Sandbox / Early Installment Weirdness Video Games Split Cleanup

This sandbox page is for cleanup in soft splits of EarlyInstallmentWeirdness.Role Playing Games and EarlyInstallmentWeirdness.Video Games.

Soft Split Cleanup

To-do

• Needs to be split in separate pages for A-M and N-Z

Works with their own pages:

• Age Of Empires I
• Devil May Cry (2001)
• Final Fantasy
• Fire Emblem
• Grand Theft Auto III
• Guilty Gear: The Missing Link
• The Legend of Zelda
  • The Legend of Zelda (1986)
• Pokémon^note also includes examples from its adaptations
• Super Mario Bros.
• Terraria Calamity
• Toontown Online

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A

• Ace Attorney:
  • The original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney used a penalty system with a fixed number of allowed "strikes" instead of the lifebar system of most later games. In later games, a mistake can cost you as little as 10% of your life bar or as much as 95%, if it doesn't result in you immediately losing the case.
  • The first case in the series, "The First Turnabout," stands out from other first cases in a few ways.
    • Pressing is not required at any point in the case, and is only introduced in the first game's second case.
    • The first case is much shorter than any other case in the series, including other first cases, only having one witness, while most first cases in the series, except for Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, have at least two witnesses to cross examine.
    • "The First Turnabout" is one of the few first cases that is not at all connected to the overarching plot, save for introducing Larry, who becomes relevant in "Turnabout Goodbyes."
  • The first game is the only one to have three-day trials, with later games limiting it to one or two days for better pacing.
  • Among the Phoenix trilogy, the first game lacks the Magatama and profile presenting. The fourth and later games removed the latter except for certain scripted sections and greatly reduced the presence of the former.
  • Early on in the series, the guilty suspects were also more basic in terms of motive and their plans were also basic in the beginning of the series. As the games grew and evolved, the motives and planning from the villains grew more elaborate, complex, and sometimes just plain convoluted and crazy, but making it complex to figure out for the sake of challenging the player and Rule of Cool both excuses it and makes it entertaining.
  • A lot of the weirdness of the first game in comparison to later entries becomes obvious in the fifth case, which was made for the Updated Re Release on the DS after the third game had already been released. The tone is very different compared to the rest of the game, and the pacing is much tighter, with longer trials allowing for more to happen within a single day. However, the new pacing is combined with the weirdness of a three-day trial, resulting in one of the longest cases in the series, making it more obvious why these were dropped.
  • The first game also featured a setting that was far more culturally vague, at least in the English version. While things like a Toku show being extremely popular among children or the general outline of the court system point to the setting being based on Japan, they were small enough details that the localisation could reasonably change the setting to a slightly stranger version of the United States. Later games feature far more overtly unique Japanese themes, causing headaches for the localisers and leading to the infamous Americasia aesthetic.
  • Both Ace Attorney and Justice For All feature four cases each (the former having a fifth case added in the Nintendo DS version released after the original trilogy was completed). From Trials And Tribulations onwards, five cases would become standard for the series (except Apollo Justice).
• Ace Combat:
  • The first game (Air Combat in the west) had a world map that allowed the player to play missions in any order once they'd been unlocked and planes had only guns and standard missiles (weapon changing first appeared in the third game). Losing a plane was permanent, and crashing every plane led to a game over. Finally, there were no fictional "super planes" until the second game (although the final boss was similar to the sorts of aerial fortresses that became common in later games).
  • In Ace Combat 2, the playable "superfighter" (a fictional plane that generally outperforms everything else in the game) set itself apart by way of being able to launch four standard missiles at a time. Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere allowed a lot of the mid- to late-game planes do this with the standard missiles as well; on top of this, the weapon changing system in this game consisted of you replacing the standard guns-and-missiles with different variations, and the closest you got to the current system was if you took some form of bomb, which the game would automatically switch you to whenever targeting something on the ground. It wasn't until Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies that the current weapon system (guns alongside standard missiles launched two at a time and a special weapon you could switch between at the press of a button) was set in stone. 2 also had an "Extra" mode available after completing the game once, where most planes that weren't made available sooner than normal were replaced with completely different aircraft - later games did away with this, save for locking the fictional superfighter away until after beating the game once, in favor of a more standard New Game Plus.
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies introduced alternate paint schemes for planes that the player could choose themselves^note 3 had paint schemes determined by which faction you were currently working with, at least in the Japanese version where you actually had a choice, but had some weirdness regarding them. There were three different paint schemes available for every plane - one normal, one used by enemy Red Shirts unlocked by getting an A or S rank on a specific mission, and one used by unique enemy aces that would be unlocked by shooting them down. However, those aces wouldn't appear unless you were playing New Game Plus above Normal difficulty. On top of that, the alternate paint schemes were treated as entirely separate craft (only special weapons were shared between the different paint schemes of a plane) and had to be purchased individually, with the ace ones costing a little bit extra. Later games changed it so aces could appear in a new game, with only a few restricted by difficulty, and paint schemes could be changed out on a single aircraft without having to shell out for them^note they went back to having to pay to switch paint schemes in Infinity, but that's in part due to the focus on tuning and upgrading planes to far surpass their regular abilities - plus switching paint only ever costs about 50 credits anyway, compared to the thousands needed to buy the actual plane in the first place.
• Adventures of Lolo: The first MSX game, Eggerland Mystery (1985), required you to collect Diamond Framers to open a door, while all other games in the Eggerland series have you collect Heart Framers to open a chest. Mystery was also the only game to include a "Type B" mode, in which each level has a time limit, or points.
• Animal Crossing: When you compare the early games to the future ones you'll notice several differences.
  • Kapp'n, Blathers, and the Able sisters (and their respective services) didn't exist in the original N64 version. The Able Sisters' absence also meant that shirts and umbrellas were sold in Tom Nook's shop (which also extends to the Gamecube version, even though the Able Sisters were introduced in that game). That said, they were originally planned to appear in the game, but couldn't be added until Dobutsu no Mori+.
  • Eavesdropping on your neighbors' conversations was implemented in Dobutsu No Mori e+
  • Players couldn't use emotions until Wild World
  • Blathers couldn't identify fossils by himself before Wild World. Fossil identification was instead done by mailing fossils to another museum.
  • Character customization was more limited: your character wore a horned (for boys) or pointed (for girls) hat with the same pattern as your shirt that could not be removed. Said hats return in later games, but only if you wear a custom pattern on your head.
  • Watering Cans didn't exist before Wild World. In older games, flowers didn't wither. Flowers also couldn't be picked up after being planted, and Hybrid flowers didn't exist.
  • Celeste, Brewster, and Harriet made their first appearances in Wild World
  • You wouldn't get pictures of the villagers as a reward for being good friends with them.
  • The villagers were less interactive. For example, in the first games, you had a menu option to do favors for them, Wild World onward, the villagers will automatically run to you if they want you to do a favor.
  • The overseas localizations of the first game feature a much more cynical setting than their Japanese counterpart, with many of the villagers, most notably the Cranky, Snooty and Peppy villagers, treating the player very harshly and insulting them for the most mundane reasons. Even the Lazy and Normal villagers, who are the nicest villagers of the bunch, can have their moments too. This is also the case for Wild World, although not to the same extend as the first game. Games from City Folk onwards don't take as many liberties regarding overseas localizations and are much more closer to their Japanese counterparts.
  • You can only get NES games in the original game.
  • Acres are less fluid in the original compared to its sequels. They are explicitly marked on your map, and the screen won't scroll past their edges.
  • Each player's house in the first game has a Gyroid outside that serves as a Save Point, meaning that you must walk back to your house if you want to stop playing without angering Mr. Resetti. Wild World introduced the ability to save by pressing Start anywhere (it also had beds in your house's attic that you could use to save your game). And a random villager would guide you through the process of saving instead of a fixed NPC.
  • The first game has balls you can kick around, which are absent in later installments.
  • In the first game, there was a dump where you would drop items, and they would disappear later. Other games have a recycling bin where you drag and drop items through a menu.
• Ape Escape: The first game, though still being about a kid catching monkeys with a butterfly net, had a story that took itself very seriously compared to later titles, which were Lighter and Softer and Denser and Wackier. Specter in particular is devoid of any comic relief antics. Story aside, the player's jump is much higher than later games, and there are some places where the game gets unfairly hard. For one thing, all hits take one whole cookie as opposed to the broken cookie system in 2 and 3. Black pants monkeys, who in later titles would shoot a spread of slow moving bullets, instead shoot ultra-fast bullets directly at you; almost impossible to dodge. Green pants monkeys have rocket launchers whose rockets can't be destroyed; also hard to dodge, but the worst are red pants monkeys. In later titles they had boxing gloves, but in this one, they have both machine guns and rocket launchers and they also carry bombs.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • The franchise as a whole is one of those success stories that somehow survived an extremely rough start. The gameplay of the first entry is completely bare-bones; you can't interact with anyone who's not involved in some way with your missions. The only optional tasks are rescuing citizens from abusive guards (pretty easy), finding all the flags (a colossal pain without a guide), and killing the Templar Knights (ditto). Incidentally, there's no reward for the latter two tasks other than the game acknowledging that you did them. Your meager arsenal consists of a Hidden Blade, sword, short sword, and throwing knives. The Hidden Blade is all-or-nothing; if you don't get a kill, it does no damage whatsoever. You have no money or other resources whatsoever. If you land in any kind of water, you die instantly (a real pain when you get to Sibrand). Enemies in the countryside will attack you on sight, and you have to move VERY cautiously to avoid their attention. Oh, and let's not forget the violent derelicts that smack you all over the place, unbelievably irritating beggars, and loudmouth preachers which say the same damn things over and over and over. Just getting rid of that crap made ACII infinitely better.
  • In the first game, the Modern Day story has a lot of background information that establishes a completely different world than what we see later, this one on the verge of apocalyptic chaos: There was a plague in Africa that wiped out 96% of all life on the continent, American refugees are fleeing across the Mexican border in droves, the U.S. and the E.U. are on the verge of war with multiple other countries over drilling in Antartica, "hurricane season" no longer exists as now there are constant massive storms that are threatening to wipe out coastal areas of the US, and all the movie theaters have closed. It was later retconned that all of these emails were fake troll messages sent by Erudito to troll Abstergo employees, but at the time Ubisoft was certainly setting up much a darker setting than what we see later.
  • The Pieces of Eden went through a number of changes over time as well, from Apples being the most common, if not only kind of artifacts, to the threat level they pose. While Isu tech is never portrayed as harmless, the Apple as it appeared in the original game was so dangerous that Altaïr, who has an unusual amount of precursor ancestry, can barely even look at it without going crazy. Likewise, Ezio was nearly powerless in the sequel against the Papal Staff and would've lost entirely if he didn't have an Apple on his person. It's also pretty heavily implied that Altair's time as Mentor is essentially the first time the Assassins have ever had control over a precursor artifact, as his actions and notes about his findings are what starts the adventure that Ezio continues some centuries afterward. This is later made to be untrue when it's shown that ancient Assassins or "Hidden Ones" such as Bayek and Kassandra were in possession of similar tools.

B

• Baldur's Gate: Since developers didn't expect it to be successful, the first game doesn't have particularly developed characters, while its sequel, Baldur's Gate II, makes them more deep and characterized. One example is Jaheira, who in the first game is introduced as the stereotype of a moaning wife with a subservient husband, while in the sequel she's way more wise, emotional and talkative. Imoen in the first game is a naive young girl who seeks adventure like it was a child's game, despite the monsters, the deaths and the ultimate danger represented by the villain, but in the sequel she's more gloomy and aware of the perils and the dark nature of the setting (though a lot of this is due to overt character development and a more central role in the second game's plot, Imoen having been a very late addition in development of the first game to help players with the game's Early Game Hell).
• Batman: Arkham Series: The first game, Batman: Arkham Asylum, is more linear than its sequels (Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight) or prequel (Batman: Arkham Origins), which are open world and feature plenty of sidequests (whereas the first game relies mostly on the Riddler's Collection Sidequest). It also lacks Batman's ability to slide while running, fire the Batclaw in mid-air and incorporate it during gliding. Nor does the Joker sing during the end credits.
• Bayonetta:
  • Compared to the following games, the first installment had a much more drab color scheme. Vigrid was largely a muted gray, and even the effects of angels and demons tended to lean more on white/silver and black than their gold and red respectively. Starting with Bayonetta 2, the settings became much more colorful, angels became associated with a more rich gold, and demons a deeper bloody red.
  • Each chapter of the first game ended with a quick minigame called "Angel Attack" that could be used to get more Halos and items. This did not return in any future game, nor was there any post-chapter minigame to replace it.
  • The first Bayonetta is the only one that has an opening cinematic before the title screen.
  • Out-of-body fights, a mechanic where Bayonetta would have her soul leave her body so that she could fight angels while guarding Cereza, only appeared in the first game and did not return in any sequel in any form.
  • The final chapter is called the Epilogue, instead of being a numbered chapter like the sequels.
  • Bayonetta was harder than 2 or 3. There were quick time events with a narrow time window that meant instant death if failed, less opportunities to get Witch Time off of enemies (and it is disabled almost entirely on the highest difficulty, something 2 and 3 do not do), and using items gives a direct score penalty. Unlocking Jeanne also had a more strict requirement, getting all Platinum medals on Normal or higher, instead of simply beating the game once.
• beatmania: In the first few versions, there are only four timing judgements (the flashing Great / Just Great was not introduced until beatmania 4th MIX), Goods will break your combo instead of incrementing it, and the game has more of a "street" theme compared to modern titles.
• BlazBlue: The first game, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, has some early-installment weirdness.
  • The game had easy specials, where you could flick the right analog stick if playing on a controller to instantly perform a special, Distortion Drive, or Astral Heat. This was replaced with beginner/Stylish mode starting with Continuum Shift which could be used on an arcade stick.
  • Only Ragna, Rachel and Nu-13 had Astral Heats by default. Other characters' Astrals could be unlocked, but were not usable in ranked online play.
• Bloody Roar: The first two games, the second in particular, have in-depth story modes that are absent in the later titles. The first game also doesn't have Beast Drives or secret characters (at least not one that can be unlocked and played as), and features a few characters who didn't reappear in later games (although most were replaced by characters with similar movesets).
• Bloons Tower Defense: The fourth game introduces camo bloons. However, in this game, the camo bloon is a specific type of bloon, rather than a property that any bloon can have. Additionally, camo bloons can be affected by collateral or splash damage from any tower, while in other games, they completely ignore attacks from towers that don't have camo detection.
• Bomberman: Before the NES installments, the first game was a fairly primitive single-player Maze Game where both the clearly non-robotic player character and the enemies could move right through bombs. There weren't any multiplayer options in the Bomberman games until the TurboGrafx-16 version. The games were also very slow paced and lacked a lot of power-ups like the rollerblades or bomb kicking. It wasn't until the Super NES era that the series found its place.
• Breath of Fire: The first game, Breath of Fire I, lacked the hidden HP bars of first-time enemy encounters that became a staple of the next several installments; instead, bosses would enter a "berserk" phase after losing their initial HP bar. Also, many of the series' signature monsters, such as Eye Goos and Goblins, weren't introduced until Breath of Fire II.
• Burnout: The first two games, Burnout (2001) and Burnout 2: Point of Impact (2002), are fairly straight street-racing games, with the only gimmick of rewarding risky driving with Nitro Boost to make them stand out. Burnout 3: Takedown was the first to actually reward players for crashing their rivals, along with the much-beloved puzzle-game-in-disguise Crash Mode, and the series has been a celebration of aggressive vehicular mayhem ever since.

C

• Call of Duty:
  • The first game is noticeably different compared to later games, playing more like a refined Medal of Honor: Allied Assault than what the series became. There's no Regenerating Health; Universal Ammunition is averted to the extreme, as even weapons that did take the same ammo in reality, like the Sten vs MP40 sharing 9mm bullets from similar magazines, or the normal and scoped versions of any given rifle, couldn't share ammo, forcing the use of German weapons for 95% of the game; enemies are slightly more sporadic in their use of grenades, preferring bursts of several grenades at once rather than the smaller but more constant stream from later games (and they like to settle for just spawning grenades at your feet instead of actually forcing enemy soldiers to physically toss them); the player can't toss enemy grenades back, even though NPCs can; you can select the rate of fire between semi-auto and full-auto for several weapons; Quick Melee takes the form of bashing the enemy with your gun instead of pulling out a knife, and is noticeably weaker than melee in later games as a result (frequently requiring two or three hits to kill a single enemy); your Limited Loadout includes a third slot dedicated to pistols, which was restricted to the M1911 for the Western Allies and the Luger for the Soviets and Germans, and frag grenades in a fourth slot rather than bound to a quick-use key; your selection of weapons in multiplayer is dependent on your faction, thus unbalancing the American team because they had two semi-auto rifles to everybody else's none; weapons have no damage fall-off; there's no sprinting, going for a Counter-Strike-like system where your movement speed is entirely dependent on your currently-equipped weapon, which interestingly makes a character holding a pistol in this game faster than a sprinting character in CoD4 and beyond; and Captain Price looks and sounds different from his more famous Modern Warfare depiction (not even a hint of stubble under his Porn Stache like the CoD4 Price has, his hat is a bright red beret rather than a boonie hat, and he's voiced by an American actor who sounds slightly different between the two games) and dies unceremoniously partway through the game, only becoming a staple of the franchise because Anachronic Order meant the second game could have him show up in missions that took place before the one he died in. Its expansion (another example in itself; none of the later games in the series have had singleplayer-only content added after release, nor has post-release content been distributed on its own in any manner except digitally) added sprinting, which cannot be used for nearly as long as it can in later games and defaults to an entirely different key, but is otherwise identical, differing mainly in rebalancing weapons by adding semi-auto rifles to the German and Russian inventories (without balancing them differently for singleplayer, thus making the campaign much more difficult), nerfing machine guns by eschewing pre-placed MG42s in favor of giving every side a portable machine gun that has to be set up where the player wants, and introducing the damage fall-off model where shots from further away deal less damage. Moreover is the game's use of the Quake III engine with few major modifications, compared to later games using iterations of a game engine still derived from Quake III's but noticeably different from it. Call of Duty: Finest Hour is much the same as the first game, but with no Gameplay Ally Immortality and a reworked medkit system to accommodate this (only two types of medkit now, small ones that heal you on contact and large ones you can carry around to Heal Thyself or an ally with). It was also the only game with a female player character (Tanya Pavelovna, a Russian sniper) and the only one where a player character at least becomes an NPC who can talk, until the Black Ops games (women are playable in some Zombies maps and an optional mission in Black Ops II, culminating in being able to play Black Ops III as a woman in its entirety, and the first Black Ops sold itself somewhat heavily on the fact that the player character speaks all the time, even in gameplay).
  • Finest Hour is another example in itself in the way the series handled console releases. At the very beginning of the franchise, it was a PC series first and foremost, so the original game and its expansion came only on PC, while Finest Hour, a console release, was a third-party spinoff. Starting with the seventh generation, things shifted as the original developers made an actual sequel for the Xbox 360 as well as PC, with the third-party spinoff for it, Big Red One, instead being shunted off to previous-gen consoles; the series would continue in this manner, with mainline releases on PC and current-gen consoles and the spinoffs on previous-gen ones until World at War, though it did briefly come back with Ghosts, Advanced Warfare and Black Ops III releasing on both seventh- and eighth-gen consoles, with BO3 coming closest to the old model (the full game on PC and eight-gen consoles, while seventh-gen ones could only fit the multiplayer and Zombies).
  • Call of Duty 2 is overall much closer to the now-more-familiar style of Call of Duty 4, but there are still some oddities, the major one being that you still can't sprint. It also brings more game mechanics that are now standard to the series, such as grenades bound to quick-use keys, letting you carry more than one kind of grenade at a time (in this case, frags and smoke grenades), and regenerating health, but it has some rather odd ideas on how it's supposed to work with those; in particular, the devs seemed to have trouble dealing with the fact that the player has theoretically infinite health, and decided to make the smoke grenades the Next Big Feature of the game by requiring you to use them every fifteen seconds to flank machine guns and tanks that will chew you up if you don't cover your advance with smoke. It also, weirdly, keeps damage drop-off as introduced in United Offensive, but for some bizarre reason only applies it in singleplayer where it's only a hindrance; the campaign can have a machine gunner tank three sniper rifle bullets to the noggin if you're shooting from fifty meters away, while multiplayer still lets you one-shot people with bolt-action rifles from the other side of the map. It would also be the last mainline game in the series to heavily avert Bag of Spilling and No Cutscene Inventory Inertia, allowing you to take enemy weapons and usually hang onto them for the entirety of a campaign even as the individual levels in it take place days and weeks apart from each other, after the heavier focus on scripted sequences in the game allowed for game-ending conflicts with that freedom (such as the last Soviet mission making objectives out of grabbing a sniper rifle and then killing an enemy sniper, which allows a player to bring the game to a halt by making the kill with a German sniper rifle grabbed from two missions prior).
  • The first Modern Warfare is noticeably different from its later two installments. Most obviously, it was sold under the title Call of Duty 4, which was later mostly phased out due to the franchise's split between Treyarch, Infinity Ward, and later Sledgehammer. Its campaign switches between little more than the Russian countryside and a hostile, unnamed Islamic country (the latter of which you stop playing in as little as a third of the way through the game), as opposed to the more varied settings of the series' later two installments; there was also only one set of missions in a recognizably-specific real-world location (and that one being set in the real-world Ghost Town that is Chernobyl), as opposed to the more varied environments of the later two, where every other mission takes place in Washington, D.C. or Rio de Janeiro or Paris. This, combined with the second and third installments' heavy use of Rule of Cool, is why some of the first installment's gritty realism feels lost in its sequels. It also featured an unlockable "Arcade Mode" to add a score counter over the whole game when replaying it and campaign cheats unlocked for collecting the intelligence, which were nowhere to be found in later installments save for the remastered version of MW2's campaign. The game's multiplayer experience is also heavily modified in its sequels. The first installment featured three fixed killstreaks (UAV, airstrike, and helicopter), equippable night vision goggles, several pre-set voice messages, and an equipment/perk system that was heavily reworked in sequels. The first-tier perks were all for extra equipment such as an RPG, claymore mines or extra ammo, for instance, and you were forced to go without one if you attached a grenade launcher or, strangely, an underbarrel grip to your weapon. The system for attachments was also slightly different: a maximum of one attachment at a time for any weapon, with the only options being two types of sights (an unmagnified red dot or an ACOG), a suppressor, a foregrip or a grenade launcher, some weapon types were noticeably restricted in what was available (like sniper rifles only getting the ACOG and foregrips being restricted to shotguns and machine guns), and there were several attachments that were only used in the campaign, like an EOTech-style holographic sight (which was coded as the singleplayer counterpart of the ACOG) and a red dot scope that shows up on every G36C in the campaign and a couple of M4s. The AK-47 was the first alternate assault rifle available upon unlocking the ability to create your own classes - the next two Modern Warfare games made it the final unlock (here that honor goes to the Golden Desert Eagle - on that subject, golden camos are restricted to one weapon per category rather than being unlockable for every weapon). The PC version also had some noticeable differences from the console versions - there was no Prestige system, it used PunkBuster as its anti-cheat system (making things difficult to set up properly when Even Balance eventually dropped official support for the game), and all of the post-release content console players had to purchase as DLC was made available for free in patches for the PC version, including a Christmas-themed variation of one map that the consoles never got except when it actually was Christmas. By Modern Warfare 2 the publisher and developers realized the implications of selling the games over Steam, and were able to implement Prestiging, use Valve's anti-cheat system, and sell DLC map packs.
  • World at War is the last game in the series with any noteworthy oddities before the now-familiar gameplay and mechanics of Modern Warfare 2. Most of these are either carryovers from Call of Duty 4 resulting from Treyarch still being just a "side" developer with little room to innovate the series at the time (the game was set in WWII mostly because Activision wasn't convinced the jump to the near-future would stick), or them trying to innovate what little they could by bringing back mechanics that had been abandoned since United Offensive, such as fully-usable tanks in multiplayer (complete with players gaining a fourth perk that only affects some aspect of using one) and eschewing pre-placed machine guns in favor of a bipod attachment for the handheld ones. It also introduced co-op modes, but campaign co-op has so far only returned for Black Ops III - Modern Warfare instead had the Spec Ops mode that repurposes singleplayer levels for contextless co-op,^note Word of God says that they wanted straight-up campaign co-op like in World at War, but couldn't balance the story levels for more than one player; scripting probably played a heavy part as well, since World at War's campaign has noticeably fewer cinematic sorts of scripted sequences than Call of Duty 4 to make up for the fact that there can be more than one player, and even then two levels (the stealth mission where you hunt a German general through the ruins of Stalingrad and the one where you clamber about between the guns of a PBY Catalina) are unavailable in co-op because of their more scripted nature. while Call of Duty: Black Ops has kept the four-player Zombies mode (which is likely why campaign co-op didn't return except for Black Ops III — given the choice between that or Zombies, everyone always picks Zombies).
• Call of Duty: Zombies:
  • The first map, "Nacht Der Untoten", plays very differently from every other Zombies map owing to the mode's humble origins as a Secret Level at the end of World at War. There is no Perk-a-Cola or Pack-a-Punch, no traps (unless you count the Exploding Barrels scattered around the map's exterior, itself an odd feature), no power that needs to be turned on, the Mystery Box is always fixed in one location, you play as a silent squad of generic Marines, and the map's "Wonder Weapon", the Ray Gun, functions simply as a powerful gun without any fancy effects, and is also a reused Easter Egg from the campaign. The map does have a musical easter egg, but it takes the form of a radio that plays random songs from the campaign alongside a bizarre genre mashup appropriately named "WTF", far from the vocal metal tracks that would become standard. The building the map takes place in is also unusual for being reused from both the campaign ("Little Resistance") and a multiplayer map ("Airfield"). Finally, it doesn't have any additional enemy types beyond the zombies, who themselves are a bit less agile in this map. It would take until "Der Riese" until all elements of the Zombies formula would be together for the first time.
  • The mode's Myth Arc was also non-existent in the beginning, beyond a few environmental clues and interactive easter egg that were mostly specific to the map itself. It would take until "Ascension" in Black Ops for the storyline to be tied into gameplay with the introduction of a sequential set of optional objectives for the player to complete.
  • The most obvious difference between earlier and later maps is that the early ones make much greater use of Survival Horror tropes. Look at the second map, "Verrükt", for example. That map plays its Bedlam House setting completely straight, makes good use of Ominous Fog, contains plenty of tight corridors designed to limit the player's ability to simply outrun zombies, and the map's central gimmick (your team is split up and can only reunite once the power is switched on) is designed to introduce a feeling of isolation. Each newer map marks a gradual but constant shift towards Denser and Wackier content and layouts designed to encourage movement and completing objectives together over camping and just shooting zombies.
  • In World at War, the Quick Revive Perk-a-Cola's ability was to speed up the rate at which you can revive your teammates. This ability is obviously useless when playing solo, but it would take until Black Ops for Quick Revive to have the alternate ability of having its user self-revive once in that circumstance.
• Castlevania:
  • The first game, Castlevania (1986), ends with a Monster Mash Credits Gag instead of the more serious tone of later games.
  • Like several other Konami games of the era, the first game was based specifically on a movie, or in this case a whole genre, i.e. classic monster movies. Other examples included Contra (Rambo: First Blood Part II/Aliens), The Final Round (the Rocky series), The Adventures of Bayou Billy (Crocodile Dundee), and Almana No Kiseki (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).
  • The early games were mostly straightforward platformers with levels, as opposed to the more open-world games that began with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and didn't include anything beyond the six basic weapons to fight with.
  • Most of the titles also had yet to follow the "X of Y" formula used today, including the un-subtitled first and fourth games and their re-reboot Castlevania Chronicles, Bloodlines, the first N64 game (also unsubtitled in the west), Simon's Quest, Dracula's Curse, Dracula X/Vampire Kiss, The Adventure, Castlevania Legends, Belmont's Revenge, and the cancelled Resurrection.
  • Dracula resembled his stereotypical theater counterpart, rather than the more original form he assumes today (although he did briefly retake a Bela Lugosi-like form for Portrait of Ruin).
• City-Building Series: The most remembered games start at Caesar 3 and follow a generally similar style. However, Caesar 1 and 2 had a number of differences from this style.
  • Separate city and province levels. The city level had you build buildings, entertainment, police equivalents, final goods industries, etc. The province level had you building ports, military units, raw material industries, and other structures that fed or defended the central city. Road and basic infrastructre at this level were more expensive as well. Caesar 3 style games effectively combined these into a single map, with farms, mines, ports, and such built within the city.
  • Industry was taxed rather than directly generating income from exports, with taxes based on productivity. Industrial productivity required both enough raw materials/labor/market access to operate, plus demand for its products from city population, connections to provincial towns, or connections to ports/trading posts. Unlike Caesar 3 where only industrial exports directly brought in money, industrial demand by a city's population would also earn city income.
  • Goods were not specifically required to do anything (no specific weapons needed for soldiers, no goods needed to grow housing, etc.) All industry functioned the same, consuming raw materials and selling to someone to generate taxes while employing people, and that was it.
  • Empire rating, equivalent to kingdom rating on pharaoh, could be improved by building up a province, instead of relying on gifts and tribute.
  • Few buildings used the walker system. Most used an area system, where houses in an area got the benefit, some were citywide, where buildings placed anywhere benefited a city.
  • Mission order could be chosen more freely. Any province next to a completed one could be played, allowing a more freeform mission order, unlike Caesar 3 and pharaoh's "1 or 2 choices available" or Zeus and Emperor's fixed cities/campaigns.
• Cho Aniki: The first game, Cho Aniki (1992), was considerably less homoerotic than every game that came after it, though still pretty weird on its own. Unbelievably, this is actually an inversion— the series only got weirder with each installment after Ai Cho Aniki dialed up the camp.
• The ClueFinders:
  • The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: The Mystery of Mathra features three "Worlds" where the titular cluefinders have to collect items and use them for that "world"'s final challenge. No other game in the series has this - the games that do have three acts will typically only have one or two challenges in the final act with the only way to move being "forward", and not being able to access the map.
  • 3rd Grade also features multiple "one-time" Challenges often done when the characters are en-route to another place. While other games (including a few later ones) would also do this, these could be repeated by going to the map.
  • 3rd Grade had a different theme, much more minimalistic animation, two songs about the "world" the cluefinders were in,as well as a need to acquire resources in the third "world".
  • The ClueFinders 4th Grade Adventures: The Puzzle of the Pyramid also had plenty of "Empty screens" (ie screens with nothing to interact with or an NPC to talk with) as well as the "one-time" challenges. However, unlike the previous game third grade, you couldn't return to these "one time" challenges. You also couldn't backtrack as moving from one "world" to the next was a Point of No Return.
  • The ClueFinders Math Adventures Ages 9–12: Mystery in the Himalayas features only one "world" to explore, and the game is all about playing a Clue-like game where you have to use the clues given to figure out a location, suspect, and an item.
  • Math Adventures 9-12 featured much rougher animation, with some mild design changes. This was changed in an Updated Re-release.
  • Leslie did not speak with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness in 3rd, 4th, or Math 9-12.
• Command & Conquer:
  • The first game, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, had several oddities that were removed from later games. Some particular ones were the lack of production queues (even training multiple infantry units or building several tanks required you to click the icon for them once, wait for it to finish, then click again) and the inability to place buildings with any sort of space between them unless you abused the also-unique-to-this-game ability to place buildings next to sandbags (later games don't let walls or other defensive structures increase your build area). The sidebar could also be pushed away at will at the click of a button, which made sense for missions where you never get to build and train anything, but nevertheless was removed in later games since even when they had infantry/tank-only missions, they'd at least give you free radar. There's no skirmish mode, either, so the only way to play the game against the AI is the campaign. (This was added in the Remastered Collection, however.) Finally, both sides have the same voice for their advisor/computer character, even if it's explained that Nod is using a stolen one because they don't have anything equivalent; Tiberian Sun onward gave separate advisors for each side. And said advisor, in the first game, says "building" even when you're training infantry. It also stands as the only game in the series with no expansion packs that actually expand on the story in any meaningful way.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1 actually tried to play the series premise (a battered alliance fighting the onslaught of an invading, tyrannical empire led by an Ax-Crazy dictator) entirely straight, with subtle performances and writing. The rest of the series devolved into high Camp immediately. In other words, Early Installment Lack of Weirdness. The first Red Alert game also apparently takes place in the same universe as the Tiberian-series games, as Kane appears as a Soviet advisor and the Soviet ending even has explicit references to the Brotherhood of Nod. The second game obviously doesn't fit into the timeline of the Tiberian games, so at some point after the first one, the timeline must have split. It's also the last game in the series to continue heavily dabbling in Cosmetically Different Sides - some of their buildings look different, and it was the first game to dabble in the idea of separate countries within the two major factions with slight differences^note albeit extremely minor and never explained in-game but for the most part it's a lot of the same tech doing the same stuff between both sides, before later games gave the individual sides even different generic infantry.
  • Up through Tiberian Sun, there were only two columns in the sidebar, one for buildings of any kind and one for infantry and vehicles, with other stuff shoved into one of the two at random when applicable. Red Alert 2 added separate tabs for all the different types of stuff you could make, with that game in particular having four, two each for buildings (one "production" and one "defensive", the latter also housing support powers) and two each for units (one for infantry and one for vehicles).
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • The eponymous character had a girlfriend named Tawna in the first game who was the Damsel in Distress. She was written out of the series starting with the second game, with Word of God stating that she had dumped Crash for Pinstripe Potoroo. The actual reason was that Moral Guardians found her design too overly sexual, and Naughty Dog wanted to have a more positive female lead, which lead to the creation of Crash's much more helpful and action-geared sister Coco for the second game. She wasn't quite scrapped completely, considering she's made a few later cameos and was in some spin-off titles like Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. The remake of the first game in Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy tried to rectify this by making her a little more feisty during the first cutscene (managing to knock out a lab assistant just before many of them surround her, instead of her being held by the arms by two of them). When she became a relevant character once again in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, she was revamped into an Action Girl from a different timeline.
  • The first game had a world map consisting of three islands instead of the warp rooms that would become a staple of the franchise starting with the second game, and bosses were scattered throughout and not always the last obstacle. Crystals, the main Macguffins starting from the second game onward, were also completely absent.
  • While Crash games tend to be hard, the first game was Nintendo Hard: in order to get the box gem for a level, you had to break all the boxes without dying. Later games had checkpoints save your box count and no-death runs were confined to special routes. The remake of the first game in Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy toned down the difficulty, limitating breaking all of the crates without dying to colored gems levels only. That said, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time decided to bring back the difficulty of the first game and increase it more, becoming even more difficult than the first game.
  • The first game had a lot more emphasis on platforming, with notable levels like The High Road, Slippery Climb and Lights Out requiring a lot of precise jumping.
  • In the first game, you needed three tokens to access the Bonus Stages instead of having a special platform that would take you to them. Also, Bonus Stages were themed after characters (Tawna, N. Brio and Cortex) rather than having their themes match the theme of the level.
  • In the first two games, Aku Aku does not speak and acts more like a mute Satellite Character. It wouldn't be until Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped that he would gain his mentor characterization. That said, he does speak in the Japanese versions of Crash 1 and 2, where he occasionally gives advice to the player.
  • Almost all of the characters are voiced by Brendan O'Brien in the first game, including Dr. Neo Cortex, who has a completely different voice than he would have starting with the second game.
• Criminal Case: The first two seasons, Criminal Case: Grimsborough and Criminal Case: Pacific Bay, lack many of the elements that would become staples to the series from World Edition onward, and even have things exclusive to them as well.
  • Grimsborough only has Jones as your partner for the entire season, with three sole exceptions where he gets replaced by another member of the team due to certain circumstances. From Pacific Bay onward, there are two or even three partners.
  • Characters in Grimsborough tend to swear several times, although usually censored, which would eventually become non-existent starting from Pacific Bay.
  • Up until the Airport district in Grimsborough, none of the Additional Investigations seem to have much bearing on the plot; they mostly revolve around checking up on the other suspects, usually to help them find an item they are missing or catch them doing something shady. Even plot-lines such as Alden Greene's activity and the Rorschach test murders are relegated to the main case rather than the AI; the same goes for the three first districts of Pacific Bay, with Jazz Town marking the point where the AI start having an overarching theme across the district/season. From World Edition onward, every AI in the season tends to focus on either the underlying plot of the game or on the villains of the district.
    • Adding to this, AI in Grimsborough and Pacific Bay lack the specific artwork that would characterize them from the third region of World Edition onward, instead showing the pictures of the suspects interrogated in them. They also lack a title, being plainly called "Additional Investigation" up to Ivywood Hills, the sixth district of Pacific Bay, where each district-specific AI starts having its own name.
  • Suspect interrogations in Grimsborough are generally much shorter and nowhere near as detailed as later seasons, with Jones often judging the suspects' characters after grilling them.
  • In stark contrast to later seasons, there are very little LGBT characters in Grimsborough beyond minor suspects, with same-sex relationships being shown in a negative light. This becomes noticeable in The Conspiracy, where the player returns to the city five years later and there are a lot of characters pertaining to the LGBT community shown in a positive light, including a member of their own team.
  • A few of the earlier cases of Grimsborough have a suspect's profile clues being found out in Chapter 1. This was later changed so profile clues are relegated to Chapters 2 and 3.
  • Pacific Bay has the members of the team receiving their own "character arc" in different districts (which also happen to be their hometowns), with the Story Arc of that certain district mainly focusing on them and their own problems, such as Hannah in Inner City, Yann in Jazz Town, Amy in White Peaks, and so on. None of this would reprise in any subsequent seasons, where characters only receive a case focused on them at most for some relevance. There are certain exceptions, such as Marina on Eurasia or Penelope in the Renaissance, where they get storylines across the district, though none of them as plot-heavy as the ones found in Pacific Bay.
  • The number of cases in each district of Pacific Bay is a lot less consistent than Grimsborough or subsequent seasons, with districts having between three and eight cases at random. In comparison, every district except for the final one in Grimsborough has ten cases (if one discounts the tutorial in the first district), World Edition (with the exception of the final region), Mysteries of the Past and The Conspiracy have six, and Travel in Time and Supernatural Investigations have five.
• Cube Escape: The first created game of the series, The Lake, is a relatively simplistic game with a Featureless Protagonist and no specified time period, as well as no Sequel Hook or obvious connection to a larger plot. In contrast, later games have clearly defined characters, time periods, and gradually-accumulating pieces of a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot. Even with a later update to tie it a bit to Seasons, you could basically skip it entirely and not miss anything about the series' overarching plot. It also remains the only game in the series to have Multiple Endings. Additionally, Dale Vandermeer, Mr. Crow, and Mr. Owl - characters who all turn out to be extremely important to the larger plot and make frequent appearances in later games - aren't introduced until Case 23, the fifth game of the series.
• Custom Robo: In the Japan-exclusive first game, Custom Robo (1999), you could only use Ray and could not switch to other bodies — additionally, most of the robos in this game looked less robotic and more like humans in armor. From V2 onward, not only are you able to switch your robo's body in addition to all other parts, there is much more variety in robo design.
• Cytus II: Charts made prior to version 2.0 lack tap-drag notes, while nearly every Chaos-difficulty chart released afterwards has them.

D

• Dance Central: In the first installment, Dance Central (2010), the game would actually slow down the song if players weren't performing well. This was dropped in all sequels.
• DanceDanceRevolution:
  • The very first release of the first game (commonly called "DDR 1.0" by the fanbase) doesn't have Versus Style. There is a two-player mode called Couple Style, but rather than two players dancing separately, they work together to complete a unified stepchart based on the Single charts (it's not Double Style since there are times when more than two arrows appear), so they have to play on the same difficulty. Additionally, the game makes no distinction between passed or missed steps; regardless of how close or far your timing is, the arrows will pass through the Step Zone. Finally, the Maniac/Heavy/Expert difficulty is absent. These oddities are addressed in the Internet Ranking Version (AKA "DDR 1.5"), but Couple and Versus Styles still have to be played on the same difficulty. The choice to select different difficulties for two-player modes is introduced in the second game.
  • Vivid arrow skin, which distinguishes the beat of the arrows, is introduced in the third game. For perfectionist players, the first two games are effectively a Luck-Based Mission, since you have no way to ascertain the exact timing of the stepcharts outside memorization.
  • The classic song wheel interface for music selection used until X2 is introduced in 5thMix. The first three games' music selection is modeled after a jukebox, with songs represented by CDs. The fourth game uses a weird interface in which songs are represented by diagonal banners at the bottom half of the screen. Other than that, the first four games also restrict the number of available songs based on the modes you select (though all of them except for 1stMix are rereleased with the option to access the entire song list) and do not allow you to choose the same song more than once within the same playthrough.
  • All mainline games up to 4thMix run at only 30 FPS, which can come off as an eyesore for those accustomed to newer games.
  • Freeze arrows, speed modifiers, and a dedicated options menu do not exist until DDRMAX. Other modifiers must be inputted with codes.
• Danganronpa: From the viewpoint of the entire franchise, there has much some notable differences between the early installments and the later installments.
  • The executions in Danganronpa V3 are more brutal in comparison to the executions in the first two major installments. Not that the executions in the first two games weren't brutal to begin with!
  • The original Danganronpa:
    • Portrayed Hope's Peak Academy as a Good All Along institution that had nothing to do with advancing the Big Bad's scheme, since it was intended to shelter the students, and the Headmaster (a suspect for the mastermind) had been killed before the start of the game. This can come off as very jarring considering how later works in the franchise portray the Academy as heavily corrupt, not giving a damn about the students as people and only being interested in their talents, and indirectly aiding the Big Bad in the process.
    • Numerous tropes the franchise is known for deconstructing are played straight.
    • Compared to the executions afterwards, the execution of Leon Kuwata is incredibly violent. This is largely due to it being lifted from the considerably darker early build of the game.
    • All versions of the game lack a light novel readable after the main game is complete, something that is in every game starting with the Updated Re-release of Danganronpa 2.
    • Both male and female students feature a character with a much more unusual look than the rest of them (Hifumi and Sakura). Later games just stick to only one of the male students having an unusual design.
    • The Re:Act feature (which itself was used with decreasing frequency in the game), a form of Dialogue Tree where progressing in the dialogue requires you to click on specific purple-colored phrases in the other characters' statements, has not appeared in any of the following installments.
    • The game has less "sci-fi and unrealistic" elements in comparison to other installments. For example, in one of Chihirio's free time intros, it was stated that they don't have the technology for a robot with an AI installed inside it yet. Given how the future installments ended up having a virtual world simulator, medicine that can change the size of somebody, anime programs that can brainwash people, and actual robots with actual AI installed inside them, that comment can be a bit jarring.
    • The 8-bit character sprites used for the students' dorms and picturing them being carried to their executions are completely different from the ones seen in School Mode, being less Super-Deformed. Later games use the School Mode sprites for dorm portraits and executions instead of having a separate set of sprites for both the main game and side content.
    • Unlike in the sequels, a student's report card doesn't list their birthday, their blood type, or the things they like and dislike the most.
    • Barring some Ho Yay, the game is more lacking in the Ship Tease department than the sequels. There's really not much romance other than Makoto's crush on Sayaka (which is short-lived as she's the first victim of the killing game), Toko's love for Byakuya (which is entirely Played for Laughs), and Kyoko being Makoto's Implied Love Interest. In Danganronpa 2 and Danganronpa V3 on the other hand, the students share plenty of Ship Tease.
    • The number of Free Time Events each character had generally depended on when they died. For example, Sayaka, the first to die, only has two events, whereas Toko, who survives, has eight counting Genocide Jack's three. Later installments gave each character five events, even if they died too early to see them all in a normal playthrough, although in V3, each character has two events with Kaede in addition to the standard five with Shuichi. Each character can either give the player a new ability to use during the Class Trials or more points, which are required to use said abilities. Free Time Events in later games give hope fragments when cleared, which are necessary to unlock abilities for the Class Trials, and the character's special ability when you clear all of them.
    • The murder plots in the first game are considerably simpler than the convoluted schemes from the later two games. Only one chapter has a murder plot more complex than "stab/bludgeon victim and dispose of evidence", and in two chapters the murders were spur-of-the-moment actions that weren't planned out at all. Most of the complications of the cases is the result of people meddling with the crime scenes and manipulating evidence after the fact. This is a stark contrast to later games where nearly every case involves untangling the murderer's complicated schemes.
  • Characters do not give you their underwear upon finishing their Free Time events as they do in the sequels, with this instead happening once the player finishes a given character's School Mode ending added in the Vita port and subsequent releases.
• Darius:
  • Though the original game does have branching paths, it doesn't use a stage select screen. Instead, the levels split into divergent courses after the Boss Battle. Darius R, released about a decade and a half later, uses this same style of stage select.
  • The first two games, released in 1986 and 1988, have multi-monitor setups that would not be seen again until Dariusburst Another Chronicle in 2010. Even then, DBAC only uses two 16:9 monitors for a 32:9 setup, as opposed to the 4:1 setup of three 4:3 monitors used in the first two games (although Darius II does come in a two-monitor, 8:3 setup).
• Dark Parables: The first two installments, and the first one in particular, are very different from the rest of the franchise. These two take place solely in real countries (Scotland and Germany, respectively), while the later games spend at least part of the time in a Fictional Country. Completing the main games of the later installments immediately unlocks bonus chapters which expand on the story of the main game, as well as other Bonus Material; Curse of Briar Rose and The Exiled Prince, however, have New Game Plus, requiring the player to play the games a second time on a higher difficulty level in order to unlock their bonus chapters, and it's only upon finishing the bonus chapters that the player gains access to the rest of the Bonus Material. And as the series has progressed, more and more features have been added to the games to flesh out the stories and their interconnected nature, leaving the first two games looking very uncomplicated and straightforward by comparison.
• Dark Tales: The first two adventures, particularly the first one, are very different from those which followed. The art style is different, and they're the only two games in the series which don't have voice acting. The first one is also the only installment in which the bonus chapter doesn't in some way continue or supplement the main game's story; it's a completely unrelated little challenge. It also follows the Poe story on which it's based (Murders in the Rue Morgue) more closely than any other installment.
• DC Universe Online:
  • As the game started out in a heavily-modified post-Infinite Crisis universe, characters all started out with their pre-The New 52 looks and moralities (for instance, Harley Quinn starts the game still attached to the hip with The Joker and wearing the harlequin costume.) These looks can still be seen in the cutscenes in the base game.
  • When the game started, there was only three movement types and six powers. Later updates would add a new type of movement, a new weapon type and a plethora of powers. In addition, the powers were split into two trees (for instance, Nature was Plants and Shapeshifting) before a massive update merged both power sets together.
  • The Iconic Powers had a set of powers that just boosted stats such as Empathetic Healing boosting how much healing those powers did. A later update did away with those with Super-Strength being the only hold out.
  • When the game began, Adam Baldwin voiced Superman, Gina Torres voiced Wonder Woman and Arleen Sorkin voiced Harley Quinn. George Newbern, Susan Esienberg and Jen Brown would later take over the respective roles.
• Dead or Alive: In the first game, Dead or Alive (1996), fights took place over platforms representing the fighting arena, and if the fighting moved away from them into the hazardous area called "danger zones," a fighter who was knocked down would not only take additional damage than normal but they'd also be sent skyrocketing into the air.
• Dead Space: The first game, Dead Space (2008), has several gameplay and narrative differences to its sequels that definitely stand out nowadays.
  • Isaac is a Heroic Mime. He never speaks throughout the entire game, only letting out grunts and yells when he's injured or exerting himself, like with a stomp or punch. In the sequels and remake, Isaac is a fully voiced character throughout the game.
  • Zero-Gravity movement is far more stilted and awkward. You must manually aim at another surface you want to be on, then leap to it and wait for Isaac to land before being able to move again. In the sequels and remake, Isaac instead floats freely throughout the zero-gravity space using thrusters on his suit.
  • Multiple quick actions in the sequels, like quickly refilling your Stasis meter and reloading manually when you are not aiming, are not present in the original. You instead must open your inventory to use Stasis packs, and must be aiming to manually reload.
  • The Marker in the original game is not actively trying to spread a Necromorph infestation like the sequels' counterparts, but is instead trying to stop the one currently in progress.
  • The color palette of the original game normally falls well into the Real Is Brown category, whereas the sequels are far more colorful and varied in terms of environments.
• Deception: The first game, Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness, was a first-person RPG which included typical item usage, merchants to buy/sell from, Summon Magic, as many traps in each room as you could fit and have MP to fund, and the ability to redecorate your castle. From Kagero on, they shifted to third-person, removed almost all RPG elements except for Hit Points, and you were limited to one ceiling, wall, and floor trap at a time, but you also received bonus points for Combos. However, the connection was far more tenuous between games in the original Japanese; the later titles are Dolled Up Installments in the US.
• The Denpa Men: The very first game, The Denpa Men: They Came By Wave, has no overworld of any kind—your Player Headquarters consists entirely of you choosing between options on a menu, and you simply travel to dungeons by selecting them. The dungeons are the only locations you can actually walk around in. The game also has only two equipment slots ("Clothing" and "Accessory"), and of the two, only clothing is visible on your character. It's also lacking a number of secondary gameplay features that the second game introduced (such as gardening, fishing, and the ability to change your color with paint), but the lack of equipment slots and overworld is the most glaringly odd.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Devil May Cry 2:
    • Dante's Rebellion. In this game, it looks generic and doesn't have any background significance. In later games, it has the skull and ribcage motif in its guard and is Dante's keepsake sword from his father.
    • Bloody Palace. Unlike its future renditions in the series that end after their final floors, this one's 9999th floor loops after being completed, making it endless until you die.
    • Certain moves such as Rain Storm, Twosome Time and Fireworks would become series staples associated with Dante's Gunslinger Style instead of being regular combos as they are implemented in this game. However, this game's version of Rain Storm lacks the aerial stylish spinning animation of its future iterations.
    • The dodge mechanic would become Dante's Trickster Style and the cartwheel from 2 was used during 3's development before being replaced with the dash. While 2 lacked the usual dodge mechanic initiated by locking-on and jumping, later games would bring it back.
    • This is the first game to have multiple playable characters. Unlike most of the next games, however, DMC2 has two separate campaigns for its two main heroes.
    • This is the first game that displays health bars for the Mooks and Elite Mooks (DMC1 only had health bars limited to bosses), but it's shown in the HUD as a vertical bar that's mostly difficult to see because of its usually dark red color. This is also the first game that displays a visual indicator over the locked-on target. Later games would combine the two HUD elements by repurposing the rim of the lock-on indicator as the target's health bar.
    • The level select feature is only available after beating the game, unlike in the sequels where it's available right from the start or after you beat the first mission.
  • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening is the first game in the franchise with Styles, but the system works differently here than in later titles. In Devil May Cry 3, only one Style can be used during a mission and new skills are acquired through levels and grinding for experience points. In Devil May Cry 4 and Devil May Cry 5, Styles can be switched during missions, and skills can be bought before missions or at Divinity Statues. The Nintendo Switch version adds Style Switching, which works similarly to Devil May Cry 4 and Devil May Cry 5, but keeps the original level grinding system.
• Diablo: The first game was markedly different from its sequels, Diablo II and Diablo III. Aside from the expected differences in scope, lore, balance and gameplay features, the first game was much more survival-oriented and featured several instances of Nethack-style permanent character damage. Shrine effects were irreversible and not all were positive, and there was a monster that would permanently reduce your maximum life. When you died in multiplayer mode, all your gear would end up on the ground and would be lost if you were unable to recover it. This would be unthinkable in the sequels which revolve around Min-Maxing character builds and Item Farming. There's only 3 character classes and they basically function the same except for one special skill. The Warrior could repair items. The Rogue could disarm traps. The Sorcerer can recharge staves. There is only one town. The dungeon maps are all fixed whereas in Diablo II they were randomly generated. There is no day/night cycle, and all the fighting is done indoors and underground.
• Digimon: As Digimon World was made fairly early on into the franchise's lifespan (before the first anime even came out), much of it may come across as strange to fans of the franchise. For example, Palmon cannot digivolve into Togemon (which isn't even in the game), Whamon is a Champion and not an Ultimate, MetalGreymon is purple and a Virus type, the Mega level doesn't exist, etc.
• Disgaea: The first game, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, has a lot of differences from its sequels:
  • First, it had something called "Promotion Exams." Since Cursed Memories, the bills you were allowed to submit to the Dark Assembly were mostly dependent on where you were in the story and which side-quests you had completed. In Hour of Darkness, on the other hand, your characters had to take these Promotion Exams, which were solo fights against increasingly strong groups of monsters, to be able to submit better bills. If you lost, it was a Game Over. Notably, reincarnating a character (referred to "transmigration" originally) required you to take at least 3 exams for that character, and also set that character's mana back to 0.
  • Secondly, the way new classes unlocked was very different. Since Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, it's worked like this: unlocking the first tier of a class requires either having a certain combination of other classes at certain levels, then passing a bill in the Dark Assembly (humanoid-type classes) or defeating a monster of that type (monster-type classes). To unlock higher tiers of a given class, you had to have the previous tier of that class leveled up to a certain point. In Hour of Darkness, humanoid classes unlock immediately upon fulfilling the requisite class-and-level combinations, and you can unlock a higher tier by having any tier of that class leveled up to a certain point. And monster tiers didn't unlock on leveling at all–unlocking a higher level monster tier required defeating a monster of that specific tier.
  • The Dark Congress was composed by several hundred Senators, and each one of them was a individual being, so the only way to work your disposition with that Senator was to propose any bill, see if it showed up then bribing it. It was practically impossible to pass up the late game bills due to the extremely large Senator pool and massive negative disposition penalties said bills place upon all the senators. From Disgaea 2 onward the Senator amount was drastically reduced and bribing any Senator of a specific party would increase your disposition with all Senators.
  • From Disgaea 2 onward, passing a bill requires you to get half the voting score +1. In the first game however, passing a bill required you to get half the voting score plus one point for every Mana point used to propose that bill +1. With the high Mana costs of the late bills, it is possible to fail to pass a bill even if you got over 75% of the votes in your favor.
  • In the first game, ending a turn while holding any unit, even one of your own, causes the lifting unit to take considerable damage and most likely dying if the unit being lifted is much stronger than the unit lifting it. From the second game onward, this only happens when ending a turn while holding a enemy unit.
  • Only monsters could be captured in the first game. Fixed for subsequent games, where humanoids can also be captured.
• DJMAX: The first game, DJMAX Online, (which most newer fans don't know about) has no Fever, hold notes only raise your combo by 1, equipment is very expensive, and currency earned per song is very little.
• Donkey Kong:
  • The arcade games are very different from both the Mario and Donkey Kong platformers that came later, the first portraying Donkey Kong as a villain, the second being the only game ever to have Mario as a villain, and the third introducing a new protagonist named Stanley, who was never heard from again. None of the enemies were stompable. These games also had a modern day setting, which (alongside older comics, the TV show and the live-action movie - even Miyamoto stated that the 1983 arcade game takes place in the New York sewer system) is a big part of the reason why fanon has Mario and Luigi as refugees from the real world.
  • Also, Mario was a carpenter, not a plumber. This characterization carried over into Wrecking Crew, where he wears a hard hat—and, unlike almost every other Mario game, he can't jump.
  • Unlike in Mario Bros. and subsequent Mario games, in Donkey Kong, falling from a tall enough height killed you.
  • Donkey Kong Country (1994) feels very basic compared to its sequels, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!. Unlike the sequels, the first game has very few gimmicks so platforming is more straightforward. The player also cannot become one of the animal buddies (unless it was a specific bonus level) instead of riding them. Bonus areas are simply there to grant the player bonus bananas, animal Bonus Stage tokens, and extra lives, among other goodies, and doesn't use the "do this objective to get a bonus coin" format. The first game also uses the Palette Swap trope a lot more for enemies and bosses, and the music is somewhat more "ambient", for lack of a better word, compared to the sequels'.
• Doom:
  • The original game, Doom (1993), was divided into three episodes, with a fourth being added in the Updated Re-release Ultimate Doom. The player cannot take weapons and powerups from one episode to the next, making each episode's gameplay self-contained. This system is a relic of the game's Shareware origins; the first chapter, Knee-Deep in the Dead, was available for free, and players had to mail-order the other two, also leaving them to have to deal with that existing framework when they added a fourth for the retail release. Notably, this only actually gets directly explained in the transition to the second episode, where the protagonist is ambushed at the end of the first episode and dies, waking up in Hell. Doom II: Hell on Earth dropped this system as part of the shift to becoming a retail game from the start, with distinct "episodes" being an afterthought at best, only really differentiated by text dumps between them and changes in the sky texture which didn't even work under normal conditions.
  • The first game, in turn, has the first episode showcase some major differences from the subsequent three, and by extension the following Doom games. Besides being distributed as shareware, it's the only episode whose last level doesn't end with a standard boss battle (standing in for a Dual Boss are two Barons of Hell, which are also the only ones in the episode); and defeating them isn't an Instant-Win Condition; their death instead simply opens the way to a portal the Doomguy has to enter where he is ambushed and killed, waking up in Hell in the next episode. In terms of scenery, this episode is also the most grounded in reality, as none of the playable areas except for the boss level have yet become as twisted or corrupted as those of the second episode, and obviously the areas set in Hell don't appear until the third episode. Lastly, the level design is the most rudimentary, which is attributed to the style and philosophy of John Romero (who designed all levels for this episode except two, and didn't work on the other episodes' levels except two for the fourth).
  • The Super Shotgun wasn't introduced until Doom II, after which it would become the franchise's most iconic weapon, second only to the BFG 9000, and a staple of FPS arsenals even well after they stopped straight-copying the game. Several of the franchise's more iconic (or at least infamous) enemies were also not introduced until the second game, including the Chaingun Zombie, Arch-Vile, and Revenant.
  • The console ports have some noticeable differences from the PC games in part because, while the Atari Jaguar port was compiled directly from the v1.2 codebase by id Software themselves, all other ports - including those of Doom II - were third-party affairs simply borrowing the Jaguar port's code, with the ports of Doom II simply adding the new maps and enemies of Doom II to the Doom 1 v1.2 code rather than recompiling anything. This leaves several mechanics noticeably dated, since none of the console ports of either game were released until more than a month after Doom II came out on PC, such as Lost Souls still counting towards the player's kill percentage (changed with the release of Doom II and the concurrent v1.666 for the first game to account for the Pain Elemental attacking by spawning Lost Souls).
• DonPachi: The first game, DonPachi (1995), has faster but less numerous bullets compared to its successors. It also lacks the crazy numbers of later games in the series: you're lucky to get more than a 20-hit combo, and you can only achieve scores as long as 8 digits, and that's if you're very good at the game; contrast Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu where a 200-hit combo is trivial and, on a decent run, you have a nine-digit score by the end of the first stage. Notably and entirely absent from DonPachi (as well as its sequel Dodonpachi) are the Robot Girls that have become a staple of the series. The first game also averted Hitbox Dissonance and had a bit of Fake Difficulty in later levels.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, Sten and the other Qunari were all but human in appearance—very tall black men with white hair and purple eyes. Dragon Age II onward gave them grey skin and horns, as well as their war paint (the vitaar). Having the Qunari be horned was intended from the beginning, but was unfeasible due to game engine limitations. Qunari were programmed to use human armor and the helmets wouldn't work with the horns. This is evident when you note that ogres, Qunari darkspawn, are horned even in the first game. In later games, it's retained as established more than some Qunari are unhorned and look more human, though, and in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where you have the option of playing a Qunari, you do have the option of creating one more in line with the first game's designs.
  • Class design in Origins is more fluid; there are few restrictions on what class could wield what weapons. Rogues can, in theory, equip two-handed weapons, for instance, while warriors were able to pursue Dual Wielding and archery. The devs, however, felt that this made rogues and warriors feel too indistinct from each other, so from Dragon Age II onward, dual-wielding and archery becomes rogue-only, while warriors are restricted to two-handers and weapon/shield. This also means that dual wielding full-size weapons (swords, axes, and maces, as opposed to daggers) is removed after Origins, as is the ability to equip two sets of weapons (usually one ranged and one melee) and swap between them. Mages completely lost weapon options - while in Origins a sword and board mage was a pretty good idea with the right specialization (and some people made more exotic dual-wielding or even archer-mages), in later games a mage could only use staff.
  • The attitude towards female warriors change in subtle but notable ways in the series, making Origins stand out a bit. A female Warden’s gender is constantly brought up as odd and unusual, with many expressing surprise and the occasional sexist remark upon meeting them. ^note A brief explanation is offered which could justify at least some of the surprise - the player character is the first female Warden in the country in some two hundred years - but it's easy to miss. This is dialed down in the second game and, by the time of Inquisition, the player’s gender is almost completely unremarked upon in dialogue almost to the point of Purely Aesthetic Gender. Female warriors are also a lot less common in Origins compared to the rest of the series; female templars and female warriors as party members do not appear until Awakening. Inquisition has a lot more - if not just as many - plot-important female warriors as men.
  • Grey Wardens do not wear any particular uniform in this game, which they are never seen without in the sequels. People don't ask you why you are not in uniform, nor can you wear one to prove your identity; many PC players use mods to equip their Wardens with the standard Warden armor.^note However, story-wise it does make sense that you wouldn't have a uniform - the Fereldan Wardens are relatively small in number, and have limited resources; moreover, you only become a Warden the day before a major battle, so there's no time to get you kitted out with the trappings. Similarly, Alistair has only been a Warden for six months when the game begins, and since they've been busy with mobilizing to Ostagar, he may also not have had the chance to get his. Also, given that for most of the game, the Warden and Alistair are branded Public Enemy No. 1, wearing a uniform that screams "Grey Warden" would be putting a massive target on their backs for the bounty hunters looking to claim the price on their heads.
  • It's possible for you to end the game with no companions by never recruiting any, killing or alienating them to the point where they leave. From Dragon Age II onward, you'll always have at least three in the end, no matter what you do.
• Dragon Ball:
  • The first video game for the NES, Dragon Ball: Shenlong no Nazo, was neither a Fighting Game nor a RPG Card Battle Game, like almost every subsequent game, but a poorly done action game with long overhead phases (a la Zelda) and short sideview platform phases and boss battles, with an extremely limited moveset. Justified in that it was based on the first series, less action-packed and more focused on exploration and adventure, but still...
  • Dragon Ball Z: Budokai:
    • Budokai 1 had a massive case of this, as it was the first Dragon Ball game since Dragon Ball GT Final Bout. There was no actual flight mechanic, but characters could gently glide down when knocked airborne. Some characters would have transformations that wouldn't be seen in other games, like Krillin would have an "Unlock Potential" transformation and Piccolo had a "Fused with Kami" transformation. Many characters would have original alternate costumes that hadn't been seen in the actual series. One that would stick out through many games is that, despite having transformations, it was quite common to hear Imperfect Cell's voice even as Semi-Perfect and Perfect Cell. This goes the same for Goku and the Super Saiyan 4 transformation. This was due to the fact that, unlike the English version of the anime, Cell and Goku were voiced by the same actor/actress throughout all variations, thus the files couldn't be altered for the various actors playing their forms in English. Another interesting aspect is that Frieza could not use his second and third forms (outside of cutscenes), and if Final Form Frieza was defeated while holding the "Frieza's Spaceship" capsule, he would return as Mecha Frieza. Cell's final transformation skill was for his angry "Power-Weighted" form instead of his resurrected "Super Perfect" form.
    • In Budokai 2, the game introduced fusions. As the game series set up attacks via Capsules, fusions were accessible through those capsules. Fusion Dance fusions ran the risk of failure, creating weak fighters while Vegito ran the risk of being intercepted and prevented. Fusion Dance fighters had a time limit that couldn't be extended and, if a player was knocked down once the timer runs out, they would defuse. It also had a few oddball fusions other games wouldn't use, such as Kibito Kai, Gokule (Goku and Hercule/Mr. Satan Potara'd) and Tiencha (Tien and Yamcha doing a fusion dance). As well, Super Buu had a number of original absorptions that he never did in-series (such as absorbing Vegeta, Frieza, Cell, and Tien & Yamcha together), and missed one absorption he did use in-series until the third game (Piccolo).
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest (the first game):
    • The first game was the only game where you had just one character, and could only battle a single enemy at once. It was also the only game where keys were expendable, and it forced the player to either use a spell or buy a torch to see in the game's several dark dungeons (which have been used much more sparingly since then).
    • It had an interesting zigzag as it relates to later game. The first game had enemies appear on a background that resembled the terrain (battles in towns/castles or in underground areas had black backgrounds). From Dragon Quest II through Dragon Quest IV enemies appeared against a black background and terrain background during enemy fights wouldn't reappear until Dragon Quest V and continued through the series. This means that in the NES area, I was the oddball compared to II-IV while in the post-NES era, II-IV are the oddballs.
    • The game did not feature a Mini-Game which is a series staple. Dragon Quest II started the tradition (kind of) with the Lottery game but was hindered by the fact that you couldn't buy lottery tickets (they appeared as a random reward after winning a battle or a random reward for purchasing an item). Dragon Quest III had a Monster Arena, where you could wager on the outcome of battles using gold. It wasn't until Dragon Quest IV that the Casino would become a series standard.
    • In Japan, the first versions of Dragon Quest lacked sprites to indicate what direction the Player Character was facing. PC and NPC character sprites were more generic and did not become chibified until the North American release, which also added border graphics between the land and water.
    • The inn music was different in the first game. The series' standard save file menu music wasn't introduced until IV.^note Though it was added to III, which originally had no menu music or intro cinematic, when localized outside Japan.
    • In the first game, the mechanics of Random Encounters meant that you could wander near-endlessly without encountering a monster, then fight several of them in close succession. Later RPGs got smoother mechanics regarding this.
    • In the first game, you had to go into the menu to climb stairs. This one was corrected in later NES installments.
  • Japanese players had to suffer through a password system with the first two games, while the American releases thankfully got a battery backup system. On the bright side, the password system is probably why Dragon Quest II got its catchy 85-second menu theme, which seems out of place on the American release since it only takes about five seconds to continue an old save, making it a case of Long Song, Short Scene in the North American release and the game's various remakes.
  • In the English localizations, the first two games featured copious use of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe (hence the Trope Namer for But Thou Must!). This disappeared as early as the NES Dragon Warrior III — it was still there a bit for when you visited Alefgard in order to give it a different feel from the Overworld, but even then it was far less prominent and most of the game doesn't use it at all.
  • In the second game, the hero is a purely physical fighter; in any other game in the series the hero fits the role of the Jack of All Stats.
  • Transport via ship didn't appear until Dragon Quest II and aerial transport didn't appear until Dragon Quest III.
  • You weren't allowed to choose a destination for the Return spell (Zoom in post-merger localizations) until III. In the first game, it always returned you to Tantegel, and in the second, the last castle you visited.
  • The menus were quite clunky early on: In all of the NES DQ games, you had to go into your menu to do something as simple as talk to someone or open a door. It wasn't until Dragon Quest V that much of this became more streamlined with an "action" button that had multiple features like in most other Role Playing Games.
  • The bag feature was not introduced until Dragon Quest VI. This meant that your characters had to share their inventories with their equipment, key items, and any restorative items. The only way to store any items was with the item vault, which was introduced in Dragon Quest III, but remakes of the first two games added it, as well. Each character still has their own inventory for their equipment and usable items, but everything else can be put in the bag. Thankfully the bag has been added to remakes of III through V.
• Dragonvale: Every dragon has completely unique art and a design that is separate from every other dragon in the game- with the exception of the Leap Year Dragon, the Clover Dragon, the Solstice Dragon, and the Blue Moon Dragon, which are some of the first limited-release dragons and vary from using the same base as another dragon to being a direct Palette Swap.
• Duke Nukem: The early games don't differ only in tone, but in genre. Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II are somewhat obscure family-friendly bloodless slow-paced platformers, when Duke had only a ray rifle and behaved at most like a teen Mascot with Attitude. Duke Nukem 3D, the first breakout title, changed perspective of Duke's series to the much Bloodier and Gorier First-Person Shooter full of adult content that we know today.
• Dune: The first game, Dune (1992), is based on 1984 film adaptation and an Adventure/Strategy game; its sequel, Dune II, is the Trope Codifier for the Real-Time Strategy genre. The major differences between them are because the games are actually completely unrelated to one another in every way bar publisher (Virgin Games) and the Dune license; Westwood Studios's game was numbered as a sequel simply because Cryo Interactive's one came out earlier in the same year^note some sources indicate another connection: what would become Dune II began development because Virgin Interactive wasn't satisfied with the progress of Cryo's Dune game and was considering cancelling it, but still wanted to use the license..
• Dynasty Warriors:
  • The original Dynasty Warriors / Sangoku Musou was a straight-up fighting game featuring characters from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Following that, Dynasty Warriors 2 / Shin Sangoku Musou was released, introducing the Hack and Slash gameplay that the series is known for. The latter game was localized as simply Dynasty Warriors 2, making it a clear example of this trope outside of Japan, while in Japan, they technically belong to separate series.
  • Dynasty Warriors 2 also had many differences from 3, which would be what the rest of the series would be based off of. First of all, the meatbun in a bamboo steamer upped both your health and musou bar in a stage instead of finding a meatbun filled steamer and a special wine that did the same separately. Another thing is that you could only string together four attacks for a combo. There were no weapons to speak of, which gave you an extra attack up to the third and fourth weapon for each character. There was no voice acting within stages, used exclusively for cutscenes before stages. Meng Huo, Zhu Rong and the Nanman tribe were completely absent. The only female character playable in Musou mode was Sun Shang Xiang. When you knocked down an enemy officer, they had the chance to completely refill their healthbar (Including Lu Bu). The game only had seven stages, with each kingdom having one exclusive stage. There was no Xtreme Legends expansion. Finally, a lot of now distinctive characters like Zhang He and Wei Yan were generic officers. Oh, and the game came on a purple disc instead of a clear DVD disc since it was one of the Playstation 2's launch titles.
  • Despite being a spin-off of Dynasty Warriors the first One Piece: Pirate Warriors game tries to be different from its parent series. Rather than being a hack'n'slash it was an awkward platformer made in the Dynasty Warriors engine, the bosses were puzzle based and as a result prone to being overly long and Dynasty Warriors style gameplay was relegated to multiplayer. The sequels settled into being much more straight forward "Dynasty Warriors with One Piece characters" games.

E

• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The land of Cyrodiil itself has a difference depiction in the early installments. It was said to originally be a Mayincatec-esque setting, with jungles, rivers, rice fields, tattoos, and stone cities. Later depictions transform it instead as a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of ancient Rome. This is justified as Tiber Septim, founder of the Third Cyrodiilic Empire, would use his powers post-apotheosis as the deity Talos to perform a Cosmic Retcon, transforming Cyrodiil into a temperate forest as a thanks to the Imperial Legions who served him so well in life. As shown in the prequel The Elder Scrolls Online, this change was retroactive, making it so Cyrodiil had always been a temperate forest.
  • The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first game in the series, is almost unrecognizable as an Elder Scrolls game. It is a simple hack-and-slash Dungeon Crawler filled with frenetic, almost constant combat. The side quests are extremely simple and only there to help you acquire gold and experience. There are also none of the series' staples like joinable factions, Daedric Princes^note Boethiah gets mentioned, but only as a "dark elven goddess", and slower-paced RPG elements. Even the very land of Tamriel is extremely different from what it would be in later appearances, with tiny villages later appearing as major cities and major cities being dropped completely. Emperor Uriel Septim VII speaks in really cheesy Ye Olde Butchered English that future appearances would drop.
  • "The Arena" was regarded as a nickname for Tamriel, due to its violent reputation, but other games never refer to Tamriel as such.^note However, The Third Edition Pocket Guide to the Empire refers to Nirn, the world, as the Arena.
  • The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall:
    • The Daedric Princes make their first appearance in Daggerfall, and they are quite different in appearance and personality than they would be later in the series. For example, Azura is much more malevolent and petty than in later appearances. She demands that you kill a priest who has spoken ill of her, and gets extremely upset if you refuse her request. She is also mentioned to be an ally of Molag Bal, something which has never been brought up in any work since then.
    • Daggerfall makes for an odd case of weirdness in that it adds in quite a bit of elements that are almost, but not quite, like they would settle down from Redguard/Morrowind onward — there are joinable guilds, but they exist only for services and a source of random quests without any plots of their own; the Daedra are called the Daedra and the Princes are there, but as mentioned are quite different; the Eight Divines are there and have recognizable domains, but Talos is nowhere to be seen^note quite possibly because the events of Daggerfall's ending are part of what turns him into a god; the Orcs aren't playable but one of the thrusts of the main quest involves an Orcish push for legitimacy and recognition; the Khajiit are more physically cat-like than in Arena but not as catlike as in later games; the Elves get distinct names for their subraces but those aren't Altmer, Bosmer or Dunmer; and the Dark Brotherhood were professional assassins but lacked the religious aspects they had had in Arena and would be merged with their profession in Oblivion.
    • The game was much Hotter and Sexier than the future titles in the franchise, with nudity and much more explicit references to sex. The most noticeable of it all is that Dibella is portrayed without Barbie Doll Anatomy and there's a certain passage in Berenziah's biography where she finds out through personal experience that Khajits have barbed penises (this part was removed in all the posterior games, ostensibly due to censorship by the Church).
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:
    • Many of the series' races have changed drastically starting with Morrowind. Orcs were generic monsters and weren't playable until Morrowind. The Khajiit started out as a Little Bit Beastly and were barely distinguishable from the Bosmer (Wood Elves). It again wouldn't be until Morrowind that they became the series' famous Cat Folk. The Dunmer (Dark Elves) started as Drow expies but would get a massive shift in characterization starting with Morrowind. The Imperial race also didn't exist until Morrowind, with the Empire being previously being considered a "melting pot" of Tamriel's races. The Dwemer (Dwarves) shifted away from classic Tolkien dwarves to a specific race of Mer (Elves) with extreme technological and magical knowledge, but who are also presumed extinct.
    • M'aiq the Liar, the series' recurring Easter Egg Legacy Character, makes his debut in Morrowind. Many of M'aiq's comments involve game tips that are blatantly false and hints to secrets that don't actually exist in-game. Later games change M'aiq's characterization to a Fourth-Wall Observer (and Leaner and Breaker) who voices the opinions of the series' creators and developers, largely in the form of Take Thats, to both the audience and isn't above above taking some at Bethesda itself.
    • While Morrowind has the "Essential" NPC flag, it doesn't protect the NPC from being killed as it would in later TES and Fallout games, instead showing the player a text warning them they've killed an NPC essential to the main quest if they do so.
  • The spin-off Action-Adventure game, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, has Nafaalilargus, a dragon in the service of Tiber Septim and the Imperial Legions. In appearance, abilities, and even naming conventions, he doesn't fit what would be established for the series' dragons later in Skyrim. Skyrim and Online retconned this, revealing that name was a pseudonym and his actual name was Nahfahlaar.
• Endless Nightmare: A series of Indie horror games, the first installment, Endless Nightmare: Home, is quite the oddball.
  • It is uncharacteristically short (it can be completed within 20 minutes) and devoid of action, for starters. Your character, James, spends most of the game running from enemies instead of kicking ass, the only ranged weapon you can use is a taser (until you found a Glock in the final cutscene), and the enemies you encounter in the entire game can be counted on one hand, giving it the impression of an "Experimental game".
  • The absence of boss battles. You complete the game by solving a puzzle instead.
  • You can't use a Finishing Move to kill enemies in an instant, either. Later games grants you this option where a cursor will appear behind an unwary enemy, allowing you to execute them even if you're unarmed.
• Epic Battle Fantasy:
  • The first two games, Epic Battle Fantasy 1, and Epic Battle Fantasy 2 lacked an overworld and simply consisted of one battle after another, with shop breaks at given intervals. There was also no leveling up — the stats remained static, if starting off very high, in the first two games while all spells were unlocked from the beginning. The second one, however, did have bonuses after every checkpoint. The series overall cut the RPG genre down straight to battling. At some point, the creator opted against this and went for a more traditional route, with overworld areas, leveling up, sidequests, unlockable spells, and upgradable equipment.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 1 used characters from other franchises as part of the boss and summon roster, and had music taken from other video games. Later installments not only near-exclusively use original or borrowed content, but actively try to scrub most mentions of copyrighted characters. (The second game's recap does not mention that the first game's final boss was a zombified Goku, even though his death-explosion plays a role in the plot. Goku does however get a small nod in a tombstone in Epic Battle Fantasy 4.) Especially as of the fourth game, when the creator started including paid DLC and thus the series was no longer completely non-profit, and had the game censor copyrighted names by replacing one letter with an asterisk. The censorship was applied to the third game retroactively when it came to Steam.
  • The first game had no dialogue at all unless one counted the short word balloons that show up, similar to Matt Roszak's earlier animations. It was not until 2 that the party regularly spoke, during attacks or in cutscenes/the overworld.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 1 is the only one with a Downer Ending. The final boss's explosion appears to kill Matt and Natalie outright. The opening of the second game retconned it so that the explosion did not kill them, just heavily injured them, and it and all the following installments end on a much happier note.
  • Lance's first playable appearance in Epic Battle Fantasy 3 came with a Good Costume Switch, where he started with the Army Set instead of the Officer Set. The Officer Set could only be found in the last major area in the game. In all future titles the Officer Set was his "default look" instead.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • The DS games have a fee for renaming your characters. The 3DS games remove this (for reference, there are 3 DS games and 5 3DS games, not counting the Mystery Dungeon spinoffs).
  • The DS games have a steeper level penalty for using Rest (resetting a character's skill points): 10 in the first game, and 5 in II and III. All of the 3DS games only take away two levels.
  • The DS games run at 60 frames per second, while all of the 3DS games run at 30.
  • The first two games don't have subclasses, nor any sort of Limit Break mechanic.
  • In the first game, the level cap is 70 with no way to raise it in the postgame (or ever). In the second game, it's possible to raise it by exploiting the Retire mechanic (though it's a very long process, as the level is only raised by one at a time), and all subsequent games (including the remake of the first game, Millennium Girl) allow the player to raise the party characters' cap by defeating certain Superbosses.
  • The iconic Hex trio of pumpkin-headed FOE didn't debut until the second game. The remake of the first game also lacks them.

F

• FAITH: The Unholy Trinity: Chapter I contains a few differences from the succeeding two chapters:
  • The chapter is much shorter and simpler than usual, with only two main enemies and a secret third one, all of which can be driven off by the cross, spread out over two areas. Chapter II contains a lot more areas, enemies and puzzles, with Chapter III following suit.
  • Chapter I's endings also call into question whether John is actually a priest and Amy is actually possessed by a devil, or if they're just escaped mental patients. Future chapters are straightforward Religious Horror games operating under the assumption that the demonic activity is very much real.
• Fallout:
  • The first two games, Fallout and Fallout 2, were top-down third-person RPGs with turn-based combat as opposed to using a first-person perspective and real-time, FPS-style combat.
  • Fallout is the only game with a strict time limit. Though the player is pressured to finish the main quest as quickly as possible in Fallout 2, there is no actual time limit and the player can finish at their leisure, and future games did away with even the pretense of urgency in the main questline.
  • The first game had an "Ask About" command, independent from the dialogue tree, in which players could type in terms and see if the NPCs they were speaking with had anything to say about them. It saw little use in that game, and was removed for subsequent games.
• Far Cry:
  • The original Far Cry is a rather different game compared to the sequels. The original game follows a linear level-by-level progression, although individual levels are often quite open ended. There are no sidequests, no villages, no friendly NPC characters except for Val, no collecting or upgrading required, and in the 2nd half of the game it shifts from human enemies to mutated genetic freak monsters. It is also the only game to use classic FPS style health bars & medkit pickups, place a heavier emphasis on the weight of your currently-equipped weapon to determine your maximum speed (later games focused more on the Sprint Meter, with sprinting letting you move at max speed regardless of weapon and games from Far Cry 3 on even removing it and letting you sprint forever) and use generic zooming for weapons without a scope attached rather than having the player aim with ironsights. Although it includes the series' now-iconic machete, no special consideration is given for it, letting you drop it for another gun at any time, and it's not even the first weapon the game gives you and lets you keep, like in the later games before Far Cry 5 - here that honor goes to the series' other constant, the Desert Eagle, which is itself in its higher-capacity .357 version with a correct 9-round capacity, rather than the .50 one with an incorrect 8-shot mag used in all later games. 4 years later, starting with Far Cry 2 - which wasn't developed by Crytek, but instead by Ubisoft - the sequels are full open world games.
    • Crysis, Crytek's next game after Far Cry is as much of a Spiritual Successor to the original Far Cry as Ubisoft's in-house developed sequels are. The first Far Cry game isn't generally considered part of the Thematic Series of "humans descending into savagery when placed in a dangerous wild environment" that starts from Far Cry 2 onward. Crysis retains a similar island setting, and shares a similar change to non-human antagonists in the 2nd half of the game that Far Cry 1 did.
    • The first game's console spin-offs are another example - for one, simply being console-centric spinoffs (the original game was PC-only until Far Cry Classic came out ten years later in 2014; every main game in the series after the first would come out in the same form on both PC and consoles), and also not being too different from their parent game, simply being retellings or immediate continuations of Far Cry starring the same protagonist rather than things like the '80s fever dream of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon or post-apocalypse romp of Far Cry: New Dawn. Moreover, while they're the games that introduced the above theme to the series, they took it much more literally, with the protagonist turning into an outright superhuman capable of far more ridiculous feats than any later protagonist in the series, barring the complete science-fiction Cyborg action hero Rex "Power" Colt of Blood Dragon.
  • Far Cry 2 is another case, specific to Ubisoft's in-house sequels, thanks in part to the developers wanting to make an incredibly immersive game first and foremost. Elements that are missing from Far Cry 3 and beyond include:
    • Weapons degrade and jam with use, some visibly corroding with each shot, requiring you to buy and pick up fresh weapons from the Arms Dealer or risk one that will jam at a critical point in a fight. Fresh weapons can also be traded out only at the Arms Dealer's place, with safehouses only letting you swap for a single weapon placed beforehand in a weapons crate, provided you've actually purchased access to said crates, and the only "special" unlockable weapons are a limited supply of golden AKs.
    • There are multiple choices for who you play as, which wouldn't technically show up again until Far Cry 5 included a customizable character, and uniquely to this game those you didn't pick show up as AI companions who help you in combat and/or offer extra missions. They're also a Heroic Mime (which wouldn't show up again until 5), even though they speak if they're an NPC, and every option universally has a decent amount of existing combat experience like Jack Carver of the first game did - later games typically focus more on twenty-somethings being pulled into survival situations and having to learn to adapt.
    • Your character also contracts malaria very early on, requiring you to stop and take medication to stave off the symptoms and regularly detour to get more when you run out.
    • There are multiple NPC factions with no clear good guys, the player is able to work for either of them, and the Big Bad isn't particularly affiliated with anyone.
    • Checkpoints don't stay dead for long after you clear them, repopulating after leaving whatever "cell" of the game world housed them. The game does have the necessary coding to allow permanently taking over a location, but restricts it to safehouses that are separate from the manned checkpoints.
    • Fast travel exists, but is presented as taking the bus between a set of stops, which means you can only fast-travel to and from specific areas on the map. This includes being unable to take the bus between the two parts of the overworld - you have to cross over yourself then head to the nearest bus stop.
    • Radio towers just offer bonus missions, as the map is completely revealed to you from the beginning rather than needing to be discovered piece by piece, and the only way to unlock new things like access to better weapons is by doing missions for the Arms Dealer.
    • There's a complete lack of predatory fauna or any need to hunt, with you at best being able to find the occasional zebra that runs away when you get close and confers no benefit for killing them.
    • There's no bow and arrow, which became a major component of stealth gameplay in the later games, although the DLC does add a crossbow that launches explosive bolts.
    • The stealth system is more transparent and difficult to work with than even the first game's, with no ability to tag enemies and no detection meter giving a visible indicator on who has or is about to spot you.
    • The RPG Elements are also nowhere to be found, with no experience points gained by killing enemies and no inherent attributes to upgrade through skill points - at best, you can buy equipment upgrades to carry more stuff or technical manuals to make weapons degrade more slowly.
    • It's also the only game in the series to not have some sort of companion release, such as the aforementioned console spinoffs of the first game or the stand-alone expansions and DLC packs following from the later ones - at best it got a single DLC that only adds a few new weapons and vehicles.
    • Finally, it's the only game to not include some sort of radar or mini-map on your HUD - instead, you have an actual, physical map you have to put away your weapon to look at.
• Farnham Fables: The Pilot Episode, "The Three Princes", has a lower-fidelity art style and a different interface compared to the rest of the episodes. The actual first episode, "The King's Medicine", is a retelling of the pilot with most of the early-installment weirdness removed, though there are still minor differences such as characters not opening their mouth when speaking.
• Fatal Fury: The first game, Fatal Fury: King of Fighters (which was developed by some of the same people of Street Fighter), had only three playable characters in the single player mode (Terry, Andy and Joe), while the rest of cast could only be used in Vs. mode and the home ports. If a second player jumped in to challenge someone already playing, they would first have to team up against the CPU opponent, similar to beat-'em-ups like Final Fight, and beat them before they would square off. Additionally, the first game lacked Mai Shiranui and Kim Kaphwan, two of the series' most popular and iconic characters, as they wouldn't be introduced until the sequel.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: The first game, Five Nights at Freddy's (2014), lacks the retraux minigames featured in every other game in the series, and is the only one where the threat of losing power is a constant gameplay element.^*While Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location brought it back, it was only for a hidden level and a separate game mode added later. Also, Freddy has a higher level of importance over the other animatronics (undergoing Villain Decay in the sequels), and the backstory is much more well-hidden; what later games bring front and center are instead hard to find Easter eggs which the main narrative never mentions.
• Forza: Both sibling series, Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon, have noticeable differences between their first installment and later ones:
  • The first Motorsport game has oddities such as point-to-point races that would never reappear down the line. It also had more original tracks, including 'Blue Mountains' which is a generic recreation of the real world Mount Panorama Circuit. Finally, the way the game handled the Performance Index was completely different: Each tier of PI had its own sub-tiers, and it was not possible to see the exact value of a car.
  • The first Horizon game was significantly more linear in both gameplay and structure compared to its sequels. Cars were limited to travelling along roads with only a few open arenas for off-roading action. As for structure, compared to the 'do anything you want' attitude of the sequels, Horizon limits you to races with strict entry requirements, and has a clear line of progression between races.
• Freddi Fish: The first game, Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, is the very first Humongous game to stray from pixel art and use hand-drawn cartoony graphics and has many glaring differences from its sequels, as well as all later hand-drawn Humongous Entertainment games. For one, the animation is much looser and characters tend to go Off-Model rather often. Freddi also has a different design, where she is much rounder and has a tall upper fin. Perhaps the biggest difference though is its plot; it's much Darker and Edgier and even violates Never Say "Die", a trope all the successors made a point to play straight. Also, on the earliest print runs of the game, the cursors that are made to look as if they're pointing into the distance rather than to the sides have a different design than other Humongous games — they are long and thin rather than short and thick, though this was corrected on later prints.
• F-Zero: The first game, F-Zero (1990), has a number of differences that make it stand out from its successors:
  • There are only four unique machines in the game. The rest of the competition is comprised of generic brown machines that try to get in your way, generic purple machines that you start to see if you fall below 5th place, and exploding stalled flashing machines.
  • Scoring Points for clearing laps, with more points rewarded the higher-ranked you are. You get an extra life Every 10,000 Points.
  • The game does not keep track of individual opponents, other than the one in 1st place, or 2nd if you're 1st. The way opponents are implemented are such that you can't lap purple machines or named opponents no matter what.
  • Also, while a non-fatal crash will cause the entire crowd of opponents to easily surpass you in a few seconds in later games, here it takes a while to fall down several places.
  • The rank requirement system, which requires that you be a particular place or higher to go to the next lap or else you lose one life. In later games other than F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, you can come in 30th place in Grand Prix mode and you'll still be allowed to go to the next stage.
  • The boost system uses a limited number of boosts you can collect per lap. Later games would let you boost as much as you want at the cost of your machine's energy.
  • The spin attack and ramming did not exist in the first game. Likewise, opponents had infinite health in the first game, so it was impossible and pointless to attack them.

G

• Gauntlet: The first Arcade Game, while it did say such things as "Elf needs food badly," didn't say "Elf shot the food"; instead, it had a generic line for when food is destroyed: "Remember, don't shoot food." Gauntlet II (at least for the NES) and later do mention who shot the food. In addition, the first game's cast was well-defined by color; Warrior was red, Valkyrie was blue, Wizard was yellow, and Elf was green. The sequel allowed for players to select what class they played as regardless of their player color.
• Gears of War:
  • The first game, which took place during a Forever War that saw frequent use of superweapons, is perhaps most infamous for its extremely desaturated and monochrome color palette. Subsequent games in the franchise would inject far more color into its world, including the Ultimate Edition remake that brings the first game up to the graphical style of the rest of the series.
  • The first game is also the only one in the series with Squad Controls, allowing you to order squad members to either advance to a certain spot or hold back. Future games just have your squad act mostly independent from you, with only a basic 'prioritise this enemy' command available.
  • The first game didn't have Horde mode, a notable exclusion considering how popular and series-defining that mode would become.
  • The first game had collectables in the form of COG Tags, which were only useful for unlocking achievements. Later games feature a much wider range of things to collect, most of which give some details on the setting's lore. Ultimate Edition, meanwhile, keeps the COG Tags but gives them an additional use as a way of unlocking tie-in comics to read.
  • The first game released on PC a year after its 360 debut, clearly as an afterthought,^note especially considering they forgot to renew its DRM certificate at one point shortly after release, so anyone who had the PC version was declared a pirate and unable to play the game for a solid week as later games would remain exclusive to Xbox until the property switched developers with Gears 4.
  • From Gears of War 2 onwards, trying to use the Lancer's chainsaw against an enemy also equipped with a Lancer will lead to a Blade Lock, with you needing to complete a Button Mashing prompt to win the duel and finish them off. This feature was absent from the original game, though it was added to Ultimate Edition.
  • The only Lambent enemies are Lambent Wretches. The characters don't treat them as anything special and they're often found fighting alongside regular Locusts in the chapter they're featured in. The next two games would make it a major plot point that there is a bloody civil war between regular and Lambent Locusts.
• Glider: In Glider version 1 to version 3, you couldn't go back a screen, and you kept drifting left or right if you released the keys, making it difficult to hover over vents. Electrical outlets also worked differently: they didn't give out zappy surges continually like in 4.0 and PRO, but set you on fire if you passed over them, like candles always did. There were elaborate paper folding and paper crumpling/falling animations for starting a life and losing it from Collision Damage; subsequent games handled glider spawning and despawning less realistically and more directly. There was also an option to play as a dart; darts only turned up in the later games as enemies.
• God of War: The first game, God of War (2005), lacks a lot of the combos that appear in the sequels, there are only three bosses, the 'Rage' special attack cannot be interrupted and the gods don't appear physically but as fiery holograms and most of them are redesigned in later games (Hades has a demonic face as opposed to wearing a horned helm, Poseidon's an old bald guy as opposed to appearing young and having long brown hair, etc.). It's also the only game to feature or even mention Artemis. The extra videos include several possible storylines that will be retconned by further installments (Cronos is said to have died in the desert a century after the events of the game, Kratos' brother was originally taken by the Spartan soldiers and starved in the mountains and Kratos knew Zeus was his father much earlier). It's also worth noting that the storyline of the original is a classic Greek tragedy, an element that the sequels forgot.
• Granblue Fantasy:
  • The first batch of characters the game had would actually meet/join you because of the weapon that unlocked them (the Thunder Rapier was stolen from Rosamia, the Draph Hammer is an old work of Galadar's, the Mandau is able to seal Zehek's power, etc.). Later characters have more varied motivations, probably because there's only so many spins you can put on "you have this thing I will now join you" before it gets stale.
  • Early events and story showed that their bond gave Lyria the ability to disappear into the main character's body at will. That was very quickly slipped under the rug, and now they are two separate existences even though they effectively share one life. Also, in an example of Characterization Marches On, Pommern was once way more of an asshole compared to later chapters, where he acts as the more reasonable foil to Furias's status as a complete maniac.
  • Earlier sections of the game shoehorned in fights to pad things out. While this is most obvious with the story (later chapters ease up on it or remove it outright if it isn't fitting for the location), it's also present in events (such as the now-sidestory Dark Giant of the Blue Sea) and uncap Fate episodes, whereas later events and Fates don't have them unless the story calls for it.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • The original game, and the London 1969 expansion pack. All the excitement of a fully realized living city in glorious, er, two dimensional blocky graphics that look like something on an Amiga. In 1997. Your character was a One-Hit-Point Wonder, and the body armor only protects you from three bullets. Lives and scoring multipliers were in both the first and second games. They would be done away with in III. There also was no saving during levels either, meaning quitting the mission early or Game Over cancels a few hours of work the player did. This was essentially bad in the two Vice City levels, where it would take a few hours to complete the levels. Players had only four weapons to choose from: a Handgun, Machine Gun, Flamethrower or Rocket Launcher. Wanted levels were also different from other games: Even a one-level wanted level would not dissipate on its own, unlike other games.
  • Grand Theft Auto 2, even more so than the first game. The use of codenames for the player, the strange neo-noir setting, the sound effects, and so on make GTA 2 difficult to consider part of the same series that later went hyper realistic in IV and V. Also, along with its predecessor, this game has limited continues, unlike later games' infinite continues; the player would get a literal Game Over text after wasting all continues.
• Grow:
  • Grow Ver.3 doesn't really have any objective beside putting every items to Level Max, nothing special even happen if you win the game beside the "CONGRATULATION !!" message that appears. Future games gives the player a motive to grow all objects to Level Max.
  • Grow Ver.3 is the only game with a score system.
  • Grow Ver.3 and Grow RPG are the only grow games where you need to drag items on a GROW logo instead of simply clicking on it.
  • Grow RPG have faceless humans instead of the Onkies, a common humanoid creature that appears for the first time in Grow Cube.
  • The "level up" sound effect in Grow ver.3 and Grow RPG is different from later games.
  • Five star Fate episode fights used to focus on your grid's power, acting as a DPS check rather than the Puzzle Boss they are now.
• Guild Wars: The original campaign, later subtitled Prophecies, is almost unrecognizable from what later releases would make it. There was none of the dry, Shout-Out heavy humor that would later become a trademark, most of the game was designed for players below max level (reaching max level less than a quarter of the way through the game would later become a selling-point), and you got an over-all feeling that everything except PvP was a lead-up to PvP. The original PvE actually was a prelude to PvP. The focus changed somewhere between Factions and Eye of the North.
• Gundam: Gundam Battle Assault is such an odd duck compared to its later installments like Gundam Battle Assault 2.
  • The game's story is an oddball fusion of After Colony and Universal Century, and acts as some sort of strange sequel to Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz where Heero boards a Mobile Suit to get rid of other suits while dealing with a mysterious figure spying on him.
  • The Wing Gundam in this game, compared to the Wing Zeroes used in later games, is just a reskinned Zeta Gundam. This is a little awkward skin-wise and makes the Wing Gundam an even worse Adaptational Wimp.
  • This game, being the first Gundam game in America, was heavy on characters whose shows hadn't gotten (and often wouldn't get) an American debut, and some character and unit spellings were different as a result. Of note was Kamille Bidan, whose first name was rendered "Kamiru", and Ple-2, which used her official spelling but later games would revert to "Puru".

H

• Half-Life:
  • The first game, Half-Life (1998), lets the player kill allied NPCs with little reprisal, whereas Half-Life 2 makes all your allies Friendly Fireproof. Word of God states that this was due to different priorities between the two games. In 1, the developers wanted to give the player the freedom to do what they want in a world filled with Black Comedy, while in 2 they realised that it wouldn't make much sense for Gordon to become The Paragon of a bleak world if he could casually murder his friends.
  • Gordon Freeman's iconic Specs of Awesome was present in the original game's artwork, but interestingly absent on both his in-game model◊ and his multiplayer model◊. Going forward, including in Expansion Packs and HD versions of Half-Life, Gordon would never be seen without them.
  • Half-Life: Opposing Force was developed by Gearbox Software without any strict oversight from Valve, and as a consequence features several oddities not present in the rest of the series. The most memorable of these is the existence of "Race X", an alien army of Planet Looters unrelated to Xen that arrive in Black Mesa to take advantage of the chaos. Race X is never mentioned again outside Opposing Force. Aside from that, Opposing Force is also the only game where the G-Man takes an active role in the player's journey (see below). Finally, the weapon selection includes a much larger range of creative and unusual choices, including a Barnacle Grappling Hook, the Spore Launcher (a pet that you feed fruit, giving it a Super Spit attack), and the Displacer Cannon (a Teleport Gun that has the potential to give you a Non-Standard Game Over), to say nothing of several more conventional options that act as almost-direct upgrades to existing weapons, such as the wrench (a slower but more powerful crowbar), Desert Eagle (a slightly faster and higher-capacity Python), M40 (hitscan Crossbow with even better damage), and M249 (MP5 without the Grenade Launcher in return for more bullets). The original Half-Life had a few unique weapons as well, but not as many as Opposing Force does, and Half-Life 2, with the exception of the Gravity Gun and Pheropods, almost exclusively sticks with your Standard FPS Guns, not bringing back any of the Opposing Force-exclusive weapons.
  • Comparing Half-Life and its sequel reveals a number of differences in how it treats the G-Man:
    • The G-Man in the first game was explicitly shown to use a teleportation ability in one of his appearances; the fact that it was also his final appearance before the ending seems to imply this was meant as a minor Reveal. He is shown doing this again in Opposing Force, but in Half-Life 2 he is never seen doing anything implausible in the physical world, with implied Offscreen Teleportation being the furthest he'll go.
    • The G-Man’s signature briefcase in Half-Life prominently displays the Black Mesa logo, implying that he directly worked for the company in some capacity. Not only is this absent from Half-Life 2, but his background is implied to be far more incomprehensible in nature.
    • Opposing Force portrays the G-Man as being far more involved in the player's journey; he opens a door to save Shephard from rising toxic waste, locks another door to prevent him from escaping Black Mesa when the rest of the HECU begins pulling out, and rearms a nuclear bomb after Shephard defuses it. This stands in stark contrast to his far more passive role in both Half-Life and Half-Life 2, where even if he is implied to be assisting Gordon, exactly how he does so is never directly shown and the most direct thing he does is having someone deliver a message.
    • When he finally speaks to you at the end of the first game, the G-Man speaks fluid English, with the only oddity being his tendency to draw out S sounds and a single instance of taking in a loud breath between sentences. Come Half-Life 2, his more alien manner of speaking is introduced, with heavy Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable, frequent Vader Breaths, and drawing out several consonants to give the impression that communicating by way of speech itself is a foreign concept to him, and glossed over to act like that was always how he talked.
• Halo:
  • The first game, Halo: Combat Evolved, had a static lifebar separate from the regenerating shield, indestructible human vehicles, less-avian-looking Jackals, no Brutes or Drones^note when they were introduced in Halo: First Strike there was mention of this being humanity's first encounter with the two species; this fell through when prequels came and threw them in anyway, and a 2010 reprint of First Strike had to excise that bit because by that point Brutes had become the major race involved in humanity's first contact, Hunters who went down with one pistol shot to the meaty bits because of relatively simple coding that treated shots to those meaty bits the same as shots to other enemies' heads, the overshield and cloaking powerups from multiplayer showing up in campaign levels, and other minor quirks not kept in the sequels. It also lacked quite a few features that are now considered staples of the series, such as having a fairly long-ranged punch as opposed to the mini-leap melees present in the rest of the series, no dual-wielding^note though games from Halo: Reach onward don't have it either, several enemy weapons that you can't use, an absence of most utility "precision" weapons (Battle Rifle, Carbine, etc.) other than the pistol (which is famously powerful as a result), no skulls, and almost every vehicle handles completely differently in this than it does from the rest of the games (most notably the Scorpion, which drives similarly to the Warthog). Almost all of these features are roughly in their present form from Halo 2 onward.
  • Combat Evolved features the Energy Sword and Fuel Rod Gun as Unusable Enemy Equipment, despite both weapons going on to become both useable and staples of the franchise's arsenal; the former collapses after the death of its user, while the latter explodes. The two also have different appearances than would later be known, with the Energy Sword being much brighter and less translucent, while the Fuel Rod Gun is purple instead of gold. The same game also features Wraiths as enemy vehicles, but they cannot be piloted.
  • Non-recharging health, absent in the rest of the mainline games, made a return in Gaiden Games ODST and Reach, plus the remake of Combat Evolved. The canonical explanation for this feature disappearing in the main games is because of the new armor Master Chief received at the start of Halo 2 including "automated biofoam injectors" that immediately heal him of any and all injuries sustained while the shield is out, which remains in chronologically later games because it became a common feature. It returned in Reach because it's a prequel set before the armor's introduction, and in ODST because it focused on an ODST squad who wear cheaper armor that simply doesn't have that feature.
  • Halo 2 marks the first appearance of the Brutes. There, they are portrayed as gorilla-like with primitive armour, their only unique weapons are the Brute Shot and a reskinned Plasma Rifle that fires but also overheats faster, and they possess high health with no shields. Halo 3 completely revamps them; they have shaven and groomed their fur, possess a range of weaponry and vehicles with an aesthetic distinct from the rest of the Covenant, and now wear full power armour that makes them function more like Elites. Word of God says that this was due to dissatisfaction with 2's bullet sponges, and a realisation that they would not work as the primary enemy in 3 in that form.
  • On a narrative note, early entries in the franchise made a fairly big deal out of the Master Chief being the last living Spartan-II after the Fall of Reach, being the main reason he is Famed In-Story. Starting around Halo: First Strike however, this idea was downplayed and then dropped, with other surviving Spartan-IIs taking center stage with him and especially with the later introduction of third and then fourth generations of Spartans.
• Harvest Moon:
  • The first two handheld games had no marriage in it and very little socialization, while the third game had marriage but only to your Distaff Counterpart. The first two games in the series to have a female protagonist had the game end after marriage.
  • As a whole the first few titles were considerably darker than what we're used to now, with the series getting increasingly Lighter and Softer from Harvest Moon: Magical Melody onward.
  • Compare the cast of games like Harvest Moon 64 to games like Story of Seasons. Overall the character designs have become less like realistic people living in a small town and more like a dating sim. Cast Full of Pretty Boys is in full effect, as is the female equivalent.
  • Any fan who picks up the SNES series on Virtual Console will be surely shocked by the difference from what they know. There's no rucksack, there are no hearts besides the names (instead being in a diary much like in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life), there are no character portraits, you can't befriend non-bachelorette villagers, there are no heart events, and there are no real Harvest Godesss interactions. The English translation was censored, thus getting you drunk on "juice", when almost all games in the series feature alcohol heavily. There are references to other gods besides the Harvest Goddess as well. The game is surprisingly difficult as there is no clock, you cannot ship at night, you can't ship perishables, and the days go by quickly. You often have no time to woo women and get your work done in the same day. Luckily there is no proper day-night system so you can work all night.
• Henry Stickmin Series:
  • The first game, Breaking the Bank, is noticeably different from later games in the series. While the series is known for Story Branching with multiple endings and hilarious fails, Breaking the Bank only gives you one choice (of how to break into the bank) and only one of the options leads into the game's sole ending. The animation is also much more stiff and primitive when compared to later games in the series. It isn't until the second game, Escaping the Prison, where many of the things which make the series what it is can be seen. The Compilation Re-release completely reanimates Breaking the Bank, and frames it as being a prologue, making Escaping the Prison the canonical first game in the series.
  • Before Breaking the Bank was the prototype Crossing the Gap. Unlike all of the other entries, there was no right answer — it was just a stick figure attempting and failing to cross a gap while using various means. It would be brought back as a Mythology Gag in the Completing the Mission episode with an actual correct choice.
• Heroes of Might and Magic:
  • The first game lacked the series staple of hero skills — leveling up only meant an increase in a randomly chosen statistic, and there were no choices to be made or specializations, that only came in with II — instead, each type of hero had some advantage, like Sorceresses being better at sailing. It also lacked any story in the game itself — the four campaigns were the same except for different starting towns and each lacking the map about attacking the lord you picked, the map descriptions were bare bones and there was no new story in the maps, far from the voiced briefings and in-map events of II onward.
    • One result is that since there is no "Wisdom" skill that caps the level of magic a hero can learn, any hero with a spellbook can learn any spell, including the incredibly broken Dimension Door
  • The battlefield in the first game is much smaller than in other games. While units range from flying units that can zip across the battlefield to Mighty Glacier types like Ogres and Hydrae, the battlefield is generally somewhat more densely packed than in later games.
  • Unit stacks could not be split in the first game, so tactics familiar to veterans of later games (such as splitting off stacks consisting of a singular "fodder" unit) are impossible.
  • The first game did not allow players to upgrade units. The second game, which introduced the feature, only allowed some units to be upgraded. In a rare exception, the Dragons, the ultimate unit of the Warlock town, could be upgraded twice. Starting with the third game, all units other than those not belonging to a faction could be upgraded, and it wasn't until the mobile game Might & Magic Heroes: Era of Chaos in 2017 that they could be upgraded more than once again.
  • The first and second games had each town offer six different types of units, but heroes only had five slots in their army, meaning that they'd have to forgo at least one type of their town's units. Starting in III, it was possible to include one of each type of a town's units into a hero's army.
  • In the first game, scenarios randomly selected your town type and in some cases, your starting location. Players could also set the intelligence level for the computer players in addition to choosing the difficulty.
• Hitman: The first game, Hitman: Codename 47, was more of a shooter with heavy stealth elements than an actual Stealth-Based Game, including a few areas where your cover was automatically broken and 47 was forced into an open gunfight. It wasn't until the sequel Hitman 2: Silent Assassin that the series embraced the idea of small, elaborate, non-linear levels that could be completed multiple ways without ever being detected.
• Hollow Knight: What would become the first game began with Hungry Knight, a short, simple Newgrounds game jam project. The Knight was still present and their design was unchanged, but they were capable of speaking and eating, explaining themselves to the player and needing to eat cherries as a game mechanic. The Knight would become a canonically Silent Protagonist afterwards, literally incapable of speaking. It was top-down instead of a side-scroller and set on a daytime grassy surface unlike the darker settings of Hallownest or Pharloom. A hidden NPC in Hollow Knight implies that the events of Hungry Knight are somehow canon, but the game is ambiguous about this.

I

• I Wanna Kill the Kamilia: Comparing the first game with the third, the first barely has any sound effects, has odd and patchworkey backgrounds, weird and out-of-place boss music, bad graphics and music looping, and so on.

J

• Jak and Daxter: The first game, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, is very different in tone from the later games in the series, although it was more in line with Naughty Dog's earlier Crash Bandicoot titles. It's much more fantastical and adventurous than its successors, with an emphasis on traveling in a specific direction. The second game, Jak II: Renegade, replaces Eco with a BFG, tones down the colors, becomes more Sandbox/GTA orientated with a greater emphasis placed on fleshing out a single location, Haven City, instead of traveling between hub areas, and Jak is Suddenly Speaking.
• jubeat: In the first version, jubeat (2008), your exact post-song bonus is displayed. Additionally, there is no "EXCELLENT" ranking—you can get a perfect score of 1 million, but the highest grade is SS, which is awarded at 950,000 points.
• Jumper: The first game was very linear and had a very crude physics engine, what with Ogmo moving at a fixed speed and lacking wall jumps and skid jumps. The sequels all feature revisitable levels, collectible items and, indeed, wall jumps, skid jumps and slippery surfaces.
• Jump Start: The earliest installments — the original versions of JumpStart Preschool, JumpStart Kindergarten, JumpStart 1st Grade, and JumpStart 2nd Grade — don't have a toolbar constantly at the bottom of the screen with options such as Go Back/Exit, Help, Progress Report, and Difficulty Levels (though most of the options can be accessed other ways). Also, the original JumpStart Preschool and Kindergarten don't contain any sort of goals, progression, prizes, anything. Perhaps most importantly, all the characters' (except Edison's) designs in all of those games were different than their designs in all later games except JumpStart Pre-K (i.e. Frankie and CJ had no clothes other than their collar and hat, respectively).

K

• Kerbal Space Program: The game being in beta/early-access for a few years, it went through many dramatic changes. The farther back you go in its version history, the weirder it gets.
  • The last version before 1.0 had no female Kerbals and no reentry heating; the latter is especially bizarre because sophisticated animations for reentry heating were added very early on, but they couldn't damage your spacecraft or astronauts.
  • All the Kerbal Space Center buildings used to be indestructible. Blowing them up is now a favorite pastime of combat-mod players, and the launch pad is infamous for exploding when you launch an overly-heavy rocket.
  • Biomes were added to the Kerbin system in 0.22, but the rest of the planets and moons didn't have any biomes until more than a year later. This discouraged running interplanetary missions, because you could get far more science points closer to home.
  • If you go all the way back to the first public release, things get really weird. There's a grand total of eleven types of rocket parts (the current game has so many that digging through them all to find what you want can get tedious). Your home planet Kerbin is the only celestial body, and reaching orbit is insanely difficult due to the soupy aerodynamics and wobbly, flimsy rockets. The launch site has a purely decorative launch tower, and palm trees (these were later removed, and generic sphere-of-leaves-on-a-stick trees appeared all over the planet but not at the launch site). If you kill your astronauts they're labeled as "K.I.A.;" explosions look like sooty fireworks. The ocean is solid, but you can't Walk on Water because your Kerbals can't get out of the capsule. The devs re-released some of the ancient versions as freeware so you can experience the strangeness for yourself.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts (the first game):
    • The original game had platformer elements that would force Sora to do a lot more exploring and jumping to discover all the hidden items. This was dropped in most of all future installments.
    • The first game also featured a context sensitive menu item at the bottom of the command menu, which would be used for interacting with the environment out of battle and using Sora's limits in battle. This made for some slightly awkward gameplay for three reasons. One, it was impossible to interact with the environment while a battle was taking place. Two, it was impossible to really choose which limit you were going to use, with the game deciding which one was available based on the context of the battle. And Three, the follow up attacks for the limits could be easily missed due to how small the menu item was. This was changed in future games with the reaction command and similar concepts. The HD port of the first game did away with the menu item, replacing its function with a reaction command. The fourth slot is now used for summons, whereas earlier the player had to navigate through the magic menu in order to summon.
    • Another instance is the Scan ability, which shows how much health the currently targeted enemy has. In the first game, it's unlocked at level 9, 12, or 15 (depending on what you chose in Dive to the Heart). In the rest, it's one of the starting abilities. Additionally, in the first game, Scan indicated the remaining bars of health with different colors instead of the green squares used later. This became problematic when a boss had more health than there were colors (5 bars), as it would appear the player was dealing no damage until the boss's HP dropped low enough for hits to "register" on the fifth bar.
    • The original Kingdom Hearts had the camera controlled with the L2 and R2 shoulder buttons instead of the right analog stick. Said analog stick instead was used to navigate the context sensitive menu as an alternative to using the D-pad. Later games in the series, along with the HD port, changed the camera control to the right analog stick (though naturally the handheld entries, all of which being be on systems that lack a second stick, revert back to using the shoulder buttons for camera control; that is unless you use the optional Circle Pad Pro add-on for the 3DS in Dream Drop Distance, which gives players the PS2 control scheme).
    • The original version of Kingdom Hearts did not have an option to skip cutscenes outside of specific circumstances, just the ability to pause them. This can make some parts of the game (notably, the Riku-Ansem boss fight) really frustrating, because some bosses follow very long cutscenes and some bosses are hard; if those crisscross and you lose, you have to watch the cutscenes all over again. The Final Mix version added the ability to skip cutscenes, and it became a standard feature from then on.
    • The "Trinity" signs of the first Kingdom Hearts allow Sora, Donald, and Goofy (and only those three party members) to interact with the environment in some way to reveal a hidden treasure. The Trinity marks are absent from Chain of Memories onward.
    • It also took until Kingdom Hearts II for the name Organization XIII to be decided on. Both Chain of Memories and the Deep Dive cinematic alternate between the 13th Order^note The literal English translation of their Japanese name, "Juusan Kikan". and just the Organization.
    • In Kingdom Hearts, the Disney villains act as the main antagonists driving the plot before it's revealed near the end that an Original Generation character is manipulating them. In all subsequent games, the Disney villains are downplayed while the Original Generation ones take prominence.
    • Related to the prominence of the Original Generation, the first game's Disney worlds all featured original stories—and for the most part, this still holds true when a world from the first game returns in another. Later-introduced Disney worlds, however, follow the plots of their movies very closely, with entire cutscenes consisting of verbatim reenactments of scenes from the film being commonplace. This is generally regarded as a negative, as the reenactments are less impressive than the films and Disney-themed bosses are becoming increasingly rare. Fortunately, Kingdom Hearts III would feature a few original plots alongside reenactments.
    • The original version of the first game is also the only one in which there are only two difficulty levels: Normal and Expert. Final Mix introduces the series staples of Beginner, Standard, and Proud Mode, with Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix introducing Critical Mode to the mix.
    • In terms of voice acting, the first game was the only one made before Haley Joel Osment's voice deepened. If you're accustomed to later games, it can be very jarring for Sora to sound so childlike—though some found it even more jarring when later games feature 14-year-old Sora speaking in adult Osment's voice.
    • In the first game, Mickey appears only once, at the very end of the game. He's also obscured by shadows and is wearing his "classic" outfit. This was a case of being Screwed by the Lawyers, as Capcom had the video game character rights to Mickey at the time to make Disney's Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse and only allowed his small part in the game after much negotiation. Starting with Chain of Memories, Mickey's role was expanded and he received a costume change in line with Donald and Goofy's. Each subsequent game expanded his role further and further, establishing him as one of the main characters alongside the Original Generation. He was also absent from the cover of the first game, but every game thereafter features him on the cover, regardless of how large a role he plays in a given game.
  • Characters from Final Fantasy were quite prominent in Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, with the plot frequently requiring you to revisit the world they're hanging out in to interact with them, especially in II. Since then, the games have had maybe one FF character appear in a small role barely more prominent than a cameo until they eventually just stopped appearing altogether, leaving the Hollow Bastion restoration, the ongoing conflict between Cloud and Sephiroth, and whatever happened to Zack to become Aborted Arcs, with Kingdom Hearts III even breaking the series tradition of always having an FF character be involved in the story in Hercules's world. This is especially jarring because the Weird Crossover that is Final Fantasy plus Disney had been a big part of the franchise's identity and what brought many people to it in the first place. Word of God says that Final Fantasy characters being in the games at all was just a case of Wolverine Publicity that is "no longer necessary". Fans who enjoyed the Weird Crossover nature of the series and enjoyed seeing the FF characters and wanted a continuation or conclusion of their various subplots were not happy about this. Kingdom Hearts III: Re𝄌Mind would reintroduce Final Fantasy characters again (likely due to fan demand), so we'll see what happens in the future.
  • Axel originally had the Catchphrase "Commit it to memory" in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, which was replaced with the more popular "Got it memorized?" in Kingdom Hearts II, and became so popular that the remake of Chain of Memories included the newer phrase instead of the older one.
• The King of Fighters:
  • The King of Fighters '94 did not allow players to assemble customized teams (despite this having always been a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation); instead, they had to pick a country and fight throughout the game with the three characters representing them (even though some of them, such as the Women Fighters Team and the Art of Fighting Team, didn't actually have any members from the country they were supposed to be representing). There were no Super Gauge stocks (which were introduced in '96 and became the norm in '99), roll evasion, or running; instead, the game's system relied on a chargeable Super Gauge, sidestepping and forward dash (the system was used until '97 and '98, where it was dubbed Extra Mode, in contrast with the new Advanced system). Also, performing SDMs was dependent on two conditions: either with a full Super Gauge, or when your character's health is running low, like in the Fatal Fury series at the time. And there was no Iori Yagami.
  • Speaking of Iori Yagami, as the first designated rival of the series, he did not follow the trends that his successors Kula Diamond, Elisabeth Blanctorche and Isla did. For starters, he is the only male rival: Kula, Elisabeth and Isla are all girls. And more importantly, he is the only rival to never make up with and become genuine friends with his saga's protagonist — it is made quite clear that the few occasions in which he teams up with Kyo Kusanagi (e.g. 2003 and XV) are alliances of convenience, and once the threat passes they immediately go back to being at each others' throats.
• Kirby:
  • In Kirby's Dream Land, Kirby doesn't absorb the powers of enemies; this was introduced in the second game and became the series' trademark. He couldn't slide, dash, or spit a more powerful star by inhaling multiple enemies at once, either. The only games after the first that don't contain Copy Abilities are spinoffs and other oddballs in the series.
  • Also in the first game, while there were boss rematches in the final stage, there was no dedicated Boss Rush mode separate from the main game like in Kirby's Adventure onward.
  • Kirby was also white on the box art instead of his trademark pink, at least in the American version. This was because Shigeru Miyamoto envisioned the character as yellow, while series creator Masahiro Sakurai was the one who wanted him to be pink, causing Nintendo of America to be unsure of what color Kirby was really supposed to be (since the Game Boy did not have a color display, white was, of course, the safest choice).
  • Kirby's Adventure was the first game to have Copy Abilities; however each ability only had one way to use them (though it made sense, there was only one other button) and there were some redundant Copy Abilities, specifically the Ice/Freeze and Fire/Burning abilities, mostly because a lot of them were very limited and only allowed one attack per ability. Kirby Super Star added multiple moves for Copy Abilities and merged these abilities as a result. The Fire/Burning and Ice/Freeze abilities are usually merged in later games, although the Freeze and Burning abilities sometimes appear in later games as well.
  • In Kirby's Adventure none of Kirby's Copy Abilities gave him a distinctive hat. Kirby Super Star gave Kirby distinctive hats for each form, but this wouldn't become a solid part of the series until the Game Boy Advance remake of Kirby's Adventure (Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land) retconned it into the Copy Abilities' first appearance. Additionally, Adventure and Super Star had Copy Abilities like Beam and Ice that change Kirby's color; colors other than pink have since been tied to the Color-Coded Multiplayer and irrespective of the current ability.
  • Kirby's Dream Land 2 and 3 add ridable animal helpers for Kirby to use that have their own abilities (Rick can Goomba Stomp and later climb walls, Coo can fly freely, Kine can swim freely, Pitch can glide and fly, Nago can jump multiple times, and Chuchu can walk on ceilings). They also provide alternate uses for Kirby's Copy Abilities. They were largely rendered obsolete by Kirby being more versatile with the uses of his abilities (including being able to transform into stone carvings of them in 64, giving Kirby the trademark abilities of a few of them), and haven't made much more than cameos until their return in Kirby Star Allies. A case of Tropes Are Not Good, however, as many fans clamored for their return.
  • Kirby Super Star introduced a two-player mode, which would become standard for the series. Kirby could use his abilities to create helpers with the ability he sacrificed, allowing a second player to jump in, though they didn't have as much control over the abilities they had, which necessitated an enemy that when copied allowed Kirby to... copy abilities. Just so the second player could use it. Dream Land 3 instead had a different character, Gooey, who was Kirby's match and could do everything he could do, but looked quite different. Every game since that had a multiplayer option, was content with just having multiple differently colored Kirbys without any explanation why there's more than one of him (save Amazing Mirror, where they're present in the single-player as well). Return to Dream Land also lets the second (and third, and fourth) player control the already existing Dedede, Meta Knight, and Waddle Dee, and Kirby Star Allies brings back the Helper system albeit having Helpers created by throwing hearts at enemies while keeping the Copy Ability.
  • King Dedede was a straight villain in the first game, stealing food from people and keeping it for himself. He also lacked his own flight ability in the game, not gaining it until Adventure. Every other game in the series either has Kirby believe Dedede was the source of his troubles or has Dedede get possessed by an Eldritch Abomination, turning every game except the first into a Vile Villain, Saccharine Show. Also extends to Meta Knight's portrayal in Super Star (which gave him significantly more characterization than his one-off appearance as a boss in Adventure), though that's a Dub-Induced Plot Hole (in the original Japanese, he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist).
  • In the first three traditional 8-bit Kirby games you couldn't press the jump button to puff up; you had to press up to puff and then you can press the jump button to continue jumping. This can be rather irritating for players that played anything from the SNES on beforehand.
  • In earlier games, Scarfies would explode upon defeat even if they weren't in their mutated state caused by trying to suck them up, and the explosion damages Kirby upon contact, which can mess up players used to the later games.
  • Kirby's Dream Land 2 and 3 as well as Kirby 64 employed the concept of Multiple Endings, with the Golden Ending being locked behind 100% Completion. All future Kirby games ditched this entirely.
  • Kirby: Canvas Curse introduced the concept of Soul bosses, which are generally the most powerful bosses in the game and share several recurring attacks. Unlike later games where they're at the end of a Boss Rush and are upgraded versions of their respective games final boss, here it's simply the name of the final boss' One-Winged Angel form.
• Klonoa: In the first game, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, Klonoa has six hit points instead of three, bosses are fought at the ends of regular stages instead of in Boss Only Levels (except the Final Boss), and the character designs are a lot more chibi than in later games.

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• Leisure Suit Larry: The first game, Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards, is rather different from the rest of the series: there's an overall time limit, you have a specific amount of money that you can spend on things and replenish by gambling (rather than just having a "money" item that is exactly enough for whatever you need to buy), the game world is divided into smaller areas that you can only get between by taxi (which costs money), and one of the women (the prostitute) is completely optional to interact with to beat the game. Later games play more like traditional adventure games, and every girl somehow brings you closer to the "final girl".
• Legacy of Kain: Unlike the rest of the games which are 3D exploration based genre, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain plays more like a The Legend of Zelda game. The vampires are also treated more like traditional vampires and less like eldritch abominations that we see in later games.
• The Legendary Starfy: The first game, Densetsu no Stafy, has no shops or costumes, and the Duck, Double Jump, and Shooting Star moves are all missing. There are several other differences, too: there's only one stage per area, you start with the Glide instead of unlocking it, all of the transformations and the Ultra Star Spin are optional to beat the game, the combo system gives Big Pearls sooner (and never gives two Pearls at once), and the sound effects for dizziness and low health are different.
• LEGO Adaptation Game:
  • In a fairly subtle example of tonal shift, Lego Star Wars: The Video Game (2005) was much more of a straight retelling of the films with the occasional joke slipped in than the outright over-the-top parodic wackiness that would later become the standard for the LEGO Star Wars series.
  • In the very first game, only Jedi had the ability to build objects, with the regular build ability that's a hallmark of the series' gameplay being absent until the second Star Wars title. Additionally, in the second Star Wars game characters could take damage while building objects with Lego pieces which would reverse a lot of building progress. In all future Lego titles, characters are invulnerable to damage while they are building objects with Lego pieces.
  • In the first Star Wars game, only Jedi characters had close combat abilities through the use of lightsabers. The second one gave non-Jedi character close combat abilities through punching, likely because of the smaller amount of Jedi characters in the Original Trilogy, however non-combat oriented characters still couldn't fight at all. Beginning with the second Indiana Jones game, all characters had the ability to fight, even if it was just a basic punch.
  • Characters with blasters couldn't dodge in the first Star Wars, making playing as them a lot harder in the original game.
  • In the first two Star Wars games, in levels with multiple characters (in other words, more than just the default two), to switch to any additional ones you had to stand right next to them, and you'd need to do so several times in order to complete the puzzles. Beginning with the first LEGO Indiana Jones game, you could now switch between any character no matter how far away they were.
  • The earlier games simply had small hubs with doors to the different levels. Starting with the experiment of Lego Indiana Jones 2 and really finalized with Lego Harry Potter, the hubs became sprawling open worlds with a ton of content hidden in them.
  • Most of the early titles had no regular voice acting, with the characters speaking in incomprehensible grunts and mumbles. Beginning with Lego Batman 2 in 2012 the video games now featured fully-voiced dialogue.
• Like a Dragon: The first game and its sequel on the PS2 used fixed camera angles when exploring Kamurocho and Sotenbori (enabling free camera only in certain areas), didn't allow you transfer items via telephone, forcing you to use item boxes in hideouts instead and Premium Adventure didn't allow you to carry save data, forcing you to do all the substories from scratch.
• LISA: The original installment, LISA: The First, functions very similarly to Yume Nikki, in that the only true "objective" of the game is to simply explore surreal locations, rather than being a side-scrolling RPG like its successors. It's also the only game in the series to not take place in post-apocalyptic Olathe.
• LittleBigPlanet:
  • The general look of the original game was a much more literal rendition of the arts and crafts aesthetic compared to later entries, especially in the Story levels as they weren't affected by the post-Launch additions of being able to hide bolts, connectors and sensors. This results in many levels "showing their work" by having pistons, winches and bolts clearly visible with no attempt being made to hide how contraptions work, unlike the later games which do and overall feel much less like a puppet show. This was likely intentional for a "use your imagination" approach, and so that Media Molecule could show players how they achieved their contraptions. Not coincidentally LBP1 is also the only entry where you collect Story level contraptions to use in your own levels.
  • Level creators who started with the second game or onward may be given a shock when coming to the original game and seeing how crude certain level creation techniques are, due the absence of almost all of the familiar cursor and Logic tools that makes seemingly simple tasks more difficult to accomplish. Multi-stage bosses in particular are a much more complex nightmare to get working, especially without Microchips to help compress the logic down and save on Thermometer use. Common gadgets from later titles like the Grappling Hook are also absent; you only have the Jetpack, Scuba Gear and the Paintinator from the Metal Gear Solid DLC to play with.
  • The crude aesthetic also applies to NPCs. It's quite jarring to go from fully voiced cutscene characters like da Vinci and Newton to Magic Mouth contraptions that only appear at the start and end of a level, and are replete with obvious stickers, visible connectors, and voices you couldn't even call Simlish!
  • With the third game's introduction of sixteen layers, going back to the older games that use only three can be rather odd, especially since all the previous DLC for the first and second games are (almost) fully compatible with the third game. LittleBigPlanet 3's vast amount of depth does a lot for level immersion, so going back to the first game and seeing it trying to squeeze every inch of depth out of only three layers is a special kind of awkward.
  • The opening of the first game depicts people sleeping as their creative subconcious energy is channeled into the titlar game world, leading Earth to be known as "the Orb of Dreamers" to the rest of the universe. This conceit was dropped in the later games' intros, which depict the people being awake instead.
• Little Tail Bronx: The first game, Tail Concerto, features many lore inaccuracies that conflicted with the much later released Solatorobo: Red the Hunter and Fuga: Melodies of Steel. Caninus and Felinekos are called "Dog-People" and "Cat-People" (literal translations of their Japanese names), the Iron Giant is never referred to as a Titano-Machina and lacked the biblical-sounding Theme Naming that Lares, Lumeres, and Vanargand has, the volatile Cloud Sea that covers the world below the floating islands does not exist, and it's the only game to lack a French voice track (on top of being the only game in the series with a full English dub). The main theme, "For Little Tail", was also outsourced to KOKIA and is the only vocal theme in the game (unless you were playing the US version, which had a completely different instrumental theme instead), where as the later two game has at least three and were all done in-house under CyberConnect2's LieN label.

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• Make My Video: The series officially began life with Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory, even though the introductory video still flashes the "Make My Video" branding on the Digital Pictures logo. It's also the only entry to have any sort of fantastic plot, with the player presented as physically working in a factory to make videos rather than just make the videos to impress random people.
• Mana Series: As the title suggests, the first game, Final Fantasy Adventure, was a spin off of Final Fantasy and thus featured several elements such as the Chocobos that were removed in the remake Sword of Mana.
• Marvel vs. Capcom:
  • The first Marvel fighting game from Capcom, X-Men: Children of the Atom, had a much slower and deliberate pace, and generally played more like Street Fighter than later entries. While things like chain combos were still there, they were far more subdued, and the game itself lacked the sheer craziness of its successors. The Mana Meter was also completely different, and aerial characters like Storm and Magneto could still block while flying.
  • Magneto and Juggernaut, being boss characters here, had mechanics very different from their later appearances. Juggernaut not only had an invulnerability mode, but could also grab steel girders from the front of the stage and use them to beat his opponents from far away. Magneto had a second energy burst attack called "EM Burst", one of his basic attacks allowed him to throw energy waves, making it very spammable and he had two invulnerability modes, one brief, the other longer. Marvel Super Heroes would nerf the hell out of them, Juggernaut losing the girders and Magneto losing his extra long range attacks and relegating their invulnerability modes to the Soul Infinity Gem. As well, their voice actors changed between those two games.
  • The first few games all had at least one multi-leveled stage with breakable floors, which could actually significantly affect the combat at times. By the time of Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes, this would be done away with.^note With that said,that game has a stage where one can extend the stage horizontally by breaking a wall in Honda's Bathhouse, and a secondary floor stage would return in its sister series Tatsunoko vs. Capcom
  • While X-Men vs. Street Fighter was the first proper crossover of the series, the trademark Assist Character mechanic would not be introduced until Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter.
• Mass Effect: The first game, Mass Effect (2007), has several crucial differences from the sequels:
  • The characters had a much larger roster of combat and defensive abilities. Additionally, Shepard and their squad could use each of their abilities (such as biotic and tech) one at a time, meaning you could used one ability, then another, and then another, and so on until you had to wait for them all to recharge. In both sequels, when Shepard or a squadmate used an ability this temporarily kept them locked out for all respective available abilities for them at the time until it recharged after a few seconds.
  • The combat was quite different, as the weapons didn't actually use ammo and had an "overheating" meter that would keep Shepard from temporarily using the weapon for a few seconds until it filled up. The sequels discarded this mechanic in favor of clip-based weapons that could be refilled from enemy drops and crates. Dummied Out code shows that it was partially implemented in Mass Effect 2, and a few weapons, either of Prothean origin or updated versions of weapons from the first game's era, bring this mechanic back in Mass Effect 3.
  • In a case where the series moved away from a standard gameplay mechanic used in previous Bioware games, not only did Shepard have a standard RPG equipment system, but it also applied to all members of the party. In the sequel, the companions didn't have any customizable armor (instead having just a couple of outfits to pick before a mission, and no customization), and the third one did a hybrid system (where certain outfits gave armor/combat bonuses). Likewise, the original game had several different classes of armor, including light, medium and heavy variants.
  • The item system resulted in the player being able to pick up large amounts of useless items, which could either be sold for money or converted into omnigel. This was later done away with altogether — in the sequels, crates and item boxes give credits, ammo or a single armor piece/weapon/item that often only can be utilized by Shepard and can't be sold. This was later lampshaded in the Mass Effect 2 DLC Lair of the Shadow Broker by Liara.
  • There are also dialogue spots in the first game that imply that the Terminus Systems have a unified government and/or other alien species who are dominant forces, as well as implying that there are a lot of species we just don't see within the course of the first game who are members of the Council-aligned races. In the second game, the Terminus Systems were established as merely being the area of space outside of Council jurisdiction, dominated by lawless pirate gangs, as well as a handful of free colonies looking to get away from "oppressive" Council control, and only two or three alien species were introduced, only one of them even loosely affiliated with the Council.
  • Character wise, you could play Shepard as a huge speciesist in the first installment. Especially with turians. However, starting in two that trait is gone, even for renegade Shepard. You could also be a total jackass to your teammates, to the point that they'd avoid talking with you. Starting with 2, you rarely can be anything less than completely professional with your crew.
  • Conversations are very samey-looking in the first game, with the difference between dialogue and cutscenes being very obvious in quality. Characters are constantly Going Through the Motions, and the camera always show characters standing rather stiffly while facing each other. A conversations with a squad member on the Normandy is never going to look any different from the next. It wasn't until the second game that Bioware started experimenting with more dynamic camera shots and poses that gives every conversation the quality of a cutscene.
• MechWarrior: The first game, MechWarrior (1989) has some early-installment weirdness. While it featured the expected first-person Humongous Mecha combat (like the later games), it had an extremely simple graphics engine (it came out in 1989, after all), and had role-playing elements. It was also the only singleplayer mech game to take place before the Clan Invasion, and the last official single-player game to feature the Unseen 'Mechs (Mechwarrior Online and its Project Phoenix releases are multiplayer-only). It also did not feature the ability to customize your 'Mech, a staple of every Mechwarrior game since Mechwarrior 2. It also did not feature a third-person perspective option, something that was available in most of the subsequent games.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man (1987) was built on a very small amount of ROM, so the game seems clipped down compared to its sequels: there are only six robot masters instead of the usual eight, all of whose stages were very small; a score display was present at the top of the screen (a leftover from when the game was originally designed to be in arcades); E-Tanks are non-existent; the Life and Weapon Energy items look different from all other games; Mercy Invincibility does not protect you from Spikes of Doom; the corridors before boss rooms contain enemies; Wily's Fortress does not have a map; the Robot Master rematches are sprinkled throughout the fortress stages instead of being collected in a teleporter room; the Wily Machine was the Final Boss rather than being a penultimate boss like in the other games; Fire Man's weakness was the ice weapon (later games usually had the ice boss weak to the fire weapon instead of the other way around); three of the weapons were thrown rather than being shot out of the Mega Buster (Bomb Man's, Cut Man's and Guts Man's weapons); the end-of-stage jingle is different; and most importantly, there was no password system (the entire game must be played in one sitting). The controls also have a decidedly rough feel compared to the sequels, Mega Man feels quite a bit heavier and it's much harder to stop his momentum while running (also likely a holdover from it intended to be an arcade game, and played with a joystick). When the game got remade as Mega Man Powered Up, several of these differences were addressed: The stages are now longer, the robot masters now have two more in their ranks to bump the total up to the correct eight, the pickups look like how they should, you’re now protected from spikes when you take damage, the corridors don’t have enemies, and the final fortress stage now has a teleporter for the rematches.
  • Both 1 and 2 had a few robot masters take extra damage from the Mega Buster.^note This also applies to Splash Woman.
  • Mega Man's sliding ability, now a staple of the series, actually wasn't introduced until Mega Man 3. MM3 is also the only Mega Man game where you have to fight the 8 bosses from the previous game in between clearing the 8 main stages and fighting your way through Dr. Wily's lair. And as the most damning piece of evidence that the game was severely rushed this is the only Mega Man (and likely the only Capcom game) where they forgot to make sure the debug controls were Dummied Out, holding certain buttons on controller 2 will have effects like slow motion or giving Mega Man zero-G jumping.
  • The final boss fights for the mainline Classic series from Mega Man 4 onward are a case of Grandfather Clause. They consist of fighting Dr. Wily in the Wily Machine, which is always a large weaponized vehicle. After that has been destroyed, the fight will continue with Wily piloting a teleporting escape pod known as the Wily Capsule. However, this isn't the case for the first three games, which each have a Wily Machine, but the Wily Capsule was absent. As mentioned above in the entry for 1, the Wily Machine was the final boss. After defeating the Wily Machine in 2, the final battle is against Wily as an alien (which turns out to be a hologram projection). As for 3, defeating the Wily Machine leads to a final battle with Wily piloting a Humongous Mecha named Gamma.
  • 4 is also the first game with a chargeable Mega Buster.
  • The American manual for the first game made up several details that were not present in the original, like the setting being named "Monsteropolis." Those details were left out of later games.
  • Mets/Metools/Mettaurs, the iconic enemy of the series, are not generalized Dr. Wily enemies, but theme baddies for Guts Man's stage. They are meant to look like hard hats that someone left laying around,^note Japanese hard hats have a green line around them, with a green plus symbol, representing safety. only for there to turn out to be a little guy underneath, who shoots at you when you get close. The way they fit the theme is that Guts Man's stage is a mine, which naturally involves hard hats.
  • Special assist items in the NES Mega Man games varied before really settling on just Rush.
    • In the first game, Mega Man had the Magnetic Beam, which was just a blue laser that doubled as platforms for Mega Man to jump on. This also had a case of this trope, as the Magnet Beam was hidden behind a barrier in Elec Man's stage that required you to have defeated Guts Man and obtained the Super Arm.
    • 2 replaced them with Items 1, 2 and 3 - a hovering platform, a jet sled, and a wall-hugging platform respectively, which were obtained by defeating certain Robot Masters. These are Proto-Rush items.
    • Wily's Revenge gave us Carry, a stationary floating platform, which is only useable while jumping and created under Mega Man's feet.
    • 3 gave us the Rush and his three forms: Coil, Jet and Marine. Jet differed here from other versions as Mega Man could avert Video Game Flight by being allowed to fly wherever he wanted to, as opposed to the other games where it has constant forward acceleration and can only be steered up or down. Marine was the most useless as it only stuck around until 4 since there were very little water stages and what stages there were could be traversed easily without it.
    • 4 gave us the Balloon and Wire Adapters. Balloon functioned the same as Item-1 from 2 while Wire was a grappling hook weapon. Rush Jet was altered to function like Item-2.
    • 5 saw one last item addition, Super Arrow, which was an arrow weapon that also doubled as a platform when it hit a wall and could be ridden on while in flight. This most likely was a leftover from the NES Darkwing Duck video game. The weapon is also unique in that unlike other platforming items that either use a fixed amount of weapon energy to use and last for a set amount of time or use it constantly while active and disappear instantly when they run out of energy, Super Arrow will consume weapon energy while flying but won't despawn until it hits a wall and sticks there for a set amount of time or flies offscreen, allowing it to be used to cross horizonal rooms of any length as long as it has a single unit of energy left.
  • Mega Man 2 was the first of two games (the other being 3) where players couldn't return to defeated stages. This makes E-Tanks, which make their first appearance here, a Too Awesome to Use commodity, as any you didn't collect during the first stage run were lost forever, so you couldn't easy stock up on them. Even if you could, you could only hold 4, while every other game after it lets you hold 9.
  • Mega Man 3 had a load of things that would never be seen again in other entries.
    • Dr. Wily is spelled Wiley, and Dr. Light is Dr. Right, the spelling used from Japan.
    • The password system could be used to manipulate how many Energy Tanks a player could start with. One could start the game with nine Energy Tanks and keep manipulating it to get that same number.
    • After beating the first eight Robot Masters, players would have to traverse four harder versions of those stages to battle Doc Robots, who used the powers of the Robot Masters of Mega Man 2.
    • Battling Proto Man/Break Man forced players to only use their Mega Buster to harm him. Later games would give his Proto Shield a much better defense.
  • Mega Man 4 is the first game where the Final Boss has a unique battle theme. This wasn't the case for the first three installments.^note In regards to the Game Boy games, only Mega Man V has a unique battle theme for the final boss.
  • Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge is the only game where Mega Man doesn't fight the second set of four Robot Masters in their own stages.
  • Mega Man X:
    • In the first two games, you could NOT play as Zero, the intentional Ensemble Dark Horse who is not only the most popular character out of the entire Mega Man series, but who was also supposed to be the main character. For the first game specifically, the head armor is used to break certain blocks with your head Mario-style, and dashing is not an initial part of X's repertoire, but rather the ability of his Leg armor upgrade, which unlike all the other armors in the series, is mandatory and unavoidable. The Buster upgrade on its own was simply a 4th level charge shot and not getting it lets you take Zero's buster when he inevitably dies later in the game, which was identical to it anyway. Also, the boss rematches, like the Mega Man 1 example above, aren't in teleporter rooms but interspersed throughout the levels. Unlike Powered Up, the remake Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X kept a lot of these weirdnesses, with the only major difference being that Zero's Buster is more powerful than the regular Buster upgrade if you can hold out for it.
    • Mega Man X2 had the Ride Chaser as a Power Up Mount like the Ride Armors that you can find in a level and use; later games would have dedicated Ride Chaser levels.
    • X1 and X2 had an interesting mechanic where using fire-based weapons underwater meant that they would be completely ineffective... to a point. The Fire Wave weapon in X1 would be completely ineffective as the water would kill it completely and not even the Full Charge Shot would override it. The Speed Burner in X2 is a different story — firing it normally in the water would instead launch the projectiles that would normally be unleashing the fireballs and these can cause damage. However, if X fully charged Speed Burner, he'd end up with a faster air dash that could hurt or even kill him. X3 would not have any fire weapons and the Playstation era would have X's fire weapons not be incumbered by such penalties until X8.
    • Mega Man X3 had a very odd set of additions that are never seen again, including a double air dash, healing (both of those were special items that you could only get one of or find the super special item in the final parts of the game) and the ability to choose different Ride Armors for certain purposes. Even playing as Zero was different as you could only use him once per stage and he would leave automatically if you tried to enter one of the gates that only X could enter, making him unable to be used for more than 1/3rd of the stage or fight the stage boss, and if he died in any stage, you lost him for good. Unless you reached a miniboss in the second stage of Doppler's fortress: Zero could fight that one. He'd be unplayable when the boss kamikazes itself, but Zero would pass his saber to X as an additional Buster power-up.
    • Also, the first three games contained secret armor power-ups that could only be reached if were at full health and had all the powerups from the initial stages. The first two games featured Street Fighter moves—Hadoken in X1 and Shoryuken in X2—that could only be used at full health. X3 didn't go this route, instead providing an enhancement part that powered up your armor's abilities and turned it gold. Also, Zero's beam saber was a Buster upgrade, so there wasn't a health requirement to use it normally, but you needed to be at full health to use its Sword Beam.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 1 and 2 both lacked the Navi Customizer the later games have. Battle Network 1 also lacks any transformations (2 and 3 have elemental style change, and 4, 5 and 6 allow you to take on the abilities of another Navi). Mega Man Star Force 1 lacks the Link Power abilities (the Navi Customizer replacement) present in the two sequels. It also has a different art style, which is very noticeable in Echo Ridge. Battle Network 1 and 2 were also much slower. In 1, the custom screen does not show the chip's code below the icon, you have to hover over it. Furthermore, instead of throwing away chips to add, the add command just added 5 more chips on the next screen, but instead of that being it, there are actually 15 slots instead of 10 or 8 like the later games have, meaning you have half your folder available in just two turns.
  • Mega Man Zero 1 did things a little differently compared to the later games. One particularly big difference was the use of a single hub-style world for the majority of the game, where everything except the opening Underground Laboratory and the endgame Neo Arcadia stages could be revisited simply by walking to them; this also meant that most stages made heavy reuse of previous stages, with both the desert to the left and the city to the right of the Resistance base getting not only two stages set in them, but also two stages set in the respective hidden base and subway underneath them. There was also a complete lack of subtanks that could be acquired through exploration - rather, you had to sacrifice a Cyber-Elf to turn it into a subtank (thus taking a permanent hit to your end-of-mission score) whereas later games split the difference between two subtank Elves and two subtanks that could be found in the stages. The game was also stingy on giving you your weapons, requiring going through most of the opening stage with just the Buster Shot before handing you the Z-Saber partway through the boss fight and then requiring completion of specific missions afterwards to get the Triple Rod and Shield Boomerang - and also blocking off access to the Underground Laboratory after the mission there that unlocks the Triple Rod - whereas later games, at most stringent, still let you use the Z-Saber for the opening and then immediately gave you the boomerang and whatever replaced the Triple Rod for that game. Bosses had their EX Skills that they use if the player comes at them with an A or S rank, but Zero couldn't copy them for defeating said bosses at those ranks. There were no alternate forms for Zero to unlock through specific actions during a mission. Finally, it and Zero 2 had minor RPG Elements with your weapons, where you started off with only basic abilities with them (e.g. a single slash with the Z-Saber and only being able to fire basic energy pellets with the Buster Shot) and had to grind out kills across the game to increase your combo length, gain the ability to charge your weapon, and getting a second charge level and/or faster charging.
• Metal Gear:
  • The first game, Metal Gear (1987) for the MSX2 and NES, had no crawling, no radar, a transceiver that was completely room oriented and a simple straightforward plot. Guards could only see in straight lines and the stages were screen-based (think the original Zelda), allowing players to escape detection by simply moving to the next screen (at least in the NES version, which lacked the higher alert phase). It also featured a leveling system that increases your maximum health and carrying capacity for every five hostages you rescued (and demotes you if you killed one) and multiple cardkeys were needed to open different doors.
  • Character designer Yoji Shinkawa was not involved with the series until the first Metal Gear Solid, resulting in an inconsistent art style for the series in the 8-bit games. The first Metal Gear featured a cover art that was blatantly traced over from a publicity still for The Terminator, making Solid Snake resemble Kyle Reese. For Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the in-game portraits themselves were also traced from various actors and other real life individuals, with Snake himself being modeled after Mel Gibson, while other characters such as Big Boss and Roy Campbell were modeled after actors such as Sean Connery and Richard Crenna (best known for the role of Colonel Sam Trautman from First Blood respectively). When Metal Gear 2 was ported to later platforms, starting with the 2004 Japanese mobile phone version later included with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, these portraits were redone not just to be more in-line with Shinkawa's designs from the later games, but also to avoid any potential likeness infringement that the original portraits might cause.
  • Although it was a non-canon sequel made by a different team, Snake's Revenge played like the first game, only with the addition of side-scrolling segments and a focus on knives that the canon Solid Snake would outright deny until MGS4.
  • While Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is much closer to Metal Gear Solid than the previous installments, it is still limited by the same technical constraints as the original Metal Gear. It also had some of the oddest items and puzzles in the series, such as hideable buckets in addition to the box, poisonous hamsters that kill you just from a touch (having to be lead into an area where they can easily be killed by equipping a specific type of ration), and hatching an owl egg so that the newly born owl can hoot near a guard and make him think it's nighttime, causing him to leave because he thinks his shift is now over.
  • In the first Metal Gear Solid, Snake's maximum health and item/ammo capacity increases after every boss battle (a play mechanic carried over from Metal Gear 2), he would regain some health after every boss battle by taking a puff from a cigarette (later games would eliminate this and just bring you back to full health without explanation when it felt the need), and there were two endings based on one specific choice halfway through (all the other games in the series only had single endings), with unlockables that were available for New Game Plus based on which ending you got (other games make them rewards for a Collection Sidequest, for completing a Pacifist Run, and/or just for completing the game on high difficulties). Also, there were no tranquilizers, relative lack of sound-based stealth (only running over specific loud floors or tapping on a wall would garner a reaction), there was no way to aim a gun in first person view or perform a roll, and the plot, while still intricate, is not nearly as insane as later games.
  • Up until Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the bodies of dead soldiers would simply disappear once they hit the ground. Killing an enemy grunt in front of one of his buddies doesn't cause as much of a reaction as it does in later games. This is also the reason why the tranquilizer gun was introduced in Metal Gear Solid 2, as there wasn't much need for one in previous games.
• Metal Slug:
  • The first installment has its share of oddities in this classic SNK RNG series:
    • The only playable characters present are Marco and Tarma, and there is no character select screen — Marco is automatically assigned to player 1 and Tarma to player 2. They do not strike a victory pose at the end of a mission.
    • The game's tone is fairly grounded, and the humor and cartoony elements made famous in subsequent games is more subdued here. The depressing ending after finishing the game with one player in particular would feel very out of place after the first entry. To wit, there are no transformations nor any supernatural elements to speak of.
    • The only weapons besides the pistol are the Heavy Machine Gun, Flame Shot, Rocket Launcher, and Shotgun. The brief diagonal firing that the Heavy Machine Gun does when switching directions is more finicky and unreliable to pull off here. The Flame Shot shoots out a weak fireball that travels far across the screen, as opposed to the shorter-range but incredibly powerful Flame Shot of later entries, and there is also an alternate "burning" animation for the enemies where only the top half of them catches on fire rather than their whole bodies (the flames also look quite different from the other animation) that is only used in the first game and never again.
    • The grenades fly at a slightly shorter range and are tinged red. Mooks hit by grenades also turns sandy-brown when blown up (the same death animation plays if an exploding Metal Slug happens to catch enemy soldiers in the way).
    • The franchise's iconic "Boss Theme", "Steel Beast", was played in the middle of the second stage, during the Mini-Bata battle. Stages in future entries featuring said song will play it exclusively at the end of a stage when the player takes on a boss, giving Mini-Bata the honor as the only Mini-Boss granted said theme.
    • The equally-iconic score, "Assault", made its debut in the latter half of the original game's second stage (after the aforementioned Mini-Bata mid-boss), lasts until the Hairbuster Riberts boss and somehow continues playing in the third stage. Later entries will play a different score by default every new stage.
    • Another music-related oddity, "Final Attack" (the score that always plays in final missions) was used in the first half of the last stage, before it's usurped by the aforementioned "Assault" all the way to the stage's end. All later installments featuring said theme ^note save for 4 where it's absent and 6 where it plays only for 5 seconds at the start will use it as background music for facing the Final Boss.
    • After defeating Allan O'Neil, you're unable to claim O'Neil's machine-gun for yourself, for no given reason. This is changed in later games where O'Neil's dropped weapon can be collected (equivalent to a fresh Heavy Machine Gun pickup).
    • The voice of the announcer is different; he's also present in 2 before his better known, hammier replacement debuted in X. His "Mission Complete!" voice clip doesn't play until the "Mission Complete" text has already appeared, rather than immediately after the prisoner tally.
    • The only usable vehicle is the Metal Slug, although the player can use a turret on the battleship in the final mission.
    • It is possible to bring a Metal Slug vehicle to each boss fight, a privilege subsequent games do not always grant you. To get bonus points for the Metal Slug, the player simply needs to bring the tank to the boss arena and keep it intact until the mission ends. Later games add the requirement the player to be on a slug during the boss' defeat animation in order to receive credit, and doing the final blow on foot won't count.
    • You can throw grenades out of the Slug's cockpit while crouching, but you can't collect them — picking up Bomb crates while riding a Slug always gives you cannon ammo, and you have to get out and pick them up on foot if you want grenades instead. Starting in X, picking up Bomb crates with the Slug in "crouch mode" gives you grenades, allowing you to choose which explosives you get. Also, you can actually throw grenades faster when using the Slug than when on foot—later games nerfed this so that you throw them at the same rate whether in a vehicle or not.
    • The health of the Metal Slug itself isn't fixed to a three-hitpoints system. It is possible to take less or more damage than 1 unit of hitpoint depending on the specific attack of the enemy.
    • In later levels, enemy soldiers will jump onto the Metal Slug while the player is using it and attempt to either destroy your vulcan cannon with a hammer (the Metal Slug cannot lose its vulcan cannon in any other game, although this idea was carried over to the Slugnoid from 2 onwards), attempt to climb and open the hatch of the Metal Slug and throw in a grenade (which will damage the Slug and not the player), or mount in front of the main cannon to block the cannon projectile from launching, forcing players to spend and waste three cannon shots to dislodge said rebel! This behavior is not present in any subsequent game.
    • While riding the Metal Slug, the "ARMS" counter in the HUD will still show your ammo count for your current special weapon, if you have one. In later games, the "ARMS" counter changes to the infinity symbol for the Slug's vulcan gun.
    • The rescued prisoner list uses a different font, namely the same one used for the 1UP and ammo count.
    • The Eaca-B and the Flying Tara (which are palette swaps of an otherwise identical plane sprite) behave distinctly from one another: the latter will fly from the background first before showing up and drop air-to-ground HE bombs, leave and repeat, while the former will always show up and launch missiles from its bottom hatch before leaving the field for good. In 2 and onwards, the Flying Tara behaves identically to the Eaca-B.
    • Jump physics of the player character is higher and much floatier and a lot more sensitive (Think Luigi instead of Mario).
    • Thematically, the first game is also notable for its lack of weirdness. No Mars people, mummies, zombies, lasers, Iron Lizards, or any stuff like that. Just a straight-up war story. It is also surprisingly less violent than later entries.
  • Metal Slug 2 isn't immune to this either, and it's particularly pronounced if you go back to it after playing X:
    • The announcer (the same one from the first game) does not say the name of the character you choose at the beginning, and the "WHOA, BIG" voice clip normally heard upon becoming fat is absent here.
    • Fio's death scream is the same as Eri's, and her victory animation is missing the part where she gives a "V for victory" sign.
    • The Camel Slug's bullets are identical to the Metal Slug's in 2, but were changed to larger oval-shaped bullets in X.
    • The Slug Flyer's first appearance is in a stage that can be traversed perfectly fine on foot. Subsequent games would relegate the Flyer to dedicated Shoot 'Em Up sections. As with the Camel Slug, its bullets are identical to the Metal Slug's in both 2 and X and were eventually changed to small lemon-shaped projectiles in 3.
    • The Heavy Machine Gun cannot be fired diagonally while fat in 2. This is particularly jarring since the segment in mission 4 in X where the UFOs show up practically requires you to take advantage of both fat mode and diagonal HMG fire.
    • Numerous enemies were introduced in X and are not present in 2; namely the mummy dogs and moth mummies in mission 2, the motorcycle soldiers in mission 4, and the white aliens in the final mission.
    • X also introduced several new weapons, and their absence in 2 is definitely felt (to put it in perspective, X has almost twice as many weapons as 2, not counting the "big" variants), especially since 2 has a disproportionately high amount of Heavy Machine Gun drops at the expense of the other weapons.
  • Halfway into the franchise, the Two Machine Guns were first introduced in 4 - it is treated as a "penetration" type weapon as shown where Rebels died in a rather gruesome manner if used on them. This particular damage-type does not return in 5 and onwards, where the the 2MG is treated as a "normal" type weapon instead. This behavior also applied to the Rocket Launcher in the first game before being changed in 2.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid (1986):
    • The first game is frustrating in comparison to later ones due to its lack of a map display and the game giving you no sort of hints or clues of what to do or where to go. It's also the only Metroid game where you can save your progress anywhere (the Save Point wasn't introduced until Metroid II) and the game used a Password Save system in the international releases (the Japanese release, which was on the Famicom Disk System, had a save system similar to that of the 8-bit Zelda games). It also had Ambidextrous Sprites^note Though, oddly enough, sprites for a left-facing Samus exist in the code but are unused, for both her power armor and armorless variants, something that even Metroid II averts despite being an early Game Boy game, and had no visual differences in the different suit power ups bar Palette Swaps and beam upgrades were mutually exclusive. The designs of Ridley and Kraid were also rather different: Ridley was a completely stationary winged thing of some kind who was fairly easy to defeat, and Kraid was tiny, barely larger than Samus. Super Metroid codified their current designs: Ridley as a fiendlishly tough and agile Space Dragon and Kraid as a gigantic lizard monster.
    • Samus can't shoot while crouching, because she can't crouch period, and she can't aim downward while in midair. Or aim diagonally at all. Anything shorter than her waist crawling on the ground (like the Zoomers that are the featured Mooks early on) can't be shot with her cannon unless she has the Wave Beam. Of course, that's why you have bombs.
    • The manual for the original Metroid describes Ridley as originally being a peaceful native of Zebes that Mother Brain brainwashed into one of her minions. This was dropped by the time Super Metroid came out — indeed, Samus's backstory, as revealed in later Metroid works, hinges on Ridley having always been dangerous and evil. Zero Mission even has a cutscene that shows Ridley piloting a ship to Zebes, implying he's not native to that planet at all.
    • The first title also started Samus out with just 30 energy points, even though the maximum she can hold is 99 before she finds Energy Tanks. This also meant that every time you died or picked up from where you left off via password, you'll start off with 30 energy points, forcing you grind for more energy every time. All games past the first installment will always start off Samus with 99 energy points on every new file you load and all energy you collected is retained when you save. The Prime series and Metroid: Other M take it a step further by fully healing you when you save.
    • Also, Samus's shots can't even reach the full length of the screen until you pick up the Long Beam, an item that accomplishes next to nothing other than this (it's stated to power up the basic beam slightly, but the damage increase is negligible) and as a result only showed up twice more: hidden in the code of Super Metroid (after its effects had already been made an inherent property of Samus' starting power beam in Metroid II) and as the first beam upgrade in Zero Mission, which only featured it because it was a remake. Interestingly, the other property of the Long Beam - the fact that it stacked with the other beam upgrades, which otherwise overrode one another - would later become standard for the platformers starting with Super Metroid, where only two of the five beams were mutually-exclusive, before later games simply had every possible beam upgrade stack with each other with no option or need to turn any of them off.^note The Metroid Prime Trilogy would treat the beams as separate weapons, but that was part-and-parcel of them being First-Person Shooter games (thus making switching between them more convenient than having to crawl into a menu like in Super Metroid), while also allowing for beam-specific missile combos.
    • It's not entirely clear if the discrepancies between the first game's supplementary materials and general franchise lore are a result of this or poor communication between the manual writers and the game makers. For one thing, the artwork of the Space Pirates don't portray them as humanoid arthropods, but as stock "shiver me timbers!" pirates complete with colonial era hats and peg-legs, while Kraid is portrayed with fur. Also, the back of the box says that "left alone the Metroid[s] are harmless." Later games make it clear that Metroids are always dangerous; it's just that the Pirates' efforts to artificially multiply them and use them as bioweapons make them even more dangerous.
    • The intro refers to Zebes as Zebeth. Mother Brain is described as the "mechanical life vein", a term not used again.
    • The manual refers to Samus as a cyborg. Nowadays, it's clear Samus wears the Power Suit and Power Beam, as the equipment is not part of her body.
    • Samus appears in-game without her armor, in a pink leotard and pink boots, with free-flowing brown hair^note aside from using a password to play suitless and then getting the Varia suit, which turned her hair a bright green. The ponytail she's now known for with the Zero Suit design would be settled on as early as Metroid II (albeit with her undoing the ponytail at the end of the game to reveal shoulder-length hair), though her hair remained brown up until Fusion and Prime changed it to blonde.
  • Metroid II: Return of Samus: Being only the second game in the franchise, Metroid II has some oddities that would be rectified by the time its remake, Metroid: Samus Returns, was released:
    • Samus's ship doesn't save the game. Refilling missiles or energy requires Samus to manually access the respective recharge station on either side of her ship's cockpit, while later games automatically refill both missiles and energy as soon as she enters her ship.
    • You have to be on the ground to initiate morph ball and space jump. If you switch back to biped mode in air you'll stay that way until Samus's feet touch the ground.
    • You're still one installment away from that precious diagonal aim, the ability to carry multiple beam types at once, or an in-game map feature.
    • This is the only game in the entire franchise that does not feature the series's six-note main theme nor the iconic Samus introduction fanfare. Both of these were added in Samus Returns.
    • In this game, all Metroids past the larval stage are immune to the Ice Beam. In Metroid Fusion, the Omega Metroid is weak to the Ice Beam, and Samus Returns extends this weakness to the Alpha, Gamma, and Zeta stages as well.
    • The Omega Metroid is only slightly taller than Samus, able to fly, and depicted with a hairy mane in official artwork. In Fusion and Samus Returns, the Omega Metroid is giant, unable to fly, and completely hairless.
    • In this game, the Queen Metroid can extend her neck, and she spits out undefined projectiles that can be rendered harmless with the Screw Attack. In Other M and Samus Returns, the Queen Metroid's neck is a fixed length, and she breathes fire that is dangerous even while using the Screw Attack. She is also vulnerable to standard Morph Bombs in this game, but that is because the Power Bomb was not yet introduced in the series.
    • Unlike in all other games, where its function is purely defensive, this game's Varia Suit also doubles Samus's running speed.
    • This is the only Metroid game where Samus is shown in regular underwear at the end rather than in a practical form-fitting outfit (though one ending for the first game does show her in a bikini.)
    • The English manual translates the name "Chozo Statue" as "Artifactor Statue", uniquely among Metroid games.
  • Super Metroid is about as close as you can get to the gameplay properly codified in Fusion, though there are still a few strange additions that didn't make their way to later games. Beyond the ability to turn upgrades on and off, there's also a sprint button separate from the Speed Booster powerup, shinesparking gradually draining health, the Crystal Flash move to convert ammo into health in an emergency, and diagonal aiming is set to both shoulder buttons (diagonally upwards with the left shoulder and diagonally downwards with the right), with switching between your beam and missile types still entirely set on the Select button. Fusion would remove sprinting and the health-drain from shinesparking, and set priming missiles to holding the right shoulder while making the left shoulder work for firing in any diagonal direction.
  • The first Metroid Prime has some major oddities in relation to its sequels:
    • Samus's suit (excluding her base Power Suit) is quite bulky and her shoulder domes are so huge that they completely dwarf her head. Later games would slim down the suit design to make it look less bulky and more form fitting. Relatedly, Samus isn't fully seen outside of her suit and her face seemed to be loosely based on her look in Super Metroid. It wasn't until Metroid: Zero Mission that Samus's suitless design would be solidified by her blue Zero Suit and blonde hair.
    • Scans work much differently from later games, as scannable objects are denoted by floating icons rather than highlighting their models, and with different coloration: Normal icons are orange, important ones are red, and already-scanned objects have faded icons. Compare to the later two's blue for unscanned, red for important, and green for scanned. There is also a much lower quantity of scannable objects and the game doesn't log the long descriptions, letting you read the whole entry in the scan window. The game also doesn't retain what objects you've scanned since your last save if you die, so be sure to rescan everything again upon dying, or you might just lock yourself out of a complete logbook if you forget to scan a boss again or something and then save afterwards (and make no mistake: It's happened). Thankfully, that's also fixed in later games.
    • The game is known for the lack of concrete missions (e.g., collecting the keys to open a temple, as in Echoes), making it less linear than its sequels, so the overworld areas are more natural and organic in this sense, and are thematically closer to the areas found in the 2D games. Samus does not get to interact with any non-playable characters either.
    • Most importantly, several important abilities are absent — namely the Seeker Missile, the Screw Attack^note The developers wanted to add this, but by the time they were able to get it to work to their satisfaction it was too late to implement it without delaying the release, the ability to use the Boost Ball to launch from a Spider Rail, or being able to shoot while grappling. In addition, the maximum possible amount of missiles is 250 and not 255. Lastly, while Power Bombs are present, picking up an expansion of it plays the game's major item acquired jingle. The sequel changes it to the minor item pick up jingle, which is used for other item expansions like missiles.
    • The enviroments in the game are more focused on the natural enviroment and anything technology related is regulated to Chozo ruins and whatever outposts the Space Pirates built. The sequels would use more technological bases for the settings.
    • This is the only entry in the Prime series where players can unlock an extra suit for Samus (though it's only cosmetic) and another game (Metroid). The sequels were planned to have similar rewards, but they were scapped due not having enough time to implement them.
    • The hazard meter shows the player how close they are to something that can damage Samus (fire, acid, etc.) The sequels would remove this feature since enviormental hazards are used far less often and are more obvious to see.
    • Samus's appearance at the end of the game shows her only with her helmet removed and her face is rendered realistically. Her appearance changed to look more like her stylized self from Metroid: Zero Mission and she would be seen in her Zero Suit. And in cutscenes, she isn't given much animations aside from a few actionzed scenes and is mostly just walking into new areas or standing in an idle stance as she looked around. The sequels gave her greater range of movement and other animations to make her look and feel more human.
• Might and Magic: The sixth game, Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven was different from the other games in the trilogy it started as something of a reboot of the series. It established much that would last for the next three or even four games^note Might & Magic X was another reboot and hearkened back to pre-VI games because full turnbased grid-locked movement is cheaper than hybrid real time-turnbased open world, but its magic system let you learn every spell if you knew the skill and could find its spell book and was closer to D&D's, with more but non-scaling spells, its aesthetics were oddly realistic, even photo-realistic when it comes to characters, and its skill system, while establishing the system of being able to invest points to increase scaling benefits or find trainers to upgrade skills to higher tiers for special advantages or faster scaling, had only three tiers (basic->Expert->Master, later games adding Grandmaster) and allowed every class that could learn a skill to upgrade the skill to its highest tier (from VII onward, upgraded tiers could be locked behind class promotions — which already existed in VI — or simply unavailable to some classes).
• Minecraft: The game's early builds hardly resemble the later versions from 2011 onward.
  • Pre-classic is the most glaring case of all. Only a few blocks in the game existed, many of which had completely different textures: Grass blocks were green all over and wooden planks looked like this. Some versions had maps that lacked any sort of grass, looking like superflat with stone blocks in its place. Human mobs (which had the same skin as Steve) could be spawned by pressing G, and jumped around the map while flailing their arms and legs.
  • Classic looked more like the Minecraft we know today than Pre-classic, but still fits.
    • It had the same bright green foliage (which continued to be used until Alpha 1.2), and introduced Survival mode. Killing hostile mobs awarded points, depending on how dangerous the mob was (creepers yielded the most points, while zombies yielded the least). Furthermore, creepers had melee attacks (only exploding when killed by the player) and mushrooms were the only source of food, dropped by pigs; red mushrooms were poisonous and brown mushrooms healed the player. The player's fist also dealt four points of damage.
    • Even Creative Classic was different from today's Creative Mode in one small but significant way: the player could not fly.
    • Sponges could also absorb water because there weren't finite water sources yet. Once finite water was added, sponges became non-functional (though they regained their old absorption properties in 1.8)
  • In earlier versions of Indev, the player would start near a house made of moss stone filled with chests containing every item in the game. Once the survival aspects of the game were emphasized, the chests were removed and the house became wooden. The items also stacked to 99; today, items stack to 64.
  • Early versions of Infdev (not to be confused with Indev, its immediate predecessor) gave the player 999 wooden planks and glass. Similarly with the item chests, these were removed in later versions.
  • As a more general example, food originally did not stack, so it quickly filled up the player's inventory. This was fixed in Beta 1.8 (which also added hunger). Meat also used to have thick outlines which were removed in 1.4.2.
  • In older versions of the game, sheep would drop multiple blocks of wool if punched by the player. Beta 1.7 added shears. Also, sheep did not drop mutton until 1.8.
• Monster Hunter: The first game Monster Hunter (2004), and by extention Monster Hunter G and the first Monster Hunter Freedom, differ in many ways from subsequent entries in the series:
  • The controls are very obtuse and took a lot of getting used to, since attacking is done with the right analog stick and the camera is controlled with the D-pad (some later games kept this control scheme as an option while defaulting to the more traditional control scheme of attacking with face buttons and using the right stick to move the camera).
  • There isn't a snowy area nor is there an ice element.
  • The skill system was dictated entirely by armors rather than numbers. G changed that and it has remained that way ever since. Hunters with any amount of completed quests could join any missions online. G introduced the proper Ranking system, which prevented certain ranks from being able to participate in certain quest.
  • The game's music and ambience had a more "grim" feel to it, with monster themes being less bombastic and adventurous and more tense in terms of melody (such as the Old Swamp and Old Volcano themes).
  • Weapon-related examples:
    • Weapon sharpness only went up to Green (later White in G) and the indicator on the screen always was shown as yellow regardless of sharpness. And the Great Sword had no charged attacks.
    • You did not start the game with one of each weapon and basic armor, you started with no armor and only a Sword and Shield.
    • Weapon selection was much less varied in the original Japanese version with only Great Sword, Sword and Shield, Hammer, Lance, Light Bowgun and Heavy Bowgun being available; in the US version, the Dual Blades were added to add more diversity.
  • Monster-related examples:
    • The "Dromes" don't have any breakable parts and run away instead of limping. They also don't actually command their minions with calls, despite Velocidrome's introductory cutscene showing him doing exactly that. They don't have their own Mini-Boss music either (none from the Theropod branch of Bird Wyverns would gain one until Monster Hunter 3).
    • Despite being the game's flagship, Rathalos (and in G, Azure Rathalos) has no unique theme that plays for him regardless of area, though the Forest and Hills battle theme became his Leitmotif. Almost all future games' flagships (except for Tri's Lagiacrus) have unique themes that will play for them regardless of the area they're fought in, starting with Kushala Daora in Monster Hunter 2 (dos).
    • All Elder Dragons in the game were online-exclusive, and thus not legally available to hunt anymore due to the online servers for PS2 shutting down. This changed in G and Freedom with Kirin being able to be hunted in offline quests, though Lao-Shan Lung/Ashen Lao-Shan Lung and Fatalis/Crimson Fatalis remain online-locked.
    • Most subspecies in G were simply stronger Palette Swap versions of the original monsters with little to differentiate them beyond one or two different moves and some were not really "Subspecies" (for example: Black Diablos are female Diablos in heat, Black Gravios are the result of Basarios spending too much time submerged in magma and burning their shells before maturing, Ashen Lao-Shan Lung are individuals exposed to volcanic ash) instead being more akin to the Variants introduced in future games, which are used for special monsters rather than legitimate subspecies. Relatedly, only Azure Rathalos and White Monoblos are available to hunt outside the now-closed online campaign, so the added high-rank quests consist largely of rematches against the monster found in low rank.
    • Originally, there were no size differences for any monsters. G is responsible for introducing the concept.
  • Quest-related examples:
    • The missions initially always said to "Slay" the monster you needed to hunt, rather than "Hunt". It doesn't affect your results on a quest, however; so if you captured a monster in a slay mission you'd still win and earn the rewards for it.
    • There were no Gathering Quests at all, nor extra objectives on quests either. The Wii port did introduce Gathering Quests, however.
    • Pre-Hunt Meals could only be eaten online. The Updated Re Release of G for the Wii changed it so meals could be consumed in both offline and online modes.
  • Examples that pertain Monster Hunter Freedom specifically:
    • It's the only game of the "Portable/Freedom" sub-series, as well as the handheld lineage of games in general, that is a straight-up slightly expanded port/alteration of a previous game rather than a brand-new game with elements lifted from the main game as its successors were. Freedom 2 and Portable 3rd had many elements in common with Monster Hunter 2 and 3 respectively, but were otherwise their own endeavors. 3 Ultimate was planned to be a port of 3 for the 3DS but eventually evolved into an expanded version of it, and from 4 onwards all handheld releases were unique entries to begin with.
    • Despite having its own unique theme and being treated as a major threat of the game, Yian Garuga is not a flagship nor an invader monster (a concept that wasn't made until Generation 3). To this day it remains one of the few non-invasive and non-Elder Dragon level monsters with a unique theme. It also can be repelled, which has not been done for any other non-Elder Dragon monsters ever since^note While technically Lagiacrus in Tri is repelled in a mission, it's not an optional win condition but rather an enforced mechanic. Gore Magala doesn't counts for this, as it is a juvenile Elder Dragon and also has mandatory repel conditions for a few missions.
    • An American version-only example comes with the G-original "Gianosu (Giaprey) being named "White Velociprey", this was corrected in later installments. They also can be fought on all ranks and always appear alongside regular Velociprey, while later games restrict them to snowy areas and the Tower.
    • Subspecies fought in the village aren't indicated to be actually subspecies and share the same icon as their vanilla counterparts. Only quest descriptions and titles give it away that you'll fight a subspecies.
    • Unlike the more traditional farms/harvest sections of later games, the one in this game acted more as a special mini-quest, where you needed to bring in picaxes and bugnets to gather materials from special spots rather than leaving behind a basic item to be multiplied.
• Monster Rancher: The first game, Monster Rancher (1997), does a number of strange things in comparison to other games in the series, such as having your monster's weight be visible in their model, having you earn money from basic training, and having death be a much more frequent occurrence if you play your cards wrong. To say nothing of the lack of Mocchis, one of the series' Mascot Mooks.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Mortal Kombat (1992):
    • The original Mortal Kombat only had one fatality for each character, while all future games (except for Deadly Alliance and Armageddon) had at least two for each character. The "Fatality" text was also bland green text, instead of the dripping red text in the later games. Several series mainstays, such as Shao Kahn and the female ninjas, weren't introduced until the second game. The story of the game was far more generic, being a simple tournament based plot instead of the battle between realms plot of the later games. Through the power of Ret-Canon (caused by the first film), the story was later rewritten to fit with the ongoing realm wars of the later installments.
    • Throughout the series, Raiden has been the protector of the earth and a wise, noble mentor to the heroes...so it can come as a bit of a surprise that, in the first game, he was neutral and destroys the world in his ending. Have a nice day.
    • Reptile in the first Mortal Kombat was just simply a hybrid version of Scorpion and Sub-Zero. He was a last minute addition to the roster and thus, simply used both characters' special moves and fatalities. He didn't even have a unique name tag for his health but used Scorpion's instead (although he did get one for the SNES port). He didn't get his own moves and reptilian characteristics until the second game, when he became a regular character. And finally, he wasn't even in the very first revisions of the first game.
    • A button combo wasn't required to perform the Pit fatality, just a regular uppercut. And even then unless it was pulled off via Liu Kang's own, it wasn't considered a Stage Fatality.
    • Defeating the penultimate Mirror Match before Goro led to him immediately jumping down to fight you after the scores were done counting. Later games simply transitioned back to the ladder screen first. Additionally, said penultimate match always takes place at Goro's Lair to allow for this. Later games didn't set a specific stage.
  • In the first two games, the tournament was referred to as the Shaolin Tournament. It was the third game that named the tournament "Mortal Kombat" and established it as a way for Shao Khan to take over Earthrealm.
  • The opening crawl of the second game describes Shang Tsung trying to "unbalance the Furies" in favor of Chaos. What the "Furies" are is never explained, and they are never mentioned again.
  • In Mortal Kombat 3, Sheeva's blood was green. In every other appearance since then it's been red. There have been no mention of this until one intro line between Sheeva and Skarlet in Mortal Kombat 11 chalks it off to "It must have been another timeline".
• Mother: The first game, EarthBound Beginnings, unlike either of its sequels, was designed after the Dragon Quest series:
  • Enemies are generally more straightforward in both name and form when compared to the wackier enemies found in the following two games, cannot be seen on the overworld, and are encountered randomly.
  • Your HP goes straight to the difference when you take a hit instead of "rolling", which makes enemies that explode when defeated more dangerous to fight. On the topic of enemies, battles take place in front of a pitch-black background, as opposed to the psychedelic patterns that EarthBound and Mother 3 would showcase ^note Of course, this was made for the NES, which is more graphically limited than the Super NES and the Game Boy Advance., battle messages are shorter and more simplistic, and there are only three battle themes throughout the game (four if you count Giegue's, which is really just a never-ending screech).
  • There are two Franklin Badges in this game, one obtained from Pippi and the other found in Duncan's Factory. In the sequels there is only one per game. While in EarthBound and Mother 3 the badge reflects any lightning based attacks back to the enemy, in EarthBound Beginnings it's only able to reflect PK Beam γ, which instantly knocks out anyone not wearing the badge.
  • This game features PSI techniques that have not appeared anywhere else or that were replaced by similar techniques and/or items in the sequels, with these including PK Beam, Darkness, 4th-D Slip, and Shield-Off. The effects of the PSI techniques are also inconsistent. For example, PK Freeze γ reduces the target to critical HP, and PK Beam γ and PK Fire Ω attempt to instantly annihilate one enemy or all enemies respectively whereas in the sequels they would simply deal much more damange than previous versions of the attacks). Also, PK Freeze Ω targets all enemies instead of just one, and PK Thunder Ω doesn't exist at all.
  • The world is open and non-linear, and the proper lack of direction makes it look like a huge labyrinth at times. The level design is much less varied than in the sequels, with most towns being way too similar to one another. There are also no transition screens between areas, and the overworld music is always the same minus a few exceptions.
  • Lloyd is the only party member that is required to beat the game, with Ana and Teddy being completely optional. The sequels all require you to have all party members in order to progress the story. On that note, you can only have three party members active at once as opposed to EarthBound and Mother 3, which allow four at once (this is somewhat of a plot point in the game, as Teddy replaces Lloyd if you have him join your party, and is later replaced by Lloyd again after being badly injured).
  • There is no "Don't care" option at the beginning of the game, meaning that you have to input the default names and Ninten's default favourite food by yourself. On that note, unlike King and Boney, Ninten's pet dog cannot be named and his name is not revealed in-game either (The Mother Encyclopedia reveals it's "Mick").
  • Ninten doesn't even have a special signature offensive PSI power equivalent to Ness' PK Rockin' or Lucas' PK Love. In fact, Ninten doesn't have any offensive PSI at all, only Ana does!
  • You can only enter buildings that have a sign above the door or that have a rounded door. Following games allow you to enter almost any building you want with a few exceptions.
  • Pippi, a Guest-Star Party Member during the first part of the game, is able to level up, equip weapons, and be hurt by enemies. Following games would have Guest Star Party Members be invincible and controlled by the CPU.
  • The NPC sprite variety of the game is much more limited than in the sequels. There is even a Zero-Effort Boss Stray Dog, one of the weakest enemies in the game, that uses the same overworld sprite as Ninten's pet dog.
  • You recover PP with multi-use PSI Stones, rather than with certain kinds of confectionary (Ana is able to use PSI magnet on enemies, however).
  • The Series Mascot, the Mr. Saturns, do not appear in this game in any shape or form.
• Myst: The first game, Myst (1993), has a number of distinctions from the rest of the series. In particular, it's clear that the creators hadn't quite figured out how the Art (the act of creating Linking Books) was supposed to work yet; this leads to such things as the Prison Books (which rather infamously had to be retconned come the fourth game), the Selenetic Book somehow being stored in a computer, and Atrus being able to talk to the player through the panel of the D'ni Linking Book. There's also an unexpectedly fantastical moment when the Myst Linking Book on Stoneship somehow materializes out of a table when discovered; while fantasy elements are very much present in the series, they tend to be examples of Magic A Is Magic A and this particular moment never really gets explained (especially given that Atrus, who presumably put the book there, tends to lean more heavily on the technology side of the lore).

N

• Nancy Drew: The first game, Secrets Can Kill, bears almost no resemblance to the later installments.
  • Its characters are hand-drawn cartoons, dialogue exchanges are rudimentary and not always in-character, Nancy's phone contacts (Bess, George, and Ned) only give hints rather than show character development, and plot-essential clues crop up on bulletin boards for no reason. Plus, the fact that Nancy's investigating a cold-blooded murder and has to point a handgun at someone to win pushes its storyline into What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids? territory by comparison with subsequent games.
  • Secrets Can Kill has since been re-released, in an updated version that sheds most of the original's Early-Installment Weirdness. The fact that Nancy's investigating a murder instead of a robbery, haunting, or other non-lethal mystery is still rather jarring, but that probably couldn't be changed considering the game's title.
  • The culprit also doesn't talk to Nancy - making it the only game (Until the remaster) in which none of the people you talk to are the culprit.
• Naruto: Ultimate Ninja: The first game has various differences from the other games:
  • The story mode consists of short Sagas involving most of the playable characters. The Sagas are non-canon and some feature alternate endings (such as Haku surviving or Neji beating Naruto). The cutscenes aren't animated, instead using portraits.
  • The English translation and voice acting is rockier than in future games (for example, the Byakugan is translated as the "Piercing Eye" in one line). Itachi also uses his original voice and Naruto overuses his catchphrase "Believe It" (which became an Abandoned Catchphrase by the second arc).
  • As the first game was released before the Search for Tsunade arc was adapted in the anime^noteOctober 23, 2003 in Japan; the Search for Tsunade arc wouldn't air until the following spring, in 2004., Naruto doesn't use his Signature Move, the Rasengan. This was also the case for most Naruto games around the time.
• Need for Speed: The first game, The Need for Speed (1994), was the only game in that series to have an endorsement from Road & Track Magazine. Furthermore, the first five games were the only games to have detailed showrooms of the cars featured in-game.
• Neptunia: The first game, Hyperdimension Neptunia (2010), used a lot of elements that were either improved upon or discarded entirely in later iterations of the series:
  • All NPCs other than Neptune's gang, the CPUs, and the Big Bad are represented by silhouettes in conversation, even if they had a significant role in the plot. In later games, NPCs who aren't important to the plot are hidden from view.
  • Characters can't sell or otherwise discard unwanted items, which left most inventories cluttered with useless weaponry later in the game.
  • Consumable items were absent; each character had to rely on "Item Skills," which gave them a chance to use specific items by combining four different alchemical components under certain conditions, and even then they were only usable during battle.
  • The Share system isn't introduced until you get a specific character in your party, and how it works isn't explained at all in the game. Neptunia mk2 does a better job of integrating the Share system into the story from the start.
  • Rather than having a single regular battle theme, the battle music is simply a slightly sped-up version of the dungeon theme your characters are in at the moment.
  • Players were graded based on how quickly they could complete each sidequest dungeon, and faster times rewarded the player with more Credits.
  • Instead of a single, overarching plotline, each of the four different worlds had its own story running almost simultaneously. Events in one world wouldn't start until you'd completed events in another world, leaving your party vastly overleveled for a few long stretches of the game.
  • The first game only had six playable characters (DLC added four more), with three of these only joining the party near the end of the game. Later games would add a lot more characters.
  • The first game opens with the goddesses being in open conflict with each other, only becoming allies at the end to combat a common enemy. The other games have them be friends from the start.
  • The first game has a more basic plot that focuses on the Muggles of the world and their trials and tribulations with the various political factions vying for power in the world. The plot also included "heretics", Muggles who didn't believe in the goddess of the land they lived on and were shunned as a result. Heretics were a major plot point, especially since one of the main characters was one. Later games would have more outlandish plots featuring powerful villains trying to bring about The End of the World as We Know It and Alternate Universes. Heretics and the politics of Muggles were never mentioned again, since later games show the goddesses to be the supreme authority of their nations.
  • The first game doesn't imply that the goddesses are much stronger than Muggles when outside Celestia, with several scenes showing Muggle weapons and regular monsters being a credible threat to them. Later games would elevate the goddesses to One-Man Army status and would go out of their way to show that NPCs are laughably ineffectual at combating even the weakest of monsters.
  • Characters Breaking the Fourth Wall was rare, and reserved for comedic scenes. Later games simply have No Fourth Wall.
  • The tone was noticably more grim and somber, with characters casually discussing topics like war and death. As such, it was rare for characters to even smile. Later games would go for a considerably Lighter and Softer tone, prioritizing comedy over drama. This was also reflected in the music, even during casual dialogue scenes. Compare Lastation's theme, from the first game, to its new one from the second.
  • The characters had far less fleshed out personalities:
    • Neptune was more serious, calm, and responsible, instead of being a ditzy Brilliant, but Lazy Genki Girl Attention Whore.
    • Noire was less of a workaholic Tsundere, and more open about being a Cosplay Otaku Girl. Her arc also culminates in her wanting to retire from her post as a CPU due to her self-percieved weakness and failure, when later games would portray being a borderline Determinator who takes great pride in her status as a CPU as one of her defining characteristics.
    • Blanc still had her foul mouth, but she was also a Perpetual Frowner with a Hair-Trigger Temper, instead of just having an A-Cup Angst Berserk Button, but otherwise being friendly and sociable. She also had to be tricked into joining the party, with Histoire's advice on how to do so mentioning that she's similar to Arfoire.
    • Vert was also more serious, calm, and responsible, instead of being a teasing Love Freak. Her Covert Pervert side was relegated to one or two side events, rather than her being an open Lovable Sex Maniac Memetic Molester who wouldn't think twice about showing porn to prepubescents or having them dress up in revealing clothing for her ogling pleasure. And while her being a Gamer Chick was part of her character, her learning not to prioritize her gaming over her goddess duties was a major part of her Character Development arc. Later games would portray her as a borderline NEET and play it for laughs.
    • IF was noticably more rude and hostile, going through a Took a Level in Kindness Character Development arc throughut the game, instead of the otherwise friendly Deadpan Snarker Only Sane Man she would become. She also shows no sign of her later Chuunibyou tendencies. She was initially reluctant to join the party, too, at first only being a part of it because you aren't allowed to leave one.
    • Compa is merely naïve with occasional bouts of wisdom and even a few Little Miss Snarker moments, instead of the ditzy Nice Girl All-Loving Hero she would become. She also has a tendency to bring up her grandpa, who is never mentioned again in later games.
    • Ho Yay was rare, only happening a few times, and a few scenes even had the girls imply an interest in males. Later games would turn the Ho Yay up to eleven, making it seem like the series has a Cast Full of Gay. As such, there is little to no Ship Tease for what would become the popular pairings that would get lots of Ho Yay Ship Tease in later games, such as Neptune/Noire and IF/Compa or IF/Vert. If anything, what little Ho Yay there is in the game seems to tease Neptune with either Compa or Vert, and IF with either 5pb. or RED.
• Nintendo Wars:
  • The very first game, Famicom Wars, in the series only had two armies (Red Star and Blue Moon) and featured a simple "one army versus another" Excuse Plot. It also lacked proper COs, meaning that the two armies were nothing more than Palette Swaps of each other. There was also no campaign, instead featuring a simple list of maps to complete. In addition, several units functioned very differently from their later incarnations (for example, while Advance Wars and beyond have the APC, which can carry footsoldiers and supply adjacent units with fuel and ammo, the APC in the original Famicom Wars could only do the former, with the latter function being delegated to a separate unit, the Supply Truck). Finally, damage and counterattack damage were calculated simultaneously during fights, meaning that two identical units on identical terrain would come out of a battle with exactly the same amount of damage inflicted on each other (in later games, the attacker would have the advantage as counterattack damage was based on the attacked unit's strength after the initial attack).
  • Super Famicom Wars, in addition to introducing Yellow Comet and Green Earth (and, thus, four-faction maps), would feature distinct COs. However, of the seven in that game, only three had any gameplay differences, all of which were severe Game Breakers as they typically gave that CO's army a massive advantage with absolutely no downside (COs in the Advance series usually have weaknesses to offset any strengths they may have). There were still no CO Powers, though, and all of the other weirdness of the original Famicom Wars remained.
  • The first Advance Wars is vastly different from later games in the series in several respects:
    • Every CO has only one CO Power, and there's a severe imbalance between each one, with weaker ones like Olaf's Blizzard and massive Game-Breaker like Eagle's Lightning Strike. Powers don't cause a BGM Override either.
    • The tutorial is separate from the main Campaign rather than integrated into it.
    • Most missions in Campaign mode are pre-deploy, and you don't get to see the map before you choose COs.
    • Only Orange Star is playable in Campaign, and all other nations are enemies.
    • There are several places where the campaign splits into two distinct paths, as well as certain missions where the entire map changes depending on the chosen CO (particularly the missions against Drake), rendering it impossible to play every single mission in one go. In addition, certain bonus missions can only be opened up by completing specific in-game tasks, such as completing certain missions within a specified number of turns or choosing a specific CO for a certain string of missions (none of which is ever conveyed to the player).
    • There are no ranking points at the end of each mission, with Speed, Power, and Technique scores represented by vague bars instead. As a result of this, maps and additional COs are not purchased with ranking points but instead using coins earned based on your letter grade.
    • The player is prompted to enter their name and takes a direct role in the campaign as Orange Star's "strategic advisor" (similar to the Tactician in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade). This was dropped from all future games.
    • The overall art style is much more cartoonish than in later games. In particular, Olaf and Kanbei in this game bear only a scant resemblance to their Black Hole Rising and Dual Strike counterparts.
    • The Black Hole army uses Palette Swaps of Orange Star troops as opposed to their own sprites. (There is an in-story reason for this, though.)

O

• Oddworld: The first game, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, has a few quirks compared to the later games and its remake. You could only have one Mudokon following you at a time (meaning, if there were multiple Mudokons in an area, you would have to keep going back and forth in order to rescue them all), there was no Quicksave option (instead the game had checkpoints that Abe would return to upon dying), Mudokons didn't have emotions, and Paramites and Scrabs couldn't be possessed. Also, all the cutscenes were narrated by Abe (in rhyme, no less) and, with the exception of the endings, featured no dialogue other than Abe's narration. The remaster, Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty!, added the Quicksave option and the ability to have multiple Mudokons following you at once.
• Onechanbara: Anyone who played Z: Kagura & Z2: Chaos first may find the earlier entries weird:
  • The first game, Simple 2000 Series Vol. 61: The Oneechanbara, was actually titled "THE Oneechanbara", as part of the theme naming of the larger series it belonged to. Needless to say, this naming convention has since fallen into disuse once it became a series in its own right. Not only that, but the first two games were also released in Europe only, named Zombie Hunters. When Bikini Zombie Slayers made it to US & EU, the Zombie Zone /Zombie Hunters name was dropped.
  • Aya is the only playable characters in the first game. An Updated Re-release of 1 and the sequels would bring additional unlockable characters. There is no stance system either.
  • Saki is a villain for the first game of series, and does not join Aya's side until second game. She does not get her signature gauntlets until Bikini Zombie Slayers.
  • The series itself owed to Dynasty Warriors and Devil May Cry, while appealing more to the former early on. The games were known for having big open environments with additions to locked rooms. By the time of the Z series, the combat and stages became more DMC/Bayonettaesque, had smaller arenas,^note Still has a lot of enemies, though not as much from older titles. and allowed you to juggle enemies or do air combos.
  • The old entries have no ranking system. They did have a gameplay grading when doing combos similar to DMC, but those did not amount to much. Later games do away with that style of gameplay grading and just go for a standard combo counter and kill combos.
  • With the exception of some bosses, all of the cannon fodder you fight are mainly zombies. It is not until the Z games that the player fights werewolves, vampires, and other supernatural creatures.
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan: The first game lacks a lot of the features from its successors, Elite Beat Agents and Osu Tatakae Ouendan 2. There's no bonus stages, which means that levelling up has no purpose, the final stage is just one song instead of two, the art style is a lot cruder than the later games in the series, the records menu is just a scrolling list of your score and rank rather than allowing you to see the rank of any stage you want, it's also the only way to view your rankings, as they don't appear on the song selection screen, the song's difficulty also doesn't appear on that screen, and you are unable to skip the intros to levels, only able to skip the Manga part of the intro.

P

• PAYDAY 2: In its infancy, the game was quite weird since it tried to be more like a Hollywood styled action game. The game was fairly grounded by having the players rob sensible locations like jewelry stores, small banks, nightclubs, and so on. The game also had a web series that were small live action sequences made to generate hype for the game. Compare this to the game's later patch updates that introduced far crazier things - the crew now includes several Guest Fighters to let, say, John Wick and Tony Montana heist together with Ethan and Hila from H3h 3 Productions; the heists have far sillier and less sensical objectives, like rescuing goats that are packed with cocaine, and several bank jobs that have required larger and larger drills; and the weapon and mask selection has grown to the point where it's possible to complete a heist while wearing a mask that is literally on fire and mowing down the police with an honest-to-God minigun.
• Persona:
  • The first and second Persona games have almost no resemblance whatsoever to the far better known later games. Besides certain very broad ideas (teenagers fight monsters with Anthropomorphic Personifications of their psyches, Carl Jung thematics, etc.) and a certain character and his home base (Igor and the Velvet Room), they might as well be two different series:
    • The lead artist for 1 and 2 was Kazuma Kaneko, who was also the head artist for the mainline SMT games from Shin Megami Tensei I to Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey; as such, P1 and P2's art styles have striking similarities to that of their parent franchise (with 2's official character art even sharing the "porcelain doll" look of later Kaneko-designed games). From Persona 3 onward, the lead Persona artist has been Shigenori Soejima (who did the in-game portraits for 2), whose art style is more "anime" and has a much brighter color palette.
    • The first two are far more combat-focused, revolving around the sophisticated "speak to demons while fighting them" system, while subsequent games are hybrid social sim/dungeon-crawling JRPGs with a far greater emphasis on the tarot card theme than the previous games (though Persona 5 brought back the negotiation system).
    • Unlike in subsequent games, Persona and Persona 2 portrayed the ability to summon Personas as a widely held trait and generally accepted as real, if slightly disregarded regardless. You could actually interact with NPC shop and restaurant patrons that would discuss Personas openly, and one of your team members would actually grouse that she was disappointed to find the power less unique than she imagined. Party members started out with a Persona of a specific Arcana related to their personality and worked best with that one or one of a few "related Arcanas"; while the "Persona related to personality" part still applies in later games, most party members can no longer switch their Personas, with the main character being the only one capable of doing so. Dungeons were actual places in the world, rather than pan-dimensional televisions, schools, etc.
    • The first game plays far more like the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series, with first-person dungeon exploration and the series staple attack Megido having an element that isn't Almighty-type (which at that point had only previously appeared in one other SMT game). It's also the only Persona game to have a grid-based battle system.
    • The battle music in the earlier games are far more standard for what you'd expect from the genre, whereas Genre Mashup pop songs such as "Mass Destruction", "Reach Out To The Truth" and "Last Surprise" would become iconic for their respective games.
    • In general, Persona 1 and 2 have much stronger story connections to non-Persona SMT games than their successors; the female protagonist of Shin Megami Tensei if... is a recurring NPC in 1 and 2, and Kyouji Kuzunoha from Devil Summoner makes an implied appearance in Persona 2.
    • 1 completely lacks the concept of Shadow Selves. The closest equivalent would be Mai, Aki, Pandora, and the Ideal Maki on your team, none of which are the singular "true self" of the character in question. Much like how a person puts on different 'masks' in everyday life, they're all facets of the real Maki's personality, and they have to fuse together to get the full picture. When the 2 duology finally introduced them to the setting, this was cut down to one character representing what's Beneath the Mask.
    • 1 has two characters change arcanas when they get their Ultimate Personas: Kei goes from Hierophant to Judgement and Reiji goes from Devil to Death. From 2 onwards, a character's primary arcana is set in stone outside of one extreme storyline event in 3, and Kei's Ultimate Persona Yamaoka is actually retconned from Judgement to Hierophant.
    • Games starting from 4 onward have at least one member of the team from the congitive world, but these characters are either independent of any real-world person (such as Teddie) or are mental constructs made from another's memories (such as Akechi in Persona 5 Royal). In 1, the cognitive party member is not only revealed to be directly connected to a real-world person, but is one of several split aspects of them, some of whom you fight.
  • Persona 3, with its drastic changes to the formulas of 1 and 2, can be viewed as a reboot to the series. While it laid the Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World groundwork that Persona 4 and Persona 5 would follow, it still has a number of design elements that 4 and 5 don't. The PSP remake of 3, released after 4 and before 5, changes a number of these elements to make them more consistent with later games.
    • The most drastic difference is that 3 lacks full party control - the player can only control the protagonist and give general orders for the AI teammates to follow. 4 and 5 keep the tactics system, but also allow the player to take manual, direct control. The PSP version of 3 added full party control, but as the game was never properly balanced around this, it becomes significantly easier.
    • There's no guard command in battle, unlike 4 and 5. The PSP version adds it.
    • If you use a multi-target attack and it doesn't knock down all of the targets, then you won't get a 1 more. 4 and 5 make it so that knocking down at least one enemy will always get you a 1 more.
    • Going out dungeon crawling in 3 is a nighttime activity - the player can do something after school, head back to the dorm, and then head out. In 4 and 5, choosing to visit dungeons is an all-day affair - the player has to go immediately after school, and won't get a chance to perform any other activities that day.
    • Dungeon progress in 3 is gated by a fatigue system, wherein exploring too much in one sitting will tire characters out and make them practically useless in combat. The only way to quell this fatigue is by leaving the dungeon. Tiredness can persist for a few days, preventing the player from making any meaningful dungeon progress while it lingers. In 4 and 5, progress is instead indirectly gated by the party's Spirit Points - Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap is in full effect here, and the easiest way to restore party health is by spending SP to cast healing spells. SP is extremely important for defeating enemies, especially bosses, but there are very few ways to easily restore it besides packing up and leaving the dungeon for the day. By contrast, restoring both SP and HP in 3 is very easy - the player simply has to head back to the dungeon's hub area for a free refill. Changed in the PSP version - restoring HP and SP in the hub area now costs money, just like 4, and the fatigue system has been changed so that it no longer immediately gates off progress.
    • 3 has no Social Links for the party aside from the romanceable girls, and the girls are treated the same as every other Social Link. In 4 and 5, the entire party has Social Links, and following these specific Social Links will grant the party unique bonuses when dungeon crawling. The female route in the PSP version adds Social Links for the entire party.
    • In 3, the growth and development of the party members is closely connected to the main plot and thus happens over a long period of time, with the cast receiving their second Personas as part of the main storyline. In 4 and 5, the main cast's plot-related character development mostly happens in their introductory arcs that lead to them obtaining their initial Personas in the first place, while their optional Social Links (or Confidants), unlocked after they receive their Persona, is where most of their growth and development happens, with the pace of such determined by how quickly the player can progress through their Social Links. Secondary Personas are obtained only on completing a character's Social Link, and are not part of the main story.
    • Related to the above, the nature of the protagonist's own evolved Personas is vastly different in the games after 3. In Persona 4 and 5, the protagonist's second Persona shows up in the finale as a story event, and can only be used in regular gameplay in New Game Plus as an Infinity +1 Sword. In 3, by contrast, the protagonist's canonical evolved Persona, Thanatos, is completely optional, significantly less overpowered, and can instead be acquired just after the Disc-One Final Boss (incidentally, just around the time the rest of the party is acquiring their own evolved Personas) by fusing him like any other regular Persona. Not only that, the protagonist has a third-tier Persona, Messiah, who can be acquired near the tail end of the game by fusing Orpheus (his first Persona) and Thanatos together. The concept of the protagonist having a third-tier Persona that can be used in regular gameplay would later be revisted in Persona 5 Royal, albeit as DLC.
    • The protagonist of 3 isn't the head honcho of the party. While his unique Wild Card power leads to him becoming the group's "field leader" (which serves an in-game justification for why the player can give the rest of the party fighting orders), the actual logistics and mission planning are handled mostly by Mitsuru and Ikutsuki. He also joins the party after it's already been formed, and there are already a few members before him- Mitsuru, Akihiko, Yukari and (formerly) Shinjiro. The 4 and 5 protagonists are both one of the founders of their respective groups in the first place and the leaders from the get-go.
    • In 3, there are some times when party members may not be able to go to Tartarus even if they aren't tired, such as if they're studying or troubled by a plot development concerning them. Related to the above, if Mitsuru and Akihiko can't go, you won't be allowed to go to Tartarus at all.
    • In 3 and FES, the protagonist can use almost every weapon type the other party members can, and has no unique weapon type just for himself, while party members are locked into their own single type. In 4 and 5, the protagonist is locked into a single weapon type like the rest of the party. The PSP remake changed this - the protagonist can now only use their designated weapon type.
    • With the exception of Aigis, who instead has some extremely heavy romance subtext, all of the female Social Links in 3 that are around the protagonist's age will eventually culminate in a romance. In 4 and 5, romances are optional. Changed in the female protagonist route of the PSP remake - the newly-added romances with male party members are optional, although the subtext of the Aigis Social Link remains, with some additional Gayngst from Aigis.
    • In 3, neglecting Social Links, reneging on plans with them, or making bad dialogue choices can lead to them becoming reversed or even broken, preventing you from progressing in said Social Link. In 4, reversing and breaking are restricted to a couple of bad dialogue choices for two specific links (Ai and Naoto, and only the former can break^ExplanationIf you ask Ai out midway through, then refuse to stay friends after she breaks up with you), and in 5 said system is removed entirely.
    • 3 also had a few instances in which progressing on Social Links unlocked other Social Links. The mechanic is less present in 4- Ai is introduced midway through the Strength Social Link, while Hisano shows up midway through the Devil Social Link. It's completely absent in 5; most of the Confidants are met during the story or mentioned in IM conversations.
    • 3 does not have a Social Link for your Velvet Room attendant; just some sidequests, Persona fusion requests, and optional events.
  • The non-game adaptations of 1 gave the protagonist an entirely new character arc, and introduced various Canon Foreigners to expand on his characterization (for instance Kazuya Toudou from the manga). 1 and 2's protagonists also had a definite personality, made more evident by the fact that they weren't of the Fool Arcana, and spoke full lines in games where they weren't protagonists (like the Boy With Earring and Tatsuya in Eternal Punishment and Maya in Innocent Sin), and even in manga or anime where they were the main characters. This was later averted from 3 onwards, where the adaptations are Truer to the Text and the protagonists have very little characterization added to them. Joker from 5 even had some of his (very few) personality traits from the game taken away in the anime.
• Phantasy Star Online 2:
  • EPISODE ONE has a heavy leaning towards Quna as the lead heroine with Matoi being the Mysterious Waif you rescued and keep checking up on. By EPISODE TWO, Matoi gets bigger billing and Quna gets pushed into the background until she's just there for concerts.
  • When the game began, weapons only reached 12 Stars with 9-11 star weapons being relegated to Infinity -1 Sword status. 13 Stars would join by EPISODE 3.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin (2001) features three Pikmin types: Red, Blue and Yellow. Red and Blue Pikmin work the same as they do throughout the series, but Yellow Pikmin function completely differently: they lack their trademark electricity immunity (there were no electrical hazards in the first game), and their unique traits were being lightweight and thus able to be thrown higher than the other types, as well as being able to handle Bomb Rocks. The lightness was kept for subsequent games, but when Bomb Rocks returned in Pikmin 2, they could not be handled at all, and Pikmin 3 allowed any Pikmin type to handle them.
  • Idle Pikmin in the first game turned pale, a trait not seen in any of the other games.
  • In the second game's 2-player battle mode, Player 1 only uses Red Pikmin (with their extra damage being removed for balance) while Player 2 only uses Blue Pikmin. The 2-player modes for 3 and 4 instead differentiate the player's Pikmin by having cyan leaves for Player 1 and magenta leaves for Player 2, as well as allowing multiple types to be used.
• Portal: The first game, Portal (2007), has a drastically different tone than its sequel and subsequent spinoffs:
  • The test chambers themselves are far bleaker, with sterile concrete and metal walls making up the vast majority of the scenery. The rest of the games have a much more dynamic atmosphere with a distinctly futuristic look.
  • Similarly, the "behind the scenes" areas in the original games were claustrophobic, labyrinthine, rusting, and quite literally falling apart. Contrast this to later installments, where these areas mostly consist of vast, sprawling chasms filled with intricate mechanisms powering everything in the facility.
  • The soundtrack of the original game consisted mostly of brooding, ambient tracks that were designed to evoke a feeling of tension and isolation. The sequel is positively upbeat in comparison, with light synthesizers and orchestral instruments forming the backbone of the soundtrack.
  • The original game relied heavily on subtle Black Comedy, to drive the point home further that all was not what it seemed at Aperture. While there's still plenty of Black Comedy to go around in the sequels/spinoffs, their overall sense of humor is far more overt.^*To paraphrase Yahtzee, it's more "custard pie in the face" humor than the original's "snooker cue to the bollocks" humor.
  • GLaDOS originally had a much rounder, more static design, only moving to dodge attacks during her boss fight. The sequel (and, by extension, every spinoff that's since followed) gave her a more squared and much more expressive design.
  • The original game had a much tighter storyline: it basically amounted to you solving a bunch of tests put forth by a noticeably malfunctioning AI and then escaping the facility when said AI tries to kill you. Later games would go much deeper into Aperture Science's history, as well as take a much closer look at the inner machinations of the company itself.
• Postal: The first game is about the player character going on a horrific rampage in order to "cleanse" the Earth of what he perceives as the corruption, i.e. human beings. None of it is played for comedy at all — the menu screen, dark music, violence, and sounds are all meant to be 100% disturbing. The sequels, Postal 2 and 3, are darkly comedic games that revel in Crossing The Line Twice... and then maybe 3 or 4 more times after that just for safe measure. And then repainting the line in blood and urine. Also, Postal is an isometric game, while Postal 2 and 3 are respectively first- and third-person shooters.
• Prehistorik: The first game was a slow-paced platformer with the caveman having to fill a hunger bar by eating fallen enemies and food items scattered everywhere. All subsequent games retained the basic gameplay but got rid of the hunger bar, got rid of the Wonder Boy-esque secret wizard character and made the caveman much more agile (e.g. being able to run on all fours and jump higher) plus the special ability to kill everything on-screen with his screams. Also, he looks more unhinged, having replaced his neatly-trimmed hairdo and beard from the first game with a wild mane of hair and a lolling tongue.
• Prince of Persia: The first game in the "Sands of Time" trilogy, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, was originally designed to be a vague prequel to the original game rather than set in its own continuity. The Prince mentions that his home city is Siraf, when the sequels established it to be Babylon. The game is also set in medieval Islamic Persia due to the Arabic inscriptions everywhere. The other games seem to be set in pre-Islamic Persia, since Babylon is the capital of the empire and The Forgotten Sands takes place in Israel, which was controlled by Achaemenid Persia but no later dynasties. Furthermore, the first game has a series of wall paintings depicting the origins of the Sands of Time, which contradict the backstory given in Warrior Within.
• Professor Layton: The first game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, is a bit different from other games. The characters aren't as zoomed in during dialogue exchanges, the red exclamation mark symbol appears when you do any examination instead of just appearing when you've activated a puzzle, and there's very little voice acting outside of the Anime cutscenes and the victory/failure quotes after puzzles. There was also no Memo function at this point (though a handful of puzzles did let you draw directly on them), meaning that any note-taking and calculating had to be done on a separate sheet of paper. Furthermore, the optional side puzzles are much simpler than they'd be in later games (one consists entirely of clicking parts to assemble a robot dog - there isn't even the challenge of figuring out where the parts go - while another is little more than a jigsaw puzzle). Finally, in terms of characterization, Layton is unusually baffled at people's obsession with puzzles, when in later games (even those placed chronologically before this one) he's not only okay with it, he himself is a veritable puzzle chewer.
• Progressbar 95: Playing v0.21 and other early versions can feel surreal. Segments are shorter, windows look different, there's only a "Like game" button when it comes to social media integration, and perhaps the weirdest of all, progress isn't given in increments of 5%.
• Putt-Putt: The first game, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, has very little resemblance to any later HE game. The game is much smaller and the puzzles are very simplistic; also, you are sent down one of three streets to mow lawns in order to make money, and solving the puzzles to make it across the other two streets will be entirely unnecessary unless you also decide to deliver groceries, and only one of the three requires an item to solve it (another one also can be solved with an item, but you can also solve it by honking your horn). The mini-games are much more like toys rather than arcade styled, as they have no objective (one of them is a cube where you just mix everything up to make crazy pictures, for instance). The characters are usually one-off characters created for small scenes, and are not given much development. It's also the only game in the entire series that actually makes use of the gas gauge, as it slowly drains while you play, although Take Your Time is in full effect as you cannot actually run out; later games would simply make the gas gauge a decoration. Finally, bar Putt-Putt Travels Through Time, this is the only game that doesn't give you a checklist of the items that you need to finish the game.
• Puyo Puyo:
  • When the original game was first released for the MSX and Famicom, it was a simple Falling Blocks game with a single field and the top of the screen as the only opponent; Madou Monogatari characters were limited to the Puyos and token appearances by Arle and Carbuncle. It was the arcade version released a year later that would start the focus on the multiplayer and cast of characters the series is known for. More subtly, the original game has six colors of Puyo—red, blue, light green (replaced with purple), dark green, gray (removed entirely), and yellow—as opposed to the five that later games would settle on.
  • While Puyo Puyo 2 keeps the Madou Monogatari characters from the first arcade game, it abandons the iconic banter/manzai sequences in favor of short character bios before each round. It's a rather surprising omission, considering the character interactions later became one of the series' biggest selling points. The Super Famicom port added them back in.
  • SEGA's first original Puyo Puyo game, Puyo Pop (2001), was basically SEGA trying to copy Compile's older games. This includes recycling voice clips from Puyo Puyo Sun, strictly using the rules from Puyo Puyo Tsu, and exclusively using the former Madou Monogatari characters. This is very different from Puyo Puyo Fever and every game since, due to the series going through a Soft Reboot with a new cast of characters and setting, a far more saccharine art style, becoming even Lighter and Softer, and the larger emphasis on Comeback Mechanics.
  • A lot of the Fever-era characters, such as Amitie, Raffina, and Klug, started off as straighter expies of Arle and her friends and enemies before going through some Divergent Character Evolution later on and becoming more unique in their own right in terms of personality. Amitie in particular was a lot more tomboyish, a result of her being the expy of the similarly tomboyish Arle.
  • In Puyo Puyo Fever 2, Sig, who makes his debut in this game, is barely ever mentioned to have an obsession with bugs and Bug Catching, a character trait that would become one of his defining factors later on.
  • Yu is a solo character in her debut in Fever. Once Fever 2 rolled around, she would be accompanied by her brother Rei.
  • The DS games have portraits of the characters that appear on one of the screens that react to events during the game, such as being close to losing or close to winning, while another screen is dedicated to the Puyo gameplay. In Fever and Fever 2, the Puyo gameplay is on the top screen while the characters are on the bottom screen; in 15th Anniversary and it successors, their placement is inverted.

R

• Rainbow Six Siege: Most of the base game operators are The Faceless or otherwise have their face heavily obscured, and their armor is almost identical among their special forces branch. This design philosophy feels a little odd compared to the operators added over the years, which feature far more varied and expressive designs. Another oddity is that the base game's CTUs like the SAS or GSG9 have, technically, three Attackers and Defenders each (two unique Operators and a generic "Recruit"), whereas most later CTUs like JTF2 or the SAT only get two Operators each, generally one Attacker and one Defender or two of one and none of the other, with a rare few much later in the game only getting one Operator period. The base game's Operators also have a slightly wider selection of weapons, including those shared between roles, than later Operators, such as all four SAS Operators getting to use the M590 shotgun, while post-release CTUs restrict shotguns to Defenders; or handgun choice being between a smaller, weaker but faster and higher-capacity gun and a larger, stronger but lower-capacity one for the base CTUs and, for the most part, a single pistol per post-release CTU.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Ratchet & Clank (2002) is very different to its sequels. Weapons don't upgrade (bar buying them with Gold Bolts), your health increase is bought only, not from leveling it up, and it starts at four health and only goes up to eight. The game initially has an air meter when you're underwater and no fast swimming (though both of these disappear when you get the appropriate gadgets, and the sequels keep them). Weirdest perhaps of all, the only way to strafe is bought through a hover pack upgrade well into the game (along with a mid air jump not present in the sequels), but makes it impossible to jump and you move very slowly. The later games are practically unwinnable without some quick strafe flipping. Also, Ratchet takes longer to run and swing his wrench, and must remain stationary if he throws it. He has a noticeably different voice actor as well.
  • Ratchet is also noticeably different as a character in the original game. In the first game he was characterized as a streetwise and teasingly sarcastic character out for a good romp who becomes arrogant and sour towards Clank for much of the game after Captain Qwark's betrayal (until he realizes the error of his ways and the two work together on common ground), while from the second game onward he is far more mature, warm-hearted and selfless. Notably Ratchet also has strong desires to be a hero, an aspect added into the re-telling of the origin story in Ratchet & Clank (2016).
  • Captain Qwark's characterization can also be quite jarring if you were first introduced to the character in the later installments. In the first two games he's an unrepentantly villainous Fake Ultimate Hero who borders on being sociopathic, and while he gets a handful of humorous moments, the general unlikeability of his personality is quite emphasized. Starting with the third game, he's still a Fake Ultimate Hero, but is portrayed as an incompetent and egotistical, but ultimately well-meaning bumbler who is somewhat consistently on the heroes' side and mostly provides comic relief. This is also addressed in the 2016 remake, where he's still an antagonist, but a considerably grayer and more morally conflicted one.
  • In the second game, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, a First Person Mode was added, but it was only available in Challenge Mode after beating the game. Oddly, Ratchet could not swing his wrench in this mode (unless he's on a grind rail), only throw it.
  • Going Commando also has Ratchet encounter Angela Cross, a Lombax, another member of his species. Even though Ratchet was the only Lombax shown up to that point, him finding another one wasn't treated as a big deal, with Ratchet only really being surprised to find out the thief they've been chasing is a girl. In later games, Ratchet being the Last of His Kind is a common recurring plot point, with the stories mostly trying to ignore the fact that he already met another Lombax.
  • There's also a noticeable shift in the games' storytelling starting with Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Whereas the first five games and Secret Agent Clank are whacky episodic adventures, starting with Tools of Destruction (sans All 4 One and Full Frontal Assault) the series begins to take itself (slightly) more seriously and features explorations of the titular characters' origins and even features an overarching plot as opposed to the largely episodic nature of the PS2 and PSP games.
• Rayman: The first game, Rayman (1995), featured almost an entirely different setting from the later games, with a different cast of characters, a more Wacky Land-style world as opposed to the more dreamlike one of the later games, a different mythos, and even different collectables. It wasn't until the second game that the modern cast of the Rayman series were introduced (most of them being old friends of Rayman's we'd never met before), along with the current version of its backstory. A subtle difference is that many characters are limbless like Rayman himself. This would not be the case in later installments. Rayman Origins tries to fuse the two conflicting storylines, but still skews a bit more heavily towards the Rayman 2: The Great Escape version of things. It does manage to explain the Electoons and Rayman's origin at the hands of Betilla the Fairy. Rayman 1 is also the only game where finding all the cages is required to reach the final boss as opposed to optional 100% completion.
• Red Dead: The first game, Red Dead Revolver, is quite different from its successors, Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II. For one thing, it's a linear Third-Person Shooter instead of a Wide-Open Sandbox, though it does have an explorable hub level. Its story and tone are also a lot less gritty than the Redemption games.
• REFLEC BEAT: The first version, REFLEC BEAT (2010), only has two Top markers, even on Hard, and focuses particularly on battle—winning will allow you to clear the song even if you have <70% Achievment Rate, said Achievement Rate is not shown during stages, and the announcer declares "You win!" and "You lose!" rather than "Clear!" and "Failed!". Finally, the menu interface is much darker than its successors and the song selection screen shows two scrollable columns of songs represented by album art rather than grids of album art.
• Resident Evil:
  • The original Resident Evil (1996) featured live-action scenes for its opening and ending sequences, whereas every subsequent installment in the series (including the 2002 remake) until Resident Evil 3 (Remake) used CGI cutscenes instead.
  • The first Resident Evil game also feels very basic compared to the later sequels. The original lacked an auto-aiming function (unless you were playing the Japanese version) and the weapons came as they appeared without any chance to enhance them. The original game had Multiple Endings while the sequels only have a single ending each (except for Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Resident Evil 5, although one could argue the alternate scenarios in Resident Evil 2 serve a similar purpose). The first game also lacked the limping animation that the player character could suffer if they were hurt, which meant even if your health was in the red, you could run at a brisk pace just fine. There was also 3D object scanning if you chose to inspect an item (which is only used to reveal two Plot Coupons hidden inside of books), something that the later games dropped, but was brought back in Code: Veronica and the remake to use for a few more puzzles. A common reoccurrence established since Resident Evil 2 is having the Big Bads and other characters go One-Winged Angel, mutating in varying, grotesque ways. Quite a number of them also become towering monstrosities. It could be a bit strange looking back at the first game, realizing this never happens at all.
  • Chris, Jill, Barry, and Rebecca in the first game are wildly different in their personalities compared to later installments due to the first game having no budget to hire better voice actors plus the developers directing the vocals despite being Japanese. Jill comes off as both whiny and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Chris sounds like a complete dweeb, Rebecca is overkly perky for one being caught in a mansion full of zombies, and Barry is known for his Large Ham tendencies mixed with puns.
  • The entire series has made a big Genre Shift from claustrophobic, escape-oriented survival horror to an adrenaline-fueled action series where the protagonists, while still under extreme duress, have more control over the situation; to wit, the first game has a S.W.A.T.-based team trapped in a horror-filled mansion, while Resident Evil 5 is set in Africa with two soldiers freely going gung-ho on infected civilians. With it, a lot of the "survival" aspects have been lost, but even during the early years of the franchise, the second game deviates heavily from the first by giving Claire and Leon far more than enough gun ammo to make it through the game. In the first game, ammo was highly limited, and running out of a particular ammo made certain boss fights near impossible to beat.
  • Another difference that gaps the first few games from later ones is that the undead creatures and monsters are far more resilient and aggressive than they were later on. It can take as many as 9 shots from a handgun to take down a zombie in the first three games.
  • The monsters in the first game were also uninspired, being clear shout outs to different movie monsters and killer animals. Starting with 2, they started becoming more unique.
  • Albert Wesker's apparent death at Tyrant's hands (er, claws) initially was intended to be permanent, as shown by an early novelization and some versions of the game where you can fight his zombified corpse in bonus modes. Subsequent games would develop him into the series Big Bad.
  • Weapons would only come in one of each type. There was one kind of handgun, one shotgun, and so on. While later games would introduce multiple weapon types, it wasn't until the fourth game where the series fully embraced having multiple weapons of the same category.
  • The level designs was very box-like. Nearly every room or area was a square or rectangle and the environments were flat. By the fourth game, the areas were more natural by having twists and turns and elevation differences.
• Rhythm Heaven: The first game, Rhythm Tengoku for the GBA, is pretty different than its two sequels. For starters, the mini-games are arranged in eight columns of six instead of ten columns of five, and the Final Exam Remix is Remix 6 instead of Remix 10. Also, the music for the sequels' mini-games are tailor-made for them while some of the GBA mini-games just have accompanying BGM with the same tempo. And there's the Unexpected Gameplay Change that Quiz brought, while the other games never radically change the rules. The Remixes of the GBA version also doesn't change the artistic theme of the mini-games and one stage actually remixes previous remixes, two things that the sequels don't dabble in. Lastly, some first-time stages have no practice sessions.
• Richman:
  • The map in the original game is a full quadrilateral with some intersections instead of having wierd-shaped maps with lots of sharp turns in later titles.
  • The movements are determined by dices automatically rolling in the first two titles instead of rolled by the characters in most titles.
  • The shop is called the black market in 2 & 3.
  • Some of the cards are labled as items and sold in different shops in 3, and a single shop with cards section and items section in 4.
  • Properties at their base level are represented by colored blocks only in the first three titles instead of having something represent the characters.
• Roblox: The early days were quite a bit different for their weirdness.
  • Character models did not have animation; they simply slid around without moving their limbs.
  • Explosions were first rendered as red spheres that flashed for an instant.
  • In the first few months of the site launching, accounts could be made that had a space in the username. This was changed before the end of 2006 with only a few hundred of those accounts surviving.
  • Robucks were once given out daily without needing to be active in Builder's Club. These were replaced by Tickets, but later on those were removed as well, and players were left without a daily stipend.
  • Blocks lacked bevels in the early days, which made things look much more rigid and connected.
  • The default place was either a simple destructible house with a few extra blocks or a flat featureless 252 square-stud plane.
  • After Builder's Club expired, players could keep the extra place slots provided. Today, they are removed once any form of Builder's Club expires, unless the user had Builder's Club before a certain time.
  • The game initially opted for a nostalgic, blocky, LEGO-esque aesthetic that made the games look like a kids' playset come to life. As the years went on and the platform became more advanced, allowing for greater detail and scripting in games, this aesthetic gradually fell out of favor.
• RuneScape: The game's original incarnation, RuneScape Classic, is massively different from its current version. The player characters and NPCs are low-res sprites; the game lacked dialogue boxes, meaning all dialogue is displayed above characters' heads; there was no indication on your progress in a quest, or if you've even started it in the first place; the camera is more restricted; there is no barrier dividing the Wilderness from the rest of the map; there was no members game in its earliest years (meaning that all skills, features, and areas were open to all players). Jagex has opened this game to members on four occasions before ultimately closing it for good in 2018.

S

• Samurai Shodown: The first game, Samurai Shodown (1993), had an interesting aspect that not only could you disarm an opponent, but you could also destroy their weapon with a strong attack.
• Saints Row: The first game, Saints Row (2006), was originally a much more down to earth sandbox action game based on gang violence. Fans of the later entries' over the top, irreverent humor might be shocked to see that the original was playing it much straighter. It also didn't let you select the main character's gender, and - as endlessly lampshaded across the second game - he didn't speak all that much either.
• Shadow Hearts:
  • The differences between Koudelka and the "core" franchise are like night and day, with Koudelka playing as a strange hybrid of RPG and Survival Horror (which it was), and the SH games being straight-up RPGs with a heavy comedic bent.
  • The original game, aside from the focus on horror, is in many ways the most "normal" RPG of the trilogy by the virtue of featuring most staples of the genre such as inns, town shops, acquisition of new abilities by leveling up, plenty of Standard RPG Items to deal with Status Effects, etc. The sequels did most of those away: there's no inns or shops in towns; all the buying and selling is done via a pair of Intrepid Merchants that kept showing up wherever the protagonists go regardless of anything, the abilities of your character are tied to their personal sidequests and there's only one item that deal with Status Effects.
• Shadowverse: All chapters from the Morning Star arc will always put the character against enemies popping out of nowhere, even in the midst of dialogue. This causes even the shortest conversations to be interrupted by monster attacks. By the second half of the arc, we get to know more of the original characters' backstories as they are trapped in the dream world. The second arc named Guild Wars actually has a better plot, leaves equal opportunities for introducing new characters as well as expanding the Character Development of the originals. Some chapters are no longer interrupted by unnecessary monster attacks. That being said, the Guild Wars chapters of each leader are actually longer than their Morning Star chapters. Shadowverse might have taken this trend from another Cygames title, Granblue Fantasy.
• Shantae: The first game, Shantae (2002), is the only installment where Shantae has multiple lives (later games give her just one, with each heart on her health bar accounting for four hits instead of just two), and interaction in towns is limited to Shantae rotating until she finds the building she wants to enter, similarly to Shining in the Darkness. It's also the only one with an active day/night cycle, with tougher monsters coming out at night, and one building in towns only accessible at night. The original also lacks the "skull = death" pits, causing the need for many blind jumps.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • The mainline Shin Megami Tensei series itself has undergone several changes since it started out. The first game in the series was an adaptation of Aya Nishitani's Digital Devil Story novels, featuring none of the alignment choices or Multiple Endings that would be characteristic of the series later on. The connection with the Digital Devil Story series was drastically toned down in the sequel, and the Continuity Reboot Shin Megami Tensei I dropped the novel series' plotline entirely. Also, many earlier Megaten games had first-person dungeon crawling as a key mechanic. This has been phased out from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne onward, though you could enter a first-person view in New Game Plus, and limitations with the DS saw the old style updated and temporarily revived with Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.
  • Most SMT games tend to have game mechanics (such as Press Turns, One More, or Demon Co-op) that reward you for hitting an enemy's elemental weakness, and/or penalize you for having your attacks nullified. Older games lack this, so the only effects weaknesses and resistances have is increasing or decreasing the damage of attacks.
  • The early NES, SNES, and PS1 SMT games let you have a whopping six people in your main party, reduced to four with the introduction of the Turn Press system for balancing purposes. Among other things, the older games had the protagonist not be able to use magic at all (he doesn't even get any MP), you had a controllable second human with you who could use magic but not summon (while Shin Megami Tensei IV brought back human partners, they are completely AI-controlled and not part of your main party), and the games in general were a lot more obtuse.
  • Early games in the series also had a far more complex elemental system. From Nocturne on, there tends to be six or seven main elements with the possibility for more in spinoffs, along with ailments and Almighty. In addition, with the exception of a few bosses, resistances and weaknesses cut damage by roughly the same percentage. In older games, due to the separation of demons' skills and magic, there were a boatload of extra elements, mostly physical, that were distinct from the modern elements typically seen in the franchise. Later games would largely merge these into the Physical element and only keep Gun as an alternative. In addition, enemies could resist some elements more than others, with 8/8 being standard resistance and the numerator going lower the more resistance the enemy has.
  • The Compendium, a key franchise-wide mechanic that lets the player register and resummon demons or Personas, was introduced in Nocturne. In older games, once you fused or released one, it was gone, though most of these games didn't have demons level up and had heavy restrictions on inheritance, if it was in the game at all.
  • There was no skill inheritance during fusion in earlier games, meaning demons were stuck with whatever skills they came with, and useful early to mid-game skills were lost if you wanted stronger demons. The ability to pass along skills was added later to enable players to Elite Tweak their demons/Personas, but they were still assigned randomly, forcing players to reroll for the skills they wanted. It wasn't until around the 2010's that the games allowed players to manually pick the skills they wanted to pass on.
• Silent Hill: The first game, Silent Hill (1999), is the only installment of the franchise on the original PlayStation (many of them are for the PlayStation 2). There are also a few oddities here and there, including:
  • Not a lot of puzzles; most of the gameplay is based on survival and combat
  • Harry, the player character, is by far the worst gun user out of any of the game's protagonists. This was because the game actually factored in external elements (perception and distance affected gun accuracy). While each is justified — they're all civilians — the player for the second game is far better.
  • This is the only game where the nurses act the way they do because of an external parasite, plus the only entry in the series to feature a male variation of the nurse/doctor enemy type. From the second game onward it would be female-looking nurse monsters only, with the design from the second game becoming the most iconic and reused (though the third game did use a less sexual design, and those nurses had actual faces like the ones in the first game).
  • The Multiple Endings are based on two decisions only; there's no Karma Meter or mixture of both involved. The endings change whether you have saved or killed your partner, Cybil, from a parasite, and if you were able to find an important item or not in Michael Kaufmann's apartment; naturally, the best ending requires you save Cybil and get the item.
  • The monsters were not representations of any facet of Harry's psyche, but Alessa's likes and dislikes. In fact, much of the plot doesn't focus on Harry at all: he doesn't have any connection or deep-seated flaws, he's just a guy looking for his daughter.
• The Sims:
  • The Sims (2000) is very different from its descendants. It's more like a typical life simulator (many which started out as, or were, clones of said game) than the goofy Sims. Unlike the more recent games, there was no aging other than from baby to child, and the Create-A-Sim page was extremely limited. Simlish was also less expansive and thus more repetitive than in future games.
  • The very first Expansion Pack, Livin' Large, didn't have a theme or focus on a major new gameplay experience and was instead a compilation of various random new items; something later games would probably call a "Stuff Pack". Eventually, both The Sims and Livin' Large were discontinued and replaced with The Sims: Deluxe Edition which bundled the two together, acknowledging the fact that by the standards of later expansions Livin' Large doesn't really stand on its own.
  • The first game didn't track what day of the week it was, so Sims go to school and work every single day. Since Sims can't grow old and retire from their careers, The Sims also features the odd quirk of forcing Sims who reach the top of their career track to move to the mid-level of another career, something that has never been seen again.
  • WooHooing didn't exist, and G-Rated Sex was in full effect. To have a child, two adult Sims simply had to do enough romantic interactions until a pop-up appeared asking if you wanted to give them one. Livin' Large made things more explicit with a "vibrating bed" that Sims could play in and create children by using it, but it wasn't until The Sims 2 properly introduced the ability to WooHoo in a variety of places.
  • The first two games frequently referenced SimCity, but these were phased out as The Sims became a More Popular Spin-Off.
  • Aliens in The Sims 2 are basically regular Sims with green skin, lacking the Psychic Powers they'd get in later games. Also, it's the only time aliens are available in the base game.
  • The Sims 2 was the first game to introduce changing seasons. In this iteration, seasons lasted only five days and had no set events (like equivalents to Christmas, although some holiday-like observances were optional via interactions with certain items), making it more of a weather pack than a true seasonal pack. The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 introduced seven-day seasons to match the length of an in-game week, as well as holidays that take place at a set time in each season (i.e. Winterfest on Wednesday in Winter) to give a sense of progressing through a year.
• Sly Cooper: The first video game, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, has a lot of early-installment weirdness.
  • The game plays much more of a standard platformer of just getting to the end of the level while collecting clue bottles that help you unlock the safe code, unlike the later games where you do missions around the hub to set up a big heist at the climax of the episode.
  • The game's plot is very simple, light hearted and has only one big plot twist near the end. The sequels have a more serious tone, a bigger story and lots of plot twists.
  • You only play as Sly for most of the game. Bentley only has a single hacking mission and Murray is only playable in the two racing levels. You also near the end play as Carmelita in a shooting range like level. Unlike the sequels where you mostly play as Sly, Bentley and Murray.
  • Murray is not the Large Ham Blood Knight "The Murray" character he would be in the sequels and was a Cowardly Sidekick who was there to drive the gang around, and had he a much smaller role.
  • The game has a One-Hit-Point Wonder with extra lives while the rest of the games have a health bar.
  • The game's soundtrack has a techno vibe to it instead of mostly consisting of smooth jazz.
  • New moves are found by reclaiming pages of the title book instead of being bought off Thiefnet with coins.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (16-bit):
    • The game has no spin dashing, no characters other than Sonic and Doctor Eggman, fairly trippy and abstract graphics (particularly in the Special Stages and Spring Yard Zone), fairly slow and mellow music, levels of very varying difficulty and length (seriously, play Labyrinth and then continue on to Star Light), and a relatively slow, platform-based gameplay style. Other oddities include only six Chaos Emeralds instead of the standard seven, the Emeralds only changing the ending instead of granting Super Sonic mode, and three Acts per Zone instead of two (although most modern games have 3 Acts, the third is usually relegated to the boss).
    • The fights against Dr. Eggman in the first game seem incredibly tame compared to the later installments. In the first game, all of the boss fights against Eggman had him just use the Eggmobile with a simple weapon or tool. Nowadays, the mad doctor uses much larger machines with hilariously outlandish weapons.
    • Some of the zone names in the first game were shorter than usual and less creative (e.g. Marble Zone in the original Mega Drive/Genesis release, Bridge Zone in the 8-bit version). Starting with the next game, almost all of the zones have had either two-word names or one long word for a name.
    • In the 8-bit version all of the Chaos Emeralds are white/clear, like diamonds. All of the subsequent 8-bit Sonic games made them a variety of colors.
  • In Tails' first appearance in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the CPU could make Tails fly, but a player couldn't; it was just used to get the computer to catch back up with Sonic. Sonic 3 & Knuckles would change that. Outside of the Sonic Advance Trilogy, Sonic 3 & Knuckles would be the only game where Tails could also swim until Sonic Mania over 20 years later.
  • It wasn't until Sonic 3 & Knuckles that Sonic could run along the surface of the water at a high enough speed. Prior to that, he simply skimmed along the surface like a stone or immediately sank into the water at the same rate as usual.
  • The original Mega Drive era games were low on lore and plot. This led Sega of America and Sega of Europe to create their own distinctive backstory from the Japanese continuity of the games, as presented in the Sonic the Hedgehog Promo Comic, which the original Sonic Bible did consider to be the series canon backstory by Sega of America of the time. This included differences like there being seven Chaos Emeralds from the beginning, the series taking place on a planet called "Mobius" with no humans (other than Robotnik) in sight, Sonic initially being brown and having regular quills until he ran so fast one day that the heat fused his quills together and changed his color to cobalt blue, Dr. Robotnik starting off as a good man named Ovi Kintobor (who was even a friend to Sonic and built him specialized shoes to protect himself from the heat of the high friction speed he could achieve), until he unwittingly turned himself into the evil Ivo Robotnik via a malfunctioning invention of his. This was eventually nullified once Sega of Japan decided that the US branch of Sonic should share the same canon as the Japanese games, starting with Sonic Adventure and on.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog CD's North American instruction booklet, Amy Rose is referred to here as "Princess Sally", evidently trying to pass her off as a completely different character from Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM). All other entries and all re-releases of Sonic CD would revert Amy to being just Amy Rose, though they would make a note of her "original" name. She also lacks her trademark squeaky hammer.
  • Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island is the first game to introduce the Homing Attack known in the game as The Dash Attack, It's a power-up you get from a golden shield instead of a natural ability you get starting out. It's not used for jumping over bottomless pits with a line of enemies but to attack enemies easier and quicker.
  • The first few 3D-era games were heavy on this trope:
    • Sonic Adventure was heavily multi-genred as while it was still a platformer, each character played differently (Sonic was a standard platformer, Tails was racing, Knuckles was treasure hunting, Amy was a chased racer, Big was fishing, and Gamma was a shoot-em-up). The game heavily relied on Once More, with Clarity to understand how one character arrived at a place or even the motivations for an encounter. It was also the first appearance of the Light Speed Dash, which would stay an item until Sonic Heroes, where it would become a standard power set. This would also be the first game where Super Sonic was relegated to an 11th-Hour Superpower.
    • Sonic Adventure 2 would introduce the grinding system, whose movement would be determined by how a character moved. As well, only Sonic and Shadow had the ability to grind. The game would be the last one to involve a Chao Garden.
    • Sonic Heroes had numerous oddities to it. It abandoned the Gameplay Roulette of the Adventure games in favor of all routes having team-based gameplay. As the player controlled a three-man team, they were able to switch between a running type, a flight type and a "strength" type. This game would codify Team Sonic, Dark and Chaotix, but Team Rose would always be in flux. For whatever reason the settings are more fantastic than the 3D titles before and immediately after, harkening back to the sorts of levels in the Genesis era. The futuristic Grand Metropolis and the impossibly giant Casino Park with pinball roads in particular feel different from the "standard" city settings seen in other 3D games. This is also the only entry in the 3D console era to have a Special Stages as well as the only one with hit points for both Eggman and the badniks.
  • Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric started development as an unrelated Sonic title that was shoehorned into the Sonic Boom IP at the last moment, so there are some bits and pieces that may seem odd to people more familiar with the cartoon. The tone is far more serious and plot-driven than the Gag Series it supposedly is based on, but perhaps more noticeable is the near-complete absence of Sticks the Badger, whose only ingame appearance is as a minor NPC in one of the hub worlds. It's an In Name Only version of Sticks, too; she acts much more childlike, speaks in You No Take Candle instead of proper English, and shows absolutely no signs of being a paranoid Conspiracy Theorist.
• Soul Series: The series began with Soul Edge (and its updated revision Soul Blade), which featured the Weapon Break meter (to prevent constant blocking) and a powerful string of attacks called the "Critical Edge" while it also lacked the 8-Way Run of its successors. The fighters also had high, floaty jumps similar to the early installments of Virtua Fighter (something also true of Tekken), players could use pursuit attacks on downed foes (another element taken from VF), the stages were simplistic in design (it wouldn't be until Soulcalibur that they progressed beyond a simple square ring), Guard Impacts could only repel an opponent's attack (Parries weren't introduced until II), Voldo was actually rather tame in terms of playstyle, and Inferno was known as "SoulEdge" (though this is partially because it's Soul Edge using Cervantes' corpse instead of fighting under its own power).
• Space Quest: Roger's hair is initially brown instead of blonde. In Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter, Roger obtains a gun to kill enemy guards, and later a gas grenade to get the one who can't be shot; when he foils the Sarien plot, he's hailed as the hero of the galaxy. The other games have Roger never using a weapon and hardly being recognized as a hero.
• Splatoon:
  • Blasters, despite functioning significantly differently from Shooters (the former launches high-damage explosives; the latter rapid-fires normal ink shots), were classified as a type of Shooter until 3. Similarly, Brushes were classified as a type of Roller until 2.
  • Character customisation was limited in the first game; there was only one hairstyle and legwear per gender.
  • The first game has several NES-inspired minigames that didn't make it into the sequels.
  • The first game is the only one in the series to have two noticeably different English translations, similar to a few other Nintendo games at the time.
  • None of the special weapons from the first game return in their original forms in the sequels.
  • Saltspray Rig is the only stage in the entire series that isn't rotationally symmetrical until Skipper Pavilion near the end of 2^note Not counting some variants of Shifty Station, which are only playable during special occasions — or symmetrical at all, for that matter, because the obstacles in the middle of Saltspray Rig are slightly asymmetrical. Unsurprisingly, neither of them ever appeared again.
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • If not for the common title and character design, you'd hardly believe that the first game and latter games are from the same series. While the engine was mostly the same, in Spyro the Dragon (1998) there were no sidequests to collect the Plot Coupons, no Hunter, and the story felt like an Excuse Plot in comparison to the deeper Ripto's Rage! and Year of the Dragon. Oh, and Spyro can't swim, not even on the surface.
  • The first game plays with a somewhat melancholic 'Last man alive' feel. You're guided through the levels by the dragons you have to rescue, which also function as save points (you can't save via the pause menu). Some of the enemies were scarier and more aggressive as well, making Spyro's world feel particular dangerous and threatening. The second game introduces goofy cartoon characters who talk to you throughout the levels with the levels mostly consisting of helping these people out and getting orbs in return; the enemies also tend to be goofier from the second game onwards.
  • Spyro is voiced by Carlos Alazraqui in the first game, and he is characterised as a cheeky little rascal and rather cocky. From the second game onwards he is voiced by Tom Kenny, and he is portrayed as older and more mature, albeit still fond of mocking his adversaries.
  • Bosses did not have to be defeated to progress through the game, Gnasty's minions are other Gnorcs he made out of gems where Ripto and the Sorceress just had an army of mooks that inexplicably followed them, and though a few powerups appear, they're very different than the standard versions in later games.
  • Even the music of the first game is unusual, being more raw, intense and 1970s progressive rock-themed. The music of the later games comprises of multiple, often contrasting genres instead.
  • From the second game on, there are regular cutscenes explaining and advancing the plot as you progress through the game. The first game, on the other hand, has only has three cutscenes: One that opens the game, one after Gnasty Gnorc is defeated, and one after the game is fully completed.
  • In the first game, enemy minions appear in the homeworld hubs as well as the standard level worlds (though in the first homeworld, the minions are merely thieves who don't actually attack Spyro, just run away). Later games turn the homeworlds into safe havens with no enemies.
  • The bosses in the first game (which, as noted above, did not need to be defeated to progress), including even Gnasty Gnorc himself to an extent, took place in the context of levels in their own right, with gems and dragons to be collected - bosses would often run away to a point further on in the level after being wounded, and Spyro would have to follow. From the second game on, boss battles moved to small circular arenas in which fighting the boss was the only thing to do.
  • Even within the first game, there are some oddities early on. In the first three Dragon Realms, there are thieves carrying eggs who must be caught to win back the eggs. They are relatively easy to catch and, in comparison to every other collectible in the original trilogy, relatively few in number - only 12 (by comparison, there are 80 dragons in total). They are only once needed to progress the game (five are required to move on to the fourth Realm from the third), and there are none past that point.
  • The first homeworld boss, Toasty, cannot be fought until at least one other level in that homeworld has been completed. All other homeworlds (except the sixth and final one, which requires the levels to be completed in a specific order) drop this requirement and allow you to play the boss level immediately if you wish.
  • The first game had some elements that were later discarded, such as clams containing extra lives (represented as little silver dragon statues), silver beads which add up to new lives over time and more different types of gem containers.
  • The flying challenges in the first game are called "flights". They would be renamed "speedways" starting with the second game.
• Squaredle: The earliest puzzles have obscure required words, something that is much rarer in later puzzles. The puzzle archive for 2022 warns: "(Word lists are weirder in older puzzles)"
• Star Control: The series is famous these days for its engaging adventures filled with unique aliens and cleverly-written storylines. The first game is a very rudimentary strategy game that only serves to tie ship-to-ship melee matches together without "campaign mode".
• Star Fox:
  • The first game, Star Fox (1993), had the low framerate and polygon count, which are obviously a result of hardware limitations, but the lack of a targeting reticule is a less excusable omission to players who grew up on games like Star Fox 64.
  • In the original game, your wingmates die if their shield gauges are depleted. By comparison, if that happens in 64, they're forced to withdraw for the rest of that mission and all of the next.
• Star Trek Online: Due to the Troubled Production that pestered its start, the early incarnation is a vastly different beast compared to the game now:
  • The game was initially subscriber-only. The game went Free-2-Play just before Legacy of Romulus dropped, but subscriptions lasted until 2019, when they were replaced with the Elite Starter Packs
  • When the game started, there were only two factions, the Federation and the Klingon Empire. However, players could only start as Federation and had to play through the first storyline to unlock the Klingons. The Klingon faction had no starting storyline and leveling up would be hell. This would be rectified in the first expansion.
  • The missions were a hodgepodge of random events that gave it an odd World of Warcraft feel of a continuous war between the two factions.
  • Sector Space was cut up into little blocks of three of four areas, requiring Loads and Loads of Loading. As well, players couldn't enter the other faction's starting area without having special permissions that took loads of grinding. Interestingly, players could initially warp into the Gamma Quadrant to fight the Borg but had little to do with the Dominion
  • The game initially had a heavy focus on the Tank/DPS/Mage trinity, as seen with the Tier 5 Galaxy, Defiant and Intrepid classes. This made the Tier 5 Galaxy a Low-Tier Letdown as it was outgunned by the much older Excelsior class that was released later on.
  • The Galaxy-X class (That's the version of the Galaxy from the TNG episode "All Good Things...") was initially a subscriber bonus should players be able to recruit 5 people to subscribe to the game.
  • Worf and Sela were one of the first previous series characters to show up but suffered heavily from You Don't Look Like You until Denise Crosby and Michael Dorn lent their voices, thus allowing them to use their likeness.
  • Lockboxes initially had secondary prizes being "Mirror Ships", factions ships that bore the skin of one ship but the layout of another and sometimes born hull skins based off of the Terran Empire and related factions. These were done away with with Delta Rising
  • The first two playable Romulan-based ships, the Tal Shiar Adapted Destroyer and Adapted Battlecruiser, are the only two not to have a singularity core nor its power set, instead using a normal warp core with the in-story explanation being that the Borg tech is not compatible with their tech.
  • Special items were obtained through a variety of Marks currencies. They would all be condensed into Dilithium.
  • Reputations started out odd with its first four reputations. Romulan and Nukara were the only reputations (and still are) that do not require a player to have Elite Marks to build items while Omega is the only one who has no Space weapons^note It initially did, but its [Borg] modifier apparently didn't work. The Dyson reputation had an extra mark known as a Dyson Commendation that would let players gain more marks and Dilithium.
  • The Romulan Republic storyline has a Bridge Officer named Tovan Kiev, a fellow Romulan who is meant to be your best friend and part of your story is devoted to also finding his sister. The backlash to the character, including the inability to dismiss him at all, lead to him being the only "major" Bridge Officer.
  • The Jem'Hadar ships first offered with the "Victory is Life" expansion were the first ones to offer a Level 6 Ship Mastery. This only allowed players to play them on all characters instead of being locked to Jem'Hadar. Level 6 Ship Mastery options would later only be used with the "Legendary" ship types.
• Street Fighter:
  • In the very first Street Fighter released in 1987, Ryu and Ken are the only playable characters (with Ryu wearing red slippers for some reason), and Ken is an exact clone of Ryu; their special moves, quite overpowered in this game, are almost impossible to pull off consistently (as they were considered more akin to cheat codes rather than mundane gameplay mechanics); other techniques such as combos, dizzies, and grappling moves are all non-existent; and every opponent has the same winning and losing quote (all spoken with the same crudely digitized Engrish voice clip), and the ground-based player movement seems to consist of repeated fixed-length hops, making precise positioning difficult. The game did feature the same six-button configuration used by Street Fighter II and its sequels, but it was actually added to the game as an afterthought, created as a cheaper alternative to arcade operators who couldn't afford the original cabinet which used two hydraulic punching pads that determined the strength of the player's punches and kicks based on how hard they were pushed down. Additionally, Ryu and Ken's special move yells were dubbed for the overseas versions of the game, resulting in them yelling "Psycho Fire" and "Dragon Punch" instead of "Hadoken" and "Shoryuken."
  • Even the sequels had this. Combos were actually an Ascended Glitch, and as such there was no combo counter. Street Fighter II was also notably violent, with battered, bloodied, bruised character portraits when somebody lost and in the actual fights you had blood coming out when certain attacks hit (like with Vega's claw or when Blanka bit at somebody's neck) and hits to the stomach actually caused a Vomit Indiscretion Shot sometimes. It was also very toned down compared to the sequels, some characters had energy projectiles and the villain had flame engulfed punches but that was it. Later games in the series would make everyone a Street-Level Super Hero, with everyone essentially having Charles Atlas Superpowers at the very least.
• Suikoden:
  • In Suikoden (1995), characters could only use a single Rune at a time, and there were no skills to customize character stats. Suikoden II let characters use up to three Runes (depending on their Magic stats), and Suikoden III introduced skills.
  • Zig-zagged with the army battles. In the original, they were just rock-paper-scissors choices, while most of the later games had war strategy game style battles. Suikoden III used a modification of the regular battling; II, IV, and V all use strategy-type battles, but each are different. II and IV use strategy RPG-style battles, one on foot and one in boats. V uses real-time strategy.
• Summon Night: The first game, Summon Night (2000), has four possible protagonists with similar stat growth to choose from, sort of averts Schrödinger's Player Character, its stat point system resembling that of the first Black/Matrix game, and starts in a world outside Lyndbaum. Later games would have two protagonists with different stat growth to choose from, follow Schrödinger's Player Character, a stat point system similar yet distinct from the Black/Matrix series, and stays in Lyndbaum.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • The first game (on the Game Boy) features an incredibly simple plot (unlike the greatly complex and interwoven stories of later games), only features the "Holy Trinity" of Mazinger Z, Getter Robo, and Gundam; all robots are intelligent beings (not largely non-sentient constructs piloted by humans), and health is in the double digits (while later games give robots thousands of HP). If it weren't for the title, you'd never know it was part of the series.
  • Super Robot Wars 2 had an interesting case of giving characters upgrades - while Amuro Ray would go from the RX-78-2 Gundam to the RX-93 Nu Gundam, Kouji Kabuto would jump from Mazinger Z to Great Mazinger and the original Getter Team (Ryouma Nagare, Hayato Jin, Musashi Tomoe) would go from the classic Getter Robo to Getter Robo G. Super Robot Wars 4 would end up putting the Getter G Team (Ryouma, Hayato and Benkei Kuruma) in the original Getter Robo.
  • In Super Robot Wars 3, despite having a much more robust Gundam line up, all characters use "Gallant Char" as their theme, no matter what era they're from. Similarly, Tetsuya Tsurugi and the Great Mazinger use "Mazinger Z" for their theme, not "Ore wa Great Mazinger". There's a unique villainous unit — the Mass Produced Jagd Doga, which physically resembles Quess Paraya's Jagd Doga, but uses Gyunei Guss' Jagd Doga colors. While this was the first game starring other Super Robots, these series would have finished their series or their first appearance lead to their completion.
  • The Mazinkaiser of Super Robot Wars F Final is vastly different from the later incarnations. In F Final, Mazinkaiser is actually Mazinger Z hopped up on Getter Rays. It would retain using "Mazinger Z" as its theme as it wouldn't gain its legendary theme until Alpha. It also had a few attacks that would disappear by Alpha Gaiden including a map attack version of Fire Blaster, a "Dynamic Tackle" map attack and Jet Boomerang, which was just shooting Kaiser Scrander at his opponent.
  • For the more modern weirdness, the first installments for Super Robot Wars Alpha and Super Robot Wars: Original Generation are pretty bizzare compared to their sequels.
    • Alpha and Alpha Gaiden had a strange mechanic that allowed players to have certain units disengage from their mecha and fly around in component craft, allowing players to fly around in Core Fighters, Jet Pilders and Getter Machines
    • Alpha 2, the first appearance of GaoGaiGar, somehow left out the Power Echoes that the other super robot series had with their pilots. Subsequent games would fix that.
    • Alpha 2 and Destiny, the first usages of the Nightingale, only had three attacks - Mega Beam Rifle, Hidden Arm Beam Saber and Funnels. This was because Nightingale was based off of basic drawings. It wouldn’t be until Super Robot Wars X that it would have more weapons.
    • Alpha 3 and Super Robot Wars Judgment, the first usages of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED made the Phase Shift Armor too overpowered, allowing those using it to tank attacks that weren't Gundam-type beam weaponry yet not actually physical attacks like Breast Fire and Getter Beam.
  • Super Robot Wars Advance was much different compared to its Game Boy Advance sequels — most of its graphics were just yanked from SRW F/F Final, the upgrading system from Shin was in place here, there were a bunch of Guide Dang It! secrets and the final stage was a Nintendo Hard countdown mission that forced you to complete it in X amount of time before everything went up. It was also the only game in the set without a New Game Plus.
  • Super Robot Wars Compact 2's Video Game Remake, Super Robot Wars IMPACT is the first Playstation 2 entry and it shows.
    • The game suffers from Loads and Loads of Loading, thus animation and voice clips suffer terribly from it.
    • Being a combination of all three chapters of Compact 2, the game is massive stage-wise, something that wouldn't be seen again until Super Robot Wars 30.
    • Most of the sprites in the game are ripped from Super Robot Wars Alpha, which clash terribly with the brand new sprites created for the game.
  • Super Robot Wars Reversal had two oddities for series that don't show up in later games. The first is that the Moon mechanic first introduced in Alpha Gaiden is replaced with a turn counter. This meant that the Gundam X and the Double X could use its Satellite Cannons whenever and whereever it wanted to. The other is that the Shin Getter Robo of Shin Getter Robo vs. Neo Getter Robo has the Stoner Sunshine, which it never used in the anime and is never used in subsequent appearances.
  • Super Robot Wars Destiny, being the first game to include Getter Robo Armageddon, has a number of instances that later games wouldn't have:
    • This game and Super Robot Wars Z 2 would be the only games to have the Tower and Stellva as playable units.
    • The original Getter Robo becomes an Ascended Extra, piloted by Benkei, and usable for both Getter Teams. It also has combination attacks with Black Getter Robo.
    • The Armageddon storyline ends with Scenario 17(?!) and backburners Shin Dragon for most of the game, forcing the Shin Getter team to pilot either the classic Getter or Black Getter (or they can take over Shin Getter, but the original Getter Team is usually better in it
  • In many of the original games, whenever Gundam and Mazinger was used, it always seemed to start out with the One Year War and Doctor Hell's attacks. Most entries nowadays jump ahead to either the Gryps Conflict at the very earliest as well as the Mycene Empire's assault.
  • Iconic yet one-off attacks wouldn't become a staple until later games and even then which ones they used were odd. For instance, the Zeta Gundam's initial strongest attack was the Hyper Mega Launcher. Alpha would give the machine the Waverider Crash while Advance would give it the Mega Beam Saber. It wouldn't be until Alpha 3 that the two would be available together.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • The contrast between Super Smash Bros. 64 and its sequels is astounding.
    • While subsequent games, from Melee onward, are notable for detailed environments and characters, as well as epic orchestral music, the original has Floating Continents in front of a simple background, many more sprites for items, Pokémon, and some attacks, darker, low-key original songs and was promoted with cartoony, comic book-style illustrations of the characters. Additionally, playing in Training mode removed said stage backgrounds, replacing them with a flat texture and the Smash series logo.
    • It lacks a lot of moves and abilities that were introduced later, like air-dodging and a side special move for example.^note Side specials did technically exist in the first game, but only the unplayable Master Hand was given a unique one — everyone else's side special is the exact same as their neutral special move. It also has very few unlockable elements (four characters, one stage, the ability to turn off what items spawn, and the Sound Test), likely due to memory and budget constraints. Lastly, it's the only game that has the platform-boarding minigame, which was scrapped in the later games in favor of Home-Run Contest and the Multi-Man minigames.
    • In the original game, the standard basic stages Battlefield and Final Destination are not available in multiplayer stages, and Battlefield was referred to in Sound Test as "Duel Zone". In fact, they're exclusively used in 1P Game as the stages for the Fighting Polygon Team and Master Hand, respectively. It's only possible to fight against other players in these stages if you use cheat devices (and even then, Final Destination requires a few extra codes to make it a truly viable stage to fight in). Melee is the first game in the series to make these two stages available for other players to fight in, though you need to meet certain conditions in order to play them both (Battlefield requires you to complete All-Star mode for the first time, while Final Destination is unlocked by completing Event Match mode). Starting with Brawl, both stages have been made available without prerequisites.
  • Melee was the only time the series experimented with the formula for beginning a Vs. match. It replaced the original's three-second countdown with the announcer saying "Ready..." and introduction-animations were dropped in favor of the characters being brought to life from trophies. Brawl brought both of those pre-match elements back, and every installment since has continued the tradition.
• S.W.A.T.: Before the series became Tactical First Person Shooters by its third installment SWAT 3, we had Police Quest: SWAT 2, a Real-Time Strategy Game in the vein of XCOM Apocalypse's real-time mode. And before that, we had Police Quest: SWAT, an Interactive Movie that was a sequel/spin-off of an adventure game series, Police Quest.

T

• Tales Series: Early installments were particularly unusual:
  • Tales of Phantasia (SFC version) and Tales of Destiny (PSX) lacked many of the things that became trademarks of the series — for example: cooking, the Dark Wings and especially the skits.
  • The battle system of early 2D entries also comes as a little odd for modern Tales players — Chibisized sprites, a slightly slower-paced battle system, a lack of primary attack combos, and a few other things.
  • From a story perspective, Tales of Phantasia also lacks several of the character tropes almost always found in later games, like a Guest-Star Party Member or a Lovable Traitor. There is also no real Chosen One until Tales of Eternia, and even in that game that aspect was minimal, while in later games the party often revolves around the chosen character. The popularity of many of those character tropes started with Tales Of Destiny. Incidentally, most of those tropes were inserted in the GBA and PSX's Updated Re-release.
  • The art style of first two entries were musty, muted and more realistic. Tales of Destiny even included digitized photographs in some of the picture frames decorating castles and mansions. Tales of Eternia led the series toward more cartoony artwork and Tales of Symphonia solidified this shift.
• Team Fortress 2: The game has changed a lot over its update history from its release in October 2007:
  • The original version lacked custom loadouts completely: you only had access to each class's standard weapons, and the only way to change weapons was by switching to another class entirely. The version of TF2 included in the console versions of The Orange Box was never patched past this point.
  • Major updates in the beginning of the game's life were very small, often focusing on a single class (the "Classless Update", almost two years after the game released, heavily advertised itself on the fact that it was the first to not do so) and including about three items for that class that had basic properties, with a map or two, a couple hats after their introduction, and maybe a new game mode thrown in for good measure. Fast-forward to the present, and major updates will include dozens of cosmetic items and, at least until recent years, a couple of new weapons with wild properties for several classes.
  • For the class-specific updates, the new weapons given to the class in question were locked behind achievements, and gaining certain numbers of the achievements granted milestone achievements that would unlock one of the new weapons in a specific order. This is weird enough on its own simply because, save for the occasional holiday-themed hat, the system was abandoned entirely after each class got an update in this manner by July 2010, but the first such update for the Medic was particularly odd for two reasons: one, you originally had to get all of the new achievements to get all three of his new weapons; and two, in spite of the strict completion requirements, a lot of the achievements were designed under the mindset of what a medic, or other classes while under the effects of a medic's UberCharge, could theoretically do in a game, when the stars were aligned just right and a sacrifice to the deity of your choice was made before you started the game, rather than what the class was actually designed to be doing 99% of the time - a lot of them even encouraged the exact opposite mindset any Team Fortress player, much less a Medic, should have by requiring you to focus on personal goals over helping the team^note UberCharging five people on your friends list wouldn't be too bad depending on what classes they're playing, but killing 50 Scouts with the syringe gun or assisting another Medic in making three kills in one life means you're invariably pulling one or two medics away from healing duty even to the point of sabotaging the team's efforts^note scoring the highest on your team without killing any enemies, which invariably requires leaving better players to die so they don't outscore you by just killing enemies and even cooperating with members of the opposing team^note deploying an UberCharge within 8 seconds of an enemy medic deploying one. Also, while it was a Medic-themed update, it wasn't actually named in reference to anything about the Medic, like most later updates - officially it was the "Gold Rush Update". Every other class-specific update was named after the class(es) in question except for the "WAR!" update for the Demoman and Soldier, which was instead named in reference to its backstory of pitting the two classes against one another in its lead-up.
  • Hats and other cosmetic items did not exist until the Sniper vs. Spy update in May 2009. It's hard to believe that "America's #1 War-Themed Hat Simulator" did not have hats to simulate for a year and a half.
  • The first few unlockable weapons and hats were simply reskins of existing weapons or hats, though the weapons had unique but still downplayed stats. For weapon examples, there's Natasha (default minigun, colored black and with an ammo belt on its side), Scottish Resistance (default stickybomb launcher, yellow-and-black paint on the ammo drum and a device on its barrel), and the Cloak & Dagger (default Invisi-Watch, yellow instead of silver). Many of the early cosmetic items were the default characters' hats with some extra additions, or simply removing their existing hat. Future items became much more diverse, including particularly-spooky top hats, lawyer friendly versions of Futurama's brain slugs, multiple varieties of Cool Shades, Bill's beret and Ellis's trucker cap, and more, to say nothing of entirely new weapon sets that completely change how the class in question plays, including Sniper's focus on shorter-ranged bows or Demoman's Cool Swords and shields, or which don't even fit the game's aesthetic to make a reference, like the Engineer's Widowmaker shotgun or the Soldier straight-up getting Quake's Rocket Launcher.
  • The first set of "Meet the Team" videos were basically animation tests, to the point that the first three (Heavy, Soldier, and Engineer) are included in the public release of Source Filmmaker. They focused on one class, were relatively short, had an extensive mix of animations made for the short and canned ones from gameplay, and didn't have too much of a storyline other than "class in the spotlight kills the other team." Skip to later videos like "Meet the Medic," "Meet the Pyro," and especially "Expiration Date," and you'll find minutes-long videos with high-quality animation, focus on many different classes, epic storylines, and more development and expression of the classes' characters.
  • The First Annual Saxxy Awards took place before Source Fimmaker was officially released to the public, and were instead focused around Team Fortress 2's Replay Tool. This meant most winners of that contest were basically just gameplay videos. If you wanted additional special effects other than slowdown, you had to add them with external video editing software. All future Saxxy Awards shifted focus to Source Filmmaker, which allowed for videos with much greater quality, effects, story, and animation, while replays were limited to a single category in the second and removed entirely by the third. Compare 2011's Best Overall winner "El Muchacho", a 30 second clip of creatively shot and edited gameplay footage, to 2017's Best Overall winner "Agent Gunn: Vulkanite", a 5 minute professional-quality animated short.
  • The game itself, when first released, lacked a lot of features and gamemodes that were later added and have since become more iconic of the game. There was no Payload, King of the Hill, or Arena at first, nor was there a Halloween event, or any kind of event, during the game's first couple of years. You also had to pay for the game; it was not free-to-play until three and a half years after release. Mann Vs. Machine was not added until almost five years after. Considering how much all of these things dominate the metagame and culture these days, it can be pretty jarring to think that there was ever a period, much less a pretty significant one, where these did not exist at all.
  • Some abilities that are vital to classes today weren't around for a while. The Pyro didn't have the projectile-reflecting, foe-pushing, and ally-extinguishing airblast, today seen as the most valuable ability of the Pyro, for close to a year. The Engineer couldn't carry buildings, which greatly limited his range and usefulness, until his update in July 2010, almost three years after release.
  • The first Halloween event was considerably different than later ones. The Halloween map, Harvest Event, featured very little Halloween-themed items and decor aside from its purple-and-orange color scheme, cobwebs, dark areas, pumpkin bombs, Halloween pumpkin pickups, and the ghost. Subsequent Halloween event maps amp up the Halloween themes and designs much more, and tend to focus on green-and-blue color schemes. This map doesn't have any type of boss; those wouldn't start until the next year. Merasmus, who stars in or narrates most of the Halloween events, didn't debut until the fourth event. Finally, subsequent events introduced a deluge of Halloween cosmetics. How many did the first one have? Two.
  • Official Fan-Submitted Content was originally submitted through an official site instead of the Steam Workshop.
• Tekken:
  • The series begins with the eponymous Tekken (1994) which features only two game modes, Arcade and VS, as well as an Options menu. You can't sidestep at all, and the game has no damage scaling whatsoever, which means that you can take out more than half your opponent's health bar with a short juggle. It also features crude graphics (albeit impressive at the time), half the characters that the games would usually have, levels based on world monuments rather than ones which suit the characters, a Galaga opening game, and the bizarre element of having to unlock characters by playing said Galaga game (Heihachi and Devil Kazuya). The music and stages are also very different, the name of the stage appearing on the screen during matches. The boss characters are more powerful clones of the starting characters, albeit with some unique special moves. P. Jack looks far more powerful than some of the later Jack (he has a drill, which he can't use), Yoshimitsu resembles a knight rather than a ninja, Heihachi is the Big Bad, and Kazuya is the lead character despite being pushed into the background in every other appearance he's made. Kunimitsu appears male rather than female (and is not revealed to be female until the next game). It also features the first Jack who, whilst essentially the same as Jack-2, doesn't appear in any other game (it should be noted that none of the Jacks barring P. Jack—who underwent a facelift between the first and second games—reappeared in a subsequent canonical game, instead being replaced by the newest model in their line). Devil Kazuya is essentially Kazuya in a purple suit with wings, but he has all the same moves (meaning he can't fly). Tekken was released at a time when its graphical capabilities and arcade perfect nature was all that was needed to impress people.
  • By the time of Tekken 2, things had changed, and so the series started to become what it is today in its sequel, with all the usual modes such as Time Attack, Team Battle, Survival and Practise added. The Japanese version also features a Theatre Mode. All of these would become standard for the series. However, the characters were still quite crudely rendered, and some of the music, boss characters, and stages were a holdover from Tekken. Kazuya, now the Big Bad of the game, is able to sidestep, albeit not as much as characters later can. You can also use cheats like big head mode, wire frame mode, and sky mode (where kicks launch your opponent much higher than normal), things which were never included in later games.
  • From the first to third games, stages were uniform and consisted entirely of a single plane that went on for infinity in all directions with a simple background. Tekken 4 would introduce more varied stages, with walls and other boundaries, although the series would continue to retain the original boundaryless style of arena for some stages.
• Telepath RPG: The first game was a traditional turn based RPG with only a single playable characters. All following games of the series are tactical RPGs with a variety of playable characters. The first game also had summoning magic which got completely scrapped after that.
• Tetris:
  • No hold, no lock delay (pieces lock into place as soon as they hit the floor or the top of another piece) unless it's a game made by Sega, slower sideways movement (again unless it's by Sega), a completely random randomizer notorious for I-piece droughts and consecutive S- and Z-pieces, and only counterclockwise rotation (in pre-Nintendo versions). So you've cleared 200 lines in Tetris DS, and gotten GM rank in Tetris: The Grand Master; NES and Game Boy Tetris's Level 19 should feel like nothing... right?
  • In the Atari arcade version: separated levels with an end-of-level bonus based on the height of your field, line-raising as a level feature instead of a multiplayer punishment, and having to play on levels whose designs were based on the initials of the top three high-score entries.
  • Sega's 1988 arcade version of Tetris supports up to three buttons...that all rotate counterclockwise.
• Tex Murphy: The first game, Mean Streets, had flight sim and run & gun sequences in addition to the adventure gameplay. The second game drops the flight sim/run and gun gameplay, and the other games from there on (including the Mean Streets remake) are FMV point & click adventures.
• Thunder Force: The first game was a free-roaming overhead-view shooter, the sequel had an equal share of top-down and sidescrolling levels, and the rest of the series only kept the sidescrolling levels. Also in the first two games, you lost all weapons except Twin and Back upon death, whereas in newer games you only lose your current weapon.
• Time Crisis: Unlike its sequels, the first game is single-player only with a Heroic Mime protagonist and doesn't have two protagonists with a dual screen, Wild Dog is the Final Boss and the Big Bad is the second-to-last boss, there's no warning when the enemies' bullets will hit you, the timer doesn't reset to 40 seconds during gameplay transitions, the timer will keep counting down even during action sequences, and this is the only game in the series where you will lose all of your lives if you run out of time. As for playing for score: There's no score at all, you're ranked strictly on time; in fact, there's even a Timed Mode where you can time-attack any of the three stages with infinite lives, a feature not seen in any game since.
• TimeSplitters: The first game is significantly different from the rest of the series:
  • The game's story mode simply placed you in a time period with no cutscenes and barely any story, and all levels simply required you to find an item and bring it to a specific point. Compare this to the decent story of the second and complex, brilliant and humour-filled time-travel epic of the third. The first TimeSplitters does make sense as part of the series plotline in retrospect, but at the time it was a series of disconnected gauntlets at various points in time with only the barest story connected to each one, and no over-arching plot. The only unifying factor was things getting really weird partway through each stage. In retrospect, it chronicles the initial emergence of the Time Splitters as they strike throughout human history and the people who managed to survive and even thwart them, but at the time it just seemed strange.
  • As a side-effect of the above, the first game had all campaign maps available in arcade mode, although a few had some areas locked off. Later games would have separate map selections for campaign and arcade modes due to the objective-based level design being incompatible with the fast-paced multiplayer action, although a few maps are available in both modes (the arcade mode version being shrunken down significantly) and others are clear analogues to campaign levels.
  • The first game only had Challenge mode as extra single-player content, and it had to be unlocked by finishing all campaign levels. Later games would split things between Arcade League and Challenge, both available from the start, with the former consisting of standard matches against the AI with specific rules and the latter having unusual goals such as shooting cardboard cut-outs or destroying windows.
  • The first game lacked character stats, so all characters had the same health, speed, and accuracy. The only difference between characters was size, so there was no reason to not pick a smaller and harder to shoot character.
  • The characters of the series tended to change a fair bit from game-to-game, owing to how each game in the series has differing philosophies over how to handle their narrative. Harry Tipper for example went from being a Cowboy Cop in the first game to a James Bond parody in the other two. Sergeant Cortez (who wasn't even in the first game, despite being the main character of the other two) similarly went from being a rather generic Hollywood Action Hero in 2 to a dorky Idiot Hero in Future Perfect.
  • In terms of setting, the first game was happy to indulge in an exaggerated case of I Want My Jetpack when it came to levels set in the future. The game was released in 2000, but "Cyberden" was set in 2005, and the golden age sci-fi inspired "Planet X" and "Spaceways" took place in 2020 and 2035 respectively. By TimeSplitters 2, the "cyberpunk era" had been pushed back to 2019 (and unlike "Cyberden", featured no sign of killer robots), while "Return to Planet X" now takes place in 2280.
  • The first game never saw a release for any platform outside of the Playstation 2. The sequels would be distributed to all three consoles of the sixth generation, but the first game would remain elusive to those who did not own a Playstation 2.
  • There are no monkeys in the game whatsoever, when the next games have them.
• Tomb Raider: The first game, Tomb Raider I (1996), needs time to get used to if you played the other games in the series. Lara Croft doesn't have flares in the first game, nor does she have the ability to duck and crawl, sprint, monkey swing, or even flip herself in a 180 degree turn when she jumps forward or back. Saving was also regulated to checkpoint style save crystals whereas all other games after the first one allowed you to save at any time. Lara also has very few guns compared to her arsenal in the later installments. The Anniversary remake keeps the paltry amount of guns. In the original game, Lara Croft notably lacks her trademark ponytail in gameplay (it's present in FMV cutscenes), due to graphical limitations of the time. Likewise, Lara's breasts in the first game were rendered as triangles/cones (except in the FMVs).
• Total War: Many elements such as dynasties being more important and a more fluid take on the "Risk"-Style Map were introduced in Rome: Total War; the first two installments (Shogun: Total War and Medieval: Total War) had stricter Risk Style Maps, less application of dynastic mechanics, and the overpowered "jedi general" mechanic. Both of these have been remade now in the style established by Rome. Shogun II also has naval combat, albeit markedly different from the Age Of Sail fights in Empire and Napoleon in focusing more on boarding actions than cannon volleys. Also, the dynasty mechanic was abandoned in Empire and Napoleon, the former actually allowing you to switch governments types through revolution, and brought back in Shogun II.
• Touhou Project:
  • PC-98 games:
    • The first game, Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers, was a strange sort of Breakout/Arkanoid game with gravity and lots of bullet dodging; from the second game onward the series was firmly in the Shoot 'Em Up genre, but the Bullet Hell formula prevalent in the Windows series was not established until the fourth PC-98 game (out of five), and the makings of the "spell card" system that would dominate the Windows Touhou games wasn't present until the fifth game. The overall tone and character designs are still fairly different.
    • While most characters in the Windows games have last names, most PC-98-era characters don't.
    • Most enemies in Windows games are either fairies or balls of energy; in the PC-98 games, various other entities such as ghosts and fairies on the ground join the fray.
    • In Touhou Gensokyo ~ Lotus Land Story and Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square, you get a bomb back after each stage. Not in the Windows games, unless you play as a specific character pair in Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night.
    • Characters who would go on to appear in the Windows games look dramatically different. Reimu has a more traditional-looking miko outfit (no armpit jokes for you) and boasts purple hair. Marisa, in her first incarnation, has a purple outfit and red hair; her signature blond hair doesn't show up until a few games later. Yuuka's hair is longer, curlier, and she wears pants instead of a skirt, and that's only in her second form; when you encounter her initially she's wearing pink pajamas of all things. Alice is a young child, and her outfit is really only similar in that it's heavy on blue.
  • The early Windows games have some oddness of their own:
    • In the sixth and seventh games, nonspells were treated like traditional shmup boss patterns, cycling through a few different attacks that could overlap rather than the highly structured patterns the series is known for, leaving that to the spellcards. By the time the eighth game came out, nonspells followed the same basic design philosphy as spellcards.
    • The setting was initially portrayed as large and full of mystery and danger. There was no indication there's only one human village, travel seems to take a while, and the concept of lost village makes sense. Around the time of Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View the setting got hammered down fairly well as being small and mostly documented.
    • Youkai tended to have Western names unless they had a good reason not to, the exact opposite of the situation from the 9th game on. Similarly, several were given a generic species of 'youkai' instead of something specific.
    • The seventh game features a "Phantasm Stage" beyond the normal Extra Stage, which hasn't reappeared in any game since, although fans often come up with custom Phantasm stages and bosses for other games. However, given that the boss of said stage is Yukari, it can be inferred that she twisted some boundaries to put herself in the game when there was otherwise no more room.
  • The sixth game in particular, (Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil) being the first Windows game, can seem very odd compared to the later entries:
    • You can't see your hitbox when focused. Focusing itself simply moves the option closer to the center, with none of the major changes to shot common in later games.
    • No boss markers at the bottom of the screen. Particularly nasty with the high mobility and randomness of boss movement carried over from the PC-98 games (there it was less of an issue with smaller screens and more shot spread).
    • On Easy Mode, you couldn't play the final stage at all; the game simply ended after Stage 5 with no ending (not even the bad one). Later installments would not do this and would let you fight the final boss on any difficulty.
    • It's the only main-series danmaku game to not have a score/power-up gimmick of some sort. Even the PC-98 games had some unique way to increase score (albeit not terribly thematic ones), but here you're stuck with collecting point items and speedkilling bosses.
• TrackMania: The first few TrackMania games lack the Stadium environment entirely. The Stadium environment has became by far the most popular racing environment, to the point where the latest entry, TrackMania (2020) only has Stadium.
• Trauma Center: The first game, Trauma Center: Under the Knife, has a number of quirks that were never repeated in the remainder of the series:
  • Organs and bodies were rendered to look more realistic, rather than bright and colorful like in later installments. On the other side of the spectrum, character artwork was noticeably more shonen-esque, whereas Second Opinion onward would go for a more realistic look provided by Masayuki Doi (an Atlus regular who would go on to be the lead artist for Shin Megami Tensei IV).
  • The game uses a different set of sound effects compared to the standard set used throughout the rest of the series. GUILT also had completely different designs across the board.
  • There were many gameplay mechanics that stand out. You had a "Miss Limit" of 20; if you miss enough times the operation will end in failure. Future games drop the Miss Limit, making losing vitals, running out of time or the occasional Non-Standard Game Over the only ways to fail an operation. Several ailments were also dealt with differently. Triti had to be cut out with the scalpel after removing its pins, while gauze had to be massaged down after applying the gel. Most notable is that you have both the Hand and the Bandage as tools you can select at anytime; the former used for the aforementioned massaging as well as for CPR, while the bandage was used to close up patients. Due to their extremely limited uses, they were removed from the tool selection in future games, only becoming selectable when relevant.
  • The sixth and final story chapter of Under the Knife took the form of a Boss Rush, in which you would deal with each GUILT strain one-by-one. The final chapters of future games tend to feature far more diverse objectives, including Second Opinion, which remade Under the Knife's sixth chapter from scratch. This was likely because the Brutal Bonus Level of each game is also a Boss Rush; finishing Under the Knife only to discover that the bonus chapter was a harder version of what you just accomplished was a bit of a pacing oddity.
• Twisted Metal: The first game, Twisted Metal (1995), in a similar manner to Cool Boarders, plays more like a glorified tech demo with unfinished elements than the games that followed it. The tone and setting are much more down-to-earth and restrained, being confined to Los Angeles instead of being all over the world and having far less humor. The game also retains several elements indicative of a plan to have more live-action aspects — the driver pictures are based on photos of actual people, and the endings consist of scrolling text over a picture of an actor portraying Calypso (a remnant of deleted live-action videos that were later included in the Twisted Metal: Head-On re-release). Much of what defined the series was either not present or utilized elements never seen again — the game began with a glorified tutorial level that had players going one-on-one with another competitor in a small arena, there were no special moves and special attacks were collectable items (instead of regenerating after a set amount of time). The characters weren't worked out, either — Needles Kane lacked his trademark Flaming Hair, Calypso is not such a Jackass Genie, and Minion is the final boss (unlike TM2, where he's a midgame boss and had a Retcon to his origin story).

U

• Ultima: The series had some bizarre quirks throughout the early installments.
  • The first two games, Ultima I and Ultima II, had only a single player character, customizable to some degree; the third game included a party of up to four, all intimately customizable; every game after that allows only small adjustments to the main character (the Avatar) during character creation.
  • The first three games include fantastic races as playable characters and friendly NPCs; from the fourth game onward, no non-human good characters can be found save the occasional monstrous defector in a town or castle. What happened to them during the unification of Britannia?
  • The first two games include space exploration and Schizo Tech. Both also involve Time Travel, although in the first game it's just to get to the end boss, where in the second it's a necessary mechanic.
  • The first game hasn't got magical, mysteriously appearing and disappearing long-distance travel gates; the second has "time gates" which show up at specific places ever X number of steps to travel between different time zones; from the third on these became the Moongates.
  • Ultima I also includes quests to defeat specific monsters found only in the dungeon in order to obtain benefits from various kings.
  • Ultima I and Ultima III take place in "Sosaria"; Ultima II is on Earth (in various times in history). Between the third and fourth installments, Sosaria is united under the rule of Lord British and takes its new name (Britannia) from him.
  • Ultima II is the only game with dungeon-like "Towers" as well as dungeons — and the only installment in the series where the dungeons play no useful part in furthering your quest.
  • Ultima III introduced a starvation mechanic, where characters suffer damage over time if they run out of food. Ultima II just kills you off if the food counter hits zero. This mechanic held on for two more games, until it was retired in Ultima VI, which merely didn't allow you to recover hitpoints or magic while resting if you had no food. The starvation mechanic was omitted from the NES version of Ultima IV.
  • Ultima IV requires the character to not just be virtuous, but to be virtuous in eight specific ways. In Sosaria, the player character(s) were expected to lie, cheat, steal and murder their way to the final showdown; after the fourth installment, the Avatar is just expected to be good, not to be specifically good.
• Uncharted: The first game, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, has some noticeable changes in the gameplay compared to the sequels. There are a few quick time events, Drake must manually switch to grenades from his current weapon in order to throw them, there is no zoom in feature for automatic weapons, machine gun turrets Drake can commandeer have unlimited ammo as opposed to the sequels where the ammo is limited, and the melee combat system is much more simplistic. And though enemies do improve in gear as the game goes on, the Heavily Armored Mook enemies that otherwise take heavy fire or headshots to finish off are absent. Story-wise, the plot is a bit more simple as well, with the action taking place almost entirely on an island; only 3 out of 22 chapters take place outside the island, as opposed to the vast number of locations and settings the sequels visit. The relationships between some of the characters also hadn’t been nailed down yet and are much different than in the sequels. Nathan and Sully’s relationship being the one that’s the most different. In this one it's more like a somewhat cold business partnership instead of the father/son one of the rest of the franchise. Compare Nate’s pretty non-plussed reaction to Sully’s alleged death in this game to him losing it over the same alleged death in the third game.
• Uncle Albert's Adventures: In the first game, Uncle Albert's Magical Album:
  • The various pages in the game do not follow any theme, unlike in the later games.
  • The English title logo is pale yellow with a black outline rather than black with a white outline like for the original French version. The other English translated games have their logo titles in black and white, just like the French covers.

V

• Valis: While later games, including all of the US releases, had rather linear gameplay, the original version of the first game released on Japanese computers had mazelike levels a naive player could easily get lost in, as did its early remake on the Famicom.
• Virtua Tennis: In the first game, KING (as well as his doubles teammate MASTER) looked like a regular modern asian tennis player and a bearded black tennis coach, respectively. From the second game onwards, King (as well as Queen and Duke, depending on the game) would start looking like stereotypical old British players.

W

• Wangan Midnight: The first game, Wangan Midnight (2001), only lets you drive in the Tokyo area and a small subset of the Wangan Expressway. Furthermore, to change your car's tuning, you don't do so before a race; you can only do so via a menu you can access only after inserting your card, versus races as well as stages 41-60 (the latter 2/3 of the Story Mode) have you race one lap around the course, and after the initial 20 tuning blocks, it takes five stages to get a new tuning block, while in later games the next 10 blocks appear every two stages. It also only takes 8 blocks to go from 600 to 800 HP, as opposed to 10 in later games.
• Warcraft:
  • Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, the first of the series, had a much grittier, more realistic art style, that definitely had color, but seemed more to help distinguish the low resolution sprites. Warcraft II started laying down the foundation for the future art style, but it wasn't until Warcraft III that the style fully embraced cartoony proportions and exaggerated animations. It should be noted that the cinematic trailers lean toward the photo-realistic to this day.
  • The first game allows you to build roads and walls, and buildings must be built next to roads. Once an unit is selected every action it will perform has to be chosen from a menu, including walking. All units need to be sent individually (or at maximum four at once) for a group action. Clicking on your own unit while a soldier is selected leads to Friendly Fire, while clicking "Heal" on an enemy unit does just that.
  • In the first and second games, humans talk about God (instead of The Light), and the lore mentions summoning demons from Hell (instead of the Twisting Nether). Orcs are Always Chaotic Evil because the humans are the Good Guys.
  • Warcraft started out as a fairly Low Fantasy, with a vaguely medieval human kingdom being invaded by orcs, ogres, and other monsters that either came with them or were summoned by them, all of which were treated as essentially demonic. Warcraft II expanded the world by revealing that standard fantasy races such as elves and dwarves simply lived north of the previous lands and the new races took sides with either the humans or orcs to form the now famous Alliance and Horde. The goblins and off-screen gnomes would provide a bit of Schizo Tech, but it was limited to them, canonically unreliable, and rarely acknowledged by the rest of the world in-universe. This remained more or less the status quo all the way through World of Warcraft, until The Burning Crusade.
  • World Of Warcraft initially started with undead basically being Always Chaotic Evil (something the Tabletop Game, which was written inbetween Warcraft III and World Of Warcraft, stated outright) as implied by them having the biggest number of evil-themed quests (such as killing farmers or torturing prisoners). This was gradually phased out over the various expansions, until there was eventually an undead paladin added (granted, he didn't choose undeath, but still remains a good guy despite being so.)
  • At the time, The Burning Crusade's introduction of heavy sci-fi elements was quite controversial. The demons were no longer simply magical monsters from a hellish realm, but a coalition of races collected from various worlds that heavily employed technology. Meanwhile, the Light further changed into a power related in some way to a strange alien race known as the naaru that builds spaceships. Even so, the introduction of a craftable motorcycle in the following expansion was still seen as quite out of place. Regardless, The Burning Crusade marked a turning point from what had become a High Fantasy, into a setting where anything goes and nothing raises an eyebrow anymore. Word of God has gone on record saying that the tech level is still around flintlock level, and the really crazy things aren't entirely canon and are mostly for Rule of Fun and Rule of Cool.
  • On a more low-key note, when Malfurion Stormrage was introduced in the original Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, he was called simply Furion, but then his name was changed to Malfurion in the expansion The Frozen Throne and remained that way ever since.
  • Another low key example is that prior to Wrath of the Lich King, racial leaders only used unique variants of their race's standard appearance. Starting with Wrath, Blizzard began rolling out custom models for the leaders. While some leaders changed little, many are unrecognizable compared to their early designs.
  • Sylvanas Windrunner had the biggest change in appearance. In the original release she, an undead High Elf, used a reskinned Night Elf model, as Blood and High Elves only used simply placeholder models at the time. In the Wrath beta she was given a reskinned Blood Elf model before that was replaced with the first version of her current unique model.
  • When the Achievement System debuted in Wrath, some bosses had multiple achievements associated with them, some mutually exclusive, although only one achievement per boss(usually the hardest one) counted toward the meta achievements for raids. In later raids, there is only one achievement per boss.
  • Difficulty modes for raids were also different. 25-man raids generally required better gear than their 10-man counterparts, hence the existence of one achievement that was awarded for completing 10-man Ulduar without outgearing it. Some of the "hard modes" for Ulduar had to be activated manually(e.g. the Big Red Button in Mimiron's arena), and Heroic raids didn't debut until Trial of the Crusader. Naturally, this seems quite strange to those who are more familiar with flexible raids and fixed 20-man Mythic raids.
  • A few quests in vanilla-era WoW could be failed, thus forcing players to cancel them and get the quests again. While similar results can happen with some Escort Mission quests, you only need to talk to the NPC in question to try again.
  • The whole Genre Shift of the franchise in general counts: the first two games were pure Real-Time Strategy. Warcraft 3 was the first to add RPG Elements, but it wasn't until World of Warcraft that the game made the shift into a pure RPG.
• Warlight: An indie, free-to-play Risk-like that allows players to generate content, most early-made maps lack elements such as bonus links or connection lines. That does not make them unplayable but it is notable and confusing to the inexperienced player.
• Watch_Dogs:
  • DedSec did appear in the first game, but as a morally ambiguous third party faction with He Who Fights Monsters tendencies. Both 2 and Legion not only have their protagonists work directly for DedSec, but the group is also depicted in a far more positive light; less Well Intentioned Extremists and more La Résistance.
  • Many gameplay elements of the first game are generally less polished than in future installments. To unlock side content, Aiden must infiltrate and tamper with ctOS Towers (the game's version of the then-ubiquitous "Ubisoft Towers"), which 2 would drop. Aiden's movement is much more limited, and he lacks any non-lethal options beyond his baton. The game's story missions are played out in a linear order, and split into multiple acts that gradually escalate the strength of enemies upon completion; later games are much less linear and drop the act structure. Police rarely patrol the streets, and upon gaining a wanted level they will first scan the area before sending backup. Aiden's clothing customisation options mostly amount to reskins of his default outfit, a far cry from Marcus' impressive and varied range of clothing options. Aiden can steal money via hacking in the same way Marcus can, but he must go through the additional step of visiting an ATM to take out the money.
  • Combat itself would be heavily downplayed as the series went on. Aiden had a Hyperspace Arsenal, while Marcus is limited to two weapons alongside his stun gun, and the cast of Legion are limited to two weapons which are strictly character-specific. Aiden also had access to an Item Crafting mechanic, were he could find or buy items scattered around the game world, and choose to turn them into consumables such as grenades and powerful hacks in the midst of battle. 2 abandons this system, and instead turns items into abilities on a cooldown.
  • The first game is also much darker in both narrative and aesthetics than the Lighter and Softer sequels. Even the gloomy London of Legion makes up for the dour tone by invoking more Denser and Wackier gameplay.
• WipEout: The first game, Wipeout (1995), has a different, less minimalistic style for both the GUI and the vehicles. The vehicle is invincible and so weapons only slow you down, and the ability to select between two pilots for each teams, a feature which would only reappear in Wipeout Fusion, itself an oddball.
• Wolfenstein: The third game, Wolfenstein 3-D, and its sequels are one of the most influential first person shooters of all time, creating the genre. Starting with the third game, that is — the first two games, Castle Wolfenstein, were overhead stealth titles. Interestingly, until Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus in 2017, Castle Wolfenstein was also the only game in the series to get a sequel from the same developers - every other dev to get their hands on the property would put out a single game and, at best, one expansion for it before it switched hands again.
• Wonder Boy: The first game, Wonder Boy (1986), is nothing like the rest of the series. Whereas all the games from Wonder Boy in Monster Land and onward are side-scrolling action RPGs (except for Monster Lair, which was an auto-scrolling platformer with shoot'em up segments), the original Wonder Boy was a stage-based platformer similar to Super Mario Bros.. NES players will most likely recognize the game under the title of Adventure Island, a modified port by Hudson Soft that replaced the original main character with Hudson's gaming expert Takahashi-Meijin (aka Master Higgins), which is part of the reason why developer Westone took the Wonder Boy series into a different direction for its sequels.
• Worms: The first game, Worms (1995), doesn't have the more cartoony style that every game in the series after it has.

X

• X: The first game, X: Beyond the Frontier, was rather obviously an immature game. You could only pilot the one ship you started with, the interface was slow and unintuitive and its learning curve was more of a learning mountain of doom, the ships didn't have defenses beyond shields, trade and station building was limited and combat was extremely simplistic. The X-Tension, uh, extension was widely considered "what Beyond the Frontier was meant to be" — and even that was still somewhat unripe, especially concerning combat — which, if anything, was even more simplistic due to the tendency of the AI to fly in a straight line while under attack. It took four years after Beyond the Frontier for X2: the Threat to come out, and that finally gave the game the features and gameplay mechanics it's maintained since then and that we know from X3: Terran Conflict.
• Xenoblade Chronicles: The first game, Xenoblade Chronicles 1, has several distinct differences from later games:
  • Party members have more strictly defined roles, but a wider pallette of combat arts to work with. Later games would introduce a Job System that allows for much greater party customization at the expense of allowing each party member to have four arts equipped at a time.
  • A recurring character's name is localized as "Vangarre" in the first game, and as "Vandham" in all subsequent games.
  • The first game is the only one that doesn't give the term "Blade" special significance In-Universe; in Xenoblade Chronicles X it's the name of the organization the protagonist belongs to, in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 it's used to refer to the Artificial Human characters that make up a sizeable chunk of the cast, and in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 it's the name given to the characters' personal weapons.
  • The first game's party is limited to the six primary characters, with no other recruitable characters outside of two Guest Star Party Members. All the later games have a large number of Optional Party Members to recruit.

Y

• Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen:
  • Adol's artwork in the PC-88 version's manual looks totally different from his usual appearance, being brown-haired and dressed in blue, among other things. All future artwork of Adol, starting with the manual for Ys II, use his more familiar appearance.
  • There's a very basic plot, a small handful of notable characters you go back to repeatedly, and Dogi is just some notable bandit stuck in the Darm Tower that crushes walls. You also have no magic or extra features beyond the Rings that can't be used in boss fights, leaving players with only the classic Bump Combat as their way of fighting. Even its own sequel would expand upon these things, and most subsequent games in the series would add new features or gimmicks on top of the series eventually hitting a ridiculous number of characters.
• Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter: The American TG-16 release of Ys I & II referred to Dogi as "Colin". Subsequent North American releases of the franchise ignored the change.
• Ys III: Wanderers from Ys: The intro of the Turbografx 16 version and a cutscene from the Playstation 2 version shows Genos as a pure human. Starting with the remake, he has been established as a member of the Eldeen.
• Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim: This is the first Ys game made in the Napishtim Engine and as such, it has a lot of differences compared to Ys: The Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin:
  • There's no fast travel between save points (until it was retroactively patched in the Steam/GOG versions);
  • There's no buff potions or experience multiplier;
  • Healing items are used like any other RPGs by going to a menu instead of being instant pickups (until Catastrophe Mode was added in the Steam/GOG versions);
  • Unlike in the next two games where you have a single weapon and three main skills, this game has Adol using three swords, and all of them must be upgraded with gold and Emelas until they reach their maximum level. The game also lacks any skills, as all three weapons have a special attack that can only be unleashed if their magic meter is full.
  • There's no double jumping or, as mentioned above, skills that allow the player to float midair. Instead there's only dash jumping and that's it;
  • There's no Boost Mode;
• Ys SEVEN: This was the first game in the series to use a party system with Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors for combat, and it has a few differences from how it would work in later entries. For example, players need to hold down the attack button to use a Charge Attack, but future installments would have it charge automatically. Another example is that attack skills can only be acquired by equipping specific weapons and can only be used independently of said weapons after performing them enough times. In later games, attack skills are automatically learned via level up or using a previous skill enough times and can be used regardless of weaponry.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Most video games in the franchise are based on the Duel Monsters anime or the manga and focus on the card game rules, making Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule Breed and Battle's Toei anime and Capsule Monsters basis stand out.
  • The first "true" Yu-Gi-Oh! game, Duel Monsters for the Game Boy, preceded the actual card game. Consequently, it is very strange to play it in light of what came later, and many of its idiosyncrasies carried over into future titles. Trap Cards do not exist and Spell Cards are much less common, you can only play one card per turn, only one obtainable monster possesses an effect (Petit Moth), attack point gains are percentage-based rather than static values and go by "levels", Levels, Tributes, and Rituals aren't a thing at all, Fusions are accomplished without Polymerization, Burn cards are vastly more powerful (Tremendous Fire did 5000 damage), and a monster left in Attack Position must attack. Also, instead of opponents having preset Decks, their decks were semi-randomized.
  • In general, early Yu-Gi-Oh games tended to bear little resemblance to the card game, and often had their own interpretations of rules from the manga or anime. Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories had an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system that carried into several later games, as well as Deck Cost and Duelist Level placing an artificial cap on the power of your deck. In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards, all Effect Monsters barring Petit Moth are Flip Monsters, and Fusions do not exist. It wasn't until The Eternal Duelist's Soul that they started to actually try to recreate the game's rules.
  • Since the games came out contemporaneously with the manga and anime, quite a bit of lore and characterization established in them is unusual in light of what would come later. Siamun Muran is a major recurring figure and mentor character in many games who shows up as early as Duelist Kingdom, when in the series he's a relatively minor character who doesn't show up until the very last arc, and it doesn't seem like the writers were aware he's a preincarnation of Yugi's grandfather. Ishizu's personality in Forbidden Memories and Duel Monsters II casts her as a menacing villain, when in the series, she's depicted as one of the most moral characters around, suggesting the writers were working off Takahashi's early concepts.
  • The ban list didn't exist in the earliest video games with cards being Limited or Semi-Limited and when the ban list was instituted, many cards weren't banned like they are today.
  • The aforementioned first game and Dark Duel Stories had Tea appearing after a duel and giving you cards for beating the opponent. Later games had you selecting from different booster packs.
  • Many games were outright weird in the early days such as most games having opponents in tiers and you had to beat each opponent in a tier a certain amount of times to move on and Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom being an RPG.

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Miscellaneous

• Early Atari 2600 games used game select and difficulty switches to select game parameters rather than menus due to the low amount of memory and cartridge storage. Games released later in the system lifespan did use menus as cartridge storage increased and the switches were less frequently used. Early models also had the difficulty switches up front, known to fans as "six-switchers." Later models moved the switches to the back, known as "fours-switchers," even though both models had six switches. The game reset switch also starts games.
• The original Game Boy started out with just a light gray edition in 1989. Then came the Play It Loud! series in 1995, in which it was released in five more colors (along with white in Japan and blue in Europe), and that sets the standard for all subsequent handhelds by Nintendo (starting with the Game Boy Pocket in '97) to be released in all different colors upon launch.
• In North America, the first year or so of PlayStation titles were packaged in oversized longboxes (similar to the elongated cases used for the Sega CD and US/EU Sega Saturn games), which had multiple variants. These would eventually be replaced by the more economical jewel case, with many of the popular longbox games being reprinted in this format.
• Early PlayStation 2 games also came in generic DVD cases in America instead of the cases with a memory card holder or PlayStation logo embossed inside. Many early games were also still being released on CDs (easily identifiable by their blue backs) until DVD became the dominant format for the system.
• PlayStation 3 games up to 2009 came in packaging similar to the PS1 with the "Spider-Man"-style logo on the side of the box and a PlayStation logo on the label of the disc. When the PS3 undergone a rebrand in 2009 to coincide with the then-newly released Slim model, the logo was changed to the more familiar PS2-style PS3 logo akin to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 logos, and the game packaging was changed accordingly, with it more resembling the packaging for PS4 games.
• One of the earliest games for Nintendo 3DS, Super Mario 3D Land, had two "modes" of stereoscopic 3D that could be freely swapped between: one where the graphics "pop out" of the screen, and one where they "sink into" the screen. Because of how disorienting the former effect is, no future game included this feature, and the vast majority went with the "sink in" style.
• Early Nintendo 3DS and Wii U games came with full-fledged physical manuals. Eventually these were watered down into single paper pamphlets and eventually even that was just replaced with a generic paper telling you how to view the digital manual. Some games still come with manuals however they're very rare and mostly limited to indie games.

Unsorted

Action Adventure

Beat 'em Up/Hack 'n Slash

Edutainment Game

Fighting Game

First-Person Shooter

Platform Game

Puzzle Game

Racing Game

Real-Time Strategy

Run-and-Gun

Rhythm Game

Shoot 'Em Up

Simulation Game

Survival Horror

Visual Novel

Other

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Not an Example

• Dark Cloud is this to Level-5 in general — if you play it now, you'd be surprised at how toned down, plot-light, and lack of quirkiness (though it's still there) it has compared to their more recent games like Ni no Kuni or Jeanne d'Arc. General example
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest III introduced many series staples. The ability to go where you wish via Return/Zoom spell or Wing of Wyvern/Chimera Wing, Vitality/Intelligence/Luck appeared as new stats, the Agility stat now determined when monsters/player characters would act, the Day/Night cycle, experience is now divided amongst party members (a lone character gets more experience than 4 characters), the enemy class Mimic first appears. This was also the first game to give Japanese gamers a battery save (something that US players had enjoyed since Dragon Quest) Not an example
• The "prototypes" of the SD Gundam G Generation series were a series of Super Famicom games called SD Gundam Generation. There were six games set around various events - the One Year War, the Gryps Conflict, the First Neo-Zeon War, a combination of the second Neo-Zeon War and Cosmo Babylonia conflict, the Zanscare War and the 13th Gundam Fight. Each game had a story mode and a two-player mode where players could purchase units and battleships and play until one side ran out. Not an example, different works
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • The spin-off Devil Summoner is like this. The first two Devil Summoner titles are basically just like the main Shin Megami Tensei series except more straightforward and having no Karma Meter. The two Raidou Kuzunoha prequels might as well be a separate series since they are Action RPGs. The only things they have in common is that they both involve a detective agency and a demon summoner from a Kuzunoha clan. Perhaps in part to rectify this, the remake of Soul Hackers has Raidou as a bonus boss. Not an example, different sub-series
  • Shin Megami Tensei I and II included sci-fi elements unrelated to demons, such as robots, mutants, and psychic powers. Not enough context
• Super Robot Wars:
  • Shin Super Robot Wars's engine occupies an evolutionary slot somewhere between the original Famicom mechanics and the "modern" 2-D engine used in the Complete Box and turbocharged for F/F Final. Its "classic" features include:
    • Individually upgradable weapons, which is annoying for a series that encourages the player to see as many combat animations as possible. This quickly degenerates into using one (hopefully free) regular-duty P weapon, and one "big gun" for dispatching bosses or other heavies.
    • Single-instance transformable mecha during Intermission. This is a very strange arrangement where you must explicitly "transform" or "combine" units to see what their different capabilities are. This is more than a mere annoyance when you see that it impacts how units sortie — if a unit is transformed to flying mode on a map precluding flying-only vehicles, it will be unsortiable. Moreover, combinable units have a separate set of equipment slots from their constituent units, so beware!
    • Old-school magical mechanics. While the spell list is considerable expanded over most of the "original" chronology games, spells like "Encourage" only work on adjacent units instead of allowing arbitrary selection. The most telltale sign is that "Luck" confers both double money and double experience.
    • Shin also has hidden items, which can be missed if you don't use a guide. Isn't this Oddball in the Series?
• DC Universe Online:
  • The game gets schizophrenic as the voice clips from the beginning of the game clearly call Shazam! "Captain Marvel", yet the subtitles keep saying "Shazam". Have no idea what this is saying
• Diablo I had some traits not repeated in later games. There's only 3 character classes and they basically function the same except for one special skill. The Warrior could repair items. The Rogue could disarm traps. The Sorcerer can recharge staves. There is only one town. The dungeon maps are all fixed whereas in Diablo II they were randomly generated. There is no day/night cycle, and all the fighting is done indoors and underground. Duplicated entries between folders "Beat 'em Up/Hack 'n Slash", "Role-Playing Games
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Much of this is attributed to the first game having No Budget and being essentially a side project that Nintendo employees worked on in their spare time. After the surprise success of the first game, the series became one of Nintendo's premier franchises and received a much more substantial budget and development effort from Melee onward. Not an example and Conversation in the Main Page
• Tekken:
  • By Tekken 3, commonly regarded as the best in the main series (Tekken Tag is considered the best overall), all of the flaws had been addressed and it set the stage for the series as we know it today. Unrelated sentence
• Soul Series:
  • The Weapon Break feature was somewhat revisited in Soulcalibur IV with the Soul Gauge, where blocking too much (indicated by a gem embedded in the player's lifebar changing colors before the entire lifebar itself began flashing red at critical levels) would cause your character to enter a state of vulnerability known as Soul Crush, which would also give the opponent the chance to end the round with an instant deathblow, a Critical Finish. Critical Edges returned in SCV, although in name only, as they now functioned like your typical fighting game super, with the enhanced specials (called Brave Edges) more closely (but not entirely) resembling the Critical Edges of the first game. Not Early-Installment Weirdness
• Guilty Gear's initial outing had quite a few quirks that were later replaced for the better, as seen here:
  • Instant Kills in the first game would not only win the current round, but the entire fight and were relatively easy to use. Later games kept the IKs, but they only won the current round, were much harder to pull off and ended up disabling the super meter for the rest of the round if it whiffed.
  • A few characters also changed between the first and second game outside of story reasons:
    • Ky was given a less flashy Instant Kill as Zwei Voltage didn't fit his character.
    • Axl had one of the biggest redesigns — his themes went from "March of the Wicked King" to "Make Oneself" to "A Slow Waker,"^note though a couple other GG1 vets didn't have their original themes retained for X and beyond, his costume underwent many significant changes between installments and his fighting style went from revolving around unorthodox move mechanics (such as a standing kick that sends him sliding halfway across the screen) to a more refined ranged zoning style akin to Dhalsim.
  • In the first game, super moves could be performed indefinitely once a character was at 50% life or below, turning characters like Millia or Justice into Game Breakers. This feature was thankfully removed from GGX onward in favor of a meter system that rewarded aggressive play.
  • In the English release of the first game, Justice was referred to with male pronouns (the original Japanese version used gender-neutral writing). Later games would retcon Justice into a female Gear. Already covered in EarlyInstallmentWeirdness.Guilty Gear The Missing Link
• Dragon Ball Z: Budokai:
  • In Budokai 3, as Super Saiyan 4 Goku, Vegeta, Gogeta and Omega Shenron were the only representatives from GT, the Super Saiyan 4 transformations were rolled into Z Goku and Vegeta, with alternate storylines even explaining how they attained them. It was also the first game that included all of Frieza's transformations, as the first game only included his first, final, and 100% forms, while the second game only used his final form (also applies to Cell with his Perfect Form). It's not Early-Installment Weirdness when it's the third game in the trilogy
• Dragon Ball Xenoverse is such an oddball compared to Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2
  • TokiToki City is vastly smaller than Conton City with three hub worlds. Players couldn't fly or even run, so getting to where you needed to go was tedious as all hell.
  • Mentors could only be used one at a time, thus if you wanted to train with another mentor, you'd needed to leave that mentor and go train with the other. As well, some mentors forced players to find items to continue training and sometimes that involved finding a rare item that is hard to drop or make.
  • The Create-A-Characters were very limited in super abilities. Saiyans had four Super Saiyan versions - Super Saiyan, Super Saiyan 2, Super Vegeta and Super Vegeta 2. Humans, Majins, Namekians and Frieza Races had to do with either Kaioken/4/20 or hope they could unlock "Potential Unleashed".
  • Obtaining the Dragonballs was equally maddening as you had to hope that a Parallel Quest you participate in had extra Time Patrollers, that they drop a Key Item when you beat them and that you can defeat the Parallel Quest before you died or time ran out.
  • The character list is much smaller: there are no movie characters outside of Broly, Beerus, Whis and Super Saiyan God Goku (you can only get Super Saiyan Blue Goku/Vegeta and Golden Frieza via DLC). It's not Early-Installment Weirdness when there're only two games
• Bloody Roar: The first two games, the second in particular, have in-depth story modes that are absent in the later titles. They — once again 2 in particular — are also generally considered vastly superior to the later titles by fans, in part because of this. The first game also doesn't have Beast Drives or secret characters (at least not one that can be unlocked and played as), and features a few characters who didn't reappear in later games (although most were replaced by characters with similar movesets). Removed gushing
• The first System Shock game differs in many ways from its successors:
  • It is a first-person dungeon crawler with the RPG Elements stripped out, which is the exact opposite of what made System Shock 2 and later Bioshock influential (FPS with RPG Elements). There’s no stat progression, no stealth or other ways of dealing with things beyond shooting them, no currency, and the levels are all abstract and maze-like. The RPG parts came about in the sequel because the devs believed the first game was dismissed as a Doom clone, and they sought to make an FPS that was as un-Doomlike as possible.
  • There's a huge focus on making the player character feel “realistic.” The player character has their own unique physics model that responds to environmental stimuli like getting shot, running, or hitting walls in a realistic-ish manner. You can move your eyes independently of your head. The sequel drops this concept.
  • There are no magic powers (though there is a gameplay analogue in energy weapons). Successive -Shock games not only have magic powers be commonplace but also have their plots revolve almost entirely around them. They are also significantly more Grimdark than the first game’s fairly upbeat cyberpunk atmosphere. There are only two games
• Touhou Project:
  • The sixth game in particular, (Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil) being the first Windows game, can seem very odd compared to the later entries:
    • It is remarkably ugly. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but the difference between it and the next is far larger than any of the others.
    • According to the dialogue between Reimu and Remilia, Reimu actually killed Sakuya in their last battle. She's mysteriously okay in the ending. Not an example, not enough context
• In Melody, the first time Arnold’s work is mentioned, Melody says that he is an engineer who works at a power plant. However, in all later mentions of his job, he works in construction. There is no series
• Brawl Royale:
  • Unlike in the Epic Battle Fantasy series, Natalie is depicted as a ninja making use of katanas and shuriken, rather than as a mage.
  • Lance uses a sword here instead of a BFG and revolver/gunblade combo, and appears in more casual attire than the Nazi outfit he uses in all later appearances. Lance was originally intended to be a visual remake of Lancelot, a character from One More Final Battle. Matt Roszak would instead make a new character out of the intended redesign, after he deemed it to look completely different from Lancelot.
  • Matt breaks out a double-barrel gatling gun if he outdraws Lazarus. To date, this is the sole time he has been depicted using a firearm. It's not Early-Installment Weirdness when it's a spin-off and different game
• Nintendo games weren't consistently localised into French, German, Spanish and Italian until the Gamecube era, with the latter two not getting localisations at all until the mid-late Nintendo 64 era. General example
• Pac-Man's design on the original arcade cabinets is a bald, bipedal, shoeless, floppy footed non-spherical being with bulging red eyes and a crooked smile, appearing quite different from the more established design. It's Early Installment Character-Design Difference and not about a work
• Pac-Man Championship Edition DX invokes this with Championship I, a Nostalgia Level based almost exactly on the Championship maze from the original PMCE. No sleeping ghosts, let alone 30-ghost trains, and the dots are not laid out in an easy-to-follow path. Nostalgia Level is not Early-Installment Weirdness
• Artix Entertainment, big time. For starters, AdventureQuest started out as a very stripped-down and basic version of itself called Land of Rising Evil, where the only actual area was, apparently, Yulgar's inn (and even that wasn't originally there); DragonFable and MechQuest both feature much improved art at the current expense of a lot of the content already available in AdventureQuest, with some fuzzy and ill-defined interaction between the three games' plots. Justified, in that the resources put into the games literally started with about two, maybe three guys working on code from scratch. In a living room, mind you. Creator, not work
• Nintendo's recurring game setting, Wuhu Island, made its first appearance in Wii Fit- but there, it was called "Wii Fit Island" and looked somewhat different, lacking certain landmarks and having different names for others. It wasn't until Wii Sports Resort that the island got its standard appearance, which was then used for later versions of Wii Fit. Not in the same series
• Leisure Suit Larry 3 has a realistic art style that clashes with the more cartoony depictions of characters in other installments. Isn't this Oddball in the Series?
• Game demos often include content that is Dummied Out or removed in retail versions, including different maps, interfaces, and character graphics than the final product. Plot, character abilities and characterizations may be different. Locations, boss battles, and items are typically moved around due to the shorter length of the demo. General example
• Aside from some oddities in the game engine and features, the original Metal Slug is weird for its lack of weirdness. The relative cuteness and humor in its animations notwithstanding, it's a straight up battle between soldiers. The second game added armed camels, mummies, player transformations, a battleship with tank treads, a lightning submarine in the sewer, and martians, and the series has never looked back. Duplicated entries between "Other" and "run and gun" folders
• Pretty Cure video games on handhelds started out as normal video games. While the Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star was initially the Early Installment Weirdness as it did just a plethora of cutesy mini-games, when Fresh Pretty Cure! got its game would be when the franchise would go full mini-game. This doesn't seem true? There are a lot of covered genres here.
• Neopets:
  • The drawing used to be in a much cruder art style.
  • A number of species were different: Acaras used to have tails, Bruces used to be called Bruce-Forsyths and look like humans, Buzz used to be called Fleyes and look like eyes with wings, Elephantes walked on all fours and didn't wear hats, Eyries used to be dragon-like creatures called Cerpulls and then equally dragon-like creatures called Tatsus, Flotsams used to be round and had crests instead of horns, Gelerts were called Polypups and looked "pointy", Grarrls had no teeth (which is odd as they are now famous for their teeth), Jetsams used to look more fish-like, Kacheeks were called Badeeks and wore sunglasses, Kaus used to look like parodies of Macy Gray, Koi had arms and big noses, Kyrii were called Fuzzios and looked more like Jubjubs, Lupes were cross-eyed with purple whiskers, Myncis looked like humans and were called Mellishes, Quiggles were called Frogstomps, Scorchios were thin and had hair, and Zafaras were thin, spiky and walked on all fours.
  • Wockies instead of Lupes were the ones who had a history of (but are implied to no longer do it) eating Chias.
  • Some petpet species, too many to list, were different too, some even appeared to be a completely different species.
  • The Birthday Bowla and Filamens used to sit on cupcakes.
  • Neopets didn't used to cry or scowl when they were in a bad mood.
  • Aquatic petpets' fishbowls could be seen.
  • Edna the witch was a human. It's not a video game
• The Getaway could be considered Early-Installment Weirdness for the 3D Open-World Crime Sandbox genre as a whole, which was still in its infancy back in 2002 - while GTA III was released the previous year, it had yet to fully exert its influence. It exists in a very distinct grey area between GTA and earlier open-world driving games like Driver - the story is a series of missions performed in a strict linear order, and said missions alternate between driving and shooting with only minor variations. Furthermore, the action takes place in a real city instead of a No Communities Were Harmed counterpart, it averts Fauxrrari by using real vehicles (which even get name-dropped by the police), and the villains throw racial slurs left and right - something that even early GTA tended to avoid; there are experimental features like Regenerating Health and the total absence of a HUD (instead, your health is measured by how bad the wounds on your body are, and you're directed around the map by your car's indicators). Most glaringly, however, there's no free roam, at least not at first - you have to unlock it by beating the story. For this reason it only really qualifies as a 'Sandbox' by the loosest possible definition, and it's often classified instead as an Action-Adventure game in light of this - regardless, it still serves as a snapshot in the transition period between simple open-world driving games and modern crime sandboxes, not really fitting neatly into either genre. General example
• • Grand Theft Auto III has several oddities in comparison to the sequels:
    • Compared to the more Denser and Wackier sequels, the third game is relatively more down to earth and gritty in the art style and the story missions. Most of the humor comes from the radio stations, with their over-the-top guests and advertisements. Grand Theft Auto IV would return to the gritty style and story while Grand Theft Auto V shifted the tone to the middle of gritty and wacky.
    • Unlike the other games, the third game had no purchasable property, thus no extra ways to make money or saving the game. Extra safe houses are only unlocked as you progress in the story and there are only a total of three, one in each island.
    • The third game throws money at the player like candy. Money awarded at the end of missions is absurdly high (the very first mission awards you $1500 just for picking up one of Luigi's girls from the hospital and dropping her off at a club two blocks away) and you can even get money by simply ramming into other cars; conversely, though, everything else is ten times more expensive than in future games (e.g. a Pay 'n Spray visit takes $1000 rather than the $100 of later games). The only things that you could blow money on were weapons and ammo, which weren't too hard to acquire anyway. The sequels would tone down costs and rewards to more reasonable levels and would give players a lot more things to spend their money on.
    • Weapon variety was very limited, as there were only eleven weapons in total in the game and you could carry all of them at once, including two assault rifles, two heavy weapons, and two types of grenades. Later games would give more variety of guns (Vice City having at least two of every category) while also limiting you to one weapon in any given category (e.g. you can't have both the flamethrower and rocket launcher at the same time). GTAV would bring over the weapon wheel from Red Dead Redemption, allowing players to carry every weapon they can find.
    • The player character is a mute and has no personality to them beyond whatever the player envisions them to be. He wouldn't even be given a name until his later appearance in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The sequels would make their player characters more fleshed out and had them speaking. A consequence of this is that he is one of only two protagonists from the "3D era" who gets messages via pager rather than a cell phone^note Though being a mute doesn't stop the player character in Grand Theft Auto Online from using a phone (the other, Victor from Vice City Stories, is simply because a pager fits its time period better).
    • The streets were mostly straight with right angles for turns and there were only a few areas that had actual curves in the roads, all which were likely due to the game still building upon from the second game which also had a box-like environment for its streets. Later games would have more natural roads.
    • The player character could not change clothes. Aside from the prison jumpsuit the player has at the start of the game, they will spend the entire game in a black leather jacket and green pants. Vice City would give the player a few more outfits to choose from, but full clothing customization wouldn't come until San Andreas.
    • Planes and helicopters aren't available to use in the third game. While the Dodo technically is a plane that can fly, its controls are so bad that you'd be lucky to stay in the air for more than a few seconds.
    • There's also no motorcycles. The game was intended to have them, but the devs couldn't get them to work right and decided to scrap them rather than delay the game or release it in an unfinished state. Motorcycles would return in Vice City, pedal bikes would debut in San Andreas.
    • So no planes, no bikes, but there's still plenty of cars, right? Well... no. There's only 56 different cars (which in fairness was still more available cars than any video game out at the time not called Gran Turismo), by comparison Grand Theft Auto Online has more than 722.
    • The game has several holdovers from the 2D games that don't mesh with how this one is designed, including that random carnage will give you money from nowhere and that one of the camera options is an overhead view reminiscent of the previous games, which are noticeably missing from Vice City onward.
    • Also missing from III was the in-game map in the pause menu, which forced you to use the map included with the game manual if you wanted to navigate the streets well. A full in-game map was included starting with Vice City. An in-game map for III would only appear on the Android/iOS version, released 10 years after the original was released.
    • Compared to later games, Liberty City isn't on a completely isolated island - Shoreside Vale is called as such because it really is shoreside, its northern boundary going into a hillside that stretches out to be visible to the north of every other part of the city. This is in large part because of the lack of easily-flown aircraft; later games allow more easy air travel, and so had to set their games on islands with nothing but ocean surrounding them in every direction to discourage trying to fly out of bounds.
    • Speaking of islands, in both GTAIII and Vice City the player can't swim, so any time you go into water you drown and die. Like a lot of things in this series that we now take for granted swimming was introduced (and even used in a couple missions) in San Andreas. Covered in EarlyInstallmentWeirdness.Grand Theft Auto III

Others

• Why is Nancy Drew in "Survival Horror" folder?