Pragmatic Adaptation / Video Games

• Arcaea, a mobile Rhythm Game that features in-app purchases for unlocking content and a recharging stamina system similar to other "free-to-play" games (in that the player can either let the stamina recharge over time or use microtransactions to instantly refill it), underwent a lot of tweaks for the Nintendo Switch port:
  • World Mode no longer has the Stamina mechanic. Maps have been rebalanced accordingly.
  • Non-collaboration packs and songs are no longer in-app purchases; they are unlocked either by paying Fragments, progressing in Story Mode, or reaching them in World Mode.
  • Many songs that were previously World Mode unlocks were made simple Fragment-based unlocks.
  • The World Extend folder in the mobile version relies on a free/paid-hybrid model where players can either pay to unlock all songs in the pack or complete temporary unlock maps. The Switch's port's solution is to just move the World Extend songs to the Arcaea folder and make them Fragment-based unlocks.
  • Memory Archive in the mobile version consists of songs that can be unlocked with individual in-app purchases. These songs are instead made World Mode unlocks for this port.
  • A new control scheme that uses traditional controllers was implemented, due to a mandate by Nintendo that all games for the system must be playable in TV Mode.
  • Features that previously required an internet connection (Partner stats and skills and World Mode, for example) were made available even in offline play. The only things you need an online connection for are updates and purchasing DLC packs.
• More of a technical limitation, but if anyone asks why Armored Core: Formula Front has a very wildly different gameplay (simply designing and tuning a Humongous Mecha's autopilot instead of directly piloting it), it's because ACFF was released in PSP. See, the games before that were released in PS/PS2, whose controllers had far more buttons than the PSP. Not knowing how to efficiently use the PSP's button layout, FROM decided to make it a game which require as little input as possible from the players. To seemingly prove their point, the PS2 version of Formula Front does enable direct piloting of your mechs. It isn't until the ''Extreme Battle' rerelease that they finally figured out how to map the controls.
• Astyanax for the NES has a completely different story than the arcade game it's loosely adapted from.
• The games in the Baker Street Kids series for Apple ][ have a lot of changes that differ from The Bible. For example, in the "God's Creation" segment of Early Heroes of the Bible (the first half of the Book of Genesis), what we read here, with the omission of most of Genesis 2,^note God created the heavens and the earth, then the animals, then He created a man and a woman; and He named the man Adam, who then named his wife Eve (for no apparent reason), before settling them in the Garden of Eden He had created differs from what is read in the actual Book of Genesis^note God created the heavens and the earth, then He created a man, whom He named Adam, before settling him in the Garden of Eden He had created and telling him not to eat anything from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; He then created the animals for Adam to name before finally creating a woman from one of Adam's ribs; Adam then called her "woman", "for out of 'her man' this one has been taken" (Genesis 2:23c, NAB). Adam naming his wife "Eve" only occurred after the serpent had tricked her into eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil along with Adam, and they were all punished for it, with the woman being compelled to give birth to children in pain, which is why Adam giving her the name "Eve" means that she would become the mother of all the living (Genesis 3:20).
• Castlevania: Dracula X for the SNES. Cutting the levels and playable characters back to fit the SNES hardware is acceptable, though legal issues meant Shaft was cut. And Vampire Killer for the MSX.
• Creed: Rise to Glory is based on the Rocky films generally, and more specifically on the film Creed. The game strips out almost everything from the film except the fights, adds more fights, and re-contextualizes the fights to make Donnie's development feel more like a steady climb to the top than a lucky underdog's story. It also turns the Training Montage into a series of microgames.
• Dawn of War removes a lot of the mechanics from Warhammer 40,000 (cover is near-nonexistent, though it was reintegrated for Dawn of War II, and there's no Random Number God) but keeps fundamentals like squads, weapon upgrades, and different armour types in order to better work as a video game instead of a tabletop one. By necessity the factions are vastly simplified, only having access to a relatively small amount of their units, as well as lacking the individual customisation of the sub-factions. In turn it creates a new Space Marine chapter, the Blood Ravens, as well as a bunch of new characters from existing groups, to tell its own story instead of trying to adapt anything from the existing, expansive WH40K lore. The result is a game that is generally well-received by the fans and gamers in general, but isn't so much an adaptation as it is just a small piece of the Expanded Universe.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Hinokami Chronicles, the game's original event in which Tanjiro fights against Rengoku's spirit after his death in the Mugen Train arc, a duel to instill growth in Tanjiro's determination ends with Tanjiro inheriting Rengoku's nichirin blade's hilt/tsuba; this is an alternative take on the canonical fact that Tanjiro inherited the same hilt but by Rengoku's younger brother, Senjuro, after he visited the Rengoku household post the Mugen Train arc.
• In the original PC release of Doki Doki Literature Club!, you defeat Big Bad Monika by going into the game's directory and deleting her character data. This obviously isn't possible on consoles, so when the game was ported to 8th and 9th generation consoles for the Plus Updated Re-release, an in-game desktop is provided so you are still capable of doing her in.
• Ports of Player Versus Player-based puzzle games to the Game Boy (and handheld systems of similar power) generally don't offer a direct take on the Player vs CPU modes of their arcade and console equivalents, either due to lack of processing power or simply the lack of real estate on the screen for two fields. Many of them instead attempt to offer a similar experience by tasking the player with filling a fluctuating gauge, meant to represent the opponent's field, while fending off occasional attacks. Pokémon Puzzle Challenge, as well as the handheld ports of Magical Drop, Star Sweep, and Money Puzzle Exchanger, are some of the games that resort to this. It is interestng to note that Puyo Puyo, which codified the competitive puzzle subgenre, never had to resort to a "false" AI opponent; even the first arcade game's disastrous Game Boy port contains real AI.
• GoldenEye (1997):
  • A number of changes were done to the original game for the sake of making a more enjoyable game. At least a half of the game's content isn't in the movie, much more was altered.
  • A number of changes were made to the Wii remake of GoldenEye (1997) plot to fit with the change in timeline to 2010. Most notably, 006's motivations are changed from getting revenge for Britain's betrayal of his Lienz Cossack parents (which would make him 71 in 2010) to anger over The War on Terror and the Great Financial Meltdown, and how big banks made a killing while everyone else suffered. Zukovsky is killed a couple dozen seconds after you meet him. After all, he does die in the films eventually, and it's not like they're planning on making a The World Is Not Enough game later.
• Most RPG games made under the infinity engine (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment) employed this approach to the original tabletop rules to fit better into a more action-oriented isometric computer game.
• An early 1980s game example: The ColecoVision version of Lady Bug replaced the arcade original's free game credit from spelling S-P-E-C-I-A-L with a Bonus Stage, since the home version didn't require quarters to play it. This is better than what reward you got for finding the diamond in the home versions of the follow-up game Mr. Do!: just 8000 points and a free trip to the next screen.
• A consistent part of the LEGO Adaptation Game series is that all playable segments must have at least two characters present, both for the various puzzles and so that the Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer aspect is available at all times. Since most of the games are based on pre-existing story plots, and there are often times where only one main character is in a scene, when adapting those scenes things are slightly altered so that a second character ends up being there, even if the altered circumstances can get convoluted at times, such as Shagrat helping Sam fight Shelob in LEGO The Lord of the Rings, only to apparently instantly forget Sam was there once the orc sees Frodo.
• The Lord of the Rings Online serves almost like a P.O.V. Sequel to the books, where the player is experiencing the events of the books from the perspective of someone outside The Fellowship. Some changes are made to allow this; Angmar rising again gives us a villain for the first part of the game (Angmar at that time is supposed to be deserted), and a company of Dwarves trying to reclaim Moria days after the Fellowship passed through gives us an excuse to adventure there (Moria was not reclaimed until after the Ring was destroyed), for example. The player does interact with members of The Fellowship (and other famous characters) and even assists them in important plot points (the reforging of Narsil, walking with Frodo before his journey and later delivering Arwen's banner to the Grey Company and riding with them.
• Invoked in The Matrix: Path of Neo, where the Wachowskis literally stop time and interrupt the game to explain that the sacrificial ending to the movie wouldn't have worked in a video game, so instead the player gets to fight a Final Boss made up of every Smith in the level.
• All of the MechWarrior first-person Humongous Mecha simulator series, based on the turn-based BattleTech tabletop wargame are this to some extent.
  • MechWarrior 3 was a nearly direct adaption in terms of weapon damage values, armor, and such, and such was a total balance train wreck full of Game Breakers - such as the perfectly legal 12x Small Laser Shadowcat that could reliably lop legs off and instantly kill the enemy in a few spammed hits.
  • MW4 greatly altered many of the mechanics from 3 and ditched the boardgame's stats entirely in the name of balance. Design-It-Yourself Equipment remains but is heavily altered, as mechs can only put certain types of weapons in certain slots, preventing some of the more infamous examples from Mech 3 like firing missiles from the cockpit canopy. The freeware re-release of the Mercenaries Expansion Pack by the MekTek Game Mod developers increased the divergence, and introduced new mechanics such as changing the Enemy-Detecting Radar to require line-of-sight, in order to reel in some of the unforeseen consequences caused by Mech 4's game design.
  • Living Legends diverges heavily from the previous games in balance, asset usage (such as having useful aircraft, Power Armor, and tanks), and basic game mechanics - all of which were changed for competitive multiplayer balance centered around objective-based gameplay. The end result is that while it still plays much like a MechWarrior game, the spirit is much more like the original wargame, BattleTech. The Design-It-Yourself Equipment was purposely delayed til the end of the public Beta Test (that never came) in order to allow the developers to balance out weapons and battlemechs on their own sake in order to avoid the terminal min-maxing that has plagued the series.
  • Online started out being a nearly direct 1-to-1 stats translation from the boardgame, which suffice to say did not work very well, resulting in massive min-maxing and entire classes of weapons and battlemechs being rendered redundant courtesy of stats copy-pasted from a turn-based wargame not transferring well to a real-time first person shooter. Later patches diverged from BattleTech for the sake of balance.
• Mega Man 2: Atari De-Make: To emulate better the limitations of Atari, some level objects were changed. Instead of the Crash Lifts, there are moving platforms moving from left to right and with a pointer that spins from time to time and hurts. The Air Cheriots do not have a circular trajectory, but are moved through shots from the opposite direction Mega Man is standing on them and are separate from Kaminari Goros. Another important change is that there are no continuous screens.
• The iPhone version of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was stated to be this by Word of God. The original game had stealth elements, but when Konami playtested it they found that it was really tedious and distracting for a casual game. So Kojima Productions took over development themselves, concentrating on shooting-range stuff.
• The Sega Genesis version of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie skips much of the film between the Rangers' first encounter with Ivan Ooze just before being De-powered and the climax of the film after regaining their powers. To pad out the gameplay on account of much of the movie being skipped over, the middle part of the game features a few stages based off of the TV show's early second season, with the introduction of Lord Zedd, Tommy's return as the White Ranger, and the changing of the guard from Jason, Zack, and Trini to Rocky, Adam, and Aisha.
• The PC versions of OneShot require you to solve several fourth wall breaking puzzles in order to progress, such as looking at a generated pattern on your desktop or finding a code in your Documents folder. The Nintendo Switch port of the game emulates this by providing an in-game desktop so that the puzzles are still doable without an actual PC.
• Ports of PC or Xbox games to the PlayStation 2 usually invoked this trope due to the system's technical limitations. For example, Return to Castle Wolfenstein's PS2 port had many of its levels split into shorter sub-levels, and sometimes completely redesigned, with the player mainly being confined to narrow corridors in contrast to the more open level design of the PC and Xbox versions. Though much less rare, this also occasionally happened in ports of games to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, even ones from the previous generation; Far Cry Classic had to have level transitions added halfway through several of the larger levels from the original PC game, and even then the game is known for crashing when you reach those transitions because even the cut-in-half maps are pushing the systems' limits.
• The N64 version of Quake II had its story changed from the original, and most of the levels replaced with all-new ones, which were generally shorter than the PC version's. The crouch function, hand grenades, and several enemy types were removed, the chaingun was nerfed, and the submachine gun's recoil was reduced.
• The console adaptations of Rainbow Six 3 have a completely different story and considerably different gameplay, although some of the locales from the PC version make an appearance.
• Spider-Man 2: As opposed to adapting the "Spider-Man No More" arc from the movie, the tie-in game instead went in the opposite direction and had Peter consider giving up his civilian life to become Spider-Man full time, presumably because a player doesn't want to spend a good chunk of the game not actually being Spider-Man.
• Splinter Cell: Double Agent, originally on Xbox 360 and PC, received a sixth-generation version on PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Nintendo Gamecube which is this due to console limitations. The gameplay and missions are entirely different, while the story is mostly the same except for two major character changes. Enrica's characterization completely lacks her sympathetic portrayal and the romantic subplot between her and Fisher, creating somewhat of a plot hole when Fisher abruptly starts desperately trying to keep Third Echelon from killing her in the final chapter. Jamie, on the other hand is given a far more loyal and sympathetic portrayal rather than the False Friend/Soft-Spoken Sadist he was in the original, which made a lot of people feel seriously bad when you have no choice but to kill him in this version.
• Street Fighter IV on the Ipod Touch. While it's highly simplified from the console/PC version (only 10 characters, reduced movelists, simplified controls, and lots and lots of contents removed), it manages to be a fun experience on its own right, despite the system not being fit for such a type of game.
• Various video game adaptations of the exploits of Superman have struggled with how to show off the character's iconic borderline invincibility, powers and strength while still presenting a game that possesses both a fair challenge and lose conditions. The Superman Returns game took a novel approach to this — instead of giving Supes a health bar, Metropolis itself is the life bar, and you have to let it suffer as little collateral damage as possible in order to succeed in a given mission. In fact, the final boss isn't even a person or machine. It's a tornado, a force of nature, that you have to put out before it wrecks everything.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. The limits of a video game (and the action-heavy elements expected from them) meant that the game needed to drop a number of systems, simplify others, and gear things more towards combat as a baseline.
  • Several of the player's clan weaknesses had to be revamped. While the Brujah (prone to frenzy), Nosferatu (ugly enough to violate The Masquerade just by walking down the street), Ventrue (limitation on who they can feed on), and Malkavian (insanity, more often than not the player won't know what the heck they're saying) weaknesses are intact, the Gangrel, Tremere, and Toreador weaknesses are modified. Gangrel get a different weakness to frenzy instead of dropping their appearance stat every time they frenzy, Tremere can't raise their physical stats past four instead of being blood bound to any Tremere elder, and Toreador get twice the penalty of lower humanity instead of becoming obsessed with whatever catches their eye.
  • The Tremere PC's use of Thaumaturgy, specifically the Path of Blood, as depicted in Bloodlines is much different than the one in the source material, being more directly martial than the multi-purpose powers in the original.
  • Animalism in the tabletop game is primarily used for wilderness survival and espionage. The Bloodlines version is also combat focused, with all but one spells being more akin to the Beckoning power of the source material. The last one (Spectral Wolf) would be at home as part of the Necromancy discipline, which isn't available to the player in Bloodlines.
• The three games for The Witcher franchise take some liberties with the books largely for Rule of Fun.
  • In the books, monsters are becoming less common in the world, which has made the Witchers who were mutated and trained to hunt them largely a relic of the past. As such, Geralt is stuck in Perpetual Poverty because he has a hard time finding work. Meanwhile, monsters are brimming all over in the games. While this runs contrary to the original setting, it makes the world feel less empty, allows the player to fight all kinds of interesting creatures, and provides context for a great number of side quests that inevitably involve hunting the beasties down.
  • In the books, Geralt typically only carried a steel sword with him. His silver sword was usually stored away on his horse, and he would only ever pull it out when he knew he would be facing a monster. In all three games, he and pretty much all witchers carry both swords with them at all times, which makes for more convenient gameplay since the player can encounter humans or monsters at any time.
  • In the books, Geralt often had his potions brewed by trained alchemists. In the games, he can brew them himself, and there's always an entire branch of skills that the player can develop to improve the quality of his potions.
• Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys for the PC-Engine, released a month after Ys IV: Mask of the Sun for the Super Famicom, was produced by a different developer (Hudson Soft), had a significantly different story and gameplay, and is not part of Falcom's canon, but is generally regarded as the superior game.

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