Franchise Original Sin / Video Games (A to L)

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• Ace Attorney:
  • One recurring complaint about the games are their recurring use of the “Filler Case”; typically the third case,^note Although Case 2 of Dual Destinies ("The Monstrous Turnabout") and Case 4 of Spirit of Justice ("Turnabout Storyteller") and The Great Ace Attorney Adventures ("The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro") better fit the bill for their respective games they're not only the weakest case in their respective game in terms of story or writing, but they are largely irrelevant to the main storyline. Turnabout Samurai, the third case of the first game, mostly avoids this, though. It serves as a Breather Episode between the tragic second case, which involves Mia's death, and the climactic fourth case, in which Phoenix tries to save his old friend Edgeworth. It also involves some Character Development, as it helps establish the Phoenix-Maya partnership, and Edgeworth starts to become a better person after Phoenix broke his perfect win record, even helping break an obviously guilty witness on the stand. Other third trials don't have nearly as much significance to the narrative, making them come across as Filler that kills the pacing of the overall story arc; the most that can be said of Turnabout Big Top from Justice for All is that it hangs a few Chekhov's Guns and sets up a few character dynamics for the new cast members that play into the finale. Turnabout Storyteller from Spirit of Justice can't even boast that!
  • Since the second game, the franchise had an established tradition of tying new characters and plot points into the backstory of the established cast to add weight, depth, and drama to the game's story. This has largely been well-received (Trials and Tribulations is widely seen as the height of the franchise despite doing so very extensively), even when it causes the odd minor writing inconsistency that needs to be politely overlooked. But many think Spirit of Justice revealing that Apollo is from Khura'in, and Dhurke's adopted son is a step too far, since in one fell swoop it begs the question of why such an important part of a character's life has never been brought up before and reshapes almost everything we used to know about him in the name of adding personal stakes to the final case of the game.
  • One complaint leveled towards the series was that the witnesses and side characters introduced began to become harder to take seriously, most of whom had designs and personalities that were over the top and/or just seemed unrealistic and distracting. These types of characters were a thing in the first few games, with characters like the Berry Big Circus being silly and a bit out of place compared to the rest of the game, or the entire concept of Mask☆DeMasque. However, what made these fine for fans was the context around them usually justified it; most of the silly or over the top characters were in positions where that made sense like clowns, actors, or were based off common jokes or stereotypes, like Sal Manella in the first game being a Fat Idiot Otaku. The original trilogy also generally kept characters to a more realistic level in design or personality, which made characters like Matt Engarde and Shelly de Killer stand out because of how different they were. Starting with Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney though, characters began to become so over the top and hard to believe that it made it eye rolling for some, like the witnesses were some kind of spectacle rather than characters. This lead to things like robots, or characters like Aristotle Means looking like a living statue, which greatly distracted from the stories of each case.
  • The franchise has long used Punny Names to convey hidden meanings in character names found in the original Japanese, and some puns translated less gracefully. For example, the main joke in Kaoru Ohba's name^note Her name, when spelled in the Japanese order, also has "Baka" or "Idiot" in it, although this may not be the main joke, since she isn't as outrageously stupid as some characters - that her surname, when pronounced, sounds like "Oba-san" - is harder to convey in English, which is why she's called "Wendy Oldbag" in the localization. That said, most of the names in the earlier installments actually sounded semi-normal; when the sixth game took Phoenix to the fictional Kingdom of Khur'ain, the names stopped sounding like actual names and were mostly just common phrases written in a funny way, making some of them sound forced rather than clever. For example, the first case has a young tour guide called Ahlbi Urgaid (which at least sounds "foreign", but made up) and a monk called Pees'lubn Andistan'dhin (which doesn't even try to sound like a name). By the final case things have reached the point of self-parody, with a major antagonist's full name being a pun on "How could this name be any longer or more pompous than it already is?" And almost all of these were even worse in the original Japanese, which barely even bothered to try to spell them differently!
  • Some people criticize the fourth through sixth games for juggling multiple playable characters, but Trials and Tribulations was the first time players could play as people besides Phoenix- the first and fourth cases had Mia as the player character, while Edgeworth became playable in the first investigation and trial days of the final trial. This was better received back then because Phoenix was still indisputably the protagonist, while playing as Mia helped flesh out events that took place before Phoenix became a lawyer and playing as Edgeworth was a fun bonus that gave both he and Franziska something to do in a Grand Finale that would've felt incomplete without them. Spirit of Justice makes Apollo the protagonist at the start of the final case despite only having been playable in the second case before then, which took place outside the region where the finale happens, causing complaints about his relevance to the Khur'ain plot failing to justify being the final protagonist, while Athena's case is considered filler. Similarly, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney received criticism for having Phoenix be a Spotlight-Stealing Squad in Apollo's game, while Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies was criticized for having to juggle Phoenix making his grand return and Athena making her debut as the protagonist, with Apollo left in the lurch, contriving to have him serve as a surprise antagonist in the final case just so he'd have something to do, on top of writing in an old friend who died in the case a la an earlier entry.
  • The later games have also received complaints for not following up on the plot points from previous games. However, the series has always avoided talking about specific plot points from previous titles; they've been doing it since the second game in the original trilogy was pretty vague about a lot of important things that happened there so as not to alienate new players picking the series up with the second installment. It only became noticeable when the plots became much bigger in scope than they were before, and the marks they should've left on the characters and the setting so much more important, like Phoenix reuniting with the supposed love of his life at the end of the third game, only for her never to be seen or even mentioned again or Apollo and Trucy never finding out that they're half-siblings, despite them both being main characters with lots of screen-time together in two full games after Phoenix finds this out and agrees with their mother that someone needs to tell them their family history.
  • Phoenix's Anti-Hero characterization and the actions he committed in Apollo Justice (such as forging evidence) have received a ton of criticism for how out of place it is with the characterization he had in the trilogy. However, while Phoenix in the original games was undeniably a good guy and wasn't an Amoral Attorney, he wasn't entirely straight-laced and would easily bend the rules for his sake if he felt the need to do so, which includes doing some legally shady actions, such as breaking into Damon Gant's office illegally and concealing illegal evidence against him until the last minute in "Rise from the Ashes", potentially telling Larry to lie like a dog in his first trial, accusing several people of murder mid-case (often just as a delaying tactic that famously almost gets an innocent woman charged with the crime in the second game), and outright lying to someone just to have him slip up. But this tends to receive a pass compared to his actions in Apollo Justice because, first, the player is experiencing these things from Phoenix's perspective in the trilogy, and so has greater understanding for and sympathy with his mindset when he does them, as opposed to Apollo Justice, where the player is seeing him from an outsider's perspective for most of it (since Apollo is the main character), and thus isn't able to get into his head and understand his motives as well; and, second, it's usually done as a last resort and/or for a very justified reason, actively defending an innocent person from being convicted of a serious crime, whereas Phoenix's actions in Apollo Justice don't really have that same justification behind them (even if they are understandable).
  • One common gripe people had with Dual Destinies was that it's hard to care about Clay Terran's death since we never got to know him while he was still alive. He's certainly not alone in that regard; most victims in the series are introduced posthumously, and the few who aren't rarely have enough screentime for the audience to get attached to them. This generally isn't seen as a problem when the victims are people the player characters didn't know too well, but Clay was supposed to be Apollo's closest friend, and his death is an integral part of Apollo's character arc, so it's strange that he never appeared and was only vaguely mentioned before he died, and we never learn much about his personality beyond him being a Nice Guy.
• Angry Birds:
  • One of the most common complaints about modern Angry Birds is the series going free-to-play. Angry Birds is no stranger to Microtransactions, with the earliest example being the Mighty Eagle in 2011. Some other early examples include Danger Zone in Angry Birds Space and the Power-Ups in Angry Birds Friends (although the latter can be purchased with in-game currency). The series went fully Freemium in 2013, when Power-Ups were added to the main games (Classic, Seasons and Rio), but fans didn't see it as a major issue. It wasn't until late 2014, when they were already many games that came out as free-to-play where this become a problem. In particular, fans disliked Angry Birds 2 for using a lives system like many other free-to-play games, which many felt took much of the fun out of the game.
  • The series' main art style using The Angry Birds Movie character designs is another common complaint, especially among fans who dislike the movies. Rovio Entertainment did the same thing with Angry Birds Toons back in the day, with Angry Birds Go! becoming the first game to completely abandon the Classic art style in favor of the Toons art style. The Toons art style slowly began to incorporate into the main games (most notably the Rio 2 update in Angry Birds Rio) and merchandise, and Angry Birds 2 become an Art-Shifted Sequel. The thing is that the Toons designs are not as divisive as the movie designs, in part because they mostly improved on the original characters, explaining why many fans didn't notice or didn't care about the change.
• Animal Crossing:
  • Animal Crossing: New Leaf, like some other 3DS games, incorporates the system's Play Coins as currency for certain features. Among these is for the fortune cookies, which contain unique furniture if the player gets the corresponding fortune. As tedious as the process of grinding the Play Coins is (100 steps on the system's built-in pedometer gives one Play Coin, with a limit of 10 per day) and the fact that the items obtained are random (possibly duplicates), this is still considered fine for the fanbase, as there is nothing else that keeps the player from trying to get them all. And then comes Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and its own take on fortune cookies. To match its elusiveness with the New Leaf ones, only two that can be bought with Bells appear on the shop per day, but the option of using premium currency is also available. This proceeded to annoy a lot of fans, as the fortune cookie mechanics (Random Drop, Rare Random Drop, possible duplicates) became more detrimental for players who want to complete the Catalog and unlock Memories. Why? The event fortune cookies appear only temporarily and show up very rarely at the shop, leaving only the premium currency as a way to purchase, which is considered by fans to be way too expensive (a dollar equals 20 Leaf Tickets) thanks to how stingy the game is when it comes to free Leaf Tickets.
  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a fair amount of controversial developments that originated from earlier titles:
    • Save-Game Limits have always been a staple in the series, and at times seen as a Scrappy Mechanic even in earlier games as save files had to share one town. However, in previous entries it was excusable by factors like Controller Paks/Memory Cards being cheap to collect, the DS/3DS being single-person handhelds, and the limitations of the Wii's save system. However, with New Horizons, save data is shared between Switch accounts, despite them normally having unique data attached to them. As a result, the only way to get a brand new Island for a friend or family member is to buy a new Switch altogether.
    • After the Save-Game Limits, the most controversial thing about New Horizons is the concept of the Resident Representative, which grants the very first player special privileges, including all main forms of progression. This started in New Leaf, where the first player would be elected mayor and be responsible for building up the town. Once again, New Leaf being on a traditional handheld meant that players were much more open to owning multiple systems and game copies per household.
    • Another common criticism of New Horizons, even among those who consider the game a step up from New Leaf, is that villager dialogue is noticeably limited and one-note, with characters feeling static and saccharine as a result of their small interaction pools (with more variable dialogue being locked behind the game's Relationship Values). The limited amount of possible interactions is actually a trend that stretches all the way back to the first game. However, in earlier cases it was excusable due to the technical limitations of the respective systems; while the Switch is also limited, it's considerably more powerful than previous systems.
• Before Origins heavily shook up the formula, the Assassin's Creed series received a lot of complaints about the fact that the core gameplay of social stealth and combat had barely changed since the first game, with later games merely adding a bunch of features to pass things off as new.
  • Assassin's Creed III is cited as the point where this became a problem, as many felt that the game's main missions were glorified scripted events, even the Assassination missions, which should be stealthy and open-ended. It was also seen as being overstuffed with side activities and additional features. However, this was an ongoing trend since the well-liked Assassin's Creed II, and its follow-ups Brotherhood and Revelations, which had moved away from the stealthy original and were filled with additional features and content. What made them acceptable was that Brotherhood and Revelations were Mission Pack Sequels, and as such, the additional features were condoned and seen as part of the appeal of the touristy cities with exotic architecture. The fact that the New World setting of ACIII lacked the tall buildings, fancy architecture, and recognizable landmarks in favor of forests and colonial outposts only brought these problems to the forefront.
  • III was also criticized for its Been There, Shaped History tendencies, with Connor interacting on a first-name basis with many of America's Founding Fathers and participating in several key events of The American Revolution, which to many beggared belief. Yet this was always part of the franchise's appeal. Altair in Assassin's Creed conversed on even terms with the very Christian King Richard the Lionheart and later fought Genghis Khan, Ezio counted Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli among his best friends and interacted with a "who's who" of the Renaissance, and the later Black Flag had Edward interact with every famous English pirate of The Golden Age of Piracy. In the case of III, the American Founding Fathers and the events of the Revolution were perhaps too prominent, known to every schoolboy, with the setting seen by foreign gamers as Eagleland. The other historical figures and settings, while somewhat well-known, aren't held in nearly the same reverence, nor are their memories part of current political discourse.
  • Assassin's Creed: Unity is an inversion, an example of the franchise returning to its roots as a result of the divisive reaction to III — greater focus on stealth, less focus on side activities, more assassination missions, toning down the Been There, Shaped History aspect — and getting thoroughly trashed for repeating its original sins. Assassin's Creed was criticized in its time for repetitive side activities, lack of additional interaction with the open world, and endless collectibles. Unity returned with repetitive Side Story quests and endless collectibles that dotted out the map, to the extent that people became nostalgic for the much-reviled flags of I. Where III was criticized for Connor being too central to the Revolution, Unity was criticized for the hero being too marginal to the events, with the game being highly criticized for its shallow representation of history. The game which followed, Syndicate, received praise for making more diverse side missions, a fairer look at the historical events, and having additional features missing in Unity.
  • Many of the recurring elements that have been critiqued for being out of place, such as a modern day framing story, the silhouette of the Assassin outfit, and the overt nature of the Assassin vs. Templar conflict, have been there from the beginning. The difference was, the framing story started out as a major reveal (and could not be said to have overstayed its welcome yet), the outfit was chosen for a reason (it highly resembled the monks of the region, allowing for social stealth), and the Assassin vs. Templar conflict was rooted in the actual history of those organizations. At some point, the developers began to treat these as too iconic of the franchise and kept them around even as they became divorced from their original contexts. The modern day framing story remains even after its original plot has long since been resolved, the Assassins continue to wear similar outfits despite how incredibly conspicuous a hooded outfit is in most contexts (plus the increasingly prominent logos), and the central conflict is increasingly overt and now predates the historical organizations (the fact that the Assassins and Templars secretly existed outside of the Crusades at all, let alone into the modern day, was the other big twist, and was part of the concept that this was the truth of our own history being revealed through Genetic Memory 20 Minutes into the Future).
  • Map synchronization is one that became a problem with Ubisoft's Wide-Open Sandbox games in general, to the point where even series creator Patrice Désilets apologized for popularizing the much-maligned "radio tower" gameplay structure. In the first Assassin's Creed game, synchronization serves an in-story purpose of allowing the protagonist to get the lay of the land from a high vantage point, and was necessary to figure out where your targets were and how to reach them. It also wasn't used to find collectibles (which only came in with the sequels); those remained genuinely hidden. In later games, however, mechanics like synchronization, radio towers (in the Far Cry sequels), ctOS towers (in Watch_Dogs), and the like were used to uncover hidden items, side missions, and other collectibles. Fans of open-world games often blame the "Ubisoft formula" for detracting from the exploration aspect of open worlds, making them feel less like places filled with secrets to discover and more like maps with a checklist of things to do.
  • Some people have commented being uncomfortable with Assassin's Creed: Valhalla glamorizing the Vikings, owing to their Rape, Pillage, and Burn activities in real life, which the game mostly justifies as "everyone was doing it back then", with the Saxons and Picts being portrayed as just as bad, and portraying Eivor and Raven Clan as exceptionally 'good' Vikings while putting more focus on their belief systems and honor culture. But the series is a franchise built on Historical Hero Upgrade, going back to the first game turning the Assassin Brotherhood into a group of heroic freedom fighters; meanwhile, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, one of the most popular installments in the franchise, is about pirates, who are about as guilty of Rape, Pillage, and Burn as the Vikings were (in fact, the concepts of pirate and viking are more-or-less the same thing, just different time periods). The argument that the game supports the Viking's brutal actions also brings to mind the "Whaling" controversy from Black Flag, where PETA argued that the ability to hunt whales in-game was supportive towards the now-frowned-upon practice of whaling.
  • One of the most controversial issues seems to be the matter of Viking colonialism, something that isn't typically associated with pirates and is more of a hot-button political argument than the traditional Rape, Pillage, and Burn is. However, this too is somewhat reflective of earlier games as well, such as Assassin's Creed III where the settlement mechanic originates and does amount to fundamentally the same thing (The Hero aids and supports an invasive colony), and the aforementioned Black Flag where a subplot during the game features the formation of the pirate colony Nassau, which amounted to seizing a port city and killing anyone who objected. Though the people they seize Nassau from are outside colonists themselves, so are the Saxons whom the Vikings are taking land from. However, while this does not necessarily justify such issues, in most previous games themes of colonialism are generally part of the historical background, limited to isolated incidents, or embodied in specific NPCs; in Valhalla, the raiding and subjugation of a foreign land is a central narrative and gameplay theme in which the player is required to engage throughout the game.
• Balan Wonderworld is an unusual case where the problems addressed by the player were present in the NiGHTS into Dreams… games, but were handled significantly worse in Balan:
  • One of the biggest complaints is that the plot is very hard to understand due to lack of dialogue and a clear understanding of what is going on. This was not a problem in the two NiGHTS games, however. The first game had very little plot aside from the final stage, but even then it was clear what was happening, and what little plot there was could clearly be understood in the manual. Meanwhile, NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams had dialogue and voice acting, which allowed the plot to be clearly understood. Unfortunately, Balan Wonderworld has neither an easy to understand plot (which requires a separate novel to fully comprehend) nor any dialogue during crucial plot moments (apart from the opening cutscene and ending, and even then the dialogue is entirely spoken in a fictional language), rendering the game very confusing.
  • Like in previous Yuji Naka series Sonic the Hedgehog, a single action is tied to every button on the controller. While it did cause some issues in that series^note 2 and 3 and Knuckles feature Super Modes that can be activated after you collect 50 rings. To preserve the one-button gameplay, 2 forces you to activate the Super Mode after jumping once. 3 and Knuckles is less bad about it, instead activating it if you press the jump button again in mid-air, so you can at least you can jump normally even if you can't use Sonic's insta-shield, Tails's flight or Knuckles's gliding without activating the Super Mode., it largely worked fine because the characters had simple movesets. Balan Wonderworld, however, has 80 costumes (power-ups) with varying abilities. As the one button is already used to jump, the one-button scheme is now a much bigger problem: several costumes will either activate their powers when they feel like it or prevent you from jumping, both of which are awkward and frequently cause Power Up Letdown.
  • Still another issue is that Balan can only be played as during bonus levels, with fans bemoaning that the game would be more interesting if you were playing as him. This, too, is another issue brought on from the NiGHTS series. In the first game, players had very little to do when a level started other than to dualize with NiGHTS, and even when they got to play as Elliot and Claris exclusively in the final level, it was still more of the same gameplay. The same also occurred in Journey of Dreams, but there were also a few levels in which the player exclusively controlled Will and Helen, including one in all three of Helen's Nightopias. Sadly, this issue was taken too far in Balan Wonderworld, where, as noted, players primarily control Leo and Emma, and Balan is reduced to being playable in bonus stages.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • One of the biggest criticisms aimed toward Batman: Arkham Origins and Batman: Arkham Knight was present in Batman: Arkham City, where, despite Hugo Strange being marketed and presented as the main villain in the beginning of the game, you'll spend so much of it curing The Joker from his disease (all but one or two hours in the entire game) that the game needs to remind you that Strange exists from time to time. Making him the Big Bad of the first game was quite sensible because - well, it was the first game in the series. The second game was intended to be Mark Hamill's swansong for the character, which nobody would have wanted pushed to a side mission. But Origins had Black Mask (a relatively unknown villain) presented as the Big Bad, only to get upstaged by Joker. By Knight, the promoted main villain Scarecrow (considered one of the most memorable villains in the original game, and who had only made a full appearance there) is overshadowed by the Joker hallucination, who ends up being the final encounter while Scarecrow is defeated in a cutscene, and certain other villains who hadn't been utilized very much (such as Two-Face) are either not present or encountered only in side missions.
  • The City PC port was decent but sub-optimized and came a month after the console versions, Origins' was filled with bugs and then the Knight port happened. It was forgiven for City because the port was still good enough to be playable, and Origins was tolerated because the game itself was seen as a quick cash-in rush job by WB and was still pretty terrible on consoles anyway.
  • Riddler Trophies. Arkham Knight had people complaining that some of them were out in the open without needing to do anything special to get them. In truth, this was the case all the way back in Asylum. The difference is that Asylum was on a much smaller scale and the Riddler trophy collecting was new.
  • Several of the complaints at Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were present in, or grew out of trends in the original beloved Arkham series:
    • Batman: Arkham City showed that the series wasn't afraid to kill off major characters or defy the comic book status quo when it killed off The Joker. But the death flowed logically from Joker's own choices, it came after 2 games of Joker getting to be Joker, the game treated it with the appropriate gravitas, and Joker continued to be relevant in later games thanks to a prequel and hallucinations (to the point that many claimed he overstayed his welcome.) Suicide Squad's plot, however, lived up to its name, but treated most of the deaths rather callously, a good deal of plot contrivance had to happen to make the deaths both possible and necessary, and since this was the first proper appearance of most of these characters in the Arkham-verse, They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character.
    • Many bemoaned how similarly the four playable characters feel, or at least fight. But the various playable characters in the Arkham series all also played pretty similarly, having most of the same basic attacks and abilities as Batman, with some variations in gadgets or movement, but never enough to break the "Freeflow" and "Predator" combat formulas. But it made more sense, since most of the characters were Badass Normals and most were trained by, some variation of, or directly copying Batman, whom the combat systems were built for, so the gameplay felt like a good adaptation of how these characters would actually fight. Playing as anyone besides Batman was restricted to DLC or a few brief story moments, so playing as other characters felt more like a treat and the game going above and beyond. Not to mention, the games' combat mechanics were praised as some of the best in gaming history, and improved with each game. In Suicide Squad, though, the game is explicitly sold as playing as a group instead of one character, and all four are playable through the whole game. The gun/shield based combat against a small selection of enemies is nowhere near as ground-breaking, and largely goes against the characters' usual personalities and abilities.
• Battlefield 1 has a Politically Correct History approach that would later be panned far more harshly in its immediate sequel Battlefield V. In 1, non-white soldiers are dramatically overrepresented in multiplayer among the American, British, French and German armies; the In the Name of the Tsar DLC depicts the Russian Women's Battalion of Death as an active combat unit instead of a ceremonial one; and Zara Ghufran, the female Bedouin warrior protagonist of the War Story "Nothing is Written", plays a larger and more direct part in the Arab Revolt than any real Arab women are known to have done. While these decisions caused some controversy, they weren't nearly as widely or deeply criticized as the liberties taken in V. The difference is that in 1, there was a greater historical basis for creative choices,^note All female and non-white figures in-game are based on real historical women and people of color who served in the conflict, like the African-American Harlem Hellfighters and Afro-French troupes coloniales. which when combined with the game's polished performance, authentic aesthetics and an in-game codex that provided historical context, creates a verisimilitude that made these particular characters feel organic to the setting. Moreover, the real actions of male historical figures were still generally credited to those people, such as the aforementioned "Nothing is Written" War Story heavily featuring Lawrence of Arabia as Zara's mentor and the Big Good. In contrast, V had wacky customizable uniforms and playable women in historically male-only factions like the Special Air Service, meaning that there isn't the historical facsimile that would prevent this revisionism from sticking out like a sore thumb (and the immersion-breaking bugs certainly didn't help). Also not helping matters is how the campaign of V falsely attributes the actions of historical figures to completely fictional women and minorities; most notably, the real-life sabotage of a heavy water plant in occupied Norway, historically carried out by an all-male team of SOE commandos, is performed in V by a mother-daughter duo, and the level itself doesn't even attempt to be historically accurate in terms of how the operation was handled, the aforementioned mother-daughter duo sabotaging both the plant and a ferry trying to salvage its product in a dramatic manner whereas the two were handled by entirely different groups of people, all of whom survived their respective operations.
• BioShock was the game that birthed the term "ludonarrative dissonance" due to the contradictions between the narrative told through its story and the one told through its gameplay, especially after The Reveal. In a game ostensibly built around player freedom and choice, the big twist concerns the fact that you actually have none, since you had been brainwashed by Frank Fontaine the whole time. The problem really comes in when you're freed from Fontaine's brainwashing, yet you're still railroaded through the game, this time taking orders from Tenenbaum ostensibly under your own free will. However, the twist, when taken on its own, was a stunning deconstruction of tropes that were taken for granted in video games up to that point. Furthermore, not only did the game still have Multiple Endings that depended on decisions that players made throughout the game and (in the fashion of the Immersive Sims it was modeled after) afforded them multiple ways to approach every problem put in front of them, but the fact that it was in fact far more linear than it initially presented itself as was the entire point of the twist, such that even a Disappointing Last Level couldn't stop it from being acclaimed as one of the greatest video game stories of all time. BioShock Infinite was not only far more linear but had no such metanarrative justification, and as such it was often criticized for leading players through its story and world rather than letting them interact with such.
• Borderlands:
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! has been criticized by some reviews and fans for having tedious backtracking and tiresome quest design. While some of these problems have existed since the first entry in the franchise, Borderlands 2 did mitigate some of the excessive backtracking and offered vastly improved gameplay and writing that helped distract from some of the sluggish pacing problems. However, as noted in this IGN review, The Pre-Sequel did not correct the pacing problems despite being the 3rd main installment in the series, thus making it more difficult to ignore these issues.
  • Borderlands 3 was criticized for having humor too reliant on shock value and shallow pop-culture references. Granted, the franchise's comedy has always been divisive since the first game with some deriding it as obnoxious and cringey. However, at the time, the game's wackiness was appreciated for making it stand out from other more serious shooters. Borderlands 2 built on the first game's comedy with memorable characters like Tiny Tina and Handsome Jack, the latter of whom was highly praised with his hilariously Bad Boss antics and cartoonishly genocidal plans making him a biting satire of neo-colonialist corporations. Telltale Games' spin-off Adventure Game, Tales from the Borderlands, was also praised for improving on the humor with more wit and new likable characters. However, fans became less accepting of the humor in Borderlands 3 because of how it recycled the writing style of the previous games without elevating it, saying anything meaningful or offering interesting characters. Not only was the comedy beginning to lose its charm, but the game's characters also failed to impress with the villainous Calypso siblings being obnoxious shallow parodies of YouTubers and social media influencers whose comical For the Evulz moments come off as weak attempts to recreate the success of Handsome Jack.
• Call of Duty:
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's Signature Scene is, by the opinions of most players and gaming outlets, the nuke from the level "Shock and Awe". It's about as big of a Downer Ending as could possibly happen for the American side of the campaign: shocking, visceral, and tragic. It's very likely responsible for lifting the series from merely a well-rated game series to a Cash-Cow Franchise. Later games, however, would try to top the nuke scene over and over, with Ass Pull after Ass Pull, moments that exist seemingly just for shock value (the airport massacre of "No Russian" in Modern Warfare 2, which at least has a story link to the rest of the game, and the death of a little girl and her family in a bombing in "Davis Family Vacation" in Modern Warfare 3, which... really does not), and a few sequences that just plain repeat the nuke sequence verbatim (respectively the EMP over Washington, D.C. in 2 and the gas attacks across Europe in 3). By Modern Warfare 3, the audience had come to expect these events, and they'd stopped being shocking and started feeling manufactured and trite.
    
    Furthermore, the nuke scene also foreshadowed the series' reliance on linear set-pieces that restricted the player's agency. This video pegs Modern Warfare 2 as the point where this problem got out of hand, arguing that it tried to create something like the nuke scene every forty-five minutes. It works in the first Modern Warfare because it's an ending to that side of the campaign, and one explicitly designed to make the player feel powerless at that, but later games use similar highly-scripted moments as power fantasies instead, which goes against legacy game mechanics that were designed to disempower the player back when the series was still focused on storming the beaches of Normandy as part of a team.
  • Call of Duty: Ghosts' multiplayer started the trend of nerfing kill/score/pointstreaks for future games. While the developers' intent was so that there would be less offensive streak-spamming and spawn-killing by offensive streaks, this had the unfortunate side-effect of making high offensive-streaks almost useless to go after. In Ghosts' case, most players just ran either the Support or Specialist Strike Packages instead of the Assault Strike Package due to many items in the Assault Package being too weak to run with (this also contributed to Ghosts' criticism for encouraging camping-style play in multiplayer).
  • One of the biggest complaints you will see about the series' multiplayer is that the time it takes to kill seems to get quicker with each installment, resulting in a devolution into Rocket-Tag Gameplay. This can be traced back to Modern Warfare, which had a few annoying One-Hit Kill weapons (primarily one sniper rifle that was bugged to deal slightly better damage with a specific sight attached), but were few in number and most players stuck with more Boring, but Practical weapons. The game also included the Stopping Power perk that gives a 40% damage boost to all ballistic weapons. When Black Ops came out, it removed Stopping Power but didn't adjust damage values to compensate. A common criticism of that game's multiplayer was that it now took too long to kill. From this point onwards, the damage of weapons were increasingly ramped up (by Black Ops II, even the pistols, at close range, rival the strongest of the assault rifles in damage) and many one-shot kill weapons became more prominent, leading to the oft-dreaded gameplay style used today.
  • One of the most derided parts of the series among critics and fans alike was the increasing shift to a futuristic sci-fi setting, beginning with Black Ops II and reaching a nadir with Infinite Warfare, the backlash from which lead to the series Revisiting the Roots with WWII. However, this trend can be found as far back as the first Modern Warfare, which took place Next Sunday A.D. and had multiple segments seemingly designed to show off cutting edge technology, from night-vision goggles to the capabilities of modern tanks. This can be forgiven, however, as said technology was genuinely novel at the time (not many games let you fire the guns of an AC-130 gunship before CoD4 featured it). The aforementioned Black Ops II was the first to shift into 20 Minutes into the Future territory, but balanced things out with levels taking place in the 1980s, and having many of the futuristic elements be based on current emerging technologies (e.g. its heavy reliance on unmanned drones and one level giving you a sniper rifle that can penetrate deeper surfaces by superposing multiple rounds to all be fired with one trigger pull) to keep things plausible. But by the time Advanced Warfare and Black Ops III gave us two different Cyberpunk settings and Infinite Warfare sent the series into outer space, it was agreed that the series had completely lost its grip on the realism that it was originally renowned for.
  • Call of Duty gained an infamous reputation as xenophobic and jingoistic following the breakout success of the Modern Warfare sub-series, to the point of inspiring several Deconstruction Games that specifically aimed to criticize it, the most famous one being Spec Ops: The Line. However, the Modern Warfare trilogy—which kickstarted the modern military shooter genre—can be interpreted as a deconstruction of exactly that type of propaganda game. In the first two entries, America doesn't save the day and its actions end in failure, whether it be a nuclear blast which kills thousands of American soldiers (looking for a warlord who turns out to not even be on the same continent), or a CIA agent participating in a civilian massacre which gives Russia the perfect excuse to invade the US when said agent is killed and left to take the fall for everything. Furthermore, the overarching conflict of all three games is later revealed to be an elaborate ploy on the part of Russian ultranationalists collaborating with an American military general to trick their two nations into declaring war on each other as part of a jingoistic power fantasy. Unfortunately, this commentary was lost on a lot of players due to the exciting gunplay (particularly in multiplayer) and the series' growing reliance on Rule of Cool. Meanwhile, the breakout success of Call of Duty with both Modern Warfare 1 and 2 led the franchise to amass a large Misaimed Fandom whose Patriotic Fervor would then be capitalized on by subsequent games in the hopes of escalating the franchise's sales numbers. While Modern Warfare 3 deliberately indulged its blockbuster power fantasy by taking on a more generic America Saves the Day tone, it still retained some of the War Is Hell commentary of its predecessors (as the story ends with moderates on both sides renouncing the war, Europe and Russia in disarray, countless civilian lives being lost, and nearly every player character and fellow soldier dead). Likewise, Black Ops II drew criticism for portraying its American leads as heroes while the villains were mostly lower-class minorities led by a Nicaraguan freedom fighter, though the game still showed said villains in a sympathetic light and didn't shy away from depicting the damage that America's actions during the Cold War had inflicted on them (and the fact that said villains' actions fell hard into Disproportionate Retribution may have also helped in this regard). Call of Duty: Ghosts however, depicted its American heroes as uniformly righteous figures even as they commit war crimes roughly once every two missions, whilst the Latin American-based Federation was portrayed as an Always Chaotic Evil horde with no redeeming qualities or even named characters other than a traitorous American (who also fell short of being likeable due to being an Invincible Villain with a generically boring motivation and ridiculous amounts of Plot Armor), in a plot that had discomforting parallels to real-world debates over immigration to the US. Not helping matters was that publisher Activision deliberately marketed the games as power fantasies and brought on US military advisers to endorse the series, including controversial figures like Oliver North (infamous for his role in the Iran-Contra affair) advising on and voicing himself in Black Ops II. Come another few years, and 2019's reboot of Modern Warfare would take this sin to its logical zenith by including real life war crimes committed by American forces in the Middle East and then blaming Russia for them (most infamously the "Highway of Death" from the 1991 Gulf War, which MW2019 turns from a legal but morally-questionable attack on retreating enemy forces into an outright massacre on fleeing civilians). Call of Duty fell victim to its own success and became the type of military propaganda that it once sought to condemn.
  • The Gunsmith system in Vanguard is criticized for robbing the game of any sense of realism by letting players slap random attachments onto the weapons. The system was introduced in Modern Warfare (2019) and was lauded for its innovative take on gun customization by allowing players to put tons of custom attachments on any given weapon, some combinations of which can completely alter a weapon's identity and role (for instance, one could turn the basic M4 assault rifle into either a long-range marksman's weapon with a longer barrel and fixed stock, or a close-range submachine gun with a shorter barrel and a conversion to pistol rounds). It worked there because the attachments all exist in reality, are frequently used by actual militaries for different mission profiles and were designed to fit the weapons in question (e.g. every stock, barrel and ammo option for the M4 is based on a real stock, barrel and handguard, or ammo conversion made for AR-15 rifles). Black Ops: Cold War skirted by on the same system because the game focused on special operations troops who historically had access to customized weapons in The '80s. Furthermore, even modified guns that clearly didn't exist at the time, like the version of the FAMAS present, were accepted mostly because the Black Ops subseries had anachronisms, almost all of which involved the exact same weapons, that already existed since the first Black Ops, and the game still took care to make sure attachments fit the time period (e.g. optics simply look more primitive than the ones from MW2019, like much bulkier and squared-off red dot sights, to reflect being manufactured thirty years earlier) and, in the case of unique attachments, their parent firearm (barrels and stocks are still universally based on ones made for the specific weapon or very closely-related weapons). Vanguard, however, went all-out on offering options for the player without as much care for whether they actually fit their parent weapon or the time period. As such, for every option based in reality (e.g. parts to convert the M1A1 Thompson into a mostly-correct M1928, a wooden stock for the MP 40 used on a real unlicensed copy, detachable magazines for the M1 Garand that were actually tested at the time, or an underfolding stock for the StG 44 based on one tested for tank crews) there are at least as many options which have no precedent for existing in the 1940s, like red dot sights made by arbitrarily scaling down aircraft-mounted reflector sights (the results looking at least as streamlined and advanced as what was available in Call of Duty 4, released and set 60 years after the war; tellingly, a few red dot models from the game are reused for Modern Warfare III, and fit right in with all the other modern sight options), mounting them at an offset as a close-range backup to a long-range scope (a technique which didn't come into common use until about the Turn of the Millennium), fitting drum magazines to weapons that could not take them (including a version of the Thompson that was specifically designed to eliminate compatibility with them, or several pump-action tube-fed shotguns), and offering stocks that are taken from weapons which didn't even exist at the time (like the Uzi, produced starting in 1950, or the Romanian version of the AK-47, from 1963) or alternate ammo types which have nothing to do with their parent firearms (like completely fictional conversions of the .30-06 BAR or 7.62x54mm Mosin-Nagant to use .50 BMG) or which, again, didn't exist until well after the war ended (like being able to rechamber the Thompson for 5.7x28mm, a bullet designed in The '80s). Not helping matters either is that MW2019 and BOCW limit you to at most five attachments at a time on any one gun while Vanguard lets you put something in all ten slots at once, which opens up even more and greater possibilities for immersion-breaking custom guns.
  • On that subject, Vanguard is not the first historical-set Call of Duty to fudge historical accuracy for the purposes of gameplay or story, as every game from the first one has had some wonky history. The difference is that Vanguard is simply the most obvious case, suffering in part due to its decision to include more women and people of color, even in situations where it would make more sense for them to not be present. Earlier games also at least had a dedication to historical authenticity, a dedication Vanguard noticeably lacks, even in comparison to Sledgehammer's previous game (where the devs admitted that player choice took precedence over historical accuracy in multiplayer - allowing, somewhat memetically, the ability to play as a black female German soldier - but kept things as authentic as possible for the campaign), and its errors tend to only be on the same level as those of previous games. A German rifle showing up one year early,^note Most games with the StG 44 in it, which get a pass since superficially-similar weapons were in development since at least '42 a mission taking place a few days after the historical operation it's part of had already happened,^note The third British mission of United Offensive, set July 12 1943, is stated to be a preliminary operation for the Allied invasion of Italy, which started July 9th Marine Raiders wearing the wrong color uniform for a night operation^note World at War's first mission gives its Marine Raiders the same camo outfits they wear across the rest of the game, rather than the all-black uniforms they wore for the real raid on Makin island or Russian weapons showing up in German hands on the Western front^note WWII includes the PPSh among the German arsenal despite not featuring the Russian front of the war where these would really be prevalent, but Germany did in fact make extensive use of stolen weapons, especially if they fit into their existing logistics, like the large amount of European rifles using 8mm Mauser - or, conveniently, Russian submachine guns, which could use 7.62mm Tokarev and 7.63mm Mauser interchangeably is much easier to overlook than the war itself being won almost singlehandedly by a special forces group made up of a disproportionate number of women,^note who would not pass selection for any special forces group until the '80s people of color,^note who were still in segregated units in WWII and defectors from Axis countries^note who simply would not be trusted so easily with such sensitive operations - remember that America interned its own citizens descended from Axis countries, particularly the Japanese, simply for being descended from those countries to say nothing of its multiplayer - you can tell a WWII-set game doesn't particularly want to be a WWII-set game when you can play as Snoop Dogg (born 1971) and use an F2000 (entered full production 2001) on the set of Godzilla (released 1954) while the game differentiates sides as "My Team" and "Enemy Team" instead of Allies and Axis.
• Chris Avellone is well-known for consistently deconstructing whatever genre, medium, or world he's working with, often through the use of mouthpiece characters. In the case of Planescape: Torment, this led to a massively-acclaimed examination of Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, Order Versus Chaos, and other core tropes of Dungeons & Dragons. Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords was also well-liked, but his mouthpiece for that game, Kreia, is a major Base-Breaking Character because she provides him an opportunity to rant on everything he hates about Star Wars, and a lot of players considered Kreia to be almost as annoying as the buggy and unfinished state of the game. However, things finally collapsed in the DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, when his author avatar, Ulysses, became a Creator's Pet of unimaginable proportions; not only is he a mouthpiece for Avellone, everyone else who talks about him is constantly shilling him as an epic badass, he always knows exactly what to do or say to influence massive events, the DLC about him is portrayed as a fated confrontation, and it's spent fighting through an army of tough monsters while listening to him rant about how he hates the setting and wants to nuke everything again (because Avellone dislikes how Fallout has rebuilt itself from the post-apocalyptic setting of the first game).
• One of the most criticized aspects of ClayFighter 63⅓ was featuring several characters leaning heavily into racist stereotypes and thus negatively received, such as the Zappa Yow Yow Boyz, Houngan, and especially Kung Pow. The thing is, the series has been prone to having characters playing up ethnic stereotypes, such as the Nordic stereotypes of Helga and the Jamaican stereotypes of Nanaman from its predecessors — but seeing as Helga was obviously based more on the pre-existing Brawn Hilda joke about opera singers, and that Nanaman was a relatively normal-looking anthropomorphic banana (the most obviously Jamaican aspect of his being his voice), it was thus much easier to separate them from the stereotypes they represented. All offending characters in 63⅓, resembling caricatured humans, were far more blatantly obvious.
• Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex was roundly criticised on release for an over-saturation of vehicle-based levels; of thirty levels, only six are the classic on-foot Crash platforming levels that made the game popular to begin with, and the rest are either played with pre-Rescued from the Scrappy Heap Coco, or in a vehicle of some kind. Vehicles aren't anything new to Crash; the very first game has the two hog levels, while Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back replaced the hog with Polar, and added in the jetboard and jetpack. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped is where this started to shine through a lot more, with a Polar replacement in Pura, a jet ski, an airplane, scuba diving, a baby T. rex and a motorcycle (which has four levels dedicated to it), but even in that game, roughly half of the levels were still classic Crash platforming, while TWoC's platforming levels are only a fifth of the game.
• Although still considered a great game, Chrono Cross received some criticism regarding the whopping forty-five playable characters available to make up a party of three, of which at most ten have any plot relevance, and five make sense as playable characters. Having so many characters join such a small party made the experience of meeting a new character feel much less special, and didn't leave much space in the game itself or the player's interest for unique personalities and storylines (mostly, each minor character an unique sentence upon beating the final boss, otherwise just all had the same dialog with different silly accents). The bloat of characters was already present, to a certain extent, in Chrono Trigger's seven playable characters, some of which ended up Overrated and Underleveled during the later parts of the game, especially after reaching a Hub Level made changing party members easy regardless of plot reason. The Chrono Trigger characters are still memorable and beloved, though, while a lot of Chrono Crosss characters are based on design gimmicks that make them look more like Pokémon (alien, dog, plant man, mushroom, cyborg, strawman, wrestler...)
• Upon its release, Cyberpunk 2077 was heavily criticized for a laundry list of issues, regardless of whether it was the PC or PS4/Xbox One versions. In truth, many of the complaints can be traced back to the previous game CD Projekt RED put out, the acclaimed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
  • Much like 2077, Witcher 3 also launched in a rather buggy state, requiring several patches for it to become stable, alongside visuals that were noticeably downgraded from the trailers. However, with Witcher 3, it was far more excusable, as CDPR was still a relative unknown in the gaming industry, so some bugs were to be expected. By the time Cyberpunk launched though, CDPR had become renowed as one of the most beloved development houses in the entire industry thanks to the blockbuster success of their previous title, alongside having a much bigger budget and team, so it was much less forgivable.
  • A common complaint of 2077 is the lack of interactivity despite its immense size and detail, with some even noting that games released over a decade ago like the earlier 3D Grand Theft Auto titles featured more to do and interact with than this 2020 release. A similar case can be said for The Witcher 3; despite its size, the world isn't terribly deep, and you'll spend most of your time exploring stumbling upon enemy outposts and high-level monsters or gear. But Witcher 3 more than made up for the shallowness of its world by including multiple story and lore-related elements that the player can change, with the main areas noticeably changing throughout the main quest due to the player's actions (such as who rules over them and whatnot). Furthermore, the story is mainly focused on Geralt and Ciri's quests, so the world being effectively window dressing wasn't an issue — and there were still mini-games, like Gwent, that one could conceivably spend hours playing. The same can't really be said for Cyberpunk, which not only has even less interactivity with the world, it also has far less in terms of narrative changes in the story, and no interesting mini-games to partake in. Night City is also a far more integral element to the game as a whole, not unlike Grand Theft Auto, so the lack of interactive features is all the more jarring.
  • On the note of the quest design, Witcher 3 featured a rather samey formula for its side-quests. Nearly all of them involve talking to an NPC, accepting their task, following the "Witcher-sense" to the main target, killing the enemy, return to claim your reward, and repeat. However, it more than made up for this by making sure to give each quest-giver and mission its own storyline and characterization, thus making each of them still feel unique from one another regardless of the similar feeling gameplay they all shared. Furthermore, this formula is also justified by the character of Geralt, whose profession is specifically geared towards taking these sorts of jobs. By contrast, Cyberpunk 2077 not only has an even more formulaic design for its quests (most of them just involve killing enemies, with no real deviation beyond one's combat style), but even less in the amount of storyline variations, making the repetitive quest-design stand out even more. The main character of Cyberpunk, V, is also far more of a player avatar than Geralt is, making this lack of variety not mesh as well character-wise.
  • Speaking of the main characters, some have also been critical of how in Cyberpunk, the main character, V, ultimately ends up taking a backseat to Johnny Silverhand in the latter half of the story, with several suggesting that it was due to CDPR wanting to take advantage of the popularity of actor Keanu Reeves. A similar case can also be made for The Witcher 3, where despite playing as Geralt, much of the story ultimately ends up revolving around Ciri's quest, with multiple sections where the player plays as her, and by the final fourth, she ends up supplanting him in terms of importance (she is the one, not Geralt, who saves the world at the end). However, the key difference is that not only does Ciri have a personal connection to Geralt, being his surrogate daughter, but the player is still ultimately the one who decides her fate and overall connection to him, even determining whether or not she lives at the end. By contrast, V has Johnny thrust into his/her story without much build-up, and there is far less for the player to determine how the latter ends up aside from the very end. V being the player stand-in makes Johnny's increased importance also stand out much more negatively, as while Geralt and Ciri were established to have a relationship and characters entirely their own, with V and Johnny, it makes the player have far less stake in their personal narrative. Not helping matters is that while Ciri is shown as an overall Nice Girl, Johnny is characterized as a complete Jerkass, making it far less easy to stomach the latter's story hijacking.
• One of the criticisms of Dariusburst Another Chronicle (EX(+)) Chronicle Mode and Chronicle Saviours's CS Mode is that they reuse the same level designs over and over. However, level cosmetic reuse dates as far back as the very first Darius game, where many later Zones are just earlier zones with different colors,, and Darius II and Twin tend to use the same tilesets for zones of the same tier. That said, they didn't cause a lot of criticism since those games have a fewer number of Zones, and in II and Twin, Zones with the same environments can be thought of as easier/harder variants of one another. The problem with Another Chronicle and Chronicle Saviours is that they to give the impression of a galactic-scale quest for liberation by reusing the same levels many times, especially in AC where it looks like there are 3,000+ levels. In fact, in AC some levels are exact copies of other levels, just with different loadout options.
• David Cage has always had great moments in his games, but even back in Fahrenheit, it was noted that the overriding plotline was just weird, and didn't fit with the previous scenes. At the time, this could be forgiven due to Executive Meddling forcing the developers to rush the game out the door before they came up with a proper ending, leading to the Gainax Ending that it ultimately had. However, Heavy Rain had all manner of strange foreshadowing with no payoff, the plot of Beyond: Two Souls is in a chopped-up order and doesn't fit together at all, and Detroit: Become Human, an attempt at a sci-fi parable for American race relations, despite being widely considered better as a whole, was widely criticized as tone-deaf despite its good intentions. Cage plots by imagining cool, individual scenes, but doesn't seem to know how to put them together in a sensible fashion.
  • An examination of Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Cage's first game, shows many of the common tropes that would typify his later works, particularly the constantly-changing Kudzu Plot, a confusing mish-mash of setting genres, and a reliance on Fate and Prophecy Tropes. Of course, this was not seen as a problem at the time considering that Omikron was the debut of a then-new and unproven Quantic Dream; when the same tropes were applied to future games, that was when Cage began to face accusations of being an one-trick pony.
• Many Dead Rising fans disliked how the fourth game felt "dumbed down" compared to past entries, scrubbing away many of the series' more unique touches in an effort to reach a wider audience, to the point where Capcom released a free patch to go with the Game of The Year Edition that made several changes in order to Win Back the Crowd. In truth, many of the most criticized elements of that game could be found in the second and third games.
  • The strict time limit placed on the player was always one of the most controversial gameplay mechanics in the series, with about half the fans calling it a Scrappy Mechanic that gravely restricted the player's freedom and the other half arguing that it was one of the best things about the series, as it forced players to memorize the map and think about their next move. As such, when the third game made the timer far more lenient, extending it to six days instead of three, the reaction was decidedly mixed, though even those who didn't like the change didn't mind too much. Plus, there was an optional difficulty to make it more like the previous games. Then the fourth game dropped the timer completely, and one of the most common complaints about the resulting game was that, without the timer, it had lost a key part of what made the series unique, turning into a cookie-cutter Wide-Open Sandbox game.
  • The second game, meanwhile, introduced combo weapons, letting the player MacGyver dozens of unique, powerful zombie-slaying tools out of the various other items around them. While the resulting game heavily emphasized the use of these combo weapons, they were treated very much as special items. The player had to visit workbenches in order to build them, meaning that the standard arsenal of "whatever isn't nailed down" was still very useful. The third game got rid of the workbenches and allowed players to build combo weapons anywhere provided that they had the two items required for it, which made them far easier to acquire — and the regular weapons far less useful as a result. The fourth game streamlined things even further, to the point where the only use for most of the various items lying around was to build special weapons. As such, one of the main concepts of the first two games, the creativity of being able to use anything you can get your hands on as a weapon, fell by the wayside. The reasoning behind doing so got weaker as well. While both Chuck Greene from the second game and Nick Ramos from the third had backstories as, respectively, motorcycle and auto mechanics to justify their creation abilities, and Off the Record was a silly What If? game that has no place in canon, Frank West could pull off all the same skills in the fourth game with nothing but a Hand Wave on how he took a shop class to meet girls^note Case West allows Frank to combine items, but conversely, he was with Chuck, someone who knows what he's doing and could catch mistakes.
  • Speaking of weapons, there's the first game's gimmick of "anything and everything is a weapon", which was ultimately just that: a gimmick. Right from the first game, the majority of weapons were worthless, too hard to find to get continued use out of them, or just plain impractical. Out of the hundreds of potential weapons, most of them were ignored in favour of guns, the easy-to-find katana, the mini-chainsaws, and the Mega Buster or Laser Sword if you unlocked them. Exceptions were made for the western sword, battleaxe, machette, and mannequin torso, but for the most part, that's about it unless you were ignoring the listed weapons, either for fun or a challenge. While it's fun to put Servbot heads on everything, or beat zombies to death with a giant stuffed teddy bear, it wasn't practical to do so. And on that note...
  • A major point of contention in the fourth game is its heavy emphasis on humor, which fans not only felt was a jarring departure from previous entries, but also didn't fit the mood the game itself was going for. Humor had its place in the series from the start: the first game let you go wild with joke weapons and wear silly costumes that would carry over into cutscenes, and you could meet multiple survivors and psychopaths that were at least partially played for laughs. The key difference was that it knew the difference between pure comedy and levity: the game's main story is still a stone-faced drama that every character takes seriously, most of its item-based physical comedy remained either out-of-the-way or optional, and the sillier characters often had a tragic side that justified their behaviour - if anything, this gave the series more comedic appeal, since many enjoyed the natural absurdity of the plot and side content being played dead serious. After the third game was criticised for being too dark, Dead Rising 4 course-corrected to an extreme. Frank has endless quips for everything, which bleeds into serious story moments and undermines some of its darker elements. Neither survivors nor maniacs are given enough development to balance out their quirks. Weapons that are joke-y or even just blatantly impossible are also given even greater prominence than before: the Laser Blade went from being an Infinity +1 Sword in the first game, to an oddball combo weapon in the second, to feeling downright tame in the fourth game when almost every combo weapon has some kind of elemental power. All these elements combine to make the fourth game feel like it cannot decide if it wants to fully commit to being a comedy or not, and the game's atmosphere suffers for it.
  • The fourth game's removal of the Psychopaths, people who had snapped and gone Ax-Crazy due to the terror of being caught in a zombie outbreak and served as boss battles, was widely criticized, with their replacement, the Maniacs, being broadly unpopular for lacking the distinctive personalities and introductory cutscenes that the Psychopaths had. (One of the big changes made in the aforementioned patch was to beef up the Maniacs, giving them more health, new attacks, and unique boss themes.) The third game had already begun toning down the Psychopaths, with most of the fights required to progress through the story being with conventionally evil military figures or gang leaders, and only six optional Psychopaths along the side. While the concept of having seven different Psychopaths based on the Seven Deadly Sins (the six optional Psychos, plus the story-critical Albert the sleazy surgeon, who represented Greed) was applauded by some fans for providing a theme to the boss fights, others found themselves wishing that there were more of them scattered throughout the game, especially in a setting that served as a pastiche of the ripe-for-satire Los Angeles. Dropping and replacing them altogether in the fourth game wasn't a big leap.
  • Finally, the Flanderization of Frank West into a snarky jerkass started with Off the Record, in which Frank became much more cocky and wise-cracking than he was back in the first game. It was forgivable in Off the Record, as it was intended to be a Denser and Wackier version of 2 that starred Frank as a way of Pandering to the Base, and what's more, it was a non-canon side-story that largely amounted to Frank imagining what he would've done if he were in Chuck Greene's shoes. It was less forgivable in the live-action film Dead Rising: Watchtower, which was a canon entry in the series, and it was a lot less forgivable in 4, which was meant to be a Revisiting the Roots entry that paid homage to the first game.
• Dead Space 2 was an Actionized Sequel that set the Dead Space series on the road to abandoning the Survival Horror gameplay of the first game in favor of becoming a Third-Person Shooter. Dead Space 2's Sequel Escalation, however, saw it ramp up the horror set pieces in tandem with making the gameplay smoother and adding multiplayer, such that some fans hailed it as an Even Better Sequel. Then Dead Space 3, in response to the sales of the last game (four million units, which was decently profitable yet not enough to satisfy shareholder and executives), scrubbed away the horror almost entirely in order to play Follow the Leader with the shooter trends of the time (Co-Op Multiplayer, the addition of human enemies that use guns and die to headshots instead of requiring the series's signature dismemberment, cover-based shooting, a weapon customization system that gave players overpowered weaponry very early on), yielding a direction with disastrous results.
• Destiny 2 has the Power Level system. In the first game, the "Light Level" mechanic from year one of the game was a major Scrappy Mechanic among players. How it worked was that you had a stat called "Light" on every piece of gear that would grant you extra levels above the normal Level Cap of 20. Players hated this system for a variety of reasons (the main reasons being how RNG-driven it was to hit Max Light Level and how being more than 1 or 2 levels below enemies left you at a significant disadvantage). When the first DLC, The Taken King, launched, the Light Level system received a major overhaul. Now, Light Level was a weighted average of the Attack and Defense stats of your gear. The new system was widely-praised for making the game substantially better and was carried over to the sequel unchanged. However, as the years went on, the system became more and more criticized. Partially because of a lack of depth, but mostly due to how often the Power Level increased and by how much it increased. In Destiny 1, Max Light was 320 when The Taken King launched, and after six months, it was raised to 335. Then, Rise of Iron came out six months later, and the Light Level cap was raised to 385, and then was raised to 400 a short while later, and it stayed at 400 until Destiny 2 launched. Contrast that to Destiny 2, where Max Power level was 300 on launch, then 330 after the first expansion, then 380 (later 400) when the second expansion came out. Then it was raised to a whopping 600 when Forsaken launched, after which the max Light Level was raised by 50 every three months, resulting in a cap of 750 by the time Shadowkeep launched, at which point it was raised even further to 950 (960 with Pinnacle Power). Then it seemed to slow down a bit, with the next two expansions raising the cap to 960/970 and 970/980 respectively. But then Bungie returned to raising the cap by 50 every 3 months. As of the Season of Plunder starting in August 2022, the Power Cap is 1580. Compounding this issue is the shift to a focus on weekly rewards as the main way to power up your character. After reaching a certain Power Level, normal loot drops stop dropping at power levels above your character, and you're almost wholly dependent on weekly "Powerful Gear" milestones to raise your Power Level. This wasn't the case in the first game, which offered a variety of means to raise your Light Level that weren't on a weekly lockout.
• The later DonPachi games are a bit controversial due to the introduction of protagonist characters who aren't just Featureless Protagonists (the Element Dolls in particular), and shmup fans often approach games with a Play the Game, Skip the Story mindset and as such don't care for the increased focus on cute character designs. However, DoDonPachi II: Bee Storm toyed with the concept of actual protagonist characters about a year before DoDonPachi dai ou jou introduced the Element Dolls. While it does have characters with Fanservice designs, fans tend not to complain due to the game not being as in-your-face about them as later games, and the characters are clearly adults and two of them are male, as opposed to the later CAVE trend of having sexualized female characters whose adult status are questionable (although another part of it is that most series fans don't even acknowledge Bee Storm anyway, as it was outsourced to IGS for the purpose of testing out new arcade hardware).
• Doom:
  • The recurring issue of mid-'90s pseudo-3D shooters using highly dangerous hitscanners as basic enemies can be traced back to their primary inspiration in Doom, whose most basic enemies were zombies armed with rifles or shotguns. Doom got away with it because they were the most basic of basic enemies: they move slowly, they attack rarely, their accuracy and damage are relatively low, and even your weakest weapons regularly kill them in two or three shots. Even though the Final Boss is also a hitscanner that actually holds still and empties its gun at you, it wasn't as much of a threat as that would imply - at further ranges (like that which you invariably alert it from in its first appearance) its accuracy is pathetic, and you can easily find something to hide behind to break line of sight; at closer ranges, the BFG can potentially kill it in one shot, and even if you're not using that against it, it can easily be stunlocked to death with a chaingun or plasma gun because of its high pain chance flinching it out of ever retaliating. Doom II put itself in position to make this a problem with its introduction of the chaingun zombie, who has slightly higher health than the other zombie types and holds still to fire continuously at you, but it still wasn't a problem because the developers knew exactly what they were adding to the game and were conservative in using that enemy type as a result. Final Doom, however, would go exactly where it never should have by making zombies far more common and in places where they're much more dangerous. MAP10 of Doom II is infamous for having almost 300 enemies on the highest difficulties, over 100 of which are hitscan zombies, but many are in either wide-open spaces where their accuracy is hindered by distance or areas where it's easy to take cover and deal with them two or three at a time, and of those hundred zombies only four are chaingunners; MAP09 of TNT: Evilution is even more infamous for having about as many enemies, but 200 of them are zombies, all of them bunched together in tiny arenas where hits are more assured and you can't take on one without exposing yourself to fire from every one of them, and one full third of those 200 zombies are chaingunners. That's not to mention other shooters inspired by Doom that also use hitscanners as basic enemies but make them a bigger threat with faster reaction times, quicker movement, higher damage and/or some other gimmick (e.g. Blood letting its basic cultists surprise you with sticks of highly-damaging TNT on higher difficulties) that makes them far more dangerous than they should be given how common they are.
  • A common complaint about Doom (2016) is that its campaign becomes homogenous and by the end stops being able to provide new and unique challenges. The original game faced this same issue: it only had 8 non-boss enemy types (compared to 19 in the 2016 game), all of them have been introduced by the first half of episode 2, and a lot of them have little to mechanically differentiate them beyond health and damage dealt - there are two zombies with hitscan guns, three demons that can only bite in melee (one of which is identical to the first save for being invisible and another which flies), and three demons that throw projectiles or scratch you depending on distance (again, one of which flies), alongside two boss monsters, one of which launches rockets in salvoes of three at a time and the other which holds still to empty its gun at you. When Doom was new, however, this was an amazing amount of enemy variety compared to Wolfenstein 3-D, which had about the same number of regular enemy types but far less variety - four hitscanners differentiated only in fire rate, dogs that can only bite in melee, and fake Hitlers throwing fireballs at you that only show up in one level, to say nothing of the bosses that all have the same amount of health and fall into one of three types (ones that attack you with machine guns, ones that attack you with rocket launchers or some mechanically-identical projectile, or ones that attack you with both a machine gun and a rocket launcher) - and this is before Doom II added things to cover gaps in the original bestiary like a faster-firing hitscan zombie, a faster combined projectile/melee demon with homing projectiles, a version of an existing demon with all the power but half the health, a projectile-only demon that fires in patterns to hit strafing players, and a spellcaster that can revive other demons and never misses when it attacks unless you put a solid wall between yourself and it. Even then, the original game also has measures to keep its combat from getting too repetitive, such as that you restart each episode with just a pistol, which leaves the need to find ways to deal with higher-tier enemies with few tools as part of the challenge of later episodes while you regather your gear, something which every later game in the series dropped as an artifact of the original game's shareware origins. What also helps is that sequels/addons/what have you for classic Doom simply added more things; both Doom (with Doom II and Final Doom) and Wolfenstein 3D (between its Nocturnal Missions, Spear of Destiny and the mission packs for that) ended up with over a hundred and twenty official levels each, but whereas Doom is still introducing new things well into its second game, Wolf3D has already shown you basically everything it can do only one quarter of the way into the full experience.
  • The Spider Mastermind, originally the final boss of the first game, became infamous for the circumstances of a fight offering little middle ground between her being stupidly easy to deal with or completely unfair, and the devs have more or less treated her as a running joke from the moment Doom II released, using her in four maps of that game and setting all but one of those appearances to make her a non-threat - putting her under a crusher that can kill her with no effort on the player's part, setting her up for a duel with a Cyberdemon she will most assuredly lose, or placing her within a swarm of Arachnotrons which can infight with her and will probably kill her if they do. Her first appearance could actually be surprisingly fair to her, especially if the player pistol-starts the level, since in that case you're forced to collect rockets from far ends of the arena, during which time she has plenty of time to pelt you with her chaingun. Playing the entire episode and keeping weapons found across it, however, makes her a joke, as you can simply pelt her from afar with the plasma gun, likely stunlocking her out of ever retaliating, or get in close with the BFG and take her out in one or two shots. The final level of the later Ultimate Doom pushed her status firmly into the realm of a joke character by bringing all of her issues to light: you're inevitably forced to confront her in a close-in area, which means she could theoretically shred you very quickly if she gets a chance to start shooting, if the arena design didn't also mean that there's plenty of cover for you to hide from her while she can't really maneuver, plenty of enemies to get her to infight with, and secret weapons set up in the map, including a BFG, meaning even a player that pistol-starts the level can simply one-shot her and be done with it.
• Duke Nukem Forever:
  • One of the biggest criticisms of the game was the character of Duke himself, who many reviewers described as a repulsively unlikable person. Back in the days of Duke Nukem 3D, though, Duke had still been a pretty unlikeable person, but he was lauded for the fact that he had a personality at all, compared to non-characters like the Doomguy or BJ Blazkowicz. Furthermore, Duke was intended as a parody of the Hollywood Action Hero archetype; his one-liners were taken from popular action films of The '80s, and his character flaws were blown up to comical proportions. In the following fifteen years, however, many shooter games had been released featuring extremely fleshed-out and likable protagonists, and Duke hadn't evolved at all. If anything, he'd become more unlikable, with the elements that had been played for parody in Duke Nukem 3D being played straight in Forever.
  • Other criticized elements of DNF's humor, the Take Thats to other franchises and the pop culture references, also hail from 3D. The Take Thats worked back then because 3D was a genuinely innovative game that improved on Doom's formula (and would go on to inspire several more games in the same way Doom did), so a bit of gloating didn't feel undeserved. DNF, however, tried to deliver Take Thats to games that it was outright copying, while bringing very little new to the table gameplay-wise. For example, there is a gag involving Duke insulting the Master Chief, proudly proclaiming that "power armor is for pussies". This joke probably would have been a lot funnier if Forever didn't also use the Regenerating Health and Limited Loadout systems that Halo popularised, much less having that joke lead into a level that just needs a couple splashes of orange and one vehicle section to look and play almost exactly like the New Mombasa levels from Halo 2. Also, in terms of pop culture, 3D's jokes were either very topical or referencing sources obscure enough that people thought they were original jokes, while DNF's infamously long development cycle meant that many of its jokes or references had long since become Discredited Memes. One particular joke about hunting for keycards is dated not only in that keycards had already fallen by the wayside even when the game was supposed to come out around 2001, but that by the time it actually did come out a decade later, its "unique and original" manner of circumventing the door (by having Duke tear it open manually via quick-time event) had long since established itself as an even bigger cliché than keycards could have ever dreamed of being.
  • The hive level, where Duke ventures around an alien hive filled with traumatized women that have been raped and impregnated with alien larvae and beg for death, has been widely criticized for being utterly tasteless, not to mention tonally out of place with the rest of the game, which is mostly a goofy action romp. But there was a very similar hive level in 3D, sobbing violated women and all. The difference came down to a few factors. The much greater tech and graphics Forever was working with^note Forever runs on a version of the original Unreal engine with a decade's worth of graphical improvements, whereas Duke 3D is on a fake-3D engine developed in the days when 480x360 was considered to be high-resolution and textures were invariably still half of that at largest showed that this was clearly a horrifying and screwed-up situation, made even more evident by the color palette being incredibly dark and grimy for the whole sequence. More than that, though, Forever made the very unwise decision to try and keep going with the raunchy sex jokes and pop-culture references even in an environment that did not call for them: when you can open a door by fingering it, slap some disembodied boobs on a wall for an ego boost, and proceed past the corpse of Isaac Clarke to find a rape victim who alternates between sobbing as aliens chew through her stomach and making whimsical double entendres about date rape, the game probably isn't treating the whole thing with the weight it warrants. And most importantly, 3D didn't have a scene where Duke, whose one humanizing trait is supposed to be a genuine love for women, nonchalantly tells two women whom he personally knows and who are about to die after being forcibly impregnated by aliens "looks like you're... fucked."
  • The games have always treated Duke as the coolest man alive, but it wasn't until Forever that they became criticized for doing so. Not only has it always been treated as a given that Duke is the only man bad enough to fight off whatever the current threat is, but Duke's dialogue is about one-third comprised of some form of bragging, and he's shown to be on some level of celebrity. The thing was, in the older games, there was little room to emphasize this: Duke was the only character who regularly spoke, and his bragging was over-the-top enough to be endearing and funny (as far back as the second game, he was naming his autobiography Why I'm So Great), leaving most of the game to be comprised of Duke's badass escapades on the part of the player. In Forever, suddenly every character can talk, which means every female character talking about how much she wants to have sex with Duke, and every male character talking about what a badass he is (barring the President, who is treated as self-evidently wrong for doing so), turning it from braggadocio to active Character Shilling. Additionally, rather than Duke's coolness speaking for itself, a large chunk of the first half-hour of the game consists of wandering around Duke's palatial estate filled with people fawning over him before he's really done anything to deserve it, turning "Duke is awesome" from meaning he's a guy who does cool things to meaning he has the whole world eating out of his hand for an adventure he had fifteen years ago.
• Far Cry:
  • Far Cry 3 started the process of streamlining many of the more unique gameplay mechanics of the first two games, downplaying the survival aspects in favor of emphasizing the Wide-Open Sandbox. The thing was, some of the gameplay mechanics from Far Cry 2 that its successor abandoned, such as malaria and weapon degradation, were seen by many players as Scrappy Mechanics due to being intentionally annoying for immersion's sake, and so their departure was welcomed by a significant cohort of the fanbase. It's not for nothing that Far Cry 3 is sometimes held up as the series' creative high point. When this trend continued with the fourth and fifth games, however, fans started to bemoan the continuing simplification of the gameplay, especially as elements of its formula started to creep into other open-world Ubisoft titles like Assassin's Creed and Watch_Dogs.
  • Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was a Mission-Pack Sequel built around recycled content from the third game, foreshadowing how Far Cry Primal and Far Cry: New Dawn would do the same with the fourth and fifth games, respectively. The difference was, it only cost $15, it was marketed as the standalone Expansion Pack it was rather than a full game, and moreover, it converted the game into an '80s sci-fi action Genre Throwback that felt radically different from the base game, with a new map, almost entirely new weapons, and a protagonist who played noticeably differently from his base-game counterpart. Primal and New Dawn, on the other hand, were the usual Far Cry formula, just set in prehistoric times and the post-apocalypse, respectively, utilizing as many recycled weapons as possible, the exact same map layouts with a slightly different coat of paint, and protagonists who played exactly like their counterparts, and treated as full games with price points to match. Strangely, Far Cry 5 already had DLC addons that hewed closer to Blood Dragon in terms of tonal shifts from the base game, new maps and weapons (albeit also adding them to the base game if you owned the DLC in question, an improvement over Blood Dragon), and price point compared to the base game, which makes New Dawn's status as a game that costs so much more for what feels like much less new content even more apparent. Ubisoft would notice and respond for Far Cry 6, whose "big" DLC packs are actually sold as DLC packs and include new maps based on those of prior games instead of repainting that of 6.
  • Another key issue fans have had with the series is the increasingly bleaker Downer Endings. However, observation reveals that this, too, was handled well at first before going downhill. The first game is the sole exception to this rule, as the ending for it is a rather typical happy ending (although the game is very much Early-Installment Weirdness, as demonstrated by the fact it only has the one ending), but from there, endings began to get worse and worse. 2 ends on your character either sacrificing or just plain shooting himself, potentially after killing off all of his other friends depending on which option you take for the final mission, but it was accepted because the actual purpose of the ending (helping refugees escape the war-torn country when the warring factions declare a truce for the purpose of killing those refugees, either by blocking off the road to get out after they've passed or bribing the border guards with diamonds to let the refugees leave) took a game that was already mostly bleak and depressing and let it end on a ray of hope. 3 had an ending where Jason fully gives himself to the ways of the Rakyat by killing his friends, which was considered bad, but players would outright have to make a bad choice to take it, and the other ending is significantly better, to say nothing that the way the game works means you get to continue playing and exploring the world no matter which ending you take. 4, however, had rather downer endings no matter which one was obtained (whether you kill Pagan Min or not), but they were, at least, both isolated to the game's country and could be rectified after the game was over or during the ending. Then came 5, where all of the endings were bleak, as none of them actually allowed the player to bring Joseph Seed to justice, and one ended with a nuclear war breaking out, largely caused by factors that were both poorly foreshadowed and completely out of the player's control, leaving fans to assume that this might happen for the other endings as well and leading to major controversy, so much so that New Dawn was created in part to alleviate the problems created by the aforementioned nuke ending, and then outright claimed the ending was nothing more than a hallucination, and that Joseph was properly arrested. This is also a problem exclusive to the mainline games, as the spin-offs end with generally satisfying and less sad endings. The problem has been resolved by 6, which ends without a Downer Ending, instead ending on a more hopeful Bittersweet Ending where the Castillo regime is totally defeated, but many likable characters die along the way, and Yara is left in a state of leaderlessness.
    • Another key flaw with the "Resist/Nuke" ending is that it is a Cruel Twist Ending, and thus renders everything the player did irrelevant. Part of the reason it failed so badly was that the previous two games ran on Grey-and-Gray Morality, with both sides having flaws that meant neither one had the moral high ground, from the Rook Islanders' Blood Knight mentality versus Vaas and Hoyt's immoral torture and business practices, to the Golden Path's leaders' fanaticism in their beliefs versus Pagan's flagrant crimes and cruelty. However, 5 runs on Black-and-White Morality - the residents of Hope County are all portrayed as righteous heroes, while the Project at Eden's Gate cult is portrayed as extremely evil in every single thing they do, and the Seeds' constantly advising you not to use violence is hypocritical, since the cultists always try to kill you on sight. So when the ending revealed that the cult was correct about the end of the world and nothing you did to stop them made any difference, it felt unbelievably unfair to the player.
    • A similar issue applies to the game’s secret "do nothing at the start" ending, taken from the fourth game. In that instance, much of the ending was meant to be a happier conclusion (or at least as happy as you can get in a game like this), with Ajay following Pagan's instructions to wait and the ensuing cutscene allowing him to spread his mother's ashes like he came to do, with the added bonus of Pagan explaining everything Ajay's mother refused to and exactly what would have happened had he gone along with the Golden Path. By comparison, if the player waits and does not arrest Joseph at the start of 5, the team sent merely leaves the compound and the game ends there, without any scenes of the National Guard being called in, indicating that the cult was left alone to continue to ruin the lives of everyone in Hope County. On top of this, the game encourages the player to do this in the opening cutscene and then never to play the game again, telling the player not to play a game they paid money for; this is in contrast to Far Cry 4's secret ending, where Pagan's dialogue ends with him all but directly telling you that now that you've discovered this Easter Egg you're free to start over and actually play the game normally.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • While William Afton is fairly beloved as a Big Bad, there are also a fair few who want to see him retired. Earlier games established that he was a Serial Killer who worked at the titular Suck E. Cheese's restaurant, and whose modus operandi consisted of dressing as a beloved rabbit character from the very first restaurant in the chain to lure children into the backroom. The third game added a supernatural element to his character, which reveals that he died inside the same animatronic/mascot suit hybrid he used for his murders and became Springtrap, the game's primary antagonist. Then Sister Location came along and marked the point where Afton's skillset became borderline cartoonish, showing that not only was he the co-owner of the Freddy's chain, but was also a Mad Scientist and master roboticist who created advanced animatronics specifically for the purpose of murder. By the time Help Wanted was released, Afton now has full-blown Joker Immunity; after dying in a springlock accident and being burned alive twice, he now returns as a Virtual Ghost capable of Grand Theft Me and brainwashing, which culminates in Security Breach with one ending showing him returning to his corpse and being able to directly control other animatronics by hacking them. Some fans now feel he has worn out his welcome due to the escalation of his capabilities and repeated deaths, with Elizabeth, Vanny, and Fazbear Entertainment itself being popular candidates for his replacement. Security Breach's DLC campaign Ruin would ultimately bring in the Mimic and implicitly render "Burntrap" Canon Discontinuity, addressing this complaint for those sick of William Afton.
  • When the first game was released, it was praised for its subtle storytelling about the animatronics' true nature as Haunted Technology and the origins of how they became that way. Details were often revealed through random events, symbolism or paying close attention to plot points, and the perfectly plausible in-universe explanation: the animatronics were left in free-roaming mode at night to keep their servos from locking up, and were programmed to insert a metal endoskeleton into a suit on sight. Meaning at night they would likely mistake the security guard for an endoskeleton and (fatally) shove him into a costume. While all of these issues could be solved by basic common sense, it worked since it was in-line with the darkly hilarious irreverence of the people who ran the restaurant, and it takes a keen eye to notice the one detail that confirms the mundane explanation is not the case ^SpecificallyThe fact that Bonnie, the only animatronic who enters the Backstage room, ignores the actual metal endoskeleton in said room. This was ripe soil for Epileptic Trees, which formed a significant part of the fanbase. As the franchise has gone on, the same storytelling method has continued to be used, which makes figuring out what actually happens more difficult, to the point where some fans just wish more things were stated outright.
  • The Withered animatronics (and Mangle) are the first set of animatronics to be heavily damaged and decrepit (though Foxy was rather worse for wear in the original). They were accepted for being a unique way to bring the first game's antagonists back, but a criticism some have of the animatronics from 3 and 4 is that their damage and exposed metal makes them look too much like generic horror monsters, as opposed to the charm of mundane Suck E. Cheese's animatronics that invoke the Uncanny Valley to be scary. While 3 and 4 were still well-received, the sin was addressed in later games, as Sister Location, Pizzeria Simulator, VR: Help Wanted, and Security Breach introduce new animatronics that utilized the Uncanny Valley to an extent rivaling the classic and Toy animatronics (and the later withered designs that Scott conceived were still given details that allowed them to fall into the valley, such as Scrap Baby's realistic-looking hair).
  • A controversial aspect of the franchise is its unique mix of science-fiction and paranormal horror. While it does play into the franchise's charm, it also leads to arguments whenever it leans one way or the other. As early as the first game it was implied that the animatronics were both haunted and advanced technology, which created ambiguity about how much of the animatronics' behavior was the result of possession or malfunctioning. The second game explicitly had the Toys capable of facial recognition and connecting to a criminal database, which helped to obscure the game's plot twist of being a prequel. 3 created the concept of springlock suits, an animatronic-mascot suit hybrid prone to malfunctioning which was crucial to the plot. Controversy started around the time of Sister Location, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, and the novella trilogy, all of which introduced plot points such as animatronics made specifically for murder, Brown Note technology, remnant^note An odd type of tangible material that can be used to bind souls to items, and, in the books, a human character being revealed as a robot. The Fazbear Frights anthology series leans more into the paranormal, such as confirming in-text that strong emotions can lead to objects gaining life^note with agony being the strongest and more overtly supernatural events occurring in-story. However, this in itself has been iffy, with some fans feeling that "agony" is a catch-all explanation for everything in the books and the series as a whole that can't immediately be explained. This, combined with FNAF's Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, also frequently leads to heated debates about whether specific animatronics (such as Glamrock Freddy) are possessed by a human spirit, gained sentience due to strong emotions, or just have advanced A.I.
  • Despite the aforementioned controversial aspects, it's easy to forget that William spends the first two games, as well as Sister Location, as a backstory villain rather than a direct threat. Likewise, Circus Baby was The Voice in Sister Location, with her only being outright confirmed as a villain at the very end. However, William only appearing in minigames or random events established him as a Greater-Scope Villain responsible for the games' story, and Circus Baby was established as a Manipulative Bitch with some tragic aspects, making her come off as a Non-Action Big Bad. While neither of these were problems by themselves, it foreshadowed a common criticism of Security Breach: Vanny/Vanessa, the game's Big Bad, being Out of Focus. Vanny is significantly built up in both Help Wanted and Special Delivery, the former as the player character and the latter detailing her Sanity Slippage in the 'unintended emails.' Vanny is also unique among FNAF enemies in that she's a possessed Token Human, rather than an animatronic, which, combined with her established Tragic Villain traits, helped to make her extremely popular before Security Breach was released. However, despite this, she doesn't make too many appearances in-game and feels underutilized, which isn't helped by Continuity Lockout and cut content. While the game's DLC does address other criticisms it received, it also notably doesn't give more character focus to Vanny.
  • The games pulling aspects of the books to use for their own canon. The first use was an important one, confirming William Afton's name as his true one. But that's all it did, and it was contained to only one person and didn't really matter much for the game's story. Then in Pizzeria Simulator, the Cassette Man is heavily hinted to be Henry Emily, the previous owner of the pizzeria, father of Charlie/The Puppet, and Afton's own partner. However it still wasn't that glaring, as there are enough hints in his speech at the end of the game to hint at what his connections to these characters are. It was also (supposed to be) the final game, so no one minded a bit of fanservice. But by Ruin, the main antagonist (the Mimic) is pulled directly from the books, meaning that people unfamiliar with them have no idea who he is or why he’s so dangerous, and further muddying which aspects of the books are canon or not.
• As acclaimed as GoldenEye (1997) is, it is responsible for codifying James Bond video games as action-packed romps lacking the kind of social espionage that the character is perhaps more famous for. With GoldenEye, it was accepted for a variety of reasons. For one, its source material had multiple memorable action scenes that easily translated into fun gameplay, along with several off-screen events that made for easy Adaptation Expansion. In addition, that gameplay was incredibly novel for the time, in particular its emphasis on completing a variety of objectives like protecting noncombatants, locating information, and destroying specific infrastructure, sometimes with an explicit time limit attached, instead of simply going from point A to point B, finding keycards along the way to open the exit, as was the hallmark of early- to mid-'90s FPS games.^note Tellingly, when Doom's fan-made source ports added enough new features that it was possible for Doom to emulate this style of gameplay, one of the first noteworthy mods to do so was given a distinct Bond flavor. It also helped that the game let the player use an array of gadgets to give it that Bond flavor, with everything from a laser built into Bond's watch for emergencies to a covert modem meant to be attached to an enemy computer and steal sensitive info. Future games based on the franchise, however, would continue to indulge deeper into the action side of the formula, especially once Pierce Brosnan's on-camera stint as the character ended and adaptations of the movies gave way for entirely new adventures, and felt significantly less innovative, as rather than being innovators these games were often indebted to whatever style of shooter was popular when they were made with only a token Bond flavor, typically stuffing a few rarely-used functions and gadgets into Bond's watch (EA's Bond games) or a do-everything smartphone (Activision's Bond games) while the rest of the game focuses much more heavily on simply sneaking up on individual enemies and shooting them in the head with your silenced P99. The final straw was 007 Legends, which suffered from trying to fit less action-packed films like On Her Majesty's Secret Service or Moonraker into the Call of Duty mold like GoldenEye's 2010 remake had done for that film, and then had the typical licensed-game problem of needing to be rushed to meet the release date of an upcoming film on top of it - it did so poorly that Activision pulled it from stores and dropped the Bond license entirely only a few months later, with other publishers refusing to pick it up for almost a decade afterwards.
• Gradius IV was extensively criticized for recycling level archetypes from previous games, with particular derision being directed at the first level simply being a rehash of Gradius II's opening stage with the flames being replaced with a liquid metal effect. To some extent, Gradius, like many of Konami's action game franchises, has always been a heavily self-referential series: the previous numbered Gradius games shared many of the same biomes and one of the big setpieces in Gradius II was a Boss Rush mostly made up of recycled bosses from the original game and its spin-off Salamander. The difference was that the previous Gradius games made sure to mix up the familiar sights with new level themes, while IV was the first major release in the series to feature no new stage themes (the closest being the magma flow section in the Volcano stage, which perhaps not coincidentally is usually cited as the level design highlight of the game). Not helping IV's case was that the previous major Gradius game, Gradius Gaiden had some very bold takes on familiar Gradius levels, or that the game's conservative nature extended to its base mechanics, with IV not adding any major gameplay feature and actively axing features added in the previous games like Edit Mode: the lack of new mechanics made the "safe" stage selection stand out all that much more.
• The Guitar Hero series, along with its successor/rival Rock Band, both found themselves plagued with Mission-Pack Sequels, a problem that only became acute late in both series' lifespans but was noticeable much earlier on.
  The Original Sin was Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, a poorly-received sequel to the excellent Guitar Hero II, made by Harmonix under contract after Activision bought the series. Neversoft (under Activision) made Guitar Hero III and onward, with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Guitar Hero: On Tour — Decades, Guitar Hero: On Tour — Modern Hits, and two different versions of Band Hero (one for DS and one for consoles).
  Harmonix themselves would continue this trend on their own with Rock Band Track Packs (bare-bones game discs with songs taken from the game's vast DLC library, for players stuck on consoles with no DLC or who want to get the songs for slightly cheaper), a LEGO Adaptation Game, and band-specific sequels. The Track Packs were tolerated due to being explicitly marketed as handy DLC bundles rather than full games, and their game based on The Beatles was critically acclaimed thanks to The Beatles' legendary status (it helps that the game's tracklist could not be exported to the main games, helping it stand as its own game rather than a Mission-Pack Sequel), but their next game, focused on Green Day, was seen as So Okay, It's Average at best.
  Other (poorly-received) imitators such as Rock Revolution and Power Gig: Rise of the SixString only worsened the situation. Eventually, both series, and the entire genre of peripheral-based Rhythm Games, drowned in a flood of Mission Pack Sequels.
• Halo:
  • Many fans criticized the stories in Halo 4 and especially Halo 5: Guardians for being too dependent on material from the Expanded Universe, leaving many crucial, plot-relevant details unexplained the games. For example, Halo 5 would not make much sense without having seen Halo: Escalation, the Spartan Ops from 4, Halo: Nightfall, Halo: New Blood, etc. This reliance on the expanded universe for backstory goes back to the franchise's first two entries: Halo: Combat Evolved and its tie-in novel Halo: The Fall of Reach. Without The Fall of Reach, the player had no clue about where Master Chief came from, why the Covenant were at war with humanity, where Cortana came from, what the Pillar of Autumn was evacuating from, and so on. But the difference was that the plot of Combat Evolved was largely self-contained to the events on the eponymous Halo ring with none of the aforementioned backstory and lore directly impacting the plot much. The missing backstory simply gave the impression that you were taking part in a much larger and ongoing story without feeling like the plot expected you to know the lore. This pattern of keeping the games' and books' plots separate was largely the same until 343 Industries took over the series, making the EU more prominent but with mixed results on its games.
  • Additionally, the complaints about Halo devolving into a Call of Duty ripoff after 343i took over. Many complained about the focus on gimmicks such as Armor/Spartan Abilities, the addition of sprinting, the removal of Elites as a playable model, increasing the pace of the game, blatantly mimicking Call of Duty's class system, and finally, the addition of ADS (Aiming Down Sights) which sparked the most controversy. Many of these things, beside the ADS, were present in Halo: Reach, the last Halo game Bungie created. Reach added Armor Abilities, including the ability to sprint as the basic one, reduced playing as Elites to exclusive modes, and added loadouts for each match for differentiation. Sprinting was even considered for Halo 2 at one point during its development, just before Call of Duty even introduced it with its expansion pack. The difference is that Bungie knew when to draw the line, making sure that it was its own original game. Specifically, the loadouts were pre-determined and could not be customized in matchmaking (making them more in common with the class-based system of Battlefield 1942, where your loadout determines your current role on the team rather than just what gun you want to use), the gameplay still felt like Halo despite the Armor Abilities as opposed to being blatantly influenced by Call of Duty, and the emphasis on balanced, map-oriented gameplay was still there (just not as much as before). 343, on the other hand, took it to another level and turned Halo into something that's barely recognizable from the older games, all by doing what Bungie did, but going even further with it than they dared to go. That said, 343i did completely remove the loadout system in Halo 5's classic-style multiplayer mode, and the ADS system turned out to be mechanically identical to the scopes of previous games (with the only non-cosmetic difference being that every weapon could be fired from a zoom).
  • Many of things that made Halo 5 so negatively received were not too different from what happened with Halo 2; trailers that didn't match the final product, controversial story choices, Master Chief being a Decoy Protagonist, and gameplay changes that were contentious, among other issues. The difference was that Halo 2 felt like a step forward for the series, with the new inclusions being good enough for most people to offset any major issues, and stuff like the perspective flip by playing as an Elite, introducing online multiplayer, and general improvements, made it successful inspite of the issues. Plus the developers admitted they had a Troubled Production, which considering it was the second game in the series, tempered people's anger a bit. Halo 5 by comparison felt like it was a regression compared to the prior game (itself also a polarizing game), and introduced things that for most players outweighed any improvements, making it harder to ignore these disliked elements compared to Halo 2.
• The King of Fighters:
  • Upon his debut in The King of Fighters 2001, K9999 was met with a rather hostile reception for being a one-to-one copy of Tetsuo Shima from AKIRA, enough to not only be quickly dropped from future games despite his rather pivotal role, but also suppressed at SNK's offices for 20 years. However, SNK had a long history of basing their characters on other, pre-existing characters, most notably Benimaru Nikaido from The King of Fighters '94 being almost identical appearance-wise to Jean-Pierre Polnareff from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. As to why Benimaru was tolerated and K9999 wasn't? Because Benimaru had a different powerset, demeanor and voice actor than Polnareff from the outset, whereas K9999 shared all of those traits with Tetsuo and had to wait until The King of Fighters XV to receive, as Krohnen, his own Derivative Differentiation.
  • The King of Fighters XV: After the game's release, many took issue with Isla becoming Shun'ei's friend despite being introduced as absolutely despising him, especially considering that she was hyped up as his saga's main rival. However, the same plotline had been done with Kula Diamond and Elisabeth Blanctorche in the two preceding arcs, with the mitigating factors of Kula's case being the first of its kind (Iori, her own predecessor as a saga rival, notably never became actual friends with Kyo), Elisabeth making amends with Ash took a backseat to the reveal that Ash was Good All Along and his ultimate sacrifice, and both of them had two games worth of Character Development so that their eventual change of opinion towards K' and Ash respectively didn't feel rushed. Isla, on the other hand, had her entire character arc shoved into one game, leaving fans to bemoan how both her actual character and her rivalry with Shun'ei were underdeveloped.
• The Last of Us Part II echoes many elements from the first game, but is widely regarded to not do them nearly as well.
  • While the first game was incredibly dark, it had enough of a sense of hope that players could care about the world without burning out on the dark tone, with a major part of that being Joel and Ellie's growing bond. Part II, however, carries the same bleak tone, but lacks the first game's hopeful elements - Joel is murdered early on, Ellie kills countless people during her Roaring Rampage of Revenge for Joel's death, Abby is playable for large portions of the game after the story has already given players a reason to dislike her by having her murder Joel, and both Abby and Ellie receive Downer Endings, causing many players to tune out. Not helping matters was the terrible timing — Part II dropped shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a time when many players would not be interested in such an unrelentingly bleak game.
  • While Abby is controversial, to say the least, her most evil action - killing Joel early in the game - is not all that different from Joel killing the doctor, who is revealed in the second game to be Abby's father, in the first game. However, while they both commit an amoral action for the sake of a loved one, Joel remains far more popular with fans. The primary difference is timing - while Joel's action comes late in the first game, after the player has gotten to know his positive traits and can understand his motivations, Abby's comes early, before the player really gets to know her, and thus her early act hangs over her later sympathetic moments. Plus, Abby's actions border on Cold-Blooded Torture, while Joel's are more pragmatic. The end result is that while Joel comes off as an Anti-Hero, Abby comes off as a straight-up villain that the game inexplicably wants the player to side with.
  • Both games delve into Gray-and-Grey Morality, but the first presents Joel and the Fireflies as both having valid arguments about whether or not to kill Ellie (with the latter group wanting to create a cure for the plague that decimated humanity in the backstory), and while Joel (who favors sparing her) wins out in the narrative, the game doesn't take a side. However, Part II isn't quite as careful, explicitly siding with Abby over Ellie when most players would do the opposite, ultimately leading to a Broken Aesop that fans heavily criticized.
• The Legend of Zelda: Several of the later 3D games in the pre-Breath of the Wild era, particularly Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, face criticism for several elements such as slow-paced beginnings, mandatory Fetch Quests that halt the pacing, and over-tutorialization. However, elements of these criticisms appeared in earlier games, where they were little more than minor annoyances compared to the major criticisms they would become later on.
  • Link's Awakening foreshadows much of the criticism of later games underusing their (later) tools, as the three items obtained after the fifth dungeon see very little use in puzzles or combat. However, it's not very noticeable in this game, since the L-2 Power Bracelet and Mirror Shield are merely upgrades of existing items, while the Magical Rod is still a fairly powerful if redundant weapon. It became far more noticeable when later games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword had very unique and interesting items like the Spinner, Dominion Rod, Gust Bellows, and Whip that didn't see much use other than their pre-made targets.
  • Ocarina of Time:
    • One major complaint about post-Ocarina of Time games is being forced to run around previous areas to unlock the next. In hindsight, the trip back to the Lost Woods to learn Saria's Song foreshadows this issue, as there is no real reason as to why Saria couldn't teach Link her song right when they said their supposed "goodbye." This issue is mitigated by putting a shortcut to the Lost Woods in Death Mountain, which is the area which triggers the quest in which you learn her song. Also, nearly every dungeon in the Adult arc involves revisiting some previous area, but this sort of Backtracking is largely tolerated since these revisits largely do not involve any lengthy quest required to open the next dungeon, and the seven-year Time Skip where Ganondorf has ruled Hyrule means many of these locations are very different from how they were the first time players visited them, even if just in atmosphere.
    • Many of the later 3D Zelda games are criticized for having an empty overworld with little to see, do and fight. However, Ocarina of Time also suffers from this issue compared to some of its 2D predecessors. Hyrule Field's enemies are limited solely to Stalchildren and Peahats in the past and Poes and Big Poes in the future, and the only places to use items in the field are a few spots where hidden grottoes could be found. The empty field tends to be excused as Ocarina of Time was one of the first 3D games with as much polish as it had, and the other overworld areas such as the Kakariko-Death Mountain area, Zora's Domain, and Gerudo Valley still had a wide variety of things to do.
    • Navi is something of a retroactive example. She was originally the butt of many jokes regarding insistent assistance in video games and was seen as The Scrappy for many. In the years following Ocarina of Time's release, the games that came out after and until Breath of the Wild had what were considered far worse examples of assistant characters when it comes to handholding. Navi is typically seen in a much better light nowadays, especially when compared to the worst example, Fi. While she is still thought of as mildly annoying, her advice is never truly overbearing and her interruptions are generally limited to rooms containing Wallmasters, which even then is considered a very helpful interruption.
    • This was the game that started the timeline debates and eventual canonization of the series splitting into multiple timelines from this game. It was meant to be a prequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past yet contradicted the backstory and events leading up to that game,^note Namely that Ganon only had the Triforce of Power when he got sealed away, in contrast to A Link to the Past which depicted Ganon having the whole Triforce at hand. and its enduring popularity with fans meant that Nintendo started making sequels to Ocarina of Time... during a time when they were starting to take continuity seriously, meaning they had to come up with a whole deal of multiple timelines, one each for the game's two time periods and a third for if The Hero Dies to lead to all the games that came out before OoT. Many fans feel such an explanation is unnecessary and would be perfectly happy to accept each game and its specific sequels as their own story, rather than trying to tie them all together in a confusing way.
    • Both Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess feature major supporting characters that follow a Farmer's Daughter archetype while receiving lots of Ship Tease with Link. While Malon is a widely-loved Ensemble Dark Horse however, Ilia is a significant Base-Breaking Character, with about half of the game's fans liking her for her realistic Girl Next Door charms standing out in a cast of big personalities, and the other half thinking that she is Unintentionally Unsympathetic for her treatment of Epona and Link, along with her amnesia subplot being a distraction in the game's main story. These traits can perhaps be traced back to Malon, who also gets a significant sub-plot revolving around her ranch that isn't essential to the main story, and is also the most grounded character in a cast of fantasy races and heroes destined to fight evil. The key difference appears to be that Malon's presence as a normal side-character served as a welcome bit of levity to the story, with her side-quest being a charming Breather Level that doesn't distract from the main plot but does give players a chance to reorient themselves after the timeskip. By contrast, Ilia being worked much more directly into the main plot means that she is now directly competing for screentime with other characters that Link ultimately spends more time with, which means that her normality compared to them goes from an asset to a flaw.
  • Majora's Mask:
    • Several of this game's 3D successors get heavily criticized for having long, drawn-out intros that involve fetch quests, various tutorials, and an overly simplistic tutorial mini-dungeon at best, but many of these problems can be traced back to Majora's Mask. The game starts out in a very simplistic mini-dungeon introducing Deku Link's mechanics, but once you leave said mini-dungeon, the game doesn't exactly start there. You are required to do many fetch quests in order to retrieve the Ocarina of Time, including rescuing a Stray Fairy, joining the Bombers, and retrieving the Moon Tear. Unlike later 3D Zelda games, this sequence of events is generally not considered a Slow-Paced Beginning since the three intro quests are done quite briskly, the player isn't handheld through the intro, and the game's tutorialization is limited to the introductory mini-dungeon.
    • As a remake, Majora's Mask 3D is highly contested for most of its changes feeling like downgrades to what was in the original game. Many of these complaints existed in Ocarina of Time 3D in a more understandable form: changes to gameplay and control schemes, and a difference in art direction that changed the visual composition and tone of several scenes. The difference is that Ocarina of Time 3D was still a very faithful remake where most of these gameplay edits were small quality-of-life improvements, while the new art direction was still largely faithful to that of artwork for the N64 original. Majora's Mask 3D, on the other hand, was far more liberal with its edits, significantly changing gameplay mechanics such as the Zora swimming controls and remaking most of its boss fights to force the use of specific items. Making use of the same bright art direction as OoT 3D instead of reflecting the darker colors seen in official Majora's Mask artwork also clashes with the darker tone and atmosphere that the game tries to present.
    • Americans Hate Tingle because he's a weird, creepy Manchild, but the vast majority of that hate stems from his appearance in The Wind Waker rather than his debut in Majora's Mask, despite his character being the same in both games. Why was he tolerated in one game and vilified in the next? For the most part, it's because he's The Artifact in later games. His weird creepiness was acceptable in Majora's Mask because almost everything in the game is similarly weird and creepy, so he fit in perfectly. Moreover, his primary purpose of selling you maps was both reasonably priced and completely optional. He was then imported into Wind Waker, where he didn't fit in with the brighter, less surreal tone of the game, with the only modification to his character being blowing out his traits to ridiculous proportions - now he sells maps that you have to buy to complete the game, and he charges exorbitant amounts for them, on top of the game halting the plot on other occasions to focus on him for things like getting arrested for petty theft and requiring you to break him out.
    • Many of the criticisms aimed at Twilight Princess' finale revolve around Zant behaving like a deranged maniac, most notably moving and acting very erratically in his boss fight, making it hard for many players to take him seriously. This isn't too different from the way Majora acts when it's fought at the end of Majora's Mask, perhaps most notably the second phase where it dances around while making what sounds like chicken noises. The difference is that this sort of behavior is in line with Majora having already been established as immature and psychotic, lining up with the game's themes of maturity and noticeably contrasting with the far more dignified, patient and cunning Ganondorf of Ocarina of Time. Zant, meanwhile, spends all of his previous scenes as a composed and subtle villain, whose worst flaws are ambition and pride, which makes it just appear laughable when he decides completely out of left field to start acting like a complete lunatic during the final fight. What also contrasts them is that Majora was the main antagonist from beginning to end (even if the Skull Kid was its puppet for most of the game), while Zant would end up revealed as a puppet of Ganondorf near the end of the game, effectively demoting him as a threat.
• Life Is Strange:
  • The original game and its prequel Life Is Strange: Before the Storm both caught some flack for requiring the player to go along with some morally iffy and occasionally outright illegal actions in order to get the game's central same-sex romances off the ground (respectively, Max/Chloe and Chloe/Rachel). However, this was largely forgiven due to the positive and rounded representation of LGBTQ+ characters and relationships, coupled with the fact that the male romantic options in both games were little more than Satellite Love Interests, while the female options were main characters; so it felt justified that pursuing Warren or Eliot was less dramatic and more incidental to the main plot. Not so in Life Is Strange 2, however, when getting Sean into a same-sex romance with Finn hinges entirely on agreeing to one hugely criminal and stupid suggestion of his; as well as being a more traditional Gay Option in that his romance route is much more easily missable than that of Sean's potential female love interest Cassidy. The (presumably unintentional) message went from the already questionable "the happiness of the person you love is more important than anything else" to "you need to be willing to commit crimes if you want someone of the same sex to date you".
  • Life Is Strange 2 also gets criticised for the fact that the playable protagonist didn't have a superpower of his own. However, it wasn't the first Life Is Strange game where this is the case: Before the Storm also featured an "ordinary" protagonist, and in fact only hints at the existence of superpowers in its world, due to being a prequel. In fact, of the four main games in the series, only the original and Life Is Strange: True Colors have you directly control a powered protagonist, while all three side-stories (Farewell, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, and Wavelengths) focus on a character who either has no powers or hasn't developed them yet.

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