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What's the biggest drop in quality between a game and its immediate follow-up?

F

flaxknuckles

Member
Red faction Gorilla to Red Faction Armageddon:
Open-world game with a glorious destruction system and tons of stuff to break to a mediocre TPS with barely anything noteworthy about it.

Saints Row 2 to Saints Row 3:
Steelport was godawful and where did all the content go? Might as well have made it linear.
 
G

Gunstar Ikari

Unconfirmed Member
Mega Man Battle Network 3 to Mega Man Battle Network 4 was a brutal one. Get the franchise firing on all cylinders before putting out an absolute turd to ruin it all. The Mega Man RPGs basically coasted on BN3's popularity until Star Force 2 sunk any possibility of a rebound.

I'm not fond of The King of Fighters XI, but I still feel like the transition to XII qualifies. XI arguably had too much stuff, while XII was blatantly unfinished with a handful of characters having movesets that would've been considered bare in 1992.
 
P

Patrick Young

Member
Star Fox Assault to Star Fox Zero
What a shitty control scheme! There was already a method that worked, but instead it was replaced with some new trash. It seems there's a great game under there, but it's not worth lowering your quality of life and bending over for some shitty controls.

Banjo-Tooie to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Rare removed the platforming I wanted and replaced it with timed racing levels. Apart from the graphics, everything about Nuts & Bolts was wrong.

Mario Kart 64 to Mario Kart: Double Dash
What felt like a raw racing game became bland, sterile and choreographed. You're forced to powerslide to turn corners at full speed. Multiplayer was stuffed. Even getting hit with a shell became some frontflip ballet shit instead of a chaotic crash.

Twilight Princess to Skyward Sword was mentioned already and I completely agree. Controls sucked and the game went for too long.

TheAdmiester said:
Saints Row 2 to Saints Row 3. Never seen a franchise take such a sudden nosedive.
Click to expand...

Wow, I'm the complete opposite. I despised those first two games and loved The Third and IV.
 
N

nevermore2782

Member
Prince of Persia sands of time to Warrior Within
Gone was the charm, the wonder and clever design of the exotic palace and traps

Added: uneccessary licensed godsmack music and grim dark aesthetic and the word Bitch
 
S

sheamus

Member
I'm gonna say dark souls one to dark souls two. Dark souls one felt perfect, and dark souls two felt rushed and the hit boxes are weird
 
G

Green Mamba

Member
Patrick Young said:
Star Fox Assault to Star Fox Zero
What a shitty control scheme! There was already a method that worked, but instead it was replaced with some new trash. It seems there's a great game under there, but it's not worth lowering your quality of life and bending over for some shitty controls.
Click to expand...
Not an immediate follow up, Command was released between them, and that game is rank garbage.
 
G

Gunstar Ikari

Unconfirmed Member
The real Star Fox quality drop was 64->Adventures.

Assault is a 4th-rate third-person shooter with a couple of good flight missions. A crap game standalone and an abysmal Star Fox game.
 
Rellik

Rellik

Member
Patrick Young said:
Star Fox Assault to Star Fox Zero
What a shitty control scheme! There was already a method that worked, but instead it was replaced with some new trash. It seems there's a great game under there, but it's not worth lowering your quality of life and bending over for some shitty controls.

Banjo-Tooie to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Rare removed the platforming I wanted and replaced it with timed racing levels. Apart from the graphics, everything about Nuts & Bolts was wrong.

Mario Kart 64 to Mario Kart: Double Dash
What felt like a raw racing game became bland, sterile and choreographed. You're forced to powerslide to turn corners at full speed. Multiplayer was stuffed. Even getting hit with a shell became some frontflip ballet shit instead of a chaotic crash.

Twilight Princess to Skyward Sword was mentioned already and I completely agree. Controls sucked and the game went for too long.



Wow, I'm the complete opposite. I despised those first two games and loved The Third and IV.
Click to expand...

This just made think of one. Crash Team Racing to Crash Nitro Kart. One of the best kart racers of all time to something so forgettable I had to Google it to find the name.
 
Z

Zafir

Member
Dragon Age 2 thread.

Regardless of whether you liked the game, I think it's undeniable that the quality just isn't there when you look at all the reused assets.
 
R

RM8

Member
Patrick Young said:
Mario Kart 64 to Mario Kart: Double Dash
What felt like a raw racing game became bland, sterile and choreographed. You're forced to powerslide to turn corners at full speed. Multiplayer was stuffed. Even getting hit with a shell became some frontflip ballet shit instead of a chaotic crash.
Click to expand...
I feel the other way around. MK64 was an okay game but I think it doesn't have anything special to it other than the superb music. Gameplay is unpolished, hardly anyone ever drifts because it's not really necessary, lots of glitches, the worst Rainbow Road in the series (look, have this insanely long track with rails)... I think it was one-upped twice on N64 (DKR and Mickey's Speedway USA) and DD just felt way more inspired, tried something different for the core gameplay, had fantastic track design for the most part, more characters, character specific items that makes characters feel actually different, and it even introduced LAN play.
 
G

GamerJM

Banned
People are mentioning Twilight Princess -> Skyward Sword, but the real one that's up there for me is Twilight Princess -> Phantom Hourglass if that counts (I don't view PH as a non-mainline Zelda game).
 
R

rekameohs

Banned
I'll go with Resident Evil 5 to 6. Metroid Prime Trilogy to Other M in just one year is a horrific, horrific downgrade, but since they're wholly different teams, I won't count it.
 
T

terrible

Banned
Rexatality said:
Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2
Click to expand...

You're getting a lot of hate for this but I agree to an extent. Based on my expectations vs what the game actually delivered it disappointed me more than pretty much any other game. I don't know if I can say it dropped in quality so much as it just changed or removed everything I liked about ME1 though.

My real answer is Day of Defeat Source. Fuck that game.

Oh man, or Perfect Dark Zero. This is a close call.
 
G

ghibli99

Member
Uncharted 2 to Uncharted 3. Lots of weird animation bugs and even a few crashes really made this feel undercooked in terms of polish.
 
B

BeamImpact

Member
Halo CE and Halo 2 for me, i really only enjoyed the campaign of Halo 2 but the multiplayer was a huge flop compared to CE in terms of competitive aspects :(
 
nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
Even though Metroid Prime 3 wasn't the best Prime and it was already a small downgrade by itself, OtherM is still bad enough to be my pick for this thread.
 
R

reaganator

Banned
Blackleg-sanji1 said:
Glad I read the thread before posting. This takes it for me. Iv killed the damn franchise by the time 5 came out nobody gave a shit anymore, ugh 4 was such crap.
Click to expand...

Yes.. glad you did. Because I am part of the Suikoden III >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Suikoden V >>>>>>>>>>>> rest of the entries suikoden "fan".
 
P

PeterLegend

Member
I'm hoping no one said Uncharted 2 to Uncharted 3.

Considering Uncharted 3's quality is still better than 90% of the games out there.
 
R

Rapscallion

Member
Controversial pick:

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor to Legacy -> Jak 2

I hate nearly everything about Jak 2. It's s shameless cash grab that tried to capitalize on a popular trend in gaming. The original was a fun enough game.
 
S

SkyOdin

Member
Gunstar Ikari said:
Mega Man Battle Network 3 to Mega Man Battle Network 4 was a brutal one. Get the franchise firing on all cylinders before putting out an absolute turd to ruin it all. The Mega Man RPGs basically coasted on BN3's popularity until Star Force 2 sunk any possibility of a rebound.
Click to expand...
This is what immediately came to my mind. Falling straight down from the highpoint of the series to its worst entry. It dealt a mortal wound to not just the Battle Network games, but to the Mega Man franchise as a whole.
 
F

FeenixRising

Banned
TheSpoiler said:
You are insane if you think TTT isn't better than 3. It's far better in every direction besides the personal choice of not liking the Tag aspect. 3 was good for its time, but it doesn't hold a candle to TTT on any level besides maybe the music.
.
Click to expand...

I don't think he was saying that. He was referring Tekken 3/TTT as one game which you can technically say since the arcade TTT was built using the same Tekken 3 engine before being revamped for the PS2 release. Similar to how many people refer to MK3/UMK3/MKTrilogy as one game.

But I do agree with it, T3 to T4 was a huge fall off.

I loved TTT, but I felt the music was a step down from Tekken 3 though.
 
D

DecoReturns

Member
Golden Sun 2 to Golden Sun DS.

The DS one felt really dumb down. Too slow narrativly, the story was uninspire and really easy, the game treatly you like a dumb kid.
 
E

Elfforkusu

Member
Linkstrikesback said:
My personal opinion says xenoblade to xenoblade X.

From potentially my favourite jrpg of all time to a pile of stinking garbage that I couldn't enjoy any part of.
More objectively from what I've played, probably prime 3 to other m.
Click to expand...
Seems like it's probably not the biggest, but this is a good answer. Game shook my faith in Monolithsoft.


I don't know if we count it because of the many years in between, but Nights. JoD remains the worst game I've ever paid full price for.
 
P

PensivePen

Member
REmake to RE0

I don't hate RE0 as much as a lot of people. But it's still going directly from one of the best mainline games to one of the worst.
 
J

JBwB

Member
Final Fantasy XII to Final Fantasy XIII - I actually liked XIII but it's obvious that XII is superior in almost all aspects.

Dragon Age Origins to Dragon Age 2 - WTF was that Bioware!?

jdstorm said:
Kotor to Kotor 2

The first game is great. The 2nd was so badly made that it took its fans a decade to fix via Mods.
Click to expand...

The unfinished version of KOTOR 2 is definitely worse than KOTOR.

However, with TSLRCM it's as good if not arguably better.
 
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