Assassin's Creed sits within the shadow not of the first game, but of Assassin's Creed II. It is still the most critically acclaimed and beloved entry in the franchise, thanks in part to its sprawling story, charismatic hero, large cast of historical characters who remain relevant to the plot, jaw-dropping period architecture, sweeping soundtrack, and for making the most improvements and innovations on the formula. Future games would add gimmicks, change up character approaches, use other interesting and dramatic settings and so forth, but none have managed to captivate the same way. In fact, despite being follow-ups to II and following the same time period and main character, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations both garnered detractors as well.
While both later installments in the Batman: Arkham Series were still well-received, they wound up having the misfortune of coming after the universally acclaimed Batman: Arkham City, still considered to be the best game in the series. Origins had to deal with having a different developer working on the game rather than Rocksteady, with many feeling that the gameplay didn't really change much up and finding it to be much glitchier than normal. Knight had Rocksteady as the developers again, but that one had several Batmobile segments taking up a good portion of the game which many felt was a Scrappy Mechanic, as well as Paul Dini not returning to pen the story, causing several people to feel it was much weaker than the previous games' stories, including Origins interestingly enough.
Battlefield 1 (2016) was seen as one of the best entries in the Battlefield series for its balanced gameplay, general polish, epic scale and authentic World War 1 setting. In contrast, the following installments Battlefield V and Battlefield 2042 have gotten a much colder reception. Battlefield V in particular was compared unfavorably to Battlefield 1 as it shares a similar historical setting but has inferior execution with buggy launch, controversial historical liberties and generally worse game design.
Bayonetta 2 has a character example in the form of Loptr. While he isn't a hated character within the fandom, there are some fans who feel he doesn't quite measure up to Father Balder from the previous game as he lacks some of Balder's charm and comes off as a bland villain. Also, the final battle with him as Aesir, while fun on its own merits, is seen by fans as underwhelming compared to the battle with Jubileus, who was a massive godlike being fought in space while Aesir is roughly twice the size of Bayonetta and the fight with him takes place in a dimensional void within a mountain.
The Beginner's Guide, created by Davey Wreden, creator of The Stanley Parable is a game about this... Or, at least, that's one very valid way to interpret it. The game followed a very open blog post by Wreden grappling with his feelings of success and inadequacy after The Stanley Parable became a runaway success, and goes into some similar territory by being a paean to a friend of Davey's who ostensibly went through the same process. The game itself appears to have avoided falling into its own subject matter, most critics considering it another triumph of Wreden's.
BioShock 2 is a decently good game, but it lives in the shadow of BioShock, one of the most renowned and critically acclaimed games of all time. Had it been released as its own animal, it might've gotten decent recognition; as is, it's often seen as little more than a pale imitation, repeating most of the same steps the original took in the hopes of creating the same magic while introducing an element of chaotic multiplayer into a game about fear and isolation. BioShock Infinite, however, averted this and received praise on equal level to the original, some even finding themselves preferring Infinite over the original. Notably, Ken Levine was not involved in BioShock 2, so BioShock Infinite marking his return to the franchise made the original game a tough act to follow in two separate cases.
The original Blaster Master was a surprise Cult Classic that had several attempts to recapture its success, and none succeeded until Blaster Master Zero came out a few decades later.
The firsttwo games of Infinity Ward's series were critical and commercial successes. Then they released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. They turned a good-selling but believed-to-be-dying series into a Cash-Cow Franchise, perfected the single player experience, changed the perception of the "generic shooter" from World War II to modern, and created possibly the most addictive multiplayer system of all time. Both Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games have had trouble following that act.
During the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the devs consciously chose not to have another campaign level where you man the guns of an AC-130 gunship — settling instead for a Kill Streak reward in multiplayer and a Spec Ops level that is the CoD4 level but with a second player instead of an A.I. squad to protect with that AC-130 — precisely because they knew there would be no way they could do it again and have it stand out as anything other than a boring and generic rehash of "Death from Above" (and the large number of other games over the next several years — including Modern Warfare 2's own sequel after its dev team got shaken up partway through development — that all featured boring and generic AC-130 segments certainly bore that belief out).
Cave Story's success and recognition was so great Studio Pixel (Daisuke Amaya) will probably never be able to top it. His next game, the arcadey Kero Blaster, was praised by the press as a well-made and engaging game, but it barely made a blip among the gaming community.
Civilization: Beyond Earth was compared to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, despite the developers not intending it to be a spiritual successor of the latter (rather a Civilization V set in space), and the reactions were mild at best. Above all, the poor diplomacy and background lore compared to the narration that was achieved in 1999. Also, the fact that the various sponsors don't look really unique from an ideological basis, and the choice between purity/supremacy/harmony, being unrestricted, only blurs them together: in one game the same faction can go in one way or the other, meaning that everything could be anything. Finally, despite what the authors claimed, there are indeed some shout-outs to SMAC which were though poorly performed, like one of the victory conditions being suddenly realizing that the planet biosphere is sentient (without any buildup, unlike the Voice of Planet in SMAC) and starting a project to achieve transcendence through it.
The main platformer Crash games in the post-Naughty Dog era (with the exceptions of The Huge Adventure/XS and N-Tranced on the Game Boy Advance) are not as fondly remembered as the original trilogy on PlayStation. The Wrath of Cortex, the first multi-platform Crash game, tried to replicate the success of Warped, but didn't quite succeed, with the overabundance of vehicles, lengthy load times (especially on the original PlayStation 2 release) and rather underwhelming bosses. While Crash Twinsanity managed to Win Back the Crowd for some people, it ended up being a rather divisive game amongst the fanbase (not helped by the game feeling unfinished in several places due to its rushed production along with a lot of Fake Difficulty to go around). And the attempted Soft Reboot games, Crash of the Titans and Crash: Mind Over Mutant, ended up nearly killing the series until the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, a remake of the original PS1 trilogy, was released in 2017 to much praise from fans and critics. The first entirely new Crash game in years, 2020's It's About Time, became one of the most divisive in the series yet due to its difficulty and monstrous amounts of padding for 100% Completion overshadowing its strengths in many parts of the fandom, though it is generally regarded as one of the better post-Naughty Dog games and certainly among the most polished.
Crash Nitro Kart didn't quite live up to its predecessor, Crash Team Racing. Much like The Wrath of Cortex, Nitro Kart tried to replicate the success of the original, but the controls, the heavy weight of the carts and some underwhelming courses prevented it from being as recognized as CTR, though it has been somewhat Vindicated by History and many believe it would be almost as good if it controlled like CTR. And then Crash Tag Team Racing came along, which tried to innovate by splicing in platforming elements alongside the racing elements, with mixed results, ultimately ending up as an even more divisive entry than Nitro Kart. Much like the N. Sane Trilogy, Crash Team Racing would be remade as Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled in 2019, though elements of the other two games (including the tracks from Nitro Kart) would be incorporated as well.
Deus Ex, naturally. Provided you accept that there wereacts that followed it at all; quite a lot of fans don't. The prequel series starting with Human Revolution started being held to the same standard as the original; considered an all-around fantastic game, and the follow-up Mankind Divided had quite a few fans struggling to invest hype in it for fear of a repeat letdown.
Donkey Kong Country Returns would have been a lot more well-received, if it didn't have the Donkey Kong Country label. While a great game standing alone from the others, it was criticized because of the ditching of ice and underwater levels, having all Kongs but Donkey, Diddy, and Cranky suffer Chuck Cunningham Syndrome, and having the Tiki Tak Tribe replace the Kremling Krew. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, the follow-up, fixed all these problems except the last one, but made the new villains in that game seem more like Expies of the Kremlings rather than entirely new antagonists, and thus became very popular among fans.
While Drakengard 3 is accepted by the fans as a worthy sequel to the main games, it came after NieR, which is regarded as the series' masterpiece; by comparison, Drakengard 3 was unable to live up to that game's legacy. It was only when a Distant Sequel came along in the form of 2017's NieR: Automata that NieR itself was unseated from the top spot among the Drakengard titles, in part because PlatinumGames' handling of the title's development allowed for solid gameplay that held up well against and meshed with Yoko Taro's lauded storytelling style as opposed to hindering it.
One of the reasons why Duke Nukem Forever festered as long in development as it did, according to a Wired article, was simply because 3D Realms wanted their game to be as groundbreaking as Duke Nukem 3D was back in its day. As a result, they were constantly adding more and more new ideas and features into the game, upgrading the technology and occasionally restarting the entire project from scratch because they felt what they had wasn't up to par, until they ran out of funding in 2009 and Gearbox finished off what they had two years later.
While Fable III still got favorable reviews, it wasn't as good as the second. Possibly because one of the most common complaints was how they changed the gaming mechanic.
While the Fallout series itself continues to host an active Broken Base over its Genre Shift from Interplay's isometric turn-based model to the Bethesda era of 3D real-time combat and exploration, the primary example of this trope in most contemporary players' minds is Fallout: New Vegas. A rare example of a video game that manages to become more appreciated with time (especially regarding the game's highly praised approach to LGBT representation in video games), New Vegas, for all its flaws and personal cases of base-breaking, is frequently pointed to as a shining example of what Fallout, and the RPG genre in general, can achieve when done right — sweeping in scope, highly replayable, finding a balance between comedy, horror, and action, with rock-solid writing and rich worldbuilding that evokes legitimate philosophical musings to back it up. Long-time fans generally agree that the lukewarm reception received by Fallout 4 and the devastatingly low reception to Fallout 76 came from both games being held up to the incredibly high standards that New Vegas set.
There is also a Broken Base regarding whether Final Fantasy V did or didn't live up to what was expected after Final Fantasy IV, which is considered one of the top games in the series, because of its characters and heightened drama typical to many other games of the series. All of these are elements many fans felt the fifth installment of the series lacked. On the other hand, many fans felt that the game featured some of the best gameplay in the series, period, thanks to the evolved Job System, which has served as the basis for that of three spin-off titles: Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy Dimensions and Bravely Default. Combine all of this with an annual unofficial charity run, and you have a franchise darkhorse, making it a tough act to follow of its own, especially when sizing upDimensions and Default. In the case of Default, however, it is credited for helping revive interest in traditional JRPGs after Square Enix's various attempts at experimentation in the mainline FF series, and was successful enough to warrant a sequel as well as a mostly unrelatedfollow-up in Bravely Default II.
And then there's Nobuo Uematsu: he has since produced many solid and great video game soundtracks, but after the dozens of anthems to video game awesomeness that pervade the sixth installment, for some people, everything he composed since is fated to be seen as "not as good as FFVI's soundtrack." Uematsu himself considers Final Fantasy IX's OST his masterpiece. For that matter, any other composer that works on the series, even in spin-offs, is destined to be held to Uematsu's standard.
The Heavensward expansion to Final Fantasy XIV is considered to be the best expansion to the game to this day thanks to the massive quality of life updates, improved story and content, and positive reception to the new battle classes. The next expansion, Stormblood, isn't seen as terrible, but many regard it as inferior to Heavensward and had many notable flaws in the story and in the changes to the class mechanics. The expansion after that, Shadowbringers, managed to one-up Heavensward for most players on almost all angles... which made expansions after that one tough to follow up on.
The Telliusduology, despite poor sales, was popular and beloved, especially by the more hardcore fans, for many reasons: strong characters, diversity and variety in character types, a very morally gray narrative full of political intrigue that also managed to touch upon race relations, plenty of Homoerotic Subtext, and a strong feminist undercurrent as the story ends with women on half the thrones. Because of this, several hardcore fans considered Shadow Dragon, New Mystery, Awakening, andFates to be inferior, though which is "worse" depends on said hardcore fan and what exactly they're looking for out of their gaming experience. For example, Fates is generally agreed to have improved on Awakening's gameplay mechanics and boasts creative map design, but suffers greatly in the story department. Suffice to say, every installment starting withAwakening had the Contested Sequel label slapped on it at some point or another, though Three Houses finally broke the trend seven years later in 2019.
Conversely, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, the 2017 Video Game Remake of Gaiden, received this sentiment from quite a few sectors of the fanbase, in part due to the aforementioned Casual-Competitive Conflict. While the writing was generally praised, both for expanding upon the original game's plot and in comparison to the other 3DS installments, SoV also kept many of the traits in Gaiden that led fans to deem it the Oddball in the Series. Most notably, there's the lack of a weapon triangle; spartan map design that either doesn't take advantage of the size of the field or is riddled with Scrappy Mechanics, such as the desert maps in Act 2 that are difficult to navigate for most units; and generally poor growth rates across the board, which leads to Fake Difficulty when player-controlled units with abysmal Resistance stats find themselves up against a magic-reliant opposition in the second half of the game. Additionally, while the series' now standard Support system was featured in contrast to Shadow Dragon, the amount of conversations between characters is very limited; coupled with the lack of an Avatar, fans who were introduced to Fire Emblem via Awakening and Fates saw this as taking several steps back in the characterization and Shipping departments.
Many of the criticisms of Fire Emblem Engage can be seen as this as well — Fire Emblem: Three Houses was seen as a massive step forward for the franchise, in part because no faction or character are truly perfect (something that Fates in particular was criticized for attempting to convey but greatly mishandling), and no matter the choice Byleth made at the beginning, there is no Golden Ending (like in Fates). In contrast, Engage features a much simpler plotline with clearly defined heroes and villains but much, much better gameplay.
Actually invoked with F-Zero GX by co-creator/producer Shigeru Miyamoto, who has said every time someone asks about a sequel (keep in mind that F-Zero GX was released in 2003) that he doesn't think he can follow it and that the series has nowhere else to go, and he has been pretty adamant that there won't be any more F-Zero gamesnote Miyamoto has also admitted that the F-Zero games not selling nearly as well as well as Nintendo's other racing franchise while being more expensive to produce doesn't help. For many years, the only other output from the series since GX would be a pair of Game Boy Advance games that play like upscaled versions of the SNES original, F-Zero: GP Legend (developed concurrently with GX and released a couple months later) and F-Zero Climax (also developed concurrently with GX and released the following year but never left Japan), both of which bombed due to their association with the ill-received F-Zero: GP Legend anime and simply not being as visually lavish as GX and lacking its rollercoaster-like course designs. It wasn't until 2023, two whole decades (and three console generations) after GX, that a new game was released in the form of F-Zero 99 — and even that's basically a Battle Royale version of the SNES original with the now staple Boostmechanic added in, effectively straying closer to GP Legend/Climax than X/GX in terms of overall feel.
Many games in the Grand Theft Auto series often get criticized "for not being as good/varied/fun as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is." Grand Theft Auto IV in particular is a common victim of these arguments given that San Andreas had an entire state to explore while IV limited players to just Liberty City, and Grand Theft Auto V also suffered from this to a lesser extent due to putting players back in the state of San Andreas, but limiting it by having San Fierro and Las Venturas missing. Another factor is that the character writing for San Andreas, which includes many charismatic and recognizable characters, seems to have become "the one that must be surpassed."
GradiusReBirth, while a good game by many accounts, had to deal with being the next game in the series after Gradius V, regarded as one of the best if not the best game in the series, and suffered in reception for it. Among other things, it was developed by the then-no-name development team M2 rather than the critically-acclaimed Treasure, it only has five stages that are over in about 20 minutes, uses 32-bit sprites while V took the Video Game 3D Leap, has a good Manabu Namiki arrange soundtrack that sadly gets snubbed in favor of Hitoshi Sakimoto's more grandiose pieces, and lacks the Option control and gauge edit features that V has. Had ReBirth been released before V, it might've gotten a better rep with less lofty expectations to hold up to. It doesn't help that it's a WiiWare exclusive; while it's relatively easy to grab a used PS2 copy of V, just buy it off the PlayStation Network, or of course pirate it, the phasing out of the Wii Shop Channel means that ReBirthhas essentially been forgotten about, now that the one means of buying and downloading it is gone permanently.
Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are both two of the most critically acclaimed first-person shooters ever made, with this trope commonly cited as a reason a third installment has yet to be released. Anything less than outstanding and revolutionary from a Half-Life 3 would face major scrutiny and backlash, not helped by the fact that many are now of the opinion that Valve is not the company that it used to be. This is probably a major factor as to why Half-Life: Alyx, the first Half-Life game to be released after a lengthy Sequel Gap, is a Spin-Off for VR hardware instead of a "proper" sequel.
In the Heroes of Might and Magic series, no game had managed to match the third installment over the twenty years since it came out.
Injustice: Gods Among Us has an in-universe lampshading from Joker during his "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Superman during the Story Mode's prologue, when Superman interrupts Batman's interrogation and confronts him after Joker tricks him into killing Lois and his unborn son, the stopping of Lois's heartbeat detonating a nuke, wiping out eight million lives. "Now run along, so I can break out of here. I've got lots of planning to do to top this."
This trope has been directly stated to be the reason that Masahiro Sakurai doesn't want to make a new Kid Icarus game, in spite of massive fan demand, since he knows that any game made will be compared to Kid Icarus: Uprising, which remains as one of the most popular 3DS titles to this day for its stellar writing and story.
Kingdom Hearts is generally considered to have peaked with Kingdom Hearts II. It expanded on the first game, improved the combat system, had probably the most complex magic system in the franchise, had several well-thought-out boss battles, and so on. While anyone could pick up the game and mash X to win, people could play the game an entirely different way using magic and summons, and it was an extremely well-made game. It had its flaws, such as making the story more convoluted, but overall is considered one of the best games ever to come out on the PS2. Fast forward thirteen years to Kingdom Hearts III, and after years of hype, several side games' worth of story additions, and a switch to the Unreal 4 engine, and the general reception to III has been that it's good, but not as good. Combat never gets more intricate than X-mashing at most points, magic has been stripped down quite dramatically, several of the levels are expansive but empty, and the sheer amount of Continuity Lockout makes it hard for even fans who have followed the series since 2002 to understand. Ultimately, the verdict seems to have settled on Play the Game, Skip the Story, as, while the gameplay is good, it is generally criticized for feeling more like an interactive movie than an actual game.
For many years, Kirby Super Star was considered the franchise's peak, especially considering it was the last main Kirby game directed by the revered Masahiro Sakurai. It's particularly praised for its snappy, fast-paced controls, diverse range of gameplay styles, and expanded Copy Ability movesets. Thus, when the next two games (Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards) used a slower-paced gameplay style with simpler Copy Abilities and a greater focus on puzzle-solving, reactions were mixed. They also had the misfortune of being late releases for their respective consoles, though both were Vindicated by History. Because of this, along with a proper GameCubeKirby game being stuck in Development Hell, it took over 16 years for a game considered a true follow-up to Super Star to be released: Kirby's Return to Dream Land.
With the release of Kirby's Return to Dream Land ushering in a new "era" of Kirby games, this was averted as it was generally felt its 3DS sequels, Kirby: Triple Deluxe and Kirby: Planet Robobot, were Even Better Sequels that expanded upon and improved the tried-and-true Super Star formula. Robobot especially resulted in a Newbie Boom for the series, as it was lauded for its much more in-depth plot, clever level design and puzzles, and awesome boss fights. The next installment in the series, Kirby Star Allies, deliberately went in the opposite direction, as current director Shinya Kumazaki felt the series was becoming too complicated; it has a generally shorter, lighter, "back-to-basics" approach that received mixed reactions upon release, especially coming off the heels of Robobot. Opinions improved after its post-launch DLC extended the game's content and added a puzzling Extra Mode that's much more challenging than the main game, but only time can tell how it will be looked back upon, especially with its immediate successor, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, significantly shaking up the formula with a widely praised shift to 3D platforming while boasting what's generally agreed to be a better balance of accessibility vs. difficulty than what Star Allies offered.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is generally considered to be one of the greatest games in the franchise, if not all time. All games in the series that followed, while all still greatly beloved by fans and critics in their own right, would garner complaints because of how unsimilar — or, sometimes, too similar — to Ocarina of Time they are. More divisive entries like Majora's Mask and The Wind Waker would be successfully Vindicated by History, but it would take almost twenty years for a Zelda game to surpass both the critical and commercial success of Ocarina.
Midna from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is one of the most developed and popular exposition fairies in the entire series, and one of the more popular Zelda characters in general. While anyone would look bad compared to her after that, Midna's successor in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Fi, fell especially flat; her robotic intonations, lack of personality, and dull interactions didn't do much to endear her to players who loved Midna's dry sarcasm, sassy mannerisms, and chemistry with Link (to say nothing of Fi's frequent Annoying Video Game Helper moments that Midna generally lacked). It might be why no Zelda game since Skyward Sword has had a character in the "Navi" role — Breath of the Wild comes closest with Zelda's voice guiding Link in the early game, but she drops out for plot reasons after the Great Plateau.
The LEGO Dimensions Starter Pack's Story Mode ties most of the Year One dimensions together in such an epic Massive Multiplayer Crossover, that several collectors have expressed disappointment that for Year Two, the developers seemed to focus more on simply adding new dimensions, than on linking them together. It doesn't help that none of the new levels expanded on The Stinger of the Story Mode.
Lemmings 2: The Tribes improved on its predecessors in many ways and added many new abilities — so many, in fact, that almost every other game in the series, typically Mission-Pack Sequels to the original with some added gimmick such as 3D environments or touch screen mechanics, has been generally considered So Okay, It's Average by the fanbase.
Despite the limited amount of games, fans commonly agree that the Little Tail Bronx series peaked with Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, as it's been praised for its gorgeous visuals, engaging story, tightly written characters and loads of world building that greatly expands on what was started in Tail Concerto. While Fuga: Melodies of Steel isn't bad and has a much more involved gameplay loop compared to Solatorobo, it's usually seen as a step down due to many believing that the Anyone Can Die nature makes it difficult to deliver a cohesive story on any grounds without coming across as pretentious or shallow, and Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2 has enough flaws in its story to easily make it the weakest entry in the series despite improving on the first game's mechanics.
Mad Max (2015) is an unusual cross-media example of this. Despite being an entirely separate project, it had the misfortune of coming out the exact same year as Mad Max: Fury Road, the first Mad Max film in 30 years, and one that not only brought acclaim and attention to the franchise that had never been seen before, but also acclaim rarely seen in the action genre, being immediately praised as one of the best action movies of all time. Even with a completely different story and concept and being a decent game in its own right, it still had to go through being compared to a masterpiece of a completely different medium in a number of reviews.
Mass Effect is this trope escalating steadily as the series goes on. It's easiest to break it down by game:
The first game is mostly seen as a classic and one of the best sci-fi games ever. The next games get compared to this one, sometimes positively but more often negatively.
The third game frequently gets negative comparisons to the first two. While the streamlined gameplay is seen as an improvement, the rest of the game — especially the writing — is much more controversial. It also has an infamous Gainax Ending and is accused of failing to properly follow up on plot points from the previous games, though later-released DLC helped to negate some of this sentiment.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is hit the hardest. It's constantly compared to the original trilogy and the comparisons are almost never in Andromeda's favor. Everything about it, from the writing to the gameplay to the characters, is accused of being pale imitation of the previous games. Even the game's defenders tend to consider it weaker than the first three.
Most of the Classic Mega Man series' sequels and soundtracks generally aren't considered quite as good and memorable as Mega Man 2. 9, however, was good enough to revive the series and rival 2's level of quality and popularity. This naturally became apparent, once 10 came out, divided the fanbase again and performed below sales expectations. The only real alternatives to MM2 you'll see fans frequently mention are Mega Man 3, Mega Man V, the aforementioned Mega Man 9, and Mega Man 11. This is not without frequent debate either, especially where the non-NES/GB installments are concerned.
When discussing sequel series Mega Man X, it is widely agreed that the original game is the gold standard for the SNES titles, if not the entireXseries, thanks to its revitalization and clever reimagining of a formula that was rapidly growing stale by the time of Mega Man 5 and Mega Man 6. This resulted in X2 being viewed as a largely forgettableMission-Pack Sequel, and though X3 managed to better distinguish itself from its predecessors, it is still generally considered to be of lower quality than X1. The only title seen on equal footing with the first is Mega Man X4, which further shook up the formula with a fully playable Zero, took advantage of the jump to newer hardware, and featured a more complex plot with higher stakes.
Mega Man Zero 3 is widely considered to be the apex of the Mega Man Zero series and one of the best Mega Man games period, thanks to its improvements on the Zero series' core mechanics and epic, high-stakes narrative famous for the surprise reveal that the amnesiac Zero is inhabiting an inferior copy of his original body while the Final Bossis said original. Mega Man Zero 4 often isn't held in the same regard, though this largely extends to debates over Z4's own shakeups in terms of gameplay; most agree that the story manages to neatly wrap up most of the lingering plot threads that weren't addressed in Z3 and gives the series a suitably high-flying (if not bittersweet)Grand Finale.
Super Metroidset a standard for every subsequent game in the series and, by extension, the Metroidvania genre in general. This was part of the reason fans didn't get Metroid 64, as after series producer Yoshio Sakamoto found he couldn't wrap his head around 3D game development, he looked for an external developer to tackle the project, with those developers refusing by saying this trope almost word-for-word.note The other reason being that Nintendo simply didn't value the franchise that much until they discovered how fond Western audiences were of the series, meaning no one else pushed for it. The series would continue on, both in 2D and 3D, but no game other than Metroid Prime (discussed below) is considered to be in the same league as Super in the eyes of most fans.
Retro Studios' Metroid Prime was fantastically well-received, successfully switching genres from platformer to FPS while appeasing the fans. However, no other 3D entry in the franchise has yet to reach the critical and commercial acclaim of that first installment. While most of the other games in the Metroid Prime Trilogy are at least beloved in their own right, special mention must go to Sakamoto's first and only attempt at a 3D game in Metroid: Other M, which is the most lambasted entry in the entire franchise for both its narrative and gameplay.
For many years, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite was hailed by fans as the pinnacle of the Monster Hunter series. Not only did it feature nearly all content from the series up to that point, but it was often seen as a major turning point for the series' popularity outside Japan. Subsequent games, while well-received, often had to be compared with this installment (and with rare exceptions, the comparisons almost always favored Freedom Unite), usually due to removing monsters (tri- infamously removed nearly every large monster from the first two generations) and/or adding rather divisive mechanics (such as underwater combat in tri- and 3 Ultimate and maps with more vertical features in 4 and 4 Ultimate). The only installments that, depending on whom you ask, either came closest to dethroning it or actually did dethrone it are Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (a good portion of fans nominating Generations Ultimate also exists).
Phantasy Star Online is so beloved that private servers for the game are still operating across nearly every platform it was released on. Phantasy Star Universe attempted to improve upon the original game, but in spite of the addition of a dedicated single-player campaign and expanded character creation systems and classes, the game received mix reviews and many considered it inferior to Online. Phantasy Star Zero played more similarly to Online and was considered a step up from Universe, but wasn't as successful from a sales standpoint. Thankfully, Phantasy Star Online 2 proved to be a worthy successor, combining the best elements of the original Online, Universe, and Zero and having a large and dedicated player base in Japan and beyond.
Pandora's Tower: Compared to its fellow Operation Rainfallnote (a fan campaign to get a trio of Eastern RPGs released late in the Wii's lifespan localized for North America) games Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and The Last Story. Xenoblade Chronicles is from Monolith Soft, the same minds behind cult classic Xenogears and the acclaimed Xenosaga trilogy. The box art for The Last Story proudly declares that it was directed by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Meanwhile, Pandora's Tower was created by some developer that until that point made nothing but action games based on Shonen Jump properties (and which returned to doing so afterwards). While not a bad game by any means, with many critics enjoying its story and gameplay, it came out so late after the other two (its North American release being months after the launch of the Wii U) and lacked their similar pedigrees that it ultimately became the most forgotten of the trio, despite even seeing a Wii U re-release when The Last Story didn't.
The rivals get hit with this, too. Blue is the quintessential beloved "douchebag rival" for his cocky behavior and the memes surrounding him, while Silver is loved for the darkness to his character and his backstory as revealed in the remakes. As a consequence, any of the "friendly" rivals like Bianca and the Kalos kids are scoffed at as "boring and useless", and until the remakes, Brendan and May were considered the most boring rivals in the franchise. Cheren is more of a Base-Breaking Character, and while Barry is thought of as annoying by a lot of fans he isn't bashed as heavily as Bianca or the Kalos rivals. Hau in Sun/Moon gets some flack for being a friendly rival as well.
Even the regional Champions get hit with this. Ruby and Sapphire first set the bar with Steven Stone, for having a diverse team, a likable personality, and an active role in the story for a Champion (which gets even further expanded in the remakes), making him one of the most popular Champions in the series among fans. Diamond, Pearl and Platinum took it even further with Cynthia, who has become arguably the most popular Champion for similar reasons, in addition to being the first female NPC Champion and being widely regarded as one of the most challenging bosses in the entire series. As a consequence, the Champions from later games have a hard time matching the popularity of Cynthia and Steven, often due to their Champion battle difficulty, characterization and role in the story struggling to live up to the standards set by Cynthia and Steven.
Puyo Puyo 2's ruleset has been hailed as the competitive standard for over 25 years due to the simple additions of a second rotation button and counterattacking the opponent's Nuisance Puyo, with all subsequent games' new rulesets being seen as gimmicks that don't really belong in serious-level play (Puyo Puyo Fever's Fever Mode) or Scrappy Mechanics outright (Puyo Puyo Sun's obtrusive Sun Puyo).
The second and third games in the franchise, Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, are wildly considered to be the best games in the franchise. Both Ratchet: Deadlocked and Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters were not as well liked from fans and critics alike, though while Deadlocked was later vindicated by later examples, Size Matters is the least favored of the traditional Ratchet games.
RayForce, the first game in the RAY Series, is regarded by many as the best game in the trilogy, due to its innovative mechanic of attacking enemies below you with Homing Lasers and splendid displays of sprite scaling and rotating for a 3D effect. Its sequels, RayStorm and RayCrisis, aren't seen as living up to the first game, due to the fully-3D graphics taking away what made RayForce look so great as well as having not aged well, as well as the lock-on system now being usable against enemies of the same altitude, which high-scoring players see as making the game worse as it changes scoring tactics completely by discouraging the player from using their main weapon.
Resident Evil was viewed as a great game (narmy lines aside) and helped popularize the survival horror genre. Resident Evil 2 became an Even Better Sequel by cranking up the graphics, the story, and introducing new gameplay elements like side-by-side stories for the protagonists and new enemies and weapons. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, while not a failure by any means, didn't quite live up to the expectations that 2 set due to being a bit too difficult at times as well as some players not liking being stalked by Nemesis when trying to explore areas. Resident Evil – Code: Veronica also didn't live up to the standard that the second game set due to Code: Veronica having story elements that were quite narmy and a supporting protagonist many considered to be The Scrappy, with even its improvements to the presentation (fully 3D characters and environments, something the series had previously only done in ill-received spin-offs) not garnering much long-lasting praise when Capcom's own non-Resident Evil output blew it out of the water just a year or so later with games like Devil May Cry.
Resident Evil 4 completely overhauled the "fixed camera angle" style gameplay that the series was built upon and opted for a third person shooter with tons of weapons, upgrades, and lots of action heavy sequences. The game was given glowing reviews and fans greatly loved the game, which made Resident Evil 5 hard to top it and it was criticized for playing everything straight instead of embracing the self-aware cheesiness that 4 ran with.
Resident Evil 2 (Remake) sold millions of units within weeks of the game launching, with critics and fans praising it for bringing a fresh look and feel to the classic 1998 original while still retaining elements that made RE2 great back then. Resident Evil 3 (Remake) couldn't quite live up to the expectations that were set by its predecessor, with many criticizing how boring and scripted the eponymous Nemesis was while also noting that the game felt incredibly short and lacked many of the original's memorable setpieces, such as the clock tower and the factory.
Saints Row: The Third had this from fans coming from Saints Row 2. On its own, Saints Row: The Third did a lot right and in some aspects much better than Saints Row 2, like weapon upgrades which needed to be earned, shortening the amount of times activities needed to be done, reducing their overall frustration, tightening the controls, and overall sillier aspects. However, for every great thing the third game introduced, it lost something in the process that made the second game memorable. The story is much more streamlined and focused in SR3, but the Syndicate as a whole feels less memorable than the gangs from the first two games and the whole menace of them feels off when the leader is offed in Act 1, replaced with a Large Ham luchador. The town is much more easier to maneuver around in at the cost of Steelport being absolutely boring compared to Stillwater. The humor balanced with more of the serious aspects of the second gave the humor more impact and needed relief compared to the third which could pass as an [adult swim] cartoon, etc. It's not like the third game is bad by any means; but it's one where despite numerous improvements, many still like the second game better.
The Shantae series, after two entries that were Acclaimed Flops, finally hit it big with Shantae and the Pirate's Curse. It was considered to be a massive improvement in every respect — it had a better story, better levels, smoother gameplay, it was much longer, and had a better balance of seriousness and humor. Not only did it review well, it sold well, ushering a Newbie Boom with fans who continue to view it as the height of the series. While the following entries aren't bad, neither were held in as high regard. Shantae: Half-Genie Hero suffered from being too easy and short, having a rushed endgame, and departing from the series' Metroidvania roots; meanwhile, Shantae and the Seven Sirens is more liked for returning to the series' usual genre, having snappier and more fluid gameplay in line with Curse, and having one of the best soundtracks in the franchise known for having great music, but its still-low difficulty and unambitious nature remained points of criticism. Though both titles would see a number of positively received updates that addressed fan complaints, Curse is still deemed as unmatched; ironic, considering that it's the only installment where Shantae doesn't have her signature dance transformation ability.
Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne set the gold standard for mainline SMT games, featuring outstanding three-dimensional visuals, a brand new combat system, long and complex dungeons, challenging difficulty that never lets up, six different endings rather than just the traditional Law/Neutral/Chaos branches including an ultimate ending where you personally become Lucifer's right-hand man, and Dante from the Devil May Cry series. As a result, Shin Megami Tensei IV had a lot to live up to, and that was just from mainline fans note it also faced opposition from Persona fans, as Persona was steadily growing into a Cash-Cow Franchise at the time, and this goes double in the West where Persona easily outdoes mainline in terms of commercial success; complaints include the step back to 2D sprites and portraits, the recycling of the combat system from Nocturne with only minor tweaks, shorter and simpler dungeons devoid of puzzles, the decision to put the game on a Nintendo platform note ironically, both of the original Megami Tensei games and the first two mainline games (Shin Megami Tensei I and II) were released on Nintendo platforms, but it wasn't until Nocturne that mainline SMT saw the light of day outside of Japan — a handheld one, at that — the difficulty reduction even on Master difficulty, the removal of the Defense stat, a more standard Law vs. Chaos plot, and the replacement of Kazuma Kaneko with Masayuki Doi as the character designer.
Curiously enough, Shin Megami Tensei IV itself serves as this to its direct follow-up, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, and the fifth numbered entry — not so much in terms of gameplay, but in the story department. While few would say IV outdoes its successors in mechanical polish (V in particular was praised for revitalizing the SMT formula with a Wide-Open Sandbox and having some of the best gameplay refinements in the mainline series), the dramatic shift in tone and feel the series underwent by the time of these two installments (along with more plot-specific criticisms*Apocalypse was viewed as being too reliant on tropes, including ones some felt were more suitable for Persona or other spin-offs (ex. The Power of Friendship) than SMT proper, whereas Vtook heat for having a narrative that seemed to liberally crib off of Nocturne, but with far less cohesion and underdeveloped characters) led to players reappraisingSMT IV. While the sentiment that IV suffered from coming after Nocturne is still prevalent, it is also seen as a better attempt at modernizing the series than what came after (and a decent game when judged on its own merits), even with a more standard Law/Neutral/Chaos setup compared to Nocturne. The fact that IV was the last mainline title with any significant contributions from the old guard of SMT (including being based on story drafts by co-creator Kazuma Kaneko) is also seen as a point in its favor, to the point that a subset of the fandom holds up IV as the last game of the series' golden age.
The series has struggled in the shadow of its second incarnation through four sequels, numerous comics and its film release. Silent Hill 2 is widely regarded as the definitive installment, which tragically influenced its subsequent media by having various elements recur when they were either unwelcome or poorly implemented (sexy monster nurses, Pyramid Head, solipsistic protagonists fighting through suppressed trauma). Even Team Silent's third and fourth games failed to enthrall the wider public as their predecessor did.
Akira Yamaoka, the composer for seven of the Silent Hill games, and sound director responsible for most of the hair-raising sounds in the first three games, also made for a big shadow over the series after he left Konami.
This is one of many ways one can describe what's happened to the series. The originalthreegames and Sonic CD are effectively and almost universally hailed as the shining gems of the series as well as fantastic examples of high-speed platforming in general. Many subsequent games have been trying to get out of this shadow, with some (like the Adventuregames) to far better results than others (such as the disastrous 2006 title). Even then, each one has an unfortunately strong Fandom Rivalry to go with it, due to Sega's regular experimentation resulting in every fan having a very different sense of what makes for a "good" 3D Sonic game. It eventually started dying down with Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, which were very well received by critics and fans, especially the latter. Naturally, these two games combined to create another tough act to follow when Sonic Lost World was released. Although that game was at least considered far superior to the Sonic Boom games that followed. Then came Sonic Mania, which was a widely acclaimed throwback to the Genesis era of the franchise... and proved itself to be yet another tough act to follow when Sonic Forces launched to mixed reception.
Many fans feel that ports of the first two games peaked when they were remastered by Christian "The Taxman" Whitehead and Simon "Stealth" Thomley, the latter of who was previously best-known for answering the poorly received official Sonic 1 port on Game Boy Advance with a tech demo of Green Hill Zone Act 1 (the very first level in the game) working just fine on the GBA. In additon to a remastered engine, these ports are widely acclaimed for adding a variety of new features not present in the original versions, most notably Tails and Knuckles in Sonic 1 and Hidden Palace Zone in Sonic 2. As a result, every subsequent port of these games not by Taxman and Stealth immediately gets unfavorably compared to their ports, even if the team working on them otherwise has a stellar reputation for Polished Ports, such as M2 (the team that made the SEGA AGES versions of these games on Nintendo Switch).
There have been no new games in the Spec Ops series after the widely-acclaimed if underperformingSpec Ops: The Line, with several retrospectives arguing that The Line's story, which served as a brutal deconstruction of the War Is Glorious mentality that the previous games glorified, was notorious to such a degree that any sequel, regardless of whether it continued said deconstruction or tried a Decon-Recon Switch, would inevitably be unfavorably compared to The Line.
Return of the Mammalians suffered greatly from having to follow up the Octo Expansion, highly lauded amongst the Splatoon community as possibly the best single-player campaign in the series due to its challenging nature, Darker and Edgier tone, expansive world-building and character development for the Splatoon setting, a jaw-dropping finale, and a ludicrously hard but satisfying final challenge. Splatoon 3 decided not to mess with an obvious winning formula and brought it back for its own base-game Story Mode, but various factors — its lower difficulty, uncannily familiar plot, more traditional methods of storytelling, widely agreed-upon failure to capitalize on its cast, shorter length, and still-challenging-but-much-less-intense Brutal Bonus Level — combined to make it a more contentious experience overall than the OE. While it still has its fans, and few Splatheads will argue against the finale matching its big brother in spectacle if nothing else, those who have played both campaigns will often make a point of how Return of the Mammalians is "just the Octo Expansion again but worse."
Splatoon 3's own DLC campaign, Side Order, is generally considered great in its own right, with many praising its experimental mix of the basic roguelike formula and Splatoon's core gameplay and having fun discovering just how broken you can make your Palette; at worst, it's still viewed as a huge step up from "Return of the Mammalians" just for taking a risk and daring to be different. That said, many Splatoon fans believe it still languishes in Octo Expansion's shadow somewhat, due in part to common criticisms such as lacking the difficulty, gameplay and story depth, and variety that made Octo Expansion and/or other roguelikes so good. The overall consensus seems to be that it's (fittingly) an 8/10 campaign that comes frustratingly close to standing alongside OE as one of the series' all-time greats, but doesn't quite hack it.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the third game of the Splinter Cell series, managed to be the second entry to totally outdo its predecessor back when the series was considered a pioneer of the stealth genre. Come the fourth installment, Double Agent, the game was changed up entirely with a convoluted plot booting Sam Fisher from his agency to act as a mole in a terrorist cell, and added several unpopular gimmicks, including a Karma Meter and needlessly difficult daytime missions. Met with the first lukewarm response for the series, Ubisoft decided to go for a total change up: after several changes and delays spanning years, the series finally received an Actionized Sequel that was flat out hated by parts of the fanbase. This was then followed with Michael Ironside leaving as the iconic protagonist, meaning that as much as Ubisoft tried to fix things with Blacklist, the repeat of a mixed response means the series has been indefinitely on hold ever since.
Much like Crash Bandicoot, the other unofficial PlayStation mascot, the post-Insomniac Games era Spyro the Dragon games don't quite live up to the original trilogy (not counting the Game Boy Advance titles except for Spyro Orange: The Cortex Conspiracy). Enter the Dragonfly was heavily rushed and critically panned by fans and critics alike. A Hero's Tail, while much better received compared to Enter the Dragonfly, was still rather divisive. As for The Legend of Spyro trilogy, while they are decent games overall, the Continuity Reboot was criticized for similar reasons to Crash Bandicoot above, and nearly ended up killing the series, with Spyro being relegated to a playable character in the Skylanders series before the release of the much-acclaimed Spyro Reignited Trilogy in 2018.
The first Streets of Rage was a decent counter to Final Fight. However, Streets of Rage 2 would easily be the best game in the series as well as one of the best games on the Sega Genesis and among beat 'em ups in general. Streets of Rage 3, even with its added features like cutscenes, was seen as inferior to 2, and while the widely anticipatedStreets of Rage 4 was received very well, it hasn't quite dethroned the second game as the series' high point.
At least a chunk of the reason that Super Mario Sunshine was fairly controversial at release was that its most obvious point of comparison was Super Mario 64 — the game that standardized how 3D platformers are supposed to work. By contrast, Sunshine looked a lot more gimmicky and weird. Sunshine has mostly managed to escape the original game's shadow since then, but it wasn't until Super Mario Galaxy that the franchise had a game that most people considered an adequate follow-up to 64 (a lot of it being due to Galaxy going all-out on scale and scope).
When Super Mario Galaxy came out in 2007, it was lauded for its epic cosmic scope and innovative gravity-based platforming that made it a worthy successor to Mario 64. The game was so acclaimed that it won multiple Game of the Year awards and even briefly surpassed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as the highest rated game of all time on review aggregate sites. However, subsequent Mario platformers struggled to capture the zeitgeist in the same way as Galaxy even if they weren't necessarily bad games. While the New Super Mario Bros. subseries received positive reviews, they were dismissed by some as formulaic platformers that lacked the innovation and quality of Galaxy. Likewise, while Super Mario Galaxy 2 was a great game in its own right, it was criticized for being a Mission-Pack Sequel that recycled the engine and assets of its predecessor and lacked the original's novelty as a result, leading to unfavorable comparisons. It wasn't until Super Mario Odyssey that a Mario platformer managed to reach similar levels of acclaim.
The originalYoshi's Island was a great game, seen as a classic entry in the Mario series in all respects. However, other Yoshi games were still seen as paling in comparison to the original. It wasn't until Yoshi's Woolly World that a new entry was widely considered to be as good as Yoshi's Island, with some arguing that it even managed to surpass its predecessor. And that game, in turn, became a tough act to follow for Yoshi's Crafted World, which is generally seen as good, but not as all-around solid as Woolly World.
Yoshi's Story and Yoshi's Island DS, despite being solid games on their own, were disliked for ditching the original's particular crayon aesthetic and gameplay.
The Paper Mario series is viewed as falling apart because of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door being a Tough Act to Follow, with its beloved battle system, horde of Ensemble Darkhorses, Awesome Music and an overall well-received plotline. Nintendo feared that later installments would tread too much old ground, so Super Paper Mario, Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Paper Mario: Color Splash all underwent an Unexpected Genre Change: the former mixed platforming with real-time battles, while the latter two turned the series into sticker-collecting Metroidvanias respectively. While Super was eventually Vindicated by History, the latter two remain hated to varying degrees due to their gameplay and plots. Paper Mario: The Origami King brought another major shake-up to the series and its formula, abandoning the sticker/card collection and Excuse Plots of the previous two in favor of somewhat more traditional RPG combat and a darker, more involved storyline. It ended up as the best-received Paper Mario game since The Thousand-Year Door — but even then, many still wish for a return to the series' original tone, gameplay, and diverse cast of characters.
Most succeeding installments from the Super Robot Wars series are generally regarded as better than their predecessors, at least when it comes to the same platform. Super Robot Wars W for the Nintendo DS is a fan favorite, featuring a great cast of series and well-liked original characters. Super Robot Wars K, on the other hand, had a myriad of problems, alongside increased difficulty and standardization of many game mechanics. Many players didn't sit well with K when they thoroughly enjoyed W.
The series, while not an example for the fanbase as a whole, has historically struggled to satisfy the Tournament Play community with later installments. Melee was — and still is — recognized as a worthy fighting game, with its fast pace and in-depth techniques often providing intense rounds. When Brawl slowed down the overall pace, added a few cases of Random Number God — most notoriously tripping — and removed the aforementioned Good Bad Bugs, potential for competitive play lowered as a consequence. For 3DS and Wii U approached a more competitive format by removing the random elements and making the game's pace slightly faster, but with Melee still making appearances in various fighting game tournaments, the former game remains standing in the shadows that the latter game has cast. It wasn't until the runaway success of Ultimate, which made its own tweaks to gameplay mechanics in an attempt to appeal to competitive-minded fans while still making the game distinct from Melee and maintaining the series' longstanding casual appeal, that Smash's second entry was finally, truly outdone.
This was a large factor regarding why Byleth's reveal as a DLC fighter for Ultimate ended up being so divisive. They were the last character revealed as part of Fighters Pass Volume 1, coming after the unexpectedJoker and TerryBogard, the long-requested Banjo and Kazooie, and the iconicHero; thus, many people were underwhelmed that the last fighter revealed was such a "safe" option, and this is before getting to the fact that Byleth's inclusion bumped the number of playable Fire Emblem characters to eight, leading to accusations of favoritism. It's worth noting that the developers expected this reaction, with a second Fighters Pass being announced immediately after and Masahiro Sakurai taking pains to highlight how different Byleth was from most other Fire Emblem reps in terms of gameplay.
In the Tales Series, Tales of Legendia released in North America in 2006 — about a year and half after Tales of Symphonia. Being made by neither Team Destiny or Symphonia, people thought Legendia was quite a step down due to the Super-Deformed artwork and the 2D battle system, compared to Symphonia being fully 3D and having more realistically proportioned anime-style artwork. While not entirely fair to Legendia, the fact that Symphonia went on to be considered one of the greatest games in the Tales series meant that Legendia had high expectations placed on it. But Legendia focusing more on character-focused narratives than the Deconstructor Fleet elements that made Symphonia so beloved meant that reception skewed negatively. It also doesn't help that Symphonia was released on the Nintendo GameCube, a console starved for RPGs at the time, while Legendia released on the PlayStation 2, a console with a lot of great RPGs including the much-beloved Final Fantasy X. All of this meant that Legendia had a tough hill to climb even before it was released, and its subpar reception was the result of several factors working against it. History has been a bit more kind toLegendia, as its character-focused narrative, while still not considered among the best of the series, at least had a more critical eye taken to it and was appreciated for the strength of its character interactions.
Tecmo Bowl had this happen after Tecmo Super Bowl was released for the NES. In 1993, they released a sequel, also named Tecmo Super Bowl, for the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis. One of the main reasons was because of the roster changes from the 1990 season to the 1993 preseason. Many teams and players got better or worse, such as Dallas improved the most and Chicago got worse. One common complaint was the three-season mode, where you play three seasons in a row with one team to get a better ending. Of course, it's an optional feature.
Trials of Mana was both the cause and sufferer of this effect:
Back when you had to emulate the game, Trials of Mana (and to a lesser extent Legend of Mana) created this for the rest of the Mana games; they've been seen as paling in comparison to Trials and/or Legend.
The Trials remake came out late April 2020... after Final Fantasy VII Remake. Suffice to say, the game is, at its core, an Enhanced Remake of a game released in 1995, which resulted in some disappointment from reviewers and gamers alike that it didn't go to the same lengths as FFVIIR in reworking and improving upon the original title. On the other hand, FFVIIR having a considerable Broken Base over its Twist Ending establishing the game to not be a remake of Final Fantasy VII but a Stealth Sequel in an Alternate Timeline where the story is poised to go Off the Rails caused some players and critics to lighten up over how the Trials remake played it safe in regards to the original.
After THQ saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship to the WWF, Electronic Arts was left in the unenviable position of having to develop the follow up to the highly regarded WCW/nWo Revenge for the Nintendo 64. What we got was WCW Mayhem, a playable but aggressively mediocre game that landed with a thud because it wasn't Revenge and because beloved developer AKI wasn't involvednote They stayed with THQ and reskinned the AJPW game Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 into WWF WrestleMania 2000, then followed that up with the hugely popular WWF No Mercy. Ironically the "No Mercy engine" would later end up with EA, who used it in the Def Jam Vendetta series. (WCW themselves spiraling into the toilet around this time didn't help). However, it was generally agreed that there was something there to build on, and a sequel that worked out some of the kinks and added a few more features would be a pretty good game. That sequel ended up being the widely reviled WCW Backstage Assault, considered by most to be the worst wrestling game ever released (Problem #1: it's a wrestling game with no ring), though WCW closing a couple months after Backstage Assault released kind of made this a moot point. Subverted by the PlayStation port of WCW Mayhem, as for all its faults it was still a massive improvement over previous PS1 games WCW Nitro and WCW Thunder.
Very few Worms games has gotten even close to achieve the same success as Armageddon did when it was released in 1999. The fact that the games after have felt like they have been trying to remake Armageddon to varying degrees of success is often considered a reason.
The first Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is considered a classic Wii game that successfully melded JRPG mechanics with the Wide-Open Sandbox worlds more emblematic of Western RPGs and was also a major Sleeper HitCult Classic for a console that didn't see very many RPGs overall. Some even liken it to the greatest JRPG classics of all time, like Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy VII. While Xenoblade Chronicles X, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 are all well-regarded sequels, they've tended to receive much more criticism than the first game. What also didn't help in the case of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 specifically was that it released near the end of 2017 — which was considered a very good year for gaming.
Yakuza 2 cast a long shadow over the Yakuza series, with a tight plot, some of the best characters of the series, and a more streamlined combat system than the original game's. Its follow-up, Yakuza 3, is a Contested Sequel due to placing more emphasis on Kiryu's life outside Tojo intrigue, and games 4-6 are considered enjoyable but still inferior to 2. So far, only Yakuza 0 and Yakuza: Like a Dragon challenge the second game in terms of plot, with the latter losing points due to its controversial turn from a brawler to a turn-based RPG.
Miscellaneous
There's a reason the SNES, with its robust game library, iconic gamepad, and impressive 2D visuals, is hailed by many older Nintendo fans as not just Nintendo's greatest game console of all time but their last great one. Every console Nintendo has put out after has had elements that garners it a bit of a Broken Base amongst the old guard and has them pining for the 8- and 16-bit days of good ol' Ninty: the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube got derided for their small third-party libraries, the Wii's motion controls and its perceived Shovelware library made hardcore gamers see it as a joke, the Wii U was a failure on most conceivable levels, and the Nintendo Switch has "Joy-Con drift". With that in mind, each of these consoles has its sizeable number of diehard defenders (with even the commercial failures being Vindicated by History in some respect), and the Wii and Switch sold far more than the SNES ever did.
Take Nintendo's legacy and make the decline far, far worse, and you have Sega. The Sega Mega Drive, or Sega Genesis as North and South Americans know it, was seen as the console to have in the early 90s if you didn't want a SNES, or had one but felt like getting another console anyway; an excellent library and strong processing power make it a great platform, especially if you enjoy fast-paced games, thus putting pressure on Nintendo to get or keep customers interested in their SNESes. However, Sega just kept slipping and slipping afterwards. The Sega Saturn was marred by its developer-unfriendliness, especially for 3D titles, in a period when 3D gaming was really starting to take off, as well as a decision to release it in North America early, pissing off many retailers and third-party developers, and Bernie Stolar running the system into the ground. Sega did manage to briefly get back in the groove, with the Sega Dreamcast appeasing fans globally, but a number of reasons, such as the hype for the PlayStation 2 a few months later, prevented it from becoming the next Mega Drive and killed off Sega's days as a console industry force once and for all.
Nintendo's 1989 Game Boy version of Tetris, at least in the West, has yet to be topped by any newer version of Tetris in terms of iconic status, even though many newer versions introduce new modes and gameplay-streamlining features.
After SOUND VOLTEX, Konami has found it difficult to produce new BEMANI games with a successful playerbase; in fact, three of their post-SDVX games had official network support terminated, while even longrunners like beatmania IIDX and DanceDanceRevolution continue to get updates and new versions. Miraidagakki FutureTomTom, a drumming game with motion sensor sticks and a face camera. was dismissed as fun for a few plays at best and shelved accordingly. BeatStream has a pretty unorthodox interface that players couldn't really get behind, resulting in the game being nixed as well. MÚSECA is marred by poorly designed buttons and a confusing system that involves arranging characters into a party, and even after an update that addressed a lot of the problems with the Grafica system, it still couldn't pull in enough players and as such was discontinued as well. The jury is still out on whether Nostalgia and Dance Rush can have enough staying power to not get nixed so early. For some fans in particular, this trope applies more widely to the franchise with everything after pop'n music and IIDX being seen as substandard, due to those games being hailed as the gold standard of rhythm games, especially challenge-oriented ones.
Questionable monetization schemes aside, this is why Electronic Arts' Star Wars Battlefront (2015) and its 2017 sequel have garnered mixed-to-negative reactions, as both entries are unfavorably compared to Pandemic's original entries and EA's own Battlefield series. Both the original Battlefront and its sequel were universally beloved for delivering on the large-scale Star Wars experience across all eras and providing variety in locations, characters, and weapons. In comparison, the 2015 Battlefront was roundly criticized for being shallow, since it lacked a single player campaign, Galactic Conquest, space battles, and the prequel-era setting. Likewise, the 2017 Battlefront II had the unfortunate luck of coming off the heels of 2016's Battlefield 1, which was universally praised for its smooth launch, unique setting, and surprisingly good solo campaign; subsequently, Battlefront II (2017) lacked these features and was seen as a step down. Furthermore, both Battlefront games lacked destructible environments, diverse ground vehicle selection, and squad systems, leading to fans deriding them as a "poor man's Battlefield."
Games designer Will Wright seems to be heading in this direction, considering the general reaction to his most recent game, Spore, hasn't been nearly as warm as with his seminal masterpiece, The Sims. The quote from Yahtzee on the main page is from Zero Punctuation's review of Spore. This is also true for post-Sims entries to the SimCity franchise, though Wright hadn't been involved with those games since at least SimCity 4. Even without Wright at the helm, 4 was critically acclaimed and is widely considered the apex of the series; just not quite as popular as The Sims.
In hindsight, Harmonix choosing to craft their first single-artist Rock Band game around the musical output of The Beatles might have been a poorly considered move in the long term, because no matter how great your music is, it's very, very difficult to find another group as universally beloved as The Beatles. So who did they pick for their next game? Green Day. After making the overwhelmingly popular Rock Band and Dance Central, Harmonix announced that they were making a game based off of Disney's legendary Fantasia films. It failed to impress fans, as the gameplay requires you to use your arms rather than using your whole body like in Dance Central. And the song count is quite low compared to their other games. Fans are still waiting for the next Dance Central or Rock Band to be announced.
Apparently, Hideo Kojima regrets being remembered only for the Metal Gear series, which overshadowed his earlier games (such as Snatcher and Policenauts), games created in-between (such as Boktai and Zone of the Enders) and whose shadow looms on every possible future title. He would eventually finally move on from Konami and start producing original games once again, but time will tell if he can shake his reputation off.
The PlayStation 3 was this to both the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, as it was more expensive, harder to develop for, had less of an advantage with third party companies (who were busy going Multi-Platform), suffered a horrible first impression at E3 2006, was tainted by absurd commercials and arrogant statements from Sony employees, had the "Sixaxis" controller instead of a proper DualShock controller at launch, and, once its reputation started to improve, was the victim of the PSN outage caused by hackers compromising the information of a majority of PSN users. Even as the PS3's reception improved later in its lifespan and afterwards, the general consensus is that it still doesn't beat the PS1 or PS2. Sony was able to rebound the next generation with the PlayStation 4, however.
A special example with Warframe that applies to modes within the game — while all modes have their fans, part of the reason that Digital Extremes has had such a hard time with new gameplay modes (Railjack, Necramech, Archwing, Operators) is that with the titular Warframes they succeeded in creating some of the greatest and most satisfying Lightning Bruiser player characters in all of video gaming, who have blinding speed, incredible agility, and a plethora of fantastic weapons and powers, to the point that the other modes can feel like they're from entirely different (and much less-thrilling) genres.
was simply because 3D Realms wanted their game to be as groundbreaking as Duke Nukem 3D was back in its day. As a result, they were constantly adding more and more new ideas and features into the game, upgrading the technology and occasionally restarting the entire project from scratch because they felt what they had wasn't up to par, until they ran out of funding in 2009 and Gearbox finished off what they had two years later.