Sequels that ruined the overall story and characters of a series
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This especially. In Halo 1 she was a basically a glorified USB Key.
Right!?
Nothing she did in Halo 1-3 couldn't have been done by even the simplest AI.
At least Halo 4 and on could've told new stories with new characters but nope, Cortana was the focus in 4, 5 and is the primary villain in 6!
The only possible hint I can think of is that one conversation where
Major Zero tells Snake to contact Adam using the passphrase "Who are the Patriots" and "La-li-lu-le-lo", which seems like a hint in retrospect, but ignoring future games in the series it simply suggests that Adam may be an agent of the Patriots, and in the end it turns out it's true.
Wow, that's a really dumb way to explain such a huge plot point. Wow.
Never made it to the final boss though. I played one run of the game and traded it in.
I'll repeat Starcraft 2, Brood War was so epic and unexpectedly serious, and Starcraft 2's plot was so generic and predictable.
It sucks too, because Starcraft 2's single player was actually pretty great. The one mission where there was a wall of fire coming to your base so you had to keep moving all your Terrain buildings from one area to the next was genius. But it was attached to such a terrible story.
It sucks too, because Starcraft 2's single player was actually pretty great. The one mission where there was a wall of fire coming to your base so you had to keep moving all your Terrain buildings from one area to the next was genius. But it was attached to such a terrible story.
I agree. I was really looking forward to how they'd wrap up the story from Brood War when SC2 was announced. That was the main draw for me.
Sc2 and HotS killed my interest in the story so hard that I didn't even bother to buy the last game. It actively shit on SC1's main plot points.
Like you said, the game campaigns are fun and make you do cool things. But fucking hell, that story was just heinous. HotS campaign dialogue made me groan pretty much every time Kerrigan or Raynor said anything.
Agree 100%. I couldn't stand what they did with Cortana and MC in Halo 4 and 5, especially.
But ESPECIALLY 5. Got the story of that game was so awful.
"Chief bad!"
"Why chief bad?"
"Because chief bad! Go kill!"
*not-mc-but-has-mc-skills team does things and meets chief*
"Wait. Chief not bad. Chief good!"
"OK chief good now. Cortana bad!"
Guess you never heard of Halo 3 then?
Prophet of Truth was butchered as a character.
Mass Effect 3.
There is no equal.
Okay, you want a list that doesn't just read "The Ending?"
But yeah, for a lot of IGN and similar things, this was apparently a 10/10. "They did the impossible thing. A perfect ending to a trilogy". Worst sequel I have ever seen, personally.
There is no equal.
Okay, you want a list that doesn't just read "The Ending?"
- Shepard is arguably undone by the amount of autodialogue he has. You can also argue it improved him/her as a character because it allowed for more specific dramatic intent in his lines and delivery, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of the time he's now saying things you would specifically have avoided in the two prequels. Worse is, that regardless of interactivity or not, the best the remainder of the writing staff could come up with was clichéd trash like "We fight or we die!" and "You're either with me or against me. There is nothing gray about that!" You know... Platitudes, redundant conversation.
- Councilor Udina and your choices. He is the councilor no matter what. Anderson is no longer councilor even if you picked him. But what did they use that opportunity for? Udina was an underhanded bastard who leads humanity in politics, a fine commentary on how political leaders can sometimes be truly disingenuous - you think they're there to fight for you, but if you know them close up, you can see the greed and ego that drives their ambition. So that's Udina in ME1 and ME2. What did they do with him in 3? They made him "conspire" against the other races by strategically promote people to make them loyal, so he can pull a grand scheme of betrayal, working with the scum of humanity to help Earth but not the other homeworlds, and his deal with the devil is Cerberus of all things. And he gets shot in the heart by you or a squadmate and then anyone can talk about what an evil prick he was. Unceremonious, unempathetic, tactless and horrible plot development for a character that by all means was headed for a redemption arc where you finally show that even the biggest clowns in the world can rise to the occasion and learn to help people, by abandoning their flaws. But no, we get the most cold and depressing outcome for this Donald Duck of a character.
- Samara The Justicar. Stoic, wise, paternal, and tragic. A character that has an air of knowledge surrounding her, you're not lecturing her, you listen to the stories of her long and arduous life, and then you learn about the tragedy that the people she loved the most, her daughters, are monsters by nature. Ardat Yakshi that have gene errors that causes the asari sexual act of mind-melding to hemmorage the partner's brain. A very vulnerable and shaming birth defect and it's understandable why her decision to kill her daughter in ME2 was done with such stoicism. And in 3 they introduce that her other daughters are attacked by Reapers in their isolated monestary. So you set up a bomb and escort those you can. Only one daughter makes it out with you and Samara. Then Samara, "abiding by her code" has to shoot her daughter, but she wants to kill herself instead, breaking the code. I'm sorry that's the best we could come up with? To me it seems more likely she would actually point her gun at her daughter and say "I'm sorry." and an interrupt stops her, or her daughter talks her out of it, OR she abandons the idea and on the way out she agonizes that she has now abandoned her code. And yet, this was another really weak attempt to recapture the essence of a character in a very short amount of time with contrived melodrama. "The code dictates that an ardat yakshi may no longer live in a monestary that no longer exists." Yah... The writing is not very good either.
- Liara becomes the Shadow Broker... so she can look at computers all day and become depressed and hopeless, and act as if you aren't (potentially) her romantic interest already. Dreary, weary, monotonous and lost potential everywhere. Wasn't being the Shadow Broker the biggest advantage we had amongst our friends in this series? Too bad because all it does is, it introduces the Crucible and that's it. After getting the Crucible Liara doesn't do anything significant for the whole game as the Shadow Broker. Not even side-quests where you get to involve her intel network and choose between a set of friendly and dangerous contacts, to broker treaties for war, or stuff like that. Just, literally nothing except a couple of personal conversations and disjointed side-missions that give you random war assets. Liara ended in Lair of the Shadow Broker. That was her denoument. In ME3 she's a footnote that the writers still insisted had to show up mandatory in a lot of scenes.
- Save Earth, but not the whole galaxy?? If anything should have been the central point of protection in this game it would've been The Citadel. It's the hub that connects all alien races, council species and a few straggling species. But the game opens on Earth, and then presumes you're in this "Galactic Annihilation" war because you care about Earth. But excuse me, there's 5 other major homeworlds that are just as fucked as Earth is, so why do the characters keep saying "But if we lose Earth!" as if that means galactic doom. The worst part is, the franchise made the alien characters so much more sympathetic in the previous games, there's barely any way you would've cared about Earth at this point. Human-centricness reaches its pinnacle in ME3.
- The Crucible, Citadel, Catalyst, Reaper plot is complete toast by the 11th hour. And there's my bullet point about the ending. "Organics will always destroy all synthe"-- what the fuck are you talking about BioWare. Plot comes from characters, and the oldest characters in Mass Effect are the Reapers and their generation of species. These characters caused the Mass Effect setting to exist and that setting is why literally anything we do happened. So the Reapers are the end all be all that should have tied everything together, and they do the exact opposite. The story concludes on a non-sequitur, that makes the message of the franchise out to be something it just never was.
- Cerberus is just Saren & The Geth In ME1, 2.0. The whole "control vs Destroy" angle the game drums up is completely one-sided. Illusive Man occasionally shows up and tells shepard he wants to control the Reapers, and Shepard then retorts "no we're destroying them" and while the overall theme is decent, the dialogue is useless. It could've been handled so many other ways. Illusive Man trying to convince Shepard that his pursuit of uniting the Galaxy is a waste if it means we end up dying, and that efficiency and using the Reapers means' against them means some of us will live and rebuild. But they never do anything with these conversations, they all repeat the exact same beat as the first one. TIM shows up, tells you what HE wants to do, and you say "No, here's what I want to do" and joke is on both because we don't know how to beat the Reapers... and we don't know how to control them either! both are just guessing; they're yelling into the void about things that have no footing in any reality, and the game doesn't even attempt to handwave it with "The Crucible, I have data that suggests it uses the same signal as when Reapers indoctrinated the colonists of Eden Prime... The device you have will control them, so let me do it!" or anything. It's a bunch of wishy washy nonsense instead and it takes Illusive Man from being his previously cunning and suggestive self into being a generic "antagonist" archetype with taunting looks and ominous sentences like "I have other plans... In motion..". It's all style over substance. But anything that was potentially nonsense here is nonchalantly labeled as "They were indoctrinated". What a cop-out.
Smaller things:
- Legion's death makes no sense but oh well, I guess we needed THE FEELS
- Anderson's characterization is really not consistent with ME1, and near the ending they force his depiction to be "Ignorant military grunt that doesn't see the bigger picture" due to the connotations the ending choice he's compared to makes for him, and what the Illusive Man says about him. He also swears and talks pretty mean in the opening that doesn't feel anything like the virtuous guy he was before. In writing terms, his voice is not right.
- Councilor Udina and your choices. He is the councilor no matter what. Anderson is no longer councilor even if you picked him. But what did they use that opportunity for? Udina was an underhanded bastard who leads humanity in politics, a fine commentary on how political leaders can sometimes be truly disingenuous - you think they're there to fight for you, but if you know them close up, you can see the greed and ego that drives their ambition. So that's Udina in ME1 and ME2. What did they do with him in 3? They made him "conspire" against the other races by strategically promote people to make them loyal, so he can pull a grand scheme of betrayal, working with the scum of humanity to help Earth but not the other homeworlds, and his deal with the devil is Cerberus of all things. And he gets shot in the heart by you or a squadmate and then anyone can talk about what an evil prick he was. Unceremonious, unempathetic, tactless and horrible plot development for a character that by all means was headed for a redemption arc where you finally show that even the biggest clowns in the world can rise to the occasion and learn to help people, by abandoning their flaws. But no, we get the most cold and depressing outcome for this Donald Duck of a character.
- Samara The Justicar. Stoic, wise, paternal, and tragic. A character that has an air of knowledge surrounding her, you're not lecturing her, you listen to the stories of her long and arduous life, and then you learn about the tragedy that the people she loved the most, her daughters, are monsters by nature. Ardat Yakshi that have gene errors that causes the asari sexual act of mind-melding to hemmorage the partner's brain. A very vulnerable and shaming birth defect and it's understandable why her decision to kill her daughter in ME2 was done with such stoicism. And in 3 they introduce that her other daughters are attacked by Reapers in their isolated monestary. So you set up a bomb and escort those you can. Only one daughter makes it out with you and Samara. Then Samara, "abiding by her code" has to shoot her daughter, but she wants to kill herself instead, breaking the code. I'm sorry that's the best we could come up with? To me it seems more likely she would actually point her gun at her daughter and say "I'm sorry." and an interrupt stops her, or her daughter talks her out of it, OR she abandons the idea and on the way out she agonizes that she has now abandoned her code. And yet, this was another really weak attempt to recapture the essence of a character in a very short amount of time with contrived melodrama. "The code dictates that an ardat yakshi may no longer live in a monestary that no longer exists." Yah... The writing is not very good either.
- Liara becomes the Shadow Broker... so she can look at computers all day and become depressed and hopeless, and act as if you aren't (potentially) her romantic interest already. Dreary, weary, monotonous and lost potential everywhere. Wasn't being the Shadow Broker the biggest advantage we had amongst our friends in this series? Too bad because all it does is, it introduces the Crucible and that's it. After getting the Crucible Liara doesn't do anything significant for the whole game as the Shadow Broker. Not even side-quests where you get to involve her intel network and choose between a set of friendly and dangerous contacts, to broker treaties for war, or stuff like that. Just, literally nothing except a couple of personal conversations and disjointed side-missions that give you random war assets. Liara ended in Lair of the Shadow Broker. That was her denoument. In ME3 she's a footnote that the writers still insisted had to show up mandatory in a lot of scenes.
- Save Earth, but not the whole galaxy?? If anything should have been the central point of protection in this game it would've been The Citadel. It's the hub that connects all alien races, council species and a few straggling species. But the game opens on Earth, and then presumes you're in this "Galactic Annihilation" war because you care about Earth. But excuse me, there's 5 other major homeworlds that are just as fucked as Earth is, so why do the characters keep saying "But if we lose Earth!" as if that means galactic doom. The worst part is, the franchise made the alien characters so much more sympathetic in the previous games, there's barely any way you would've cared about Earth at this point. Human-centricness reaches its pinnacle in ME3.
- The Crucible, Citadel, Catalyst, Reaper plot is complete toast by the 11th hour. And there's my bullet point about the ending. "Organics will always destroy all synthe"-- what the fuck are you talking about BioWare. Plot comes from characters, and the oldest characters in Mass Effect are the Reapers and their generation of species. These characters caused the Mass Effect setting to exist and that setting is why literally anything we do happened. So the Reapers are the end all be all that should have tied everything together, and they do the exact opposite. The story concludes on a non-sequitur, that makes the message of the franchise out to be something it just never was.
- Cerberus is just Saren & The Geth In ME1, 2.0. The whole "control vs Destroy" angle the game drums up is completely one-sided. Illusive Man occasionally shows up and tells shepard he wants to control the Reapers, and Shepard then retorts "no we're destroying them" and while the overall theme is decent, the dialogue is useless. It could've been handled so many other ways. Illusive Man trying to convince Shepard that his pursuit of uniting the Galaxy is a waste if it means we end up dying, and that efficiency and using the Reapers means' against them means some of us will live and rebuild. But they never do anything with these conversations, they all repeat the exact same beat as the first one. TIM shows up, tells you what HE wants to do, and you say "No, here's what I want to do" and joke is on both because we don't know how to beat the Reapers... and we don't know how to control them either! both are just guessing; they're yelling into the void about things that have no footing in any reality, and the game doesn't even attempt to handwave it with "The Crucible, I have data that suggests it uses the same signal as when Reapers indoctrinated the colonists of Eden Prime... The device you have will control them, so let me do it!" or anything. It's a bunch of wishy washy nonsense instead and it takes Illusive Man from being his previously cunning and suggestive self into being a generic "antagonist" archetype with taunting looks and ominous sentences like "I have other plans... In motion..". It's all style over substance. But anything that was potentially nonsense here is nonchalantly labeled as "They were indoctrinated". What a cop-out.
Smaller things:
- Legion's death makes no sense but oh well, I guess we needed THE FEELS
- Anderson's characterization is really not consistent with ME1, and near the ending they force his depiction to be "Ignorant military grunt that doesn't see the bigger picture" due to the connotations the ending choice he's compared to makes for him, and what the Illusive Man says about him. He also swears and talks pretty mean in the opening that doesn't feel anything like the virtuous guy he was before. In writing terms, his voice is not right.
But yeah, for a lot of IGN and similar things, this was apparently a 10/10. "They did the impossible thing. A perfect ending to a trilogy". Worst sequel I have ever seen, personally.
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Burial at Sea does a fantastic job of shitting up the original Bioshock's story for no apparent reason. Namely that
Elizabeth felt bad that one little girl died while she was murdering all of the various Booker incarnations so felt the best way to avoid this was to cause a civil war that killed thousands instead
I wish they'd gone with what the marketing implied, that Master Chief was being framed in a Jason Bourne/Jack Bauer style, and would have to fight to clear his name.
Instead he's hunted because... he's absent without leave.
The guy that saved the UNIVERSE multiple times, didn't tell you where he was going, so you decide to arrest him... riiiiiiiight.
Also, MC is suddenly with Blue Team... you know, the folk he fought and trained with on Reach?
It was a big reunion the whole fanbase was anticipating... and we don't even get to see that moment.
Yeah, I say Shadow the Hedgehog because that game actively went back to plot details about SA2 and retconned them. At least Heroes kind of just existed on its own and one could argue that they could've done something interesting with his character in the future.
Also supposedly there's a line that occurs if you wait 5 minutes into the final boss of Shadow the Hedgehog where Eggman says he had one of his mechs catch Shadow as he fell from space in SA2 which is how he ended up in his facility at the start of Heroes. It's dumb.
They were always gonna do that. He was more popular than Sonic at one point. I laughed when they shoe horned that in tho lol
It ruined everything I liked about the gameplay, setting, and characters. Such a waste.
I'm still 100% sure they're course-correcting or outright retconning stuff with Infinite, but given all the departures I also smell signs of project indecision or reactions against the direction, because what you typically see is that it's actually act 2 that gets screwed up and the writers haven't realized just how bad that is, until they're in the middle of writing the third act and they have to account for the things that no longer adds up to anything significant. That's the danger of making twists that seem "cool" without an idea of why else you're doing it.
You'd think they'd prioritize finding a good spot to tell us such critical information haha
Every sequels games or other media formats to main numbered Final Fantasy games "except" Crisis Core.
Exactly. I refuse to accept the PSX and DS versions because of those additions.
I edited my original post on the front page to better convey my opinion. I never wanted a sequel. Both games should have stood on their own with zero connection.
If I could erase one game from existence and all memory of it along with it, that game would be Dawn of the New World. Every single new character introduced is a complete throwaway.
God of War 3's ending
Kratos was on such a path of destruction and had become a completely irredeemable character whose personal quest for revenge had plunged the world into ruin. Then he does a complete 180 at the end of the game for no reason whatsoever. It made no sense at all.
Kratos was on such a path of destruction and had become a completely irredeemable character whose personal quest for revenge had plunged the world into ruin. Then he does a complete 180 at the end of the game for no reason whatsoever. It made no sense at all.
Supposedly, Persona Q2 did a good job at dialing back most the one-note characterizations that plagued the characters in the previous crossovers.
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles ruined a decent story by introducing Firstname Lastname von Russia (Sergei Vladimir) and retconning every Tyrant in existence to be a clone of him.
These two are the unholy grail of absolutely hobbling and degrading two of the best female protagonists in gaming.
What absolutely offending garbage those stories were.
Dark Souls 3 ruined Gwyn, took the cycle aspect too far, etc. It still had an enjoyable story but it was worse than even 2.
There's some with SIGINT and Paramedic too.
I don't think he even had a sequel in mind for MGS2, let alone 3, so I'm not saying he had a whole sequel in mind, just who The Patriots are.
Assassin's Creed spent four entire games building up Desmond as the ultimate assassin who would use the skills from his ancestors to take down Abstergo and save the world from apocalypse.
Then in 3 he just finds a literal "click here to save the world and also die" button and he presses it and that's it.
Then in 3 he just finds a literal "click here to save the world and also die" button and he presses it and that's it.
I'm 100% with you on this one for pretty much the same reasons.
Another one for me that I know is gonna be controversial is Mass Effect 2. I greatly enjoyed the slow build up of the story and some of the RPG gameplay mechanics of the first game, but with part 2 they went all Hollywood blockbuster with the story and turned the gameplay into dull gears of war lite with some space magic thrown in. It went from my favorite game of that generation to my most disappointing game, and made me think a bit less of the first game since it was all building up stakes for the following games.
Prototype 2's writing is both the best and worst follow up to the first game's.
IT'S TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED NEW VELCRO!
Metroid: Other M
Specifically because it ruined story focus in Metroid forever. The problem wasn't with focusing on story (the Metroid universe has fantastic lore), it was with absolutely garbage writing and an even worse localization that went for wooden performances mandated by Japanese directors with no idea how English works in real life (IIRC)
Specifically because it ruined story focus in Metroid forever. The problem wasn't with focusing on story (the Metroid universe has fantastic lore), it was with absolutely garbage writing and an even worse localization that went for wooden performances mandated by Japanese directors with no idea how English works in real life (IIRC)
Xenosaga episodes 2 and 3. It was a confusing enough series to begin with, but then they drastically changed it between each sequel. The games had a lot of promise, but it was a broken promise.
Assassin's Creed III's ending ruined AC and completely halted all momentum the overarching story had to the point they gave up, finished it in a comic, and basically rebooted it in Origins.
Just the T-103s.
Which makes sense, since they were already established as a mass production model, and only 1/100,000 people are compatible to become Tyrants.
Having a source person to clone them from makes perfect sense.
He was still a pretty bad character though lol.
Just the T-103s.
Which makes sense, since they were already established as a mass production model, and only 1/100,000 people are compatible to become Tyrants.
Having a source person to clone them from makes perfect sense.
He was still a pretty bad character though lol.
Megaman X6 for sure. Zero is assumed dead at the end of X5 which is the lead up to the Zero series, but Capcom wanted to make a new X title and they wanted it to have Zero. So this is what happens right. X finds Zero's ghost. He kills it and then suddenly the real Zero appears out of cufking nowhere. He says I "I hid myself while I tried to repair myself." That's it, the explanation you get after watching his emotional sacrifice at the end of X5. It's hinted that maybe a hologram of Dr. Light somehow repaired him because you know, that makes sense. And then Zero goes into hibernation which leads to the events of MMZ. The end. But it's not see because Zero also doesn't go into hibernation in a different ending and that leads to the god awful MMX7. None of this was necessary. There was plenty that Capcom could have built on after X5. X is implied to have done quite a bit of shit after Zero's death for the hundred or so years he is gone, do we get any of that though. Nah. I enjoy playing X6 occasionally but fuck that game and it's story.
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Kingdom Hearts 3 was ruined because Nomura wanted to connect the story with Union X. I like how the story of Union X is developing, but it didn't have to be the central focus on Kingdom Hearts 3. The story was supposed to be about rescuing everyone and defeating Xehanort. I hated that every single important part of the story was done at the very end of the game, rushed and/or offscreen!