Once Original Now Common / Video Games

"Super Mario Kart... is superannuated. It's been so thoroughly surpassed by newer games that while I can appreciate it, I was never able to squeeze much fun out of it."

— The Geek Critique

Due to the rapid rate at which the medium is evolving (especially compared to other older, non-interactive media like Film, Music, or Television), video games are affected by the trope quite frequently.

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Platform and creator examples

• Scaling and rotating sprites. The Super Nintendo allowed sprites to be rotated in any direction and scale them up or down without having to redraw the sprite. Of course, such feats are a standard in many sprite-based games today and aren't that mind-blowing, but the SNES using such features was a huge leap from the NES where sprites on the NES platform couldn't rotate or change size. That said, the Super Nintendo, without the help of any specialized mapper chips or software tricks, was limited to scaling and rotating on the seventh layer via the aptly titled Mode 7, and that involved basically using an entire layer for a single sprite, somewhat demystifying the effect in comparison to more powerful tech.
• The use of pre-rendered asset(s) such as backgrounds and sprites was used to make some games in the fourth and fifth generation of gaming look much better than they actually did. Asset(s) were pre-rendered on a computer, then digitized placed into the game. This made some games such as Final Fantasy VII and Space Channel 5 look seemingly amazing since they were able to fit a lot of detail into backgrounds. Games like Mortal Kombat (1992) had digitized sprites of actors while games like Phantasmagoria had flat out video sequences of a digitized character moving. Some games with digitized computer renderings like Shining the Holy Ark even looked like modern (at the time) CGI. The practice has fallen out of use today - since people compare the pre-rendering to the characters looking like they are made out of rubber, backgrounds looking incredibly artificial compared to the characters, obvious green screen effects, and has even caused some technological nightmares in trying to port them onto modern hardware. It can be hard to believe that at one point, digitizing things and then downscaling them into a sprite was at one point innovative.
• The impact Working Designs had on English language localization is probably far too easy to overlook nowadays. Throughout the '70s, '80s, and '90s, Japanese video games were often given highly literal English language translations by non-native English speakers (essentially, they took a Japanese word and then searched for its English language equivalent in a Japanese-English dictionary). Working Designs, however, put great care into making sure their translations were both sensible and appealing to American audiences — which meant not only translating individual words, but also rewriting sentences, removing jokes or pop culture references that would go over the heads of (or offend) Americans, keeping NPC dialog varied and interesting (e.g., avoiding Welcome to Corneria situations), etc. Their stable of voice actors also maintained a much higher standard of dubbing than the under-rehearsed line readings of too-literally translated scripts typical of games localized in the CD-ROM era. Today, with Japanese game developers typically hiring professional translators and doing far more thorough translation jobs than before, Working Designs' translations (which, even in the '90s, had a tendency to be too pop culture focused for their own good) don't seem so special anymore.
• The Game Boy was revolutionary back when it came out. It was one of the first handheld consoles to have interchangeable carts, the first handheld console to have home console-quality games, and with an incredibly expansive library to boot. Add on an affordable price point (at a time where handheld electronics in general were still a rare thing) and a great battery life, and it's not hard to see why it became a smash hit. Nowadays, the awful greyscale screen, bulky form factor, and the overabundance of puzzle games chasing after Tetris have made for a console that hasn't aged especially well. Even in its day it was seen as Boring, but Practical compared to the Atari Lynx and Game Gear, two consoles with flashier feature sets but expensive price points and terrible battery life.
• Back in the 16-bit Console Wars, video games were still seen as strictly a children's pastime thanks to Nintendo and its heavy restrictions on what kind of content could be featured on their platforms. Then Sega stepped in and challenged that status quo by targeting an older demographic, having much looser restrictions on the content of their games coupled with edgy, in-your-face ad campaigns compared to Nintendo's rather straight-forward ads, the latter of which actually attracted the concern of parents who feared that Sega was brainwashing their children with subliminal messages. It even spurred Nintendo to make themselves edgier so that they could compete with their own "Play It Loud!" campaign, releasing more mature games like Killer Instinct and Super Metroid, and laxing before eventually abandoning their own content restrictions. While it's obvious today that video games are for both children and adults, it's thanks to Sega that we have that notion, and while a lot of the things Sega did seem tame by today's standards, at the time they were to Nintendo what The Rolling Stones were to The Beatles.
• Commodore's Amiga was one of the first true multimedia computers, representing a massive leap in computer tech. It was, at the time of its 1985 release, leagues ahead of the PC and the then-monochrome Macintosh (to say nothing of 8-bit machines that were popular at the time), boasting an impressive set of custom chips for graphics and sound, and 16-bit Motorola 68k CPUs, all of which caught the eye of many a gamer and creative professional with the trademark bouncing ball demo, as well as the Video Toaster, which made it incredibly useful for TV production. Even more impressive was its preemptive multitasking, a full decade before its competitors. Many a British developer would get their start on the Amiga. Unfortunately, due to almost willful mismanagement and marketing missteps, the Amiga would neither catch fire anywhere outside the European gaming market nor get the needed technological updates to keep in step, much less keep ahead of rapid advances in PC and Mac tech. By December 1993, a little game called Doom that showed what the PC could now do changed the scene overnight, the Amiga began looking old hat, and months later, Commodore went bankrupt due to a patent troll, leaving the Amiga brand to all but languish. Even though AmigaOS still holds up, the Amiga brand was never able to find a company with the needed backing to get back in the game. PCs meanwhile made up for their former deficiencies and then some with graphics, sound cards, and versions of Windows 95/NT onward giving multimedia beyond what the Amiga could fathom, and ever faster processors from Intel and AMD, and Apple would make a major comeback with the iMac. These days, the idea of specialized multimedia chips onboard isn't so exotic, though most serious users will get a discrete graphics card. Outside of a diehard fandom, the Amiga reads like a lost technological civilization.
• The very idea that a game would, for example, have an incentive to make you boot up/log on every day also falls into this. Back in the earlier days of multiplayer or endless games, it was highly likely for a player to "run out of content" to do and thus feel less of an incentive to log on. Having things such as a daily reward for logging on or daily/weekly objectives was actually seen as an innovative feature in that it ensured a player would always have something to do, something to work towards, and something to help others out with. These days, this practice is often criticised for trying to make the player get addicted to the game, inducing FOMO^*Fear Of Missing Out, or in the case of Freemium games, trying to frustrate the player into paying or get them to watch advertisements or fill out surveys.
• The fact that the PlayStation 2 had a built-in DVD player was absolutely groundbreaking in 2000. Even though the DVD format was around since 1996, the Playstation 2 was, at the time, one of the most affordable DVD players on the market (if not the most affordable). This really really opened the idea of using a console as an "Entertainment box" instead of just a dedicated device to play video games, which led to systems in the next generation having ties to Netflix and built-in DVD/video players. Even the PC got into it with DVD drives being able to play DVDs natively. Over twenty years later, with streaming platforms having a much wider reach (especially as they could become easily accessible through the TV itself) the idea can be seen as a little odd to a modern viewer - one could see it as early as the announcement of the Xbox One, which heavily advertised itself in the leadup to its launch as an all-in-one entertainment system, and underperformed compared to the PlayStation 4 in part because all the features they advertised had become or were becoming commonplace on TVs themselves, forcing them to shift gears after the fact back towards being primarily a game console.
  • The idea of a console being more than just something you played games on was itself Older Than They Think by the time the Playstation2 hit the field - systems like the Philips CD-i were actually conceived as being a device more comparable to a home computer. An idea that itself is quite hilarious since many of these became rendered somewhat obsolete with the rise of budget laptops, tablets, Smart TVs, and smart phones.

Other examples:

A-F

• Adventure for the Atari 2600 makes this Older Than the NES. Old codgers and video game historians recognize the game as revolutionary. Your character is graphically represented on screen. He can pick up graphical representations of items. The items can be left anywhere in the game world and the game will "remember" where they are. Graphically represented enemies with AI that changes based on the environment. And the game has an actual goal and ends when you complete the goal, instead of going on forever.
  • This applies for most Atari games. As The Angry Video Game Nerd pointed out, the majority of Atari games suffered from bad sound effects and repetitive gameplay (Cut and Paste Environments for instance), but still were revolutionary for the time.
  • Or, for that matter, the Atari 2600 itself, which was the first commercially successful home console to store games on interchangeable cartridges. There are however 2600 games that are exceptions to this trope.
• While Age of Empires was a groundbreaking RTS in 1997, the release of a Definitive Edition twenty-one years later that runs on modern PCs has exposed how much it was surpassed by its own sequel two years later, to say nothing of the many other games that have iterated and expanded upon - or diverged from - the formula in the succeeding twenty years.
• Alone in the Dark (1992):
  • The game was probably the Trope Codifier (along with Resident Evil) for most Survival Horror tropes, at least outside Japan. Yet the animations for it and some of the voice acting come off as narmy and act as nightmare retardants. The game itself doesn't look very dark either, and lacks the sorts of graphical elements that make more modern games actually scary. While the graphics of the first game may not seem impressive now, they were considered cutting edge back in 1992.
  • The series invented the Survival Horror video game genre outside Japan (where Sweet Home (1989) predated it by three years), inspiring many other franchises, many of which greatly improved upon the formula, making the game mechanics seem dated in comparison to some people.
• American McGee's Alice was, in 2000, a very dark and brutal game that took a happy and light-hearted story like Alice in Wonderland, then broke it into pieces and made it much darker and oppressive to reflect the damaged state of the main character's psyche. Today, people might see it and simply write it off as an exploitation game (Especially since executives told the developers to make it darker) with dated graphics that do little to actually scare the player.
• Animal Crossing: Wild World was a Killer App for the DS, the second game to use Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and a Franchise Codifier that made the series mainstream. Nowadays, it's seen as barebones due to its lack of content and quality-of-life improvements from later games, such as being able to quickly switch tools or stack fruit.
• Ao Oni looks barebones by today's standards for Explorer Horror games with its Excuse Plot, Flat Characters, lack of clear instructions for its puzzles, and fairly cheap graphics, especially when compared to other games of its ilk such as Mad Father and Ib. But back in 2007, Ao Oni was considered revolutionary for using RPG Maker to create a combat-less horror game, enough to spawn a multi-media franchise and help popularize the Explorer Horror genre.
• Ape Escape is nowadays plagued by Damn You, Muscle Memory! and what is now considered terrible camera controls (a standard scheme nowadays would put camera control on the right analog stick, but that's used for your selected gadgets, so the camera is instead controlled by the D-pad). However, at the time, it was a huge experiment in 3D control, as well as for the PlayStation in general. For one, it was the first game to require the DualShock controller.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • On account of its ubiquity and overexposure through subsequent spin off media, Assassin's Creed is often written off as another open-world game these days, but many people often forget how fresh and innovative it was when the first game came out in 2007, with a heavy emphasis on social stealth and parkour in city-wide environments.
  • The open-world foot, parkour and climbing of the first game was more or less one of the first attempts to make a detailed and immersive game where the background buildings, with its roofs, side walls, ramparts were fully interactive and accessible. Unlike Grand Theft Auto and its clones, most of which had vehicle traversal, and as such had buildings and roofs that were mostly background scenery and open only for scripted sequences, the open-world in AC-1 was fully interactive by hand and foot, with nothing truly inaccessible and out of reach.
  • Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed III more or less became Genre-Busting explorations for how open world games could work as Historical Fiction, giving you a real sense of simulating the sense of being in the past.
• Atelier Iris got this when it finally came over to the U.S. in 2005. "So it's a standard JRPG with "alchemy crafting"?" While the "standard JRPG" bit is not exactly false for Iris, what a lot of Western consumers fail to understand in shrugging off the crafting system is that the progenitor of the Atelier series, Atelier Marie, was the first JRPG to not only feature a very robust (in the case of Marie, absurdly robust) crafting system but was the first JRPG to feature alchemy heavily. After Marie and its sequel sold a quarter-million copies each, you suddenly had alchemy coming out of the woodwork in Japanese pop culture and nearly every JRPG in the wake of Marie has featured some kind of crafting system. The problem is, due to some poor business decisions on the part of multiple parties, practically everything else that was influenced by Atelier crossed the Pacific before it did, and the original games never came over at all. Over time, the Atelier series did manage to carve out a niche overseas by returning to its roots of lighthearted, Slice of Life stories while making the crafting mechanics even deeper, but it's still regarded as a footnote in the JRPG release timeline in the West, when in fact it seems to have had nearly as much influence on game design in Japan as other staple series.
• Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge is a bit of an inversion of this. When it was released on Steam in 2009, the store was still relatively new (it had only even started selling non-Valve games two years prior), had very few games and, because Valve still hand-picked every game that would appear on Steam at the time (meaning primarily those from other big publishers or indie devs with proven track records), had a level of quality control that made it hard for bad games to join the catalog, so Bad Rats quickly became known for being the worst game on the store. But it also became known for being So Bad, It's Good, attracting an ironic following and ironic positive reviews, and the game became surprisingly successful thanks to people buying the game to gift them for their friends as a prank, leading to Steam implementing a way for users to refuse gifts. Years later, however, Valve opened the floodgates, particularly with their announcement in 2018 they would allow basically anything so long as it wasn't outright illegal, and Steam became overflowed with shovelware, making Bad Rats lose the appeal.
• BioWare:
  • The Baldur's Gate games are considered Western RPG landmarks. Try telling that to BioWare fans who got on board circa Knights of the Old Republic, when the developer had started going more for the cinematic angle, or to fans who got on board after Mass Effect, or Dragon Age, when they had perfected the style. To elaborate a little, Baldur's Gate was hailed as an accessible way for newbies to get into computer role-playing games. To modern eyes, Baldur's Gate is Nintendo Hard and in dire need of more tutorials (in large part due to the game running on AD&D 2nd ed. rules-as-written - and 2e AD&D itself being an ancient fossil nowadays that's unfamiliar to anyone outside the retro scene of TTRPG), which is a testament to just how brutal the previous generation of Western RPGs were. Of course, this may not be a bad thing for some, especially for anyone who prefers a more challenging RPG experience.
  • To a minor extent, the bonus merchants in the Baldur's Gate 2 Collector's Edition. At the time the game was released, having these two merchants was a huge deal, as they not only were highly exclusive bonuses that were only limited to a comparative handful of game owners, but the equipment they sold was much better than anything else at the beginning of the game. Fast forward through a generation of Pre-Order Bonus and CE content offers, and its hard to see what the big deal is.
  • Even Knights of the Old Republic was revolutionary at its release. It was one of the first RPGs out there (Gothic came first, but it was not nearly as famous) in which literally every line of dialogue (other than the lines chosen by the protagonist) was fully voice acted. While voice acting was common in RPGs by that point, it was usually reserved for narrative-focused scenes with text boxes sufficing for non-critical interactions. KotOR did a lot to drive the immersion in its universe by giving even minor characters a literal voice.^note Granted, they used alien languages with a canned number of set lines, particularly Huttese and Manaanese, to add "voice" to a lot of minor alien NPCs, but even so, at the time that was an extremely clever solution. Most RPGs that came after would reach for the same bar so often it became ubiquitous.
  • BioWare is famous for its ability to have a Gay Option, to the point where it's incredibly noticeable when one isn't available. But back in 2003, they got severe blowback from LucasArts for sneaking Juhani past their censors, even if her "romance" option is very subtle and somewhat buggy.
  • One particular character is HK-47. In 2003, the whole idea of a Robot Buddy who was a Deadpan Snarker, a cold-blooded killer, and casually prejudiced against organics was pretty novel (the only other major example at the time would probably be Bender), and made him almost instantly iconic. It was especially notable when the most obvious frame of reference for audiences beforehand would have been C-3PO, who is about as far from HK-47 as you can get. Today, the Snarky Non-Human Sidekick is an archetype in itself, and most of HK-47's jokes have long been done to death, leaving many newer players to find him one-note and unfunny. Even Star Wars itself has done the "cynical jerk robot with no qualms about killing" in many different projects, most notably K2-SO.
  • Dragon Age: Origins in 2009 was really really pushing boundaries of what sort of sexually explicit content could be put into a game and still get away with an "M" rating. This is incredibly tame in The New '20s with games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate III being even more explicit.
• The original Battle Arena Toshinden was in its time a revolutionary 3D fighting game and one of the most highly rated games for the original PlayStation when it originally came out. It was one of the most advertised launch titles for the platform in North America and Europe, as well as the third game to ever get a score of 98% from Game Players magazine (the other two being the SNES port of Super Street Fighter II and Final Fantasy VI). Toshinden was credited for taking the fighting game genre into "true 3D" with its introduction of the sidestep maneuver, and it was also the first 3D fighting game to feature weapon-based combat. However, the sequels got progressively worse reviews (the fourth one wasn't even released in North America), and the release of the superior weapon-based 3D fighter Soul Edge (itself influenced by Toshinden) eventually rendered Toshinden obsolete. Many today now compare the game unfavorably to the Soulcalibur games (or later Tekken and Virtua Fighter games), without realizing just how revolutionary Toshinden was for its time.
• When Battle Garegga was first released, it was infamous amongst arcade gamers at the time for its unusually high difficulty that's partly due to its infamous "rank" system that punishes players for collecting too many resources or firing too much and encouraging the player to die on purpose to keep the game relatively winnable; as a result, it took an unusally long time for someone to get the first publicized no-continue clear. However, outside of the shmup community where it remains a well-known and frequently talked-about game, anyone who picks this game up today will scratch their heads as to why this game has that iconic status and why it has such a "pull out all the stops" port on PS4 and Xbox One, due to its Real Is Brown visuals that fail to make the game stand out for casual shmup enjoyer, and the "rank" system seems like it's overhyped and derivative ("Didn't Zanac do this ten years prior?") in a genre that's already known for being Nintendo Hard, plus the proliferation of Bullet Hell games that have thicker and more intricate patterns of bullets and have more colorful visuals further diminish this game's status as a high-challenge shmup amongst the general audience.
• As mentioned in this video, Beneath a Steel Sky had something rather revolutionary with its engine: The fact that you could witness NPCs walking around and doing actions while you were talking with a player. Most engines at the time didn't allow this, either time froze during a conversation, or NPCs were limited to only one or two per screen and couldn't do much aside from standing there while you spoke to them. These days however, the movement of the characters in Beneath a Steel Sky comes off as Artificial Atmospheric Actions.
• BioShock is a lot harder to appreciate and respect for gamers who didn't latch onto it in 2007 when it came out. At the time, a title like it — a First-Person Shooter Immersive Sim with RPG Elements, genuinely rich art direction, and a high concept parodying a real-world writer of note — was revolutionary. It was also one of the first mainstream games of its era (bar RPGs, which have had them for a while) to have a morality based ending that is based largely on actions the player took over the course of the game, instead of a single decision made toward the end. Finally, it made the Deconstruction Game mainstream, and its famous Plot Twist was genuinely surprising, inspiring later games like Spec Ops: The Line and Far Cry 3 among many others. Today, RPG elements have extensively crept into mainstream games, and Multiple Endings based on morality are so common that BioShock's can seem simplistic and binary. Furthermore, so many games mine similar material and concepts that the city of Rapture can now seem ho-hum, and similar Nolan-esque twists have been used so many times that The Reveal in this game can feel predictable. The mixed reception to its sequels didn't help matters, either.
• The first Bloons Tower Defense game was well-received at the time it was released; the concept of every enemy creep being nested was rather new. However, considering how full-featured later games in the series are, it can be tough to go back to BTD1, which feels bare-bones by comparison. It doesn't help that the game has unbalanced towers and a very simple dominant strategy of spamming the basic Dart Monkey for victory.
• Bokosuka Wars, originally released for Sharp X1 and MSX computers in 1983, was seen as a revolutionary game in Japan, where it helped to lay the foundations for the tactical RPG sub-genre. Its NES console port, however, significantly toned down the Strategy Game elements, instead making it look like a badly designed Action-Adventure. When the inferior NES port was discovered in North America, Bokosuka Wars was rubbished by retro gamers, and is even seen as a joke, especially its Game Over screen with the Engrish phrase "Wow! You Lose!"
• Breath of Fire II, for the SNES. Compared to today's games, its mild swearing (a single "damn" and "hell"), explicit references to death, and religious themes (including a Corrupt Church and explicit references to gods, with the Church's god as the Big Bad) may seem tame; nonetheless, it was definitely Darker and Edgier than anything ever before seen on a Nintendo system. The same can also be said about a game released only 20 days after, Lunar: Eternal Blue. While Sega's censorship policies weren't nearly as bad as Nintendo's, the fact that both games had a Corrupt Church was rather edgy, and Lunar had a surprisingly Crapsaccharine World, something that wasn't very common at the time. Nowadays, it's rarer for a church in fantasy settings to not be a Corrupt Church, and it's also common for the local God of the setting to be a major villain and/or a malevolent imposter.
• Back in 1995, Bug was considered an impressive 3D platformer as it was one of the very first platformers with 3D effects, movements, and environments and the first 3D platformer on the Sega Saturn. Thanks to the advent of many far more impressive 3D platformers, the game and its sequel Bug Too! haven't aged well at all especially with its repetitious, clunky gameplay and annoying Mascot with Attitude.
• The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series is a microcosm of this trope. When the Marine player character in the first game is permanently killed by the nuke about halfway through the game in "Aftermath", it was a huge break from other FPS games of the era. The fact that you controlled a dying character in the middle of a nuclear blast zone (and had no say over whether he lived or died), and that all your efforts in the American campaign were for naught was a huge deal then, and flew in the face of conventional video game tropes - there are multiple stories of people repeatedly reloading the checkpoint for that level, thinking they'd failed and that there had to be something to do to survive. The two sequels, however, do the same thing 5 times combined, not to mention the slew of other post-CoD4 FPS games that also do it at least once, and for players who played MW2 or 3 before the original, the effect of the "Aftermath" level is lost.
  • Connected with the previous one is, well... the WWII era of Call of Duty. While there certainly had been FPS games before where you fought alongside groups (including the Omaha Beach level of the aforementioned Allied Assault), the idea that you could constantly be having a squad (or larger!) of men fighting alongside you for basically the entire game, with at least a few of them having something of a personality, was such a leap forward that the marketing slogan for the first game was "No One Fights Alone." Nowadays, that's standard operating procedure in basically every military FPS. Ironically, while the WWII Call of Duty games were among the best-selling FPS of their day, they are now more of a footnote compared to the more modern setting games.
  • Call of Duty 4's multiplayer was viewed as pretty advanced for the time, with class customization that let you set up everything about your class (compared to other class-based shooters that at best would let you swap out one weapon with another one or two, but otherwise forced a class to play how the devs intended), a persistent experience system that held across every server you played on, smooth multiplayer and reasonably good graphics. However, the problem seems to be that the series has become too formulaic, with a lack of general change until the announcement of Black Ops II (which added the "Pick Ten" system, letting you for example eschew a perk in one tier to instead have two perks in another), and then another lack of general change after that combined with the engine becoming visibly dated in the visuals until the 2019 Modern Warfare (which overhauled the engine and the weapon attachment system). Even then, the class customization of CoD4 comes off as completely anemic today, with weapons only allowed one attachment, a very small amount of attachments on top of it (Grenade Launcher, foregrip, red dot sight, ACOG, or suppressor, with every weapon class restricted from at least one attachment), and a fixed set of Kill Streak rewards (UAV, Airstrike and Helicopter), compared to even Modern Warfare 2 with its greatly expanded available killstreaks (among others, there are four different airstrike options, two different helicopter options, two more helicopter or other gunship options that you can control the guns of, and, for a player who can make 25 kills without dying, a nuke which automatically wins the match for their team) and ability to use two attachments on your weapons combined with a veritable explosion of options for those attachments, from the returning grenade launcher and red dot sight to ammo that pierces objects better, underbarrel shotguns as a close-range backup, extended magazines to shoot more before reloading, and a heartbeat sensor to spot enemies before they spot you.
• City of Heroes is often remembered fairly fondly - but younger players may look at it and wonder what was so popular about it, especially after it's unofficial revival in the 2020s:
  • Its character customisation was one of the selling points. Even in the present day, it has more flexibility and options than more recent MMORPGs and even some video games themselves. But it can be hard to appreciate simply because many games just did not have that many customisation options back then. Especially not in the day before microtransactions. Something not helped by how dated the game's graphics are.
  • A lot of stuff was intended... for roleplaying. Very few people actually engage in in-character roleplaying in MMORPGs these days, instead favoring either to do so in text or just outside of the game, so younger players might find it hard to see just why this was so special, especially for a roleplay purpose.
  • It was also a very solo-friendly MMORPG that pre-dated the now omnipresent Damager, Healer, Tank "Holy Trinity" of today. However, it was still very much an MMORPG made in the Turn of the Millennium. Healing and support characters were at their best when paired with a group, and a tank character mostly won by outlasting. In the days of Star Wars: The Old Republic's companions, World of Warcraft allowing players to swap specialisations on the fly and featuring armor sets that changed with them, Guild Wars 2's attempts to abandon said Holy Trinity altogether, and Final Fantasy XIV's "Green DPS"/"Blue DPS" and chocobo companion letting tanks & healers play through solo content easily, it's easy to look at the difficulties of a pure support class being leveled and balk at how other games have done it better.
  • The "Going Rogue" expansion added some greying morality which was actually a very very big thing back in 2010 since very few games actually did it well. Most Gray-and-Grey Morality or Black-and-Grey Morality was handled by single player stories, whereas "Going Rogue" actually allowed for players to select any particular option, neither of which is inherently "good", and fit them into either a paragon of good or a card carrying villain.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day has fallen victim to this in multiple ways:
  • It was among the first video games to use context-sensitive gameplay, meaning that you were given unique abilities based on the situation at hand. How? By stepping on a Context Sensitivity Pad, where you were granted otherwise impossible abilities until stepping off. Compared to the context-sensitive gameplay of later games like God of War, Conker's seems very clumsy and limited.
  • The game was also known for its liberal use of Vulgar Humour that attempts to utterly demolish any line that was there. It was essentially an Animated Shock Comedy in video game form and often described as the best South Park video game (at the time). While this still makes the game fairly unique in its own regard, its humour itself may come off as either quite tame or even just not-funny after two decades of the line being pushed further - including by one of its inspirations (South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured but Whole).
• The original Cool Boarders was the first major snowboarding game on the market. It set the bar for an entire generation of snowboarding franchises like Amped, SSX, Snowboard Kids, and Shaun White's Snowboarding. Yet, Cool Boarders had only five tracks, two characters, a handful of boards, an incredibly slow top speed and absolutely no competitive mode to speak of. It looks like a glorified demo in comparison to later snowboarding games, especially within its own series (to the point that Cool Boarders 2 in 1997 is considered to be the "true" start of the franchise). Later franchises reused Boarders' Competition mode, trend of qualifying jumps, unlockable characters and boards. However, all those franchises wouldn't have succeeded (or would have been drastically different) if Cool Boarders hadn't started the trend.
• DanceDanceRevolution was quite revolutionary when it was released in 1998 ("A dance game played with your feet?"). However, with the proliferation of motion sensor dance games in The New '10s such as Dance Central and even Konami's own Dance Masters / DanceEvolution, those who aren't already familiar with the BEMANI franchise find DDR to be outdated and irrelevant ("Why be restricted to stepping on four directional panels when there are games that make you use your entire body?") It doesn't help that many expert players hold onto the safety bar while playing, a practice that, while essential at high-level play, looks unappealing and nothing like dancing to those not familiar with the series. It still has its players, particularly in Japan where Konami continues to produce arcade DDR versions and update them with new content from time to time. DDR has also been called "Guitar Hero for your feet," despite the former predating the latter by seven years.
• The original Darius was a very ambitious release for 1986. Even ignoring its "three screens lined up to simulate a widescreen aspect ratio" gimmick, the game featured a quantity of content that was unprecedented for its genre: where previous year's megahit Gradius featured seven levels and three boss characters (one of which is a Zero-Effort Boss that doesn't even move), Darius boasted a branching-path system that compelled players to explore all of its 26 levels over multiple playthroughs, 12 boss characters with distinct appearances and attack patterns, and Multiple Endings in a time where most arcade shooters might as well have none. But with subsequent shmups (including its own sequels) upping the amount of content and production values, the original Darius's heavy reliance on repetitive palette-swapped environments doesn't seem so impressive anymore, and its boss battles pale in comparison to the complex and cinematic confrontations in Darius Gaiden and G-Darius.
• Death Jr.. While it wasn't the first 3D platformer to be released on handhelds, it was among the first original IPs (Super Mario 64 was an Updated Re-release of the Nintendo 64 game). It also featured movement handled with the analog pad - something almost completely unheard of in a handheld. These days, after games like Super Mario 3D Land, it's hard to appreciate just how unique the game was simply for being released on a handheld.
• Devil May Cry was lauded on release for its fast action and deep gameplay; today many players who try it find it kind of slow, clunky and limited (not to mention "jump" being set to the Triangle button and no option to change it, which is usually the most major change made by rereleases). It has the right to be, since it basically set all the foundations of the modern Beat 'em All genre, four years before God of War and Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden.
  • These days, however, it is lauded for its Resident Evil-style atmosphere (not coincidentally, it was one of several games that was created out of early concepts for Resident Evil 4) that was dropped in later games, which has given the game a unique niche not found in other games with a similar style, keeping its popularity up even when its gameplay was surpassed.
• Picking up shiny new gear had always been a part of video games, but Diablo codified it. By not only providing large quantities of it (most of which turned out to be Better Off Sold) but by procedurally generating its qualities, they turned loot, and the hopes of scrounging up the perfect Infinity +1 Sword, into the raison d'etre of the game. (The addition of Socketed Equipment didn't hurt.) When combined with the Color-Coded Item Tiers from World of Warcraft, Diablo's loot system is the gold standard, and has been copied wholesale by a large number of games in a large number of genres.
  • Diablo also had a lot of random, quaint, and player-hostile design decisions. These included but were not limited to shops having completely random inventories that might not include staple survival items, unpredictable emergency teleport spells that would happily land you right by a level exit or in a boss's "Instant Death" Radius with equal likelihood, and standard enemies that could do permanent, irreversible damage to your character's stats. All these and more can lead new players to complain the game is frustrating and random. To be fair, it is - Diablo was originally a prettier, but otherwise completely classic Roguelike until a developer set turns to pass automatically and accidentally created the isometric ARPG. The main thing the sequel did differently was just play fair.
• Donkey Kong Country was deemed revolutionary upon release on the Super NES in late 1994. In addition to being a pretty darn good platformer, the game's main draw was that its graphics were almost entirely rendered in 3D — which was, until then, unheard of in 16 bit video games. Granted, it was a sprite-based game, so nothing was rendered in real time. However, its graphics were impressive enough to sell truckloads of copies and make it a game that finally pushed sales for the SNES ahead of the competing Sega Genesis in North America for good. Today, when compared to the far more sophisticated rendering that has developed ever since, the once awe-inspiring graphics don't look so impressive anymore, having that detailless plastic/rubbery look that immediately gives away that you're looking at early '90s CG. Meanwhile, its gameplay, while still very good in its own right, has been largely surpassed by its sequels (particularly Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and the Donkey Kong Country Returns games).
• Doom. A Space Marine Is You, demons, Foreboding, Benevolent and Malevolent Architecture, futuristic techbases and hellish landscapes (sometimes both at once)... we've seen it already quite a lot ever since.
  • Back when it released, Doom gained much controversy for its use of violence and gore. With a few exceptions like its predecessor Wolfenstein 3-D, or things like Mortal Kombat and the occasional FMV game, most prior games were largely marketed towards children and families. As such, audiences were shocked by the amount of mature content and Doom became one of the main targets of '90s Moral Guardians with some even blaming it for inspiring various school massacres, most infamously Columbine after it was learned that the shooters were fans of the game and that one of them had even created custom maps for it. Nowadays, most gamers would view its controversy as overblown and its supposed violence to be relatively tame, largely due to the dated low-resolution graphics and lack of narrative. With improvements in graphical processing and contextual story telling, many modern games like Spec Ops: The Line and The Last of Us could depict more realistic violent events that would leave a more shocking impact on audiences. To younger audiences, the violence in Doom would seem too simplistic and bland to elicit shock and disgust.
  • With the level of detail and fancy graphics in most modern mapsets, it can be quite jarring to come back to the original official Doom levels and find them looking downright primitive in comparison.
  • Ironically, given the sorts of design directions that FPS games have taken since the turn of the millennium, Doom has become Vindicated by History in that its simple, fast-paced gameplay and free-form level design is considered by many as a welcome alternative to the slower, oft-railroaded and more "realistic" style of later games within the genre.^note There's a semi-joking image that compares and contrasts level design in FPS games between 1993 and 2010, where the 1993 map is the outline of Doom E1M6 and the 2010 map is a line with four 90-degree turns and markers pointing out cutscenes at or between every corner. This is primarily why the 2016 reboot became such an acclaimed hit, as its refinements to the classic, fast-paced '90s FPS gameplay with the right amount of modern touches was considered a breath of fresh air. Some mods for classic Doom are even able to incorporate the best of both worlds: the simple, fast paced action with highly detailed, organic level design.
  • The game came from an era when FPS control schemes were still being standardized, and defaults to control schemes where the player uses only the keyboard or the mouse, rather than both at the same time. The game's control scheme is nowadays seen as rather clunky as a result, and while it was possible and even recommended in the manual to set up the game with a control scheme similar to modern keyboard-and-mouse controls, the game was still designed with the keyboard-only control scheme in mind. The result is that versions of Doom that use now-traditional FPS controls are much easier, with Doomguy's natural speed and durability combined with actual finesse allowing him to wipe out whole armies when fully equipped. You can see a shift in focus from the game's horror atmosphere towards the fast-paced action it's now famous for as modders and then the developers took notice of this and started designing levels around keyboard-and-mouse control schemes; 1995's Ultimate Doom adds on a fourth episode to the original game that is noticeably more difficult than the first three, and the release of Final Doom the next year acts as the highest-profile demonstration of the point where it was realized that, with modern controls, ambushes consisting of throwing fifty Revenants at a player were entirely survivable.
  • In a weird way, even certain ports of Doom have fallen victim to this.
    • The PlayStation port is looked at somewhat unfavorably now, partly because certain features had to be removed, most notably the complete removal of the famous Arch-vile enemy. Many people forget that, at the time, it was probably the first console port of Doom to successfully stack up to the PC original and even hold its own in some regards (it introduced colored lighting, replaced the original's admittedly cheesy MIDI rock with a downright creepy ambient score, etc.).
    • At the same time, the Super NES version is widely seen as a very shoddy port — while it keeps a surprising amount of the levels and all the monsters, it makes lots of cutbacks to the graphics and has pretty awful controls. Never mind that, at the time, simply getting such a technologically complex game on the five year old SNES^note albeit with some help from the Super FX chip was seen as a remarkable achievement. It also had one of the best renditions of the original Doom soundtrack on any platform.
• Dragon Quest created many of the tropes still used by JRPGs today, to the point where the older games are often labeled "archaic" or "outdated".
  • The series has been doomed to almost-niche status abroad due to the following: Long localization holdups with the 8-bit generation games in particular rendering them either obsolete or in competition with the new 16-bit generation, the temporary folding of Enix's American wing, and last but definitely not least, the game to break the genre in the West and define it, Final Fantasy VII, stood in stark contrast, being more about outrageous battle systems and cinematic spectacle.
  • While a few recent games have gotten some pretty good remakes, going back to the original Dragon Quest VII can be a bit hard. Even at the time it was released in North America (2001) it looked a bit dated. The game was originally made for the 64DD in 1996, moved to the PlayStation in 1997, and spent a few years in Development Hell. It showed, especially with successor systems within a few months or even weeks away.
  • The twist of the original Dragon Quest was that once you defeated the Big Bad Final Boss, the Dragon Lord, suddenly he reveals his true form and you get another, more powerful opponent to face before victory. While sequential final bosses in JRPGs have since become the norm, at the time this was actually seen as a pretty big twist.
  • Dragon Quest II is similar — the apparent Big Bad of the game, cult leader Hargon, is fought and defeated, only for a sudden repeat of the previous game to happen - you have another boss to fight. That wasn't the Big Bad you just faced, it was The Dragon. Now you must fight The Man Behind the Man, the cult god Malroth/Sidoh. Having an apparent Big Bad who turns out to be The Dragon or for the Big Bad to have The Man Behind the Man is pretty run of the mill almost thirty years after its release, and its sudden appearance at the end with little foreshadowing would get it labeled an Ass Pull or Giant Space Flea from Nowhere by today's standards.
  • Dragon Quest III: While the game has aged very well, especially with the remakes, many modern gamers miss just how groundbreaking this game really was at the time. It is the Ur-Example, Trope Maker, and Trope Codifier of many, many JRPG tropes which now seem basic like Black and White Magic and Trapped in Another World. To truly cement this in one's mind, consider the following — Dragon Quest III came out a scant 2 months after Final Fantasy.
  • Dragon Quest IV was very unique for its day in that it featured a bunch of seemingly unrelated people eventually coming together for the final chapter, something completely unheard of in gaming. After games like Live A Live, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Treasure of the Rudra, Octopath Traveler, and SaGa (RPG), it can be a little hard to appreciate just what made this game so unique.
  • Dragon Quest has a similar effect with music - while in-game music isn't anything new, Dragon Quest's music was surprisingly advanced in terms of technique. They often used different volumes and sound effects to mimic instruments, such as Jipang. Dragon Quest IV's battle theme, for example, is one of the earliest uses of a crescendo in gaming. These days, they sound like nothing new. And when Dragon Quest XI, released in 2017 and 2018, used MIDI sound effects, people felt they were annoying and even those who didn't thought they were rather generic. Except Sugiyama was a surprising pioneer in video game music.
• When Duke Nukem 3D was released in early 1996, just hearing the word "Damn!" uttered at the very beginning was pretty hardcore, let alone being able to do things like dance with (or kill) strippers. Today, with far more brutal and foul-mouthed games having been released ever since, it's hard to look at this game as little more than a standard mid-'90s FPS with a cheesy '80s action movie gimmick, as the lukewarm reception for Duke Nukem Forever demonstrates.
  • Beyond that, the gameplay was an immense leap forward from the Doom era only three years beforehand. The environments represented multiple realistic buildings with destructible environments, scripted cinematic events like missile launches, interactive items like light switches and playable billiards, working mirrors (something even a lot of modern games still lack) and remote security cameras, and incredible use of verticality with the jetpack and underwater segments. Just being able to look up and down was a technical achievement in 1996, and is now of course taken for granted.
  • Not to mention such trivial things like the electrical sockets shocking you if you use them. There were a lot more nuances planned, but didn't make it into the full game, like the tripmine's laser reflecting off mirrors.
  • And then there's the character of Duke himself. In the mid-'90s, he seemed like a perfect embodiment of masculine pride. And, while he wasn't the first FPS protagonist to deviate from the generic A Space Marine Is You character^note Dark Forces, released almost a year prior, also had a protagonist with a personality that went beyond "generic space marine", he was probably the first to gain significant mainstream attention. When you consider the major leaps in narrative the FPS genre has made ever since (protagonists now have complex backstories and fully developed personalities) and the way recent video games have depicted "manly" characters who are reasonably fleshed out and developed (or, at least, infused with a healthy amount of self deprecating humor, with a genuinely fun personality besides being "macho"), Duke's rather un-ironic depiction of the stereotypical "manly man" seems extremely goofy at best and mildly unsettling or cringeworthy at worst.
  • As hinted above, Duke Nukem Forever suffered heavily from this. George Broussard wanted the game to be a collection of every awesome new gameplay mechanic he could find, but due to the constant delays in its development almost every one of them had ended up already becoming old hat by the time the game actually came out. The joke about keycard puzzles is a particularly stark instance, as it tries to present itself as a unique and clever subversion of a common gaming cliché - the problem is that its idea of a "common cliché" (opening doors with keycards) hadn't been done in almost a decade, while its idea of a "unique and clever subversion" (quicktime event to perform a mundane action) had since become the gaming cliché.
• Dune II was one of the very first Real-Time Strategy games and the Trope Codifier whose design scheme would be used by both Blizzard and Westwood to define the entire genre for years to come. Faction differences boiled down to limiting certain units from a faction and giving them one or two typically impractical high-tier units. Considering that Warcraft: Orcs and Humans didn't even have that and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn largely did the same, it was ground-breaking. Meanwhile, compared to today's RTS games, where different factions could have entirely unique tech trees, structures, and entirely different unit lists, it comes off as lazy. This wound up hurting its 1998 remake Dune 2000, which was overlooked at the time in part for not co-opting quite as many advances as the RTS genre had made in the six years since Dune II.
• MOTHER (A.K.A. EarthBound Beginnings) was groundbreaking when it was first released in 1989 on the Nintendo Famicom. While other contemporary RPGs at the time like Dragon Quest (One of MOTHER's inspirations) were set in the middle ages (With a few western RPGs being set in the distant future or the Ruins of the Modern Age) MOTHER was the very first RPG to be set in modern times with a slight sci-fi approach. It was also one of the first RPGs to have a fully explorable overworld with towns integrated directly into it, unlike other RPGs that represent the overworld as a map that the player walks on while towns and dungeons are represented with icons that the player must walk on to enter or as first-person mazes. The gameplay was non-linear and you can even walk diagonally. However, many aspects of the game have aged poorly like the Random Encounters, the bare-bones battle system, maze-like dungeons, and its grindy Nintendo Hard gameplay. While it retains a small cult following, many find it to be the weakest of the MOTHER trilogy.
• While EarthBound (1994) (MOTHER 2) is universally regarded as a major improvement from its predecessor, some people find the game's battle system to be clunky and the game's inventory system to be limited and counter-intuitive (a problem that carried over from the previous game). Mother 3, in comparison, improves on these aspects immensely by streamlining the battle system and giving the player more inventory space, and it has an extra unlimited space exclusive for key items whereas in Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings the key items take up inventory slots. The "clunky" battle system was actually unique for the time because it introduced a rolling counter HP system that gave players a chance to heal before their HP drops to zero if they take a fatal hit. While the game's quirky sense of humor, and juxtaposition between that and surprisingly dark content, was groundbreaking, it has been copied by other games like Undertale, causing many people to wonder what made EarthBound so special in the first place.
• Elite was completely groundbreaking when it was published in the mid '80s, with its open-ended trading and shooting gameplay and massive universe of stars and planets. It's still talked about with fondness by those who spent hours at a time playing it back then. To many who didn't play it in the '80s, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about.
  • The immediate successors, however, either due to slightly improved interface (or perspective shift), customization, or storyline, did not suffer so terribly. Chalk most of it up to youngsters these days being untrained to deal with vector graphics and unable to gauge depth properly. It is still a commonly used and cherished game mechanic, since it's tough to mass-produce this sort of thing to the point of disgust without sinking a company: StarFlight and Privateer, to name just a pair of the oldest.
• Eversion is a cutesy indie platformer utilizing its hidden macabre nature and Interface Screw to mess with the player. When it was released in 2008, this was fairly novel, and it executed the tropes solidly. Now, so many games have attempted this twist that it's become a Cliché more often met with groans than surprise.
• Although the first two Fallout games avert this trope in comparison to the Bethesda titles (due to being grid-based turn-based RPGs as opposed to an FPS/TPS-RPG hybrid), the same can't be said for Fallout 3 - said game was revolutionary for the franchise upon its release and brought the franchise back from the dead, but after the release of New Vegas (which has a much more dynamic story) and 4 (which improves upon the gameplay significantly), it's seen as rather lackluster by many, especially when compared to other open-world games that came out after it (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3).
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy III introduced the Job System, allowing players to switch character classes at will. This introduced or expanded many of the series' staples, like Geomancer, Dark Knight, and Scholar. Sadly, the game wasn't localized overseas for sixteen years. By then, Western players were used to the more complex and versatile systems of games like FFV and the Tactics sub-series, which allowed characters to have secondary abilities from other jobs, multiple abilities per job, and didn't include III's "adjustment period" where a newly switched job has lowered stats for a certain number of battles or Capacity Points, which were needed to change jobs in the first place, thus discouraging experimentation with different job combinations. While the 2006 remake added much more in the way of characterization and graphics, it kept its mechanics largely in line with the original. Still, many find it a refreshing change of pace compared to the complexity of the job systems in later games. Although V is widely regarded for taking everything III did right with the Job System and expanding upon it immensely, being credited with having one of the best in the series, classic or otherwise.
  • Final Fantasy IV:
    • The game was revolutionary during its time because the game introduced a more developed storyline and had Character Development; characters actually think about what they have done and what they must do to have a better future for themselves and the story itself still has the "save the world" plot, but it also has much more behind it so that the story isn't just about world saving. Nowadays, people snub the game for having characters being predictable and the story being too simplistic, even though said people forget that the game using those concepts back when it was new was mind blowing at that time.
    • The gameplay is seen as rather "generic" nowadays, yet many gameplay features in the game were unheard of. The active time battle system required the player to have more of an eye on battles than before in the series (and most other games like this on the market at the time). Not only that, but the bosses themselves would change their attack patterns depending on the battle phase. Thus, players would have to adjust their own strategy and have characters pick convenient times to hide or defend to ward off an incoming attack, adjust to the party's layout being messed with, knock down a shield so that the boss may be damaged, Shoot the Medic First, or wait because their actions would be countered. In an age with games like Monster Hunter, Dark Souls, and World of Warcraft, it's hard to believe that these battles actually tripped people up back in the day.
    • Scarmiglione was itself a minor Kaizo Trap before Kaizo Traps became popular. The boss attacks you, you beat it, but once you take a few steps away, he announces that you did exactly what he wanted you to do and attacks you even stronger than before. Not only that, but he did so from behind, meaning your three squishy mages are in the front row. Some players actually didn't even know you could swap rows in battle since you had virtually no reason to so before that point, meaning they battled with Cecil's damage output reduced. Additionally, Revive Kills Zombie - something not everyone knew, as you had no reason to target the enemy with HEALING spells. Even when people played the remakes, almost everyone used the internet, had played it before, or knew someone else who had — so they knew to swap rows right before triggering the next event flag, then said "Scarmiglione is hard?" And compared to most Kaizo Traps... This boss is very forgiving.
  • Final Fantasy VI got rid of the Crystals, which were a key staple of Final Fantasy before. This was highly controversial at the time, and the game paved the way for the Anachronism Stew and Schizo Tech that the series is most widely known for. The exclusion of the Crystals is lost on most modern fans, and a common criticism is that the cast is shallow and unexplored and the gameplay is easy and simple. The game's Big Bad Kefka is frequently written off as a goofy Joker knock-off, but prior to Kefka, Final Fantasy villains fit the generic Tin Tyrant / Evil Overlord mold, and Kefka's insane wisecracks and clown-like appearance were a huge departure. Similarly, rather than turning into a generic monster as the Final Boss, Kefka became a Physical God, and the final battle had many parallels to The Divine Comedy. These days, JRPGs including Final Fantasy frequently have angelic and divine final bosses, and Faux Symbolism is par for the course, especially with Final Fantasy.
    • The opera scene is a particular victim — for gamers in 1994 who were used to getting virtually all speech and information in text format only, hearing any kind of vocalization was astonishing and groundbreaking. But while gamers at the time were able to forgive the midi/synth approximations of singing under the limits of the era, newer gamers used to full voice acting and lush musical vocals are more likely to find it cheesy. A good example is the fan parody Final Fantasy VI In a Nutshell, which initially has Celes brag about her "iconic opera scene," but makes the actual scene into a punchline.
    • The translation (along with that of Chrono Trigger) proved the partial Trope Namer for Woolseyism. The idea of a mostly-accurate translation was still new - to say nothing of one that punched up the dialogue to give it more character and attempted to translate over cultural ideas. It featured reasonably good writing and even jokes in an era where end screens could still get away with spelling it "CONGRATURATON." Nowadays, a competent translation is the bare minimum and a translation that reworks the original material tends to raise hackles, and Woolsey's translation has more than a few weird errors or oddities.
  • Final Fantasy VII in particular tends to suffer from this. At the time of its release, it was regarded as a revolutionary milestone and hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, and it’s still regarded as such, but the things it did would become copied by so many future games and RPGs that it can be hard to experience how unique they were.
    • Having a troubled protagonist (who may have Identity Amnesia) chase around an Unfettered Omnicidal Maniac might seem played out, but at the time you would've been hard-pressed to find many RPGs with that formula. While earlier Final Fantasy games had troubled heroes, Final Fantasy VII was the first with a hero who turns out to be an Unreliable Narrator questioning his existence.
    • The switch to a Science Fantasy and Urban Fantasy setting, in contrast to the traditional fantasy of previous games, was another thing that helped the game stand out as different. For many people, this was their introduction to the Urban Fantasy genre, and it even caused debate over whether or not it could be considered fantasy. This was way way different than what was seen at the time - even in Western RPGs, the closest you got was blatantly post-apocalyptic, not 20 Minutes into the Future like Final Fantasy VII was. Then later entries would take after it, leaving behind the pure fantasy of the first six games, and it became less special. To put it into perspective, the fact that a Genre Throwback in Final Fantasy XVI was medieval was actually seen as somewhat subversive.
    • While we had Darker and Edgier games as well as games set in different timeframes, Final Fantasy VII was a flat out Urban Fantasy set in a much more bleak setting as Midgar. Games with modern settings like EarthBound (1994) and Pokémon were much much Lighter and Softer, whereas VII detailed poverty, corporate greed, pollution, and environmental destruction in an almost eerily prophetic way. It would then become fairly normal for RPGs in general to tackle darker subjects, many of which are relevant to both the time they were made and later years.
    • On a technical level, the first few seconds of the opening sequence, with Aerith stepping out from a typical stone fantasy shrine with glowy lights and intricate carvings onto the streets of a dark, modern-day city, were initially meant to be shocking — and they were.
    • The Plotline Death of Aerith was originally a huge shock felt across the gaming industry, but is today perhaps the video-game example of It Was His Sled. It was not the first to kill off a party member for real (Final Fantasy II beat it to the punch, with Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V also featuring the mid-game deaths of major characters), but it was the first to try to portray such a death with a feeling of loss rather than it being an intense, dramatic moment. Not to mention the fact that unlike IV and V, the character who died wasn't an old man but a young woman who has plenty of Ship Tease with the main character and a special lineage that's crucial to the plot. Similar to the case of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man, it also looks less favourable in modern times with the increasing backlash against female characters getting Stuffed in the Fridge.
    • It's also hard for newer gamers to appreciate (in any sense of the word) the thoroughly screwed-up nature of the cast, even though FFVII was released long before BioWare made collections of tortured individuals de rigueur for Western RPGs. It even beat Planescape: Torment by two years, a game in which the thoroughly screwed-up nature of the cast is a major plot point.
    • Final Fantasy VII is frequently criticized for having a "Blind Idiot" Translation. While it does indeed suffer from a large number of spelling errors, wonky sentences, and outright mistranslations that future games in the series, and future JRPGs in general, would improve upon, the translation was very serviciable for its time. The character limit for names was increased so that the names for people and items wouldn't have to be abbreviated, there was a lack of censorship that allowed for cursing and mature themes to be discussed, and the plot managed to be understandable despite the Mind Screw nature of it in the second half. It also has a lot of personality, with very individual vocabularies and speech patterns for each of the characters - something even a lot of modern translations struggle with.
    • VII was the first FF where the characters, magical as they are, were supposed to directly reflect the real concerns of young people, with Cloud, Aeris and Tifa carrying heavy baggage from their teen years that still dominates their behaviour. This was groundbreaking at the time, and formed the template for nearly all later Final Fantasy games, particularly VIII and XV, which had the 'normalness' of their casts as a selling point. Nowadays, the use of fantastical happenings as a metaphor for the struggles of teenage identity is something you will see in any JRPG which features young characters, to the point that many tend to dismiss such themes as anime clichés.
    • One other thing that set this game apart at the time was the fact that the first bunch of characters you meet are basically ecoterrorists. The very first thing you do? Bomb a power plant. And your characters are depicted as being in the right for it - even though it may not be morally right. Even though some games did allow for an "Evil" path or let you play as an Anti-Hero, most of the time it was up to the player's control to make the character into such. These days, established main characters engaging in morally grey or even black things like ecoterrorism isn't anything new by any means.
    • Minigames as well - one reason Final Fantasy VII stood out back in the day was the sheer amount of mini-games. While Final Fantasy VII did not invent the concept of mini-games or the mini-games being part of the story, it was one of the first games that featured such a large amount - especially in an RPG. Most RPGs prior to VII (Both eastern and western) were pure RPG. If there were mini-games, it was often a simple card game or a few casino games such as slots. Games the engine could handle. Final Fantasy VII featured a literal arcade - in fact there's a reason the game is the Trope Namer for Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer.
    • People remember VII as being very foul-mouthed when the strongest word it uses is 'shit' and everything harder is Symbol Swearing. It was still the sweariest Final Fantasy for the 23 years before it was beaten by the extensive Obligatory Swearing in its own remake (which was then in turn beaten by Final Fantasy XVI), but years onward, it's difficult to appreciate just how shocking the swearing was. With no censorship from Sony, no public attention and no voice acting, the game was able to squeak fluent swearing past the radar at a time when many of the people who played it would never have played a game with swearing in it before (and certainly hadn't played an FF with any in). Compared to the Cluster F-Bomb-throwing Rated M for Money titles of the late 90s and early 00s, VII seems restrained and realistic.
    • Sephiroth, like Kefka before him, became a very popular and iconic villain because of how different he was compared to traditional villains in the series or RPGs in general; instead of an Evil Overlord, Evil Sorcerer, demon lord, or ancient evil entity, he is a handsome, white-haired Super-Soldier with a tragic backstory who went mad after a long series of misfortunes and becomes a Godhood Seeker with an angelic motif and transformation. However, his popularity was such that he codified the White Hair, Black Heart villain with light powers in RPGs, with Final Fantasy alone having several later villains modeled after him, and thus he is as likely to be dismissed as just another white-haired pretty boy villain.
    • For that matter, Sephiroth's final boss theme and the game's signature song, "One-Winged Angel," was among the most talked-about, if not THE most talked-about piece of game music for its time. At that point, video game music was thought of as bleeps and bloops (and for many, they still do), and here was this song with not only realistic-sounding-for-its-time orchestral instrumentation, but actual spoken vocals by a real choir. Video game music had never been this grand before. Ever since then though, actual orchestrated music, and original music with vocals, have become commonplace enough in AAA games (Nintendo even has its own orchestra, called the Super Mario Orchestra, which it now also uses for its B-tier franchises), that "One-Winged Angel" sounds rather messy, simplistic, and repetitive by comparison, though it still has a fair share of fans.
  • Final Fantasy X, while its gameplay, storyline, and music still hold up extremely well (and it's considered to have one of the best turn-based battle systems, soundtrack and even story in the series), it's hard to appreciate nowadays how much of a risk voice acting was back around the turn of the millennium. These days, it suffers a lot from Lip Lock (especially with Yuna) or Hong Kong Dub. The presentation itself also fell victim to this. In 2001, the game's opening was mind blowing, having fully motion captured character animations and subtle facial expressions. The "this is my story" scene was practically a tech demo of showing how far Squaresoft had come without having to totally rely on pre-rendered cinematics to have big emotional highlights with character models like prior games. But Technology Marches On, and within only three years after this game's release, other series rapidly caught up to and showed up Final Fantasy X in presentation, and by today's standards it becomes incredibly obvious where Square had to cut corners to get higher quality scenes elsewhere.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has, much like most other MMORPGs that have run for as long as it has, had this happen with itself. By Shadowbringers, people would often express annoyance at getting "A Realm Reborn" duties in the random Duty roulette since a lot of players were practically AFK during them, or they were just tired of running Crystal Tower again. As a result, plenty of duties from "A Realm Reborn" were redone so they are no longer as "mindless" as they once were and their design(s) do a better job of teaching player(s) about what the rest of the game would be like, as some duties were designed to be less linear and more "Maze-y".
  • In 1991, Final Fantasy Adventure was one of the darkest games ever made. Many of the characters you meet end up dead, and at best, the quest only delayed the inevitable. Playing it these days it's quite tame - primarily because a lot more games have done much much more bittersweet endings or even flat out downer endings, and tried much harder to really punch their audience.
  • The Final Fantasy Legend's leveling system was an improvement of the one in Final Fantasy II, and was subsequently improved in the following games, making the original look rather old by comparison.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Japan, the best-loved games are Marth's, having been the originals and with a lot of fans citing a love for the cast/world. For fans outside of Japan, though, the series effectively started six games later, with all the advancements made since then (including the weapon triangle, the Support system and the ability to see a unit's movement and attack range at the touch of a button rather than having to check their Move stat and counting spaces). Thus, international fans weren't impressed when the remake of the first game eschewed many of the newer features in favor of staying faithful to the original. The lack of the Support system (which gave the casts of the later games much of their characterization) is a particular sore spot.
  • This is even happening within its own series - someone used to the sheer number of support options available in Awakening (as well as the less Guide Dang It! ways to get them) will find the supports in Elibe to be much less rewarding. For example, Chrom in Awakening, who is the most limited in terms of his support options, still has more romance options than the main characters in Elibe and Sacred Stones, and won't lock out of getting them to S-Rank if he goes up to an A support with his best friend first.
  • This also happens between the two Elibe games. Because the west got the Sequel First (or rather, prequel), many going back and playing Binding Blade via Fan Translation find it feeling very primitive by comparison. All mission objectives are seize, Thieves can't promote, many weapons that are now staples of the series (the Tomahawk and Spear, for example) are enemy-only, axes have HORRIBLE accuracy even by their standards, character balance is overall very off, most characters are shameless copies of those from Marth's games, and the plot is very basic and formulaic (especially compared to its prequel, which has one of the more original plots in the series). And then there's the support system, which comes off as very basic compared to later games (for one, only Roy, the main character, has romantic supports). Binding Blade was, however, vital in shaping the series as we know it today, as not only did it introduce the support system, it was also the first Fire Emblem on a portable system, where the series now finds most of its success.
  • One of the criticisms levied at Fire Emblem Gaiden's remake, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia was that the map design is a little too "NES-Era", featuring larger maps but with enemies that are sometimes even less in number than your playable characters available. (And with only two or three types, sometimes.) Coming fresh off of Fates, which featured plenty of maps that left you outnumbered, outgunned, and some truly unique gimmicks, it felt a little simplistic. The game is still much more polished of a remake than Shadow Dragon was.
  • Mageknight404's ROM hack for Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade was actually one of the first hacks to do stuff like change around the event data, so that the characters were not actually just cutting the lines from a Game Boy Advance Fire Emblem game and replacing them with their own. However, playing it now, you'll notice that the characters are obviously splices or edits, while some of the custom faces fall right into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. In addition, the custom music will seem out of place, the events will seem weird, there are glitches (such as brigands with sword ranks) amongst other things like a Purposefully Overpowered character based on one of the sprite artists. However, it was merely a beta, after all, and the game was revamped and re-released, given a name change to The Last Promise, and is generally a vast step up from the original version. The idea of a main character who was a Jeigan was also a rather novel concept.
• Friday the 13th (NES): The Game Over screen, which informs the player that "YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD." Doesn't seem like a huge deal now, and many younger gamers assume that the game calling a defeated player "dead" has always been an everyday element of video games, but at the time of its release in 1989, it was taboo for video games in the United States to make references to death, due to games still being seen as children's toys. Player characters were never "dead", just "knocked out", "defeated", "finished", or similar euphemisms. So for this game to explicitly inform the player that they were dead was a big deal in its heyday. Nowadays, it's pretty normal for video games to tell a defeated player that their characters are dead (although some games avoid using "dead" to refer to a character with no hit points left to distinguish from a permanent Plotline Death).
• Front Mission was essentially Band of Brothers with giant robots with a bit of 24 mixed in. However, Square thought that westerners wouldn't appreciate such a story and had created a route meant to cater to the American Public with a more traditional anime inspired plot and another which is very similar to previous titles. Too bad they didn't realize that nowadays, moral greyness and protagonists with complex personalities are the norm, as seen with Front Mission Evolved.

G-P

• When Gex was released in early 1995, its sheer volume of voice samples was impressive. But even more impressive was that they were done by a professional comedian (until then, most video game voice work was done either in-house or by local talent). Those playing the game for the first time today are likely to find Gex's constant one-liners both annoying and outdated (expect lots of Totally Radical slang and unironic references to '90s pop culture like Full House). A matter not helped by the fact that his mouth doesn't move when speaking them, and they don't blend with the remaining soundwork in the game. So they sound more like external narrations than character quips.
• GITADORA was the first Rhythm Game series to simulate a rock band, featuring up to two players on the guitar component, GuitarFreaks, and one on the drum component, drummania. It was quite revolutionary back in 1999, when the rhythm game genre was still fairly fresh and Konami was picking up as the developer of rhythm games. However, Guitar Hero and Rock Band came along mid-next-decade to provide a number of Westerner-friendly staples such as full-length Western licenses and consoles in mind as opposed to arcades, and now GITADORA is seen by Western gamers as little more than a poor man's Rock Band, citing the lack of availability (No Export for You doesn't help) and the 2-minute song cuts (which are necessary due to the format of giving the player three to five songs per credit), as well as differences in guitar chart design.
• GoldenEye 007, one of the best Video Games based on a movie that didn't suck (in some ways, it was better than the movie), now suffers from this. At the time, the game was basically the first console First-Person Shooter done right^note though it wasn't the first to be positively reviewed or commercially successful and is, in many ways, the reason why the genre became so popular on consoles (before, it was almost entirely PC based). But it holds up poorly by today's standards because of its lack of online play (not its fault, since it was on the Nintendo 64), crude aiming system, heavy dose of Escort Missions, lack of voice acting (again, not its fault, it was on the Nintendo 64 and was an early game on the console to boot), large amount of linearity (which is ironic, since at the time GoldenEye was possibly the least linear game on the market), dated graphics, and inconsistent framerate. Ironically, there was another James Bond FPS for the N64 that vastly improved the graphics, controls, missions, and plot, but it's not nearly as well remembered as GoldenEye.
  • GoldenEye was the first time many, if not most, gamers of the day ever had something like a sniper rifle to play with. Today, it's hard to realize how cool it was to take your buddy out from 300 yards away in any FPS, not just a console game.
  • Also, while GoldenEye wasn't the first FPS to deviate from the "shoot everything that moves while collecting the occasional keycard" style of gameplay, it was the first such game to have significant mainstream appeal. While things like actual mission objectives (beyond just flipping switches and collecting keycards) and allies/hostages you don't (or shouldn't) shoot seem pretty standard now, they were actually quite revolutionary in 1997. The latter being a concept that would later be expanded upon in the aforementioned Half-Life.
  • A revolutionary aspect of GoldenEye's single player campaign that tends to be retrospectively overlooked is its artificial intelligence. In a time when artificial intelligence models in first-person shooters were usually limited to standing in place until alerted and then shooting at them in between randomly-generated movement in their direction, GoldenEye's more sophisticated AI (enemies dodged bullets, recognized noise, patrolled areas and moved to set off alarms upon seeing the player, etc.) was downright amazing. Unfortunately, after games like Half-Life and Halo further revolutionized AI routines in first-person shooters, the guards and enemies in GoldenEye seem downright moronic now, not least of all helped that long-time players have made actual shortcomings in their AI very well-known.
  • Ironically, GoldenEye was also largely responsible for instigating this trope with a game released just a few months prior: Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Upon release, Turok was among the most critically acclaimed games on the Nintendo 64, widely praised for its impressive weapons arsenal and lush/detailed jungle landscapes. Unfortunately, once GoldenEye was released and blew everybody away with all the traits mentioned above, Turok's flaws (namely its bizarre and non-configurable control scheme, ridiculously short draw distance, and over-emphasis on item collecting) became much more noticeable. While Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was also highly regarded upon release (due in no small part to its at-the-time mindblowing graphics), subsequent Turok games garnered less enthusiastic responses, with Turok Evolution often being credited as one of several games that bankrupted Acclaim Entertainment. After the 2008 Turok reboot garnered a lukewarm response from both critics and gamers alike, it's pretty safe to say that the series is now defunct.
• Golden Sun and its sequel are remembered very fondly due to being some of the first original titles on the Game Boy Advance period. Unfortunately, many things that they were pioneers of aren't really seen as too special twenty years later:
  • One of the reasons for their legacy is the fact that they were original titles on a handheld game - among the first on the Game Boy Advance period. Unless you were Pokémon? Most games released on a handheld were Gaidens... and played much more like something seen in The 16 Bit Era Of Console Video Games rather than what you could get on consoles.
  • Golden Sun, thanks to its pre-rendered graphics, also looked like something that you would have seen on the The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games. (In fact? It had the same software team as Shining the Holy Ark and Shining Force III) Handheld games just did not look like that at the time. These days, pre-rendering graphics and compressing them into sprites is generally seen as more work than necessary, and the look generally makes people compare them to plastic toys or clay.
  • The games themselves played a little more like their contemporaries as well - with hidden treasures to find, puzzles that were more than just pushing blocks, and the second game had you Opening the Sandbox in 2003. These days, it's seen as nothing special with people finding it a bit aggravating since the game had no way beyond a pen and paper of tracking your progress and gave you very little instruction on why you need to find three pieces of a Trident.
• Gothic was an Action-RPG with a handmade, fully-open world you could explore to your heart's content, and it came out more than one year before The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind... in Germany, where it's a huge deal with a massive cult following. It also featured full voice acting for every character, even the generic miners who had nothing relevant to say. Sadly, it took the game more than a year to come to the USA, and by then it was completely overshadowed by Morrowind (bad marketing didn't help either). Still, some of its innovations (such as having to find teachers to learn new skills when you levelled up, for example) have yet to be seen in any other game other than the ones made by Piranha Bytes.
• Upon release in 1998, Gran Turismo was a major step forward for the driving game genre. Until then, driving games were typically arcade-like racers with limited car or track selections and little in the way of customization beyond choosing "Manual" or "Automatic" transmission. Gran Turismo was probably the first driving game to put a heavy emphasis on almost RPG-like customization (even being lovingly called a "Car-PG" by some fans) and depth. Plus, while it wasn't the first racing game to emphasize realistic physics and car handling (Top Gear Rally and the original Need for Speed did it before), it was probably the first to emphasize realism without compromising accessibility or fun. By today's standards, the game's once awe-inspiring level of customization seems rather quaint, and the jagged low-resolution graphics look downright horrible compared to modern driving games. Nonetheless, Gran Turismo established the blueprint for the driving game genre, and its influence is still felt to this very day.
• Grand Theft Auto III was both revolutionary and hugely controversial when it came out in 2001. While games like Driver and Body Harvest^note The latter of which, incidentally, was made by DMA Design, the same studio that made GTA III and later became Rockstar North. had done Wide-Open Sandbox gameplay before, none came close to the scope and production values of GTA III. The game had respected Hollywood actors voicing characters both major and minor, and combined driving, exploration, and combat in a way that had no rival at the time. Players could run around an open world, steal cars and run down pedestrians with them, kill anybody they saw with a wide array of weapons, and pick up prostitutes to get health, earning it the award of "Most Offensive Game of the Year" from GameSpy and other publications. Nowadays, with many Wide-Open Sandbox games that have built upon GTA III's gameplay foundation, things like the clunky shooting mechanics, the Excuse Plot, and the long load times between areas of the city stand out more. The presence of Hollywood celebrities voicing characters isn't that impressive when nearly every AAA game released nowadays has big-name voice talent. Lastly, the edgy content seems tame in comparison to Manhunt, Saints Row, God of War, and the "No Russian" mission in Modern Warfare 2.
  • And, if you want to go back even further than Body Harvest or Driver, there's Quarantine (1994). This vehicular combat game was the very first 3D Wide-Open Sandbox. It had a massive (for its time) city to explore, pedestrians you could pick up (you were a cab driver) or kill, and missions scattered throughout the city that you took on to advance the plot. Plus, the game was violent and gory as Hell. However, games like GTA or Saint's Row make it seem normal.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was also revolutionary in that it was one of the first mass-market games ever made to feature a soundtrack made up almost entirely of well-known, licensed music tracks from more than one artist. Typically, a game either used in-house music (which tended to be fairly simplistic) or had a single artist or band (more often than not a fairly obscure one) produce the music. The fact that Vice City had nothing but licensed music^note well, for all but four songs in the entire soundtrack from many of the most famous artists of The '80s, across multiple genres, blew the minds of both reviewers and the public at large, and is credited as being a big part of the game's '80s vibe.
• Guild Wars, while not the first MMORPG to have a "plot" to it, was very notable back in 2005 for the fact that a lot of its plot wasn't told via in-game books and sidequests and had the player follow a horizontal narrative. The fact that there were cutscenes that had your characters speak with the NPCs back in 2005 was surprising - or the fact that the game had a Final Boss and an ending sequence with more adventures on the rise. In fact, it was fully possible to have beaten the game's "story content" almost entirely solo - a novelty at the time. Now? A lot of MMORPGs have a semblance of a "personal story / main plot" while some can even be played like a glorified single-player RPG - games like Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy XIV, The Secret World, Guild Wars 2, and even later expansions of World of Warcraft took a lot of cues from games like this. These days? Looking at Guild Wars, the cutscenes come off as clunky, Cliche-ridden, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious.
  • The Henchmen and Heroes themselves were also very innovative for their time. They allowed players playing a class suffering from Crippling Overspecialisation (Mesmers) or healers (known for their low DPS) to go through the entire story and level up from levels one to twenty (The max level). In most other MMORPGs at the time, healing, support, debuff, and other specialised characters were typically a rare sight at max level due to the difficulties of leveling them up thanks to players needing a team to even survive. Modern MMORPGs have introduced other ways for characters playing tank and support classes to encourage players to play them, for better and for worse.
• Half-Life, being the first modern, highly scripted first-person shooter with adaptive AI, now seems somewhat typical after being endlessly copied, ripped off and modified by just about every FPS that came after it. It's not for nothing that Civvie 11 called it "the Citizen Kane of shooters"; it seems like an above-average FPS nowadays because it laid the template for what a modern FPS looks like.
  • Half-Life also popularized the seemingly simple concept of placing weapons in realistic locations (weapon lockers, dead security guards, dropped by enemies that use that weapon) rather than the floating weapons often displayed on literal pedestals of Doom or Quake. SiN did this too, and was released slightly earlier, but didn't enjoy the same level of popularity.
  • The grunt AI in Half-Life was a big deal at the time. Most FPS ranged enemy strategies amounted to "walk towards player -> stand in place shooting gun while player is in line of sight -> occasionally move in random direction or use secondary attack." The grunts would stick together in squads, lay down covering fire for each other, retreat after taking heavy damage, hide behind cover, throw grenades specifically to flush the player out of cover, and many other little touches that made them feel like actual adversaries rather than simple obstacles. And this was variable, too, with the game's enemies all showing noticeably different tactics and even a clear sense of factionalism. Today, their AI comes across as downright stupid, with them running into obvious traps or the player's gunfire, occasionally killing each other or themselves, and utilizing covering fire in part to distract the player from the fact that they can't move and shoot at the same time.
  • The overall sense of realism in the series is another thing that's hard to understand. Half-Life took place within an actual environment, full of friendly NPCs and with a clear arc to its storyline despite having no cutscenes. Its Scenic-Tour Level immediately established a sense of time and place, as did the transition from a peaceful environment to a wartorn one. The first weapons you get are scavenged off dead security guards. Other FPS games of the time usually started you off with a gun and a pack of ammo, shooting something in the face in the first ten seconds. And while every other shooter of the era was level-based and featured little more than hints of connective tissue, Half-Life simply seamlessly loaded its chapters into each other, very often allowing you and sometimes even requiring you to retread previous levels after accomplishing an objective in another one, creating an immersive narrative. But today, if anything, Half-Life feels like a throwback, with it featuring many things that later games got rid of in the name of realism: lack of an extensive cover system, the ability to carry all weapons, health being based on a static amount that is increased by medkits and armor, and many other things. Gordon came across as vulnerable by the standards of other shooter protagonists, but now he seems superhuman. And while Black Mesa once felt like a genuine place, now, people mostly just notice the weird setpieces and environments that suggest Black Mesa was designed by lunatics. Freeman's Mind made much of its humor off things like the labyrinthine design, the inexplicably locked doors, the ridiculously unsafe navigation methods, the room that exists only to smash boxes...
  • Its sequel, while absolutely revolutionary in 2004, now seems cliched when just about every single other FPS game now contains the level of physics, graphics, vehicles and what-have-you that made it such a hit at the time.
  • The idea of being able to pick up nearly every single item and have it react appropriately within the game's physics engine simply didn't happen in games at the time. Objects like bottles, cinderblocks, and crates shatter, barrels and planks of wood float while rocks sink, and every object has a defined weight. Plenty of setpieces and even the game's most iconic weapon all rely on making use of the various properties of the game's items, like making a ramp out of a wooden plank by setting cinderblocks as a weight on one end. Nowadays, the Source engine is very outdated, the physics feel floaty and buggy (vehicles are practically made of foam rubber), and many modern players are just tapping their feet at the sequences where you have to weigh down a seesaw or stack a bunch of boxes to climb higher.
  • Though the facial animation tech in Half-Life 2 has aged extremely well, it just looks above-average nowadays. In 2004, there was about a one-in-three shot that a character wouldn't even open their mouth while talking outside of prerendered cutscenes, and when they did, they would more often than not simply switch between a few preset facial expressions and flap their jaws. The bit where Alyx says "Doctor Freeman, I presume?", displaying subtle eyebrow and lip movements and seamlessly switching between amused relief at Gordon's condition and alertness when an alarm goes off in the distance, was practically a moneyshot in those days.
  • It's been believed by some fans that the reason Valve doesn't release Half-Life 3 is because the existing franchise concepts would be deemed too generic nowadays, and creating a third game that delivers the same level of monumental innovations as its predecessors is a daunting task. Indeed, Half-Life: Alyx more or less proved these theories true, by way of being a major leap forward for VR games.
• Halo:
  • Most shooters nowadays have Regenerating Health ^note Halo is one of the few that accounts for regenerating shields in its story; health is depleted separately in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach and does not replenish on its own, let you carry only two weapons at once, use the weapon you're holding as a melee weapon instead of using a separate weapon that you have to switch to (e.g., a crowbar), allow you to throw grenades without making you switch to them first, have enemies drop their weapons and equipment when they die instead of just having weapons pre-placed on the stage, use vehicles during the stage without being gated by a loading bar, etc. All of these elements were around before Halo, but never all in the same game. Halo: Combat Evolved was all that in one game, and on a console. It was also the first console game to include networked multiplayer, which soon gave birth to online multiplayer.
  • For the console players, it was the first time ever being allowed to multiplay through local network, up to 16 players at a time, by hooking up TV sets and systems. Network play over the Internet for PC games was available since Doom, but it was considerably harder to set up properly, and even some of the more famous late-90s shooters that were designed specifically for online multiplayer, like Quake III: Arena and Counter-Strike still predate true online multiplayer for PC by a couple of years; in fact, what really constitutes a Seinfeld is Unfunny option is the server browser. It is unthinkable today to ship a multiplayer game without a server browser or online match-making system on consoles, but there was a time where you had to manually search for games, and in that regard Halo was indeed the first FPS on console to feature a robust match making system.
  • For those whose prior FPS experience was limited to console games, the concept of moving in one direction while aiming in another direction was revolutionary. The Xbox could handle this because the controller had two analog sticks, while previous systems (like the Nintendo 64) offered one or none^note the PlayStation's Dual Shock controller did as well, but that came about a few years after the system itself, unlike that of the Xbox, and the system wasn't very big on first-person shooters, much less popular and/or influential ones like the N64.
  • It's hard to overstate just how much of a shock the introduction of the Flood was in Halo: Combat Evolved. The Flood came out of nowhere and represented a wild tonal shift from the ongoing fight against the Covenant. No one expected this bright, colorful, mega budget killer app first-person shooter to introduce an enemy straight out of a horror game into the middle of its narrative. It became easy to forget the impact of that twist as the Flood persisted as a threat over the rest of the original trilogy. And as videogame narratives evolved and grew more complex, these sorts of shocking twists became more common and expected, and even wild swings in tone and genre within a game grew much less surprising. Gravemind, a massive sentient plant that controlled the Flood and spoke in iambic heptameter, was a profoundly weird character when introduced in the sequel and elicited a lot of criticism as a result. Nowadays, that sort of off-the-wall weirdness is much more accepted by gamers.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft:
  • The voice acting and visuals of the game were outright revolutionary. Each individual minion has some kind of personality to them because of their voice acting, and the detailed battlegrounds and artwork made the game feel very much alive. It was the first card game to be immersive, which was quite the draw. Every Card Battle Game since then has included these in the hopes of taking Hearthstone's crown, and among the fanbase they're mostly taken for granted nowadays, to the point of many asking for an option to turn them off, culminating in the infamous Shudderwock, which duplicates so many card abilities upon being played that it's liable to take longer than the next player's turn is allowed to.
  • The game itself was also free to play. Most card games are known for being quite expensive, especially to keep up with the changing meta as more sets are released. Because of this, most card battle games these days are "required" to release "Free" or at least free to start - because most players would be discouraged from seeing a single price tag, when multiple card games can be "Tried out" with no cost to the player. Additionally, the fact that the player could purchase packs without spending a cent was quite a novel thing. This is cited as one of the reasons why Artifact failed.
• A decade and change after its release, Heavy Rain is primarily remembered for its many Narmy Memetic Mutations and its creator's increasingly controversial public profile. While all of this is fair criticism, it's easy to overlook the fact that it was the first story-rich choose-your-own-adventure video game to gain a lot of attention, and was actually praised for its narrative at the time despite its ropier elements. Indeed, it's likely that other big-name titles that followed suit (such as The Walking Dead (Telltale), Life Is Strange, and Until Dawn) wouldn't have been made over the next few years if Heavy Rain hadn't laid the groundwork and created appetite for the genre. Unfortunately, the fact that those games were all praised for their superior writing, acting, and animation really exposed a lot of the weaknesses in those areas which Heavy Rain possessed.
• Hydlide, originally released in 1984 for the PC88 computer in Japan, was one of the first Action RPGs ever (along with Dragon Slayer from the same year), but by 1989, when the NES port was first released in North America, it was much more primitive than similar games, especially The Legend of Zelda and Ys series. As a matter of fact, both of those series were influenced by Hydlide in the first place, so much so that after Hydlide released in North America in 1989, it was wrongly accused of being a Zelda clone. Despite its negative reception in North America, Hydlide had a mostly positive reception in Japan, where it was seen as a revolutionary game (and not mistaken for being a Zelda rip-off, since Zelda didn't exist yet).
• Hydro Thunder has fallen victim to this. It's very hard to imagine how it was innovative when every aspect of it (outside of the boat racing) has been imitated (mostly very poorly) and used. Mention it to anyone who wasn't around or into the arcade scene in the late '90s and you'll be bound to hear a bunch of groans complaining how they've seen it all before.
• Back when the series first hit arcades and Xbox-360, the elaborate, choreographed, motion captured dancing in The iDOLM@STER was a very novel concept. In an age when rhythm games with mocap dancing are a dime a dozen and can even be downloaded "for free" on mobile devices, it doesn't seem all that impressive to newcomers.
• Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy gave us the first ever seamless 3D open world, without a single loading screen, not even when using the game's (admittedly basic) fast travel system. Nowadays this is pretty standard.
• Jazz Jackrabbit was mindblowing when it released on PC's in mid-1994, as until then, a PC platformer with gameplay and graphics that rivaled even the finest console platformers of that era was practically unheard of. While it certainly wasn't the first PC platformer, it was the first to have the buttery smooth gameplay and excellent level design of games like Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog. Combined with gorgeous 2D pixel art and an excellent soundtrack, the game single-handedly made it clear that the PC could indeed to be a viable outlet for side scrolling hop-and-bop platformers. Today, with PC's having long been note-for-note harmonized with gaming consoles and high quality 2D platformers being a dime-a-dozen on them, it might be difficult for newcomers to see what made Jazz Jackrabbit so special in 1994.
• Joe Montana II Sports Talk Football, released back in 1991, was the first football video game to actually have continous commentary.
• Jurassic Park: Trespasser. Granted, part of the reason it was hard to get into was the fact that it was an Obvious Beta. But at the time, a game like that was actually highly ambitious. Tying back into Half-Life 2, the physics in that game wouldn't have been possible without the physics engine from this game as inspiration.
• Kanon was a huge success when it first came out in 1999, as it was the first H-Game to prove that a Visual Novel focusing more on plot than porn could be commercially viable. At one point it was the second highest-selling PC game in Japan, even staying in the national top 50 several times afterwards. However, with a lot of time having passed since its release and having been adapted several times (two anime adaptations, two manga adaptations and a light novel adaptation), nowadays most people would fail to see what made it so special.
• KanColle ushered in a new era of Moe Anthropomorphism games with a large stable of artists and voice actors/actresses depicting numerous characters. Years afterwards, while the game still commands a sizeable playerbase and fanwork production, its obscure, almost entirely Random Number God-driven gameplay, lack of a detailed, engaging storyline and inaccessibility to English-speaking or even other East Asian audiences makes it look quite dated and has led to many newer gamers shunning it in favour of titles like Azur Lane or Girls' Frontline that do have superior player control, narrative and English support.
• kill.switch was an immensely influential entry into the Third-Person Shooter genre: Though not the first game to feature cover-based shooting, its implementation of the mechanic is the one everyone would imitate: the game's cover mechanics would inspire blockbuster mega-hit Gears of War and lead to a shift in shooter design, so much that in 2020, it's easier to name modern TPS that don't feature some sort of formal cover system, even if it's not the focus on the game. However, with games like the aforementioned Gears of War iterating on the controls and cover mechanics, modern reviews of kill.switch are often not at all complimentary toward the game, with complaints directed toward its repetitive nature, comparatively clunky controls and production values, which were drab and low budget even for their time. Even at the time, it was treated as beter-than-average, and mostly praised for being a straight action game, by comparrison to the then ubiquitous stealth action games imitating the Metal Gear Solid franchise (and much maligned trend of a tacked on Stealth-Based Mission).
• The original Sierra games like King's Quest were revolutionary at the time, and the American games industry would not be the same if Sierra adventure games had not existed, yet, even a relatively short time after the originals came out, everyone with a computer and their dog could program a game like that. It was when they grew the beard with King's Quest III and onward, introducing such things as evolving plots, characters that functioned as people rather than just obstacles, varying flesh-out environments and graphics that actually looked liked there was an actual artist on board rather than a 5-year old with a paint program that they began to stand out as legitimate products rather than just simple high school projects. In fact, King's Quest was often used to train new programmers, and while it shows with one and two, take a look at three or even four that look far more polished.
• King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! was a huge step forward for the series, featuring significantly more detailed and beautiful artwork, full voice acting, and replacing the text parser with a more intuitive point-and-click system. Now that all these things are the norm for adventure games (or gaming in general in the first two points' case), it's easier to notice the game's flaws, such as the voice acting being very unprofessional, and some of the puzzles making little sense. (Most infamously, using a pie to kill a yeti.)
• King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow was and still is considered by many to be the series apex. But most notably? Two of the game's biggest draws seem quite lacklustre today:
  • The fact that it had a song associated with it. ("Girl in the Tower") This wasn't just MIDI music - but an actual song people could request on the radio. This doesn't seem like anything special today, but this was a big big thing in The '90s since games just did not do this at the time.
  • The CD-ROM version offered voice acting by Hollywood actors - as opposed to people in the office like the previous game. This was, as mentioned, huge in The '90s. Both because voice in video games was an infancy, but also because it had Hollywood actors. These days however, the voice acting can come off as rather Dull Surprise since the Limited Animation meant that the actors had very very little guidance for how to act. Gabriel Knight displays a similar foible.
• The first two numbered entries of Kingdom Hearts wrote the book on Action RPG combat. Before Kingdom Hearts, Action RPGs more resembled The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which was more akin to real time D&D than something like Dark Souls. Kingdom Hearts really put the emphasis on observing enemies to gain an idea of their attack patterns, dodging and blocking their attacks while waiting for an opening in which damage could be dealt safely. Those who are willing to put in the time to master it will find that the combat of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II have aged phenomenally well. However, others feel that the Command Menu system, which imposes a Final Fantasy-esque UI onto real time combat, is clunky and archaic, which results in the combat feeling dated compared to those that came after it such as the aforementioned Dark Souls.
• Kirby's Adventure wasn't just innovative for the overall Kirby franchise, but it also pushed the upper limits of the NES; it features many large and detailed sprites, great use of color, a catchy and varied soundtrack, lush animated backgrounds (including the famous rotating towers in Butter Building), and extra features such as save files and a Boss Rush mode. In fact, much of this was uncommon even on 16-bit systems of the time; nowadays, it can be easy to take all of this for granted and see Adventure as a typical NES game.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda, compared to the newer games, would look like it's missing a lot of the elements that are staples of the series (such as towns full of NPCs, traveling by way of a horse or vehicle, and lots of dialogue and cutscenes) but at the time, it was an epic adventure the likes of which was almost completely unheard of in a console game. Why? Because you had a free-range environment, a whole arsenal of inventory items and needed a save feature just to finish it (this was an early NES game, and most of those games at the time were the kind you could finish in a single sitting [at least in principle], or used a password system). The save feature in particular is nothing remarkable anymore, since save features are now taken for granted in video games to the point where a title not having any form of autosave is seen as archaic by some.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was the first Zelda game to add more intricate lore and characters for the series, and also introduced what would become the series' classic formula for the next twenty years (get three MacGuffins, major plot twist, collect some more MacGuffins, then defeat the final boss). It was one of the most epic gaming adventures ever at the time of its release. Nonetheless, because its innovations became the standard for the franchise, and its "First Act-Master Sword-Plot Twist-Second Act" plot structure has been repeated time and again for later games, newcomers may have a hard time understanding why ALTTP was a big deal.
  • From a technical standpoint, The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games were actually rather impressive for the time they were released, being one of the first games in 1993 on a console to feature animated cutscenes with voice acting. However, most of these technical achievements were lost on players due to the fact that most people weren't aware of their existence until the mid-2000s, which by that point, people were already used to more professional cutscenes in games, causing the cutscenes here to be judged as ridiculous.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask were a spectacular Video Game 3D Leap at the time, and are the base for every third-person game that exists now, having introduced features such as the now ubiquitous Camera Lock-On. However, just like Super Mario 64, the low-poly graphics and mostly square environments don't look nearly as good today, especially when compared to later entries. The 3D remakes... remedied this, depending on who you ask. On the note of the Camera Lock-On, this was seen as a huge step forward for gaming in general, as it finally allowed players a sense of accuracy and strategy when it came to combat. Thanks to the multitudes of action games that have since refined and expanded what was seen (including later entries in the Zelda series itself), the usage in the Nintendo 64 games can come across as rather clunky and unintuitive.
  • OoT's spiritual successor The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess suffered from this for a time. It was highly anticipated and unanimously praised at its time of release for being a return to Ocarina of Time's beloved formula after the unconventional and controversial (at the time) Majora's Mask and The Wind Waker. Its Real Is Brown aesthetic was also praised for being a return to the "mature" Zelda style fans had been clamoring for, especially since The Wind Waker and The Minish Cap had raised fears that the series was falling into the Animation Age Ghetto. However, by the time Skyward Sword released, Twilight Princess was more contested for those very reasons: some feeling that its formula was too derivative and that its "realistic" graphics have aged poorly.
• Live A Live was and still is a very unique game in its own ways. However, its animations and the graphics have not aged well at all, especially when compared to Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI which followed it . They look very janky and slow in comparison, and the work of the different illustrators doesn't really translate that well to the small sprite size (Which is why the HD-2D remake had so much love put into the graphics). The concept itself was also quite unique for an RPG, it comes off as almost like a crossover with people from seven completely unrelated plotlines all with different illustration styles coming together to fight a Greater-Scope Villain. These days, it isn't anything special, especially after other crossovers entered the mainstream.
• More than 15 years after the release of The Longest Journey, a modern-day gamer might be surprised to find that back in the day, this game was rated "M" — perhaps the only reason it was rated so was the innuendos between April and Flipper, as well as a part where you have to drop aphrodisiac into somebody's coffee. Which, today, are pretty mild. If released today, The Longest Journey would get a "T" rating. Another good example of the times changing is the fact that Fire Emblem Fates, a game released in the west in 2016, got away with not one but two gay options yet still manages to have a "T" rating... on top of all the innuendo, risqué character designs, and the infamous Skinship feature. (Which had to be removed in the international versions due to different ratings standards anyway) Even without the "Skinship" feature that was removed, the sheer amount of content that Fates DID get away with is pretty amazing, given how much it would have been Bowdlerized only ten years before.
• Bungie's Marathon series, or Pathways into Darkness, were among the first FPS games to feature a complex storyline that drove the gameplay, alternate fire, and the ability for computer players to move the mouse in order to rotate their character's view (including the ability to look up and down and side to side without restrictions). By today's standards, though, it's hard to believe that these games were once revolutionary.
• Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was the first FPS that deliberately set out to be "cinematic". The endless imitators that followed, Call of Duty series most prominent of all^note though COD was made by former MOH producers, have led to its 10th anniversary and impact going nearly forgotten.
• Mega Man 2 has fallen under this. Upon its release, it was praised for refining the various aspects of the franchise, such as establishing the standard 8 Robot Masters to battle, Energy Tanks for on-the-go healing, special items that you get for clearing certain stages that make navigation easier, and a password system that allows you to quit the game and pick up where you left off later. However, nowadays, there is an emerging group of people that see the game much less fondly for reasons such as its dated appearance, high difficulty, and the extremely broken Metal Blade.
• The first Mega Man Battle Network game definitely fits this trope, especially if you've played even the second and third games (considered the best with the fifth and sixth often competing). It was released in 2001, when the Game Boy Advance was still a very new format. Nowadays, it can practically pass for a touch-screen telephone game with how bare-bones it is compared to even the second, which introduced style changes for replay, the third which added customization outside of and in addition to style changes, and so on and so on until you get the Surprisingly Improved Sequel of the fifth and sixth. It can only compare to the terrible fourth game. It practically seems like an Obvious Beta when you play it, nowadays (very few wood chips, HP gets recovered, bosses top out at a thousand HP, game just gets disgustingly easy). The irony is when you look up reviews of the Battle Network series as a whole, you find those rating these games consider the first to be the best one, and the sequels all derivative copies, despite everything that was brought to the table by them.
• The ice bucket from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Whilst little pieces of 3D interaction had been on the PC for some time, back on the PlayStation 2 in 2001 the idea that you could shoot a bucket full of ice off a minibar and watch each individual cube slowly melt at varying speeds depending on their proximity to each other right before your eyes was so amazing that some period magazine reviews supplied screenshots of the event or advised you to save beforehand just so you could watch it a second time. Needless to say, it's unlikely anyone today would be quite so enthusiastic.
• Metroid:
  • Samus Is a Girl. So what's the big deal? Well, nowadays it's easy to forget that the original game was released at a time when female protagonists (or any female character fitting any trope besides Damsel in Distress) in video games were essentially unheard of besides Ms. Pac-Man. Even the trend of required token female characters in fighting games hadn't started yet. A rather dull twist today was one hell of a shocker at the time.
  • The game itself also suffers from this, as Samus's jumping is floaty, you take lots of knockback from damage, you can't crouch or shoot diagonally, many of the rooms look the same, there's no map you can reference, and you can only save when you die, after which you must write down a complicated password and then grind back all the health you've lost because, whether you're starting a new game or loading a save through a password, you only start with 30 health. However, this was the first ever platformer of such a scale, back when going any other direction than right in a platformer was unthinkable. While the environments don't change up much over the game, this allowed for a very expansive overworld for an NES cart, by far being one of the biggest games for the NES, and helped set the Metroidvania genre into motion.
• Certain custom adventure maps for Minecraft can fall under this trope, since updates are constantly adding new features that make it possible to craft more in-depth adventures. Well-known maps like Herobrine's Mansion and Wrath of the Fallen may seem a bit clunky and simplistic by modern Minecraft standards, but they were the first maps to exploit tools like MCEdit and command blocks to their full potential to create custom enemies, bosses, and armor sets.
• Monster Hunter:
  • For anyone who has become a fan of the series since the second generation and/or onward, the first-generation of games (the very first installment in particular) admittedly feel very outdated mechanically, with many of its features being difficult to master due to the absence of the quality-of-life improvements added over time. However, this doesn't account for how massive a deal the series already was for its time, especially in Japan, and at the end of the day these early games still laid the blueprint for the staples and core elements that are now renowned, and the series was already inspiring Follow the Leader games from other series as a result.
  • Players who got into the series through later games in the series may scratch their heads wondering why Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (an Updated Re-release and Expansion Pack of Monster Hunter Freedom 2) in particular even has the reputation it has amongst old-school MonHun fans, due to FU's dated controls (most infamously, the game, much like the PSP MonHun games before it, mandates a rather unusual and uncomfortable grip on the D-pad to move the camera and analog nub for character movement) and graphics, and it doesn't help that the game only has ad-hoc mode available for multiplayer and no online infrastructure-based multiplayer, which mandates a solo run of the game's multiplayer-tuned content if one doesn't live near other players by chance^note Or use third-party tools like XLink Kai, which allow LAN-based multiplayer games to be played over the Internet. While most veterans of this game won't deny that it has its share of glaring problems that have caused it to age poorly, at the time, FU was seen as a very ambitious game for having every single monster and almost every single map in the mainline games prior to it (which is no small feat given that the PSP's Universal Media Discs have less storage space than the DVD discs used by some PS2 games), and for being a culmination of the core aspects of the series; as a result, it became one of the best-selling PSP games alongside its successor Monster Hunter Portable 3rd.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The series its depiction of digitized characters mutilating, decapitating, and just plain murdering each other with their Fatalities caused quite a stir during the early 1990s with both players and parents. Nintendo caved in to the Moral Guardians when it came to "their" version of the game for the Super NES, which had all the blood removed and some of the Fatalities Finishing Moves changed, resulting in significantly less units sold than its uncensored Sega Genesis counterpart. Mortal Kombat could be cited as the game that single-handedly created the ESRB. Nowadays, the violence of the Mortal Kombat series seems cartoony and tame compared to some of the more disturbing games released since the rating system has been established, such as Manhunt and Silent Hill, or even the newer games in the franchise itself.
  • The game seems almost like a gimmick nowadays, with its graphic violence and intriguing atmosphere/storyline hiding an otherwise primitive fighting system, both of which can now be found in more complex games. Mortal Kombat 4 especially suffers from this. While the game was nothing special in the gore department, the use of swift good-looking 3D graphics made it a successful game. If you check the reviews of the time, it usually got pretty decent scores (6.5/10 to 8.5/10). Most people nowadays consider it a horrible game, forgetting that it was the first Mortal Kombat game to do 3D well.
  • The digitized graphics were widely touted as unprecedentedly realistic (contributing further to the above), and a major selling point over Street Fighter II. Characters had realistic proportions and looked like real people, which was still incredibly uncommon at the time. Show them to someone today, and they'd be less likely to point out the realism and more likely to point out the low resolution, the choppy animation, and the fact that the characters look like gymnasts in Halloween costumes. Though the debate on which has the better gameplay will probably last forever, it's hard for anyone to argue today that Street Fighter II looks worse.
• With modern processing technology, it can be hard to believe that Myst was once one of the most beautiful games on the market. Its graphics aren't the only thing that hasn't aged well.
• The Apple ][ game Mystery House, released by Sierra in 1980, practically created the graphical Adventure Game genre, and inspired other programmers around the world to create their own. Even compared with slightly later games of the same generation, it looks hardly worthy of the commercial publication it received.
• Night Trap also helped cause the ESRB to be formed, or was one of the prime motivators. Seeing it now, it's amazing to think of how it was supposed to be so offensive on the Sega CD. Of course, even then, there wasn't any actual violence (implied, not actually shown), and many of the things that were shown were so fantastical people couldn't possibly replicate it (as it was filmed). However, the sex... oh boy... a girl in a nightgown that looked like something in the '50s. As a demonstration of just how incredibly tame the game has become now, the 25th Anniversary Edition was downgraded to a very bog standard Teen rating, despite featuring much higher resolution video quality than the original Sega CD release.
• Oregon Trail of course evolved beyond the simple game it started off as. From just the second edition, the player was able to select more than three careers (many of which all had their own abilities and different starting amounts, such as how a tailor had a built-in tailoring ability to make clothes last longer; whereas any carpenter related job would have an easier time fixing broken wagon parts), was required to buy different types of food, could select from different draft animals, was able to trade for specifics, could fish (albeit in a Guide Dang It! way), could select different starting points and destinations, was able to pick options to treat (or aggravate) ailments, could get more than just dysentery.... And it only got more and more complex from there.
• The pixel art style of Owlboy fell victim to this, as a result of a very Troubled Production. When the game was first announced in 2007, post-SNES/Sega Genesis games with pixel art, while not nonexistant (e.g. Cave Story), were fairly uncommon outside the realm of handheld consoles. The game then spent nearly an entire decade in Development Hell until it was finally released in November 2016, by which point the Indie Game industry was in full swing and many other games with pixel art had already been released, with Terraria, Towerfall, Shovel Knight and Undertale being just four of many examples. While Owlboy's beautiful art style has been highly praised, its long time in Development Hell meant the pixel art didn't stand out as much as it would have if the game had been able to be released a few years earlier.
• Pac-Land was actually a groundbreaking game when it was first released in 1984. It was the first side-scrolling platforming game, utilized parallax-scrolling before many consoles were even capable of natively doing it (though Pac-Land wasn't the first game to utilize this trick), and was even the first mascot platformer. However, games like Super Mario Bros. (which itself was influenced by Pac-Land) further refined the platforming genre, making Pac-Land look dated in comparison with the game's rudimentary control scheme (two buttons to move left and right instead of a joystick/D-pad) and its level-design being simplistic for today's standards. These days, Pac-Land is seen as archaic, but even then it still gets some respect from some fans (as its appearance as a stage in the later Super Smash Bros. games shows) because if there was no Pac-Land, there would be no Super Mario Bros.
• PaRappa the Rapper was a major innovation back in 1997, because no one else had seen a Rhythm Game before (this was before even DanceDanceRevolution), and the Paper People graphics was considered revolutionary for a game back then. Years later, Paper Mario would re-revolutionize Paper People graphics, and further rhythm games would re-revolutionize the rhythm game genre. Parappa's simplistic rhythm mechanic is considered completely obsolete, as every rhythm game after it uses a better system than "Press a certain button at basically random times". On top of that, PaRappa and each of its sequels would feel unforgivably short, as no game in the series has ever had more than 8 songs, meaning you could finish any PaRappa game within an hour even at a low skill level. Compare that with modern rhythm games, which have at least 30 songs, with best-selling franchises having hundreds per game. And while it's the norm for rhythm games to either have licensed soundtracks or get record industry professionals to do original songs, Parappa's songs were done in-house and have silly lyrics that make no sense outside the context of the game, as parodied Robot Chicken.
• Parasite Eve is usually seen as a generic JRPG with primitive graphics and having a generic story. What most people tend to gloss over is the graphics engine used in the game was to test its capabilities and it would later be used for the graphics engine in Final Fantasy VIII. The character models were realistically proportioned so that they looked like actual people rather than exaggerated cartoon figures and the special effects used for special attacks had a lot of flair to them, which would pave the way for the special effects in later Final Fantasy titles on the PlayStation. While having an RPG in a modern setting is old news by today's standards, a JRPG taking place in a real life city and basing its story on scientific horror (mutated mitochondria rebelling and taking over the world) was considered mind blowing at the time.
• Phantasy Star gave birth to a lot of the tropes of JRPGs in general, including the mash-up of sci-fi and fantasy elements, customizing party lineups by swapping out party members, and the emotionally shocking but dramatically effective storyline deaths of important protagonists^note  Technically, Final Fantasy II had protagonists meet their demise over the course of the story but they were the fourth party member and not any of the main three. Now it's all par for the course. In addition, while the Phantasy Star games were generally Darker and Edgier than the Final Fantasy games of their day, ever since Final Fantasy VII, the majority of RPGs have been at least as grim as anything in the quadrilogy. It does technically hold onto one claim to fame, though it is unfortunately at home in the 'Dark Horse' of the original quadrilogy. And that is a branching storyline caused by marital succession. Granted, such a thing is probably a massive pain in the arse to script then implement, so it is no surprise few others have a constantly refreshing cast of characters.
• The original Pico Flash games on Newgrounds were the pinnacle of Flash 3 programming, but are very primitive nowadays, to the point where Newgrounds creator Tom Fulp had to heavily reedit and rerelease them in 2006 just so that they would run properly on newer computers. That's to say nothing of the gratuitous gore, swearing, violence, and lewd humor, which were edgy Black Comedy in 1999 but can read as very immature and fairly tame by today's standards.
• Player Unknowns Battlegrounds: In an amazingly short time, the game was hit by this. Despite launching the late 2010s Battle Royale games craze, the game's aesthetic was one of generic realism, using store-bought assets to decorate itself, which did little to make itself notable in front of games with more personality (like the cartoony Fortnite or sci-fi Apex Legends). It still manages to be one of the top 5 most popular Battle Royale game due to the sheer size of playerbase, but many don't see the appeal to it besides the large player base.
• Pokémon:
  • The Generation I games were huge and ambitious by the standards of a Game Boy game, with the games introducing the series's innovative mechanics of capturing enemy Pokémon to use yourself and adapting RPG battle mechanics into a symmetrical player vs. player format. When compared to later games in the series, however, they can easily come across as feature-barren, plotless, extremely glitchy, and far too easy, with enemy Pokémon suffering from terrible movesets and highly exploitable Artificial Stupidity.
  • Generation II of Pokémon games (and to a lesser extent, their remakes) provokes this reaction from younger fans who got into the series from Generation III or higher, with many of the changes that were considered groundbreaking to older fans coming across as seemingly negligible to them.
    • For starters - the game being in full-blown colour. At the time of Gold and Silver's release, this was considered monumental as Generation I was entirely in black and white. Those who got into the franchise after Gold and Silver, however, will be baffled that the game being in colour was worth mentioning at all. Gaining the ability to play as a female character in Crystal will also be met with a similar shrug of indifference, as female player characters in Pokémon (and video games in general for that matter) are much more common.
    • In fact, many of the mechanics introduced in Gen II, such as breeding, Shiny Pokemon, Dark and Steel types, Berries, and being able to use HM moves by simply interacting with the relevant object rather than having to select the Pokémon with the relevant move from the menu, have become so mainstay in the Pokémon series that the fact that they were considered new features will come across as odd to modern fans.
    • Story wise, the fact that the players could visit Kanto was considered a spoiler during the initial release hype, and was not only an incredible feat to program into the game itself, but also provided a pseudo-sequel to Generation I. Being able to battle Red at the end of the game was considered incredibly shocking as well. However, to newer fans, who are used to Pokemon generations being separate fully-fledged areas rather than extensions of previous games, Generation II comes across as little more than "Kanto 2.0" or "basically just Gen I with minor tweaks." Those who played the remakes before the originals, or were not aware that Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver were remakes altogether, will feel this especially strongly.
    • In the same token, while Generation III was the Franchise Codifier for this concept, the idea of a Box Legendary was introduced in this generation, with Lugia and Ho-Oh being on the box art rather than the starters. Nowadays, with every Pokemon game following the same story pattern, this does not come across as new or fresh anymore.
    • The idea of the games tracking the real life passage of time is nothing new for most fans that didn't grow up with the second gen games. For Gen 2, the idea of time affecting what Pokémon spawn and what events occur, and changing the look of the game based on what time it was in the game, was pretty mindblowing.
  • The Pokémon Stadium sub-series suffers from this trope in several ways:
    • The big one is the series's main selling point: the ability to have your Pokémon battle in fully-animated 3D. This looked great in the days when the series was restricted to the Game Boy, but now that the main-series games (starting with Pokémon X and Y) are in 3D, Stadium's models look chunky and bare-bones by comparison, and their animations are likely to come across as too long and time-wasting.
    • The Artificial Brilliance of the games' movesets and AI. The handheld generation I and II games both have very simplistic AI that rarely switches, and the trainers often have poor movesets, so playing a Pokémon game where the trainers will carry coverage moves to handle Pokémon theirs would otherwise be weak to, use Status Buff moves properly, and switch out if they're at a disadvantage was quite a surprise. The more advanced strategies and AI would eventually migrate to the main-series games starting from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, however, so from a modern perspective, the Stadium trainers will seem unimpressive by comparison.
  • Mewtwo is this when it comes to Legendary Pokémon, as it was one of the first alongside the Legendary Birds and Mew, with great power and a dark backstory to match, not to mention its brokenness on the competitive front. From Generation II onward, the franchise would introduce other powerful Legendary Pokémon rich with lore and myths regarding them and powers over land, sea, and sky, time and space, life and death, and more, even going as far as to introduce the Pokémon equivalent of God himself, making Mewtwo's power simply being "the strongest Pokémon" feel a bit basic by comparison. That being said, it's still one of the most powerful Pokémon in existence, especially in light of its two Mega Evolutions introduced in Pokémon X and Y.
  • Team Rocket. At the time of Generation I, the idea of there being a group of bad guys out to exploit Pokémon for evil purposes added a sinister shade to the franchise, with Team Rocket filling such a niche and being highly regarded for it. From Generation III onward, the series would introduce more villain teams who would take this approach and build upon it with more defined plans and motives (usually being that of a Well-Intentioned Extremist or Utopia Justifies the Means plot). As a result, going back to Team Rocket in the first two generations, their plans can come off as more basic and lack the nuance of evil teams that would follow. People today may not realize that Team Rocket began the trend of evil teams as a whole, not to mention Team Rocket is stated to have experimented on and even killed Pokémon, the latter of which no other evil team can attest to having committed.
• Pole Position was truly ahead of its time when it was released in 1981, being the first driving game in three dimensions; driving games prior to that use a top-down view instead. But it has since been usurped by newer racing games that refine the genre further and are far more popular; Pole Position's lack of proper racing mechanics (such as positions/ranks) and excessively volatile cars (as in, cars that blow up if they so much as rub paint with each other) means that most players see it as a stepping stone for the genre at best.
• Pong is the ultimate example of this trope. Whilst not the first ever video game as is widely believed, it is the first game to truly make the medium popular, which is far more important in establishing whether something will become commercially viable or not. Indeed, this sheer popularity is most likely the reason why essentially no one today can name what came before it without the aid of Google. It's a pity that even gamers who grew up with it probably think of it as nothing more than two lines and a dot on a hazy monochrome screen. It doesn't help that the game is designed to be played with dials, while most modern versions use a d-pad, touchscreen, or mouse.
  • And before Pong, there was the Magnavox Odyssey, a console so primitive, it didn't even have graphics. Most of the games were basically just variants of "move the white dots across the screen", and the game came with transparent plastic overlays to put on the TV just so it would look like something was happening. And yet, it was the very first home console, and the direct inspiration for Pong.
• The Portopia Serial Murder Case was released in 1983, and was the Ur-Example and/or Trope Codifier of many of the hallmarks of the Visual Novel that most nowadays take for granted, such as the Dialogue Tree and Multiple Endings. This proved to haunt its 2023 Video Game Remake, as alongside the Artificial Stupidity resulting in numerous cases of You Can't Get Ye Flask, critics were quick to accuse it of being derivative of the numerous other visual novels it had inspired.

Q-S

• Quake 1 was an immense hit in its day due to its technological innovations. But its once-shocking 3D graphics now look... underwhelming, due to low polygon counts and lack of texture filtering. Though the overall atmosphere and art design still hold up quite well despite the limitations. Even its other claim to fame, being the first widespread online FPS is relatively unimpressive to today's gamers. Today, with gaming networks like Steam, Play Station Network and Xbox Live Arcade, Quake's lack of a server-browser, let alone a gaming network (excluding early 3rd party networks like MPlayer and MSN Zone), seems downright primitive. Still, considering today's gaming dominated by multiplayer FPSs, Quake's popularization of online gameplay makes it one of the most important technical feats to this day.
• The Quest for Glory series is one of the oldest examples (if not the Trope Codifier) for the Old Save Bonus. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, it was a huge deal to be able to port over your saved data from one game to another (five in total), including your character class, level, weapons, abilities and gameplay aspects that still aren't used with regularity in modern games (namely, importing a character from I to II and acting in a virtuous way allowed the player to get access to the hidden Paladin class, or the Thief class having several specific items that transfer between games). In the wake of many modern RPGs that have gone much further with this concept (namely, the Mass Effect series), it can be hard to appreciate just how important the Quest for Glory series were to gaming as a whole.
• When Raiden was first released, it was a hit in arcades due to taking what shmups by Toaplan did and refining them, resulting in a Not-So-Cheap Imitation of their works. Raiden II in particular is seen as an Even Better Sequel, thanks to the introduction of the purple Bend Plasma weapon, with its dazzling show of twisting lasers especially once the player gets the weapon up to higher power levels. Many arcades would stock Raiden II, causing it to become the face of early 90s shmups. But in this day and age of Bullet Hell shooters, younger gamers don't really find the Raiden series all that interesting, due to many of them having been introduced to the shmup genre through what they consider far more appealing shooters by CAVE and from the Touhou Project series with high bullet counts and diverse selections of weapons. While fading out of mainstream relevance hasn't stopped the Raiden series from receiving more games with more modernized graphics and features, including Raiden V in 2016, they're not exactly the sort of games to attract attention from big-name video game publications today.
• Rebel Assault II was released two years before Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and was the first piece of Star Wars media to use live-action footage since Return of the Jedi 12 years prior. It was a huge deal at the time, bringing Lucasarts a giant surge of popularity (to the point that it had several compilation packages based around its inclusion) and along with The 7th Guest was one of the primary reasons CD-ROM games took off. Today, it's hard to look at the footage from II (especially compared to the aforementioned Jedi Knight, which has actual actors and actually feels like a legitimate entry into the canon, rather than just a Gaiden Game) and not laugh at the stilted dialogue, cheap props and bad effects, even though it was the Killer App for the company.
• Renegade was the first "belt-scrolling" Beat 'em Up and pioneered such features as throwing enemies. The Japanese version launched the Kunio-kun series, and the Westernized version was popular enough to get its own line of sequels. Even as a Beat 'em Up it gets little respect nowadays, likely in part because even the arcade version lacks the Co-Op Multiplayer that became a staple of the genre. Seanbaby, describing the NES port as one of the "Top 20 Worst NES Games," claimed sarcastically that "there just weren't any other games involving guys walking around and fighting bad guys on the street." To a large extent, there weren't: It came before such better-remembered games as Double Dragon and Final Fight.
• Resident Evil did for video games what Night of the Living Dead (1968) did for movies. Zombies. Used to be, zombies were about as common or less likely for one to encounter as the old 1980s stand-by enemies, the robot and the ninja. Then Resident Evil came along. Nowadays, zombies are almost as ubiquitous in games as crates. Not to mention the entire shift in what a Survival Horror title even is. These days, the genre is more focused on action, with combat being quicker and more frantic and story and level progression more fast-paced. This is a far cry from the "tank/turret-style" controls and complex puzzle-oriented gameplay of the first Survival Horror titles.
  • Resident Evil was also a stellar example of game developers using relatively limited technology to their advantage. The dispensing of real-time polygonal worlds in favor of pre-rendered backgrounds that were dynamically switched as the player triggered a certain "hot spot" (e.g., opened a door or reached a certain point on the image) was a clever way of coping with the PlayStation's limited 3D rendering capabilities, while creating a genuinely creepy and unsettling environment. Of course, this had the major caveat of the dreaded "tank controls," meaning players needed to become accustomed to a cumbersome control scheme that, even when "fully mastered," was still very wonky and awkward. Now that technology has advanced enough that it's entirely possible to create believably creepy and bizarre worlds in real-time, it might be difficult for players accustomed to games like Silent Hill and Dead Space to go back and enjoy the first few Resident Evil games for anything more than their campy voice acting and ridiculous B-movie plots.
  • Resident Evil – Code: Veronica suffers from this big time. When it was first released on the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast in 2000, the game was praised for its use of fully three dimensional characters and environments, as well as successfully continuing and concluding Claire Redfield's quest to find her brother Chris. Unfortunately, the game's massive praise and fanfare died down pretty quickly. Its beefed-up PlayStation 2 port garnered mostly So Okay, It's Average reviews (despite being seen as an improvement over the DC original) for comparing poorly to Devil May Cry,^note RE:CVX included a playable DMC1 demo — the full version of which was released two months later which had all of its improvements over Capcom's earlier horror-themed games on top of a new and unique story involving something other than zombies, and much faster-paced gameplay with more satisfying combat.
• Sakura Wars was a perfect product of its time, being released with the tagline of being "an anime that you can play" right as the anime boom was taking off in both the East and West. While Strategy RPGs and Dating Sims had both existed before that point, no one had ever thought of combining them, and the franchise became one of Sega's biggest hits of the late nineties and early aughts because of both its unique gameplay and the story that took cues from popular anime of the time. Unfortunately, in the present day when hundreds of games from every corner of the world draw inspiration from anime, the story doesn't seem nearly as groundbreaking, and the series suffered diminishing returns once the tropes the plot relied on started to get old and players found that the gameplay was rather simplistic and easy, resulting in Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love selling poorly and killing the franchise for over a decade. The 2019 reboot was warmly received by critics and considered to have the best gameplay ever in the series, but it was still criticized for its heavy reliance on anime and dating sim tropes that were more than two decades old at that point.
• Shining Force was one of the progenitors of the Strategy RPG, right alongside Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light. Unfortunately, it suffers from being the first, with somewhat wonky systems, levels, characters and balance, and much of what made it unique has been done in much more refined form in other games.
• Anyone who counts the post PlayStation 2 era as the main base of their video game experience will be extremely unlikely to appreciate just how revolutionary Shenmue was to the Wide-Open Sandbox genre. It was one of the first truly interactive city environments that actually felt like a living breathing world: NPCs were at work or home depending on the time of day, real time weather effects that could actually be set to mimic the actual day to day weather of 1986/1987 Japan, arcades that featured classic arcade games such as Space Harrier, the range of dialogue was extensive even if it did constantly loop itself and, most importantly, invented the Quick Time Event. Today however it has been copied and surpassed by so many internationally famous franchises such as Grand Theft Auto (and, more directly, Like a Dragon) all it is likely remembered for by modern gamers is its infamously bad voice acting that admittedly even at the time was outdated when you consider the original Metal Gear Solid came out a year beforehand and set the standard for all vocal performances to come.
  • The note here about Quick Time Events needs to be expanded because unlike its overshadowed contributions to sandbox games, QTEs are now more or less in every genre of modern game imaginable from third-person shooters to RPGs. They are now in fact so widespread that some reviewers today are so sick of them they even downgrade their ratings just on the basis of their presence, nowadays considered to be lazy design at best and a jarring and often-unfair sudden obstacle to progress at worst. Yet as hard as it may be to accept now, back in 2000 the concept of having such interactivity in a cut scene on a console game was unheard of. The closest we had were basic things like the odd text box popping up with a simplistic right or left style choice.
• Shin Megami Tensei
  • Shin Megami Tensei I was one of the first major RPGs (another was The Final Fantasy Legend) to include heavy Christian imagery and cast God as a villain. It predates Neon Genesis Evangelion by three years, Final Fantasy Tactics by five years and Xenogears by six. It also focuses heavily on story (a rarity at the time), includes a free-roaming environment, has Multiple Endings and gives you the option of choosing what kind of morality you want to follow based on the actions you take in the game, which significantly changes the story. One of the villains destroys the world partway through the game two years before Kefka did it. And most importantly, in a genre filled with Cliché Storms at the time, this was an Urban Fantasy set in the real world that quickly shifts into After the End. This isn't even mentioning the ultimate twist, which rarely leaves its series to this day — you only had two party members, while the four other spots were filled with Monster Allies. Of course, since all of these controversial themes kept it inside Japan for over a decade, most fans don't even realize it was a trendsetter because they just never had an opportunity to play them and by the time they did come over, the themes that are frequent fodder for the franchise had already become commonplace.
  • Soul Hackers tends to be well-regarded among fans of the series for its interesting Post-Cyberpunk story, but its 2012 Nintendo 3DS port (the first time the game released outside of Japan) sold poorly with general audiences due to the graphics and some gameplay mechanics (having to pay your summoned demons for each step you take, and those demons being unable to gain experience) not having aged well.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne is getting some of this in its HD remaster. Even with a couple of quality-of-life improvements, 18 years of advancement shows that some of its notorious difficulty is down to a simple lack of Anti-Frustration Features. In particular, a combination of save points that are few and far between and instant Game Over if the main character bites it that can mean losing up to an hour of progress thanks to an unlucky random encounter feels very much like archaic Fake Difficulty in an era with much more forgiving save systems.
• The effect of fog in Silent Hill was used to mask the Playstation's poor draw distance, but it also created a side effect of making the atmosphere really creepy and adding to the immersion. Nowadays the use of fog is much better done on modern games and people who didn't grow up with Silent Hill don't see what the fuss is all about, but the game helped jumpstart the use of atmospheric effects to make believable and scary settings.
  • The central themes of sexual and emotional repression in Silent Hill 2 can be pretty easily guessed by a modern player encountering the game for the first time, even though they're meant to be revealed slowly as the story plays out. However, the cult classic status of Silent Hill 2 is almost certainly the reason that those themes became a common go-to in horror games in the first place.
  • P.T. has spawned so many imitators that it's sometimes hard to remember that it represented a huge turning point in video game horror in the mid-2010s. The switch from third-person action to first-person exploration as the go-to format for horror games followed on the heels of P.T.. This was particularly true in indie titles, hence the idea becoming commonplace relatively quickly, but even the Resident Evil franchise took notes from P.T. for its change of direction beginning with Resident Evil 7.
• SimCity:
  • SimCity was a groundbreaking title in both edutainment as well as the fact that the game had no real "End". At the time? It almost didn't see a release in The '80s because it had no real "win" condition. (This led to the introductions of Scenarios.) These days, a Wide-Open Sandbox game with no real "endgame" isn't anything special.
  • Additionally, Sim City was essentially the Trope Maker and the Trope Codifier for the Simulation game - many simulation games would not have been a thing were it not for Sim City's success back in the day. It can be hard to look at the original and how primitive they were after playing more complex Simulation titles.
  • The series started to have this within itself - with how every release prior to Sim City Societies became more and more complex. It became hard to see the original Sim City as so groundbreaking after being spoilt by 2000 and beyond.
  • The "Sim" branding was, in many ways, very ahead of the curve. Games such as Sim Copter and Streets of Sim City, while very much bug-ridden messes, were somewhat of a pioneer for video games such as Grand Theft Auto. They were also somewhat of an Ersatz level editor - players oculd actually import cities they built in Sim City 2000 and explore them - and in Sim Copter? Even on foot. Being able to walk around a city that was built by the player was absolutely groundbreaking in The '90s. A player today would see nothing but staticy textures and loads of glitches.
  • While it was actually made by Bullfrog, not Maxis, Theme Park World (Released as "Sim Theme Park" outside of Europe) and its sequel Theme Park Inc/Sim Coaster also followed a similar principle to Sim Copter and Streets of Sim City: They allowed the player to walk around a three dimensional amusement park they made - and even ride the rides from a first-person perspective. Without it, games like RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Planet Coaster would have had less to draw from or do better.
• The SOCOM series, full stop. During the PS2 days, SOCOM blended the best aspects of PC tactical shooters (mainly Counter-Strike, Delta Force and Rainbow Six) and made the gameplay palatable for console gamers. Combine this with the ultra-popular PS2 and the result? Six million total sales between the first two games. However, SOCOM's relevance was symbiotic with Sony's problematic online gaming support, which suffered from the PS2's lack of a built-in hard drive (making patching impossible and dropped games were common). Then Halo 2 was released, and Xbox Live's popularity exploded. And then, the worst combination for the series: PS3's lackluster launch handicapped the console, developer Zipper did not make another SOCOM game for years, and many different tactical shooters flooded the console market (e.g., the "Tom Clancy's" line of shooters, Battlefield variants, and especially Call of Duty, which would release one of the most influential games of the generation just a year after the PS3's launch). By the time SOCOM 4 was released, only longtime fans remained interested. Worse, SOCOM 4's attempts to convert new fans was a failure, and the remaining fans are caught into a bitter civil war with the franchise. Now that developer Zipper has shut down in March 2012, the franchise looks to be a footnote of the PS2 days, and little else.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: The games tend to fall into this frequently as Sega will take an idea initially praised and keep it, only for it to get worse over time and people get tired of it.
  • The series' signature focus on speed has fallen into this. To understand why Sonic's speed was important, you need to understand that the platforming genre is generally focused on slow, and methodical gameplay that may require tons of trial and error to play properly. Sonic basically took the art of Speedrunning and turned it into its main gameplay mechanic. However, later releases would focus more and more on making Sonic go faster, rather than how he goes fast and people started to believe Sonic didn't offer anything else beyond just being a faster than average platformer.
  • Sonic himself kind of got hit with this; he's still a beloved video game character, but what initially set him apart from his direct competitors was his perceived "attitude"; most platform protagonists were cutesy everymen who usually saved princesses (like Mario), but Sonic set himself apart by having a more defiant attitude in his '90s Hair, and his smug demeanor. But because Sonic codified the Mascot with Attitude, he spawned many imitators that tried to copy his success to no avail, that by the time the 2000s came, Sonic was seen as the very thing he was created to avoid.
  • Shadow, The Rival to Sonic, also got hit with this pretty badly; In his debut in Sonic Adventure 2, he was overwhelmingly popular, more so than Sonic himself. Shadow had the most nuance than any character to date (barring perhaps E-102 Gamma from the previous game) with a complex backstory and development that resonated with a lot of fans, and capped off with a Heroic Sacrifice at the end. His stoic and no-nonsense attitude contrasted greatly with with the rest of the cast, who had some level of whimsical and comical traits. However, because Shadow himself would become a Spotlight-Stealing Squad, and the series would introduce other complex characters with developed character arcs, Shadow was starting to be seen as both a generic Stock Shōnen Rival and a '90s Anti-Hero that was greatly out of place in the series, which firmly cemented him as a Base-Breaking Character.
  • The first game became a huge hit when it first came out, giving birth to one of the largest names ever in the video game industry and elevating Sega higher than Nintendo, thanks to its marketing on speed and the perceived edginess of the hedgehog himself, whom he and the first level have become so iconic that they've become the Trope Maker and Trope Namer respectively. However, modern reviews are quick to note how its signature speed-based platforming past Green Hill Zone is noticeably absent from much of the rest of the game. It also lacks the series' iconic Spin Dash or even the seventh Chaos Emerald so the player can become Super. This is (in some ways) a reason why every re-release or remaster made afterward retroactively adds the Spin Dash and why Sega's reluctant to ever re-release it in its original, unaltered form or even acknowledge anything past its legendary first zone.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog CD was initially praised for its very unique level design and aesthetic; unlike most Sonic games, CD had a much larger emphasis on exploration with much more vertical level design. The music was also very different from its predecessors and successors, particularly because it's the only game with two different soundtracks depending on the region. The fact that the game wasn't exactly easy to find added to its mystique. When the game would get an Updated Re-release in 2011 that touched up some things from its initial release, finally making the game widely available to the public, fans started to notice its issues and how what it attempted would be improved greatly in Sonic 3, causing CD to fall out of favor. Nowadays, it's generally considered the weakest of the 2D titles along with the very first game.
  • Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 are two notorious sufferers of this trope. At the time of their release, they received massive critical acclaim for their impressive graphics (note that this was when the original PlayStation was still dominating the gaming industry), elaborate story and characterization (at a time when Sonic games had as much of these elements as a typical Mario sidescroller), and unique take on the series's gameplay style that managed to accurately convey Sonic-style platforming in a 3D world. Nowadays, the graphics are a very frequent source of mockery due to the over-the-top animations and admittedly terrible Lip Lock (particularly in the English dub of Adventure 2, where characters frequently interrupt each other due to the dub writers apparently not realizing that Japanese is a much more compact language than English), the characters and stories are both considered to be quite hammy and clichéd by modern series standards, especially due to some of Sonic's lines being Totally Radical, and the gameplay is commonly derided for being full of bugs and oversights, particularly in the GameCube ports. When comparing the Adventure games to more recent 3D Sonic platformers (other than Sonic '06 and Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric), the former shows its age quite a bit. That being said, the games are still remembered fondly among the fanbase.
  • Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations upon release were the highest rated 3D games since the aforementioned Adventure titles above for doing away with many of the Franchise Original Sins that plagued the series for years. By the time of 2017 with Sonic Forces, fans had begun seeing these games in a much less favorable light, particularly from the group of fans who came into the series with, once again, the Adventure titles and saw the games as too simple with having only Sonic as the main playable character and none of the series' fan favorites, focusing way too much on 2D in what are supposed to be 3D games, and the writing being much more simpler and juvenile and absolutely no attempt at developing the series' world building.
• The Soul Series, specifically Soul Calibur II, is known for its use of the Guest Fighter. Despite not being the first game to do this by any means, it was the most popular in its day, especially due to the fact that the version you owned actually affected the Guest Fighter you got in your copy (Heihachi for PS2, Spawn for the Xbox, and Link for the GameCube) complete with their different fighting styles. The use of a Guest Fighter has become all too common and it's no longer a selling point. It probably didn't help that later Guests included Yoda.
• Space Invaders is Older Than the NES and was the first game to have interactive music that sped up as the invaders moved closer, the first game to popularize the high score and save a player's score, the first game with multiple lives, and attracted controversy back in The '70s for being a game where the goal was to shoot and kill creatures. It's very likely the first game to have some kind of difficulty curve, due to the aliens growing faster as their ranks thin (which was originally an accident). On top of all that, it saved the video game industry from the Video Game Crash of 1977 caused by an overabundance of Pong clones, and launched the industry into a global one. Nowadays, such innovations have become such common staples of video games, and killing enemies in games is so common, that people nowadays wouldn't bat an eyelid. Players nowadays who don't know about its impact could easily mistake the game for a generic shooter.
• Spelunker, with its pixel-perfect jumps and death for falling a quarter of the screen height, is seen by many retro gamers as some sort of sick joke. These infuriating characteristics were shared by many early Platform Games on 8-bit computers.
• Spyro the Dragon (1998) was the PlayStation's first notable explorative 3D collectathon platformer, a game more akin to Nintendo’s own Super Mario 64 or Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie than Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot ^note which were linear and streamlined games more focused on a pure 3D platforming experience than exploring sandboxes for bits and bobs. It featured lots of objects to find and collect, a nice variety of sandbox-y levels to roam around, and enemies with a wide range of animations—all things that are taken for granted in modern platformers. When a remastered collection of the original three Spyro games was announced twenty years later, the initial reaction of many people was wondering what made the original games so special.
• The Stanley Parable was designed to be a commentary of how choice was implemented in video games up to 2011, namely that they were still essentially railroading the player despite promising freedom. While gaming had not evolved enough for this message to be irrelevant for the 2013 HD Remix, the same could not be said for the Ultra Deluxe version in 2022. By this time, it was commonplace for developers to acknowledge players' awareness of railroading, and as a result games promising freedom tend to be Wide Open Sandboxes to better live up to the hype, with some games taking a more retrospective view of choice, such as Undertale and Disco Elysium.
• In StarCraft professional play, this is the reaction a lot of newer fans (especially those who joined with Starcraft II) have to the (now retired) pro player Boxer, who is considered a serious contender for the best Starcraft player of all time. People go back to watch Boxer's games at his prime... and they see a lot of common, even obvious Terran strategies that everyone uses. Sure, they'll admit that Boxer had amazing micro-managing skills, but those alone aren't worth the hype he gets. What these fans fail to realize is that all those "common" strategies that Boxer used, he invented. At the time, no one had seen them before, which made them devastating, and that's a large reason why those strategies are so common now. In fact, at the time Boxer came on to the scene, Terrans were considered a garbage race that only a noob would pick; Boxer proceeded to more or less singlehandedly develop the entire Terran metagame and make the race a serious contender.
  • By watching Brood Wars pro matches throughout the years, one can clearly see the gradual evolution of the metagame. As players came up with new brilliant strategies, there were periods of top-level dominance for each of the three races. By the 2010s, the game was exceptionally complicated as many potential tactics have to be protected against. Each step on the way towards the later versions of the metagame was driven by some innovation by an individual player—so to make a judgment about the strategies used in a game, one has to be mindful of when it was played.
• The original Star Fox was a ground-breaking game, and it was impressive how, thanks to the Super FX Chip, it could give convincing 3D graphics in 1993. Today, despite its clever use of sprites, because of its low framerate, obvious clipping and other limitations, it would be considered nearly unplayable by a large range of young gamers.
  • Star Fox 64 invokes this in two ways: 1) Upon release, the game's use of force feedback (made possible through an attachment called the "Rumble Pack") was considered revolutionary. Today, with force feedback being taken for granted (due to almost all controllers since the succeeding generation natively including rumble support rather than requiring a separate addon), it might be hard for modern day gamers to see what the big deal was in 1997. 2) The game's at-the-time extensive use of voice acting^note More than 500 different clips and real time cutscenes were seen as downright impressive for a cartridge in 1997. After later N64 games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Rogue Squadron significantly upped the ante in terms of cinematics, the rather campy dialog and repetitive cutscenes in Star Fox 64 didn't seem so impressive anymore.
• Star Ocean, primarily the first two games when they were remade for the PlayStation Portable. The first game was actually, for the most part, drastically different in story from most other RPGs (with a few exceptions like Fallout and a couple of Shin Megami Tensei games, which often used elements of sci-fi) and the fact that this game was actually credited as the one that pushed the SNES's technology to the limit. People often criticized it as "There isn't enough sci-fi, there's magic so it's not sci-fi", "It's Short, So It Sucks!", or "They Changed It, Now It Sucks!" regarding the changes to their PSP versions. The plot for the first installment is very similar to an episode of Star Trek, and the plot for the second one (called a Cliché Storm by some reviewers who had played the PSP remake) was actually far more original for its time than it seems now. The entire skill system (which was actually pretty in-depth and thorough) is often ignored, and the amount of recruitable characters and somewhat complex recruitment branches (giving some more replay value than the typical "you get these eight characters but can use only three or four at a time"-RPG) is considered just one part of a cliché storm. It was also one of the first games that featured optional "Private Actions" to develop characters since the plot was written with only the required characters needing to be involved.
• The video game tie-in to Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was one of the first games released for the Nintendo 64 and one of the first third-person shooter games released in 3D. It was praised as a landmark game with impressive environments for its time and for its faithfulness to the movies, right down to having music taken directly from the films in addition to its own new sound cues. Being set between the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi was a huge selling point as well — up until then, there had been no Star Wars tie-ins that really bridged the gap between those two films, and it along with the other multimedia tie-ins considerably opened up the possibilities of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe. In hindsight, however, the game has not aged well from a technical standpoint; the environments are very barren and rough looking, the combat is extremely rudimentary, and Dash Rendar controls in a very floaty, awkward way. The starfighter segments, while good for their time, simply don't stack up in contrast to the games that took inspiration from it while substantially improving the flight and gameplay mechanics, such as Factor 5's Rogue Squadron series. The rudimentary story probably won't win over newer gamers either, since you really need to read the accompanying novelization and comics to get the full story of what's going on in the game, and its novelty as a Star Wars interquel is completely lost on newer fans who are used to seeing that kind of thing regularly in Star Wars works that came after it, such as Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, The Force Unleashed and Rogue One.
• The original Street Fighter. Back then, arcade games were almost universally simple affairs. Punch, kick, jump, shoot, duck, defend on occasion, maybe if it got really wild, you had an alternate weapon. Large sprites, one-on-one gameplay, a pair of analog buttons which produced a variety of strikes (later replaced by the now-standard six-button grid), holding back to block, super-lethal attacks unleashed by secret joystick movements, and unique opponents with a variety of styles and attacks... all of these were amazing innovations. Especially for Capcom, which at the time had almost nothing but platformers and various Shoot Em Ups. It was a huge success, better than anyone could've imagined. Today, good luck finding someone who remembers that this game existed, much less will admit to liking it.
  • Street Fighter II accidentally introduced animation cancelling, and as a result, the entire concept of combos in fighting games. This glitch single-handedly extended the life of video arcades for a decade. Today, the system seems clunky and sometimes unresponsive, and overpowered to boot^note The basic Ryu/Ken combo of jumping roundhouse, crouching forward canceled into fireball originally did over 45% damage and instantly dizzied the opponent; then again, it was a glitch, and not an integrated component of the game engine.
    • In particular, the many, many, many Updated Rereleases of it has made the original game this. Even among fans who consider II to be their favored wing of the franchise, most will point to literally any game except the original (usually Super Street Fighter II Turbo), because they're just Street Fighter II, but without the slow speed, tiny roster, or motherfucking Guile.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario 64. It's easy to dismiss it for its poor camera, dated graphics, and simplistic gameplay compared to its sequels. However in addition to being widely considered the first example of a 3D platformer done right, it was the first to successfully create a seamless 3D world and show what could really be done with the small addition of the Z-axis. Even the title screen was impressive, showing off the amazing (for the time) power of the Nintendo 64 with a fully rendered 3D Mario head with lighting and squash-and-stretch, all in real time. For quite a while, it was the premiere example of the Video Game 3D Leap and set the standard for just about every 3D game thereafter.
  • Or, hell, even the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES. With its abundance of repeated level styles, there's some people who don't realize that this game kickstarted Nintendo's juggernaut of a series. Back in the 1985, 32 side-scrolling levels^note although six of them reuse the layout of earlier stages with more enemies (with many secret areas) was simply immense for a game world (at the time of The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, many games made do with only a few static screens), and Mario's Goomba Stomp and forgiving Jump Physics made for much livelier gameplay than most earlier platformers, where characters couldn't jump high and often needed a power-up to have any chance of defeating enemies. And, double hell, even the smooth scrolling qualifies — for literally anyone born after 1980, it's impossible to see how that could be a big deal, but in 1985, SMB's larger-than-single-screen levels that scrolled smoothly at the refresh rate of the television were absolute goddamned voodoo, and other developers actually struggled for a little while to replicate the buttery smoothness of the level scrolling and progression in SMB.
    • There are many articles about the visual language of World 1-1 that show off the high innovation of teaching the various mechanics of the game without text instruction, especially in an era of gaming steeped in Guide Dang It! For instance, the ? symbols on the blocks entice the player to hit it for a goodie; the game doles out various power-ups early in low-stress situations to orient the player on what they do and for how long; illustrates to the player that being hit as Super Mario shrinks him back to a vulnerable state; that Piranha Plants will disappear if you stand next to the pipes, and Koopa Troopas can kicked and ricocheted; invisible blocks are placed in relatively common trajectory to instruct the player to keep their eyes peeled for secrets, among other examples. Players well-versed in gaming mechanics post-1985 will hardly pick up on these visual cues, but at the time, World 1-1 was a watershed moment in how gameplay would forever change.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES was considered groundbreaking back in its release of 1988 (1990 in North America and 1991 in the PAL regions) with its expanded power-ups, more variety in the worlds, bigger back-story, and just more depth in general. However, younger gamers who did not grow up with the NES will wonder why older gamers find the game to be amazing today and will just think of it as a standard Mario platformer.
    • In the same way horizontal scrolling was groundbreaking in the original Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3 introduced diagonal scrolling. Horizontal and vertical scrolling, simultaneously. This was achieved in the same machine that brought the horizontal scrolling a few years back.
  • Super Mario Land was hit heavy with this. When it came out in 1989, the same year as the Game Boy, it was mindblowing to play a Mario game like this, or any game like this, on a portable device. Back then, most portable games were those LCD Handhelds with calculator graphics. But as time went by, players started to realize that it looked much inferior to other Mario games at the time. Even the original Super Mario Bros. looked and played better, and to make it worse, the sequel Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins that came 3 years later was much better in every aspect, it looked much more like a proper Mario game, and it was also for the Game Boy.
  • New Super Mario Bros. is a case where it's even unfair to the game, much more than the other examples. When it came out, it was the first 2D Mario game in years, counting Super Mario Land 2 from 1992 and not counting Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (part of the Yoshi sub-series) from 1995; it was a 14-year wait for a new proper 2D Mario game; it was actually ambitious and creative at launch; was Mario's—and the video game industry in general's—grand return to the 2D Platform Game scene; and did a great job using the potential of the Nintendo DS. Then New Super Mario Bros. Wii came out and was similarly celebrated for having multiplayer co-op for the first time ever in a Mario game, as well as the return of the Koopalings, who haven't made an appareance in a mainline Mario title since Super Mario World. Not to mention it being the first 2D Mario game in years to be released on a home console. But then the sequels that came after were considered uninspired, gimicky in the latter case, and derivative, recycling too much from previous games, and the New Super Mario Bros. formula became stale, giving a bad reputation to the original 2006 DS game and especially its sequel on the Wii. As a testament to this, while the Koopalings' return was celebrated when New Super Mario Bros. Wii came out, by the time New Super Mario Bros. U came out, people were outright sick of the Koopalings being the boss for every world when the original game had unique bosses.
  • Super Mario Advance is a minor example. Despite being a remake, it was an amazing showcase of the Game Boy Advance's tech. Not only did it make extensive use of sprite scaling, stretching, and rotating which wasn't even possible on the original Super Nintendo Entertainment System without an external graphics co-processor, it was the first 2D Mario game that was fully voice-acted. All in a handheld. For 2001, this was absolutely groundbreaking, and the Game Boy Advance would be considered a technical marvel. These days however, it's seen as just another forgotten 2D Mario remake of a game that was already divisive in the first place. Any graphics card these days can manipulate sprites with ease, so the visual effects of Super Mario Advance don't look as impressive now than they did in 2001. Not only that, but many players find the voice acting to be grating, while it was impressive that a handheld game from 2001 even had so much voice acting in the first place. While it may be overlooked now, Super Mario Advance was to the Game Boy Advance what Luigi's Mansion was to the Nintendo GameCube.
• A couple of Super Mario World hacks have actually fallen into this category as well.
  • The Second Reality Project was one of the first major Super Mario World hacks. Completed in 2002 (around Lunar Magic's really early years), the game just had level edits and nothing else. But the creator did do a remake incorporating newer graphics, levels and other things.
  • Rob-Omb's Quest probably looks lousy today compared to other Super Mario World hacks, but around the time it came out, many people were impressed by the custom Super Mario Bros. 3 music, overworld, and level ideas. One world in particular revolves almost entirely around direct remakes of levels from Super Mario Bros. 3, which is something that can get a hack rejected from SMW Central these days.
    • Even the SMB3 music seems bland compared to the custom music that can be inserted into a SMW ROM hack now.
  • For a hack made in 2003, Super Demo World: The Legend Continues is a fairly impressive 120-exit hack, with a nonlinear overworld, custom graphics, and even some ASM; commonplace today, but unheard of then. And while people would rave about the large levels and "puzzles", today the oversaturation of item babysitting and overall cryptic design would be criticized.
  • The first hack that demonstrated what ASM editing can do? Brutal Mario was pretty famous for the custom bosses, sprites and other features, but had bad level design. Nowadays, there are many other hacks that incorporate ASM, and the custom bosses are largely considered pretty lousy themselves.
  • Kaizo Mario World, due to two big factors. At the time, all those cruel tricks were actually original, and even things like the Kaizo Trap or invisible coin blocks were used sparingly and in a clever way. And things like invisible/underwater Bowser, that Big Boo boss in the second, the final Reznor fight and many of the levels were actually fairly well designed, it's just the imitators that came since copied so much of it that the game itself is old hat. The second big problem is a bad stigma among the ROM-hacking communities: Since Kaizo Mario World is among the most famous Game Mod out there and had so many imitators, it can make people think the ROM-hacking communities only produce Platform Hell games, which is quite aggravating to most ROM-hackers.
  • Other hacks have issues with this too. Ore World 1 and 2 were extremely old examples of Mario hacks with lots of ASM in the form of custom bosses and sprites, and were actually kind of impressive back in the olden days. Nowadays though, the fact their custom sprites/bosses are extremely basic and somewhat poorly designed, along with the fact everything but the ASM was generally low-quality has meant that the games have practically been forgotten. Other examples include the Super Mario World Returns hacks by KT. They were notable about a decade ago for being the first ever hacks to have custom sprites in levels, having enemies from other Mario games as basic mooks you could fight throughout the adventure. Now of course, with sprite tool actually existing and many more interesting examples of custom sprites being made, their design is just coming across as dated to anyone who plays them.
• Super Mario 64 ROM hacks fell victim to this about as much as their Super Mario World counterparts. Most notably, Super Mario 64 The Missing Stars was revolutionary upon release, being the first completely new game based on Mario 64's engine with levels made from scratch rather than modified from the existing ones. Nowadays though, the rise of Super Mario Star Road and Super Mario 64: Last Impact (as well as the numerous other full mods on SM64 Central) have rendered it obsolete, with its flat empty levels filled with random objects feeling outdated compared to the fully designed 3D worlds of those that came after it.
• Super Mario RPG has even developed some of this as well. Peach and Bowser were Promoted to Playable and actually had more of a personality beyond "Damsel in Distress" and "Big Bad" (This characterisation would actually continue throughout the series, rather than just Mario-themed RPGs!). It also introduced Action Commands - and was a more comedic and light-hearted RPG - at a time when they all took themselves seriously. Many of its advancements have been taken for granted so that it doesn't feel as special any more beyond merely being there first, and some modern players expressed disappointment at its balance, linearity, and the Shared FP system.
• Mario Kart:
  • While Super Mario Kart was groundbreaking, it has not aged well in that it was only limited to two players, has a lot of recycled track themes (other than Rainbow Road), a handful of items, slippery controls, and only eight characters to choose from.
  • Mario Kart: Super Circuit was hit hard by this trope. The main shtick here? The ability to play with up to four people via link cable - on a handheld. This was unheard of at the time, but after the online Mario Kart DS it's become quite hard to appreciate just what this game did in 2001. While a few tracks are seen as some good (Sky Garden, Ribbon Road, Cheese Land) many required a from-the-ground up remake to appreciate them outside of their music and visual aesthetic. Additionally? this was the first game that included retro tracks as a bonus... but only from Super Mario Kart, which had the various recycled track themes.
  • In 2005-2006, Mario Kart DS was a Killer App on the DS, being the third-best selling game on the system and the third best selling title in the series overall. Its main addition to the series was offering a somewhat refined 3D experience on the go - and with online play. After Mario Kart 7, players simply felt that this game didn't have much to offer that Mario Kart 7 didn't do better. Especially after its online feature was subject to hackers and the base-breaking "Snaking"^ExplanationDrifting gives the player a temporary boost in speed - which can be chained together by repeatedly changing the direction of a drift, allowing players to constantly receive speed boosts that even Nintendo seemed to agree with, since it received a Nerf in Wii.
  • Back when it was released, Mario Kart Wii was generally lauded for its many additions to the series in well implemented motion controls for steering coupled with the accompanying Wii Wheel accessory to make it feel even more immersive, a new bike vehicle class with a characteristic wheelie mechanic, expanding the number of racers from 8 to 12, tricks and half-pipes, a significantly improved and expanded online play compared to Mario Kart DS with the Online Tournaments being seen as a nice, if smaller, online equivalent to the Mission Mode from said game. Its large, further expanded, character roster with various Unexpected Characters and almost its entire track selection was also seen as excellent. Nowadays though, outside its dedicated fanbase that remembers and acknowledges all that, when speaking of the game the only thing that will be most often be talked about is the criticism directed at the games' bikes and characters being unbalanced —which has always been acknowledged as a flaw of the game alongside restricting its Battle Mode to teams only, with its own Broken Base between those who mind the Complacent Gaming Syndrome it caused and those who don't, but not the only thing worth talking about it—, while ignoring or forgetting all the objetive additions and online improvements the game brought. It's also fairly common to see people think that the bikes were the only thing the game added, while the game actually introduced much more than that.
  • The introduction of gliding, underwater, and kart customization in Mario Kart 7 were generally well-received and seen as some of the most innovative ideas in the entire franchise whose impact is still felt in the most recent entries alongside small but significant touches such as the addition of the Frontrunning first place beats to the music. However, when the Even Better Sequel Mario Kart 8 (and its Updated Re-release Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) were released afterwards, which, alongside Mario Kart Tour to a lesser extent, came around with larger rosters, more courses, and in the case of 8 and 8 Deluxe, anti-gravity alongside a more varied Battle Mode in the latter, it can be difficult to go back to Mario Kart 7, which now can feel barebones in comparison. There's also the fact that in the Switch and smart phones, as they have more power under the hood, characters and courses look far better than on the 3DS. It also doesn't help that many of the courses in 7, classic remakes or otherwise, were remade in 8 Deluxe's Booster Course Pass, as well as a part of Tour (which even provided the basis for the pass' content).
• The Super Robot Wars series has been around for a while, but licensing issues have ensured that a Western player is more-or-less forced to emulate if he or she wants to experience them directly. To date, the newest and best game in the series that has been fully translated is Super Robot Wars Judgment. However, playing it first is an excellent way to ruin all the other games currently available in English, including Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden and the localized Super Robot Wars: Original Generation games, as all three make use of much more primitive interfaces, mechanics, and overall presentation than Judgment, and have a much less fair difficulty curve.
• The original Super Smash Bros. 64 has not aged well, especially in comparison with further installments of the series as a whole — with only 12 playable characters and 9 selectable stages, rather sluggish gameplay, and lack of features such as side special moves. But back in 1999, such a Massive Multiplayer Crossover between several of Nintendo's franchises was unheard of, and it proved to be popular enough to spawn not only a successful series, but also an entire genre.
• When it first released in 2006, as one of the first Fan Games of Super Smash Bros., the original Super Smash Flash was met with largely positive reception — especially considering that it was McLeodGaming's first real foray into video game development. Nowadays, with both its Surprisingly Improved Sequel and the rival fan game Super Smash Bros. Crusade existing, the numerous severe glitches of Super Smash Flash has made it seem primitive by comparison, with many willing to admit that Flash 2 and/or Crusade are far more functional and polished.
• The System Shock games, System Shock 2 in particular. Despite being one of the most undersold games ever, never really moving beyond Cult Classic, System Shock 2 was a very well put together and innovative PC game. It was so good it has at least two Spiritual Successors. Both BioShock and Dead Space copy its solid blend of Survival Horror/shooter in a Sci-Fi environment with vending machines, upgrade stations allowing for a good deal of customization, and special powers (often used in puzzle solving), and a plot where everyone's turned into monsters and the only normal people are either on the other end of the radio, die five seconds after you meet them, or are the villains. However, improved graphics and gameplay, combined with the fact that not as many people played System Shock create such moments as Dead Space being described as "like BioShock, but on a spaceship."

T-Z

• This actually happened with Tactics Ogre - because nowhere outside of Japan got it until it was remade for the Playstation, it was mistaken as a watered down clone of Final Fantasy Tactics... when it was actually the precursor to Final Fantasy Tactics.
  • The 2010 remake itself was, as far as remakes go, was considered to be one of the most ambitious remakes of all time due to just how much was changed. The game was barely recognisable as Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together in any way besides aesthetics. It was basically the gold standard for an Enhanced Remake - not just a polished remake, but an almost complete overhaul. Ten years later, the bounds of what a remake is was pushed with Final Fantasy VII Remake, making this game seem almost generic in terms of what was done to remake it.
• Tales of Phantasia had this as a complaint when it was finally localized. The first two Tales games (Phantasia and Destiny) may also be somewhat hard to get into with how their battle systems (which was actually a rather major change in what RPG players had been accustomed to since the days of Dungeons & Dragons and what was just showing up in action games like the World of Mana series and Secret of Evermore) are much slower and simplistic than installments like, say, Vesperia and Dawn of the New World, both of which were released a little over a decade after Phantasia. You were restricted to just a 2D plane, there wasn't a lot of comboing, and the action froze to display spells and most other special attacks. Also added was the fact that in Japan, Phantasia was called "The game that sings" for having a theme song, unlike most other games at the time. Nowadays everyone more or less expects the games to be fast-paced action or else they don't fulfill the Action Quota produced in part by Phantasia and Destiny. And having a theme song? Psssh... nearly every game's got one of those now.
  • Some of these were subverted by the remakes the two had (the PlayStation version of Phantasia is considered the best version of Phantasia).
  • Its plot also falls into this. The big plot twist of Phantasia? The Big Bad, Demon Lord Dhaos, seemed to be a typical RPG villain but was revealed to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist Anti-Villain trying to sacrifice Earth to save his own planet. Nowadays that's almost expected of a Tales Series Big Bad, to the point where it's more surprising when a Tales Big Bad is not an Anti-Villain (Kronos/Miktran, Zilva Madigan, the English version of Alexi Dionia, Innominat the Suppressor). But at the time, having the Big Bad of an RPG not be a Generic Doomsday Villain was revolutionary. Later games in the series are famous for their Deconstructor Fleet Wham Episodes, but this game lacks one.
  • Tales of Eternia, the real Tales of Destiny 2 and Tales of Symphonia have been suffering this. In the 2000s, they were all moments when Tales grew the beard in terms of Character Development, plot depth, Gameplay advancements, establishing deconstructionism, and in the case of Symphonia, bringing the system to true 3D. However, all three games are still very much products of their time. Fans who were used to installments around or after Vesperia may find them underwhelming for one reason or another. The fact that Eternia and Destiny 2 only received ports on the PSP (That are hard to find) while Symphonia's own ports to modern systems were disastrous certainly didn't help their reputations stand the test of time either.
• Tetris:
  • Sega's 1988 arcade version is quite revolutionary for its time. Unlike the NES and Game Boy Tetris games, which were released a year later, SEGA Tetris introduced several big staples that are essential for high-level play: Fast sideways movement, fast soft drop, lock delay (when a piece hits the stack or floor, it has a split-second to move before it locks into place; unlike in Nintendo Tetris where pieces instantly lock and the game kill screens at level 29, a good SEGA Tetris player can play indefinitely), and a standardized piece color scheme. Many of these features would go on to appear in Tetris: The Grand Master, and lock delay and standardized piece colors would later become part of The Tetris Company's Tetris Guideline, a series of requirements for official Tetris games. Nowadays, especially amongst Westerners, it's seen as yet another Tetris game at best and a third-rate clone at worst; it doesn't help that it only has one direction of piece rotaton and that it doesn't feature "Korobeiniki" (aka "Tetris Game Boy A-Type music"). It also was released a year after the Atari version, which was beloved in the US because you could choose between 4 Russian music tracks and had a CPU versus mode and a difficulty select screen that included handicaps that was also absent in the Sega version, but never was released anywhere else due to Atari being forced to realize that they did not have the rights to it. Nintendo's versions generally avert this trope due to being marketed much more sucessfully and resulting in nostalgia for many players, while SEGA Tetris never found success outside Japan.
  • If you're used to modern iterations of Tetris, the slower piece movements and the stricter engine (pieces lock into place once they touch the floor or object, rather than being allowed to slide for a few frames) of older entries, such as the ones released for the NES and the Game Boy, can feel like poor quality and Fake Difficulty in hindsight.
• The Tokimeki Memorial series as a whole, being the series which made non-H Dating Sims and Otome Games popular, and having created or popularized a number of Romance and Harem Series tropes along the way, suffers from this nowadays. Especially notable in the case of Tokimeki Memorial 4, the latest game in the series: It's generally accepted that it's on par, if not superior to the best episode in the series, the back-then groundbreaking and extremely popular Tokimeki Memorial 2; but it's mostly shrugged off by critics and gamers alike as "so Nineties" and "so old-school", being used by games such as The iDOLM@STER and Love Plus. That said, the Girls Side games hold up somewhat better (and are the only ones with English patches) due to being made more recently and the fact that few other otome games to this day have such well-crafted gameplay, or any gameplay at all aside from your standard visual novel format.
• Tomb Raider:
  • The series was initially praised for its detailed, realistic interactive 3D environment and use of set pieces, which was groundbreaking at the time. Nowadays, the original game rarely gets the respect it deserves, and even then, it's mostly remembered for the fanservice (she has big boobs, therefore the game is sexist and completely cancels out every other positive aspect of Lara's characterization) that is mentioned rather than the many other things it did and the major part it played in establishing the 3D Action-Adventure genre in general.
  • Lara Croft herself was also the first female protagonist who gained a lot of her attention due to her "assets". Back in the mid 90s, a female character made for sex appeal was controversial. Nowadays, no one bats an eye.
• The original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was probably the first mainstream game to use an extensive licensed soundtrack. While most of the bands (except maybe Primus) were pretty obscure outside the Punk community, it was quite impressive at the time to hear such a wide range (i.e., more than just one or two) of different bands in a video game. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, meanwhile, perfected this formula by offering a wider range of musical styles (basically anything from Punk to Rap to Metal) and larger assortment of mainstream bands. Just about every game with licensed music thereafter has owed a lot to the first two Tony Hawk games.
  • Before THPS, Road Rash for the 3DO pioneered the fully licensed soundtrack with bands like Soundgarden, Monster Magnet, and Paw.
• The first Windows game in the Touhou Project series, Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, was released in 2002 and was meant to have a running theme of subverting the audience's expectations (which is why it has more western themes in a series whose name translates as "Eastern"). However, ZUN would note in a 2017 article that "the ancient vampire is a childish little girl" had become such a popular archetype in Japanese Media since then that the Big Bad no longer felt quirky.
  • Reimu, one of the two protagonists of the series, has her premise fall to this— though inspired by Kiki Kai Kai, a video game in the same Shoot 'Em Up genre no less, shrine maidens weren't all that common in video games around 1995. One only needs to look at the article for Miko to see how that's changed.
• Trials of Mana (also known as Seiken Densetsu 3) was, during the late 90s and the Turn of the Millennium, held up as a Sacred Cow and was considered to be one of the best games ever made by Square, and essentially the apex of the World of Mana series. Unfortunately, by the time the game finally got a legitimate release, twenty three years and multiple generations of gaming had passed.
  • In 2019, the game finally released as Collection of Mana with the super nintendo version. Some people who had never played the game before pointed out all the glitches, janky combat (By 2019 standards), sluggish casting, a very difficult early game if Angela and/or Charlotte are chosen as the first heroes, and its rather shallow plot (Also by 2019 standards). With how animated and expressive the sprites were, some also didn't see what made them so special, due to viewing it in a 2019 context rather than the context of 1995.
  • In 2020, the Video Game Remake released - and while many were glad it was not like the controversial Secret of Mana remake (Which was a Shot-for-Shot Remake), it also had the unfortunate side effect of releasing just after the first part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake - resulting in some gamers and even reviewers feeling just a bit disappointed that this remake of a Nineties game... still kind of played like a nineties game and did not have nearly as much Adaptation Expansion as the Final Fantasy VII remake.
• Ultima was once described by Yahtzee as "needlessly obtuse", though there wasn't really anything better available at the time the games were released (which is only true for Ultima IX and perhaps Ultima VIII).
  • The early Ultima games were often described as "RPG/adventure hybrids" at the time, because they brought into RPGs such revolutionary elements as talking to NPCs and solving puzzles beyond "use key on door".
  • It also was the first source of a morality system in an RPG, in Ultima IV.
  • The Ultima Underworld games, along with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, revolutionized RPGs with 360 degrees of 3 dimensional freedom, before the term FPS had even been coined. It looks less impressive compared to today's RPG hack-n-slashers.
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune : At the time of its release, practically every one and their mother praised it for its stellar graphics, cinematic appeal, fully playable setpieces rather than QTEs, and topnotch voice acting and storytelling. These qualities may be harder for fans of the sequels to appreciate, as each of those elements were built upon and improved, leaving the original game looking rather dated and dull by comparison.
• People playing Unreal might have thought it another regular corridor walker, and would have been amazed upon exiting the Vortex Rikers into a beautifully rendered, vast open world with a sky. While the graphics have aged surprisingly well for a 1998 game, open space shooters are hardly uncommon now.
• Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth was one of the most unique games of its era thanks to its blend of platformer, Turn-based RPG, and even some mild real-time elements. On top of that, it had some pretty good voice actors for its english dub... which were mostly associated with Creator/4KidsEntertainment and the Slayers anime. Which created a lot of Narm due to role association, plus some genuinely funny voice clips (especially ICICLE DISASTER!) These days, Valkyrie Profile can be seen as a bit wonky with its transitions as well as VERY poorly balanced leading to massive amounts of Complacent Gaming Syndrome... and its voice acting aged like milk, despite these voice actors being some of the industry's best.
  • A similar effect can happen with Dark Chronicle - at the time they were getting some of the most experienced voice actors for the English Dub, but it just so happened many of them were known for their work on Nickelodeon, PBS, or Cartoon Network shows. Cue Drew Pickles explaining about the fancy train time-machine he just created or Carl Foutley greeting you, or hearing Kath Soucie using her Blake Gripling voice for a... serious encounter.
• The first Virtua Fighter is horribly bland if you've played any 3D fighting game that came later (let alone later entries in the series), yet words fail to describe how innovative and astonishing it was when it came out. Of course, the very name indicates that it was made to demonstrate something new at the time.
  • On top of its polygonal graphics, the game stood out in a sea of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat clones by way of ditching the fantastical, projectile-based gameplay in favor of more grounded gameplay. The game painstakingly recreated multiple forms of martial arts, forewent background story and lore that was becoming commonplace, and traditional "special move" inputs resulted in more elaborate and dangerous strikes rather than fireballs. The streamlined 3-button setup also allowed for a lower floor of accessibility; players could access simple but effective combos through punch-kick combinations while high-level players could study the deep list of more complex moves. These innovations have had their impact diminished over time, especially when Namco got in on the 3D hand-to-hand (or weapon-to-weapon) field with Tekken and the Soul series, taking the depth of Sega's gameplay but adding numerous frills that kept them more prominent than VF since then.
• The first Valis game, as originally made for the PC-88, is practically unplayable by modern standards, with its choppy framerate, stiff controls and grinding for health, the last being necessitated by an uncommonly cruel powerup system which makes you pay with your health just for collecting them. Even the cinematic cutscenes (predating Ninja Gaiden by two years) are barely even animated. Yet this Japanese PC game was popular enough to spawn a series that went on to greater glory, despite the original development team going (temporarily) independent and the commercial failure of the Famicom version that frustrated players in its own way.
• Welcome To Pia Carrot was made in 1995. Like many other adult games and dating sims, it lingered in No Export for You territory. By the time a Fan Translation of the PC-FX port was made in 2009, the art style looked quite old. But on the other hand, only a few other similar games in English by then had simulation-style gameplay.
• Wolfenstein 3-D, being a granddaddy of the first person shooter genre, suffers HARD from this. Upon release in 1992, the game was unlike anything else on the market. In addition to having some of the most detailed (and violent) graphics ever seen in a computer game up to that point, the game more-or-less set the template for the first person shooter genre, allowing the user to explore a fully three dimensional^note technically ray-casted two dimensional world, with an arsenal of weapons that could be expanded upon and switched between at will. Unfortunately, by the standards of the genre even two or three years later (let alone today), the game seems downright primitive due to its flat, maze-like levels, rather limited arsenal of weapons and comparably simple/limited gameplay. Still, the game's widespread influence on video games (let alone first person shooters) cannot be understated.
  • The speed of the game is another factor that was revolutionary at the time. "Fast-paced action PC game" was practically an oxymoron in the early nineties; the first PC graphics cards wouldn't be released until the mid-to-late '90s, which left general-purpose home computers horrendously ill-equipped to run games compared to dedicated gaming consoles like the SNES. PC games were almost always slow and methodical simply because that's all they could handle - in some cases, PC games were nigh-indistinguishable from spreadsheets. That Wolfenstein allowed you to run and gun at high speed and required quick reflexes was mind-bending to PC gamers in 1992.
• Warcraft:
  • Despite popularizing the RTS genre and making Blizzard Entertainment into what it is today, the original Warcraft and Warcraft II won't seem very impressive to modern gamers. The games feature awkward controls, Cosmetically Different Sides, and bland stories. Revolutionary for its time, although it's probably better to stick to Starcraft and Warcraft III nowadays.
  • On a similar note, Stop Poking Me! quotes fall into this. The idea of annoying an in-game unit and prompting a special line of dialogue was an ingenious Easter Egg. Now it's an expected feature of RTS games, and has been used in just about every way possible, from in-jokes to long dialogues to references to all sorts of media, especially exploited by Blizzard themselves. The original poke lines - usually only one or two quotes involving the unit getting mad at the player for clicking on them - seem tame and unfunny by comparison.
  • Unit selection is a huge thing that modern strategy fans take for granted. With the likes of Starcraft and Warcraft III having a selection cap of 12 units, it's often cited as a massive Scrappy Mechanic for those who play modern strategy games, or even Command & Conquer fans whose franchise never had selection caps to begin with. Of course, looking back at earlier Warcraft games shows that this problem was even worse; Warcraft II would only allow you to select nine units at a time, and Warcraft I would only allow four. Only until Starcraft II was the unit selection cap completely removed from the scene.
  • Looking back at World of Warcraft, it's hard to appreciate just how "newb-friendly" or even "Casual" the game was back in 2004, with all the things that have been changed and replaced with Anti-Frustration Features today. The fact that the worst you had to worry about dying was your equipment eventually breaking was considered a MASSIVE headache relief back in the day. In fact, you couldn't lose your items (especially if killed by another player) or de-level. Another big factor was the fact that the game provided a lot of content that could be done by yourself, and in theory it was possible to reach the max level without ever having to group with another player.
    • The game is quite interesting in that it has had this trope happen with itself — when Burning Crusade released in 2007, its world was considered to be top-notch in design. Then the non-expanded world was revamped in 2010 for Cataclysm, meaning Burning Crusade is now the chronologically-oldest content in the game, and is considered to be quite dull and grindy. Many of the old dungeons (that have not been remade for later expansions) are quite dull by today's standards with lots of boss fights being a boring Tank and Spank.
    • Many players have also become quite spoiled by the changes made to balance and class performance over the years — one reason finding a group was so hard in Classic World of Warcraft was that there was literally only one class that could feasibly tank: Warriors. Druids and Paladins could not do it as they were better off using their abilities to heal. Druids also had virtually no damage-dealing ability and very little survivability, resulting in them becoming quite rare. Paladins had no way to generate and maintain threat against single enemies.
    • Specializations. True, they will never be equal in players eyes and there have been plenty of ups and downs, Classic and Burning Crusade were notorious for how horribly balanced the specs were. Most classes back then had only one spec that worked - two if you were lucky.
    • It was even worse for classes whose talents allowed them to fulfill more than one potential role (Druids, Priests, Shamans, Paladins, Warriors), since many were massively gear dependent and they would require different stats to perform their role effectively. For example, Shamans, a hybrid class, will require either gear that boost their mana and spell damage or agility and physical damage depending on their spec. If the only gear available for you was for healing, then you're stuck with inferior gear if you chose the Magic Knight.
  • While World of Warcraft was far from the first MMORPG to be "Solo-friendly" (many MUDs that existed long before even Ultima Online or RuneScape and EverQuest had no "party" dynamic, while City of Heroes was also lauded for being "Solo-friendly"), the fact that one could reach max level while playing solo was considered a big thing in 2004, when games like Final Fantasy XI more or less required you to have a group. Admittedly, it did follow the MMORPG-rule where support classes were pretty rare at max level due to the tedium.
  • The way loot is distributed has also changed a lot, making even the first quality of life improvement in the form of tokens (items for multiple classes that can be exchanged for gear) look archaic.
  • The game itself has also developed this - the story arcs after Wrath of the Lich King became more intertwined with the expansion's arc as a whole, whereas Classic was sort of a Random Events Plot / Slice of Life (with no real Big Bad and loads of bigger bads in the future) compared to the expansions like Mists of Pandaria and Legion which have defined storylines from the start to finish.
• Willow on the Nintendo Entertainment System has been hit hard by this. While it averts the pitfalls of licensed games, it had the worst luck possible to be outdone by other action RPGs released within a year or two later, such as Crystalis and the Mana games. Going back to it and noticing its combat hasn't held up well compared to other games, along with its Guide Dang It! moments, was why it hasn't aged that well.
• Xenogears, in the late '90s, almost didn't see an American release because of its religious overtones. Compared to what a lot of more recent games get away with in terms of religious content, it's hard to believe that the game's surprisingly reverent treatment of the topic was met with so much controversy. Even stranger: Final Fantasy Tactics, released almost one year earlier, had much stronger and harsher religious overtones. But there were no qualms about giving that game a US release. And let's not even get started on the Satanic overtones of ID Software's mid-'90s games.
• The Spiritual Successor to Xenogears, Xenosaga has also not fared particularly well in the long-run.
  • The models were considered to be quite clean and refined - compared to the jagged edges and low-resolution models of The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games and even some of its contemporaries. These days, the game is often criticised for its highly stylized models falling into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley, making the characters look somewhat "Doll-like" with their eyes that don't seem to respond to almost anything - or just how robotic and lifeless they seem in the first game. The second and third games however gave the series a bit of an Art Shift towards less cartoonish styles and by the third game, the high-quality cutscenes actually aged quite well.
  • The trilogy's main protagonist was a woman - which at the time was quite rare not just for JRPGs, but RPGs as a whole. Even western RPGs at the time only gave the player the option to play as a woman and either made the protagonist canonically male (See: Divine Divinity and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic) or sidestepped this by simply never mentioning the protagonist of the previous game. It's hard to see how this would be special these days, though in some ways this works in its favour years later since a lot of RPGs make the player character default to "Male" or never actually state the gender of the Player Character for any future works.
  • Its soundtrack was done by none other than the London Philharmonic Orchestra. And this music you hear in-game too. At the time, this was fairly unheard of - and over a decade later? Video games wound up keeping Symphony Orchestras relevant. It's hard to wonder just why this would have been seen as a marketing ploy back in the Turn of the Millennium.
• Back in the day, UFO Enemy Unknown was revolutionary, setting the standard for squad-based tactical games and for how a challenging environment should be. Today, especially after the reboot XCOM: Enemy Unknown changed many gameplay aspects and introduced simplified controls, most players of young generations would consider it awkwardly confusing, frustratingly difficult, even goofy in certain features. Getting your soldier immediately hit by a plasma bolt reaction shot right after stepping out of the Skyranger was seen as a Difficult, but Awesome challenge in 1995, now it would be only seen as painful, unfair, nonsensical (why should you land right in front of armed enemies and why didn't they fire at your vessel while descending?). Above all, soldiers are not seen as expendable as before, particularly if you spent a lot of time leveling them up. In 1995, losing a veteran from a hidden alien reaction shot while moving was seen as a sad eventuality to be overcome, swap to the next operative and continue the battle, and a total squad-kill was an accepted outcome; a soldier in the 2012 reboot dying to a lucky hidden overwatching alien can lead to savescumming, and a total squad-kill can be seen as a failure of the entire campaign.
  • The latter is also due to the reboot introducing many personalizing traits like customizable face, national flags on the back, callsigns, rpg-elements in the form of skills chosen after leveling up. In 1995 you might lose a veteran soldier but it still was an average Joe, with only the personal name preventing him/her from being anonymous.
• Xevious was a landmark release for the Shoot 'Em Up genre. Before its release in 1983, most vertically-oriented shooters were simple single-screen Space Invaders/Galaga affairs where the only goal was to kill all enemies on-screen, and what little games implemented vertical scrolling were simplistic. The game pioneered many genre innovations such as expansive scrolling levels, a large enemy roster with distinct AI routines and attack patterns, deviously well-hidden secrets, large boss characters and a Dynamic Difficulty implementation that went beyond "enemies move and shoot faster when there are less of them". Xevious influence was immediately felt and many of its core features are now taken for granted, so much that western reviews made around the turn of the millennium were likely to ignore how ambitious the game was for the time and complain about things like boring enemy designs, an annoying soundtrack and a total lack of power-ups. Indeed a microcosm of this can be seen with the game's NES release: while Famicom Xevious was a smash hit at release, its NES version which, for whatever reason, was delayed by four years was met with a mediocre critical reception, as shinier and faster-paced shooters that had been released in the meantime like Life Force made it look seriously outdated.
• YU-NO was one of the earliest successful visual novels and it would set the standard for many visual novels afterwards, but many of its aspects that were considered groundbreaking when it was first released don't stand out as much nowadays:
  • The game was a Genre Turning Point for visual novels. In Japan, YU-NO is regarded as a visual novel classic. It inspired countless visual novels and their popular anime adaptations, ranging from Higurashi: When They Cry, CLANNAD and Fate/stay night to Steins;Gate, Zero Escape and Danganronpa. However, these visual novels and their anime adaptations released in the West before YU-NO, making it look dated to Western audiences by the time its visual novel remake and anime adaptation released in the West for the first time in 2019.
  • It was also the first visual novel to have an epic, world-spanning plot, different from the simplistic Dating Sim games that preceded it. While there were Japanese adventure games with relatively sophisticated plots, such as ones by Hideo Kojima, these were few and far between and nowhere close to YU-NO's 1.3 million-word-script in sheer scale. Unfortunately, since almost every visual novel released in the modern age has a deeper plot than just dating girls and lengthy games requiring as much as over 100 hours to read aren't unheard of either, it comes across as quite standard. It also introduced several character archetypes and plots that were revolutionary in the day, but since they've been copied ad nauseam, it's hard to see why they were so groundbreaking today.
  • YU-NO was also essential in establishing the Multiple Route Mystery structure; it was the first visual novel to feature a branching timeline system, where the story branches into different timelines with alternate endings, with the player able to switch between timelines along a flowchart, different endings revealing different aspects of the plot, and there being a "true ending" to the story. This was revolutionary back in 1996, and the basis for countless visual novels since.
  • The Trapped in Another World (Isekai) plot twist that precluded the second act of the visual novel was genuinely revolutionary in 1996, but works of that genre became so saturated in the 2010s that it's hard to see what was so novel about it. It doesn't help that the anime adaptation aired in 2019, more than two decades after the game had released, and also aired alongside four other isekai series, which led to a frosty reception from the community that was sick of stories of that type.

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