Spiritual Successor / Video Games

Spiritual Successor in Video Games.

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Video Gaming itself

• The first Video Games (and arcade games in general) can be seen as a Spiritual Successor to various carnival games such as the claw game, shooting ranges and Pinball as you spend little money for one game that is quickly over and in the case of pinball you aim for a high score. It also helps that the only business experience Nolan Bushnell had before founding Atari was from maintaining these at a carnival. However, they're more a spiritual successor to the earlier electromechanical arcade games, at least some of which had a similar cabinet design to those first video games.

0-E

• The freeware game 0 A.D. can be considered a spiritual successor to the Age of Empires series as a whole: it was originally going to be a total conversion mod of Age of Kings before the decision was made to create a whole new engine for it, it is set in a similar time period to the original Age of Empires, and its graphics quality is currently on par with Age of Empires III while also having a similar premise for the multiplayer function (that the player is in charge of a colony or settlement of the larger civilization, rather than building from the ground up). It even has (or will have) a lot of the same civilizations as the first two games.
• The Five Pillars and The Reincarnation are successors of the browser game Archmage.
• 10.000 Bullets can be a worthy successor to Capcom's Gunsmoke, because Rockstar's Red Dead Revolver actually started life by Capcom as an arcade-style, stylized version of Dead to Rights, but Take-Two Interactive acquired Angel Studios, and Freedom Fighters influenced the gameplay of Rockstar's Revolver. It can also seen as this to Gungrave.
• Aaero is Gitaroo Man meets Rez with a dubstep soundtrack.
• La Abadia Del Crimen is essentially a video game adaptation of The Name of the Rose, to the extent of opting to ape the book's working title when they couldn't secure the rights to the original.
• The Adventures of Lomax is a Lemmings spin-off, but the gameplay and art style make it clearly a spiritual successor to The Misadventures of Flink, by the same developers.
• The Age of Wonders series is a spiritual successor to Master of Magic.
• AkaSeka is the spiritual successor of 100 Sleeping Princes and the Kingdom of Dreams.
• Alan Wake developed by Remedy Entertainment, is the Spiritual Successor to Max Payne also by Remedy. Both are third person shooters with a gimmick, Max Payne has Bullet Time while Alan Wake has weaponized Weakened by the Light; both have Shows Within a Show; both use a genre that video games do not normally dabble in (Film Noir and Stephen King-esque horror), both have evil old ladies as the main antagonists, and both have Shout Outs to Norse mythology.
• The original Aleste is this to Zanac, both by Compile. Both games feature a plot about an evil supercomputer ravaging the world, high-speed scrolling, a Dynamic Difficulty system, a "main shot" weapon and multiple choices of subweapons represented by numbered icons, and extensive use of Cores-and-Turrets Bosses. Some enemies in Aleste are even lifted straight from Zanac, such as the "mortar" enemies that shoot endless streams of missiles, "almond" enemies that fire a 3-way spread and split into two indestructible halves if not killed quickly, and midbosses work the same way (they bounce off hits from your weapons to reduce your fire rate (although they still take damage), gradually turn redder as they take damage, and explode into an 8-way spread of missiles when defeated). However, subsequent Aleste games would deviate from this formula to give the series its own identity.
• Aliens: Infestation can be seen as a Spiritual Successor to the Alien 3 video game on Super Nintendo and Genesis, and Metroid II: Return of Samus. It also requires saving people during the game (althrough with the difference that in Aliens: Infestation saved people are marines, and are later playable thanks to it), a similar visual style, and Metroidvania style of play, similar to that in the Alien 3 game. The PDA's in Aliens: Infestation, also work similarly to the terminals in the Aliens 3 game. From Metroid II, it has the requirements to use special tools/abilities to get further, a similary variety of enemies, and the general feel of the game is similar, which has sense, seeing how the Metroid series is a Spiritual Adaptation to the Alien franchise, with Metroid II being especialy similar to Aliens.
• After Silent Hills was unceremoniously canceled, British studio Lilith Ltd. created Allison Road in order to give players some way of playing a full-length version of Silent Hills' acclaimed P.T. demo.
• Doublesix's All Zombies Must Die is a spiritual successor to their earlier zombie-slaying game, Burn Zombie Burn.
• Alpha Protocol is a spiritual sequel to Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Deus Ex, an action-RPG where choices result in tangible consequences and gameplay is more heavily affected by one's character sheet than most games, including other RPGs. More cynically, Alpha Protocol gets a lot of undeserved flak and is often brushed aside as an attempt at "Mass Effect with SPIES" that failed miserably, so it also shares living with a bad rap (as well as some genuine technical problems) with Bloodlines.
• Nintendo's amiibo line of NFC products has been described as partially a successor to the e-Reader accessory for the Game Boy Advance, which allowed players to scan cards to unlock certain game features; in this case, however, the function is built into the game hardware rather than requiring a separate peripheral (save for the original-model Nintendo 3DS, which requires a small accessory that connects to the system via an infrared sensor). Additionally, you don't need to buy another system in order to use amiibo.^note One of the biggest factors of the e-Reader's failure outside of Japan was the fact that since it connected to the GBA through its cartridge slot, a link cable and a second GBA were needed to use e-Reader-centric features in compatible games. Since GBAs never exactly sold for peanuts and since e-Reader features tended to be quite minor, many in the west felt that the cost did not justify the reward. While amiibo were initially just in the form of figures, amiibo cards eventually debuted alongside Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, suggesting the possibility of similar uses to the e-Reader. Since then, the amiibo cards have found use in Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival and the Welcome amiibo update for Animal Crossing: New Leaf. The figurines themselves also successors to the NFC figures for Pokémon Rumble U.
• Several people have remarked on Among Us's similarity in premise and gameplay to Space Station 13, to the point that the latter is mentioned on its Wikipedia page.
• Aqua Ippan is an upcoming run-n-gun game heavily inspired by the Metal Slug series, down to the detailed pixel graphics, gameplay, HUD, jazzy soundtrack and so on. The only differences are the addition of a combo system, the player characters being two girl divers and the prisoners being kids with facemasks instead of bearded blond men. However, the dev mentioned in the comments that the full game is going to bring more original features.
• Aquaria is essentially Ecco the Dolphin with a mermaid and a little Metroidvania. It also may be considered a better adaptation of The Little Mermaid than the licensed games of prior generations.
• Arc Rise Fantasia is more or less a Tales Series game, but with turn-based battles. There are three morally-grey nations that eventually fight each other, a number of "summon spirits" - Rogress, critique of organized religion, and a Fantastic Racism subplot. There's also costumes for your party (unfortunately, they show up only in menus), Tales' trademark skits, and even a cameo battle, using a trio of characters from Luminous Arc. Later plot developments include existence of The Mole in your party, death of one of your party members, and a Bittersweet Ending, that separates The Hero from the party, all of which can be seen in several Tales games. Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the developers, director Hiroyuki Kanemaru and scenario writer Takumi Miyajima, worked on Tales games in the past.
• Armed Police Batrider:
  • The game is a spiritual sequel to Battle Garegga, as it inherits many of Battle Garegga's mechanics, such as bombing the scenery for powerups and medals, as well as the medal chaining system, and even has guest appearances by the ships of Battle Garegga and the Mahou Daisakusen series. Batrider in turn had a spiritual sequel in Battle Bakraid, which borrows Garegga's option changing feature, has a somewhat modified medal chaining system, and the "tickle laser"-cum-charge-shot from Batrider.
  • The Dynamic Difficulty system of these games is lifted from Zanac, of all things, only made completely and utterly inconvenient (notably, the removal of every rank reduction method except dying.)
  • Ibara, sharing the same main designer also counts as a Spiritual Successor, if you can count a near-exact copy of the rank system of Garegga as one. Its sequel, Pink Sweets, is considered a successor to Recca, with unlimited but charging bombs, separate option firing, and variable speed options.
• Armikrog is a Point-and-Click Game with Stop Motion Animation, all in the same style as Doug TenNapel's earlier The Neverhood and Skullmonkeys. It was even advertised as such on Kickstarter.
• The Surge Concerto series (Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star and Ciel nosurge) was thought to be one to the Ar tonelico series, until Ar nosurge established a solid connection.
• The Asphalt series of free-to-play racing games from Gameloft is basically Burnout with real licensed cars and Ridge Racer drifting.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • The franchise as a whole is considered by many to be a Spiritual Successor to Ubisoft's Prince of Persia series. However, fans of Prince of Persia are very confused by that notion, seeing as the two titles have almost nothing in common, gameplay and story wise. This may be due to the fact that Assassin's Creed started out as a Prince Of Persia game, but it was made into its own separate franchise, due to those differences in tone, story and gameplay.
  • Assassin's Creed itself now has its own Spiritual Successor in the form of Watch_Dogs, sharing many thematic elements while still being distinct series. Watch_Dogs also shares a lot in common with the Driver series, specifically DRIV3R and Parallel Lines.
  • A lot of people consider the first game to be an excellent follow-up to Kingdom of Heaven.
• Wanako Studios' Assault Heroes can be seen as a spiritual successor to Konami's Jackal, as both games put you in control of a heavily-armed jeep (though Assault Heroes adds such features as multiple weapons, on-foot stages and dual analog-stick control).
• Astebreed is the spiritual sequel to Ether Vapor.
• Asura's Wrath:
  • Developers Cyberconnect 2 states the game was meant to be a spiritual successor to God Hand in the sense of over the top action, but the concept of the game itself is more like one of these to Time Gal or Yarudora due to being touted as an Interactive anime like the aforementioned games.
  • There are many reasons why many refer to Asura as the Japanese God of War due to both storylines starring a father that's favored but then betrayed by godlike figures getting revenge by massacring them all in a rage (though Asura, to his credit, is much nicer than Kratos is for the most part).
• Axiom Verge is a modern adaptation of the classic 2D Metroid games.
• Back 4 Blood is a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, both having been developed by Turtle Rock Studios (the latter while part of Valve Software, who holds the Left 4 Dead IP).
• Balan Wonderworld is meant to be one for NiGHTS into Dreams…, even sharing the same producer (Yuji Naka).
• BallisticNG has been considered to be a spiritual successor of the WipEout (especially to the PlayStation 1 trilogy) since the dissolution of Psygnosis and its moddability.
• Bangai-O was originally supposed to be a remake of an old Japanese PC game called Hover Attack.
• BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! is perhaps the closest that Rhythm Game fans outside of Japan will get to CHUNITHM, with its lane-based touch-device gameplay that features tap, slide, and flick notes.
• The Baten Kaitos duology for the Gamecube is a Spiritual Sequel to Chrono Cross: both games share several staff members, have the same art style (hand-painted backgrounds with 3d sprites), and have similar battle systems.
• Battle Brothers has been called an unofficial video game adaptation of The Black Company, and a turn-based Warhammer strategy game.
• Capcom's obscure arcade beat-em-up Battle Circuit seems to be a spiritual successor to Captain Commando, complete with the protagonist, Cyber Blue, being an expy of Captain Commando.
• Battle Chef Brigade has been called a great sequel to Gourmet Warriors, as well as a great video game adaptation of Toriko.
• Battle Princess Madelyn is very clearly (and openly) inspired by the Ghosts 'n Goblins series of games. Even Madelyn's movements and body language are reminiscent of Sir Arthur's.
• BeamNG.drive, with its intricate crash physics model and stunt-heavy gameplay, is a more than worthy follow-up to the Burnout series.
• BEMANI:
  • SOUND VOLTEX is this to beatmania, featuring a row of white keys, a row of black keys, more white keys than black, and a "build up your Life Meter up to a certain point to pass the song" mechanic. However, while beatmania focuses on hitting keys to piece together the complete song, Sound Voltex involves taking an existing complete song and adding effects on top of it.
  • Nostalgia (BEMANI) is this to Keyboardmania, being also based on playing a piano and even having a few songs that originated in the latter.
  • Dance Evolution is this to both ParaParaParadise, another motion-sensor dance game, and DanceDanceRevolution, the original Konami "dance simulation" game, but instead of just stepping on tiles you have to use your entire body and actually dance. Better yet, both games have heavy involvement by Naoki Maeda, who was the sound producer for DDR and producer for console DDR games for a while before moving on to produce DanEvo.
• Bethesda:
  • Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, developed after Bethesda purchased the rights to the series following Interplay's bankruptcy, have the distinction of being direct sequels to the earlier Fallout games, while also being "spiritual sister" games to Bethesda's other major property, The Elder Scrolls series. Fallout 3 was created using Oblivion's engine, while Fallout 4's engine would be used in the Updated Re-release of Skyrim, intertwining the two series even further.
  • A literal In-Universe case of this occurs within The Elder Scrolls series' lore. Talos, the Aedric Divine Deity of Human Origin formerly known as Tiber Septim, founder of the Third Cyrodiilic Empire. While the exact means of Talos' apotheosis is hotly debated, he is almost uniformly connected to Lorkhan (aka Shor, Shezzar, Sep, etc.), the "dead" creator god of Mundus, the mortal plane. Two of the most prominent theories have either their souls fusing or Talos ascending to Lorkhan's former station via an act known as "mantling". In either case, Talos is the spiritual successor deity to Lorkhan, being a champion to mankind to who is despised by most Elves.
• BitLife is a non-educational, Denserand Wackier Allegedly Free Game version of Real Lives.
• Black is where XXX adapted as a First-Person Shooter done right since Warthog Games' official game was cancelled.
• Black Finger JET is an upcoming run-n-gun being made by Kohachi Studio, which is actually formed by former Irem, SNK and Nazca Corporation employees... in fact, the creatives behind the original Metal Slug game! It looks like it's going to be a 2.5-D game instead of purely sprite-based, with a more fantasy/sci-fi setting, but for the rest the gameplay stays exactly the same, with the heroes mowing down dozens of identical mooks and facing gigantic mechanical bosses. Even some of the sound effects and the iconic announcer returned!
• Bladed Fury is a Metroidvania sequel to the long-lost Valis series.
• BlazBlue is a Spiritual Successor to Guilty Gear, with more emphasis on offense and greater penalty for turtling. Early in development, Arc System Works received a lot of flak for basically just giving Guilty Gear a huge makeover.
• Blazing Chrome is a Run 'n Gun video game that serves as a spiritual successor to both Konami's Contra series and Nazca/SNK's Metal Slug series.
• Blazing Star is the semi-official sequel to Pulstar, which in turn is a spiritual successor to R-Type. It may not be coincidence that Aicom/Yumekobo was founded by former Irem personnel.
• Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain may be counted as a spiritual sequel to Chakan: The Forever Man as they have the same lead artist doing the same bleak horror style.
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a 2-D Metroidvania video game that's meant to be a successor to Konami's Castlevania series.
• Blue Dragon takes heavily from Dragon Quest, even getting Akira Toriyama to do the character designs.
• BLUE REVOLVER is basically Ketsui but with a more forgiving version of Battle Garegga's rank system and intentional death incentives and Dangun Feveron's ship customization variety.
• The Boktai series (including Lunar Knights) can be considered a spiritual successor to Metal Gear: Ghost Babel. The game engine is very similar, and Ikuya Nakamura, the director of all the Boktai games, was also the character designer of Ghost Babel.
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is undoubtedly a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio, down to its gameplay, aesthetics, and it even has its main composer, Hideki Naganuma, working on the soundtrack.
• 2009's Border Break is Sega's own spiritual sequel to Virtual-ON. It takes the storyline conceit of Virtual On that the arcade consoles are networked to future actual Humongous Mecha by networking them on the Internet to play against other players in other arcades.
• Border Down: Successor to Metal Black, a Shoot 'Em Up by Taito. Hiroyuki Maruyama, the president of G.rev, started the company and did subcontracting work for Treasure and Taito to generate revenue just to make this game. Why? He just really liked Metal Black.
• Broforce:
  • The Alien levels remind people of Contra.
  • If you're playing as Indiana Brones, you're pretty much playing Spelunky.
• Brütal Legend's "Stage Battles" were intended as a spiritual successor to Herzog Zwei... and they do have some strong similarities, but also to Sacrifice — not surprising, as they had a developer for that game on the dev team.
• Buck Bumble for the N64 is a 3D spiritual successor to Codemasters' C64/NES game Bee 52.
• Bug Fables aims to be one to the Paper Mario series, namely the first game and its sequel.
• Bulletstorm
  • The game is this to Painkiller.
  • The game is also considered to be a better Duke Nukem game than Duke Nukem Forever. The main character, Grayson, is seen as a throwback to protagonists like Duke and his ilk. It's even more ironic now, since the Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition has Duke Nukem as a playable character. There are others that see it as an FPS version of MadWorld or Wild 9 due to use of The Joys of Torturing Mooks, Video Game Cruelty Potential, and a electric, leash weapon.
• Many UK video game magazines of the era argued that Bully is this to Skool Daze. They weren't wrong.
• The original Burnout was heavily inspired by the arcade game Thrill Drive. Beside the basic premise of being a checkpoint-based point to point racer with an emphasis on violent crashes, the two games share similar graphics and interface.
• The Callisto Protocol is one to Dead Space, created by the same minds behind the original series. From its gory presentation to even having the Kinesis and Stasis power equivalents, it makes no attempts at hiding it's supposed to be just like Dead Space.
• Some of the later games in the Call of Duty series, starting with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare before the return to the more grounded settings, have been compared to the Crysis games due to the addition of Powered Armor suits with various abilities.
• Carrier Air Wing is more or less Capcom's successor to U.N. Squadron, only without the licensed characters from Area 88.
• Chase the Express is one of these to the movie Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, being a Die Hard on a Train hijacked by terrorists looking for a nuclear weapon onboard, and the protagonist being a special forces elite attempting to diffuse the hostage situation on his own. The protagonist even looks a little like Steven Seagal on the cover◊.
• Chrono Trigger can be seen as Live A Live's Spiritual Successor due to the similarities of both games. Both games were also created by the same director, Takashi Tokita.
• Citizens of Earth has been described as a Spiritual Successor to EarthBound.
• Cities: Skylines is so similar to the SimCity series, despite being made by a completely different developer with no involvement whatsoever from Maxis or EA, that many consider it to be a better SimCity 5 than the actual SimCity 5! The dev team behind Cities: Skylines was also behind the Cities In Motion games, and such is reflected in Cities: Skylines' heavy focus on designing efficient transportation networks.
• City of Titans is this to City of Heroes. Both being superhero MMOs with its own original lore and setting and full of customization options. The former is being made to fill the void left by the latter's cancellation by NCSoft. In fact, Titans is being developed by a team that were diehard fans of Heroes.
• Clive 'N' Wrench is this to Rareware collectathon platformers, specifically Banjo-Kazooie for the gameplay, and the worlds having a similar time travel/fairytale motif to the unreleased Twelve Tales: Conker 64.
• Code of Princess to Guardian Heroes. Some of Treasure's former employees worked on the game.
• Code Vein is a successor to God Eater. As another anime themed action RPG made by Bandai Namco Entertainment, but Bloodier and Gorier and Nintendo Hard. A reveal late in the story shows that it's actually a Stealth Sequel.
• Command & Conquer is the spiritual successor to Dune II, both done by Westwood Studios.
  • And Universe at War is in turn the spiritual successor to Command & Conquer, both done by the same development team under a different name: after EA bought up Westwood, their high quality expectations coupled with restrictive development timeframes resulted in successive C&C titles losing critical acclaim which became an excuse to assimilate Westwood into EA Los Angeles and put the ex-Westwood personnel to work at EA's own titles instead (fans still rage about it to this very day). Many disgruntled ex-Westwood personnel left and formed Petroglyph Games to produce Universe At War as the first installment of a planned series... that never got the green light from SEGA.
  • Now it seems that End of Nations is another spiritual successor to Command & Conquer, also made by Petroglyph Games who decided to move on to another publisher, Trion Worlds.
  • And yet another one, the 8-Bit series is a spiritual successor of the original Command and Conquer.... BUT ALSO ALL major RTS franchises, including a Warcraft expy and a Starcraft expy. It is probably the closest to an official version of a RTS Super Smash Brothers (though there are mods for other games that fit this bill better).
• Sega's Confidential Mission is considered by many a spiritual successor to their Virtua Cop games.
• The Sega arcade game Congo Bongo may had seemed like a blatant Donkey Kong-ripoff, but in reality the game's developer, Ikegami Tsushinki, was the same company Nintendo contracted to handle the programming for Donkey Kong.
• Contagion (Monochrome) is a spiritual successor to the first two Zombie Panic games, being made by the same developers.
• Cook, Serve, Delicious! was originally the third game to a series of fangames based on an obscure Japan-only game Ore No Ryouri.
• The Namco Arcade Game Cosmo Gang: The Video seems to be trying very hard to be a Galaga sequel while still maintaining a fair resemblance to the original electromechanical Cosmo Gang.
• Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time's character roster can be seen as a revival of the character roster formula seen in Yoshi's Island DS. Crash is the equivalent to Baby Mario, being the Jack of All Stats, Coco is Baby Peach, being the Distaff Counterpart with only very minuscule changes, Tawna is Baby Donkey Kong, being the heavyweight who specializes in tethering, Dingodile is Baby Wario, being the Anti-Hero who specializes in Weapons That Suck, and Dr. Cortex is Baby Bowser, being the Token Evil Teammate who specializes in projectiles and makes a Face–Heel Turn.
• The open world racing game The Crew, published by Ubisoft, is developed by Ivory Tower — a company that includes former employees from Eden Games, the company that created the Test Drive Unlimited games. And it shows.
• Crude Buster/Two Crude is the spiritual successor to Bad Dudes, also by Data East.
• Cuphead to Treasure's Silhouette Mirage, a similar 2D Platformer/Shoot 'Em Up hybrid also featuring a red and blue main character who uses a Finger Gun that shoots energy blasts at enemies as their primary attack.
  • In a similar vein, Cuphead itself is also one to Parodius, as both are Cute 'em Up shooters parodying the popular media and have cartoonish art styles donned on it. Both also started out on Microsoft platforms^note Parodius started out on MSX, and Cuphead started out on Microsoft Windows and Xbox One.
  • It's a modern-day Alien Soldier. Both games are challenging Run-and-Gun games with lots of bosses with light platforming segments in between.
  • It can also be considered a successor to Earthworm Jim, as Cuphead's sprites and animation are derived from hand drawn cartooning, in an evolution of the process that created the 90's annelid hero.
• Cute Knight is quite similar to the Princess Maker series of games, as are Cute Knight Kingdom and Spirited Heart, and the Flash game Project Princess.
• A lot of Cyberpunk 2077 can be played like a modern Deus Ex game (especially Deus Ex: Mankind Divided), especially since that franchise is currently stuck in limbo. You're in a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia, given objectives that can be beaten in multiple ways, and can upgrade yourself with cybernetics to open up more pathways to complete stuff.
• Konami's Dance Masters is sort of a spiritual successor to ParaParaParadise, and even has several parapara/eurobeat songs, including the famed "Night of Fire".
• The Dark Cloud games could be considered spiritual successors to ActRaiser, given their emphasis on reconstructing the world with RPG elements. Sega's 2019 release SolSeraph is an even more blatant successor, even recruiting Yuzo Koshiro to do the music.
• Dark Fall - The Journal is the closest thing we're ever likely to get to a Sapphire and Steel video game, being an homage to Assignment 2.
• Dark Souls:
  • With its near-identical Action RPG gameplay, the original game probably would be Demon's Souls 2 if Sony didn't own the IP. That Other Wiki outright classifies them as part of the same series (the Souls series).
  • And then came Bloodborne, another horror Action RPG by the director of Dark Souls and Demons Souls, but set in a new continuity. Bloodborne might also be considered a Spiritual Successor to the PlayStation classic Nightmare Creatures; another Nintendo Hard survival horror game where you play as a flintlock-toting warrior in a city filled with monstrosities. Even more, due to it being a Cosmic Horror Story, it has also been considered to be an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's works and the Cthulhu Mythos. Its monster-mash themeing and interconnected levels also call to mind the Castlevania series.
  • Elden Ring is yet another dark fantasy action RPG created by the same developers with its own similar but different setting. It isn't Dark Souls IV not for any intellectual property reason, but mainly to give guest writer George R. R. Martin more creative freedom.
  • Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are the 3rd-person, multi-player spiritual descendants of the 1st person dark fantasy dungeon crawlers King's Field and the two Shadow Tower games. Elements taken from those earlier games include the Moonlight Sword and a poisonous land that'll quickly deplete your health if you don't have adequate protection.
• The Dark Pictures Anthology (which so far includes Man of Medan, Little Hope, and the upcoming House of Ashes) is a spiritual successor to Supermassive Games' breakout hit Until Dawn. Until Dawn introduced the shtick: an interactive horror movie with a group of playable characters whose fates would be determined by the players' actions. The Dark Pictures Anthology debuted four years later, with the intention of releasing two short games per year following the same formula (though so far it's been released annually). Other than the fact that the Dark Pictures games are shorter than Until Dawn (5-6 hours vs. 10-12 hours) and feature fewer playable leads (5 instead of 8) the concept is the same.
• Darkwatch, because of Capcom publishing the game in 2005, has some believe it to be a spiritual sequel to Gunsmoke. In actuality, Sammy Studios, before Capcom publishing it, announced the game in 2004, more-in-line with being a spiritual sequel to Blood.
• Dawn of War II plays more like Company of Heroes than the first Dawn of War. It largely abandons base-building, which was a major part of the first Dawn of War.
• Death Stranding, headlined by Hideo Kojima, seems to be a continuation of the concepts Metal Gear Solid V introduced to the Metal Gear series. It carries over the open world setting; the Alfonso Cuarón style Oner cutscenes; the zombie-like enemies; and vehicle and character customization (weapons customization has yet to be announced, but likely). It also carries on more general series traditions, such as having stealth mechanics, long cutscenes, weirdly-named characters, a radio support team and a cynical Dead Pan Snarker protagonist with a gravely voice.
• Deltarune is the spiritual successor to The Halloween Hack. Both games were made by Toby Fox, both with the theme of choice and whether said choices matter or not (The Halloween Hack has Varrick break free of the narrator's given choices, while Deltarune has Kris seemingly break free from the player's control at the end. Both feature traipsing through a normal town before The Reveal of something more sinister hidden within. Finally, both games have you play as a non-emotive knight that is hinted to be someone else from their prequel games (Ness for Varrick and Chara for Kris).
• Taito's Demon Sword is the spiritual sequel to The Legend of Kage, both being Wuxia-influenced platformers with a high-jumping ninja protagonist. Irem's Ninja Spirit, although made by completely different developers, was also a spiritual successor (pardon the pun).
• Parodied by Valve, who tried to pass off Deus Ex: Human Revolution as the spiritual successor to Midway's Rail Shooter Revolution X, starring Aerosmith.
• Dishonored 2 has been cited by some players as the "true successor" of the Thief franchise, due to how many ideas and concepts are carried over from the latter series. A game with Stephen Russell voicing a main character (one of two), a prologue sequence dedicated to showing the main character training a young woman (possibly influenced by the Sequel Hook set up at the end of Thief: Deadly Shadows, in which it's implied that lead character Garrett will train a young girl), deliberate references to aspects of Thief's mythology (a reference to Garrett's line, "It's a long way down..."; the presence of clockwork robots built by a mad inventor, who speak in a third-person tone and deliberately reference their own creator, pronounced steampunk elements) and contributions by several former Ion Storm staff, including Terri Brosius, who provides her voice to a character that the player can hear while exploring a largely-desolate area (Shalebridge Cradle/Dunwall in the final mission).
• The DJ MAX series has primarily been a beatmania-like game, but DJ MAX Technika is a much different game, with touchscreen-based gameplay combining elements of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, Elite Beat Agents, and Lumines. Due to its similarities to the former and its harsh Life Meter, it's a very Nintendo Hard game; you can easily fail a song in the first 10 seconds.
• Domino Rally to No One Can Stop Mr. Domino.
• Donkey Kong Jr was the spiritual predecessor to Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, differing in that Donkey Kong Jr made the protagonist the antagonist where Wario Land made the antagonist the protagonist. Wario Land, a Super Mario Bros. Spin-Off of a Super Mario Bros spinoff, was in turn the spiritual predecessor to Donkey Kong Country, a Donkey Kong Spinoff of a Donkey Kong spinoff. Donkey Kong Country was in turn the spiritual predecessor to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, another spinoff that took a new mechanic from Super Mario World and ran with it. New Super Luigi U and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker are in turn spiritual successors to the Wario, Donkey Kong and Yoshi platform series.
• Double Dragon was this to Technos' earlier beat-em-up Kunio-kun a.k.a Renegade, although each also had their own series of sequels.
• Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure is a spiritual successor to a game based on Dragon Ball released on the NES that's better known overseas as Dragon Power: both are action games with 2D fighting elements based on Goku's adventures, with Advanced Adventure improving heavily on the gameplay and expanding the scope of the game beyond the Emperor Pilaf saga to include everything up through the King Piccolo saga.
• Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is an open-world RPG that recaps DBZ's story reminiscent of the Legacy of Goku series.
• Dragon's Crown is a successor to Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara. Both games are cooperative multiplayer-focused side-scrolling Beat'em Ups set in a highly detailed fantasy world. George Kamitani, one of the designers on the Mystara games, later became president of Vanillaware, developer of Dragon's Crown.
• The Drakensang games are a spiritual successor to the Realms of Arkania series, being the first video game adaptation of The Dark Eye system and setting since Realms of Arkania: Shadows over Riva. The first game Drakensang: The Dark Eye was even nicknamed Realms Of Arkania 4, before being published. Although the Real-Time with Pause playing style, and the interactions with companions, also show a large influence of Infinity Engine games, especialy the Baldur's Gate series, and that influence was confimed by the creators. And all of this goes even further back, as the original Realms of Arkania games, were confimed as having influenced the making of the Baldur's Gate games.
• Driveclub:
  • Created by Evolution Studios, the game is more a spiritual successor to Taito's long-discontinued Battle Gear series than their own MotorStorm series. The driving physics are somewhat similar, and they are more of skill-based racing games set on fictionalized courses.
  • Driveclub itself is also a spiritual successor to Sega's discontinued OutRun series, in a similar way like above. Both Driveclub and Out Run are score-based racing games in regard, except the latter has branching routes lead to Multiple Endings when the former has no plot at all.
• Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler is a pretty obvious one to the Monkey Island series.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, as a Hack and Slash game with RPG Elements, is a successor to Capcom's earlier Knights of the Round and The King of Dragons.
• Although EarthBound shares the same villain, the Sufficiently Advanced Alien Giegue/Giygas (albeit in a vastly different form), with its predecessor EarthBound Beginnings, it's more this than a direct sequel to it. The main plot revolves around stopping an Alien Invasion just like the first game, and it stars characters that are close Expies of the party in the first game for the most part (to the point of the main protagonist of the game, Ness, being near-identical to his predecessor Ninten). However, it takes place in an entirely different setting: Eagleland, as opposed to America of the first game.
• Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is marketed as a Creator-Driven Successor to Suikoden, being a fantasy RPG created by the former lead writers of the Suikoden games with loads of recruitable characters, war sequences, and sidequests like a cooking competition inspired by the one in Suikoden II.
• Endless Ocean is a spiritual successor to Arika's previous EverBlue games, which comes across more in its Japanese title — Forever Blue.
• Several developers of The Elder Scrolls: Arena said they were inspired by Ultima Underworld (kind of given, nobody could ignore Ultima back then) and, more importantly, by an obscure underappreciated 1992 game Legends of Valour: Volume I ~ The Dawning. Many distinguishing features of TES first appeared in Legends Of Valour.
• Elemental Gearbolt is the spiritual successor to Project: Horned Owl.
• Elemental — War of Magic is the spiritual successor to Master of Magic.
• Endless Frontier^note Full title Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier is considered a Spiritual Successor to Namco × Capcom. Both games are developed by Monolith Soft, and shared a similar action-styled battle system, even though the latter game was structured like a Turn-Based Strategy game, and the former being more a Eastern RPG. The kicker is though that the protagonists of Namco × Capcom, Reiji Arisu and Xiaomu, get caught up in the events of Endless Frontier, while chasing down the Big Bad they thought they had killed at the end of Namco X Capcom, thus making the two games in continuity. It was then followed by Project × Zone, bringing back the crossover (and Turn-Based Strategy) elements in full force (Sega even joins the fun!) and includes the protagonists of both NXC and EF (and KOS-MOS too, of course).
• Esoteric Ebb is a Spiritual Successor to Disco Elysium. The protagonist is an... eccentric cleric in a Standard Fantasy Setting.
• Raw Thrills, the arcade game devhouse headed by Eugene Jarvis, has several instances of this.
  • Target Terror is a Spiritual Successor to Area 51 and Maximum Force, down to the similar graphical style.
  • Their Fast and the Furious arcade racer series is the Spiritual Successor to Jarvis' Cruis'n series. They eventually brought back the Cruis'n brand in 2017 for Cruis'n Blast.
  • H 2 Overdrive is this to Hydro Thunder, from the same developers as the classic 1998 boat racer. Seriously, just look at the thing.
  • Winter X Games Snocross is this to Arctic Thunder. Both cabinets have small fans designed to blow on the player and simulate the rush of wind from riding a snowmobile, and they even both have tracks set in a snowed-over Washington, D.C. and Moscow.
• The Evil Within to Resident Evil. The first game is a successor to mainly RE4, while The Evil Within 2 is a successor to RE, RE2, RE3, and RE4.
• E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy has been called a successor to Deus Ex.

F-L

• Video System's F-1 Grand Prix and its sequel are the successors to their similar but unlicensed Formula 1 Racing Game Tail to Nose: Great Championship.
• Far Cry, as well as spawning a couple of re-imaginings, also has a spiritual sequel in Crysis. It was made by the same company, it's set in a similar location, and includes similar themes.
  • In fact, Crysis plays much more like a sequel to Far Cry than Far Cry 2 does. Far Cry 2 was developed by a different team, is highly non-linear in terms of both storyline and gameplay, and isn't connected to the original's story in any way.
• The FAST Racing series is often considered this to the F-Zero series.
• Fatal Fury to Street Smart. The first stage music from the latter is even featured as the Versus Mode theme in the former.
  • It is also a spiritual successor to the first Street Fighter, due to both games having Takashi Nishiyama at the helm.
• First Encounter Assault Recon has multiple games filling in the legacy of frantic Bullet Time First-Person Shooter combat with highly destructive environments and intelligent enemy soldier behavior, namely Trepang2 and Severed Steel.
• Final Fantasy Brave Exvius has clear influences from Brave Frontier.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Bravely Default started development as a sequel to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, itself a love letter to the early Final Fantasy entries (I, III, and V in particular). Along with its Class and Level System, its save-the-crystals plot and Warriors of Light are lifted straight from there and then given a twist.
  • Another game by Square-Enix, that's technicaly a spin-off, but also feels like a throwback to the first six Final Fantasy games, is Final Fantasy Dimensions. Many characters, not seen since Final Fantasy return here, like Bikke and his crew, Matoya, and the Prince (well, now King) of Alfheim. The Final Boss is also a form of Chaos, and the Superboss is the Omega Weapon from the Gameboy Advance port of Final Fantasy VI.
  • Technically, Final Fantasy can be seen as a "Spiritual Series", as virtually none of the games have direct relation to each other, unless they have odd numberings or alternate subheadings, like Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy: Dirge of Cerberus. Every numbered Final Fantasy game has no direct relation to any other other than a few series trademarks. Even though they are technically sequels based on numberings, fans never consider them to be actual sequels. Thus Final Fantasy takes Spiritual Successor to the extreme.
  • In the other direction, Richard Eisenbeis of Kotaku argued that Lost Odyssey and The Last Story were closer to being Final Fantasy games than the actual Final Fantasy games that came out during the Seventh Generation. This is particularly notable given both games' lineage — they were made by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, with music by Nobuo Uematsu, who scored Final Fantasy through X.
• Although the two games are very different, much of Final Fantasy V's dungeon/castle layout system is seen in Treasure of the Rudra.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 is slated to be something of a Spiritual Successor to Chrono Trigger, with its storyline that revolves around Time Travel through the centuries with the goal of preventing the postapocalyptic future one of your main characters hail from and multiple endings depending on your actions in the game.
• Despite being a beat-'em-up instead of a competitive Fighting Game, Final Fight is a spiritual successor to the original Street Fighter. It was even marketed at trade shows under the Working Title Street Fighter '89. Guy and Sodom would later show up as playable characters in the original Street Fighter Alpha, followed by Rolento, Cody, and Poison in the sequels.
  • Captain Commando is in turn a spiritual successor to Final Fight as a beat 'em up set in Metro City (albeit in the future). A bust of Mike Haggar is even a collectible.
• The Fire Pro Wrestling series, along with HAL Wrestling for the Game Boy, is this to Nintendo's classic Pro Wrestling game, following the same style of play mechanics as well as the use of Captain Ersatz versions of existing wrestlers.
• Fishing Superstars, the successor to Gaia Online's fishing minigame.
• Following development of the late-80s soccer simulation Kick Off and its sequel, author Dino Dini left publishers Anco. Although Anco released a poorly-received "official" Kick Off 3, Dino Dini's Goal (written for another company) is considered to be the true successor to Kick Off 2.
• Football Manager to the earlier Championship Manager, as the development studio Sports Interactive split from the publisher, retaining the game code but not the name of the franchise.
• Siren 1 was made by former members of Team Silent, the original developers for the Silent Hill series.
• According to Turn 10 Studios, they consider Forza Motorsport 3 to be the true spiritual successor to Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo series. To paraphrase Polyphony Digital president Kazunori Yamauchi, "No it bloody well isn't".
• The Foto Flash duology of games by Studio Gamaii is a successor to the Frank's Adventure series of Flash adventure games, about a photographer working for an adult magazine completing various tasks to take cheesecake pics of various models.
• Galactic Civilizations is this to Master of Orion 2. In fact, it's a better Master Of Orion 3 than Master Of Orion 3 was, since MoO3 was Spreadsheets IN SPACE!.
• The Tiger Game.com could be considered the spiritual successor to the Game Gear, as the Game.com featured games from Sega licenses (like Virtua Fighter II and Sonic Jam), and was launched the same year as the Game Gear was discontinued in 1997, with Sega not making a new full handheld console after that.
  • To a lesser extent, the Neo Geo Pocket Color could also be considered a spiritual successor to the Game Gear, as it also featured games from Sega licenses and can be linked to a Sega Dreamcast.
• Taito's Gekirindan is a spiritual sequel to the Truxton/Tatsujin games, being developed by former Toaplan members.
• General Chaos is a spiritual successor to Pigskin, a "footbrawl" game developed by the same people back when they worked at Midway Games.
• God Hand is the spiritual successor to Final Fight and a Genre Thow Back to the Beat Emup genre as a whole.
• The G.I. Joe arcade game by Konami is a spiritual sequel to an obscure pseudo-3D shoot-'em-up titled Devastators by the same company, which itself was loosely based on the 3D stages from the original Contra.
• No pun intended, but Ghost Master is a spiritual successor to Haunting Starring Polterguy
• Ghost Trick is a Spiritual Successor to the Ace Attorney series. Both of the games even share the same director and creator, Shu Takumi. This got recursive once Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies came out, as much of its cast are outright expies of Ghost Trick characters.
• Many players of the defunct browser-based RPG Glitch have recreated their avatars and in-game communities as "Folk" in Here Be Monsters.
• G-Loc was developed as a spiritual successor to Sega's After Burner.
• Gobliiins trilogy didn't get a proper sequel for two decades. In the interim there were:
  • The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, by the same studio and also featuring art and character design by Pierre Gilhodes.
  • Pilot Brothers games don't share any creators, but feature slapstick misadventures of a Red Oni, Blue Oni investigating duo similar to Gobliins 2. They were created by fans of Gobliins 2 in the dark time when a real sequel was beyond hope.
• Strategic Simulations, Inc.'s legendary Gold Box Game Engine and the eponymous Western RPG meta-series running on it had at least three successors: the Black Box series, a.k.a. Eye of the Beholder, by Westwood Studios; the Infinity Engine meta-series by BioWare and Black Isle Studios; and the Seven Dragon Saga, announced in 2015 (!) by Tactical Simulations Interactive (an indie studio comprised of SSI veterans). The former two in particular had strong ties, as both were based on the Dungeons & Dragons Game System, and BioWare developers noted the Gold Box series as one of the inspirations for Baldur's Gate (also, David "Zeb" Cook worked on both Pool of Radiance and Baldur's Gate, the first games on the Gold Box and the Infinity Engine, respectively). Another Spiritual Successor specifically to the Gold Box-based 1991 Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Neverwinter Nights, is Cryptic Studios' MMORPG Neverwinter.
  • The two Icewind Dale games that run on the Infinity Engine, are argubly the most similar to Gold Box games in general feel and gameplay. In the Icewind Dale games, like in Gold Box games(and many other older games), the player creates the whole adventuring party.
  • The Realms of Arkania series creator, Guido Henkel, outright admited in an interview, that the split into the first person exploration, and isometric view battle mode, is patrly inspired by the Gold Box games. In turn, the founders of Bioware admited that the Realms of Arkania games, were also one of the inspirations for the Infinity Engine games, like Baldur's Gate. Guido Henkel himself latter worked personaly on Planescape: Torment, one of the Infinity Engine games. It's actualy even him in make-up as the Nameless One, on the game's box.
• Rare's Perfect Dark is often described as an unofficial sequel to their GoldenEye game, albeit with the James Bond license swapped out for a near-future sci-fi setting and a Distaff Counterpart to Bond in the form of Joanna Dark (a classy, British-accented super-spy equipped with a vast suite of high-tech gadgets). It was built on the same Game Engine as GoldenEye, so it feels like a natural extension of the same game, despite Bond being nowhere in sight. They even use guns and settings from GoldenEye with the names slightly changed. GoldenEye later had another Spiritual Successor in the form of the TimeSplitters games, done by the core team behind GoldenEye. TimeSplitters 2 especially is very similar to GoldenEye, and with the use of the Map Maker, one can get extremely close to it.
• Word of God says that Golden Sun is this to the Shining Force tactical RPG series, which makes sense considering Camelot was the ones who developed said series before they split with SEGA. In fact, the botched release of Shining Force III on the Saturn is the whole reason why they split and started Golden Sun.
• Gotcha Force is considered by its fans a thematic successor to Virtual-ON. It's also a Spiritual Successor-slash-Serial Numbers Filed Off version of the Gundam Vs Series.
• The Two Guys from Andromeda, the guys behind the Space Quest games, have just recently come back together to try and create a "SpaceVenture" that looks every inch like it'll be a successor to their previous series. They've even gotten Gary Owens back to narrate again!
• Codemasters' GRID is a spiritual sequel to the TOCA Race Driver series, while DIRT was the spiritual successor to Colin McRae Rally.
• Grim Dawn shares the same game engine, gameplay mechanics, and game development team as Titan Quest.
• Gubble is a spiritual sequel to Crystal Castles, with a Sci-Fi setting instead of fantasy. Both games were developed by Franz Lanzinger.
• The Guided Fate Paradox is a spiritual successor to another Nippon Ichi-developed roguelike, Zettai Hero Project. Whereas ZHP's protagonist is a loser who becomes a superhero, GFP's protagonist is a loser who is selected at random to become a god.
• Guilty Gear 2: Overture is a spiritual successor to the Herzog Real-Time-Strategy/Action hybrid games. Really.
• The Neo Geo & Sega Dreamcast Platform Game Gunlord is essentially this to Turrican.
• Gunstar Heroes was considered a spiritual successor to Contra III: The Alien Wars due to the fact that two of its main programmers worked on both games. In fact, it was the closest thing to a Contra game for the Sega Genesis before Konami decided to release Contra: Hard Corps.
  • A similar case of a spiritual successor to the Contra games could be made with Sin and Punishment, another game by Treasure. It also has programmers returning from Contra III: The Alien Wars, and the very story and setting of game is very much a darker version of Alien Wars. It was, and is also regarded as way superior 3D Contra game, than the contemporary Contra: Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure.
• Hacknet is one to Uplink.
• Some consider Bungie's Halo series a spiritual sequel to their earlier Marathon series.
  • The other theory is that the Halo series takes place between Pathways into Darkness and Marathon, though that seems more unlikely now due to the Halo IP no longer being owned by Bungie. With that said, Destiny appears to be a successor to that franchise.
• Haunting Ground is considered to be the Spiritual Successor to the Clock Tower series due to its similar gameplay and style. The fact that it was made by some of the same people behind Clock Tower 3 didn't hurt either.
• H.A.W.X., to Blazing Angels (both arcade flight sims by Ubisoft's Romanian studio).
• The game Heavenly Guardian was originally supposed to be a game in the Kiki Kai Kai series (Pocky & Rocky), and had its sprites reworked into a new game when the publisher lost the license.
• Heavy Rain is a spiritual successor to Fahrenheit. Both from the same developer and both being mostly interactive movies.
• Hell Pie to Conker's Bad Fur Day, a similarly crass and vulgar 3D Platformer.
• Hellgate: London to Diablo.
• Heretic is a spiritual successor to Doom. Both are published by id Software, and both use the id Tech 1 game engine. In fact, using the God Mode and Weapons cheats from Doom will result in death and loss of all weapons, respectively, when used in Heretic.
• Heroes of Newerth was intended to be the Captain Ersatz of Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars. With the only real difference being that the Warcraft-based characters and visuals are replaced with ones from S2 Game's previous game, Savage, all the mechanics, items, and heroes are nearly identical to the original, barring a few new additions. With Icefrog leaving development to work with Valve to create Dota 2 however, the game was left to its own and became a more straightforward example.
• Heroes Of The Pacific is a spiritual successor to Capcom arcade classic 1942 and its sequels.
• Hometown Story was made by Yasuhiro Wada, who is better known for making Harvest Moon. Its general idea is Harvest Moon with the player running a shop instead of a farm, but the Dating Sim aspect gets downplayed in favor of forming friendship bonds with all 32 main villagers.
• Horizon Chase is such an unabashed tribute to SNES classic Top Gear, the soundtrack was commissioned from Barry Leitch, the original game's composer.
• Hotline Miami has a very similar premise to Hitman; you fail and/or die a lot, must learn the layout of the levels and the placement/patterns of the enemies in order to progress, and so on.
• Ikaruga was a Spiritual Successor to Treasure's earlier game Radiant Silvergun, and had the Working Title Project RS2. The octahedron-shaped object also makes an appearance in both games; the track that plays when you fight it is even called "The Stone-Like", which was its name in Radiant Silvergun.
• Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma are considered to form a thematic, though unofficial, trilogy as successors to SoulBlazer. Although there are direct links included; The first boss of Soul Blazer is a Superboss in Illusion of Gaia, with a storyline explanation of why, albeit a somewhat bizarre one. Meanwhile, Terranigma is explicitly referred to as "Illusion of Gaia 2" in a Developer's Room Easter Egg.
  • There's also a dog named Turbo who shows up in all three games.
  • To some, The Granstream Saga on the PlayStation may be considered a fourth game due to a few shared themes.
• The Infinity Engine games themselves had a colossal impact on the Western RPG genre and, thanks to their complicated parentage (it's virtually impossible to separate BioWare and Black Isle's contributions to their awesomeness), received a plethora of successors:
  • BioWare's Neverwinter Nights (a series later continued by Black Isle's successors) was a successor both to their own Baldur's Gate series and to the aforementioned Gold Box game by the same title. All three games were based on D&D.
  • Dragon Age: Origins, also from BioWare, was another successor to Baldur's Gate, although the Dragon Age series started severing ties to their Tabletop RPG-based ancestry almost immediately thereafter.
  • Pillars of Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment (the aforementioned Black Isle successors) borrows elements from all three Infinity Engine series: the companions and exploration of Baldur's Gate, the dungeon-delving and tactical combat of Icewind Dale, and the storytelling and themes of Planescape: Torment. Stretch goals added George Ziets, the lead writer of Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, to the team.
  • Torment: Tides of Numenera by inXile Entertainment (an offshoot of Interplay Entertainment, who published all Infinity Engine games) is being billed as a direct successor to Planescape: Torment. They avert Dueling Games with Pillars of Eternity because Obsidian is very supportive of the project.
• Rage's Invasion is vastly superior Independence Day game compared to infamous official one by Radical Entertainment.
• Iron Helix can be considered a Spiritual Predecessor to Survival Horror games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Outlast, which popularized the idea of running away and hiding from the monster as opposed to challenging it head-on, which is what most mainstream horror games were doing at the time.
• I Wanna Be the Guy has a spiritual successor by the name Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril, endorsed by the maker of I Wanna Be the Guy.
  • I Wanna Be the Guy itself is arguably the spiritual successor to a Japanese flash game known as Zinsei Owata no Daibouken/The Big Adventure of Owata's Life, which inspired IWBTG's creator. Owata acknowledged this in its final version, which ended in a Homage to I Wanna Be the Guy...followed by a Crossover appearance of the main character as the Final Boss.
• Jade Empire is either the successor to Bridge of Birds, or the only game adaptation it's ever going to get.
• Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is clearly being inspired by EarthBound, being a RPG with simple colorful graphics, quirky characters and a similar battle system (with similar psychedelic backgrounds too) which hides some serious and creepy themes behind the cheerful facade. Theme-wise, it also reminds of Rakuen, in that you play as a young boy with cancer who travels to a fantasy world that is a distorted, colorful reflection of his own life and experiences.
• Japanese video game developer Arzest, is essentially Artoon, without actually being Artoon. Many key staff members, such as SEGA veterans Yoji Ishii and Naoto Ohshima, worked for Artoon before it went defunct and then moved on to work at Arzest. Additionally, many games developed by Arzest resemble games developed by Artoon, including games in the Yoshi series.
• Data East's Neo Geo platformer Spinmaster stars the same characters from the Sega Genesis game Dashin' Desperadoes, but plays more like a modernized version (literally and figuratively) of the original Joe & Mac (aka Caveman Ninja) than the game it's supposed to be a sequel to (which was more of a racing platform game). Spinmaster might as well had been called Joe & Mac AS INDIANA JONES-STYLE TREASURE HUNTERS.
  • Speaking of Joe & Mac, Joe & Mac Returns is a Spiritual Successor to TumblePop.
• Jewelry Master is Arika's attempt at making a Falling Blocks game that isn't a Tetris game with all the copyright baggage that follows. Like Tetris: The Grand Master, one of Arika's best known series, Jewelry Master features a speed level counter that increases with each piece dropped (in addition to each line cleared), a short delay between when a piece reaches the stack or floor and when it locks in place and a "firm drop" command that instantly drops the piece without locking it in place. The key difference is that instead of clearing lines, you try to surround gems with blocks to clear them.
• Journey (2012) is pretty much the successor to ICO and Shadow of the Colossus.
• The Wii game Saint is effectively the successor to The Monkey King: The Journey Begins, with a more realistic art style. They were clearly developed on the same engine, and are both very loosely inspired by Journey to the West.
• Jumping Flash! is a spiritual successor to a Sharp X68000 game called Geograph Seal. Same developers, similar gameplay blend of First-Person Shooter and Platform Game. Have a look at video and compare the two.
• Kane & Lynch can be seen as a successor to Freedom Fighters (2003). Both were developed by IO Interactive and feature music by Jesper Kyd, and aside from the co-op mode in the former game, the gameplay in the two games is practically identical.
• Kaze and the Wild Masks to the classic Donkey Kong Country games. Kaze plays very similarly to Dixie Kong, the Wild Masks function much like the Animal Buddies, and many other elements of the games are reproduced; for example, giant crossbows that Kaze can launch herself out of stand in for the series's signature barrel cannons.
• Kengo serves as the spiritual successor to the deceased Bushido Blade series.
• Kenka Banchō is sometimes considered to be the 3D version of Nekketsu Koha Kunio-kun that Technos never got to make.
• Kero Blaster by Studio Pixel is this to his most famous game, Cave Story. Both are Run-and-Gun type games using a strong Retraux aesthetic with a variety of unique upgradeable weapons, and a healthy dose of Surprisingly Creepy Moments. Also, a few of the music tracks in it are remixed from Cave Story.
• Killer7 and No More Heroes, both brainchildren of Goichi Suda. Travis, the protagonist of No More Heroes, can learn special abilities themed after the various personalities from Killer7 by bringing balls to a drunk in a bar.
  • Killer is Dead also shares motifs and themes.
• kill.switch, to WinBack.
• Net Dragon announced a Chinese company is developing an MMORPG featuring all of the Disney franchises separated into different worlds that the players can visit called "Disney Fantasy Online". That's right, it's an MMORPG version of Kingdom Hearts with the Square elements subtracted. The website really screams it out, since the Disney characters are wearing the same outfits they do in Kingdom Hearts.
• Knack to the Naughty Dog-developed Crash Bandicoot games. Mark Cerny, one of the chief architects of the PlayStation 4, was an executive producer of the latter game, and director of the former.
• While Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is the sequel to Knights of the Old Republic, it is the spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment. The first Knights of the Old Republic itself is a spiritual successor to Neverwinter Nights.
• Since a direct sequel of Knights of the Old Republic fell through (although they ended up making Star Wars: The Old Republic), Mass Effect is seen as this due to the story progression, outer space setting and decision making system, along with a type of morality meter.
• Krazy Rain is a spiritual sequel to the massively-multipler online Rhythm Game O2Jam.
• The NES game Laser Invasion can be considered the successor of the two first Top Gun games released by Konami for the NES. Laser Invasion shares the same engine used in Top Gun The Second Mission and similar HUD, except that you control a gunship instead of a F-14, and there's a few light gun and maze sequences set on foot.
• L.A. Noire is a spiritual successor to the (very) rough but surprisingly ambitious Dick Tracy videogame on the NES. With a nigh-identical open-world structure about finding clues and using them to interrogate and incriminate perps with shooting sections in between.
• The Last of Us is a Darker and Edgier successor to the Uncharted series. Both are made by Naughty Dog.
• League of Legends is one to Defense of the Ancients since most of its dev team previously worked on earlier versions of Dota.
• Legasista is a spiritual successor to Nippon Ichi and System Prisma's ClaDun games, and features some of the same elements, such as create-a-character mode and Randomly Generated Levels.
• The first Legend of Zelda game was planned from the start as a spiritual successor to Adventure. In fact, the working title for the game was "Adventure".
  • Adventure itself was a graphical spiritual successor to Colossal Cave Adventure.
  • Link's Awakening is a spiritual successor to For the Frog the Bell Tolls because both are action-adventures for the Game Boy that run on the same engine. The rival character from the game, Richard, even makes a cameo in Link's Awakening.
  • Triforce Heroes is a spiritual successor to the Super Famicom title, Marvelous: Another Treasure Island as both games are teamwork puzzles, and both were directed by Eiji Aonuma.
  • The infamous CD-i games, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, were designed by the creator of the acclaimed Below the Root and have a rather similar gameplay style. So it's easy to see them as spiritual successors. Whether or not they're worthy successors, that's a different question.
• LEGO Indiana Jones to LEGO Star Wars, and further LEGO games to both of them — we tropers have even filed all of them as a single series.
  • Similarly, Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures was a Spiritual Successor to the Super Star Wars games, being built on the same engine.
• LEGO Minifigures Online is one to LEGO Universe; both are LEGO minifigure MMORPGS.
• Len'en Project has a lot of influences from Touhou Project, from the Fantasy Kitchen Sink setting to the Expies of Touhou's characters to the spellcard system. Heck, some of the assets from Len'en were initially used in unpublished Fan Remakes of the PC-98-era Touhou games made by the same creator!
  • Touhou itself was heavily inspired by Pocky & Rocky. Not to mention the two Phantasmagoria games are one to Twinkle Star Sprites, and Touhou Shinkirou ~ Hopeless Masquerade and its sequels are sucessors to Astra Super Stars.
• The Like a Dragon series is a spiritual successor to Shenmue, being an action-adventure game with in-depth combat, a Wide-Open Sandbox with a plethora of content to uncover, and various minigames, sidequests, and other diversions.
• Little Dragons Café is a Spiritual Successor of a Spiritual Successor. It's Hometown Story (in itself a Harvest Moon successor) but in a cafe. Little Dragons Cafe is made by the same team who created Hometown Story and all three series share a creator.
• Long Live the Queen is markedly similar to Princess Maker, but with a more story-driven gameplay with many skill checks and fail states added to it.

M-S

• Mad News to Mad TV (1991). Both were designed by Ralph Stock, but for different publishers. The only major difference is that you run a newspaper instead of a TV station; it is heavily "implied" that you still control the same character, just with the Serial Numbers Filed Off.
• MadWorld appears to be a Spiritual Successor to God Hand, being made by the reassembled remains of Clover Studios, creators of the original game.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Gears of Destiny is this for the Wild ARMs series. To start with, the Original Generation main character is a combined Expy of the various Wild ARMs protagonists, and she comes from a dying wasteland planet that's a Filgaia Expy and whose restoration serves as one of the main plots of the game. It helps that Kaneko, the Wild ARMs creator, is the one in charge of the game's development, and that he and Tsuzuki, the Lyrical Nanoha creator, are old acquaintances. This was confirmed in an interview Tsuzuki included in the guide, where he mentions that the Wild ARMs elements were included as a show of respect to Kaneko and the franchise he made, of which he had been a fan of since Wild ARMs 3.
• Mario Kart DS was not only a successor to the previous Mario Kart games, but to Crash Team Racing as well because of the infamous snaking mechanic: both games required a vehicle with low drift stats to spam boosts on straight lines.
• Mars Matrix is a spiritual sequel to the Giga Wing games.
• Martial Masters doesn't even try to hide that it's first and foremost an unlicensed fighting game adaptation of the Once Upon a Time in China film series, to the point that some of the characters have the exact same names in the Taiwanese version (Wong Fei-Hung, Ghostfoot Seven, 13th Aunt and White Lotus Master).
• Marvel Super Heroes: War of the Gems is this to X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse: Both games are Beat 'em Up with Platform Game elements, developed by Capcom; both share the same gameplay and graphic style, even Wolverine's sprites are reused.
• Mass Effect serves as this to Brute Force, both Rated M for Manly games featuring similar squad-based gameplay, similar UI elements (the red bar is health and the blue bar is energy), and a similar sci-fi setting.
• The Matrix Online development started a year before the films as a MMORPG remake of mid-1980s Alternate Reality series. Those were an unfinished episodic sandbox RPG (only 2 parts were released) with Lotus-Eater Machine planned as The Reveal for part 7.
• Max: The Curse of Brotherhood is a successor to Heart of Darkness
• Maximo: Ghosts to Glory was created as an heir to the Ghouls 'n Ghosts series, to the point of borrowing the first-stage music of the latter, and having protagonist stripped to his boxer shorts after taking enough damage.
• Mega Man:
  • The platformer Mighty No. 9 is one to the classic Mega Man series, from the bright cartoony artstyle, upbeat music styling (which also has an 8-bit rendition composed by Manami Matsumae), similar run and gun gameplay but the crux of the gameplay is built around the character's faster mobility, and copying some other abilities beyond their special weapons.
  • Azure Striker Gunvolt is a spiritual successor to the Mega Man Zero series, and developed by the same company, Inti Creates. It loosely takes the themes and gameplay of said series, particularly when the sequel introduced Copen as a playable character, whose Power Copying abilities are rather evocative of Mega Man.
  • Mighty Gunvolt is more a retro-throwback to the Classic series' platforming with Beck and Gunvolt as the stars, with various other characters thrown in for good measure.
  • Dragon: Marked for Death is yet another spiritual successor to Mega Man Zero and Mega Man ZX series, and in fact was deliberately designed that way by Inti Creates. Whereas Gunvolt is loosely inspired by Zero and ZX in theme and gameplay, Dragon: Marked for Death looks, plays, and feels like a Zero or ZX game if you replaced all of the futuristic elements and Power Copying with medieval fantasy and multiple character classes.
  • A roguelike game going by the name One Step From Eden can be considered one for the Mega Man Battle Network series, given its fast-paced grid-based combat is based on it and its sequel series, to the point where the most widely used description for it is Mega Man Battle Network meets Slay the Spire.
• Melatonin is very clearly inspired by the Rhythm Heaven series and replicates its gampleplay (a series of unique rhythm-based minigames, followed by a level that switches between multiple games) precisely, although its art, music, and mood are very different. RH's creators are given special thanks in the credits, to make this explicit.
• Metal Slug is the spiritual successor to Gunforce 2 and In the Hunt, which were made by the same staff back when they were working for Irem.
  • By the same developers, the Neo Geo golf game Neo Turf Masters is a spiritual sequel to the Major Title series.
• Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light are considered by many to be the successors to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise. They are very similar in theme, the major difference in setting being Metro taking place mostly in the underground Metro in Moscow, and for the gameplay, that Metro is a traditionally linear fps as opposed to the sandbox of the Stalker series.
• The Konami arcade game M.I.A.: Missing In Action is pretty much an unofficial official sequel to Rush'n Attack (aka Green Beret), using what is essentially a more advanced version of the same engine, but with a different setting (being set in Vietnam instead of Russia).
• Midnight Fight Express is this to both Hotline Miami and RUINER, being a Beat 'em Up in a top down or isometric view.
• The Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers video game by Bandai for the Super NES is a spiritual successor to the Choujin Sentai Jetman game by Angel for the Famicom. Not that surprising, considering Natsume developed both.
• The old Taito game Mizubaku Adventure AKA Liquid Kids could be considered a successor to The NewZealand Story. Both of them are cutesy maze-like platformers with a hero who needs to rescue his kidnapped relatives/friends from cages in every level, have enemies pop up from randomly appearing portals, and have warps to other levels that appear by shooting empty portions of the stages. They also both have the same font for in-game messages!
• Modern Warfare itself has two of these. Call of Duty: Ghosts is one, created by the new Infinity Ward that Activision created after much of the original Infinity Ward left to create Respawn Entertainment. Respawn's game Titanfall can also be seen as a Spiritual Successor as it seems to share many of the same ideas, although it diversifies significantly from the Modern Warfare games.
• Medal of Honor: Allied Assault led to Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 1, 2, and the Modern Warfare trilogy''.
• Moonlighter is this to Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, giving its own take on the dungeon crawler/shop management hybrid gameplay.
• Mr. Do! could be considered a spiritual successor to Dig Dug, what with the tunneling, the center-screen prizes and the boulders/apples.
• The open-source game Naev is a Fan Sequel to Escape Velocity, meant to be what EV 4 might have been if Ambrosia Software hadn't stopped making games. The also open-source game Endless Sky is much the same, although goes in different directions to Naev in what it changes. In either case, the line between Spiritual Successor and Fan Sequel is blurred by Escape Velocity having been a Thematic Series.
• Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- is this to Bungo to Alchemist is this to Touken Ranbu is this to KanColle.
• Naughty Bear is the spiritual successor to Manhunt with teddy bears.
• NBA Jam is a spiritual successor to Arch Rivals (both are arcade-style basketball games created by Midway which played fast and loose with the rules).
• Saber Interactive's NBA Playgrounds series is a spiritual successor to both NBA Jam and NBA Street.
• Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is this to both the web-browser Super Brawl series (a fighting game featuring Nicktoons) and Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion (a Super Smash Bros.-like clone with characters from a children television channel).
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) is a Spiritual Successor to both Hot Pursuit 2 and the Burnout series. Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) has been near universally referred to by the gaming press as a Spiritual Successor to Burnout Paradise.
• NeoGeo Battle Coliseum is a practically a sequel to SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos, only without the Capcom characters.
• Nexus War to Urban Dead, with the added twist that the former made off with a substantial chunk of the latter's player base when it came out. So not only does it have similar mechanics and interface, it's played by all the same people.
• NFL Blitz to High Impact Football.
• The rare coin-op Nightmare In The Dark is a spiritual successor of sorts to the more well-known Snow Bros., except that you control a hunchback who engulfs enemies in balls of fire rather than snowmen burying enemies in snow by pelting them with snowballs.
  • Snow Bros itself is one to Bubble Bobble.
• The Nintendo Switch is ironically one to the PlayStation Vita outside of Japan where the system bombed. The Vita, after developers jumped ship and western retailers abandoned it, became known for its selection of ports, remakes, and indie titles. Within its first year, developers announced a bunch of ports, remakes, and support from indie developers - making the Switch an unknown Spiritual Successor.
• Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is a direct sequel to the first Ni no Kuni, but it borrows a lot of elements from Level-5's much older RPG Rogue Galaxy. Both Ni no Kuni II and Rogue Galaxy are action RPGs where each character uses both a melee and a ranged weapon, where battles in dungeons take place on the dungeon map instead of in specialized arenas, and jumping is an important mechanic. Compared to the first Ni no Kuni, which was not a pure action RPG, was Mons-focused, and, while you could jump, it was a bonus ability that was not supposed to be as good as it was.
• No Man's Sky to Noctis, as both games feature gameplay revolving around exploring lots of procedurally-generated planets.
• Not for Broadcast is this to Papers, Please and Night Trap, borrowing story elements from the former and gameplay elements from the latter and even giving Shout Outs to both.
• The Tetris clone NullpoMino is somewhat of a spiritual successor to Heboris: Unofficial Expansion (sharing the same font and a similar level of customization), developed from scratch due to Heboris UE's source code—a mixture of C++ and a gaming script — being an Eldritch Programming Abomination.
• Obliterator, a Platform Game by Psygnosis, features a slightly more refined form of the mouse-based control system and gameplay of their earlier game Barbarian (not to be confused with Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior), but takes place in a science fiction setting instead.
• Octopath Traveler:
  • Producer Masashi Takahashi considers the game to be a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy VI in terms of game mechanics, in the same way that Bravely Default built upon Final Fantasy V.
  • As far as art style, setting, and combat system goes, Octopath might as well be considered a spiritual successor to the Bravely Default series. (This is a little contentious for some, though, as while the producers at Square-Enix worked on both games, the development studios are different - Silicon Studios for BD vs. Acquire for Octopath.)
  • The Legend of Legacy shares the same concept of choosing one of many characters and watching their story unfold within the same setting, while also recruiting any other characters that weren't chosen from the start. The vague connections between each character's story also hearkens back to Square's own game Live A Live, which would later see a remake in Octopath's HD-2D visual style.
  • Finally, the overall structure of the game, with the choosing of a protagonist, the freedom to go in your own direction, and even the arrangement of the battle screen, harkens back heavily to the SaGa series, particularly the Romancing SaGa games. It's to the point that a number of fans jokingly say that the game's other title is Romancing SaGa 4.
• Oddity was developed, art style, gameplay, and all, to be a successor to the Mother series. This is an invoked trope, though, as it was initially conceived as an outright fan sequel.
• Odin Sphere is a Spiritual Successor to the little-known and Japan-exclusive Sega Saturn title Princess Crown, being created by the same director and company, and featuring several thematic similarities, including the "little girl reading the game story in a book" narrative device.
  • The Nintendo Wii game Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a spiritual successor to both of them, and was in earlier stages referred to as Princess Crown 3, in the same way Odin Sphere was named Princess Crown 2.
• Of Love and Eternity is a Retraux Survival Horror game where you play as a literal Failure Knight who is murdered along with his girlfriend in the intro cinematic. Barred from the Afterlife and stuck in purgatory as undead, he has to reunite with her soul and set right his greatest failure so they can rest in peace. For anyone who has played Medievil on the original PS1, this setup seems really familiar.
• Omega Five is a successor to Capcom's Forgotten Worlds, using the same rotary aiming mechanic, as well as Natsume's own NES game SCAT, which also drew inspiration from Forgotten World.
• One Piece: Gigant Battle for the DS was developed by Ganbarion, makers of Jump Super Stars and Jump Ultimate Stars, and reuses many of the same assets.
• Operation Flashpoint:
  • After a falling out between the developer and publisher, the publisher won the rights to the name and would reuse it for a rather different duology, while the developer kept the rights to the engine behind Operation Flashpoint and went on to create the ARMA series, which is widely considered to be the true successor to Operation Flashpoint to the point that the developers collectively call both series the Armaversum.
  • As a twist, for the tenth anniversary of the original Operation Flashpoint, the developers released a final patch (just over six years after the penultimate patch) that actually renamed the game to ARMA: Cold War Assault, as well as removing the Codemasters-developed expansion campaign "Red Hammer."
• The Mitchell arcade game Osman and feelplus/Square Enix's recent Moon Diver are this to Capcom's Strider, both developed by the same designer (Kouichi Yotsui).
• While official Stargate SG-1 game was cancelled, Outcast is the closest can get to a game based on Stargate, even features the time-traveling portal!
• Overload, by the creators of Descent, is a spiritual successor to that series.
• The Pandora is the spiritual successor to the GP2x which is the spiritual successor to the GP32. While all three handhelds differ in developers, companies, and even nationalities, the philosophy of being and open games device anyone can make games for has been present and strengthened throughout the series.
  • A more closely-related successor to the GP2X is the Wiz, made by the same company (Gamepark Holdings). The Pandora, it should be noted, is made by a separate group of developers though its underlying philosophy is very similar to the GP32, GP2X, and Wiz.
• The Paper Mario series was conceived and created in-house by Nintendo's Intelligent Systems after a direct sequel to Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars became impossible due to Nintendo and Square's late-nineties falling-out.
  • Likewise for the hand-held Mario & Luigi series. Practically the only differences between Mario & Luigi and Super Mario RPG are the plot, characters, and change of perspective from isometric to more traditional side-scrolling. Incidentally, Alphadream, the development company, is made of staff originally from Square.
  • Two licensed games, South Park: The Stick of Truth and Steven Universe: Attack the Light, are both successors to Paper Mario as Action Command-heavy RPGs despite being based on two shows that couldn't be more different.
  • Bug Fables takes direct inspirations from the Paper Mario games, taking its aesthetics and combat system and turning it on its head in a bug-themed world.
• Phantom Breaker is one to the Asuka 120% series. It was developed by former Fill-in-Café employees Masatoshi Imaizumi (Asuka 120%, Mad Stalker: Full Metal Force, and Panzer Bandit) and Masaki Ukyo (who also worked on Mad Stalker, and for a time worked with Treasure on games such as Guardian Heroes and YuYu Hakusho: Makyō Tōitsusen), and share similar Tournament Arc themes featuring pretty girls.
• Pizza Tower is one to the Wario Land series, mostly taking its inspiration from the third and fourth games.
• Planet Coaster is one to Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Both of which were developed by Frontier Developments.
  • Same as goes with Planet Zoo from the same developers that are widely considered to be the successor of Zoo Tycoon series.
• The emergent "battle royale" genre of game, including Trope Codifier Player Unknowns Battlegrounds and its competitor Fortnite Battle Royale, are spiritual successors to the controversial Japanese novel Battle Royale. Both of the aforementioned games follow very similar sets of rules to the novel's eponymous death game: players are dropped off in the battlefield and tasked with killing one another until only one player (or team of players) is left standing. As the game progresses, areas of the map become cordoned off, forcing players into closer proximity with one another and forcing them to fight, less they be killed for staying out of bounds.
• For some, the original PlayStation is considered the spiritual successor to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System even more so than its actual successor the Nintendo 64. This is mostly due to the fact that the PlayStation was originally an add-on to the SNES, both systems have similar controller layouts (which is especially noticeable with the original controller), and many third-party developers for the SNES moved to the PlayStation during the fifth-generation.
• One could make a case for the entire Pokémon series being a spiritual successor to the Mother series, considering that the two series were made in part by a common developer (Creatures Inc.), and share a number of uncanny similarities.
  • In particular, Pokémon Black and White is one to Mother 3 in many ways:
    • The music: The Nuvema town theme, the Surfing theme, Route 10 theme, and N's Farewell are all suspiciously similar to songs from Mother 3 (respectively: Hinawa's Theme, The Green Train's Fun, Too!, Run, My Dog, Run!, and the Love Theme).
    • The story: The backstory reveals that Unova's two dragons, Reshiram and Zekrom (and probably Kyurem) were once one, and twin heroes formed Unova alongside it. However, one twin wanted things to remain natural and the other was in favor of urbanization. The dragon then split in two as a result, the older twin forming Reshiram and the younger twin forming Zekrom. N and Ghetsis are said to be the descendants of one of these twins.
    • The Pokémon: Drilbur and its evolution, Excadrill, are reminiscent of the Mischievous Mole and Reconstructed Mole enemies respectively. Garbodor is similar to the Forlorn Junk Heap. Many others resemble enemies from the other Mother series games.
  • Mewtwo looks quite similar to Giygas from EarthBound Beginnings, except with some purple and a few extra details added.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon's plot is also this to Mother 3. A benevolent-looking modern society gets established within a quaint island area, with many outsiders praising it as an utopia. Inside it, it turns out that there are unethical experiments that have been conducted by masked men (including the creation of chimeras), the inhabitants that they house are treated horribly, and the leader is insane and has a strange obsession.
  • Furthermore, Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!, in addition to being a remake of Pokémon Yellow, can also be considered this to Hey You, Pikachu!, Pokémon Channel, and PokéPark Wii, all of which were Pokemon games aimed at younger audiences than the main series that focused on cute Pikachu antics.
• Poker Night at the Inventory and its sequel Poker Night 2 are successors to both Telltale Texas Hold Em as a poker video game where you play against four other players with lots and lots of funny dialogue and Sam & Max: Freelance Police since it features both of the titular protagonists in both of the games and was devised as a form of Revisiting the Roots with the sense of humor that their Sam and Max games pioneered.
• Valve's Portal is officially the Spiritual Successor of Narbacular Drop, and the whole team behind ND now works at Valve.
• Prince of Persia was a Spiritual Successor to Karateka, an earlier Jordan Mechner game. The rotoscoped kicks and punches in Karateka prefigured the rotoscoped swordplay in Prince of Persia. Karateka even included a gory instant-death Booby Trap.
• Project Exonaut is this to FusionFall. Both are online games revolving around redesigned Cartoon Network characters.
• The Project Gotham Racing series is a spiritual successor to the Dreamcast game Metropolis Street Racer. In turn, Forza Horizon is a spiritual successor to PGR, with its development team including many former Bizarre Creations employees.
• Project Wingman confessed right from its Kickstarter pitch that it was aiming to be Ace Combat with the Serial Numbers Filed Off after the latter series had been dormant for a number of years. After the game was funded, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown was announced and released to considerable acclaim. When Sector D2 released their effort a year later, the revitalized fanbase congratulated them on releasing Ace Combat 8 so quickly.
• [PROTOTYPE] is this to The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Both are superhuman Wide-Open Sandbox games by Radical Entertainment that downright relish in their Video Game Cruelty Potential.
  • According to Word of God, the inspiration for Prototype came about due to Hulk's "weaponize" ability; that is, the ability to turn vehicles and such into improvised weapons, rather than limiting the player to "pick up and throw." Reportedly, during testing, somebody posed the question "what if you could weaponize the player?"
  • Continuing the chain of succession is Saints Row IV, which features a set of superpowers that control and function almost identically to the ones in Prototype.
• The team that worked on Pro Wrestling later formed Human Entertainment and developed the Fire Pro Wrestling series.
• Pochi & Nyaa, the last game Compile was working on before they went bankrupt, was an obvious attempt to recapture some of the gameplay and aesthetics of the Puyo Puyo Cash-Cow Franchise which they no longer owned.
• Project: Snowblind actually was meant to be a spinoff of Deus Ex, but was retooled when its actual sequel sold poorly.
• Propeller Arena: Aviation Battle Championship is the spiritual successor to Wing Arms on the Sega Saturn.
• Pump It Up Pro is, oddly enough, this to In the Groove. Since the rights to ITG were picked up by Konami (in other words, Konami nixed ITG), the team behind ITG, who had collaborated with PIU developer Andamiro for the In the Groove 2 dedicated cabinet, decided to collaborate with Andamiro once again, this time working on a Pump It Up game geared towards the same sort of players who enjoy ITG, featuring a lot of ITG elements such as the use of the StepMania engine, notes colored by beat (rather than each column having its own color like in mainline Pump, although the option to use that coloring scheme exists), scoring based purely on accuracy rather than other factors like note streaks, and a good chunk of the soundtrack consisting of songs from artists who contributed to ITG such as Kyle Ward. In short, it's In The Groove WITH A PUMP IT UP PAD LAYOUT!
• Pumpkin Jack bares more than a few similarities to MediEvil; 3D Defanged Horror platformers about men brought back to life in a cartoonish, cel-shaded, Standard Fantasy Setting with their mission to kill a wizard. Health comes in the form of a green potion, their soundtracks are similar and the protagonist's reward is safe passage into the afterlife.
• Barring the change to true 3D, Quake is so close to the earlier Doom that it's common for fans to consider it to be effectively a sequel by a different name. If anything, it's more like Doom than it is like Quake II (which is something of a Dolled-Up Installment). Nearly all the weapons are shared in some form, both have a space marine protagonist fighting his way through a demonic horde (though Quake has a Lovecraftian tinge compared to Doom's focus on heavy-metal-cover Satanism), and the overall gameplay and feel is very recognizable as an evolution of Doom. Its biggest differences compared to Doom are its graphics, its use of true verticality, and its far more elaborate multiplayer. The two are close enough that a lot of ideas from Quake leaked into Doom (2016)—that quad-damage powerup had to come from somewhere.
• The UK-based company Graftgold ported Rainbow Islands to the Amiga and other European-market home computers. They followed it up with a game called Fire & Ice: The Daring Adventures of Cool Coyote, which had somewhat similar game mechanics (in particular, combat is done by shooting something that immobilizes an enemy and then touching it while immobilized, enemies left immobilized for too long will become stronger, every level contains a certain amount of enemy-dropped items which the player is supposed to collect, and taking too long to finish a level causes something to chase the player character), and its box cover had a quotation from a review that called it "the best platformer since Rainbow Islands".
• Raging Blasters by Terarin is a love letter to the Star Soldier series, featuring graphics in the style of 16-bit games, a 5-way shot similar to the one used in Star Soldier, and a focus on destroying waves of enemies rather than the modern-day standard of dodging hailstorms of bullets. It even has a Caravan mode in the style of the ones in Star Soldier (in which the player has a fixed amount of time to earn as many points as possible in a target-rich environment).
• Rakuen has been compared to To the Moon, an RPG Maker game that Rakuen's creator Laura Shigihara has composed songs for. While they go about it using different methods, both games are ultimately silly but heartfelt stories about granting the final requests of dying patients by experiencing their memories with the help of an alternate dream-like world.
• Rampage, to Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!.
  • War of the Monsters to both Rampage and King of the Monsters.
• Rare:
  • The Donkey Kong Country series seems like a Spiritual Successor to Super Mario World, where they took everything that set that game apart from the earlier Mario games and expanded on it, and the gameplay was even reminiscent of a Mario game. Keep in mind that Yoshi's Island only picked up its sequel status for American release.
  • Donkey Kong 64 is more of a successor to Banjo-Kazooie rather than the Country games. Note that this was before the latter got an actual sequel.
  • The Banjo-Kazooie series also got a spiritual successor in 2017 with Yooka-Laylee, made by former Rare developers.
• RayStorm: spiritual successor to RayForce. RayCrisis is the official prequel to RayForce.
• Razing Storm is the spiritual sequel to Crisis Zone, the Gaiden Game to Time Crisis. Like Crisis Zone, you use a machine gun instead of Time Crisis's handguns (though for bigger targets, you automatically switch to stronger weapons), and instead of hiding behind objects, you take cover behind a heavy-duty shield. Razing Storm has since been renamed Time Crisis: Razing Storm for its PS3 release.
  • Time Crisis is itself a spiritual successor to Rolling Thunder, borrowing some elements from the older games. Take Cover! and a Timed Mission is a common similarity between them. The themes are also similar.
• While Red Dead Redemption is the official sequel to Red Dead Revolver, Redemption has a lot more in common with the Activision-made Gun than its true predecessor.
  • Also, Red Dead Redemption is considered a Spiritual Successor to Grand Theft Auto (namely, Grand Theft Horse).
  • L.A. Noire is also considered a Spiritual Successor to Grand Theft Auto (what if GTA was a film noir?), though arguably less so, due to the fact that this one's much more story-driven; the Wide-Open Sandbox aspect of GTA and Redemption is not used in the main storyline. Instead, it has you moving from one mission directly into the next.
  • On the topic of Grand Theft Auto, the series also started out as this to Body Harvest
• Refazel was supposed to be the sequel to Ferazel's Wand—hence the similar title. Sadly, the fellow who was in charge of the first game left Ambrosia Software shortly afterwards, and they wouldn't give him the sequel rights, so he made it into a sort of inverted Dolled-Up Installment.
• The Remothered trilogy for the Clock Tower series, unsurprisingly, considering it started out as a Fan Remake of the first Clock Tower (1995) game before it slowly morphed its own thing during its long development. Despite the changes in story, it retains the atmosphere and Alone with the Psycho-style gameplay that defined the Clock Tower games. It even has traces of the original Clock Tower plot and characters, most notably in how it ended up swapping the roles of Jennifer and Mary, with the originally villainous Mary — now named Rosemary — being the protagonist of Remothered.
• Resident Evil also borrowed the control scheme from the original Alone in the Dark (1992). Eternal Darkness is also something of a spiritual successor to Alone in the Dark as both games feature a female character called to an old mansion to investigate the suicide of a family member; an investigation that leads to Lovecraftian horrors.
• The original Resident Evil was conceived when Capcom wanted an updated version of their Famicom horror RPG Sweet Home (1989). An early teaser for Biohazard even used an arrangement of the Sweet Home battle theme and it is believed that the international title of Resident Evil came from a line in Sweet Home which describes the mansion where the game is set "a place of residing evil."
• Resogun is the modern successor of Defender.
• The game Reunion (1994) followed by Imperium Galactica series and then Haegemonia: Legions of Iron series. All are plot-heavy 4X real time strategies about humans expanding to space. The publishers kept collapsing before the next instalment was ready, but kept the rights.
• The 1995 pinball machine Attack from Mars turned out to be a huge seller, but didn't get a proper sequel until the Pinball 2000 machine Revenge from Mars. In the meantime, the 1997 pinball Medieval Madness was created by the same developers and, despite the different premise, was far more similar to the original game's structure than the sequel was.
• RiME: Another "Myst"-like game, very much in the mold of the original. The protagonist lands on an eerie, beautiful island, is given no prompting, so the only way forward is to start exploring. The story unfolds as puzzles are solved.
• Risen to Gothic series after Gothic 3. Developers — Piranha Bytes — left the publisher, who retained rights to the title, world and most characters. Risen uses similar mechanics, but tries to correct the drawbacks of Gothic games.
  • After mixed response to the former's sequels; ELEX would take up the mantle in a sci-fi setting.
  • The Gothic series is already a Spiritual Successor to the Ultima series, with the future Piranha Bytes seeing Ultima IX, and trying to do a better 3D Ultima game. The interactivity with the surroundings, life-like NPCs with their schedules, and many more will seeM familiar to fans of the Ultima series. The war with orcs, is even similar to the war with gargoyles from Ultima VI, with the orcs, like gargoyles being also revaled as a much more sympathetic species, that averts Always Chaotic Evil. The Sleeper is also defeated in a similar way to Exodus. both are defeated not in battle, but by destroying the things that bound them to reality. In Exodus' case, you insert 4 punchcards into slots in Exodus' computer interface, which overloads and destroys it, while in the Sleeper's case, you must stab the 5 hearts that anchor him in the Mortal Realm.
• Rise of Nations, a strategy game designed by Brian Reynolds, is to some degree a Spiritual Successor of Civilization III.
  • Rise of Nations is the third Age of Empires game. Period.
  • In turn, Rise of Legends is a Spiritual Successor to Rise of Nations.
  • Mobile game DomiNations is in turn yet another Spiritual Successor to Rise of Nations, not only being developed by the revived Big Huge Games but also having Reynolds as head developer.
• While Guitar Hero III is obviously the notional sequel to Guitar Hero II, many feel that the "soul" of the franchise has moved along to Rock Band. After Harmonix, the series' creator, sold the Guitar Hero IP to Activision, they moved on to Rock Band, making it the game which still employs the Guitar Hero II development team, game engine, and philosophy regarding note chart design.
  • While we're on the subject of Rock Band, Unplugged for the PSP hearkens back to Harmonix's pre-Guitar Hero days, playing much more like Frequency or Amplitude (in fact, it was orginally supposed to be a direct sequel to the latter, but Sony then vetoed the idea, forcing Harmonix to slap the Rock Band label on it). The DS version of Rock Band 3 continues the trend, while the DS version of Lego Rock Band is a similar but more watered-down game. The similarities then ballooned into Rock Band Blitz, which is little more than a direct self-plagiarism of Amplitude. This means that, in a way, Harmonix finally got that Amplitude sequel they wanted!
    • And now, Amplitude has its own successor, thanks to Kickstarter.
  • The fan made Clone Hero is aiming at being a Spritual Successor to Guitar Hero III.
• Players of both RuneScape and Ragnarok Online have each joked that Team Fortress 2 is a Spiritual Successor to their games, as they're all about collecting party hats, known for their "The one with the most hats wins" rule. In turn, Overwatch is often considered a spiritual successor to Team Fortress 2.
• R-Type had a line of actual sequels, but before most of these Irem made a spiritual successor titled X-Multiply.
• Satellite Reign is the spiritual successor to Syndicate. It was created by the lead programmer of Syndicate Wars, who was irked to see the renowned action-strategy series rebooted as a first person shooter.
• The shoot 'em up-fighting game hybrid Senko no Ronde (known as WarTech in other countries) is one to Psychic Force. Both games are developed by Taito's arcade division, who then split up and formed G.rev, and both titles also share similar gameplay flow. What sets these two apart however is that Psychic Force is much more akin to a traditional fighting game, whereas Senko no Ronde plays much more like a bullet hell shooter.
• Serpent In The Staglands to Darklands. Low Fantasy Wide-Open Sandbox in a world where medieval or pre-Christian beliefs are real. Not as much historical accuracy, though. No watercolor illustrations, but pixel art and sepia sketches are quite similar.
• Shadowverse is one to Rage of Bahamut. In fact, nearly every card in this game uses card art from Rage of Bahamut (not to mention the huge failure of Rage of Bahamut in the west due to Screwed by the Network). The second expansion is even called "Rise of Bahamut".
• Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus was thought to be a Spiritual Successor to his previous game, ICO. However, he revealed a direct connection between the two games in an interview several months after the game's release: the protagonist of Shadow of the Colossus is actually a direct ancestor of the protagonist in Ico. However, the two play very differently and have no further storyline connections. In turn, The Last Guardian is part of this world.
• Crowd-funded effort Shadow Of The Eternals was meant to be Eternal Darkness 2 in all but name.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • The original Shin Megami Tensei is a spiritual successor to the original Famicom Megami Tensei games, refining gameplay elements introduced in those games while creating an original story inspired by both the Digital Devil Story novels (and the Megami Tensei adaptation) and the post-apocalyptic setting of Megami Tensei II.
  • Persona is an obvious spiritual successor to one-off MegaTen Gaiden Game Shin Megami Tensei if... This is most prominent in the first Persona, with there being a truly astounding number of parallels between the two games, but even later Persona games have some of this; if nothing else, the "persona" system remains a greatly revised and expanded version of the "guardian" system found in If....
  • At the time of release, Digital Devil Saga was a Spiritual Successor to Persona, featuring some noticeable similarities in both story and gameplay. However, the Persona series itself has been fully revived since then, thanks to the success of Persona 3 and subsequent games.
  • Devil Survivor is a Spiritual Successor for the Majin Tensei spinoff series, although this statement is based only on the fact that they are strategy games.
  • Persona 4:
    • A group of young adults and a nonhuman solve a supernatural mystery, and the Big Bad is a human. This is basically the best Scooby-Doo game ever made.
    • Its narrative similarities, Fighting Spirits, small town setting and the fact that the Big Bad has the same power as the heroes makes it the best Diamond is Unbreakable game out there.
    • A psychological story about having to directly face one's inner demons while needing to deal with a fog that never lifts and attracts monsters to the town it infests makes this a rather lighthearted retelling of Silent Hill 2.
  • Persona 5 Strikers ended up not becoming a typical Dynasty Warriors spin off given that it incorporates day and nighttime social interactions of Japanese cities to find clues when not exploring dungeons, while level exploration takes more from a typical action rpg, especially with its elements of platforming and stealth as opposed to the focus on defeating large number of enemies to guard points on a map. With combat itself also emphasizing Megaten weakness exploitation, the game is pretty much a modern Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army in both setting and release. Funny enough, Raidou was the first Megaten star to dress in black with a talking black cat sidekick.
• One of the victory conditions in Civilization II is to make a journey to Alpha Centauri, thus beginning the colonization of the galaxy by your side. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri can thus be seen as the direct sequel to this particular victory. Or, it's just Civilization II IN SPACE!
  • Taken full circle in Civilization: Beyond Earth, which is a Civilization-series game that borrows a lot from Alpha Centauri.
• Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is an attempt to resurrect the gameplay codified by the classic stealth-strategy series Commandos, but replacing the World War II setting with the Sengoku Jidai, and hardened Allied special forces operatives with a ragtag gang of ninjas.
• Shantae (2002) is a successor to the Sabrina licensed games for the Game Boy Color. They both star a teenaged Half-Human Hybrid with magical powers embarking on an adventure. Both games run on similar themes, share similar level designs, and even run on the same engine with the exact same controls. Notably, they also have the same developer.
• Sigma Star Saga is considered this in regards to The Guardian Legend. While both games are hybridizations of the Action-Adventure and Shoot 'Em Up genres, Sigma is more story-driven.
• Electronic Arts's Skate is a successor to their NES-era game Skate or Die.
  • And interestingly enough, the series it used to duel with, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, is itself a spiritual successor to 720 Degrees.
• Skies of Arcadia is considered to be a spiritual successor to Phantasy Star since both were developed by Sega's Overworks studios, and they're both turn-based roleplaying games. In fact, some fans consider Skies to be more a successor to Phantasy Star than Phantasy Star Online.
• Skullgirls is being considered a spiritual successor to Arcana Heart, according to people in the fighting game community who attend professional tournaments and have played both of them.
• The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, a Wii flight sim game made by Project Aces with WW2 like planes, is this to the Ace Combat series.
• Smash TV was a Spiritual Successor to the arcade classic Robotron: 2084.
  • Smash TV later got its own Spiritual Successor, Total Carnage, with the same gameplay and over-the-top violence, except you're fighting a Saddam Hussein lookalike instead of going through a futuristic game show.
    • It's actually Hitler.
• Soccer Spirits, the successor to Captain Tsubasa, Tecmo Cup: Soccer Game and Blitzball.
• Sockman is a spiritual successor to the ZX Spectrum classic Manic Miner.
• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter can be seen as this to Mega Man Legends due to the surprising about of overlapping concepts and themes the two games share, from having a adoptive brother-sister hunter duo who live on a mobile airship (Red and Chocolat on the Asmodeus/Mega Man and Roll on the Flutter), steampunk-inspired civilizations segmented by islands and are under constant threats of sky pirates, objects from an advanced ancient civilization being a constant source of interest, and everyone using some form of Mini-Mecha in their daily lives, The comparison grows when, like Mega Man, Red is also unknowingly tied to a villainous group that wants to commit genocide against the world, and the "Reset" is mentioned as a major catalyst in both franchises (though the "Reset" was never mentioned in Legends specifically, it was in the ending of ZX Advent). It's enough to make Solatorobo be considered the Legends 3 that never was, even moreso when CyberConnect2 went on record saying they would develop Legends 3 in a heartbeat if Capcom gave them the offer.
• The Soul Series can be considered one to the Samurai Shodown series. Another Historical Fantasy fighting game featuring a samurai who loves to fight strong enemies. It comes in full circle when Haohmaru becomes a Guest Fighter in Soul Calibur VI.
• The laserdisc arcade game Space Ace was an obvious Spiritual Successor to Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair.
• Sega's Spikeout series is the 3D successor to Streets of Rage.
• Spore is this in some ways to SimEarth.
• Squad is for the Project Reality, a Game Mod for Battlefield 2. Squad actually spun-off from a failed Project Reality 2 project, which was slated to be a standalone version of the mod in a more modern engine.
• Starbound is this to Terraria, as one of the developers of Terraria is the head developer of Starbound.
• Stardew Valley was apparently always designed to be a spiritual successor to the Harvest Moon games, borrowing many elements from them while also rectifying a number of common criticisms, such as the lack of a Gay Option. It uses an art style especially similar to the original SNES Harvest Moon.
• Star Citizen is the successor to Chris Roberts' earlier titles Wing Commander, Starlancer, and Freelancer. The single-player "Squadron 42" portion is more like WC and Starlancer, while the Wide-Open Sandbox MMO half is more like Freelancer.
• StarCraft can be argued to be a spiritual successor to the first two Warcraft games, also made by Blizzard Entertainment.
• StarFlight and Star Flight 2 influenced several others:
  • Protostar started as StarFlight 3 under the same producer, Joe Ybarra, but had Serial Numbers Filed Off after disagreements between developer and publisher.
  • The first Star Control game, was inspired by Starflight, but bore little resemblance. Star Control 2 came much closer. Both were designed by one of Starflight designers Paul Reiche III.
  • Alien Legacy, also produced by Ybarra, has a smaller scope — only a single star system and only 1 on-screen alien race — but shares similar After the End / Apocalypse Not mood, as well as scouring the surface of alien planets for many kinds of Applied Phlebotinum and quest items.
  • Mass Effect director called Starflight a key inspiration. More so, the twist ending reveal Drew Karpyshyn originally planned was quite similar: the frequent use of mass effect caused stars to explode, thus Reapers wiped all advanced civilizations, hoping one of the harvested races would be able to figure a solution. (And harvesting Protheans took so long, it almost destroyed the galaxy. And the human proto-reaper seemed like their best bet.)
• In Japan, Hudson Soft produced the NES and MSX ports of Star Force and ran a nationwide tournament around it. But Star Force was a Tecmo game, and so Hudson developed a rather similar game called Star Soldier to feature in the next year's tournament. Star Force and Star Soldier each had their own line of sequels.
• Star Ocean was a Spiritual Successor to Tales of Phantasia, the first game in the Tales Series. They share many gameplay and interface elements, and even things like items and spells; the original Tales of Phantasia team splintered into the two series, with the exception of music composer Motoi Sakuraba, who remains the composer on both series.
  • Tales of Symphonia is a spiritual successor to Tales of Eternia design-wise. Never mind that it's already a long-distance prequel to Tales of Phantasia, which makes it a spiritual successor as far as the theme is concerned.
    • Tales of the Abyss is the spiritual successor to Symphonia, particularly in terms of gameplay, but also in cartain thematic elements. This is due to it sharing Symphonia's development staff ("Team Symphonia"). It was followed in turn by Tales of Vesperia, making a sort of spiritual trilogy.
• The Atari 2600 game Solaris was intended as an unofficial sequel to Star Raiders by Doug Neubauer, who programmed both games.
• Star Trek Online's space navigation/combat portion is a spiritual successor to Star Trek: Starfleet Command.
• Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity is a successor to Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth, as the two games share a lot of the same battle mechanics.
• Strikers 1945 series: Successor to the Aero Fighters series, but more Bullet Hell-ish.
• Street Racing Syndicate can be where Genki's unreleased game based on The Fast and the Furious done right ("Winning's winning." - Dominic Toretto).
• Sunset Overdrive as this to Total Overdose, Crackdown, and to lesser note Saints Row IV and Jet Set Radio Future.
  • It also can be this to Infamous and [PROTOTYPE], abelt Lighter and Softer with Ratchet & Clank-esque humor.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • New Super Mario Bros. 2 is strongly influenced by Super Mario Bros. 3, from the Tanooki Leaf power-up, to those colorful rectangular sheet platforms Mario can walk on, the Koopalings, and each World's map being a wide rectangle. Reznor's role in this game is also rather similar to that of Boom Boom, guarding the midpoint of each World.
  • New Super Mario Bros. U is likewise heavily based on Super Mario World, featuring the return of Yoshi after his absence from the above, baby Yoshis, visual elements like the slanted polygonal hills seen in the background of some levels, Edible Theme Naming, a level select consisting of one large map instead of eight separate small ones, a haunted shipwreck, and the hidden Brutal Bonus Level Superstar Road.
  • Super Mario 3D World is highly based on the American Super Mario Bros. 2, as it involves Mario being joined by Luigi, Princess Peach, and Toad on an adventure to another world to free a world of cute fairy creatures from the bad guy. The characters keep their own unique abilites (Mario is balanced, Luigi jumps higher, Toad moves fast, Peach can float) like in said game. The Sprixies are a stand-in for the Subcon fairies. The "Player Select" theme from Mario 2 get a Musical Nod in the Lucky Houses. Toad in particular even has his color scheme from the NES version of the game rather than his normal look. Finally, Bowser, who wasn't in Mario 2 originally, apes the original Big Bad Wart in the idea of capturing the Sprixies and imprisoning them inside of a jar.
  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder is for all intents and purposes a 2.5D successor of the afforementioned Super Mario 3D World even down to similar plots, scenarios, and gimmicks. Mario and Friends explore a new kingdom that is attacked by Bowser? Check. Tiny Green character based on royalty? (Sprixie Princess/Prince Forian) Check. Multiple playable characters? Check. A quirky new power-up introduced that is based on an animal (Cat/Elephant)? Check. A new race of cute creatures is introduced (Sprixies/Poplins)? Check. Bowser undergoes a new transformation that is fought in the final battle? Check again.
  • Super Mario Odyssey is basically a modernized, larger-scale version of Super Mario 64.
    • A sandbox collectathon platformer, in which a hero and his sidekick change into myriad different forms to navigate the world? Sounds like a damn fine Banjo-Kazooie game.
• Glitch Strikers is this to Super Mario Bros. Crossover in that the game is based on characters from vastly different games with their gameplay retained. The differences in this case are that Glitch Strikers is a Writing Around Trademarks version for commercial release (as such, the characters are replaced with expies — Mario himself, for example, is replaced by a German miner named Manni), the worlds in the game are based on each of the characters rather than solely emulating Super Mario Bros., and there's an actual storyline that ties everything together.
• Super Robot Wars W is the Spiritual Successor to Super Robot Wars J for the Game Boy Advance. Despite being in separate continuities, they both share many of the same series' (Full Metal Panic!, Martian Successor Nadesico, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, and Tekkaman Blade are the standouts), with units even using the same sprites and attacks. W also has many of the same features as J, such as Unit Switching with battleships, altering background music, and series favorites. A common fan theory is that the other race J's Fury mention they're avoiding is in fact W's Database, or at least will be once their storylines come up in the Original Generation series. Similarly, K has a similar engine and graphics, but series-wise it really only shares SEED This all culminates in Super Robot Wars High School, which combines all three.
  • Similarly, the original mecha of Super Robot Wars Advance are descended from the mecha of Super Robot Wars 64, and SRW MX is considered to be a successor of the Compact/Impact series.
  • K is actually a successor to Z — created out of all the content the devs wished they could have put in the latter, and sharing a few series and several themes.
  • Super Robot Wars Z is likewise one for Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, sharing many of the same series as well as largely taking place in a post-apocalyptic setting.
• A case of one with a fan work: Super Smash Ponies is considered a spiritual successor to My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic.
• The ill-fated 1st party Play Station Vita action game Freedom Wars has one: Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, of all games. Fatal Bullet is made by the same developers and features a more RPG-oriented spin on most of Freedom Wars' core mechanics. It even includes a hookshot mechanic that is clearly inspired by the Ibara Hookshot.
• SWIV was created by the developer of the home computer versions of Tecmo's Silk Worm, reusing some of the sound effects, and was all but advertised as a sequel to it. "Silkworm IV" was only one of three official expansions of the Initialism Title.
• System Shock has three. BioShock retains the gameplay of System Shock 2, Dead Space retains the horror atmosphere and setting, and Prey mixes up between gameplay of 2 and the setting of 1 with Bioshock's influence mixing in on both front.
  • Deus Ex can be considered as a spiritual successor to System Shock as well. Warren Spector, the creator of Deus Ex worked on System Shock in the past.
    • Deus Ex also shares many similarities to Commodore Amiga adventure game KGB, also known as Conspiracy.

T-Z

• Shiwuyu/The Tale of Food is essentially Touken Ranbu to Food Fantasy's KanColle – they're both Chinese games with a premise of Cast of Personifications of food items, but the former, with its exclusive focus on Chinese cuisine, takes an approach more heavily based in Chinese culture and history than the latter's international one.
• The Talos Principle: To co-writer Jonas Kyratzes's earlier game about an android questioning human spirituality in what might be the ashes of our civilization.
• Tech Romancer, a 3D Humongous Mecha-themed fighting game, is a spiritual successor to another Capcom-made Humongous Mecha-themed fighting game, Cyberbots. One of the mechs from Cyberbots, Blodia, and its pilot, Jin Saotome, appear as a playable character in the home console version.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is a spiritual sequel to the classic Konami-era beat'em ups Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, as stated in this GameReactor interview with the DotEmu CEO Cyrille Imbert.
• Tell Me Why feels like Life Is Strange 3 in all but name. Developed by Life is Strange developer Dontnod Entertainment, Tell Me Why features a coming-of-age narrative, sympathetic focus on LGBTQ+ characters, and young people developing superpowers in Everytown, America. Some have even speculated that the stand-alone nature of Tell Me Why is mainly due to the game having a different publisher, suggesting that it might have been tied in to LiS in some way if not for that.
• Telling Lies has similar themes and gameplay to Her Story (a prior game by the same creator), but a different plot and a broader scope.
• Tenchu was originally Acquire's work but then FromSoftware had the license. This would lead to Acquire making the similar Shinobido games, which has Tenchu's stealth kills and Ki-meter for detecting enemies. FromSoftware had plans on returning to the world of Tenchu, but instead their Project Ninja would become Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
• Tetris: The Grand Master is the spiritual successor to Sega's Tetris games, and borrows many elements such as the piece colors, the bottom-biased rotation system, fast sideways movement and soft drop, and piece lock delay (a feature present in all of Sega's Tetris games but not in Nintendo's, at least for a while).
• The 1997 comedy hospital management game Theme Hospital had a spiritual successor in 2018, in the form of Two Point Hospital, and several old hands from Bullfrog (the developer of the original) worked on the successor.
• Timespinner's gameplay and aesthetic are very closely based on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night-era Castlevanias, especially Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.
• Tiny Metal is one for Nintendo Wars, as both are Turn-Based Strategy games with a colorful cast of characters.
• The cancelled Tiny Toon Adventures: Defenders of the Universe / Tiny Toon Adventures: Defenders of the Looniverse is a gameplay successor to Treasure's earlier Rakugaki Showtime.
• Titanfall to Call of Duty, more specifically Modern Warfare, due to the fact that developer Respawn Entertainment is composed of the majority of developers from Infinity Ward who left Activision following the release of Jason West and Vince Zampella, the co-founders of Infinity Ward.
• Torchlight is a spiritual succesor of Fate and/or Diablo.
• Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.
  • Uber Entertainment is trying to fund a new one called Planetary Annihilation on Kickstarter.
• The Trackmania series is considered to be the Spiritual Successor of an early 90's game called Stunts, which not only has the merit of sporting super-sleek 3D graphics (for the time of course), but is about clearing obstacle-laden tracks on powerful sports cars. Coincidentally, Trackmania Nations, to put an example, is about clearing obstacle-laden tracks in an Formula-1-lookalike racing car.
• Transformers: Animated: The Game is a successor to The Lost Vikings as a teamwork Puzzle Platformer.
• Transistor to the earlier Bastion.
• Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon and Locomotion.
  • And to those, Urban Games' Train Fever and Transport Fever.
• Treasure's Bleach fighting games for the Nintendo DS are considered to be spiritual successors to their Mega Drive fighting game Yu Yu Hakusho: Makyo Toitsusen.
• Even though it's an entirely different setting and story, Tree of Savior has been hailed as a successor to Ragnarok Online for a multitude of reasons:
  • Tree of Savior's developer, IMC Games, was founded by one of RO's original developers (prior to the Samsung buyout that caused most of Gravity Corporation's founders to leave). Several other people from those days are also working on Tree of Savior—notably, SoundTeMP, who provided most of RO's memorable soundtrack.
  • The game has a 2½D Sprite/Polygon Mix, like RO, and the in-game art style looks like a higher-detailed evolution of RO's.
  • Tree of Savior shares many game mechanics with RO—it can be controlled via mouse, it has a similar Character Class System and Point Build System, and features a number of things that were planned for RO by the original devteam but never happened.
• The Turing Test: To Portal and The Talos Principle.
• Twin Cobra was a spiritual successor to Tiger Heli, which in turn had a predecessor in Gyrodine, whose programmers went on to found Toaplan, the company which made the other two games. All three of these helicopter-based vertical shooters were distributed by Taito.
• Ty the Tasmanian Tiger to Crash Bandicoot.
• In a rare example of spiritual sequels crossing from one franchise to another, a group of developers wanted to make a new Ultima Underworld game, but failed to secure the license. They changed the project to a Spiritual Successor in an original IP, Arx Fatalis. They were later hired by Ubisoft, and created a Spiritual Successor to Arx Fatalis as part of Ubi's revived Might and Magic brand, becoming Dark Messiah.
  • Ultima VI received its own spiritual sequel in the form of Cythera, which featured an improved resolution and expanded skills.
  • The upcoming Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is the spiritual Spiritual Successor to classic Ultima series, and it's MMORPG offshoot, Ultima Online, being even developed by Richard "Lord British" Garriot, the Ultima series creator. Interestingly, you will apparently be able to control if the game will be a single player, few friends online, or a full-blown MMORPG experience. The setting of game is even called "New Britannia", the player character will be called the Avatar, and there are other, almost sequel-like nods to the old series.
  • Underworld Ascendant is a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld.
  • Legends Of Aria is a spiritual successor to Ultima Online.
• Unbound Saga is one to Comix Zone, both being old-school arcade style Beat 'em Up action games set inside a comic book world. The stages in both games are designed in a similar way, too, looking like comic book panels where you leap out one panel to another to progress.
• Valkyria Chronicles too is considered such to Skies of Arcadia. While Valkyria is a strategy RPG instead of turn-based, it has some members of Sega's now extinct Overworks studios on its development, and even Skies protagonists Vyse and Aika make a cameo in it.
• The Valkyrie Drive series is basically this to the Senran Kagura series.
• The Vic Tokai Platform Games Kid Kool, Psycho Fox, and Decap Attack all feature different characters (and the Japanese versions are different still), but have many elements in common, including the acceleration physics.
• Viper Phase 1, while having no real plot of its own, retains much of the look and feel of the same developer's Raiden series, specifically Raiden II.
• Irem's Vigilante is pretty much a more advanced version of their earlier single-plane Beat 'em Up Kung Fu Master in a different setting, although there was an official sequel for the Family Computer in Japan titled Spartan X 2.
• Warframe is this to darkSector. Developers at some point hinted to Warframe taking place in the same universe, thousands of years in the future, though this was since recanted. They have also stated that Warframe is the game they wanted to make back when they were in early development of darkSector.
• WarioWare to the Sound Bomber mode of Mario Artist: Polygon Studio, and Mario Artist to Mario Paint.
• Warlock: Master of the Arcane is one for Master of Magic
• War for the Overworld is regarded as a spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper, and actually began as a fan-made remake of the game before the developers decided to file off the serial numbers and sell it as its own game due to fear of copyright issues with EA.
• The turbulent history of Wasteland's developers has prompted a lot of this:
  • After Interplay made Wasteland for Electronic Arts, EA made a "sequel" named Fountain of Dreams, which they ultimately decided not to market as a sequel to Wasteland.
  • Since Interplay couldn't get the rights to Wasteland back from EA, Interplay (specifically, the RPG group, which later became Black Isle Studios) instead repurposed a prototype GURPS RPG to make Fallout and Fallout 2.
    • After Fallout 2, Interplay committed many dark and evil deeds that sapped away Black Isle's strength and ultimately led to all of their development efforts (including Fallout 3, codenamed "Project Van Buren") being canceled. After firing droves of Black Isle employees, shutting them down, and ultimately going down in flames itself, Interplay put Fallout on the auction block.
    • Much of Black Isle had regrouped as Troika and created another Spiritual Successor to the series: Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura.
  • As the crowning glory to this nonsense, InXile head Brian Fargo (the producer of the original Wasteland) reacquired the rights to Wasteland and released an actual sequel in 2014 thanks to the Kickstarter's success. Oddly enough, this game works in many ways as the spiritual successor to the first two Fallout games, since the Fallout 3 that was released is often considered to be different compared to the first two.
  • Then there's The Outer Worlds, developed by Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment and led by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, key staff in the creation of Fallout. While Fallout is about 1950s culture in the 21st century, The Outer Worlds is about Gilded Age space exploration, and essentially embraces and advances the concepts that were largely abandoned by Bethesda, including the emphasis on player choice over linearity.
  • The scepter then has to go to Afterfall which is being developed as a spiritual successor to Fallout, set in Nuclear Winter Eastern Europe.
  • Interplay also released Dragon Wars, the spiritual successor to The Bards Tale trilogy they developed for EA. Brian Fargo then obtained the rights to The Bard's Tale and published another game under that title in 2004.
    • Similarly to the Starflight and Mass Effect example below, one of the Baldur's Gate series' designers, Kevin Martens, named The Bard's Tale game and series among the most important inspirations.
    • After Michael Cranford, the main creator and programmer of the first two Bard's Tale games, stopped working with Interplay, and wasn't involved in the creation of The Bard's Tale III, he created his own take on how he would make the third part of his game, Centauri Alliance, which was more, or less Bard's Tale In Space!, although with a lot of improvements to gameplay, and a battle-mode similar to that found in the Gold Box games. Centauri Alliance even had an option to transfer characters from the three Bard's Tale games.
• The Westport Independent has been frequently compared to Papers, Please in style, theme, and tone. Both have a low-fi dictatorship setting, a somewhat similar art style, rebellious organizations, "choices mean everything" plots, and gameplay revolving around paperwork. The former revolves around a newspaper that must adjust to new government regulations or aid a rebellion, while the latter is about a border checkpoint official. Interestingly, Papers Please author Lucas Pope had also created a game with a similar premise called The Republia Times prior to the development of Westport, though the Westport development team have stated that they were unaware of Pope's first game until their game jam was over.
• Wii Party appears to be one of Mario Party.
• The Wii's menu system (including the default channels and at least part of Wii Sports) is a Spiritual Successor to Mario Paint. The music is too similar to be a coincidence, and the Wiimote works a lot like the old SNES Mouse did.
  • The way you can customize the Wii menu through drag-and-drop is also very similar to the GBA Movie Player. Both the Wii and GBAMP also have 512MB of memory.
  • WarioWare D.I.Y. also shares a lot of elements with Mario Paint, such as the usable colors. The music maker borrows all of the symbols used for notes and the man running above the staff outright.
• The Witness: Very much in the style of Myst (even more so its sequel Riven), with the lonely Beautiful Void and numerous puzzles aimed towards a common goal.
• The 2000 RPG Wizards and Warriors by D. W. Bradley (not to be confused with the NES Wizards & Warriors game) is one for the Wizardry series. Bradley was also the creator of Wizardry games 5 through 7.
  • Class of Heroes is the Spiritual Successor to the (Japan-only) Wizardry Xth subseries, although much of the races, and (in the first game only)classes are almost identical to those in the Dark Savant Trilogy (Wizardry 6 through 8).
  • The Dark Spire is a Spiritual Successor to the first three and fifth Wizardry games, even coming with an option to change graphics and sound to be like from a game produced in The '80s.
• WolfQuest is this to Wolf (DOS). Both games are very similar, having the same subject matter and made with the same goal in mind: Educating people about wolves.
• The Wonderful 101, a Wii U game by PlatinumGames, seems to be based somewhat on Viewtiful Joe.
• The WonderSwan can be considered to be a spiritual successor to the original Game Boy since they were both made by Gunpei Yokoi.
• World's End Club is set up as a successor to Danganronpa, in a deliberate attempt to make the player believe it's just another "death game". The plot then spins off in another direction, and it ends up feeling like a Zero Escape successor instead, although it's significantly more lighthearted than either.
• The X-Universe series is widely considered a Spiritual Successor to Elite and Privateer.
• The original Xbox is widely considered to be the spiritual successor to the Sega Dreamcast, since many Dreamcast games - particularly those from Sega themselves - were ported to (Shenmue II) or received sequels on (Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future) the system, they both have similar controller layouts, the Xbox was at one point going to be backwards compatible with the Dreamcast, and both are compatible with Windows CE and DirectX.
  • To a noticeably lesser extent, the PlayStation 2 can also be considered a successor to the Dreamcast. While the two don't share any hardware or software, the PS2's mere existence being a factor in the Dreamcast's failure meant that those Dreamcast games which didn't see ports to or sequels on the Xbox instead saw them on the PS2. Amusingly, the PS2 even managed similar third-party support long after its time had ended — the Dreamcast still saw official releases in Japan until 2007 (and indie devs are still making the occasional game for it beyond then), while the PS2's last official release was in 2013, just two months before the debut of a fourth PlayStation.
  • Even the Nintendo GameCube can be seen as a spiritual successor to the Dreamcast, as many Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Phantasy Star Online, and Crazy Taxi received updated ports on the GameCube, and both systems used proprietary disc formats. Also, the dual-screen functionality with the GameBoy Advance link-cable can be seen as a spiritual successor to the Dreamcast's VMU.
• When developers leave their parent company to start a new studio or otherwise lose the rights to their previous intellectual properties, it's not uncommon for them to create spiritual successors. For example, when the development team responsible for Xenogears and Chrono Cross left SquareSoft to form Monolith Soft, they created successors to those games in the form of the Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos games, respectively. When the developers behind Devil May Cry, P.N.03, Viewtiful Joe and God Hand left Capcom to form PlatinumGames, they created Bayonetta, Vanquish, The Wonderful 101 and MadWorld, respectively.
• Xenosaga was one for Xenogears. This was due to copyright, as Square Enix owned Xenogears, while all the people who worked on it and wished to do more with it went on to create their own studio called Monolith Soft, under Bandai Namco. There are a metric ton of Shout Outs and characters that are strikingly similar, and the third game and the sourcebooks would even hint that the two take place in the same timeline. Word of God, however, states that Xenosaga was a Continuity Reboot for Xenogears, and not an actual prequel.
  • History would repeat itself with the Xenoblade Chronicles series, which is a spiritual successor to both, though it originally wasn't meant to be: the continued use of the Xeno name came from their new owners at Nintendo thinking it would be a cool Production Throwback. Unlike its predecessors, the Blade games are more loosely-connected, taking place in the same universe, but being standalone stories featuring completely different characters and settings.
  • The Xeno games as a whole can be considered spiritual successors to the Final Fantasy series, as Xenogears was originally proposed to be Final Fantasy VII, but rejected as it was considered "too dark" (which says a lot considering what Final Fantasy VII ended up being). Most of Monolith Soft's senior developers also got their start working on the pre-VII Final Fantasy games, thus providing further links to the JRPG titan.
• The popular, but now dated, X-COM series has a number of unrelated spiritual successors, including the UFO After Blank series, Xenonauts, the open-source UFO: Alien Invasion, and Rebelstar: Tactical Command for the GBA. Like XCOM 2, Xenonauts 2 would take place in an Alternate Universe from the first game.
  • X-COM: UFO Defence itself is kind of a prequel to earlier Gollop's game Laser Squad, quite successful on ZX Spectrum, but nearly unknown elsewhere. XCOM Apocalypse even borrowed MegaCorp names from Laser Squad. This came a full circle with Laser Squad: Nemesis — a true sequel to Laser Squad and Spiritual Successor to X-COM.
  • After the series reboot by Firaxis Games in 2012, XCOM Apocalypse received a spiritual successor in the form of XCOM: Chimera Squad in 2020, which like its predecessor takes place in a single city and revolves around a multi-species squad, but in a far less dystopian setting.
• X-Men: Next Dimension was an attempt at doing a 3D take on the old Capcom-produced Marvel fighting games, like X-Men: Children of the Atom and the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Next Dimension even had moves that were obviously lifted from Marvel vs. Capcom.
• Nexuiz: after the IllFonic fiasco with PS3!Nexuiz, the community created their own SS in the form of Xonotic, retaining the gameplay and most of the content.
• Yo-kai Watch to Dragon Quest Monsters.
• Zera: Myths Awaken was a Spyro Fan Game that was shut down due to a cease-and-desist order. It was reworked but it still looks awfully Spyro-esque.

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