformer to grittier shooter/sandbox-platformer.
  • Though the fandom isn't too large, many fans of Jazz Jackrabbit do not regard the GBA port of the original for changes to the character designs and storyline (such as changing Devan Shell's name to Dark Shell and leaving out Jazz's girlfriend Eva).
  • Kane & Lynch is considered by its fandom as a decent game with many Shout-Outs to Michael Mann films. Second game? Talking about it is often considered as trolling. It turned from high paced film-like game into another generic shooter with a gimmick in form of NPC/PC character following you. And it disregards the ending of the first game.
  • The King of Fighters XII was infamously disowned by almost everyone for several reasons, such as its bare-bones presentation, a few severe glitches, and its paltry roster (especially when compared to the series' other two Dream Match Games, but the game had even less characters than the very first installment) excluding several fan-favorite characters such as Mai Shiranui. Most fans thus tell newcomers to skip directly from The King of Fighters XI to The King of Fighters XIII.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • It's not uncommon to find fans that believe the franchise should have ended with Kingdom Hearts II and pretend the following games are not canon, as it perfectly concluded the series with a Grand Finale that addressed nearly every question in the games by that point (with the exception of a few like Maleficent's whereabouts) and Sora finally returning back to the islands after three games. Especially since some fans consider the post-II games to be a Happy Ending Override that complicated the story more and more with a base-breaking antagonist responsible for the series' Ass Pulls and Retcons, constant changes in gameplay that often come off as gimmicky and less refined compared to the numbered titles, and story changes that gradually stray further from its original concept of being a Square Enix and Disney crossover.
    • Ask a bunch of Kingdom Hearts fans if Organization XIII is really dead. This lessened substantially after later games revealed that, due to the odd circumstances that led to the "birth" of the Nobodies, they could potentially come Back from the Dead. (And as of the lead-up period to Kingdom Hearts III, roughly half of them already had.)
    • Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] confirms that worlds run on their own time axis, which unfortunately caused plot holes regarding certain worlds, most noticeably Halloween Town. Many fans still insist that time flows are the same or only slightly different in at least a majority of worlds, and that Disney Town is, and forever will be, "timeless."
    • 3D in general gets this from quite a few fans — courtesy of its Scrappy Mechanic-heavy gameplay, and its exaggeration of the franchise's already infamous Kudzu Plot. Some even deem it the Kingdom Hearts equivalent of Final Fantasy XIII-2.
    • There are fans who disregard Kingdom Hearts coded for several reasons, mostly because they see it as not furthering the story of the series.
    • A lot of fans of Kingdom Hearts III pretend that the game ends with Sora and Kairi looking out to the sea in a palm tree together, cutting out the part at the end where Sora fades away due to using the Power of Waking to bring Kairi back from her death as many fans took issue over the Bittersweet Ending tone despite being the Grand Finale for the Xehanort Saga just for a cheap Sequel Hook for IV that cheats both Sora and Kairi out of their happy endings. It also doesn't help that the incident that led to the ending being bittersweet was Kairi undergoing Badass Decay and getting pointlessly killed off by Xehanort, and that the Foretellers' return was more than enough of a Sequel Hook to get fans excited without ticking off a huge portion of the fandom.
  • King's Quest: Mask of Eternity is largely ignored and/or derided by the King's Quest fanbase as In Name Only, due to its drastic change in tone, reliance on violence in a series that usually rewarded you for thinking your way out of the situation, and protagonist that wasn't a member of the Daventry Royal Family. Similarly, Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire is often consigned because of a mediocre transition to 3D and a shift in emphasis from adventure to RPG elements. That said, the game is truer to the QFG spirit than Mask of Eternity was to KQ, and thus it's more accepted.
  • While The Last of Us Part II was widely acclaimed by critics, about half of Part I fans despise it and refuse to acknowledge its existence. This is due to a number of controversial elements, but probably the most contentious is the unceremonious murder of the well-liked original protagonist, Joel. Fans that believed his murderous death was unjustified were further angered when the game forces you to play as his killer Abby for the entire second half of the game. While an attempt was made to make her sympathetic, explaining in detail her reasons for killing Joel, it did not sit well with many players and in the end she is allowed to live by Ellie which just angered Joel's fanbase even further. Given the many controversial decisions characters make in the story, many players felt uncomfortable that they have absolutely no choice in the matter and must follow their actions even if they do not agree with them. The result was a very heated broken fanbase, and more than a year later the fiery discourse surrounding the game has hardly died down.
  • The League of Legends community has three different views on the game's lore: Either canon is as it stands presently, canon stopped when the Journal of Justice ended with a few exceptions, or canon stopped after the second-to-last Journal issue. This was due to several major retcons in the game's storyline taking place within the last year, including the removal of the Summoners (and thus players) from the game's universe, the reimagining and "nativization" of many champions, and the complete destruction and recreation of champions Karma, Trundle, and Skarner. Making it worse is the fact that new lore has been promised for years but held back by problems in the narrative department meaning large chunks of lore were cut away and replaced by either placeholders or nothing.
  • Left 4 Dead has fans that liked Bill completely deny that he is dead after saving the other survivors from the huge zombie horde in The Sacrifice campaign (plus the comic) and also believe that he is actually alive, but gravely injured. Also, Left 4 Dead fans like to pretend that Left 4 Dead 2 is not canon because of the new characters and other changes in the game while ignoring the fact that the survivors from both games do meet up in The Passing campaign.
  • When Blood Omen 2 came out, Legacy of Kain fans were pretty mortified. As it turned out, the events of the game take place in the alternative (yet canon) timeline created. The official explanation was that the events of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance made the events of Blood Omen 2 happen by giving Janos Audron to Hash'ak'gik as a host, so that he could later imprison Janos in the Eternal Prison and become the Sarafan Lord. Of course, Blood Omen 2 was released almost two years before Defiance, and none of the games so far have explained how Vorador came back to life...
  • D.W. the Picky Eater, the final entry in the Living Books series of interactive storybook CD-roms, is very shallow and cheap compared to the franchise's earlier entries due to being outsourced to Media Station, a company previously known for producing cheaper-quality Living Books clones, as well as most of the Disney's Animated Storybook series. A fair amount of fans pretend that D.W. the Picky Eater isn't a Living Book and that the series instead ended on a high note with Arthur's Computer Adventure.
  • Many, many Lunar fans tend to completely ignore Lunar: Dragon Song, if not outright pretend it doesn't exist.
  • Within the Mass Effect fandom:
    • The general response to the novel Mass Effect: Deception has been extremely negative, with an almost universal refusal to accept the book as canon. The novel was so poorly received that there is a site that lists all the continuity errors in it and the Mass Effect Wiki even issued an open letter to BioWare that requested it be declared Canon Discontinuity. BioWare announced that they'd correct the errors in a subsequent revision.
    • In Mass Effect 3:
      • Everything after the final scene with the Illusive Man and Anderson, ultimately the last twenty minutes of the game, quickly shaped to be this for many. Doesn't matter the reason (significant blood loss, continued exposure to Geth/Cerberus/Prothean/Reaper mind altering technology, stress from the fate of your species and the galaxy resting on your shoulders, or personal losses) — just forget about it. It never happened.
      • A considerable number of fans disavow everything after Shepard gets hit by Harbinger's beam, period. Some Fix Fics go as far as ignoring the entire final level (two-ish hours), while others retcon it as a dream, hallucination, indoctrination effect, or something else along that vein — promptly followed by the "real" ending.
  • Most fans of the Master of Orion franchise would rather forget about the third installment.
  • Mega Man:
    • Mega Man 7 has the infamous (and heavily debated) moment in the ending where Mega Man points his Buster at Dr. Wily after defeating him yet again, making it look like the Blue Bomber (who'd be an All-Loving Hero even if he wasn't Three Laws-Compliant) is giving serious thought to the idea of actually killing Wily. Some thought it was an interesting way to address Wily's Joker Immunity as well as explore how certain Robot Masters have higher cognitive functions approaching that of Reploids (who aren't bound by the Three Laws of Robotics), but there was a lot of outcry over this scene going against Mega Man's entire character and the Lighter and Softer feel of the Classic series compared to X, causing many fans to pretend the game ends without this particular sequence of events. This goes double for the American version, which had additional dialogue in which Mega Man claims he's "more than a robot" and openly threatens Dr. Wily, creating a Dub-Induced Plot Hole (as he still hesitates to open fire) and coming across as even edgier than the original scene. If Mega Man 8 is any indication, Capcom themselves might have felt they went too far, as the game takes great pains to highlight Mega Man's Incorruptible Pure Pureness.
    • The Mega Man X franchise gets a lot of argument from fans over what should be considered canon and what shouldn't. For example:
    • Mega Man Legends is in an odd place regards to this not because of the gameplay or story itself (in fact, the former was Vindicated by History), but because of what the backstory implies for the Mega Man franchise as a whole. The long and short of it, Legends is set thousands of years in the future of the Classic Timeline After the End, where humans and Reploids are extinct and the Carbons are Artificial Humans that have replaced them after being made by them. Considering there's almost nothing left of the world that Rock, X, Zero, Vent/Aile, and Grey/Ashe fought for since it was flooded, it provides some massive Mood Whiplash to the overall setting and tone and makes things rather depressing, especially since Legends is currently Left Hanging. As such, even fans tend to disregard Keiji Inafune's words on the matter and see it as an Alternate Timeline in the vein of Battle Network and Star Force, which is very easy to do considering, again, how Legends barely has any connections to the other Classic Timeline sub-series outside of small Call-Backs and Mythology Gags. Some of these fans speculate Legends takes place in a timeline that split off from the main series with X5's Bad Ending, due to it being heavily implied that X became the creator of Legends' Elysium.
    • The fans of Mega Man Battle Network tend to ignore the fourth game of the series, some of the reasons (a complete list would be too long) being:
      1. You have to beat the game multiple times to get all the transformations and best weapons, while in previous games such things simply are unlocked as you progress in the game.
      2. Despite the plot of the game being the scientific community's efforts to stop an asteroid from crashing into the earth, 90% of the game is centered around battle tournaments with the main characters only discovering the aforementioned crisis just before the final scenario. Note that the two plots do turn out to be connected, at least by the time of the final tournament (it's an artificial asteroid with a computer guidance system, so NAXA wants to find the best NetBattler in the world and have their Navi infiltrate the rocket to guide the asteroid away from the planet), but the potential calamity is treated as the B-plot for the majority of the game. It's telling that Mega Man Star Force 3 would recycle the "meteor is approaching the planet" plot point but treat it as integral to the main narrative.
  • Metal Gear:
    • Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has left a bad taste in many fans' mouth due to its mostly filler plot that didn't contribute much to the overall storyline (other than retconning the ending timeline of MGS3 to explain Zero's role in MGS4, explaining how Big Boss got his money, and establishing that he can't even come up with original names for his crazy eight-bit fortresses) and how it retconned Sokolov's death and Gray Fox's original backstory in order to shoehorn them into the game (considering Sokolov doesn't really do much in MPO and Null could have easily been a new character). Kojima Productions has clarified that MPO is still canonical, but they acknowledge the game's negative reception by choosing to title the next PSP game in the series Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker instead of Portable Ops 2 and promoting it as the "first true Hideo Kojima game for the PSP", while the only acknowledgement the events of MPO actually get are Kaz Miller's first words in PW talking about moving on from "all that crap in San Hieronymo."
    • There are various cut-offs where groups of fans believe the timeline starts or ends. A few fans accept everything which (in the series' timeline) was before MGS2, including the Naked Snake games (or they accept all that and MGS2, but only the Tanker chapter), thereby eliminating Raiden. Others accept the entirety of MGS2 and everything "before" it, but not MGS4. Then there are those who don't accept anything set before the original Metal Gear (which usually means MGS4 is off as well). And then there are fans who accept MGS3, but not MGS4, Portable Ops or Peace Walker.
  • Most of the Metal Slug sequels after Metal Slug 3 are disavowed by fans of the original Nazca-developed installments, as they were made after the original SNK went out of the business and without the involvement of the original Nazca team. Metal Slug 4 and 5 were farmed out to a Korean developer and were not as well received, especially due to their use of too much Frankensteined sprites. 6 and 7, which were developed by SNK Playmore, were better received, but still considered not as good as the originals by purists (especially 7, which was developed for the DS and ported to the PSP, despite the previous installments being arcade games).
  • Metroid:
  • Monkey Island:
    • Escape from Monkey Island was almost universally disliked, causing many to just pretend the series ended at The Curse of Monkey Island. At least until Tales of Monkey Island was released, meaning there's now just a gap.
    • The gap is there even if you didn't mind Escape, considering how Tales takes place after an unspecified fifth game. The only change is how big the gap actually is to you. It should be noted that a lot of the fans of Tales actually started with Escape when they were very young and didn't know there were previous games, hence the Special Editions being released.
    • There are even some who exclude Curse because Ron Gilbert wasn't involved, ending the series with Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and its Gainax Ending. However, Ron has stated that he loves Curse, despite having different ideas for the third game, thus fans generally love it too.
  • Quite a fair bit of fan creations pertaining to Mother 3 completely ignore the finale of the game in which the protagonist's brother, Claus, is revealed to have been mind controlled and forced to be a secondary antagonist, before being Killed Off for Real.
  • A lot of NiGHTS into Dreams… fans prefer to believe that NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams never happened.
  • A lot of arcade Pac-Man fans discontinue the fact that he has always been anthropomorphic, not a pizza shaped thing, despite official art always depicting him as so. Also, Pac-Man's Ghostly Adventures design with blue eyes has the same rocky reception that Sonic's Sonic Boom redesign did.
  • Quite a number of Parasite Eve fans like to forget that The 3rd Birthday was ever even a thing. To start, it has a very different tone and gameplay than the first two games and appears to treat them as Broad Strokes at best and ignore them at worst, series protagonist Aya Brea is de-aged for no reason (outside of being turned into a Ms. Fanservice with plenty of Male Gaze), and the big reveal: You are actually playing as mitochondria Eve-2 in Aya's body (who was killed in a flashback) the entire time and at the end, Aya is erased from existence in a Heroic Sacrifice that has to do with time travel, leaving Eve to take over her identity and continue the fight against future biological threats. However, in a secret ending it's implied that Aya still exists somehow. Many fans hated the twist and the Kudzu Plot so much that the game ended up being a commercial disappointment (even with a very strong marketing push) as well as killing the franchise, only being referenced in other Square Enix games by having Aya in posters or her clothes as DLC or as a bonus unlockable.
  • PAYDAY 2:
    • The sequel that was generally well liked, but many die-hard fans of the first game refuse to believe that the sequel takes place directly after the first game due to Hoxton being replaced with someone else and Bain not acting the same as he did in the first game. Some people consider the sequel a prequel instead because the heists aren't large as they were in the first game. Surprisingly noticed by the developers, who have since tied the stories together better, reintroduced Old Hoxton, and elevated the heists far beyond anything done in The Heist. Bain is still a jerk, though.
    • Starting in October 2015 with the release of the John Wick crossover, and increasingly after the introduction of The Butcher and her first weapon pack DLC, many fans bemoaned the changes in the game's tone, going from an overall serious game about crime with a subtle narrative of government corruption and conspiracies with Acceptable Breaks from Reality to a big joke ridden with out-of-place crossovers, goofy, gimmicky content and nonsensical plotlines that detracted from the immersion and aesthetic of the game, with the Chivalry Pack, Meltdown Heist, BBQ Pack, Hardcore Henry Heists and abundance of throwaway playable characters serving as prime examples. It's become so bad that some fans deny that said content exists within the game canon, or that it was all simply imagined by the Ax-Crazy protagonist, Wolf.
  • Some fans of the original Perfect Dark consider the prequel Perfect Dark Zero to be a horrible game that changed several things from the original game, and had a completely different style. Others accept it for being a decent game that just did not live up to how good the first one was.
  • Persona 3:
    • The Answer, the Playable Epilogue in Persona 3 FES, is a bit contentious due to how OOC the cast is perceived to be by many players (most notably Yukari causing the party to go at each other's throats because she wanted to risk bringing back Nyx to save the Protagonist), its difficulty, and nothing the player does affecting the story (for example, Chidori is still dead, despite whether or not you went through the conditions to bring her back, though this only applies in the English localization due to Lost in TranslationExplanation (spoilers)).
    • Certain fans, mostly Militant Shippers outright refuse to acknowledge the ending where the protagonist passes away on Aigis's lap, as the blatantly romantic undertones of the scene makes it clear that Aigis was the one who the Main character ends up with regardless of whomever the player romances with certain people favoring the New Game Plus of Persona 3 Portable's version of this scene more where The protagonist passes away in the lap of whomever the player chooses.
    • A fan Q&A segment on one episode of Persona Stalker Club established that Chidori did indeed survive the events of P3, as per the new story content added to FES, with the necklace Junpei wears in Persona 4: Arena Ultimax being a gift from her. There are fans who disregard this revelation, either because Junpei's words and actions during The Answer potentially contradict this statement (again, not helped by Lost in Translation as mentioned above) or they simply think it clashes with the game's dark tone and central theme of death.
  • Most fans of the Phantasy Star series disown Phantasy Star III due to it being poorly made, overly difficult especially in the beginning stages, and its story having little-to-nothing to do with the main arc. Also, a small but vocal corner of the fandom ignores the Phantasy Star Online games, being that it has nothing to do with any of the previous games beyond some vestigial name-drops; a major complaint is the fact that Numans are a playable race, while in the 16-bit era RPGs, there was a grand total of three, and only one of them survived long enough to have a single half-blooded child.
  • Pokémon:
    • There are communities that declare that the series to have ended at various arbitrary points (usually after the demarcation by which portable platform they were on), which can lead one to wonder how anyone is left to actually partake of the Cash-Cow Franchise if it supposedly ended after Red and Blue/after Yellow/after Gold, Silver, and Crystal/etc.
    • Machoke's black "speedo" helped it stand out among the original 151, eventually making it one of the franchise's breakout mons. So when it was revealed that they were was actually black markings that looked like a speedo, many fans were not happy. To this day, it (and its evolution Machamp) are still depicted as one of the few Pokémon to wear clothes of some kind.
    • The Pokémon Mightyena is more often portrayed or considered solely a wolf despite being based more on a brown hyena (hence the "yena" in the name). This is partly because of the brown hyena being such an obscure species many people have never head of it, so they don't know what it looks like to be to see the resemblance so they assume it's a wolf, and partly deliberate discontinuity because hyenas (allegedly) just plain suck compared to wolves. It also debuted way before a proper wolf Pokémon was made (this took until Gen VII for whatever reason), so that didn't help matters.
    • As far as the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon side series is concerned, some fans of the older games like to pretend Gates to Infinity never happened due to its limited roster of Pokémon and jarring shift in tone compared to older games. This was easy to do back when the game first came out, but its sequel has made it pretty much impossible without ignoring that game as well, due to it confirming that Gates, as well as the first two games, all take place in the same world. Many characters from Gates also return in Super as optional recruits, and a remixed medley of the songs appears in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. This seems to have been toned down around the late 2010s, with Gates to Infinity starting to get Vindicated by History (at least in terms of the story) and fans starting to appreciate more positive aspects of the game. Even more so than Gates to Infinity, however, many fans would rather pretend Pokémon Mystery Dungeon never had an installment on the Wii. Unlike Gates to Infinity, Adventure Squad does not have Super Mystery Dungeon's blessing to back it up as canon outside of a few cameos.
  • [PROTOTYPE 2] tends to be ignored by many fans of the original game due to its treatment of the original's protagonist. To be more specific, in the original Alex Mercer was an anti-heroic jerkass; blunt and eager to charge headlong into combat. He was motivated primarily by revenge, but also risked his neck to save Manhattan and stop the spread of the virus and was even willing to sacrifice his life to stop a nuclear bomb from blowing up the city. He was hardly a "nice guy", but he had some redeeming qualities and was the lesser of the various evils. In the sequel, he's suddenly a smooth-talking, snarky Evil Overlord, who wants to spread the virus because of a disdain for humanity (the reasons for which were never explained in-game at all, but rather in side material). Some fans that might be willing to go with Mercer's portrayal in the second game feel that the side material does a poor job explaining things and prefer to come up with their own explanations (often treating the Mercer from the first game and the one from the second game as separate beings).
  • Rainbow Six: Lockdown and Vegas are disregarded by many fans of the original PC trilogy, due to the deviation from the classic tactical shooter gameplay. Some go back even further and argue that Rainbow Six 3 for the Xbox either never existed or is not the "true" Rainbow Six 3.
  • Ratchet: Deadlocked suffers from a fairly large share of people who say it never existed. The fact that it's pretty self-contained and appears to have been a spin-off in the first place helps. It does have its fans, though, who appreciate that it took the combat from previous installments and honed it to a razor's edge, even if it's at the expense of the exploration and platforming the series was also known for. Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank also suffer from this, since they were not made by Insomniac Games, but rather High Impact Games. The former's dull story and glitches may also contribute to its hate.
  • For most Rayman fans, there are absolutely no such things as Rabbids.
  • For fans of the classic Resident Evil series, many of them refuse to admit there are Resident Evil games beyond Resident Evil 3 or Code: Veronica, due to the series taking on a new direction by Resident Evil 4. Then there are people who refuse to acknowledge Resident Evil 5 or Resident Evil 6. Resident Evil: Revelations was at least accepted enough to be ported from the 3DS to consoles and start its own subseries with the release of Revelations 2.
  • RuneScape is well-known for its excellently written quests, except for one infamous example, Salt in the Wound. Supposedly the conclusion of the series of the mind-controlling sea slugs bent of world domination, it involves The Dreaded Mother Mallum being crushed by a pillar. This quickly became the most ridiculed thing ever in the game, with players making every possible (bad) joke involving a pillar (e.g. "it's a bird, it's a plane, it's a pillar!"). A popular fan theory is that when Mother Mallum temporarily take control of the player, she never left, and the rest of the storyline is a fantasy she has trapped the player in.
  • Many fans of the Saints Row series, particularly fans of the first two games, disregard Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV due to a case of Reverse Cerebus Syndrome cranking up the silliness and a perception of Badass Decay turning the 3rd Street Saints from a Badass Crew into pop culture celebrities, and then to the White House. While the latter two games have just as many fans as detractors, the detractors are very vocal and wish for a hypothetical fifth game to erase them from the continuity, which Agents of Mayhem kind of did. Unfortunately, the initial price for this was erasing the Saints from existence and undoing everything the Playa accomplished. As for the reboot, both fans of the first two games and the latter two agree it appeals to neither.
  • A good number of fans refuse to acknowledge every Silent Hill sequel after Silent Hill 4: The Room on the grounds that they were not done by the original team at Team Silent, some going so far as to label them as licensed fan-games because of it. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories averts this, even while the matter of 0rigins and Homecoming races towards Broken Base territory. Shattered Memories is a "re-imagining" of the first Silent Hill — it's different from the first four in a completely deliberate way. Most people who worry about canon are content to just label it a side-story or alternative universe (as a sequel to Silent Hill's bad ending). Then there's the overwhelmingly negative reception that Silent Hill: Book of Memories received after the trailer was unveiled.
  • The Sims 3 messes with established characters enough that many fans of the two originals choose to ignore its impact on the series' canon, even if they do enjoy it for the improved gameplay. The announcement of The Sims 4 brought even more discontinuity. Similarly, some fans choose to ignore the canon status of console spin-offs and other one-off games in the series (like The Sims Stories or The Sims Medieval), either dubbing them "alternate universe" installments or just pretending they don't exist.
  • Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, similar to many other examples on this list, was produced by a different developer from its predecessors, and faced criticisms for its gameplay and story (the latter especially). Though the game maintained its fair share of fans despite that, opinion only started to shift from the game being a Contested Sequel to full-on fandom-discontinuity when Sanzaru Games confirmed that they would not be making a sequel. The game has a massive cliffhanger with the titular character stuck in Ancient Egypt, and one former ally escaping prison and sending her ex postcards. While there are still a few people who appreciate Thieves in Time, many fans today insist that the third game is the last.
  • The DS version of Snowboard Kids never happened, according to fans of the first games.
  • Soulcalibur V is widely seen as the black sheep of the Soul series for having a controversial yet paper-thin plot that arbitrarily skipped ahead seventeen years, shelved many series mainstays (even outright killing some of them off-screen) while replacing them with Suspiciously Similar Substitutes that received little development (complete with probably the epitome of Designated Hero and Unintentionally Unsympathetic as the main protagonist), and made most of the returning cast immortal or slow aging for various contrived "reasons," all while leaving numerous plot threads dangling. A lot of fans hoped there'd be a Reset Button in the future and even supporters tend to pick and choose or reinterpret aspects of the narrative as they see fit. That first camp eventually had their wish granted, as Soulcalibur VI would return to the time period of Soulcalibur's story, sort of like what Mortal Kombat did with its ninth game. And much like MK9, it turns out the events of the original timeline are still canon to this new course of history... as a Bad Future. Naturally.
  • Spyro the Dragon:
    • Many disregard anything past the first three games. Given that the next console game was by a different developer and had a sharp quality nosedive, the cut-off point is fairly clear and most fans don't care to know what happened afterwards.
    • Reaction to the fifth game, Spyro: A Hero's Tail varies; some like it for the platforming gameplay and new characters, some dislike it because of the new characters—and, of course, because it wasn't part of the original trilogy. Some purists accept it, many don't. The same applies to the Game Boy Advance games made by Digital Eclipse; some like them and consider them faithful to Insomniac's trilogy (including Ted Price), while others either dislike the isometric perspective or hate them for not being made by Insomniac.
    • And on the other side of the coin, there are fans who pretend the Insomniac trilogy was never made.
    • On the shipping side of things, Ember from A Hero's Tail stops crushing on Spyro and falls for another character in Shadow Legacy, a development fans almost exclusively ignore.
  • Star Control 3 is disowned by nearly every fan of the series, plus the makers of the first two games. Between reused dialogue, retcons, But Thou Must!-style Nonstandard Game Overs, cryptic Broken Bridges, and perhaps more than anything (though perhaps not), the Game-Breaker Doogs, a race that can be converted early in the game, whose ships are more powerful than any other ships in the game (they're fast, maneuverable, can auto-fire their cannon at nearby ships, and quickly regenerate) it had something to annoy everyone. Even some of the game's characters complained about The Power of Friendship endgame.
  • Star Fox:
    • Many fans would like to ignore Star Fox Command, made easier by the game's Multiple Ending chop suey and the fact that the next non-remake Star Fox game, Star Fox Zero, was a reimagining of Star Fox 64. An official statement during the Wii era indicates that this was also canonically in play before Zero came along, with Satoru Iwata noting that if another title were to have popped up, it would've either been set post-Assault or pre-Command.
    • Some would also like to believe there was no Star Fox Adventures, if it wasn't for Krystal's appearance in Star Fox: Assault.
    • The aforementioned Zero brought everything full circle due to its mixed-to-poor reception and status as the series' second Continuity Reboot (albeit one that heavily takes cues from 64), with a common reaction being that the series should've just followed Iwata's Word of God and resumed from where Assault left off.
    • And then there are the "SNESsers" who cannot accept Star Fox 64, preferring the SNES game (optionally including the cancelled-but-eventually-released Star Fox 2) and its accompanying comic. Or, at least, they reject the changes in 64 that contradict SNES canon.
  • Star Wars:
    • Like all SW products, Star Wars games are regulated by an official list, making them "canon unless the movies say otherwise." note 
    • Playing Knights of the Old Republic? It's not a matter of if you throw out some of the canon, it's when. Some do it in the first screen of the game by choosing a female Revan. Others cringe at the Bastila romance arc or think the Light Side ending was jarring in light of the Brainwashing for the Greater Good stunt the Jedi Council pulled. Second game? Well, LucasArts made the Exile female as an apology over the controversy in declaring Revan a guy, but tell it to players who tend to play Exile as a guy! (The Handmaiden having much better Character Development than the Disciple helps.) The book Revan is also looked upon with massive controversy. Either you think the Sith Emperor is the scariest thing ever, or he's every BioWare villain cliche in one package. There's enough annoyance about MMO games in general for some fans to ignore the rest just based on that, but when you get into Star Wars: The Old Republic and you find the Exile reduced to a passive, non-entity of a Force Ghost hanging on only to comfort Revan (a guy who betrayed the Exile on several levels) and Revan launching a genocidal campaign with a Rakata robot factory to kill off 98% of the Imperial population. And the Imperial players are the ones saving the galaxy by putting him down like a rabid mutt? Pick your cutoff.
  • Story of Seasons:
  • Street Fighter:
  • Fans of the Streets of Rage games like to pretend that the localized version of the third game never existed due to several changes made to it: Axel, Blaze, and Skate had their iconic colors changed, which didn't sit well with fans. The story got butchered by changing it from a plot about "The Syndicate wants to use nuclear bombs to blow up the city and cause a war between two countries" to "The criminal empire aims to cause general destruction and mayhem with their goons and generic bombs" while the heroes just stumble their way forward with very little leads in between levels. When the fourth game was made, any references made to the third would be based on the Japanese version.
  • Suikoden IV has plenty of hate for feeling rushed, the boring ocean being a world map, having the Rune of Punishment being awful (despite being a True Rune), as well as a few other things.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: Many fans of the game acknowledge it as the only Yoshi game ever made, and disregard the rest.
    • There are some fans who do not recognize the American version of Super Mario Bros. 2 as a real Mario game, mostly due to it actually being a Mario-infused version of Doki Doki Panic. This is mostly a case of the dramatically different gameplay, as opposed to The Lost Levels, which is viewed by those fans as the legitimate sequel. Even those who don't mind the game's origins are still doubtful at its canonicity due to the All Just a Dream setting.
    • The (admittedly smaller) portion of the fanbase that throws the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 into this does so in part because it's a Mission-Pack Sequel and in part because Shigeru Miyamoto didn't do any work on the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 but did do work on Doki Doki Panic (which, as noted above, was later adapted into the American Super Mario Bros. 2). That Doki Doki Panic was based on a prototype of Mario 2 that was shelved during production is another point of argument. All that said, elements of both The Lost Levels and SMB2 do make further appearances in later games, which aren't subject to this reaction generally.
    • The official confirmation that the events of Super Mario Bros. 3 are part of a stage play has been rejected by passionate fans, who feel this undermines the game's impact and legacy.
    • Nintendo officially considers Super Mario Run to be a "mainline" Super Mario game, even putting it alongside the other Mario platformers on the franchise's website. However many fans prefer to see it as a spin-off instead of a main entry, due to its different control style to 2D Mario gameplay compared to other 2D Mario games and being on mobile devices as opposed to a Nintendo console. This even led to issues when Super Mario Bros. Wonder was announced, with many fans referring to the game as the next mainline 2D title after New Super Mario Bros. U and Princess Daisy's and Yoshi's playable debut in a 2D Mario game, despite Run having released between them. Contributing to the confusion, Nintendo officially considers, alongside some other fans, Wonder the first traditional 2D side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. game in more than 10 years while still acknowledging Run and the Super Mario Maker series official status as mainline games.
    • Though their canonicity has not been officially confirmed or denied, the Mario edutainment games, including the Mario Discovery Series, are generally not considered canon by fans to the rest of the Mario games.
    • Many Mario Kart fans refuse to acknowldge that Mario Kart Tour is part the main Mario Kart series and prefer to see it as a disconnected side game (similar to the Mario Kart Arcade GP series and Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit) despite Nintendo clearly considering it as such. The reasons for this include the game's infamous gacha mechanics and microtransactions, the fact that it doesn't have a proper set of cups and has players wait for certain tracks to be available, and many players not being happy with Nintendo giving a mobile game more attention than a console game, with it being constantly updated with new karts and characters such as the various Kongs, Pauline, Birdo, Chargin' Chuck, and Kamek, characters that fans have wanted for many years. The initial heat died down a bit with the announcement of the Booster Course Pass DLC for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe where Tour's exclusive tracks and most beforementioned characters were added into a console game, but the fact remains that many fans still refuse to consider Tour as a mainline Mario Kart game. Like with Super Mario Run, a particular distinction also exists in that, while officially a mainline game, it's not a numbered entry like console games have been since Mario Kart 7.
    • Bowser Jr. is not Peach's son but this hasn't stopped fans from elaborately theorizing how he is. Similarly the Koopalings are not Bowser's kids but rather random Child Soldier minions but fans scoff at the notion, though admittedly the games themselves support the belief depending on the title. Some fans who are slowly starting to adapt to this have the Koopalings be adopted by Bowser so they can still technically be considered his kids.
    • The Sequel Reset at the beginning of Yoshi's New Island that cancels out the beautiful ending to its predecessor Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is disliked by many players, both those who like the game and those who don't. The completely unexplained appearance of the adult Bowser as the Final Boss doesn't help matters. Of course, those who don't like the game just tend to ignore the whole kit-and-kaboodle altogether.
    • The Paper Mario fanbase is pretty heavily divided regarding the later games. Most fans adore the first two, but anything after that is subject to debate. Super Paper Mario was the first in the series to replace the traditional turn-based combat with something entirely different, causing some to consider it to be where the problems began, though it's still generally looked upon favorably and was later Vindicated by History due to retaining the subseries' quirky humor and focus on narrative. Many fans prefer to imagine that Paper Mario: Sticker Star never happened at all, due to its widely reviled battle mechanics and its near-total lack of compelling story elements or characters compared to its predecessors. The following sequels, Paper Mario: Color Splash and especially Paper Mario: The Origami King, are seen as improvements with the former actively fixing some of Sticker Star's most glaring flaws and the latter once again retooling the tone and gameplay of the series into something closer to the originals, though some still prefer not to acknowledge anything that came after either Super or Thousand-Year Door.
  • The Super Punch-Out!! protagonist is canonically Mac but the vast design change makes few fans consider him so.
  • Starcraft II is discontinued by many fans of the original game because of its important retcons, sometimes even overriding Memetic Badass statements and lines of Brood War, and because of the not much plausible developments which happened between the two games. Among the most infamous contenders: everything that was done between Kerrigan and the Overmind and the Zerg origins, the "redemption" of the Zerg, the complexities of the Protoss society being handwaved with black & white stances, Raynor turned out from "I'm the man who is gonna kill you" (although there is a Continuity Nod with him remembering Fenix at some point), Mengsk suddenly rebuilding everything and even more in so few years despite he was left totally beaten and ruined by Kerrigan, the lackluster final battle against the Big Bad, the excess of space magic and space gods, the whole thing of prophecies as plot devices. Some vocal minorities might also do this because the multiplayer, which is a core part of the community to the point of becoming one of the most played e-sports ever, is simplified in certain aspects compared to Brood War. For example, deathballs are now common and easily exploitable, and while some players think that you need skilled micromanagment and quick planning decisions to assemble effective ones (and neuter them) because of the focus on soft and hard counters, other consider them a cheap way of issuing orders to units all packed together.
  • Super Robot Wars:
  • Any fan of Supreme Commander and its expansion Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance will tell you that Supreme Commander 2 took everything that made the original games good and threw them away. It also horribly reversed all the events of the previous game's campaign and storyline. Due to this, many fans don't regard Supreme Commander 2 as a Supreme Commander game. The game does have its own fandom that prefer it this way though.
  • Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow. Or for some, the whole second trilogy.
  • Tales Series:
    • Many fans don't count The First Strike, a theatrical prequel to Tales of Vesperia, for this reason, due to inconsistencies with the source material. This post gives a good summary of this.
    • About twenty years after its release in Japan, Tales of Phantasia finally got an official English translation — which changed some characters' names from the ones used in fan translations and even some official promo materials. Most of the established fandom sees no reason to let a little issue like canon get in the way of what they've been calling the characters for two decades already, and it's hard to blame them.
    • Tales of Symphonia was a wonderful game. What sequel? There was never a sequel as far as a lot of fans are concerned, Symphonia ended on a happy note and did not have a continued story in any game that never actually came out.
  • Many Tetris fan games intentionally ignore several of the more restrictive rules in the official Tetris Guideline, such as the unwieldy Super Rotation System, the much-maligned infinite rotation rule, and the "bag" randomizer that just deals random permutations of a sequence of all 7 pieces. As far as many fans are concerned, Tetris: The Grand Master 3's Classic mode (as seen in the famous "Invisible Tetris" video) provides the definitive Tetris rules and game mechanics, especially the Arika Rotation System, and most fan-made games tend to default to ARS over SRS.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master ACE, a console "installment" of TGM on the 360 released one year after TGM3, is regarded by fans as a monstrosity beyond Arika's control. Some wouldn't have minded the not-TGMness so much if it were not for the fact that proper ARS has to be unlocked through an Xbox Live update, and even then both versions of ARS now has a finite-though-still-lenient variant of infinite spin. As far as TGM fans are concerned, TGM3 is the last installment of the series.
  • Most fans of the Thief series don't like to acknowledge the 2014 game. Since the game was developed by a completely different company and fans feel that it's very bland compared to the deep world-building that the previous games had. Some purists go as far as to disregard Deadly Shadows as well because they feel it's not as good as the first two.
  • Tomb Raider has an extremely Broken Base, leading to different games being omitted out of existence by different groups of fans.
    • Back when the second game came out, some fans — nowadays basically extinct — considered it, and everything afterwards, a franchise-ruining blasphemy.
    • Some prefer to think that the series ended with The Last Revelation, where Lara dies after stopping Set. Given how poorly received the next two games were, and the subsequent Continuity Reboot, it's easy to see why:
      • Chronicles is disowned by everyone, being universally derided as a fast money-grab and a way to buy time for the next game. Poor plot, contradictions with previous games, mediocre level design and an already dated engine managed to rub everyone the wrong way. Probably the best thing about the game was the Level Editor, which gained its own life, providing steady improvements in design and game engine with countless custom levels and small scenarios written by the devoted community (and that's only if you bought the PC version; PlayStation and Dreamcast owners were shit out of luck).
      • The Angel of Darkness bombed after a rushed release. Glitches, a camera from hell and a trainload of game-breaking bugs were so annoying that most people couldn't focus on the plot, which by itself was a case of polarizing Darker and Edgier approach to the story. Even Eidos themselves decided that it was time to hire new developers to make future games and start a whole new continuity.
    • The new continuity is usually completely disowned by fans of Core games, since Crystal Dynamics changed a lot of the characters and considerably simplified level design. Upon its release, the fandom scorned Legend for being a dialogue-packed shooting gallery lasting for five hours, having almost nothing in common with previous games. Anniversary managed to win back many older fans, but another faction splintered, pointing out how the changes in the plot managed to flatten characters from the first game into cardboard cut-outs.
    • Underworld is often considered to be the peak of the first reboot in terms of level design, if not for all the games made by Crystal Dynamics. Conversely, its plot is seen as sketchy and hardly involving, while treating itself dead-serious, with lots of overdramatisation. Heavily pushed mommy issues for Lara didn't help any.
    • The 2013 prequel started yet another new continuity with a new origin story for Lara, and resulted in yet another break in the fanbase. While it was popular among fans, others disliked it for changing the style entirely from previous games and making Lara more vulnerable, whiny, and hating tombs, which are demoted to mini-dungeons.
  • Touhou Project:
    • The first game, Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers, came before there was supposed to be a series, and it shows. It was a completely different genre, having more in common with Arkanoid than with the later games.
    • Spin-off manga series Silent Sinner in Blue has largely been disavowed by the games' fans by introducing a pair of Creator's Pets and a number of very questionable moments usually involving the aforementioned characters. Posting a single page from it on an ImageBoard or merely mentioning the series at all risks causing backlash.
    • Double Spoiler ~ Touhou Bunkachou is subject to this trope a lot, with many of the conversations ignored entirely. An essential example is how the two reporter protagonists of the game discuss the character of Inubashiri Momiji and her actual relationship to her superior Shameimaru Aya (who is also one of the protagonists) and perhaps crow tengu in general. Another popular point of contention is encountering fan-favorite Kawashiro Nitori and talking about how her kind of youkai drown children for their "lifeforce ass balls." For added fun, consider that they chose a comparatively less horrifying story of exactly what Kappa anally extract from their victims — other accounts suggest it's blood, intestines, or even the liver.
    • Some fans didn't take to what's been revealed about Nitori in Touhou Shinkirou ~ Hopeless Masquerade well, as it portrays her as a money-obsessed atheist with shades of Jerkass, a contrast to the shyer, friendlier (if self-centered at times) type seen in the 10th game, so they're finding ways to negate it.
  • Ultima IX: Ascension? Ask a lot of the fans of the series, and they'll tell you it didn't happen. Or Ultima VIII: Pagan for that matter. Some also choose to ignore the first few games of the series, saying Ultima is only games 4-7. There was later a fan dialogue patch for Ultima IX to try and get the game closer to Ultima canon.
  • The Golden Ending in Undertale has Asriel being left to his fate of transforming back into the sociopathic flower, Flowey, after he returned the souls he had stolen. Fans who grew deeply attached to the character completely deny said character's fate and will usually make up another story or give an explanation on how they can be bought back. This is such a strong feeling that a few fan games were made to cover those theories. Notably among them is the work-in-progress Undertale: The End, which covers a widely accepted third option by the fans, where Frisk didn't stop resetting their Save time and time again until they finally managed to find a way to rescue Asriel... By donating their own soul, in order to mend his, obviously sacrificing their life in the process.
  • Many fans of the Warcraft franchise choose to ignore the plot of World of Warcraft. Here are a few common complaints:
    • Investment in canon feels pointless to some fans after character flattening, confused motivations, inconsistent pacing, ongoing poorly received continuity changes, and the static nature of what was once a more story-driven world. Changes to some characters have punctured the fandom popularity they had previously enjoyed. Thus, every lore fan has their own version of the story. Retconning the retcons has been the object of many a Fix Fic.
    • Entire expansions, or key parts of expansions, have gone through periods of Fanon Discontinuity, some of which continue today. Cataclysm, which overhauled all vanilla game content, remains controversial. Alliance players in particular reject large portions of it. The unpopular Warlords of Draenor, which takes place in an Alternate Timeline and Retcon's the orc history, can be ignored completely. Mists of Pandaria is often ignored due to its Flanderization of the Horde. Battle for Azeroth has entire phases that have met the same fandom fate as Warlords, particularly the Nazjatar zone and storyline. Events surrounding Teldrassil during Battle are extremely controversial for both factions. Just like Mists of Pandaria, many people like to ignore the faction war.
    • It's not uncommon for warchiefs, who can symbolize the overall direction of the Horde, to be rejected by Horde fans. Garrosh Hellscream, previously the subject of some interesting quests during Burning Crusade, came to be loathed by the broad consensus, with most present-day Horde players preferring not to think of his reign at all. Sylvanas Windrunner as warchief also became controversial. Because she is not unanimously despised like Garrosh, having had a much longer canon history and many fans since Warcraft III, discussions about her and her story among Horde players can become intense.
    • The Warcraft tabletop RPG and computer games often conflict, pushing fans to pick one as canon. Blizzard later split up with White Wolf and declared them non-canon.
    • Some fans refuse to acknowledge anything written by Richard A. Knaak, even as some events of his books are referenced directly in the game. Some of this can be attributed to fan reactions to his protagonist Rhonin, perceived by some as an Author Avatar.
    • Some fans also outright refuse to count the comics or manga as Warcraft canon. Again, it doesn't help that some events from these are referenced in-game. Med'an, the comics-only offspring of firmly canonical characters Garona and Medivh, even had his position as Guardian of Tirisfal became Canon Discontinuity as of Legion.
    • The main PvP area for Warlords, Ashran, has such a flimsy justification for the Alliance and Horde to be fighting (the Alliance uncovered an old ogre artifact, and the Horde's commander decides to fight them because they might use it against the Horde) that many people consider it separate from the actual story. It helps that the events of Ashran are never mentioned anywhere else in the expansion's quests and raids, and at least one of the characters involved in Ashran can be found at garrisons for both Horde and Alliance players. Indeed, the PvP aspects of the game have become increasingly detached from the story, possibly an acknowledgment of how badly fans took the story when it tried to play up PvP. Many of the PvP aspects of the later expansion Battle for Azeroth could even be done as PvE content if desired.
    • Near the end of Warlords of Draenor, one of Blizzard's employees tweeted that each member of the Burning Legion is a multiversal singularity, meaning that every demon is the same person across all alternate universes. Due to the many, many problems this creates, most fans disregarded it, and some even joke that it was a drunk tweet.
    • Some Legion-era artifact quests, class hall quests, and even entire class halls have been rejected by fans playing certain classes. Most of these are isolated enough from the rest of the game, or even contradicted by later content, that fans can ignore them.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Most Dawn of War fans deny that the Soulstorm expansion ever happened, due to the absolutely staggering amount of Game-Breaking Bugs (including one for unlimited resources) and the ridiculous unit imbalances that made it unplayable, the sheer amount of Narm made it bizarre (SPEHSS MEHREENS!), and the utter butchering of the background material (Imperial humans freely using Xeno technology, the local Alpha Legion portrayed as Khorne fanatics, the local Imperial Guard general somehow losing 100 Baneblades, a formerly quiet Necron Lord sounding like he needed a cough drop, etc.). Dawn of War II, however, states that it actually is canon, but as Cyrus says in the campaign, "What happened on Kaurava was a mistake... I will not speak of it again."
    • The revelation in Dawn of War III that Ensemble Dark Horse and Memetic Badass General Vance Stubbs is retroactively not the canon winner of Soulstorm, fell into this category for many fans, with the most vocal being (of course) Imperial Guard fans angry that one of their favorite faction's few victories in the series got written out of existence.
  • Some groups will declare the Wing Commander series ended with Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, others will only recognize the Kilrathi Saga (WC1 through 3) as canon.

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