Early Installment Weirdness / Video Games Numbers To M

Early-Installment Weirdness: Video Games
# to M | N to Z

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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).
  • The first trilogy had different objection themes per game. Later games instead have different objection themes per point-of-view character. While the first and third games' objection themes have both become Phoenix's Bootstrapped Leitmotif, the second game's has not been reused.
• 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 several playable planes were made available sooner than normal or 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.
• Age of Empires I:
  • You cannot queue unit production prior to the expansion. You also cannot create units and research technology of different types at once; this was retained until the sequel.
  • Double clicking a unit will not select other nearby units of the same type. This is added in the expansion.
  • Town Centers don't have the ability to defend themselves. The concept of Garrisonable Structures also didn't exist for Town Centers and Towers.
  • Units cannot walk over farms. Since players are expected to mass them for food production, this causes bases to be severely cramped and difficult for units to move around. This was changed in the Definitive Edition. Also, a single farm can be used by multiple villagers, though only one will collect food from it.
  • All human soldiers and non-Temple technologies have a food cost. Later games have human soldiers that don't cost food, usually archers.
  • The lack of an in-game tech tree and civilization description. Until the Definitive Edition, this information could only be found in the manual.
  • You don't start with a scout unit, so you are forced to rely on one of your villagers to explore the map. It takes an age upgrade and building a Stable to get the first good scout unit.
  • Buying resources is not available. Trade units gain gold in exchange for food, wood or stone.
  • Granaries are not only drop-off sites for non-animal food, but also used to research fortifications.
  • Economic technologies are researched at the Market instead of drop sites (this is reused for Age of Empires III, where resources don't need to be dropped off).
  • All units are male, all civilizations speak the same Simlish language, and all civilizations with the same building style have the same wonder, rather than each having an unique one.
  • All animals provide meat, not just prey but also predators, and predators attack all units on sight, even siege engines. It's not too rare to get the "unit attacked" chime and when you center on it, finding an almost undamaged hoplite beside a lion's or crocodile's rotting carcass.
  • Land-based mechanical units like siege engines can't be repaired by villagers, they have to be healed by priests just like flesh-and-bone soldiers. That doesn't extend to boats, which are repaired by villagers.
  • Started the game and skipped the intro expecting to hear the franchise's iconic theme at the main menu? Nope, this game had a completely different theme: what we now recognize as the main theme was "Gray Sky", just another late-in-the-playlist music track that otherwise only played a small snippet during the intro and in one campaign FMV.
  • The game also does not feature any voice-acting and all details related to the campaign storyline are found in the instruction tab at the start of every scenario. The Definitive Edition adds a narrator to these instruction tabs.
  • A more minor example comes thanks to the Gold Edition, which packed the base game and the expansion onto a single disc. The original game's soundtrack was replaced entirely with new music for The Rise of Rome, while the Gold Edition features a selection of tracks from both with a completely new track order. This meant that there were four tracks each from the base game and the expansion that never play, so if a Gold Edition player gets their hands on the non-Gold Edition of the original game or Rise of Rome they'll have a completely different soundtrack. This also applies to the Definitive Edition as it plays remakes of all the base game and expansion tracks in their original order. In tandem with this, the original Loss and Win tracks were redone with The Rise of Rome and are the default in the Gold Edition even when selecting the original.
  • There are several units whose production is unlocked by researching upgrades that are otherwise unrelated gameplay-wise, and also provide additional effects apart from unlocking the unit, such as needing to research Wheel (which makes Villagers move faster) to unlock Chariots. Age of Empires II does have Chemistry, which increases the damage of ranged units alongside unlocking gunpowder technologies, but save for that exception, all technologies that unlock units have no additional effects.
  • A common refrain from critics upon the 2018 release of the Definitive Edition is that while AOE I was groundbreaking in 1997, it really doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny due to just how the whole genre - or even its own franchise - changed in the meantime. Its sequel being one of the greatest RTS games of all time, and with a lasting popularity even to this day, also meant that it simply couldn't compete unless it got a substantial rework. Eventually, the developers tried again with the Return of Rome expansion for AOE II, combining the original game's civilizations and units with the engine and gameplay of the sequel, and added features such as unit garrisoning, alarm bells, market resource exchange, gates, and unit formations, plus a plethora of balancing changes. Three new campaigns also showcased what the original game's campaigns would look like with in-mission scripting and voice acting.
• 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:
  • Crash had a girlfriend named Tawna in the first game who was the Damsel in Distress. However, her overly sexualized design was not well received by Moral Guardians, and Naughty Dog wanted to have a more positive female lead anyway. This lead to the creation of Crash's much more helpful and action-geared sister Coco for the second game, and Tawna would be written out of the series with no explanation. The remake of the first game in Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy tried to redeem the character by making her a little more feisty during the opening cutscene (managing to knock out a lab assistant just before many of them surround her, implying she only got captured due to being outnumbered), as well as reducing the size of her breasts, though she still remained completely absent in the following two games.
    • She would jump back into prominence with the remake of Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, where she's made into a member of the Nitro Squad and becomes a playable racer. This would continue into Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, in which she was revamped into an Action Girl from a different timeline and is fully playable within her own levels.
  • 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 (Some, like Sten, are born hornless, while others- usually deserters- cut their horns off), 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. The 'appearance' thing is justified as they are shapeshifters, but the personality, not so much.
    • Azura looks like a topless woman with brown skin and blue hair (she'd later appear in Morrowind looking like a fully-clothed Dunmer), acts a lot flightier and pettier (she asks you to kill someone for speaking ill of her) than she later would, and talks like a Valley Girl. She's also associated with vanity, something that wouldn't come across in later games.
    • Boethiah is associated with Cruelty and Torture (along with murder and assassination), spheres she/he would later lose.
    • Clavicus Vile's spheres aren't mentioned, and instead he's called a "politician of Oblivion" who's carefully neutral about everything, while later he'd be settled as the Prince of Wishes and Bargains.
    • Malacath appears as an orc but isn't explicitly their Ethnic God; his worshipper who rewards you for doing his quest is a non-Orc noble, and he's referred to as the Prince of Deception, Lies, and Hypocrisy (hence the intrigue-loving noble worshipping him), when he'd later become associated with Pariahs, Curses, Oaths, and Vengeance.
    • Mehrunes Dagon is mostly the same but has an odd speech pattern he'd later lose.
    • Mephala is simply the Prince of Murder and is explicitly the patron of the Dark Brotherhood. Later, she'd expand her portfolio to include Interplay of Sex and Violence and be the patron to the Morag Tong, rivals to the Dark Brotherhood- though it's still a possibility that she's The Man Behind the Man to the Dark Brotherhood in the guise of the Night Mother (in Daggerfall, the Night Mother is present and explicitly a separate character).
    • Meridia, like Mehrunes Dagon, speaks differently, and she's associated with greed and called "a collector of sorts." While her greed association remains present, she doesn't collect stuff- instead, she's greedy for worship and has a All Take and No Give relationship with her followers. No mention is made of her hatred for necromancy or association with life energy and light.
    • Namira is simply the Daedric Prince of Hunger, with no mention of her other spheres of Revulsion, Grotesquery, and Decay.
    • Sanguine asks you to kill a monk who slew some of his worshippers; his later quests would be much sillier in nature.
    • Sheogorath acts mostly the same but is also a redhead who wears a green waistcoat, while all other appearances of his show him being grey-haired and wearing purple.
    • Vaermina is the Daedric Prince of Corruption and Decay. Later games would give the sphere of Corruption to Molag Bal (in Daggerfall only referred to as "the most power-mad of all Daedra") and Decay to Namira, and make Vaermina the Prince of Nightmares.
    • 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. ^note : Behind the scenes details reveal he was intended to be Black Mesa's unseen, but mentioned Administrator, but this idea was scrapped, and Dr. Wallace Breen was revealed to have been the Administrator in the next game. He also confiscates Gordon's weapons, justifying it as they were "government property," implying he was part of or related to said government. Not only is this logo is absent from his breifcase in 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.

L

• 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.
• Despite the series perhaps being best known for always featuring a Queer Romance, the original Life Is Strange is surprisingly light on overt depictions of queerness. There's heavy Les Yay running throughout many of Max and Chloe's interactions, as well as Chloe's reminiscences about her relationship with Rachel, but not so much that it stands out from the many other games that utilise Bait-and-Switch Lesbians or Pseudo-Romantic Friendship tropes between same-gender characters who are ultimately never confirmed as anything more than friends. The only unambiguously romantic moment between Max and Chloe is easily missed, occurring in only one ending variant, and only then if you pushed the flirtatious nature of some of the dialogue as far as possible. Life Is Strange 2 would also catch some flack for being But Not Too Gay when it came to the lead and his Gay Option love interest, but at least featured several unambiguously queer characters in its supporting cast; and the fact that Life Is Strange: Before the Storm and Life Is Strange: True Colors both put sapphic romance options front-and-centre mean it can be jarring to go back to the first game and remember how much more low-key the LGBTQ+ representation is.
• 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.

M

• 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.
    • Allan O'Neil is fought in the third stage, while future games will feature O'Neil as a mid-boss of the final mission. Additionally, 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.
  • The setting and humor of this game is more subdued and grounded than its Denser and Wackier sequels. For instance, some of the things you investigate in this game include a zombie-infested graveyard, a zoo with animals running amok, a Dream Land whose queen is trying to remember a forgotten melody, an eerie abandoned factory, and a haunted house. By comparison, the very next game features a brainwashed cult that wants to literally paint the world blue, a zombie infestation masterminded by a sentient pile of puke who is also enslaving a village of strange Waddling Head creatures, a Corrupt Corporate Executive being brainwashed by an evil statue that in turn hypnotizes you into an illusory Bizarro Universe, and a dungeon builder who loves RPG dungeons so much that he turned himself into a dungeon that you have to explore.
• 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).