Franchise Original Sin / Video Games (M to Z)

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• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite:
  • The Marvel side of the roster was heavily criticized for almost exclusively focusing on characters featured in Marvel's live-action films, with Nova, Ghost Rider and Venom being the sole exceptions. What people tend to forget is that mainstream popularity and adaptations have always influenced which Marvel characters were included in the Marvel vs. Capcom series, with the huge number of mutant characters in the earlier games largely owing to the massive popularity of the X-Men cartoon that was airing at the time the series began. While there were more adventurous and obscure choices like Shuma-Gorath and M.O.D.O.K., those were always a relatively small portion of the overall cast. It's just that in the case of Infinite, the favoritism shown to the MCU characters came across as far more blatant, since characters whose film rights were not held by Marvel at the time, such as the X-Men and Doctor Doom, were mysteriously left out of the game and given, at best, confusing and nonsensical reasons for why (like the infamous "functions" comment, where they tried to argue that players don't care about the actual characters in a fighting game so much as what moves and abilities they have, while also making the patently-false claim that nobody remembers the X-Men anyway) because they weren't allowed to either use those characters or simply admit that they weren't allowed to use them (presumably because anyone paying attention would have been able to discern the real reason why). In fact, the MCU influence was there earlier but much, much more controlled and less prominent. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 added Thor, Hawkeye, Doctor Strange, Iron Fist, Rocket Raccoon and Nova^note Though Nova ultimately didn't appear in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), he was featured as one of the main characters in the original draft of the script. specifically because they all had planned projects in the works for the MCU. It also downplayed the presence of X-Men, with 2 having X-Men reps make up a whopping 18 out of the 28 Marvel characters but 3 only having 7 out of 25. Only four returning X-Men characters from that game appeared (Wolverine, Magneto, Storm, Sentinel) while the rest got cut in favor of three newcomers (Phoenix, X-23, Deadpool). However, given that it gave more exposure to the general Marvel roster, still maintained the presence of non-MCU and Unexpected Characters, and the three newcomers being fan-favorites, this was something people liked. Unfortunately, this only got worse when Infinite rolled out, removing almost all non-MCU characters just as a spite towards Fox and a blatant promotion of the movies, combined with massive Executive Meddling and a lack of polish that made it feel like the cheap MCU plug that fans widely condemn it for.
  • One of the biggest complaints about the game was the sheer amount of returning characters from MvC3 and other previous games, with the only new characters in the launch roster being Captain Marvel, Mega Man X, Ultron, Gamora, and Jedah. While many fans and critics accused Capcom of being lazy, the entire Marvel vs Capcom series was practically built on reusing character models from older games like Marvel Super Heroes and the Street Fighter Alpha series — Darkstalkers' Morrigan in particular was infamous back around the MvC2 days for reusing the exact same sprite set for several games across seven years, long after her sprites had started to clash with the style and quality of those for the other characters. Another notable example could be found in Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, which was mostly a reskin of X-Men vs. Street Fighter (even using slightly altered versions of the same stages and the same boss) with a slightly different (and almost entirely recycled; even Cyber-Akuma was just an edit of Akuma's Street Fighter Alpha sprite) cast, and had several secret characters like U.S. Agent and Armored Spider-Man who were actually just quick Palette Swaps of existing sprites. The amount of brand new characters has always been quite small when compared to the sheer amount of recycled fighters. The main reason this proved so problematic for Infinite was that its immediate predecessor had far more newcomers (20 in the base roster, with an additional 11 in the Updated Re-release), as well as the fact that there were fan-favorite Marvel and Capcom characters fans were hoping for such as Ms. Marvel and Nero who got left out in favor of less-popular returning characters who seemed like they were only included due to laziness (such as Spencer, whose inclusion was met with widespread derision and bafflement). Not helping matters was the announcement that new characters like Sigma, Black Panther and Monster Hunter would be available as DLC, which created the perception that Capcom had purposefully avoided including too many newcomers so that they could charge extra for them down the line.
  • Additionally, the practice of recycling sprites, though still lazy, was understandable as quality sprite artwork, especially starting from the fifth generation as in early MvC's heyday, takes a long time to age. Infinite, in an attempt to cut costs, had to recycle a lot of models from 3, but didn't accommodate for the fact that 3 had a different lighting engine and textures. You could instantly tell which characters were returning veterans because their models just looked so much worse than the newcomers—and as established, there were a lot of veterans.
  • Also, while Infinite's "laziness" was one of the most criticized aspects, this is yet another aspect that was on full display in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the franchise's most popular entry (particularly in the west). Rather than using individual themes for each character, which is what the prior games in the series did, MvC2 used a handful of jazz tracks that usually sounded like something you'd hear in an elevator or at a lounge, most of which clashed badly with their respective stages. Meanwhile, the stages themselves broke from the series tradition of representing specific Marvel and Capcom locations (such as the Blackbird, Avengers HQ, Dr. Wily's lab and Morrigan's demonic realm) in favor of weird 3D backgrounds that had nothing to do with the history of either company, such as a cave, an amusement park and a clocktower. This also meant that these stages lacked any of the cameos or easter eggs that could also be found in older installments. Additionally, MvC2 did away with the individual Arcade Mode endings for each character, much like Infinite would be heavily criticized for doing years later. However, thanks to the large roster, fun gameplay and a pretty large dose of Nostalgia Goggles, many fans tend to overlook this, with some even liking the bizarre soundtrack (which was later Vindicated by History not only on its own merits but also because the use of jazz in Fighting Games really wasn't that bizarre; many titles both before and after MvC2 featured jazz-heavy soundtracks, including those made by Capcom).
• Max Payne 3 divided fans over its darker tone, abandoning the Heroic Bloodshed elements, and the treatment of Max as a Failure Hero who drunkenly charges into situations and ends up making things even worse through Cutscene Incompetence. But the seeds for these complaints were already planted in the second game, which was praised where 3 was criticized. The gameplay of 2 presents Max as an nigh-unstoppable force who can kill rooms full of gunmen with ease, but in cutscenes he loses these abilities and is stopped in situations where he would have succeeded in gameplay. The tone is also significantly darker and more dramatic than the first game, with the story playing out as a Tragedy with Max repeatedly failing to stop the plans of the Big Bad. However, fans didn't see these as problems thanks to Sam Lake draping the story in metaphor and the many bits of meta-humor peppered through the game. The writing in 3 ditched the metaphor and subtext of Lake's writing, and combined with the caustic edge to the story and Max's character, it made for a far more divisive reception.
• MechWarrior's signature MechLab, a form of Design-It-Yourself Equipment for your Humongous Mecha, was never very well balanced to begin with, but as the series went on and more mechanics were added and the games were tweaked, it became more and more broken resulting in massive Gameplay Derailment. Its first incarnation in MechWarrior 2 was bare-bones, and the game's many coding oddities resulted in it being balanced if only because of the byzantine design. Mech 3 is where it started to go crazy, with heavy Complacent Gaming Syndrome of identical loadouts on identical mechs. Mech 4 attempted to fix it, but introduced a slew of unforeseen gameplay consequences. In Online, the game has multiple painfully Obvious Rule Patch mechanics to limit the MechLab's silliness and still fails spectacularly, resulting in players with One-Hit Kill-capable or infinite screen shake autocannon spam mechs. Living Legends avoided implementing the MechLab until the game was feature complete and balanced ("version 1.0"), specifically because the lab fundamentally broke the competitive multiplayer of every previous game, though it was never implemented due to the game being Screwed by the Lawyers in version 0.7.
• Medal of Honor:
  • As discussed in this article, the game contained early versions of many of the things that later military shooters would be criticized for — most notably, its desaturated color palette and how that style became associated with "realism". Much like Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, the first Medal of Honor game deliberately went with a desaturated color palette and shaky cam effects as a subversion of newsreel propaganda movies. While this style worked initially a shout-out to Spielberg's war movies, it became less acceptable in later World War 2 games-especially those set in the Pacific theater where the grayish colors clash with the realistically colorful setting.
  • Like its later sister series Battlefield, Medal of Honor gradually shifted towards more dramatic events that aren't grounded in any real historical basis. Much of this stems from the series' America-centric look at the war, as the player character is an American soldier who takes part in operations that historically only involved members of groups like the British SAS or French Resistance. That said, events in the initial games were faithful to real life events and lacked the blatant propagandistic views of later entries. In fact, a study in contrasts can be made with Frontline from 2002 and Airborne from 2007. While both include missions set in Operation Market Garden, Frontline presents the campaign accurately as a failure with the player character spending most of the missions set during it accomplishing largely inconsequential objectives or simply trying to get out alive, whereas in Airborne, the player succeeds at every objective and the operation in general is presented as a great victory. This is also easily visible in their climaxes: Frontline ends with the player giving coordinates for a bomb strike to prevent the completion of a prototype jet, which is acceptable since the jet in question never entered service in reality, the game simply giving a more dramatic reason for why, and there really was a bombing mission in that area on that date; conversely, Airborne ends with the 17th Airborne Division assaulting one of Germany's flak towers, a mission that never happened (only the Soviets ever actually attacked any of the flak towers) in a location where a flak tower was never even built (none were planned for Essen; all the completed flak towers were in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna), not to mention that the tower in question is guarded by super soldiers carrying around belt-fed machine guns.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 5 was the first game in the Classic series to not make any substantial change to the series formula (Mega Man 2 had items and eight bosses, Mega Man 3 had Rush and sliding, and Mega Man 4 had the charged buster shot and the Disc-One Final Dungeon). The series became notorious for repetition not long after. It was also the first game to repeat the 'twist reveal' that the Big Bad was Dr. Wily all along and make it completely unsurprising; 4 had the element of Wily supposedly dying in the previous game while introducing a completely new antagonist in Dr. Cossack, making the twist somewhat surprising. For 5 to suggest that Proto Man had suddenly undergone a complete Face–Heel Turn for no real reason, most gamers could easily guess how it was going to turn out.
  • On a related note, Wily always being the bad guy was a prominent joke about the original series, but it generally wasn't seen as a major problem — partly because the designers eventually just started treating it as a Running Gag, and partly because the plots in the Classic games are generally pretty shallow to begin with. People tend to be much less forgiving of his Spiritual Successor Sigma always being the bad guy in Mega Man X, because the X series actually did try to have a story with lots of Grey-and-Gray Morality, and an Obviously Evil villain who constantly hijacks potentially interesting plots by making one side go mindlessly berserk simply by his presence doesn't play ball with that. It's meant to be a joke when "Mr. X" shows up in Mega Man 6; not so much when the Repliforce General is discussing a potential rebellion with a perpetually-shadowed figure who clearly has Sigma's silhouette in Mega Man X4. What's more, Mega Man X6 never mentioned Sigma once until the final stage (outside of the intro). Fans were far more forgiving with Mega Man V only mentioning Wily in the intro until the final stages, in part because by that point fans accepted it as pretty much a given that Dr. Wily would be the main bad guy, and the surprise would be more in learning how he obfuscated it. This might be why X8 changed up the formula by having Sigma be the Disc-One Final Boss and new face Lumine be the true Big Bad and True Final Boss. The Continuity Reboot, Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X, also addressed this issue by means of Adaptation Expansion: Despite being portrayed as even more villainous than he was in the SNES games, Sigma's characterization was tweaked to be more consistent with later appearances and avoid Motive Decay, downplaying his original goal of Kill All Humans in favor of backporting his plan in X8 to "evolve" Reploidkind, which was inspired by seeing X's limitless potential in action in the MHX continuity.
  • One of the most common gripes about later games, especially 5, 8, and nearly every Mega Man X game after the first, is their lackluster boss weapons. Dud weapons are a thing that goes back to the very first game, with the Super Arm and Hyper Bomb being extremely situational and slow to the point of uselessness, respectively. The difference was that the earlier games had enough standout options to ignore the bad stuff; even 2, generally seen as having some of the worst weapons otherwise, had the Metal Blade and Quick Boomerangs to make up for it. The later games tended to either lack standout options (the closest thing in 5, for instance, is probably the Gyro Attack), or repeat archetypes from the older games (how many times do you need to see a shield, a screen-nuke, a time stopper, and something that crawls on the ground?). On top of that, the increasing buffs to the Mega Buster made the other weapons a lot less viable in comparison, to the point of outdamaging boss weaknesses in some games (likely a factor in Mega Man 9 just removing the charged buster, which led to many boss weapons being significantly better). As a result, boss weapons became an increasingly less relevant feature, only being used to resolve Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors.
  • One of the bigger complaints about Mega Man X7 was that X, the protagonist of the series, was downgraded to an unlockable character who has little relevance to the story and Can't Catch Up when he does become available — indeed, by some accounts, he wasn't going to be in the game at all at one point in development. But when you look at the other games in the series, X had always been something of The Unfavorite compared to Zero^note in fact, Zero was originally intended to be the series' main protagonist before it was changed to X due to how radically different he was compared to the previous Mega Man, and one could argue Zero was pushed as the "real" protagonist as much as possible in response, being usually depicted as weaker,^note Even in the first game, Vile in a Ride Armor presented a Hopeless Boss Fight for X and a minor nuisance that could have its arm shot off in one blast for Zero given less interesting gameplay,^note Other than replacing the slide with a dash and the additions of wall-jumping and armor parts to enhance some of his abilities, X is more or less a carbon copy of the Classic gameplay style, while Zero gets a more varied style with weapons activated by specific button combinations and a focus on melee — he doesn't even have his Z-Buster for his first fully playable appearance in X4, despite having it in almost every other game before and since and having less to do in the plot, especially as the games went on.^note At least as early as X4, X's plot gave him no connection to the villains save for the two explicitly identified as traitors to the Maverick Hunters, and had all of the rest act mindlessly aggressive when they talked before a fight; Zero's gave him a vested interest in stopping the conflict peacefully, due to a love interest (Iris) whose brother was among the enemy (Colonel), and actual attempts at rational, peaceful discussion were made as a result X's protagonist status had increasingly become a formality, among both the fandom and the developers — but simply dropping him, and unceremoniously adding an unheard-of Replacement Scrappy, was going too far.
• Metal Gear:
  • The series has always had problems with its female characters, like holding onto The Smurfette Principle with an iron grip, many of them being Ms. Fanservice, with Male Gaze out the wazoo and often killing them off to give a male character angst, but the earlier games always gave them interesting characterisation as well as at least some vital importance to the plot to make them decent characters in their own right, with a heaping helping of Mr. Fanservice and Female Gaze to go on top of that and act as something of a balance. However, in Guns of the Patriots, the female villains barely act as characters at all, having their backstories told to us by another character after their fight and barely even speaking, other than reminding us of their primary emotion every few seconds during their fights. In the next game released, Peace Walker, a boss battle starts with numerous lingering chest and butt shots of a woman in her underwear, and the same character is killed off in the most gratuitously sexual manner possible in Ground Zeroes to establish the villain as especially bad. This eventually leads to The Phantom Pain, where the only prominent female character almost never speaks, has minimal plot importance, spends her entire screen time in a bikini top and ripped tights unless you go out of your way to unlock more reasonable outfits, is given a ridiculous justification for that outfit, and has multiple scenes that come completely out of nowhere and serve as nothing but excuses for her to make sensual poses in front of the camera.
  • The series has always had issues with its Kudzu Plot, full of Ass Pull after Ass Pull, numerous Retcons, and Heel–Face Revolving Doors. Creator Hideo Kojima, a massive fan of Hollywood films, loved to emulate the movies he loved as much as possible and add as many Shout-Outs and nods as he could, even if it didn't make sense story-wise. Early on, this was considered intriguing—during the 8-bit era, players were lucky if games had any sort of plot whatsoever, and even in the PS1 era, it was considered a major innovation that games could emulate film at all, so these quirks merely added to the series' charm. However, repeatedly relying on Rule of Cool within a complex narrative inevitably takes its toll, and fans became much, much less tolerant of these issues in later games as the series became bogged down by Continuity Creep. The lowest point is typically agreed to be Act 3 of Guns of the Patriots, where the true identities of the original Patriots are revealed to be Naked Snake and his radio support from MGS3. This one revelation brought all of the series' worst excesses to light in the eyes of its fans; it had become so obsessed with its own continuity that every single minor detail had to be connected, and many minor (but likable) characters had to be thrown under the bus to provide lots of Call-Backs to previous games. The Continuity Porn continued with things like Naomi Hunter making ridiculous decisions that require her to change sides once per act, revealing herself to have cancer despite the technology present being clearly capable of making that a non-issue, and killing herself, despite her plan in no way requiring her to die, just so that Otacon could cry over another woman like in previous games. Rose and Colonel Campbell pretend to be a happy married couple so that Raiden can go through another emotional character arc similar to the one in 2, become yet another cyber ninja, and then wind up in the same Belated Happy Ending. The game even ends with Big Boss himself (a character dead since Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, 18 years earlier in reality and 15 in-universe) returning to explain the last few plot threads. In addition to introducing even more twists which may raise more questions than answers, these twists also have the effect of making the entire universe revolve around a small cast of characters that can perfectly manipulate worldwide events across half a century. Many of these problems can be attributed to the fact that Kojima never really intended to continue the series beyond Metal Gear Solid 2 and, as one of the translators from that game stated, Kojima's writing style is too heavily influenced by wanting to create big set pieces and emulate cool things he likes from his favorite movies.
• Metroid:
  • After eight years in rest since Super Metroid, the series was revived with two well-received games, one of them being Metroid Fusion. Despite the positive reception, a point of criticism from fans was its stronger focus on a story; it was even the first time Samus verbally interacted with another character. This was seen as a turning point for the entire series to shift towards more plot-driven games, like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Other M brought the debate on whether or not this is a good idea to a flame war-stricken head, particularly due to how it characterized Samus Aran.
  • Samus has also become more and more gratuitously sexualized as the series has gone on. The series has always rewarded good gameplay with an image of Samus out of her armor and in skimpy clothing, but in the earlier games it was much more about the Tomato Surprise than Fanservice (which was kind of hard to do with the pixelated graphics of the time), and most players wouldn't even see it because it required a very good performance. Metroid: Zero Mission introduced a skintight undersuit for her, which just barely skated by with the fanbase (while it was the first time players were guaranteed to see Samus out of armor, it still got a pass because the entire point was that her Power Suit was destroyed, and she was more vulnerable as a result). Ever since then, suitless Samus has become just a thing that happens for fanservice, at times in contexts some fans consider inappropriate and/or degrading. The prominence of Zero Suit Samus in Super Smash Bros. starting from the third game did not help things either.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The series only completely entered its Audience-Alienating Era when it made its Video Game 3D Leap, but the third game shows at least some of the weaknesses of later installments: over-reliance on dial-a-kombo,^note a term in the fandom referring to cheap combos that only require Button Mashing, without any stick movement the complete shattering of the Eastern-ish theme (which resulted in people realizing how ridiculous some of the characters looked), and the bosses suddenly getting cheaper. Yet there's still a lot of fans and defenders of this one because it was the conclusion of the "Outworld Trilogy" and the stakes and tone of the original game were still there.
  • Mortal Kombat II introduced many fan-favorite characters, such as Kitana, Mileena, and Jax, but it also conspicuously took Sonya and Kano out for no real reason other than to have a Damsel in Distress and establish how badass Shao Khan is, respectively. However, as the developers admitted, Sonya and Kano were the least popular characters, and the real fan favorites (Liu Kang, Sub Zero, Scorpion, Raiden, etc.) remained, so Kano and Sonya's losses were deemed acceptable. The third game, however, is when the absences started getting out of hand. After the departure of Dan Pesina and Katalin Zamiar, who portrayed all of the male and female ninja characters, Midway decided to drop almost all of the characters they portrayed from their lineup. Johnny Cage was killed off, Raiden said Screw This, I'm Outta Here, and neither Kitana nor Mileena returned in the initial version of 3. Even worse, Scorpion, the most popular character in the series, was left out as well. The team quickly rectified most of these mistakes with the Updated Re-release, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, but within the casual market, the damage was done. This problem continued on throughout the rest of the series, as many fan-favorite characters were arbitrarily included or dropped from each installment. Sometimes they're killed off, sometimes they switch sides, sometimes they turn into completely new characters. This has become so ingrained within the fanbase that a common question when a new game is announced is "Will [insert favorite character here] be in it?"
  • Related to absentee fan-favorites (and possibly the cause of it) is the bloated roster, which consists not just of Joke Characters and hidden bosses, but almost every single character that is vaguely referenced, even as a meme. Examples of this include Ermac, Scarlet, Blaze, and Tremor, just to name a few. There are also many bland and forgettable entries with tangential connections to more popular characters, like Mavado, Hsu Hao, Kobra, and so on. Traces of this started all the way from Mortal Kombat II, where the first game's hidden boss character (Reptile) made his playable debut, and characters with tangential connections to older ones like Kung Lao and Jax also made an appearance. The difference is that the series was small enough back then that new characters were a welcome sight, and felt like genuine expansions of the lore. By the time of Mortal Kombat 4, however, several new characters such as Fujin, Jarek and Kai felt like poor replacements for the ones missing (indeed, in some cases, the new faces were actually meant to be older characters who were then reskinned, such as swapping out Kano for his underling Jarek). This continued all the way up to Armageddon, where every single character — even the superfluous ones like Meat or ones they went on-record as hating like Hsu Hao — was part of the roster, in a deliberate attempt to Torch the Franchise and Run. The 2009 reboot dialed down on this, with almost every character included being a fan-favorite. X followed suit, but experimented with a few new faces, as well as a few of the old darkhorses like Tremor.
  • The MK series is known for retconning and revising characters and plot points, starting with the second game—which retconned Raiden into a wise Mentor Archetype instead of an arrogant god, and revised Shang Tsung into a servant of Shao Kahn (amongst many other changes). From that point on, almost every single game in the series has revealed, revised or rescinded some plot detail — especially after the feature film proved popular, and plot elements from it were folded into the games. This became rather confusing for fans of the lore, but it wasn't minded too much because there was genuine interest in seeing where things would go from there. The first decision that truly split the fanbase was the Cosmic Retcon that occurred in Mortal Kombat 9; here, not only are the retcons obvious,^note such as Mileena being a recent creation of Shang Tsung instead of being raised as Kitana's sister but the fact that the game was a Soft Reboot meant that the story didn't really move forward in any meaningful way. This, again, was forgiven come Mortal Kombat X because that game introduced a Time Skip that took the story in new and fresh directions never seen before and allowed for several new characters alongside the existing cast... but fans were not so forgiving when Mortal Kombat 11 pulled off another Cosmic Retcon that completely wiped out all timelines everywhere, meaning that not only were the events of every single previous game in the series completely wiped clean, but so was the new timeline, all the various comic books, cartoons, TV and film adaptations, and offshoot games like Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe — with no indication of how Fire God Liu Kang and Kitana would remake things. Fans, even those who liked 11, were NOT pleased with this direction, and the problem was compounded by the Aftermath expansion, which added more retcons^note Such as Sindel being evil the whole time, and Mileena and Kitana having again been raised as "sisters". and retconned the previous ending of 11, leaving every character except either Liu Kang or Shang Tsung dead, with no indication which of the two endings will be canon going forward.
  • The character-focused story chapters of the NetherRealm Studios games have been heavily criticized due to things like how characters usually only win fights if they are the chapter's main character, causing inconsistent displays of power, some characters not doing anything or just vanishing for large chunks of the story, some fights occurring just for the sake of padding out the story, or causing the villains to look weak because they lose every fight they are in gameplay-wise, and never get to display their powers. These issues can be traced back to before Netherrealm took over the series with Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, which started the trend by having two story modes, one each for the MK and DC characters, and only allowed for a small number of characters to fight each other. However, the game was pragmatic in addressing these issues and created an In-Universe explanation for the reasons characters would randomly fight each other, or seemed to be stronger if they were the player character, the first being a "Kombat Rage" that caused someone to go berserk and attack anyone nearby, while the second was a power fluctuation, which caused people to rise and fall in power randomly. Once Netherrealm moved on to Mortal Kombat, though, games afterwards kept using these story beats without trying to address them at all, causing all the previously mentioned issues to become more noticeable as each game went on and the series tried to make more complex stories. This led to things like in Mortal Kombat X, where the new "Kombat Kids" are beaten by relatively strong characters like Sub-Zero, but are later on somehow able to fight several Revenants like Sindel without too much trouble despite no story hints that they got stronger, while Mortal Kombat 11 had things like a Mortal Kombat II-era Kitana somehow defeating Shao Kahn.
• Nintendo:
  • The company's censorship policies have existed since the beginning of their involvement in console gaming. It was an intentional move and justified during the 1980s, as many infamous games that helped crash the industry (such as Custer's Revenge and Beat Em and Eat Em) were glorified porn. Nintendo's family-friendly approach (to the point of calling their first console a Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan) was viewed positively back then, since combined with the "Seal of Quality" it gave customers the assurance that they were buying games by developers who were putting actual effort into making games. However, their continued adherence to censorship guidelines during the releases of subsequent consoles has followed them in two ways. In the first case, it was what led to Nintendo having the negative reputation of being "kiddie games" at a time when games and the people who played them gradually started to mature in better ways than just making literal porn. The censorship of the original Mortal Kombat was especially infamous, since the Sega Genesis version was released with the gore intact (albeit hidden behind a cheat code), and was much better received by fans despite otherwise being technically inferior to the Super NES version, resulting in Nintendo putting a Content Warning on the box for the second game just so they could sell it uncensored. On the other end, Nintendo's censorship practices also showed the early signs of their strenuous relationship with third-party developers. By the time the fifth generation of gaming came, Nintendo's censorship combined with their refusal to adopt CD technology caused developers like Square to get fed up with their practices and jump ship to Sony's new console. Nintendo's lack of strong third-party support has been a reoccurring flaw in all of their consoles since, most visible in the Nintendo 64 having under 400 games published for it, less than half of the Sega Saturn's one thousand and less than a tenth of the PlayStation's four thousand. Not helping is that censorship (especially when sexual objectification is involved) started becoming more politicized during the 2010s, meaning that reaction to any change that could be seen as censorship went from merely "Nintendo doesn't take its older fanbase seriously" to more intense backlash (leading to boycotts in some cases). With the release of the Switch, this began changing drastically, especially in regards to Sony's eventual censorship policies, which is by itself nothing short of ironic.
  • Nintendo's consoles past the SNES have often been criticised for being underpowered in comparison to the competition, with many accusing Nintendo of cutting corners on technology in order to save money. This flaw could be traced back to the original Game Boy. It was designed with Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of "lateral thinking with withered technology", which refers to using technology that is older, cheaper, and well-understood in a new and innovative way, instead of using the most advanced technology available at the time. In the case of the Game Boy, this was accomplished by programming games for what was essentially an LCD calculator with a CPU whose design dated back to 1976; this meant it had primitive hardware and a screen with only four shades of a single color, but this also gave it a low price point (no variation of the Game Boy ever sold for more than US$100) and long battery life (15 hours minimum with four AA batteries) that gave it the edge over the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear, both of which were full-color, backlit, and more powerful than the Game Boy but were noticeably more expensive and shared the Fatal Flaw of draining six batteries in a few hours.^note To compare, the Game Boy only got a full-color display in 1998 and backlighting with the GBA SP in 2003, by which point Nintendo was able to implement them without noticeably impacting battery life. Though this garnered some complaints, mostly around the Game Boy Advance not getting a backlit screen until the release of the SP revision in 2003, it was when that same philosophy was applied to their home consoles that people really started to notice a problem. It first showed up on the Nintendo 64, where, in spite of it being a legitimately 64-bit system at a time where games were nowhere close to breaking the limits of even 32-bit hardware and other 64-bit consoles were only such because their marketing misinterpreted how bit counting works, Nintendo was criticized for continuing to use cartridges in an era where CD-ROMs were taking over the market,^note The Nintendo 64 had a planned add-on called the 64 Disk Drive that did have the ability to use disks, but it was delayed so much that it only came out in Japan, underperformed, and was scrapped after only nine games were released, many of which were repurposed for cartridges as well as the GameCube, which used proprietary, lower-capacity optical discs instead of DVDs in order to save money (namely, to prevent piracy and so that Nintendo wouldn't have to pay licensing fees to the DVD Forum), and it continued on the Wii, which was initially seen as the big winner of the seventh generation by catering to more casual consumers but whose main innovation, motion controls, showed its limitations early in the console's life cycle. The problem culminated in the Wii U, which ended up a commercial failure and Nintendo's worst-selling home console. A number of people blamed the "lateral thinking" design philosophy for the Wii U's downfall, considering that it got trounced by two consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, that were both considerably more powerful yet barely more expensive on release due to the Wii U's main gimmick, the tablet controller, significantly driving the price up (in contrast, the Wii was the cheapest home console of its generation because of its noticeably lower graphical prowess than its competitors, giving it an extra point of appeal even towards people who didn't care much about the motion controls). When Nintendo scrapped the Wii U and released the Switch (to considerably more acclaim), they made sure that it had enough power to be competitive with its rivals, if not as a home console^note It's really not competitive with its rivals in terms of raw horsepower, in fact it's not really even competitive with the rivals' preceding consoles, falling somewhere between the seventh and eighth generation consoles, though in fairness none of those other consoles are also portable. This isn't really a problem with first party titles as Nintendo has always done a great job at getting the most out of limited hardware, but third party games that are ported to all three current consoles (of which there aren't many, mainly for this reason) are often stripped down and/or perform noticeably worse on the Switch, and usually get pretty lousy reviews from critics then most certainly in comparison to handhelds and tablets.
  • Nintendo has often had problems reinventing the wheel with their controllers, but their controllers have always been unique. One of the NES's main selling points was its four-button controls (Start, Select, A and B), which simplified gameplay compared to the 12+-button number pads and joysticks of other consoles. Nintendo added four more buttons to the SNES controller (two more face buttons, X and Y, and two shoulder buttons, L and R) and in the process, codified what many consider to be the perfect controller layout. To this day, the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo DS, Switch and Valve Steam Deck control layouts all mimic the basics of the SNES controller.^note D-pad on the left, four face buttons in a diamond formation on the right, Select/Start in the center and shoulder buttons at the top. Other than small tweaks, like the PlayStation's addition of a second set of shoulder buttons and later two analog sticks or the Xbox 360 adding a Home button between Start and Select, the SNES layout is still the apex of design. After this, however, Nintendo kept making radical controller "innovations" which have been far more problematic. The Nintendo 64 controller required switching hand positions between the analog stick and D-pad (most games thus either disregard one or the other or have the D-pad do the same things as the C-buttons), had a center trigger in addition to shoulder buttons, and also had four "directional" C-buttons in addition to the A and B buttons. The GameCube had another confusing button layout,^note An enormous A button surrounded by a tiny B button and bean-shaped X and Y buttons, with an extremely small and limited "C-stick" for a second analog and a shrunken D-pad that was just out of the way enough to be uncomfortable to use. and the Wii, of course, used "nunchuck" controllers that completely eschewed any form of traditional control layout.^note Even using only the "Wiimote" without the attachable nunchuck reduced controls to almost the same amount of buttons as an NES controller. Fortunately for Nintendo, each of those consoles were still successful, but even then, third-party developers often cited Nintendo's controllers as a reason they avoided making Nintendo ports or exclusives, and popular genres like fighting games were usually more successful on other consoles because of the familiar controls. The Wii U tablet controller was just the last straw, evoking cries of "What the hell are we supposed to do with this?!" from casual gamers, hardcore gamers, and developers alike.
  • Nintendo reworking initially different games to serve as part of one of its own properties goes back to Super Mario Bros. 2, and served them well enough in titles like Diddy Kong Racing or Super Smash Bros.. In those cases, the original game was either already very similar to the franchise it was trying to blend in with, or so radically different that it could be declared a spinoff. However, this completely backfired in the case of Star Fox Adventures, where they tried to rework the fantastical Zelda clone Dinosaur Planet into part of a space shooter series; not only was Adventures too significant and too far distant from the last game in the series to be dismissed as a spinoff, but it was incredibly apparent that it'd once been its own game and any attempts to the contrary (a handful of token Arwing sections, a nonsensical Hand Wave for why Fox can't use a gun) were hilariously obviously tacked-on.
  • The Nintendo Switch's online play gets criticism for connection quality issues, as it turns out that Switch games use peer-to-peer connections to other consoles instead of dedicated servers. However, using P2P connections dates as far back as the Nintendo DS (the online services of which are now defunct, along with the Wii's). It was more acceptable on the DS due to it being a dedicated handheld that is much less powerful than contemporary consoles, so top-quality connections were not expected. When this same format of netplay extended to Nintendo's consoles, it made them stick out like a sore thumb compared to Microsoft's and Sony's consoles, which both use dedicated servers. The criticism for Switch netplay only deepened when Nintendo began charging for it when netplay on their previous consoles was free, with many players feeling like they're having to pay money for what appears to be no improvement in Switch netplay. Granted, the fee is considerably cheaper than that of other console makers, at 20 USD a year for an individual plan and 35 USD a year for a "family" plan of up to 8 users, as opposed to 60 USD a year for Microsoft's and Sony's online services, but whether Nintendo's online services are worth even that is a base-breaking topic.
• Outlast did not include any means to defend yourself against enemies. This trend continues in Outlast II, but many fans think that the lack of a way for the player to defend themselves here makes no sense, as there are plenty of weapons lying around: hammers, scythes, crowbars, etc. and the enemies aren't genetically altered super-strong patients like in the previous game, but disease-ridden and weakened rednecks. Similarly, there's the player character's refusal to use flashlights when there are many available.
• There has always been an element of sex appeal to Aya Brea, the protagonist of the Parasite Eve games, with her design deliberately being made to be strong and sexy. The illustrations showed this aspect of her quite a lot, and the beginning of the first game famously had her chasing after Mitochondria Eve in a rather revealing black dress. However, while Aya was a sex symbol, she was always depicted as a strong-willed and determined woman who had full control over her life and didn't take crap from anyone. However, the series' third game The 3rd Birthday not only heavily cranked up her sex appeal to the point that it came off as simply leering and distracting, it also hit her with a very strong dose of chickification and depicted her as insecure and frequently taking orders from authority figures with little initiative of her own. The twist that you were actually playing as Eve, a girl with little control over her situation, possessing Aya's body for most of the game didn't do anything to help, especially once you added the ickiness of Eve being a much younger girl in an adult woman's body.
• Persona:
  • One complaint about the series from the PlayStation 2 onward is its overuse of Prolonged Prologue, particularly with its fourth and fifth installments, where the first several hours of the game are made up almost entirely of cutscenes before one is given the full control of freetime that the series is known for. The roots of this problem can be found as early as Persona 2: Innocent Sin. The start of that game begins with the player forced to walk around their high school talking to NPCs looking for one specific NPC, watch a lengthy cutscene where the third party member is introduced and the gang has their first incident with the Joker, travel to the mall, learn how the rumor spreading mechanic works, return to the mall, and then finally get back to the high school where they started, which serves as the first dungeon. All told, it's about 30-45 minutes from starting the game to the first time the player is given actual control in combat encounters, and while that may not be as long as the prologues of later games in the franchise, it was still far from the norm for a roughly 40-hour PlayStation RPG. It seemed as though as the games got longer, so did their prologues.
  • One of the biggest complaints about Persona 5 is that Morgana stops you from going out and doing whatever you want at night, making you go to sleep, such as when you get home from a day of dungeon crawling, a story event takes place earlier that day, or when you have plans the next day. Except this is not new for the series, just the first time another character is preventing you from going out. Even in Persona 4, you are told that you can't go out at night numerous times, such as when you have to check the Midnight Channel (two or three nights in a row per dungeon, plus one time on the night of the deadline). Persona 3 had this problem less often, but the player was prohibited from going to Tartarus at night if both Mitsuru and Akihiko were unavailable that evening. The difference is that Morgana plays the same role as the fourth game's narrator, so he's easier to blame for this Scrappy Mechanic. Royal addresses this problem, since you can usually do nighttime activities at Leblanc^note Making coffee or curry, cleaning, studying, reading, crafting infiltration tools even if you're not able to leave.
  • When the announcement came that the Updated Re-release Persona 5 Royal would be released as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, more than a handful of fans and critics decried what they saw as Atlus' attempt to get people to pay for the same game again on the same console three years after release. What these people tend to forget is that this is, in fact, the second time that Atlus has done something like this. Persona 3 FES, an updated rerelease of Persona 3, was released in Japan in 2007 and in the US in 2008 for the PlayStation 2, only a little more than a year after (or the same year as, in other territories like the EU and Australia) its initial release on that same console, and with less substantial changes than the ones announced for Royal. This is also to say nothing of the One Game for the Price of Two treatment of Persona 2 for both the PlayStation release and PlayStation Portable remakes. The rise of DLC/expansion packs and the fact that its two predecessors had both been remade for a mobile device changed what people had come to expect for an Updated Re-release for the series.
  • Persona 3 introduced the running gag of the male characters being in a bathhouse when the female cast came in, causing the girls to go into Pervert Revenge Mode in response. Later games like 4 and Persona 5 Strikers brought it back to much criticism from fans. 3 got away with it at the time because you could avoid it in a mini game, and the party consisted of two well known perverts, so if you did get caught, it made sense for the girls to freak out and get angry (especially with Yukari and Mitsuru being the way they are). 4 and Strikers feature only one character who could be called a pervert, and in both cases the girls' reactions are far less justified because the player has no way of avoiding the issue. 4 in particular is criticized because the girls are the ones who made the mistake, and yet never apologize for it. In addition, the bathhouse scene in Persona 3 was (at least in intention) a comic relief scene in an otherwise very dark, serious-toned game. The games that followed, Persona 4 in particular, are far more lighter in tone than Persona 3, making these scenes not just mean-spirited but needless as well.
  • Persona 5 receives a lot of controversy for its treatment of Ryuji as the Butt-Monkey. This type of character was always a staple of the series, but both Junpei and Yosuke's treatment was far less contentious with the fanbase because of the story context surrounding it. Junpei was intentionally written as unlikable initially, but gradually develops into a more thoughtful, mature character, at which point his comic elements are heavily downplayed outside of spinoffs. His early Butt-Monkey moments make his later Character Development all the sweeter. Meanwhile, when Yosuke is the butt of a joke, he's usually done something to deserve it, such as being forcibly entered into a drag pageant after he signed the girls up to a beauty contest without their consent. By contrast Ryuji is one of the catalysts of the Phantom Thieves' formation, remains a likable character through the whole story, and was a victim of physical abuse in his past, making his treatment a lot harder to swallow for many fans.
• For the Postal series, a major complaint fans have with Postal 3 and Postal 4: No Regerts is the amount of bugs the two games have, with the former being a complete mess of a game while the latter didn't take advantage of its early access phase to fix issues as well as having horrible optimization, even on stronger computers. Thing is, this can also apply to Postal 2, as the game launched with a lot of glitches and loading times, not to mention the engine crashing under fairly innocuous (for this game, at least) circumstances, and its Expansion Pack Apocalypse Weekend was even worse, becoming infamous among the game's early fanbase for it because of its most famous mods requiring the expansion. However, this was all the way back in 2003, where Running With Scissors was not as well-known and the Unreal Engine 2 it runs on was brand-new and thus not well-understood, and the game offered features not seen before, such as a combination of open-world and FPS gameplay, as well as surprisingly good liquid (blood and vomit) and limb dismemberment, the latter of which was improved upon by Apocalypse Weekend for all its other faults. What helps is that the Steam release would be much more optimized and fixed up thanks to the benefit of a decade of hindsight, with even the formerly-very-crash-happy Apocalypse Weekend being more stable nowadays. The issue with the successors is that Postal 3 was on the Source engine seven years after it was introduced and thus should've allowed for more stable gameplay, which didn't happen, mostly because of the game being outsourced to a Russian developer who almost immediately had to lay off their A-team. Postal 4: No Regerts continued to have bugs and bad optimization even after multiple updates while in early access, without the excuse of a Troubled Production since this time it was an in-house development again, and many felt like it left early access way too early due to bugs and crashes still being plentiful, despite having had two and a half years in early access to fix these issues as they came up.
• What initially helped Ratchet & Clank step out of the pack was the way it satirized the nature of consumerism — Mega-Corps supplied most of the series staples such as high-powered weapons and arena challenges, the Big Bads were often Corrupt Corporate Executives, people out to make a quick buck were a frequent obstacle, enemies were hired goons and mass-produced Mecha-Mooks — these elements made the series' famous use of destructive ordinance and snarky sense of humor fit well, and so it stands to reason why many fans attribute the franchise's faltering in later years to later installments dropping that angle in favor of a more cinematic, Family Friendly style. However, this refocus started as far back as the third game, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, which had the duo joining the Galactic Rangers to thwart the machinations of a cartoonish super-villain, and had Captain Qwark, previously a cowardly fraud out to make a comeback through Engineered Heroics, pull a Heel–Face Turn at the end. Of course, the humor remained on-point, the characters were well-written, and the gameplay was polished, allowing the game to be a classic despite focusing away from the satirical tone of its predecessors.
  Then came the Ratchet & Clank Future sub-series, which fully shifted the series in a more cinematic direction, revolving around the duo discovering their origins and coming into their role as heroes. While the Future series was well-received overall, it ultimately left the franchise without much of a direction to continue on from there, and it struggled to stay relevant ever since. The cinematic re-imagining of the first game was where it became clear that the series was missing much of what gave it its charm in the first place — characters like Ratchet and Captain Qwark ironically ended up constrained by the more heroic characterizations they would grow into in the original continuity, the sense of humor was watered down, and series staples were a part of the game simply because they were staples, which ended up clashing with the more whimsical, light-hearted, and some would say generic tone the re-imagining had established. Because of this, many fans are accusing the series of trying to be the kind of Big Budget Cash-Cow Franchise that earlier games would have mocked.
• 2010's Red Dead Redemption was Rockstar Games' first open-world game with actual mid-level checkpoints^note Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony had an attempt at one that let players replay the latter half of a mission depending on how late they failed — to say it was rather primitive would be an understatement, which allowed the game to have missions that not only were much longer and complex than those found in their earlier games, but also allowed better storytelling in the progress. In three years, their next big open-world game, Grand Theft Auto V, would bring this type of level design to the GTA series, but despite the improved narrative aspects, many players and critics started noticing that the game had a habit of Railroading the player. Then five years after that, Red Dead Redemption II was openly criticized for its overly-strict mission design that started to feel immersion-breaking; moments such as players being told to remount their horse if they stopped it 3 feet before a waypoint where they were supposed to get off their horse, missions failing instantly if the player wandered off the exact path^note This includes moments of trying to go back to get more ammo from bodies killed earlier in the same mission, their allies complaining if the player stops to clean their weapon, and some plot elements that would have been easily preventable if the player was not tied to the aggressive scripting^{Examples (Spoilers)}The first bounty target is failed if the player "spooks him" by trying to take him in without revealing they're a bounty hunter, and Lenny only dies because his killers (who are on-screen for a second before shooting — remember that the game's gimmick is Bullet Time) are marked invisible before they take their shots. Effectively, the system designed to improve the narrative was now getting so aggressive it started harming it.
• This article by Grey Carter for The Escapist argues that RPG Elements are this for action games as a whole, having been the Trojan horse that allowed microtransactions to proliferate in singleplayer-focused games while also allowing developers to get away with sloppier balancing of enemies and combat. The thing was, in the RPGs that popularized leveling systems and loot, those mechanics were the combat gameplay. Many RPGs revolved around constantly pushing players to make their characters stronger by improving their stats and figuring out the best loadouts, the growing power being the goal in and of itself rather than the means to an end, with the actual task of fighting enemies often boiled down to simply clicking on them or going through a menu. When RPG mechanics were combined with other forms of combat gameplay, however, they threw even the most careful balancing out of whack by allowing players to grind their way to a point where they could just curb-stomp every enemy in their path without actually learning the gameplay mechanics and getting better at the game. Worse, the clear-cut stats provided with level and loot systems allowed developers to introduce microtransactions to full-price, single-player games by selling powerful weapons and stat boosters for real money.
• Saints Row, as a series that underwent a major evolution in style through each installment, is bound to have a few examples of this:
  • The Saints Row games started out as The Rival to the Grand Theft Auto series, focusing on a more ridiculous and over-the-top experience that leaned into the Power Fantasy side of its Wide-Open Sandbox setting, a design formula that many fans felt peaked with the second game. However (as noted by Tyler J. of Cleanprincegaming), given that the first two games had both been overshadowed by competing entries in the GTA series (San Andreas and GTA IV, respectively), Volition decided to go the Denser and Wackier route with the third game in order to more effectively distinguish it from the competition. This move was met with a mixed reception from fans and critics, who felt that the game world was less cohesive and more scattershot than before, though the resulting game still retained enough of the Saints Row series' DNA to meet a positive reception. This problem grew much harder to ignore when the fourth game added aliens and superpowers and turned into more of a clone of Crackdown or inFAMOUS than anything, such that many classic gameplay elements now felt entirely pointless. After all, when your character can run faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings with a single bound, there's no point in saddling yourself with a car outside of missions where you have to. The game's Troubled Production didn't help matters at all.
  • Johnny Gat is a prime example of how a Breakout Character can become a Base-Breaking Character if not handled carefully. Traces of his status as The Ace go back to the very first game, where he was by far the most competent and psychotic member of the Third Street Saints, but what is often forgotten is that he was very much a Deconstruction of stoic action heroes. When not in combat, he was devoted to Aisha, and her death in the second game sends Johnny into emotional turmoil. Saints Row 2 was also the game where his reputation began to be played up, but he still wasn't a perfect, undefeatable badass as that reputation would have suggested - a significant portion of his involvement in both games involves him being laid out by an injury relatively early on and having to rely on the player character to help him while he recovers. Johnny's death at the start of The Third solidified his popularity in the fanbase, but his return in IV would be controversial for a variety of reasons. The Heartbroken Badass traits from before would be played down, including having him move on from Aisha. The story and every character also treats Gat as a legendary figure, including the villain who saw Gat as more of a threat than the Boss, despite them and other gang members having similar levels of competence and screentime. After IV, Johnny Gat also became the go-to character to represent the franchise, being the main focus of Gat out of Hell and a Guest Fighter in both Divekick and Agents of Mayhem. Overall, by this point many fans who had liked him earlier had gotten sick of the disproportionate amount of focus he would receive, especially as his character became shallower with time.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV introduced Downloadable Content to the series, including demons that could only be unlocked through DLC. However, the demons were either rewards for defeating the Superbosses of brutally-difficult DLC quests, or were just Palette Swaps of pre-existing demons. The Persona games also introduced DLC Personas, but they were just cameos of Personas from previous games. The practice would only start getting noticeable complaints once Soul Hackers 2 announced that iconic demons like Mara and Satan would be locked behind a DLC purchase.
• Sierra:
  • One of the most hated characters created by the company is Cedric the Owl, who is viewed as little more than The Scrappy because of how completely and utterly useless he is as King Graham's companion. In some ways this is a bit unfair — Sierra had quite a number of useless companions in older games forcing you to do everything by yourself. For example, Keith Robinson, Sonny's partner in Police Quest 2: The Vengeance, only occasionally runs back to the squad car to get on the radio for you and otherwise does nothing at any point to help you, whether you're scouring for clues at a murder site, getting shot at, or dealing with a plane being hijacked by terrorists. Pat Morales in the third game is even worse: aside from being little more than The Millstone for Sonny by having him backtrack to assist her in even the simplest of situations, at the last segment of the game, she will reveal herself as one of the villains and kill Sonny unless he successfully got an investigation going with Internal Affairs, and if you miss it, you get no chance to backtrack. Yet neither of them received the hate Cedric got, largely because Cedric, unlike the others, was voiced — not only was he voiced by a complete amateur (one of Sierra's programming staff, releasing back in the days when game developers didn't even consider hiring professional voice actors, much less have the budget to do so), but spoke some of the more narmful and hammy lines in the game (like the iconic "Graham, watch out! A POOOIIIsonous snake!").
  • Many of their games include oddball puzzles (e.g. an incident in King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne where you must throw a bridle at a snake and turn it into a Pegasus, or guessing the gnome's name in the first game, both of which make little sense even today) as well as unwinnable situations (e.g. losing one of the three treasures in the first game). Most of these are heavily criticized many years later, as the senselessness of the situations were much more exposed to more players. The early games were more open-world (allowing backtracking) and made it obvious you were at a dead end (compare to the fifth game where something you missed much earlier, like failing to save a rat from a cat, or overlooking a fishhook on a distant island, or missing the one shot at getting a moldy piece of cheese, will make it impossible to win, and you cannot go back except by having a separate save file from before you missed whatever you need), and that there are often alternate solutions in earlier games that will only penalize your score, such as, well, killing the snake in the second game. You get fewer points and a harder puzzle later on, but can venture onwards.
• Silent Hill 2, while still remembered as one of the best games in the Silent Hill series, held the origin of a number of trends that plagued the series in the long term.
  • The first was with its monsters. SH2 was acclaimed for its creative enemy design, the two monsters most heavily identified with the game being the chilling figure known as Pyramid Head, an Implacable Man wearing a pyramid-shaped helmet, and the sexy, faceless nurses in the hospital. They weren't the main villains, but they were both incredibly popular, and became unofficial mascots of the series. However, they served a very specific purpose in that game, acting as metaphorical representations of the protagonist James Sunderland's guilt and sexual anxiety. This didn't stop the nurses from reappearing in later games (and in the film adaptations), growing increasingly sexualized in the process, nor did it stop several attempts to try and copy Pyramid Head, be it with similar "icon" monsters (like the Butcher in Origins and the Bogeyman in Downpour) who felt shoehorned in more often than not, or by simply bringing him back straight-up (as in Homecoming, the films, and some of the comics). However, the symbolism of what they represented no longer applied in these new stories. While SH2 remembered to give its creepy, cool monsters a purpose beyond just the Rule of Scary, later games took only those monsters' most superficial elements in the name of fanservice.
  • Secondly, SH2 laid the groundwork for the series' Broken Base. Whereas the first game was about a battle with a cult known as the Order that's trying to bring about the birth of their god, the second game's story, about a man who had lost his wife only to receive a mysterious letter from her, was much smaller and more personal in scope. Outside of the setting, the style, and a few Continuity Nods, it had little in common with the original game, and fans were divided between the original and the sequel almost from the get-go. The divide grew wider when the third game went back to having the Order as the villains and acted as a direct sequel to the first, with later games alternating between continuing the story of the Order and telling stories separate from it. Today, the Silent Hill fandom is split into two sects, one that prefers the Myth Arc about the Order and the other preferring the standalone stories.
  • Finally, the game introduced the concept of the protagonist having to own up to a tragic past upon entering the town, a plot point that would not only become increasingly controversial in later installments such as Homecoming and Downpour, but became an Original Sin for the Survival Horror genre as a whole. It's common now for horror games to copy the idea of the horror coming from a dark secret in the protagonist's backstory that turns out to be the reason he or she is being tormented, such that it can be predictable and hard to relate, feeling less scary and more like the player is being Blamed for Being Railroaded — and that's if they even bothered to make the story make sense outside of trying to shock you. Even SH2 wasn't immune to being a bit cheap with that horror, if the wide variety of theories about the actual symbolism of the enemies and whether any two characters were experiencing the same thing in the town are any indication. SH2 managed to pull it off easier, however, partly because it was new and surprising at the time and partly because it focused less on James as a flawed man with a tragic backstory and more on him as an ordinary guy trying to survive against hordes of monsters, making his struggle feel suspenseful and the twist feel unique. This article by Kyle Campbell for Bloody Disgusting discusses it further, arguing that the back half of the Silent Hill series has consisted largely of attempts to recapture the magic of SH2's twist, no matter how much Fridge Logic it produces or how much it wastes perfectly good plots.
• The Sims:
  • Expansion packs have always been a part of The Sims going back to the very first game, whose first expansion Livin' Large released just six months after the base game and mostly added new items as opposed to major gameplay features (a pack adding what it did for a more recent Sims game today would be called a minor "stuff pack"); ultimately, the first game wound up getting seven expansions. At the time, however, they were building on a truly unique base game, and after Livin' Large each expansion added new features that genuinely changed the game, such as parties, shopping, dating, vacations, pets, celebrities, and magic, while Livin' Large was packed with the original at some point after release to make up for not being all that special compared to what came later. It was only with later games when it started to get out of control. Many of these packs often retreaded content from previous games' expansions, with each game since the second having their own separate packs dedicated to college, nightlife, owning a business, pets, seasons, and vacations. This was forgiven with the second and (to a lesser extent) third games due to the genuinely new features added in the base games, but with the troubled launch of the fourth game, many fans grew to suspect that Electronic Arts and Maxis were withholding features from the base games in order to sell them back to the player at a later date. To be fair, The Sims 4 did later receive a lot of free content updates in order to Win Back the Crowd, but the cycle of expansions continued at a higher pace than ever, to the point that as of 2022 The Sims 4 has $1,000 worth of DLC, and is still receiving more beyond then. Even then, some long-time fans will point out that collecting the complete set of The Sims 3 (including all micro content from The Sims 3 Store) would still set you back about ten times that much.
  • The Sims 3 and 4 were largely seen as a big downgrade from The Sims 2 at launch simply because the base games barely incorporated any of the features from the previous games' expansions. However, this criticism is just as valid towards The Sims 2. This was a point of contention at the time, but it was roughly accepted because the game was already pretty large at launch (it came on four discs) and, due to the change in engines, trying to incorporate everything the first game ended up with out of the gate would have left the game buggier than a wetland summer. It would also be vindicated with its own expansions, which added all of the features The Sims 1 got and then some.
  • The Sims games are generally really, really huge, taking up multiple gigabytes of space on a hard drive, and could be rather taxing on computer resources. This was especially true with The Sims 3, where due to the way how game data is stored, it can easily chug down 50 GB just on keeping track of its persistent world, and the top popularity mods are QoL changes that disable particularly memory-hungry features and clean up save files from no longer frequented locations. But those issues date back to the first game, which would take up over a gigabyte (not counting the extra space for saved games, mods, or custom content) of space on hard drives, at a time (early 2000) when most hard drives would only have a couple of GB worth of storage space. While the fourth game tried to take this into account, the sheer amounts of extra expansions and stuff packs added over the course of a full decade have added up yet again to a rather bulky presence on the hard drive.
  • This is also how some feel about the inclusion of supernatural elements and other odd things in the game, with fans of The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 in particular complaining it's becoming more and more difficult to "ignore" them as they're increasingly incorporated into the game. But Magic Realism themes were around since the first game: though only the final expansion, "Makin' Magic", focused primarily on supernatural elements, ghosts were present from the beginning and the first expansion, "Livin' Large", added the Grim Reaper, alien abductions, and Frankenstein's monsters. The second game, meanwhile, debuted with ghosts and aliens both present and heavily featured in the base game, and every major expansion throughout its lifetime added a new creature type^note zombies in University, vampires in Nightlife, Servo robots in Open For Business, werewolves in Pets, PlantSims in Seasons, Bigfoot in Bon Voyage, genies in FreeTime, and witches in Apartment Life.
• Sly Cooper: One of the biggest criticisms about Thieves in Time is that it ends on a clear Sequel Hook, despite there being no guarantee that a sequel will even be made. This can actually be traced back to the first game, which ends with a shot of Clockwerk's eyes glowing, hinting that he could return. At the time of its release, no one knew if there would be a sequel, much less three. Similarly, the other Sucker Punch games also had similar hooks, Band of Thieves ends with Bentley injured, Murray in grief and Sly once again escaping from Carmelita, while Honor Among Thieves ends with Bentley planning to build a time machine, despite Sucker Punch explicitly moving on from the series. However, these scenes happened after the main stories had been resolved, the Fiendish Five had been defeated and all pages of the Thievius Raccoonus were recovered, Clockwerk had been destroyed for good along with the Klaww Gang, and Dr. M went down with the Cooper Vault and Sly faked amnesia to be with Carmelita, meaning that there was still a sense of closure. The same can't be said for Thieves in Time, which sees Sly disappearing on Le Paradox's blimp and the rest of the cast desperately looking for him. With his fate unclear, this create a great sense of urgency and suspense, essentially demanding a sequel to be made. With no new installments planned, many people felt cheated by the ending.
• Sony:
  • Many of the problems that caused the PlayStation 3 to struggle in its first few years of its existence were actually also present on the PlayStation 2. Like the PS3, the PS2 had a complex and exotic Central Processing Unit that many developers struggled to understand and make the most out of, especially if they were used to developing on other platforms. Both consoles also had a Graphics Processing Unit that was relatively underpowered and required the use of the CPU's more exotic features to make up for it. Last but not least, both consoles served as a showpiece for the latest and greatest optical disc format at the time. In hindsight, it looks like Sony was merely trying to replicate the success of the PS2 with the PS3. So why didn't this work as planned? The first reason probably has to with game development in general during The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games becoming more complex, difficult, and expensive, which gave developers all the more reason to balk at a non-standard system that added even more complexity on top. The second was that compared to the PS2, the PS3 was a far larger victim of Sony's love of exotic and/or brand new tech. DVD was already a few years old by the time the PS2 came out (developed in 1995 and first starting to enter the consumer market in November 1996, about three and a half years before the PS2 launched in March 2000), which meant that the technology and manufacturing was much more mature, allowing Sony to include it in the console and still sell it at a reasonable price - for a couple years, the PS2 was infamously cheaper than many dedicated DVD players in some areas. The PS3, however, came out mere months after the Blu-ray format itself (Blu-Ray entered the consumer market in June 2006, the PS3 launched that November), which meant sky-high prices for it since the economies of scale had yet to kick in, producing the console's infamous 599 US DOLLARS price point. All of this made the PS3 an expensive console with no games in its early years, and though it would eventually Win Back the Crowd and outsell its main competitor, the Xbox 360, it still would go on to be the lowest selling PlayStation home console to date. The PS2 also got off easy due to it launching earlier than all of its competition save for the Dreamcast, which didn't pose much of a threat due to Sega's finances and reputation struggling in the wake of the Sega Saturn's poor sales, to say nothing of how well the first PlayStation had performed in the previous generation - it's been said that the last factor that killed the Dreamcast was the hype generated just by the announcement of the PS2. Unfortunately, the PS3 was up against the Xbox 360, which launched a year earlier and was made by Microsoft, a huge MegaCorp who could and would spend whatever it took to ensure its product's success. With the Xbox 360's one-year head start allowing Microsoft's marketing machine to successfully sell its vision of next-gen gaming to both gamers and developers, the PS3 looked unfavorable in comparison by the time it finally launched. Sony seems to have learned their lesson with the PlayStation 4, which features a highly industry standard x86 CPU with a powerful AMD Radeon GPU.
  • Its sister console, the PlayStation Portable, had problems in its own right—a high price, a focus on graphical power for a handheld, more features than needed, and a heavy focus on Eastern RPGs. But none of these things were truly dealbreakers, and though it was a distant second to the DS, it still carved out a niche. The Play Station Vita, its successor, doubled down on all these problems, resulting in it having enough graphical power to receive graphically-enhanced ports of PS3 games but being expensive for both users to own and developers to make games on, burdened with unhelpful programs, and lacking much of anything outside of a handful of genres. On top of this, the Vita launched in a much less favorable market due to the encroachment of smartphones, and lacked the boost of pirates widening its install base, meaning its flaws shone far brighter. Despite the Vita's advantage of being the most powerful handheld on the market at the time, the Nintendo Switch would eventually steal its thunder, leading to its slow demise.
• Soul Series:
  • The use of Guest Fighters that can annoy fans nowadays began with Soulcalibur II, considered by many to be the best entry in the series. While back then it was considered a neat idea, today, virtually every game, especially fighting games, has at least one, which has made it a little harder to see the inclusion of guests as an "innovative" concept. Meanwhile, Soulcalibur has been front and center as the game where guest fighters are a staple of the series, much to the annoyance of some. Often, fans hold the sentiment that staple veterans, fan-favorites, and other highly requested characters get shafted in favor of a fighter that will only be there in one game, may not have universal appeal, or looks jarringly dissimilar to the rest of the game in either aesthetics and/or gameplay, something that came to a head when Soulcalibur IV included Star Wars characters to hype up The Force Unleashed. It's understandable why you see fans who are adamant about the idea that there should be no guest characters, which would defy expectations, but that often falls on deaf ears. Although Soulcalibur V and VI did alleviate things somewhat by having their respective guests (Ezio and Geralt) be more fitting with the series' aesthetic, the latter game then went back on it and threw in 2B, a Robot Girl from a distant future/post-apocalyptic sci-fi game, as part of its Season Pass. Then it would zig-zag it by introducing Haohmaru who, while admittedly from a later point in history, still manages to fit in with the aesthetic.
  • The series had been fairly consistent with the roster until Soulcalibur V, which was the first game directed by Daishi Odashima. Many complained about V jumping forward 17 years while removing fan-favorites such as Sophitia, Taki, and Xianghua, while replacing them with considerably less-liked successors. However, a smaller-scale variation of this happened in the earlier games. Specifically Hwang and Li Long, who appeared in the original Soul Edge (Soul Blade in North America, Europe, and Australia), were removed from subsequent games and replaced by Yun-seong and Maxi respectively. This caused considerable outcry back then, but had since subsided over time. Additionally, Cassandra was meant to replace Sophitia in II, as she was the only one in the original arcade release. However, due to popular fan demand, Sophitia was brought back. Odashima would later leave Project Soul, being replaced by Masaki Hoshino and later Motohiro Okubo, who appear to have different views over the series. Hoshino's contributions (Lost Swords and Unbreakable Soul), though non-canon and largely deemed to be of middling quality, began to bring back several of the missing veterans (such as Sophitia, Cassandra, Taki, Seong Mi-na, and Amy), while Okubo doubled down by taking things back to basics and rebooting the series with VI — which rewound to the era of the original Soulcalibur and features a substantial portion of the first two games' rosters (though with a few faces from later installments also along for the ride). Only time will tell if these efforts can undo the damage caused by V's Soft Reboot. ^note So far, VI seems to be doing very well, ensuring that the series will continue on for now, though Okubo revealed that V was almost a Franchise Killer, putting the series on very thin ice when he lobbied to revive it.
  • Soulcalibur VI created one of its own. Namco had done Day 1 DLC as a means to unlock characters before, with Soulcalibur V having Dampierre and Tekken 7 having Eliza (who debuted in the F2P installment between Tag 2 and 7, Tekken Revolution). Those times, there was practically no backlash (or at least, it was very minimal), mainly because they were niche characters who had their own fans but not a super prominent fanbase, and were not highly popular, highly requested series staples. When VI did their go-around at this, they used Tira, considered the iconic Dark Action Girl of the Soul series and a Breakout Character from III who is likely the most recognizable character created post-II. For many, it felt like using a character as well-liked, requested and iconic to the series as Tira for an incentive to increase revenue was a low blow.
  • Also, as the series went on, it began attracting more and more criticism for its increasingly Stripperiffic female character designs and focus on Jiggle Physics (particularly for Ivy and Taki) reducing what had been a serious historical fantasy to borderline sleaze like Dead or Alive, without the benefit of that series' tongue-in-cheek self-acknowledgement. However even as far back as the original Soul Blade there was an Easter Egg you could employ to cause Sophitia's skirt to disappear, or even have her fight in an actual swimsuit.
• Splatoon's massive success started a trend of Nintendo releasing multiplayer games and then adding free DLC updates afterwards in something akin to a "live service" model. With the first Splatoon, it was a new thing for Nintendo to do and the game was already packed with plenty of content in the vanilla version, ensuring it would play host to a lively player base for a long time. Splatoon being a brand new series at the time, players had no idea what to expect from it, so the "live service" model was accepted as simply being part of its identity. It became a problem for fans when later Nintendo games used this model to lesser returns. The Mario sports series (especially Mario Tennis Aces, Mario Golf: Super Rush, and Mario Strikers: Battle League) stand out in this regard, since they have installments that predate the live service model, so they ended up feeling barren compared to their predecessors at launch. To many people, this comes across more as Nintendo putting in cut content that should have been in the base game, rather than adding in completely new material to reward longtime players and keep the community thriving.
• Square Enix's updated re-releases and ports of some of their older games once got a great deal of excitement from many RPG fans, especially those in the US and Europe. It gave many people the chance to play some of Square's classic catalog but with far less of the No Export for You, "Blind Idiot" Translation, Bowdlerisation, and financial difficulties of hunting down certain SNES cartridges that RPG fans dealt with before the very end of The '90s. In some cases, Square even remade entire games for the purposes of re-releasing them. However, during the later half of the 2000s, many of these same consumers started complaining about this practice. It became viewed as oversaturation, partially due to the huge numbers of systems that these games were playable on. Between 2005 and 2011, Square Enix re-released Final Fantasy IV alone four times, for example. The Troubled Production of both Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII and the lack of a game to really fill that gap did not help either.
• Some of the problems fans have with the later Star Fox games, primarily Star Fox Command and Star Fox Zero can be found in the earlier entries.
  • Command and Zero were criticized for their gimmicky gameplay and being considered nothing more than glorified tech demos. This was the case of the first game on the SNES. The game was made to show off the graphics possible with the Super FX chip, which were revolutionary for games at that time. This wasn't an issue as its gimmick was mainly in the graphics, and the game was still well-regarded for its gameplay, which was simple yet fun and engaging. Command however used the DS features for its gameplay, primarily the stylus and touch screen, and the game was wildly criticized for its finicky and repetitive gameplay. Zero used the Wii U Pad for a lot of its functions and also came to be regarded as frustrating to use as well for some people. The fact that there's no way to use traditional controls for either of these games also didn't help.
  • Krystal's sudden change in character was also one of the biggest criticisms in Command. This wasn't the first time it happened. Before her debut in Star Fox Adventures, she went from a modestly dressed courageous heroine in Dinosaur Planet to a telepathic Nubile Savage Ms. Fanservice who gets captured in the prologue as we know her today. Fox also received a shift in personality towards being more of a Nominal Hero as Saber's personality and lines were transferred to Fox when the former was axed. While Krystal being reduced to a Damsel in Distress was and is still criticized, it was softened due to Rare intending Krystal to retain her deuteragonist role only for a Christmas Rushed Troubled Production forcing them to cut out her playable sections, and she ditches that aspect in Assault, while Fox's changes didn't detract that much from the plot. However, Krystal becomes a Woman Scorned with almost none of her positive traits in Command after Fox removed her from the team for her safety, despite having no similar issues with the rest of the team, creating romantic drama between her and him, which ended up consuming nearly the entirety of the game's plot. While she can get together with Fox again and go back to her original self, it only happens if you choose the best possible path in an ending that's considered non-canon anyway, and to make matters worse this is currently the last Star Fox game she's appeared in, so she hasn't had any chance to return to her prior characterization.
  • The main complaint of Star Fox Zero is that it's a rehash of Star Fox 64 and yet another Continuity Reboot. This can be traced back to 64 itself, as that game was more or less a remake and a reboot of the first Star Fox game. Aside from a few fans, it wasn't that much of an issue as the first timeline barely had any lore to it at all (with an intended sequel not seeing release until more than two decades later) and 64 improved on every aspect of the original game. Zero, on the other hand, was polarizing for its control system and retconning the 64 timeline which had several defenders despite the controversial sequels to it, particularly fans of Krystal and Panther who were not happy that they were written out. It didn't help that a remake of 64 was made for the Nintendo 3DS five years earlier. Zero is often held as proof that Nintendo can't get the Star Fox series out of 64's shadow.
• The Star Ocean franchise had long been considered to have fairly standard JRPG storytelling that was nothing to write home about, but was made up for by having good gameplay. When Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness was criticized for its gameplay, it brought the fact of it having a fairly weak story as well to the forefront.
• Street Fighter
  • At the time of its release, Street Fighter III proved controversial with both longtime fans and more casual players for dropping nearly the entire cast of Street Fighter II in favor of a bunch of new combatants, with Ryu and Ken as the lone returning veterans. If Capcom seriously thought fans would accept that, it's probably because the studio actually had successfully pulled off a similar transition with the aforementioned Street Fighter II, which dropped everyone from the first game except for Ryu, Ken and Sagat, and replaced them with new characters. The main difference was that the original Street Fighter had been, at best, a Sleeper Hit, while II went on to become a bonafide global phenomenon, meaning the cast of the latter game garnered far more popularity. As such, while very few people cared when characters like Joe, Retsu, Eagle and Adon didn't return for Street Fighter II, a great deal did when now-iconic favorites like Chun-Li, Guile, Cammy and Dhalsim were left out of Street Fighter III. Capcom seemed to quickly realize this was an error, as Akuma and Chun-Li were added to the subsequent updates of III, but by then the damage had already been done. Tellingly, all subsequent Street Fighter sequels have made a point of striking a balance between new characters and returning favorites, seemingly having learned from the backlash to III.
  • Street Fighter fans became rather burned out on the series after Ultra Street Fighter IV came out, adding yet more characters to an already-overcrowded roster and making the combo system even more complicated with Red Focus. Casual fans complained because now they were being asked to spend even more money on a single game that cost roughly $100 in total (even more if you purchased all the DLC) and had now become so incredibly difficult to play that getting started now would take months of training just to learn the basics. Fans of Street Fighter since 1991 can tell you that this sounds very familiar. Street Fighter II went through the same problems — although the competitive scene reveres the Super Turbo edition as the series' best, by the time it came out, the casual fans had tuned out. Further sub-series in the franchise (such as Alpha and III) increased the complexity of the fighting system, making it nigh-inaccessible for casual players, and by the time the console version of Alpha 3 hit shelves, the roster had expanded to thirty-six. These problems are why the series took such a long hiatus between EX3 and SFIV. Capcom decided to take a "back to basics" approach with Street Fighter V in terms of gameplay, focusing on fundamentals and accessibility, and starting off "small" much like many of the other sub-series' initial iterations (16 characters in the base roster + 6 DLC characters for Year 1) in response to these complaints. Unfortunately, this led to fandom infighting whenever "new" fighters, be they former NPCs Promoted to Playable or actual new faces, were unveiled beginning in Season 2 after the return of Akuma, as many complained about the "missing" characters who were mainstays in previous entries or wanted to see more characters who had been on a Long Bus Trip since their last sightings (in the vein of Karin, R. Mika, Alex, and Urien). Capcom was able to strike a finer, less "controversial" balance starting with Season 3; only two of the six characters were newcomers, and the first S3 fighter to be revealed was none other than perennial fan-favorite Sakura. Similarly, the fifth and final wave of DLC was mostly comprised of returning characters (Dan, Rose, Oro), with one character hailing from another corner of the SF Shared Universe (Akira) and another being the only legimitately new addition to the roster (Luke).
• Tales Series:
  • The problem with the games relying on DLC over in-game rewards all started with the Updated Re-release of Tales of Vesperia, which had costumes that could only be obtained by preorders, and then more that could only be obtained by paying with real money. While this upset some fans, the game overall was still very meaty and had easily the most in-game costumes in the series before or since. The very next game, Tales of Graces, had no more than two in-game costumes per character (to compare, everyone in the rerelease of Vesperia had at least five, with Yuri and Karol having well over that), with the rest only available through DLC. The game after that, Tales of Xillia, had four, not even one for each character, and two of them were for the female lead. Games after Xillia only worsened in this regard, to the point where Tales of Zestiria only offered recolors of the characters' main outfits, unless you bought the DLC for it. This reached a tipping point with Tales of Arise, which had only a few in-game costumes that weren't recolors of existing outfits, but also had DLC costumes that had gameplay benefits due to each costume giving a title that included skills and Artes, resulting in a lot of criticism of the game for it.
  • From Tales of Graces to Tales of Zestiria complaints arose of the series suffering a Seasonal Rot thanks to the stories suffering from a Cliché Storm, where the game's plot and characters were seen as boring or weak. The series has always had cliché storm issues, but what made the games before this point fine was the intense Deconstructor Fleet each game had. For example: Tales of Symphonia heavily deconstructed The Chosen One from start to end, Tales of the Abyss deconstructed Fate and Prophecy Tropes, and Tales of Vesperia deconstructed Protagonist-Centered Morality and the concept of vigilantism vs following laws. All of them used the cliché storm to create unique stories that used the nature of those clichés to highlight how realistic they would be. Graces onward though played the clichés too straight, such as Graces' themes of The Power of Friendship without deconstructing any of it, with only Tales of Berseria seen as doing a good job of returning to deconstructing themes and characters.
  • Tales of Zestiria received criticism for its use of Guest-Star Party Member in the form of Alisha, who was an Advertised Extra and left the party after only a quarter of the game had been explored, only returning as playable for one small section and the optional DLC. The series always had characters who only joined once or briefly, dating back to the second title in the series with Leon. In particular, later titles like Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Graces had a major plot character join you for a brief section despite being still present in the game. The difference between past titles was that the character in question was always still important, and they either were a recurring character, or they were some kind of antagonist. At the very least, past characters usually had a justification in the story for being only around for a short time or leaving for the rest of the game. Alisha, however, rather suddenly leaves the party after only a few hours with a weak justification, and is quickly replaced by someone else who plays entirely differently for the rest of the game. Furthermore, other guest characters were portrayed as important characters, but had their full role kept a mystery until release, so it wasn't very jarring for them to leave; Alisha, meanwhile, had her departure come off as very strange after the game spent her screentime playing her up as a main character, and the trailers and information leading to release focused around her gameplay.
• Telltale Games always had a problem with providing players merely the illusion of choice, as seemingly plot-critical decisions only left an impact for a few moments or affected how a subplot would be resolved before the main story simply progressed with little deviation. This problem goes all the way back to their Breakthrough Hit, The Walking Dead: Season One, where, no matter what you did over the course of the story, the Broad Strokes of the ending were the same. The difference was that not only was Telltale's style of games still very new and fresh, but your choices did affect the tone of the ending as it confronted you with all the decisions you made up to that point, judging whether or not the protagonist Lee was a good person. As Telltale recycled the formula with subsequent games, however, the seams in the storytelling and branching paths grew easier to spot as players caught on.
• One of the biggest complaints about the Tekken roster is that the roster has become increasingly unbelievable as the years went on, focusing less on actual martial arts and artists and more on made-up styles that look cool with blatant anime influences. It reached a sort of critical mass in Tekken 7, when Lucky Chloe, an extremely kawaii pop-idol with Gratuitous English who fights by dancing, was made into an official character, leading to unbridled rage in the West. While Harada said that he would replace her with a muscular skinhead in the US, it was confirmed he was only trolling, and so Western gamers shared a Collective Groan over having to deal with her. That's not with mentioning other unrealistic characters, such as Kazumi, Claudio, Gigas, and Akuma. However, this type of unbelievability was there from the beginning. The original Tekken featured Yoshimitsu, a cyborg ninja that seemed completely out of place amongst a roster of mostly martial arts-based fighters. There was also Kuma, a bear as a playable character, which was also out of place. The sequel even added a Boxing Kangaroo and a freaking utahraptor. The primary difference here is the fact that these characters were few and far between, instead of being shoved in as the stars of the game and taking up a sizable portion of the roster.
• Team Fortress 2: As pointed out by lister, in Mann Vs. Machine, there was originally no refund button, because most of the harder missions involving sending one wave consisting of an enemy dealing exclusively one type of damage, and sending another dealing a different type of damage, so that players who were spending their currency had to carefully consider what are the most important upgrades, and made sure they used the same loadouts and character, since switching meant losing the upgrades and money. However, Valve likely recognized how it unintentionally caused Early Game Hell at a ridiculous rate, and added an Anti-Frustration Feature in the form of refund tokens, which were earned by earning enough money so that players can refund their upgrades to spend it on other classes. However, there was also a major Good Bad Bug involving a way to get infinite tokens by going into spectator and then get automatically assigned. This was so popular that Valve later made it official, allowing players to refund anytime. While this decision was respected at first, the introduction of the notorious Game-Breaker, the Pyro's Gas Passer resulted in many players feeling that it felt like it took too much difficulty away from the game and made it feel less challenging as a result, creating a Broken Base whether players should play MvM for the loot or the challenge.
• A Scrappy Mechanic in Thief (2014) is that rope arrows can only be used at very specific spots, taking away a lot of player freedom. But as this video mentions, this was also present in the first two Thief games, albeit in a more subtle way - rope arrows only work if they hit a wooden surface (or metal grills for the sequel's upgraded version, vine arrows), so if there's no wood or grillwork nearby, you cannot climb here, which makes sense in-universe. Contrast with the 2014 game, where you can't use rope arrows for the more arbitrary reason that there isn't a convenient "use rope arrow" marker nearby.
• Tomb Raider took a lot of beating from fandom for overemphasis on shooting with human combatants, with greatly simplified platforming bits and removal of puzzles by the time Square Enix took over. Lara almost literally ploughs through a small army in the last three games. However, the much bigger scope on combat was present already back in the second game, all the way back in 1997, with introduction of a wider plethora of weapons and numerous humans enemies that were just Mooks instead of plot-sensitive characters. But back in times when Core Design was still making the games, it was still first and foremost a Dungeon Crawling series, putting puzzles and exploration first, second and third, throwing in more combat simply to make the difficulty spike even more steep. When Crystal Dynamics took over, they expanded on combat, while simplifying puzzles and automating a lot of platforming already, but they still tried to strike at least a balance between those and keeping it "true" to the roots. It was only that the 2013 reboot reduced exploration and tomb-raiding to side activities (despite having much better engine and technical capabilities), instead putting full focus on cover-shooting, elaborate combat against a seemingly endless army of mooks and clumsily trying to put focus on characterisation, reinventing Lara^note who went from the Action Girl to just a clueless graduate, giving the planned origins trilogy lukewarm reception from long-time fans before the trilogy was even finished as a character and turning the title into The Artifact.
• American Wasteland may have marked the exact moment when the Tony Hawk series' franchise zombification became irreversible, but as this episode of {Errant Signal} makes clear, the things that sent it and later games off the rails can be seen as far back as the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, when the series was still on top of the world.
  • Even in the very first game, the way combos are scored (powerful multipliers awarded for each little trick, losing everything for bailing) helped elevate rail-slides, which created tons of opportunities to perform little stunts, above everything else. The addition of manuals in Pro Skater 2 only added to the combo focus by allowing players to string together different lines, though the game design didn't suffer for it. The kicker, though, was the introduction of reverts in Pro Skater 3. Now you can do air on a quarter-pipe and link it into a manual, making the expected combos longer (and riskier, since bailing cancels out the whole thing) even for relatively casual players who didn't make as much use of the long grind and manual chains in the earlier games.
    
    Increasingly, gameplay grew more dependent on over-the-top stunt chains than anything resembling real skateboarding, while the intricate level design of the first game, designed to get the player to hunt for the best line, was replaced with a greater focus on level exploration and creating monster combos anywhere. When Underground added the ability to walk around on foot and drive around in vehicles, it was acknowledging this growing shift in focus — and in doing so, it started the series' trend towards over-reliance on gimmicks like Project 8's "Nail the Trick" feature and Ride's use of an expensive skateboard peripheral. Every new feature made the games less focused on actual skateboarding — something that was made readily apparent when Skate came out without any of these gimmicks and proved that they were unnecessary. Indeed, when the Video Game Remake Pro Skater 1 + 2 came out in 2020, it offered the ability to turn off the more recent gameplay innovations of the later games and play them with the classic controls, in recognition of the fact that the new tricks like manuals, reverts, and spine transfers could make the original levels (all faithfully recreated) far easier.
  • Likewise, the juvenile humor and pop culture references that were criticized in later games have always been with the series. The games are rooted in skateboarding culture, which has always had a streak of countercultural irreverence, so it stood to reason that the series would reflect that. It was only around Pro Skater 4 and the Underground games that they really started to take over and, more importantly, degenerate into fratbro idiocy, with the final straw probably being the inclusion of the cast of Jackass in Underground 2.
• Many of the problems found in later entries in the Trails Series have their origins in the earlier games in the franchise.
  • The Clueless Chick-Magnet protagonist. In the Sky games, while Joshua was prone to comically misunderstanding what his female companions are talking about and gets a fair amount of admirers, it was never the focus of his interactions. He genuinely does not have feelings for anyone but Estelle, their romance is heavily integrated into the plot, and he can't understand why he's so often flirted with. Most importantly, Estelle was the main viewpoint character, and Joshua's girl troubles were secondary to their development. In later arcs, both Lloyd and Rean are heavily flirted with by any and all available romantic partners, who will invariably confess a hidden infatuation with the protagonist if you dig deep enough. Lloyd had it bad enough with three, maybe four, potential suitors, but then Rean had to top him with at least eleven. What's more, the many potential options have divided fans on which, if any, should be picked, and who got the most development among them.
  • The Cold Steel games got a lot of flak for how Easily Forgiven Crow was by the rest of Class VII. Despite being the leader of the terrorist group responsible for starting a civil war, Rean and the rest of Class VII were willing to forgive him and welcome him back to Class VII. However, this willingness to forgive villains applied to both the Sky trilogy and Crossbell duology. Estelle was willing to forgive Renne and Joshua for their actions as Enforcers of Ouroboros, while Lloyd was willing to forgive Ian for the murder of his brother Guy and conspiring with the Crois family. However, the different circumstances of these villains has made them less controversial than Crow. Estelle was willing to forgive Joshua and Renne because they were both mentally broken Child Soldiers, not to mention that Joshua was also brainwashed by Weissman into doing his bidding so he wasn't in full control of his actions. And while Lloyd did forgive Ian for killing his brother, the perpetrator was still arrested and sent to prison, so Lloyd's forgiveness wasn't an easy get-out-of-jail-free card. Thus, Rean and the rest of Class VII going on and on about bringing Crow back so he can graduate seems naive at best, considering they barely bring up any atonement or punishment for his actions even though Crow does eventually end up paying for his sins and doesn't get off scot-free either.
  • The ending to Trails in the Sky FC began a trend in the series by ending on a Wham Episode cliffhanger: Professor Alba reveals himself to be Weissmann, a high ranking member of Ouroboros and the real instigator of the game's events, and also reveals that Joshua was an Ouroboros Enforcer. Joshua knocks out Estelle and leaves her to try and take down Weissmann himself. When the series would attempt a similar cliffhanger in the ending of Cold Steel 1, Crow assassinates the chancellor, Noblist forces seize Heimdallr and attempt to take Thors, and Rean is forced to flee and leave his classmates, the move was more contentious. Much of this is due to the nature of everything leading up to the endings in both games. While Sky FC's ending reveal is sudden, it comes after the main driving forces for the plot (Estelle and Joshua becoming bracers and the Liberl Army Coup) have been resolved enough to give the player some feeling of accomplishment, and making the ending cliffhanger more of a Sequel Hook setting up the story of the next installment. Cold Steel 1's ending, on the other hand, comes at a point when so many plot threads are either still left dangling or have been barely resolved and the player having accomplished so little that it feels as though the plot is just starting, and thus making the cliffhanger feel not so much a tease of the next installment as much as demanding the player pay for a full other game to get the rest of the story.
• X:
  • The X-Universe series of games had fundamentally flawed gameplay design — in the developer's own opinion — due to the Singularity Engine Time Accelerator, a device which makes the game run faster to make the long travel times bearable. It wasn't too bad with the simplistic gameplay of X: Beyond the Frontier, but as the games went on, it became more and more obvious to Egosoft that they had built up the entire game around the abuse of SETA. If they were to speed up the slow item production rate at factories^note players would park their ship somewhere, engage SETA, and watch a show while their factories made goods, the economy would implode when the player traveled across a sector with SETA. If they were to make ships faster to reduce travel time, the A.I. would break (well, break harder than normal), battles would turn into jousting matches, and the economy would implode from traders instantly grabbing every deal. They attempted to rectify the flaw in X: Rebirth by introducing a completely different travel system and were somewhat successful, though the nigh-unplayable state of affairs at release brought up a whole slew of new issues.
  • Ironically, SETA was re-added to Rebirth in one of the many Win Back the Crowd patches, albeit not as something necessary to play the game without losing one's mind like it was in the previous games. SETA returns out-of-the-box in X4: Foundations, but the rest of the game has been reworked so extensively that it is mostly a quality-of-life feature for fleet and production management; ships now have an innate fast-travel mode on their thrusters, and the player can unlock the ability to teleport between ships.
• The most common criticism of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was the overt anime influence, largely because of the large amount of fanservice present and the more overt Shonen influence to the cast and story. The Xeno titles had always been anime-like or been influenced by anime; Xenogears was inspired by Gundam, while Xenosaga had fanservice in many areas and several anime adaptations. Since both titles were older and didn't sell particularly well enough to become mainstream, people were unaware they even existed, and those who did likely only knew them for the complex story—thus, the anime feeling (which tended to homage a lot of Seinen works that were also not as well-known in the West at the time) was largely not very noticeable. It was Xenoblade Chronicles 1 that largely went against the anime influence, due to it having what some saw as a more Western approach to designs, characters, and presentation, which helped give it a unique feeling of maturity to newcomers, a view reinforced by Xenoblade Chronicles X, which while more anime like, still seemed Western in design. When 2 came out with fanservice and more Shonen anime-like visuals, characters, designs, and writing, many people, especially those who had gotten in with the previous Xenoblade games, were not happy about the new direction, feeling it was hard to ignore said elements.
• A major problem fans had with the second entry of the Zero Escape series, Virtue's Last Reward, was the inclusion of Alice and the lack of her role in the story. Major spoiler for the first game, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, follows: In that game, the characters discussed an urban legend about a mummy named All-Ice who was hinted at being the unaccounted person who may or may not be behind the murders. No mummy was discovered but in the epilogue, the cast is shocked when they see a woman wearing stereotypical Egyptian clothes in the middle of the desert. It should be noted that nobody actually knew what All-Ice was supposed to look like. The first game was originally intended to be standalone, but since it became a surprise hit with western fans, a sequel was greenlit which forced the main writer to figure out how to make sense of the Gainax Ending.

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