Its The Same Now It Sucks / Video Games

• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! has been attacked for having gameplay nearly identical to that of Borderlands 2. The narrative and humor has also received similar criticism for relying on the formula of pop-culture references and internet memes. It didn't help that Pre-Sequel did improve the existing gameplay or fixed more contentious mechanics despite being the 3rd installment in the series.
• Dragon Quest has received this complaint at least in the US, which isn't surprising given the conservative nature of the series compared to Final Fantasy. Dragon Quest VII, the first post-Super Nintendo installment, was especially bashed for not really pushing forward with the gameplay or the graphics. Since Enix and Square merged, it seems they've been trying to expand the series with more online multiplayer options and with more immersing gameplay, but given the series' huge popularity in Japan it's unlikely they'll experiment with the fundamentals of the series that much.
• Gears of War 2 had a list of detractors who would frequently say things like "Everything looks the same. The chainsaw bayonet, the roadie-run, the torque bow... they're just remaking the first game." Apparently it was a big enough concern that X-Play's review deliberately said something to the effect of, "This is not Gears 1.5, it is a real sequel." Upon launch, no one has complained that it is just a rehash of the first game, it was much bigger and better. Instead, everyone cried They Changed It, Now It Sucks! regarding the shotgun nerf. Or, if you're a lancer guy, then you got the problem of a shotgun which seemed to be more overpowered than ever.
• Hitman 2 had complaints by fans and critics that the game is too similar to Hitman (2016), with very few changes to the stealth gameplay formula, and this complaint would also return when Hitman 3 released. However, what goes unmentioned is that there were good reasons behind these sequels, and the original plan was to perpetually update 2016, but the developers, IO Interactive, were dropped by publisher Square Enix due to poor sales, and so 2 was made with the help of Warner Bros instead. After that deal ended, the company decided to go independent to avoid publisher interference (outside of physical copies of the games).
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was They Changed It, Now It Sucks! for many... and later, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was accused of this trope by some. Actually, every single entry of the series ever since Ocarina of Time (if not even earlier than that) has received both of these at the same time. One second you find a comment trashing the game for not changing the Zelda formula at all, demeaning its new features as "gimmicks", and the next second you find another one that trashes it because those "gimmicks" are new features that totally change (and ruin) the Zelda formula.
  • Of course, TP was purposefully designed that way, since Nintendo vowed that it would be "the last Zelda game as you know it" before the gameplay of Ocarina of Time was retired. Similar to Ocarina changing Zelda to fit 3D and analog control or Phantom Hourglass changing Zelda to properly fit the DS' stylus control, the series received a major overhaul for Skyward Sword to become a proper Wii game. Twilight Princess shipping for the Wii at all was something of a fluke, caused by excessive delays during its initially GCN-only development.
  • Some people accused Spirit Tracks of being this to Phantom Hourglass. The trailer and plot summary dispelled this, however, to the point of one article writer at Zelda Informer issuing a public apology to Nintendo for ever doubting them.
  • The two lowest reviews for Skyward Sword use both this trope and the polar opposite.
  • Ironically, the fanbase by and large loves A Link Between Worlds because it is almost literally A Link to the Past using Ocarina-era tropes and gimmicks.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • New Super Mario Bros. was the first Super Mario Bros. game in a while that played similar to the original SMB, even though it brought gameplay elements introduced in 3D Mario games back to 2D Mario games (namely Triple Jumps and Wall Jumps). Guess what its biggest complaint was.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Wii was described as just New Super Mario Bros. for DS put on Wii, despite the better graphical rendering, new platforming obstacles not possible on DS or previous consoles, or the fact that the game had four player multiplayer in all its levels in addition to a fairly large VS mode.
  • New Super Mario Bros. 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U got a lot of flak for being too similar to Wii, especially music-wise. Both games had a small number of new tracks and most of the soundtrack being re-arrangements and recycled songs. Especially 2, which only has 4 total brand new songs. New Super Luigi U doesn't get this as much, most likely because it's Downloadable Content (despite its commercial release), alters the physics to a notable degree, and replaces Mario with Nabbit.
  • Miyamoto himself accused the beta of Paper Mario: Sticker Star of being "too similar to The Thousand Year Door" and convinced the developers to do away with the plot. The result, of course, was greeted poorly by the fans. And even then, it still suffered from this in a different way, in that one of the complaints was how it intentionally lacked new characters (design-wise at least) save for Kersti, while the characters in the series's previous installments became very well-known.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash got this reaction right out of the gate for being essentially Sticker Star 2, a game that was poorly received on its own to begin with.
  • Ironically, Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2) was treated as being too samey in the eyes of Nintendo's American branch. Nintendo of America felt that the game was just Super Mario Bros., but more difficult, so they decided to localize and rebrand Doki Doki Panic as Super Mario Bros. 2 for North America.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2, while a solid game overall, was pretty much a Mission-Pack Sequel with similar level designs, concepts, and power-ups, which was a bit unusual for the Mario series.
  • The Mario vs. Donkey Kong subseries received significantly less backlash compared to most examples of this trope mostly because this series was vastly ignored at best after the fourth game but for those who did care about it, it didn't escape from their eyes that the games after March of the Minis (other than Minis on the Move, which tried to be innovative) were mostly the same with only minor changes to the gameplay or slapping a new mini character, even reusing the Video Game Settings and plenty of musical tracks/leitmotifs outright. Of course, given that the series was mostly ignored and unpopular after the fourth game, it never got much flak about it, unlike its much more popular mainline brothers.
• Hanging around the GameFAQs message board for it, people complain that Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. Abaddon-Ou is too similar to Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army. Considering how many people complained that the first game was a great idea that needed more improvements, you'd be surprised anyone would make this complaint considering how Atlus did exactly what they asked for (i.e. same engine, better battles, more demons, deeper story, etc.). It didn't matter.
  • The issue was that the 3D-over-2D-backgrounds engine of the first game (which was badly-dated even when it was first published) was the main thing that needed improvement. Most of the complaints were that they reused it rather than coming up with something else, not that the gameplay was the same.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony received criticism for three things: the controversial ending, pulling a Decoy Protagonist with the fan favorite Player Character Kaede and replacing her with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for previous player characters, but the only one related to the gameplay was its inability to shake up the stagnating and predictable Strictly Formula followed by the previous installments. Several murder cases became predictable based on the fact that they didn't try anything new on the game besides killing a protagonist. While this was not a problem in the previous game, since the parallels between the first and the second killing game were actually a plot point, the re-utilization of the formula was received as poorly-written and unoriginal. Besides that, Franchise Original Sin was very strong on this installment, with several recurring elements, such as the relatively normal male protagonist in comparison to the rest of the cast and the unsympathetic murderer becoming annoying to fans.
• Overwatch:
  • A longstanding concern that's become increasingly prevalent with the game's fixed Role Queue is the unstable ratio between damage heroes to tanks and healers, with widespread groans whenever a new damage hero is announced. This reached a peak with the announcement of Echo, a much-anticipated character who many believed was going to be a support hero, with noticeable disappointment when she was revealed to be yet another DPS (not helped by the fact that she was confirmed to be the final new hero before the release of Overwatch 2).
  • The fourth PvE and third Archives event, Storm Rising, received this reaction upon release. Junkenstein's Revenge, Uprising, and Retribution before it all received massive acclaim upon their release because each was wildly fresh and unique, felt very polished and balanced, and showcased lore and/or character interactions that hadn't been seen before. Storm Rising, on the other hand, has largely the same gameplay style as Retribution, with all of the same enemies and three returning heroes from previous events (Tracer, Mercy and Genji). Lore-wise, it adds or explains nothing that fans weren't already aware of, and in fact, the ending raises more questions than it answers, feeling like a teaser trailer for a character that could become then-unknown Hero 31. Ironically, balance-wise, it falls victim to They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • Overwatch 2 got a lot of flack for this, with the common joke revolving around it being "just Overwatch 1, but with one less tank and much the same gameplay as before". The ambiguity of whether or not 2 is actually a true "sequel" (suggested by its marketing) or merely a large Expansion Pack that's essentially a game patch (suggested by the actual content) remains a frequent subject of complaint. Fans have complained that 2 ultimately doesn't do much to warrant its sequel status, simply adding content like new heroes, maps, and game modes that should've already been expected as normal business for the perpetually-updating Overwatch, and remark that Overwatch 2 is an unnecessary rebrand especially because one of the most advertised parts of the 2 (the PvE co-op missions) got canned in favor of the multiplayer, despite being the key selling point of the sequel.
• Pokémon:
  • The series in whole tends to get a lot of this, especially in regards to the core gameplay remaining as the monster count climbs. In general, The Pokémon Company's strategy seems to be to keep the main titles to the formula while releasing periodic spinoffs - if you want a Pokémon action game, there's Ranger or Rumble. If you want an RPG with a deeper plot, there are the Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games. Some people just seem to think they don't count because they aren't part of the main series.
  • One complaint of FireRed/LeafGreen is how slavishly it adheres to using only the original 151 Pokémon until the National Dex is acquired by disallowing trading with Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire and tampering with the evolution system - evolutions introduced after Red/Blue like Crobat and Blissey are automatically cancelled when their conditions are met, the Day Care Center only allows one Pokémon at a time, preventing breeding (and access to pre-evolutions like Pichu and Magby) until access to the Sevii Islands' Day Care, and the day/night cycle is gone completely, meaning no Espeon or Umbreon for you. That being said, the remakes of Pokémon Gold and Silver and Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire avert this and allow you to get (pre)evolutions introduced after the original games without needing the National Dex.
  • The Fire/Fighting-type is very unpopular among fans since it's shared among the final forms of three starter families (Blaziken, Inernape and Emboar), all introduced one after the other (and despite being a Fire/Dark Pokémon, the final form of Litten's line is a "cat wrestler"). With seven generations of Pokémon, this means that just under half of the Fire-type starters all become Fire/Fighting, leaving very little in the way for inspiration and variation.
  • Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are divisive games among fans for being mostly unchanged iterations of Pokémon Sun and Moon, which came out only one year prior. Beyond a few new additions, the story and progression through the world remain unchanged from before^*or in the former's case, made worse due to new elements and certain controversial character rewrites not meshing well with it, and some hold the opinion that what the games did add could/should have been Downloadable Content for the original pair.
  • Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, similar to FireRed and LeafGreen, got a lot of this as fans derided it for being "too similar" to the original DP. The lack of Platinum content, including the Platinum Dex, only made things worse. It certainly doesn't help that some believe "faithfulness" was used as a pretense for laziness. From a graphical standpoint, the only real change made to the DS games that came out in 2007 for hardware a fraction as powerful is that the sprites for characters and Pokemon are replaced with 3D models. But the models are even more chibi-ified than they were in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire outside of battle as a further callback to the 2D sprites, and the characters aren't subject to redesigns as was the case with past remakes. Somewhat unsurprisingly, this was a B-Team Sequel done by ILCA, who had little credit to their name outside of contract work and the also-controversial Pokémon Home.
• Animal Crossing: City Folk received plenty of criticism for being too much like its predecessors. (Specifically, it's an almost to the letter Wii port of Animal Crossing: Wild World, except Kapp'n drives a bus instead of a taxi and can take you to a city where a few shops/characters have been moved to.)
• The reason why the Dynasty Warriors series is hated by reviewers. Even if they make what most people would consider major changes to the combat scheme, it will still get panned as more of the same. Dynasty Warriors is also unique in that this trope is subverted among its fanbase, or rather, that the fanbase has always held the opposite opinion to the reviewers on this issue. This was shown with the backlash when 6 tried to change things up, mostly because what they tried (Renbu) was not well implemented.
• Plot has always been a strength of the Avernum series, so when Avernum 4 turned out to have the exact same plot as Avernum 3, many fans of the earlier games were not at all happy.
• The Castlevania series has been a victim of this trope since the release of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, with purists missing the days when Castlevania titles weren't all Metroidvanias.
• The second and third Ace Attorney games on the DS got some flak for having the same gameplay but no DS-exclusive features or levels, unlike the first game's remake, which had a bonus case.
• Armored Core gets this fairly frequently, as well, the biggest complaint being the antiquated control scheme (using the shoulder buttons to look up and down instead of the second analog stick which has that feature in almost every other game ever but wasn't used for anything in Armored Core for far too long).
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 4 has the special distinction of being this trope and They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. The game received complaints about the gameplay and the artstyle for the characters being too different, meanwhile the game's level themes, special stages, gimmicks, bosses, and enemies were criticized as shallow copies from mostly Sonic 1 and/or Sonic 2.
  • Following Sonic Adventure 2's highly-praised original release on the Dreamcast, the game received the Battle port to the GameCube port that while having some added perks (namely the expanded multiplayer mode) and having some assets changed around, was otherwise largely watertight to the Dreamcast version. Despite coming out only six months after the Dreamcast release, Battle received a more tepid response from reviewers, the main reason (ironically enough) being that reviewers felt the re-release should had done more to improve from the DC version.
• Resident Evil:
  • The series was infamous for sticking to its formula of pre-rendered, fixed camera zombie hunting, even after it moved from the PlayStation to the GameCube (only the made-for-Dreamcast Resident Evil – Code: Veronica, eschewed the pre-rendered backgrounds in favor of real-time ones). Resident Evil 4 underwent a massive genre shift to more action-oriented gameplay and was widely acclaimed. Then Resident Evil 5 came along and was called a rehashed RE4.
  • Proof that Tropes Are Not Bad, Resident Evil 2 was nearly finished when Capcom executives thought the game was too similar to the first one and didn't expand on the playable areas enough (it would have been confined to a mansion again, basically). The game was redone and the end result was what is generally considered the best game of the "pre-rendered" era of RE.
• Persona:
  • When Persona 4 was announced to be on the PS2, and using the exact same engine and practically the same system as Persona 3, it met with skepticism from fans that they were just cashing in on P3 (especially with P3:FES, a remake of P3, also being announced), instead of pushing the game forward into the next generation with a PS3 or Xbox 360 title. Of course, then the game came out. While the gameplay was a welcome change from Persona 3, the story and characters of Persona 4 were accused of being too similar to its predecessor.
  • Persona 5 Royal is an enhanced rerelease of the original which while it added a lot of new additions, including a third semester, the entire vanilla storyline is exactly the same^note Something which has been noted by Word of God as a deliberate design choice. There was cut content including the original idea for the Will Seeds which was scrapped and the new party member Kasumi Yoshizawa despite getting much more screentime than any other character in the vanilla storyline and even having her awakening take place in it, is forced to not join the Phantom Thieves until the third semester of the game simply because she didn't exist in the original storyline. While a majority of the fandom is fine with this, others were upset at this as it felt like a downgrade to Persona 4 Golden in terms of new content.
  • A rather unique series-wide case where the Made of Evil trope was used to the point of this. If there is a Big Bad, there is 98% of the time where it's a God "born from the desires of humanity" in addition to similar-sounding banter. It reaches the point where any twist arch-villain that isn't Made of Evil (e.g. Persona 5 Royal and Persona 5 Strikers where the arch-villains are outright human) are considered welcome and refreshing.
• Any Rhythm Game series has been around long enough will get this. The sameness is somewhat justified with games that use peripherals, since there's only so much you can change before making a sequel require new controllers to be playable.
  • The longevity of DanceDanceRevolution makes it a prime target for complaints of staleness. When Dance Dance Revolution X introduced a new difficulty rating system and announcer, this trope once again rubbed shoulders with They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. (It is an annoying announcer, but his disastrousness can get blown all out of proportion.)
• Fallout:
  • The Fallout 3 hatedom is interestingly split between this trope and They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The former party accuses the game of being essentially "Oblivion with guns", while the latter considers it too great a deviation from Black Isle's original Fallout games.
  • Fallout: New Vegas seems to be running into this criticism, as well. It has been accused of being little more than a game mod to number three, due largely to sharing the same engine and many art-assets. New Vegas was still largely praised for its open-ended approach to its many unique quests, diverse roleplaying experiences and opportunities, and complex storytelling. ^note The release of Fallout 4 reinforced this warm reception.
• Tomb Raider:
  • Applies at some point to the first five games. The point at which this happens for someone tends to be entirely based around the point they consider the game quality to drop.
  • Tomb Raider: Underworld. Pretty much the same as Tomb Raider: Legend, only Darker and Edgier, but still with the same problems (and a few new ones to boot). Considering that Tomb Raider: Anniversary fixed some of these flaws (in particular the length), Underworld felt to many like a step backward.
• Tales Series
  • This is a recurring complaint lobbed against the Tales Series as a whole (mainly because so many games are released in such a small amount of time). Whether it's a genuine complaint or not is up to debate, but fans of the series don't tend to mind the similarly-styled games.
  • Tales of Vesperia is one of the most acclaimed games for the 360 and easily one of the best reviewed JRPGs of this generation. And yet, the biggest complaint? It plays exactly like the other Tales games.
  • Tales of Xillia got complaints over its share of things, but the most noticeable is the complaint that the story basically took plots from previous games of the Tales Of series and rehashed them. The fact that its sequel again took a story aspect of a the same previous game and used it for two characters in that game for Alternate Milla and Elle, both who are originally from fractured dimensions, and hence suffer their share of feelings of inadequacy over not being real and not having a place in this world, very similar to Luke's issues over being a replica did not appease fans for that game, either.
• JRPGs in general get this for consisting of the same basic gameplay. Not surprisingly, any game that does attempt to break from this trope is usually badged with They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, even if it's a company like, say, Square Enix, that attempts to break the mold with something really gutsy like...their flagship franchise.
• Before it became a long-loved classic of 64-bit gaming, Banjo-Kazooie was accused of being a Super Mario 64 clone simply because it was a 3D platforming game.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man Battle Network saw its review scores slowly but surely drop across the later games of the series, largely because reviewers didn't feel that the gameplay changed enough to justify a new game every year. This kicked into overdrive with the Sequel Series to Battle Network, Mega Man Star Force: despite Capcom sacrificing much of Battle Network's strategy for pure action and splitting the fandom in half in the process, critics dismissed it as a flimsy rebrand and thus penalized the series from the very first game.
  • The Mega Man (Classic) games grew increasingly less popular with each release, as they all had similar gameplay mechanics and structure. Though 9 was acclaimed as a nostalgic throwback to the NES days, 10 was criticized because it was too similar to 9.
  • Mega Man 6 is criticized because it recycles the Hijacked by Ganon concept of the two immediate previous games.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is often considered to be a "step backward" for the Fire Emblem series because the latest entries were in 3D, had a rescuing system, skills, and many, many more aspects that made the game more complex. Intelligent Systems said this was a remake and it looks more like a port. To note, this example isn't quite as jarring because not as many people play the original 3 Fire Emblem games anymore (which play very similar to this), and the truly popular FE games were beginning from the fourth one... which was extremely different in terms of mechanics than Shadow Dragon.
• Five Nights at Freddy's dealt with this to an extent. Each game was essentially "You are in a room for 6 hours. There are at least two entrances. There are monsters coming to kill you. You have a method of holding them off, but you can't use it forever." Subtle changes happened, but overall each game was quite similar to the last.
• Wario Land: Shake It! was criticised for being too similar to the previous game, Wario Land 4 despite its core mechanic not even being possible before the Wii.
• Despite considerable acclaim, Punch-Out!! for Wii was accused of being just a $50 NES remake that has nothing new or different from the original game.
• The Madden NFL franchise has accused of only making incremental improvements, but there's not much to be done with adapting a real-life sport.
• In the same vein, FIFA Soccer suffers from the same problem. The reviewers joined in calling FIFA 20 Legacy Edition out on this, with IGN blasting it for being just a reskin of FIFA 19 Legacy Edition with the added features of mainline FIFA 20 nowhere in sight.
• Left 4 Dead 2 was bashed for this AND They Changed It, Now It Sucks! before the game was even out. People complained that the sequel was just the exact same game as the first with just different maps, weapons, and characters, but they also complain that including daytime and using totally different characters ruined the feel of the game.
• StarCraft II is getting hit hard by this trope and They Changed It, Now It Sucks! at the same time. It's not uncommon to see a forum thread complaining that the game is more like "Starcraft 1.5" rather than a true sequel, and then see a thread right below it complaining that the game changed too much and doesn't capture the essence of the original.
  • It is basically the same game strategy-wise (the majority of the units structures are the same ones) but on a new engine and all the perks of modern RTS features, shortcuts, hotkeys, options, etc. So that does explain how it could be both "changed" and the "the same" - it depends on if you are looking at the tactics and units, or at the system used to enact them.
  • Incidentally, the original Starcraft was sometimes referred to as Orcs IN SPACE.
  • Particularly ironic, given that "Warcraft IN SPACE" has always been the 'basic' premise of Starcraft. The clue's in the title, folks.
• Some people bashed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash Up, because it has the Super Smash Bros. engine, panning it because they think it will be Super Smash Bros. with Turtles, but the gameplay showed that there are some differences, namely that there are health meters rather then stock damage, the environments change consistently, tag battles, and guard breaks are different. The people who developed the game in question? Had experience with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, as well as Ninja Gaiden, so they're really bashing themselves.
• While on the subject of Ninja Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Reshelled is a rather fascinating case study. We have a game that started as an arcade game, Then got ported to the SNES with some added content to make up for the lack of 4-player, and then was remade for the Xbox. The primary complaint that critics site is that they removed the added content from the SNES port, making it the same as the original arcade game. Thus we have 'it's the same as the original, but that sucks because we wanted it to be the same as the SNES port'. Some critics don't even seem to be aware that there was an original arcade version.
• Both applied to and averted by Command & Conquer Command & Conquer 3- it was released around the same time as Supreme Commander, leading to something of a rivalry between the two fandoms. The SupCom fans bashed C&C for being nothing more than a shiny graphical overhaul of the early days of the RTS genre, with none of the innovations that have appeared since (like, say, in Supreme Commander). The C&C fans responded by pointing out that there are plenty of innovative RTS games around, and that all they really wanted from Command & Conquer 3 was... well, another Command & Conquer game, only prettier.
• Similar to the Zelda example above, Final Fantasy fans wanted a classic (1-6) style game with the technology of the PS1 era game. What they got was Final Fantasy IX, which they complained about being too much like the classic games. Then they got Final Fantasy X, which they complained was too much like the modern (7-8) games.
• People complained about all the WW2 games in the Call of Duty series until Modern Warfare came along. Then they complained when the next game was a WW2 game. Then they complained when MW2 was largely a refinement of the original. See the Casino Royale (2006) example above for something similar.
  • As far as the WW2 complaints go, most of them are due to the sheer umber of WWII shooters there are, while WWI, Vietnam, Korea, etc. get ignored.^note Ironically, CoD and the series it spun off from, Medal of Honor, were largely responsible for popularizing the genre.
• Halo forums surrounding topics such as the inclusion of Sprint, Armor/Spartan Abilities, and Loadouts, usually see this trope as a counter-argument to discount the criticisms towards the newer Halo titles.
• The arcade Double Dragon II is criticized for being DD1 with new graphics and tweaked levels/backgrounds.
• The WWE Video Games series has received some criticism in recent years for having too little variation between each release, although considering that it has had annual releases for eighteen years and counting, this is hardly surprising.
• Even art gets this. They seem to especially be cracking down on Tetsuya Nomura, who can't make any of his characters resemble another of his characters in the least bit or else he's supposedly re-using designs of Sephiroth and Cloud. He also is not allowed to have any characters wear black or have white hair, because then they're a ripoff of Sephiroth, even if the only black are shoes or a black T-shirt.
  • Let's also not forget the people who dislike Yoshitaka Amano also point out that he too has his own trends.
    • Amano's characters rarely make it verbatim to the actual game, while all characters Nomura has designed actually appear in game. Yes, Amano's concept art is similar, but the characters themselves don't look that much alike.
• Half Life: Source. Valve essentially imported the original meshes and graphics from the first game into their new engine, resulting in the only appreciable changes being the introduction of physics and improved water effects. It's gotten some pretty heavy flak from the fanbase.
• Part of the reason Conker: Live & Reloaded failed to reach the same hype and praise won as its former N64 self was due to this. The other part was Microsoft's, replacement of mini-games featured in Bad Fur Day with copies or expansions of the war-based games and despite the title (which was originally going to be named "Live and Uncut") swear words were beeped out (which butchered the famous Great Mighty Poo scene), with only the one scene where Conker witnesses the execution of three squirrels where 2 died and one hid, that was censored in the N64 version by removing the 2 squirrels that died from the game entirely, getting a full restoration to show its original intent.
• Crackdown 2 takes place in an identical environment to the original—they literally copy and pasted most of the city, and in many ways it lacks the charm of the original, even with the nightly Zombie Apocalypse that occurs. Many were not pleased at how little was new.
• One of the in-game problems of Heavy Weapon. After going through the first nine levels and defeating the first nine bosses, you are treated to a Your Princess Is in Another Castle! scene. After that, you have to go through the first nine levels with harder enemies and defeat the first nine bosses again, except that most of them are just rehashes with more health and faster speed.
• One of The Angry Video Game Nerd's criticisms of Rambo on NES was that the developers followed the plot of the film too closely story-wise, and that the game suffered from this.
• The Sims 3 suffered from this complaint. Granted, they did reuse a lot of object meshes and animations from the previous game. It also got hit with They Changed It, Now It Sucks! because of WHAT was changed.
  • The Sims 4 received much stronger accusation of this, since the most notable differences from 3 were the omissions.
• Crash Bandicoot falls here prior to Crash Twinsanity. After Naughty Dog sold their ownership do a different company, the Crash series started to look a lot like the same game over and over again. Then those owners sold their owership, and it started all over again. Crash of the Titans and Crash: Mind Over Mutant fall under They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn got some of this, with many people complaining that it felt like Camelot stapled the first two games together, without any of their original charm.
• Almost any FPS out there can suffer from this because, besides a small range of gameplay variation (corridor shooters vs. fighting humongous hordes of Mooks being the main two), they all boil down to the same few things and use the same skills. While Call of Duty's Metagame is worlds away from Serious Sam and Doom, the similarities you can draw between the two are still vast.
• A Super Smash Bros. with Playstation characters has been in demand for a very long time now. Yet from the very second it was officially announced, people were already whining about PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale being a "ripoff" of Super Smash Bros..
• God of War: Ascension and God of War III, though still very well-received, received some criticism for having unchanged, identical gameplay from the previous games.
• Almost any MMO out there that follows the traditional style of World of Warcraft complete with the tank/healer/dps MMO holy trinity, the level cap, the epic gear grinding, will be dismissed as just another unimaginative WoW clone.
• This is the primary complaint leveled at Bioshock 2, which uses the same setting and same gameplay elements as the previous game. The only noticeable changes are the hacking minigame and the use of a Big Daddy as the protagonist (which does give a different feel to the mechanics, as well as add some intriguing narrative elements as the game progresses).
• The most common complaint against Nintendo is the company "always producing the same games with the same plot elements". People tend to ignore the fact that Nintendo always refines their flagship franchises so that it's still familiar with older fans while also bringing something new for them and new fans alike. There's also the point where Nintendo tries to do something different, only for people to complain They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
• This is what some have been saying about Saints Row IV and not just in terms of the re-used city of Steelport, but, bizarrely, about gameplay as well. The last game was a wacky, over the top GTA style game, whereas IV is a wacky, over the top superhero game who's gameplay is only similar in that you can still drive a car and shoot guns, ignoring that you really don't have to anymore. There was a Superpower DLC for the 4th game.
• The Syphon Filter Trilogy for the original Playstation got complaints of having the same graphics and gameplay. The former was probably because when better graphics meant better games.
• This was one of the complaints IGN had with Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies in terms of gameplay, despite the game being the BIGGEST jump in terms of new gameplay that the series has gone through (excluding the spin-off) since it's début. Considering one of their other complaints was that this visual novel game was "too linear" and "had too much text, that's really not surprising though. Oh, and this caused the fandom to go berserk. Let's just say that the response to their review was not a positive one.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • The biggest complaint about Batman: Arkham Origins is that it felt too similar to Batman: Arkham City, being set in the northern and southern sections of Gotham City with the northern section being the area that eventually becomes Arkham City, but also including many previous gadgets and offering minimal changes to gameplay. While Origins was a good/decent/catastrophic game (depending on who you ask,) in it's own right, its scores were lower than its predecessors' near perfect scores. It doesn't help that the game wasn't made by Rocksteady, who made the first two, but WB Montreal, and replaced veterans Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy with Troy Baker and Roger Craig to voice The Joker and Batman, leading many fans to expect the worst from the start. This is also the reason so many people were angry that The Joker ended up being the main villain, and Black Mask just a red herring. Even those who thought the game's take on the Joker was interesting sometimes can't help but express disappointment that he ended up being the main villain again, instead of letting one of Batman's other foes take the spotlight.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight is also accused of this, as some feel that the gameplay is too similar to the previous games. On the other hand, people have complained about more or less every change by this point (Batmobile, Fear takedowns, throw counters etc.) so it crosses over with They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
• Thief (2014) has gotten complaints the gameplay has barely changed over the years.
• It is quite common for game reviewers to deduct points from a game for not doing anything original. If a game does experiment, a reviewer may still say that it isn't different enough from whatever game it's being compared to. An otherwise excellent game may get a lower score simply because it didn't revolutionize its entire genre.
• The game versions of Inazuma Eleven had this so much, that the sales for each subsequent release went down, especially when the series changed from the NDS to the 3DS. The major complaint for each title from most critics was that it was the gameplay and structure was exactly the same in each game, and that the gimmicks thrown in such as "fighting spirits" just felt like a cheap way to make it feel fresh without updating anything. This was actually admitted by LEVEL-5 as being the main reason for why the latest game's sales were ridiculously low, and it's been announced on Twitter that they're currently working on a project to completely change how Inazuma Eleven plays in the future.
• Assassin's Creed Rogue has been criticized for being substantially similar in terms of gameplay to its immediate predecessor, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, with the most noteworthy changes being more in the nature of tweaks (an air gun instead of a blowpipe, a faster and more maneuverable ship for naval combat, etc.) than innovations. Critical and fan opinion is divided as to whether the result falls under this trope or has distilled the elements that were good about Black Flag while removing those (like the eavesdropping missions) that fans hated.
• A problem with many of the recent ship releases in Star Trek Online is that the ship's layout are not distinct enough from their previous tier level. The problem ships are the Resolute-class (a T6 Excelsior-class ship), the Yamato-class (a T6 Galaxy-X-class ship) and the Valiant-class (a T6 Defiant-class ship). The Resolute and Valiant are too close to the Excelsior and Defiant that buying the T5 variant is much cheaper in the long run. The Yamato's problem is that it boasts the same layout as the Andromeda-class ships (the T6 Galaxy-class ship). Many fans think that Cryptic is trying to sell these ships under the power of their legacy than anything unique.
• Yooka-Laylee is the Spiritual Successor to Banjo-Kazooie, made by former Rare staffers. However it hedges very close to its forerunner in terms of things like music design and aesthetic elements (such as the way characters talk to the protagonists, through small boxes that slide in from the left along the bottom of the screen and in a Comic Sans-like typeface that bounces). Even the logo is very similar to Banjo-Kazooie's. As a result of this, despite this game delivering exactly what people were looking for in a throwback to Rare's golden age and collect-a-thon platforming games, there is a sense that they aren't pushing themselves forward so much as aping as much of Banjo-Kazooie as they can get away with. There is a desire to see a game that takes the charm and wit of classic Rare titles but breaks the mold as well with its own unique voice and flavor.
• One of the reasons Gradius IV is panned by series fans is because while many Gradius games rehash a stage or two, Gradius IV has a lot of rehashes. Stage 1 already gives off this feeling by being what is effectively Stage 1 of Gradius II but with liquid metal instead of mini-suns.
• A common criticism of Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours DLC is that while they provide new and interesting ways to play the game, they don't add any new stages or bosses, making the DLC feel overpriced ($5 for each ship/character).
• Monster Hunter 4 and its Updated Re-release Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate have Dah'ren Mohran, a monster criticized for being almost the same as fellow colossal sand whale Jhen Mohran. 4 Ultimate additionally receives some criticism for taking the Old Desert map from earlier games and simply rehashing it to take advantage of 4's vertical movement mechanics.
• One of the biggest complaints about Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 5's English-language versions is that unlike the Japanese version, the game feels less like a sequel and more like an Updated Re-release of 4: it only adds one new map (Mt. Taikan) rather than three (Sub-center Shibuya/Shinjuku and Sub-center Ikebukuro as well), it doesn't have the Maxi G currency system, and it uses the same "Entry" background music as Maximum Tune 4. Non-Japan Maximum Tune 5 even runs on the same Namco ESA1 hardware as 4, unlike the Japanese version which uses Namco's newer ESA3. These problems would eventually be addressed in Maximum Tune 5 DX, which features roughly the same content in both the Japanese and international versions (thus adding the various features and maps that were excluded from non-Japan MT5).
• Some fans of the Etrian Odyssey series are disappointed that Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth is too back-to-its-roots, having ditched the overworld exploration of the previous two non-spinoff games and the Story Modes of the Etrian Odyssey Untold games.
• Fans of Daytona USA got hyped up when Daytona 3 Championship USA was announced...only for the game to turn out to be a remake of the first game, with not even any references to Daytona USA 2. Fan backlash led the game to lose the '3' part of the title to make it clear that it's just a remake. To add insult to injury, there's already been a previous HD remake for arcades of the first game, SEGA Racing Classic, making this version even more redundant.
• Splatoon 2 came under fire at its initial release for not really differentiating itself from Splatoon too much, while also not really fixing the flaws imported from the first game, causing several people to label it as an enhanced port of the first game. It didn't help that the game initially had very few stages and only a fraction of the weapons from the first game, making people feel that content was taken away instead of being added. Most of this was a result of fans and critics being unfamiliar with the series' system of regular free content updates: new weapons (including all those from the first game as well as several completely new ones) were added weekly for the first year and a half after the game's release, and the game eventually received four times as many stages as it had at launch.
• XCOM Terror From The Deep received some not-unjustified flak for this trope, being literally the same game engine and mechanics with a few new assets, in addition to many of the changes it did implement being either annoying, buggy or adding Fake Difficulty. XCOM Apocalypse, which was supposed to be the second game in the series but got held up, was a lot more ambitious in its changes to the established formula.
• Puyo Puyo Tetris 2:
  • One of the more recurring complaints about the game is that, aside from incorporating the Skill Battle mode from Puyo Puyo Chronicle, it is a textbook example of a Mission-Pack Sequel. While issues such as Puyo Puyo and Tetris having shared online rankings were addressed, other things some Puyo Puyo fans wanted such as the standalone Fever ruleset were not. Not helping matters is the fact that there were alternatives for both Puyo Puyo and Tetris fans on all of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2's platforms when taking backwards compatibility into account, especially on the Nintendo Switch which had five other Puyo Puyo games plus Tetris 99 available upon the game's release.
  • Even for players that were more receptive of Puyo Puyo Tetris's character spells in the English dub, the fact that Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 recycles a significant amount of these spells (and in some cases, such as Schezo and Dark Prince's alternate voices, are exactly the same as in the first game) left a bitter impression, moreso considering that all Japanese character spells were remade for PPT2.
• The PETA video game parodies that have sequels have been criticized of having little difference from the previous games.
  • The Super Chick Sisters sequel New Super Chick Sisters is once again a parody of Super Mario Bros. that has Nugget and Chickette rescue Pamela Anderson from a slanderous portrayal of a popular fast food franchise while Mario and Luigi are made total fools and attacked for actions that PETA sees as animal cruelty. The only significant difference is that this time, the fast food franchise being attacked is McDonald's rather than Kentucky Fried Chicken.
  • Pokémon Black and Blue had a sequel titled Pokémon: Red, White & Blue. Like the original, the sequel was nothing more than a parody of Pokémon that attacks the game series by accusing it of teaching children that animal abuse is okay. The only significant change to the story is that the game also serves as an attack on McDonald's and accuses the fast food franchise of reinforcing the Pokémon franchise's alleged stance on animal abuse.

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