Oddball In The Series / Video Games

• Ace Attorney:
  • Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and its sequel is notable for being the only sub-series in the Ace Attorney franchise that plays more like a point-and-click adventure game than a visual novel. Furthermore, they're the only games in the series where the investigation sections take place in third-person rather than first-person.
  • The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles are the only games in the series not to take place 20 Minutes into the Future, instead being ambiguously set sometime around the 1890s, during the Meiji era in Japan and the tail end of Queen Victoria's reign in England; and therefore are also the only games not to heavily cross-reference characters and events from the main timeline, which takes place in the 2010s and 2020s. Furthermore, at least in the localisations, they're the only games that still take place at least partly in Japan, and are the only games where the real-world settings are so integral to the story as to be necessarily retained across all localised versions.^note Whereas, in all other games' English releases, California is substituted for Japan, which has knock-on effects like Germany often standing in for the USA and France for Australia when characters are called on to travel to other countries. This also means that the major Japanese characters in GAA retain their original names in translation, which almost no characters elsewhere in the series do; although most minor characters still have theirs changed to something As Long as It Sounds Foreign so that Anglophone players can still appreciate the puns.^note Interestingly, this sometimes takes place in reverse too, with the localisation changing an English character's As Long as It Sounds Foreign Punny Name from the Japanese version into something that would still be broadly plausible to an English-speaker, e.g. renaming "Egg Benedict" to "Eggert Benedict" in English.
  • Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney stands out as the only game in the main series (i.e. aside from the Investigations and Great Ace Attorney spin-offs) where Phoenix Wright isn't the primary playable character. You play as Apollo for the vast majority of the story, and while Phoenix is intermittently present as an NPC throughout the game, his POV is shown for only about one-third of the final case, and during a flashback at that. It's also the only Ace Attorney game not to have been directed either by series creator Shu Takumi^note Who directed the first three Phoenix Wright games and The Great Ace Attorney duology, and co-directed the Professor Layton crossover or by Takeshi Yamazaki^note Who directed both of the Investigations spin-offs and the fifth and sixth main series games that followed Apollo Justice, although they did both work on the story of the game.
• Ace Combat:
  • In a What Could Have Been example, the unfinished game Brave Arms would have been an Ace Combat title that, despite taking place back in its fictional world of "Strangereal", would have been more of a Ninja Gaiden/Metal Gear Solid hybrid clone than a flight simulation game.
  • Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is one of the few entries in the series set in the real world rather than Strangereal (the others being Joint Assault and Infinity), the sole entry that allows the player to control gunships and helicopters as well as planes, the sole entry that features turret-gunning sections in addition to flying sections, and the sole entry that's 100% devoid of science-fiction elements — instead being framed as a realistic military thriller in the vein of Call of Duty.
  • Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation is a mild example: it's the sole entry that was released as an Xbox exclusive rather than a PlayStation exclusive, and it's set on the continent of Anea rather than the continent of Usea (where the majority of the other Strangereal games take place); the plot is centered on a war between the newly introduced countries of Emmeria and Estovakia, with the countries of Belka, Erusea, Osea, and Yuktobania (the major players in all of the other entries) being entirely absent.
• Aero Fighters (known as Sonic Wings in Japan) is a series of wacky arcade shoot 'em ups... except for Aero Fighters Assault, which is a half-realistic 3D flight simulation.
• Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the second game, is the only installment of the Amnesia series to not be developed by Frictional Games, but rather The Chinese Room, and is thus far more of an Environmental Narrative Game than the other games, that lean towards the genre of Survival Horror.
• Armored Core:
  • Nine Breaker, the ninth entry in the series, does not have a plot. Instead of going through a series of missions with which the player gets money to buy new parts and weapons, Nine Breaker features 250~ tests designed to assess the player's understanding of Armored Core's mechanics, capped off with a final exam that has the player fight the series iconic boss Nine Ball. The arena also work very differently than it does in the other games: where the arenas in previous games were opponent ladders, Nine Breaker's unusual set-up has the player set various parameters (such as opponent skills, weapon/leg types, etc) and pairs them with one of hundreds of randomly-generated opponents, rinse and repeat to unlock more search parameters until the player gets enough ranking points to be invited to fight the 25 rankers (which do not need to be defeated sequentially, either).
  • Formula Front is a pure arena game with no mission component and has a Lighter and Softer premise, casting the player as an architect for an AC combat league team instead of as a mercenary doing dirty jobs in a Crapsack World ruled by corporations. The original Japanese release also did not allow players to directly control their mech, only program its A.I.
• Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is the only work in the franchise to not focus on the Assassin-Templar Conflict. Justified since the Hidden Ones/Assassin Brotherhood doesn't exist yet and even the antagonists are the Cult of Kosmos instead of the proto-Templar Order of the Ancients.^*Though as revealed in the Legacy of the First Blade DLC, both groups did work together to facilitate the Persian invasion of Ancient Greece. Additionally, it's the first mainline installment to have multiple endings for the protagonist(s) and the complete absence of the Hidden Blade as a primary weapon.
• Backyard Skateboarding, unlike the rest of the Backyard Sports series, is an adventure game with tons of Fetch Quests. It also has bosses, which the main games lack.
• Unlike the preceding Banjo-Kazooie games, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is based around designing and driving vehicles instead of collecting and platforming. It also has a completely different artstyle and character designs from past games. The result was intensely polarizing to say the least. This is even lampshaded in-game with fourth wall-breaking jokes that the game would sell terribly (which it did) and the fans would hate it for being vehicle-based instead of the traditional platformer they were promised for many years (which was also true). At the end of the game, L.O.G promises that the next game (if there ever is one) would once again be a traditional platformer.
• Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate is this in the Batman: Arkham Series for its pared-down nature originally designed for portables, being a 2½D Metroidvania compared to the Wide-Open Sandbox of the other games.
• Battlefield Hardline, which is a cop-and-robbers game in what has usually been a military FPS series.
• Among the mainline campaigns in Battle for Wesnoth, Under the Burning Suns differs wildly from the others due to being set far in the future when the Kingdom of Wesnoth is but a distant memory, making heavy use of units that are not available in the normal multiplayer factions, using an alternate day-night cycle^note Instead of the normal six-phase Dawn → Morning → Afternoon → Dusk → First Watch → Second Watch → Dawn cycle, UtBS uses a fifteen-phase First Dawn → First Morning → First Midday → First Afternoon → First Dusk → Short Dark → Second Dawn → Second Morning → Second Midday → Second Afternoon → Second Dusk → Long Dark(1) → Long Dark(2) → Long Dark(3) → Long Dark(4) → First Dawn cycle that slightly favors Lawful units on average but gives Chaotic units a very long dominant period, and dealing with the religions of its characters in a way most content does not.
• Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon compared to the rest of the Bayonetta series. In stark contrast to the mature Stylish Action trappings of the mainline games, The Lost Demon is a more family-friendly Action-Adventure title built around puzzles and combat where you control two characters at once. This difference extends to the presentation and story; while the usual Bayonetta game has a more realistic artstyle and putting its titular character in the middle of large-scale "save the world" adventures, this spin-off has a more cartoony, watercolor fairytale aesthetic and follows a teenage Cereza trying to find her Missing Mom.
• SNK's Beast Busters series is composed of three horror/sci-fi light gun games (the first one predating The House of the Dead) and Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999, which is a top-down action RPG with guns and a monster collecting mechanic; it also is more markedly dark gothic fantasy a la Castlevania.
• Blaster Master: Blasting Again is the only 3D game in the series, and up until Blaster Master Zero the only one where you fight the bosses inside of your vehicle, rather than outside of it.
• Bomberman had Bomberman Act:Zero, which had a drastically Darker and Edgier look and feel, complete with Bomberman's redesign having much more realistic proportions and a grittier color scheme. The following games instantly reversed course back to the light-heartedness synonymous with the series.
• Spil Games's Bomberman-esque series Bomb It normally has robots as the playable characters. The sole exception was Bomb It 3, which instead has humans.
• Parasol Stars is the oddball in the Bubble Bobble series; it lacks either of the two iconic weapons of the series (bubbles or rainbows) and instead has Bub and Bob beating up enemies with parasols, a mechanic that has yet to appear in any other game in the series. (Parasols themselves have been in the Bubble Bobble games from the beginning, but as a special item, not a weapon.) It is also the only installment in the main series that was not released in the Arcades, but for the PC-Engine and a couple of ports on less powerful platforms.
• Castlevania:
  • Castlevania: Judgment, the series' first (and, given its limited success, only) Fighting Game.
  • Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Back before The Angry Video Game Nerd told everyone they weren't supposed to like it (he was kidding, by the way), there actually were quite a few fans who preferred its open-ended gameplay model over the more linear parts I and III, back when Metroidvania was just an itch in Konami's pants. It still stands out for the confusing, misspelled, or just plain lying hints, overabundance of instant-death pools of water and unexpectedly easy Boss Battles. The day/night cycle would return in later games, but much less annoyingly, while the gameplay template would be reused to much greater success a decade later with Symphony of the Night.
  • Vampire Killer on the MSX2 is a similar case, using nonlinear stages that require you to find keys to progress from one stage to the next. And like Simon's Quest, Simon can buy upgrades with hearts.
  • Castlevania: The Arcade presents the typical quest to destroy Dracula and his minions as a Rail Shooter.
• The ClueFinders:
  • Puzzle of the Pyramid is Lighter and Softer than the rest of the series, is the only game to engage in Breaking the Fourth Wall, is the only game to give Socrates any prominence, puts the characters in different clothes than any other game sans Math, the Backpack interface looks more like a box, is the only game not to have The Reveal or utilize Let's Split Up, Gang!, and parodies everything from God's Hands Are Tied to the Evil Laugh. Even the art style is a little different with Lapras looking more like a flying saucer.
  • Gameplay-wise, Math Adventures. Even Puzzle of the Pyramid features the ClueFinders traveling to multiple "worlds". In Math Adventures they stay in the same village the entire game. There is also no "inventory" - so Joni does not have a backpack
• Super Columns allowed you to rotate the jewels to form rows as well as columns, instead of only being able to adjust the order of the gems in the column like every other game. The A.I. wasn't programmed to do this, giving you a nice advantage when fighting them.
• Command & Conquer:
  • Command & Conquerer: Sole Survivor. It feels more like a mod than an actual game, but it's an actual standalone product.
  • Command & Conquer: Renegade took the series into FPS territory.
  • Command & Conquer: Generals doesn't play at all like any of the earlier games, does away with the iconic sidebar, removes the pre-mission videos, and is set in an entirely new continuity.
  • Command & Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight considerably changed gameplay (this time, to a more "tactical" game a la Dawn of War II) as well as the plot. A fairly restrictive population cap was added, compared to previous games' emphasis on mass combat, and resource generation was eliminated, replaced by a capture point system.
• Cradle of Persia has you connect three or more pieces in a row by clicking and moving through them with the mouse, instead of the swap to match 3 gameplay model used by the rest of the Cradle Series.
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • Amongst the four home console racing titles, Crash Tag Team Racing notably sticks out like a sore thumb. Whereas Crash Team Racing and Crash Nitro Kart are standard Mario Kart-influenced kart racers, Tag Team Racing opts for a "vehicular combat" approach to its gameplay, with added emphasis on the slapstick violence the series is known for. It's also the only Crash Racing game to have the player exploring the Adventure Mode overworld on foot and not in their kart, and even has bowling and shooting minigames available. Finally, its plot doesn't involve fighting aliens at all, but is about solving a mystery in a derelict theme park (with a really weird staff) instead. In a series that's known for its Denser and Wackier tone compared to other platformers, that's saying a lot!
  • Out of all the portable entries, Crash 99X is pretty unusual even when accounting for its Early-Installment Weirdness; Crash and Aku Aku are the only returning characters, and the whole game has a spooky theme, revolving around fighting monsters that defend a treasure belonging to a greedy dead man.
• Cyber Troopers Virtual-On MARZ is widely disown by fans of the earlier three entries due to unfortunately stripped down the gameplay even further in several aspects. It also including a Hack and Slash-style story mode which fleshes out the nature of the Virtual-ON universe, making it oddball out from the earlier entries which are Fighting Game-like.
• Amusingly, you can make the argument that Danganronpa is made up primarily of oddball entries, since only two releases in the whole franchise are visual novels set in the primary continuity, with the rest being:
  • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls: A third-person shooter in a series of Closed Circle murder mystery visual novels. Its status as the oddball is only cemented by how much darker, edgier, bloodier, and gorier it is from the main series Danganronpa games — which weren't exactly pulling their punches in the first place.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: A Soft Reboot and the only major entry into the series not to be part of the Hope's Peak arc, a tightly-interwoven series of stories encompassing the first two games, the abovementioned spin-off, a concluding anime, and several tie-in novels (which could all be seen as oddballs themselves, especially the anime since it's pretty crucial to closing out the whole story). So while the core gameplay remains largely the same, V3 stands out as a far more isolated one-off story.
  • Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp: A spin-off digital board game released alongside the remastered collection and Best Known for the Fanservice that merrily messes with canon, bringing more or less all the major characters from the games together regardless of whether they would ever have met in the main continuity (including characters who are canonically dead and V3 characters who may not even exist in the same universe). Furthermore, most characters are presented as being broadly the same age — despite the cast of Danganronpa 2 being a year ahead of the cast of the first game, and V3 generally believed to be set a fair bit further into the future — since it's set in an Alternate Universe where everyone's at school together.
• Darius Force stands out from the rest of the series with its comparatively darker, brooding art direction, multiple unusual gameplay mechanics (including restarts at checkpoints, weapon power being halved if both missiles and lasers/bombs are fired at the same time, and having to switch between laser and bombs instead of being able to fire both), an odd grid-based version of the branching path system that lets the player play anywhere from 5 to 7 stages, and it having the biggest proportion of bosses that aren't fish or marine life. Design sketches included in the Special Edition of the Darius Cozmic Collection show that even wilder deviations from the series formula were considered, including making it a vertical shooter.
• Dark Parables: The eighth installment, The Little Mermaid and the Purple Tide. The game mechanics are, in several respects, different from the previous games; the basic gameplay remains the same, but certain things about it are just different enough to catch the notice of longtime fans. This is because it's the only collaboration in the series — all previous games were done solely by Blue Tea Games, and all subsequent games were/are done solely by Eipix.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Devil May Cry 2 is so much of an oddball even the producers generally try to ignore its existence, namely by making all games made after the second game set chronologically before it until Devil May Cry 5 (which is not only set after 2 but was paired with a retcon where Devil May Cry 4 was stated to now take place after 2 instead of before it). Between a lowered difficulty and the protagonist's personality change from Badass Trash-Talker to an unintentionally-and-hilariously-cringe-worthy guy. The fanbase was largely disappointed.
  • DmC: Devil May Cry was not only set in its own continuity, but was also made by a Western developer; it's also Darker and Edgier and had a simplified combat system, leading to fan disappointment. Capcom returning to the classic continuity with Devil May Cry 5 after this makes its oddballness even more apparent.
• The arcade game DJMAX Technika, unlike other DJMAX games that follow the beatmania formula, plays more like a cross between Elite Beat Agents and Lumines. It's very popular in areas where arcades have it, in some cases even being more popular than DJMAX Portable.
• The last Dizzy adventure for 8-bit systems, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy, is the only one with a sequence of separate levels. Whereas the Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 versions of the earlier games look like very clear ZX Spectrum ports, these are far more colourful - Commodore Format magazine described it as "Dizzy with the lights turned on".
• Donkey Kong 3 is more or less a Shoot 'Em Up. Neither of the previous two Donkey Kong games featured shooting, and scarcely any of the later ones do. Moreover, you control an exterminator named Stanley, who never appears again in the franchise.
• Doom³ is a major departure from the classic games in its own time, and later sequels would serve as throwbacks to the originals' style, making 3 and its many digressions stand out all the more.
  • The overall tone is far more grim, serious and frightening. Where other Doom games have never shied away from snarky quips, dark comedy and goofy over-the-top violence, 3 plays the scenario primarily for horror, with a heavy emphasis on pitch-black environments, scary sequences, and a plot that's taken dead seriously.
  • Many of the returning monsters have been heavily redesigned, most notably the Cacodemon, Lost Soul and Pinky, which are practically unrecognizable. The only redesign that stuck in future installments was the Hell Knight, presumably because its original design was merely a Palette Swap of the Baron of Hell. Of the handful of new enemies introduced in 3, only the Zombie would return in Doom 2016.
  • The guns, like in real life, have finite clips that need to be reloaded; in all other games, the player can fire continuously until they're completely out of ammo.
  • There is no automap feature of any kind, forcing players to navigate the levels on their own.
  • Many items are kept in locked cabinets that require codes to open, which the player usually must find by reading or listening to the various Apocalyptic Logs they pick up. While future games retained pickups that add readable story elements, they're purely an optional bonus, with no gameplay component to them.
  • The levels do not end with a statistics screen showing the total amount of enemies killed and items collected. Although there are still plenty of secret areas containing useful items, the player has to find them all on their own, with no way of knowing if they missed anything.
• Double Dragon had two fighting games based off of adaptations. The first is Double Dragon V, based on the animated series, and the second is a Neo Geo fighter based on the live-action movie.
• Falcom's Dragon Slayer games are mostly various types of Action RPGs, with The Legend of Heroes being a more typical Eastern RPG. Then there's Lord Monarch, which is a (rather simple) Real-Time Strategy game.
• Drakengard 2 was the only game in the series not directed by Yoko Taro. This is clear in the game's Lighter and Softer tone than its immensely bleak predecessor and its equally-as-bleak sequel, and its main character Nowe being a far more straight-laced and clear-cut All-Loving Hero, in stark contrast to Caim and Zero who are only the "heroes" because they're pitted against even worse villains.
• Earth Defense Force:
  • The Earth Defense Force Tactics was developed by thinkArts instead of Sandlot, and changes the genre from Third-Person Shooter to Turn-Based Strategy.
  • Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is the sole American-developed entry in the series, created by Vicious Cycle Software. Fittingly, the game is also set in America rather than Japan, and introduces a class system that would be adopted by later games.
  • Earth Defense Force 4.1: Wingdiver the Shooter, a top-down shoot-em-up spun-off from Earth Defense Force 4.1: Shadow of New Despair.
  • Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain, another entry from another developer (this time, Yuke's) with a Darker and Edgier story, as well as a unique character class in the form of the Prowl Rider.
• Ecco the Dolphin is famous for bizarre plotlines and Nintendo Hard gameplay, which someone at Novotrade must have noticed was cruel to youngsters who wanted the games but were frustrated by the brutal case of Surprise Difficulty. For them, there was Ecco Jr., an edutainment game centered around exploring the ocean where it's not possible to die.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard and An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire are spin-off games which are an Action-Adventure game and a Dungeon Crawler, respectively. Battlespire was originally planned as an expansion to Daggerfall before getting a solo release while Redguard was intended to be the first installment of an Elder Scrolls spin-off series. Neither sold well (though Redguard had a decent critical response), so Bethesda went back to their Wide-Open Sandbox Western RPG roots with Morrowind and have since followed suit with Oblivion and Skyrim.
  • The Elder Scrolls Online is a MMO prequel to the main series of games.
  • Beyond Skyrim: The Atmora: Expedition to the North subproject is this in the context of Beyond Skyrim Game Mod, being essentially a large-scale adventure that has you travel to its location through its main quest, leave through its main quest, not be able to come back, being highly focused on its main quest with relatively few sidequests, and having a hard restriction on the player having progressed far enough into the main quest of Skyrim to be able to start. While this is fairly normal for TES (just done on an extremely large scale), it contrasts with the other subprojects, that act more as extensions of Skyrim beyond the province of Skyrim^note Hence the name and so are open at any time and have a variety of questlines.
• Endless Frontier and its sequel, part of Super Robot Wars, is not a crossover-heavy turn-based Strategy Game, but rather an RPG with fighting game leanings featuring a mostly original cast of characters. The focus on robots is also noticeably reduced, with only a few Mini-Mecha showing up.
• Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan has a large number of deviations from the usual Etrian Odyssey formula:
  • It's the only game to have overworld exploration as part of the main story. Sure, Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City has seafaring, but it's not strictly required to complete the game.
  • Instead of a 30-floor dungeon divided into six strata, you instead have six "Mazes" spread across the lands. Furthermore, none of the Mazes in this game have more than 3 floors, when each stratum in other games is usually 5 floors high.
  • It's the only game not to have you traverse up or down Yggdrasil. Instead, Yggdrasil itself becomes the Final Boss.
  • It's the only game to have "Caves", one-floor mini-dungeons that each have less floor space than traditional labyrinth floors. This may be why this game's equivalent of strata are surprisingly short. Mini-dungeons return in Nexus, but they're called "Mazes" and are much wider on average.
  • It's the only game that doesn't have an FM synth version of its soundtrack. The DS games only have FM soundtracks, and the other 3DS games have them as optional alternate soundtracks.
  • Its "horrifying stuff is happening" theme, "Imminent Calamity", follows a distinctly different format from other themes of its line in the series, and for the longest time was not shared with any other track in the series (Etrian Odyssey I and II, as well as their respective Untold remakes, have "Red and Black"; Etrian Odyssey III and V have "Unknown Menace"). It was finally brought back in Nexus.
• In the Fallout franchise, there was a drastic change in gameplay when the series changed hands from Black Isle Studios to Bethesda. Despite this, the oddball in the family is Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, a top-down, 3D action game with almost no RPG Elements and some big continuity issues, which was created by Interplay Entertainment.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is considered to be the oddball in the Crystal Chronicles subseries. Since it plays more like an action/hack and slash RPG instead of the usual turn based one, many fans either hated it or loved it.
  • Within the main series, there's Final Fantasy II which uses a number of completely different systems (stats and spells leveling with use, for starters) than the rest of the series. Final Fantasy VIII also replaced the entire magic system with drawing and Junctioning. Not surprisingly, both games tend to be heavily contested as a result (not helped by being sandwiched between far less contentious installments, with VIII having the added misfortune of coming after the immensely successful and franchise-definining VII).
  • Then there is Final Fantasy X-2, which is the first direct sequel, the only game to feature an all-female party, and is a significantly Lighter and Softer game compared to the more drama-heavy entries in the main series (such as Final Fantasy X itself).
  • Final Fantasy Tactics also falls under this to some degree. Mainly focused as a strategy game where you raise up to 16 members in the party, have tons of customizations for abilities, reading the layout of the terrain to plan your attacks, etc. Quite different from your standard Final Fantasy. It eventually became popular enough to spawn two more spin-offs of the same style and an enhanced remake.
  • There are games like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, a far simpler and much easier exploration-focused game intended for newcomers to the RPG genre, and Final Fantasy Adventure (eventually remade into Sword of Mana), a real-time action-adventure game that launched the World of Mana series.
  • Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV are both MMORPGs, which makes them stand out amongst their single-player contemporaries. In particular, XIV initially took a lot of inspiration from XI when first developed and released. When this proved to be the game's (and potentially Square's) undoing, the game was scrapped, rebuilt, and relaunched to critical acclaim.
  • Final Fantasy XV has a battle system rooted in Kingdom Hearts, with dynamic movement around an open arena and actions performed on the fly as opposed to "the party standing opposite the enemy party and using menus to execute actions in turn-based fashion". Tellingly, the game was originally meant as a loose continuation of the "Fabula Nova Crystallis: Final Fantasy" Expanded Universe project under the title Versus XIII (with the actual Final Fantasy XIII carrying the torch for the numerical installments, retaining the more familiar JRPG-style of gameplay).
  • On the subject of Fabula Nova Crystallis, there is also Final Fantasy Type-0, which stands out from both a gameplay and narrative perspective. The gameplay is considerably more action-oriented than even XV, and while the story has more connections to XIII through the use of common lore elements, it is immensely Darker and Edgier. Tellingly, it is the first Final Fantasy game in the series to receive a Mature rating from the ESRB.
  • Final Fantasy Explorers is a Monster Hunter clone that combines the Job System that FF made famous with epic boss battles in an Action RPG setting.
  • Final Fantasy Dimensions is quite different than all the mobile-exclusive games that followed, including its own direct sequel. Like Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, it was released as a series of episodic chapters; unlike TAY, it has never been ported to any other platform. Its original release was 2010, shortly before the development of the gachapon business model that all succeeding mobile-exclusive games adopted—so in a collection of Allegedly Free Games based on character collection and nostalgia factor, Dimensions is just a SNES-era Final Fantasy game that happens to be on your phone.
• Final Fight had three games of being straight beat 'em ups, then Final Fight Revenge was a fighting game based on characters from the first game, including a zombie Belger. A couple of years later, Final Fight: Streetwise came out, which tried to go back to its roots but with RPG elements and GTA influences. It bombed, hard.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden holds this distinction. While the others are completely linear games where you go from one chapter to another, this one has a map you move around on, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't because of the Forced Level-Grinding you need to do every often in a while, in a series that usually has no Level Grinding at all. Furthermore, all weapons are unbreakable, and magic is Cast from Hit Points instead of being regular weapons that hit another defense stat. Furthermore, you face off against monsters often, instead of just humans aside from some bosses/Elite Mooks. And there's a weak "Villager" class that can promote to one of the "normal" base classes. Most of these ideas were recycled for The Sacred Stones.
  • While generally much better received than Gaiden and The Sacred Stones, the Jugdral games both have a number of unique features. The first, Genealogy of the Holy War, has ridiculously large and sprawling levels in which multiple castles have to be captured and there are at least as many bosses in each level as there are castles, the arena is a function in your castle in which there are a given set of enemies for each level (instead of being infinite and random), each character has their own supply of money and items can't be traded; also, you pair up your units in the first half of the game and play as their children in the second half. Many of these units also have "Holy Blood." While Holy Blood is naturally still present in Thracia 776 (as it's set in the same world and had some of the same characters), everything else introduced in the previous game was scrapped and never came back. However, a bunch of other new features were added. The Build stat, determining the size of a unit, is introduced, and both Build and Movement have growth rates and can potentially increase when leveling up. Large enough units can rescue smaller allied units and can capture enemy units after defeating them, and a captured enemy can be "traded" with (read: stripped of its items) before being released (at which point they'll die)... or not released, as many recruitable enemies have to be captured and kept in order to get them to join. It's also the first game to have gaiden chapters that can be unlocked by fulfilling certain requirements, and most of these chapters are full of darkness, as is one regular chapter. Also, some units have "movement stars," which gives them a random chance of being able to act twice in one turn, and all units except the main character have a fatigue meter that goes up every time they engage in combat or use a staff, which can only be reset by sitting out a chapter or having a certain item in their inventory, and if their fatigue exceeds their max HP, they'll be forced to sit out a chapter. Rescuing allies, fog of war, and gaiden chapters all became staples of the series. Capturing enemies, growth rates for Build and Move, Movement Stars and fatigue meters didn't, and none of these were ever seen again in this form.
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, from a story standpoint. It's the only game in the series not to feature a major war (small coups are as close as it gets), the antagonists are a gang of assassins rather than an invading nation, and the plot is structured more like The Quest, with a small band of knights collecting magic artifacts to fight an unaffiliated Evil Sorceror. Dragons are treated as a mythical, near-extinct species rather than the series' typical Manaketes, and rather than a godlike demonic one, an ordinary Fire Dragon serves as the Final Boss.
  • Fire Emblem Warriors is a Dynasty Warriors-esque spin-off which replaces the tactical turn-based battles with hack-and-slash action that borrows strategic elements from FE.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses stands out both among its modern contemporaries and the series as a whole. The Weapon Triangle that is emblematic of the series is changed radically, such that simply using a weapon against an enemy they would normally be weak against (i.e. a lance against a sword) doesn't confer bonus damage on its own. Instead, proficiency in a specific weapon bestows Combat Arts, special abilities similar to those found in RPGs that grant bonuses when used at the cost of weapon durability. Combat Arts include abilities that can be more effective against others weapon types (ie. a lance user with the Swordbreaker Combat Art). Combat Arts are honed through training during the Life Simulation Game segments, with players planning lessons for their students over the course of a month during each chapter. The levelling system is also completely different from the rest of the series: EXP required between levels gradually increases like a standard RPG instead of staying at 100 every time, there's no Class Change Level Reset, the level cap is 99 instead of a multiple of 20, and stat caps are fixed per character instead of per class.
• Front Mission:
  • Front Mission Evolved is a third person mech shooter with some poorly executed concepts such as on foot segments which breaks sequence and storytelling that leaves VERY much to be desired. Evolved failed to win much love from the franchise's already narrow fanbase, and bombed hard as a result — and sadly, buried the franchise as a whole.
  • Left Alive is a Stealth Sequel to the Front Mission series released in 2019... and makes many of the same mistakes Evolved did, trying to be a third person action/stealth game that fails on multiple levels and, perhaps most damningly for fans of the franchise, barely features any of the iconic Wanzer mecha. Even having art design by famed Metal Gear Solid artist Yoji Shinkawa couldn't redeem the game, and its commercial and critical failure has likely put the final nail in the franchise's coffin.
• Gradius: The Interstellar Assault features very little music, enemies, or level themes from the previous titles, is the only game in the entire franchise to feature Direct Continuous Levels and has a final boss that actually fights back (albeit not much) and isn't an immobile brain or core.
• Grand Theft Auto 2. While the first two Grand Theft Auto games in general have some Early-Installment Weirdness compared to what the series would later become (most notably with their top-down 2D gameplay and limited number of extra lives), this game goes above and beyond its predecessor and its successors alike. For one thing, it's the only GTA game set in the future, specifically in a Retro Universe 2013 inspired by a mix of '70s/'80s dystopian sci-fi, cyberpunk, and postwar-era aesthetics, the latter most visible in the vehicle designs. Furthermore, gameplay is built around a mechanic that no subsequent GTA game has used since. Rather than following a linear story path, the "respect" system allows players to take missions from different gangs and kill gang members in the streets (in or out of missions) in order to play them off of one another, building or hurting their reputation with one at the expense or benefit of their rivals.
• Most Grow games have their own unique schticks that make them unique, but a few examples stand out.
  • Grow Ver.1 has a different kind of gameplay where instead of having a bunch of objects that you need to place in a certain order, you need to choose one item out of two to interact with an item that's already on the screen (sometime you only have one item to choose from). Then you are given another choice with different items. This goes on until you reach the end of the path you were going to.
  • Grow nano vol 1 (And nano vol 0) has a different gameplay where the player just have to click on some parts of a structure to make it evolve.
  • Grow Cannon has a different kind of gameplay where instead of directly placing objects, the player must use a cannon to fire in different spots and interact with the scenery.
  • Grow Clay is visually unique as it uses clay animation instead of 2D digital animation like every other game in the series.
• Guilty Gear is no stranger to introducing strange and experimental gameplay aspects (Isuka ^note which had a two-lane system similar to that of Fatal Fury, Dust Strikers) or undergoing a minor Genre Shift from Fighting Game to Beat 'em Up (Isuka again, Judgment). The biggest offender, though, is Guilty Gear 2: Overture, a Real-Time Strategy game that also jumped ahead five years from the events of the first game (while glossing over X and XX) and sidelined most of the cast in the process.
• The Halo Wars sub-series, which are Real-Time Strategy games amongst a family of first person shooters. Also made by different developers. Its oddball nature is ironic, because Halo was originally conceived as an RTS.
• Harvest Moon:
  • Save The Homeland, with its lack of marriage and emphasis on horse breeding.
  • A Wonderful Life, with its ramped-up difficulty, episodic format, and overall emphasis on your child's ultimate fate).
  • There's also Rune Factory and Innocent Life, the former a fantasy game with monsters and an ongoing plot and the latter taking place in the future with the player character a cyborg. The former was significantly more successful, and was spun off into its own sub-series.
• The Hebereke games already only have a tenuous connection between one another, but Hebereke no Oishii Puzzle wa Irimasen ka is the only one that is set in real-life Japan rather than the usual alien world and features human characters. That's because it's a remake of a previous arcade puzzle game by Sunsoft and Atlus, with the Hebereke characters pasted on to gain a little bit more appeal, but otherwise left completely identical.
• Heroes of Might and Magic:
  • The fourth entry has several differences between it and other entries, including heroes that participate in combat, 4 levels of units as opposed to the previous 6-7, a distance-based rather than grid-based combat system, the removal of creature upgrades, and an overhaul of both the attack/defense and hero skill systems. The first game looks like an oddball in retrospect, due to creature upgrades and hero skills not being introduced until the second game.
  • The ninth installment of the main series falls under this trope, and much for the same reason. Both Heroes 4 and M&M 9 were meant to serve as story reboots by moving the series to a new planet, just as Heroes I and M&M 6 had done. Unfortunately, an acute case of Died During Production prevented this from happening. The main series died a sadly unspectacular death before much later receiving an attempted resurrection that looked like a case of this trope by having many of its gameplay mechanics hearken back to Might & Magic IV/V, while the Heroes series attempted to hearken back to the glory days of its third installment.
• Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile breaks from many of the City-Building Series' gameplay conventions: it averts Ridiculously Fast Construction; has no active Gods; forces residents to seek out their own resources rather than receive them from walkers; relies exclusively on physical resources produced within the city in place of an abstract Global Currency; and restricts the city's educated workforce according to the ruler's prestige, which degrades if not maintained. It also marked the Video Game 3D Leap for the series.
• The Jak and Daxter series has Jak X: Combat Racing, which turns the emphasis to Vehicular Combat in what is normally a platformer series with a large collection of other elements — it's present in the other games, but to nowhere near the same degree.
• The Aquatic Games is the only sports games in the James Pond series.
• Kingdom Hearts as a whole is a series of Action RPG games. Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is a near complete departure from this, being, of all things, a Rhythm Game with RPG Elements.
• King's Quest: Mask of Eternity. Ditched the interactive narrative formula, and went for action/adventure instead. Like other entries on this list, some prefer to think it never happened.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby & the Amazing Mirror is the only Kirby game to be a full Metroidvania instead of a straightforward Platform Game the series' main games are known for. It's also the first game in the entire series where King Dedede does not make an appearance.
  • Kirby's Epic Yarn is one of these as well. Replacing the traditional "eat > gain abilities" power set with yarn-based transformations. Amongst other things. It helps that this wasn't originally intended as a Kirby game.
  • Kirby Mass Attack is instead akin to Pikmin, in that you guide a group of tiny Kirbies who are harmless on their own but pack a punch when united. The game's tone is one of, if not the the most oppressive in the franchise, as everyone is actually out to kill the poor pink blobs. All this plus the new graphics and the surprisingly robust sub-games were certainly in response to the criticisms Kirby: Squeak Squad faced for being too much like the Game Boy Advance installments.
• Many Legacy of Kain fans dislike Blood Omen 2 because it's so different from the Soul Reaver series in terms of gameplay, and because of plot holes (there are no explanations in that game for how Vorador and Janos Audron are alive again, for instance^note In the context of the series as a whole, the explanation is that Kain's actions at the end of Soul Reaver 2 mucked up the timeline, but scenes in Defiance that would have explained it more fully were cut). Then again, the whole Soul Reaver series, in a way, is the Oddball in the Series, considering the original Blood Omen is a Legend of Zelda-style action game with Kain as the main character, not a Tomb Raider-style puzzle game with a different protagonist. Also, contrary to a common misconception, the game isn't a Dolled-Up Installment developed originally as a sequel to Chakan: The Forever Man; no work had began on the Chakan sequel before it was scrapped and fully converted into a Legacy of Kain project.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is unique among the series, as while overworld traversal is still the overhead view used by every other 2D entry, the actual combat and gameplay is that of a side-scrolling Platformer. Though future games would make use of RPG Elements to varying degrees, Adventure of Link goes a step further to have Link leveling up and gaining experience points, which no other entry would do. Also unique to the game is a lives system and a lack of money/shops. The items of the previous game have been replaced with various spells, and it's the only Zelda game not to have "The Legend of Zelda" as its prefix. But despite all these differences, it's still a key component of the franchise, being the origin of many features and concepts (towns, magic meter, the Triforce of Courage, the names for several Ocarina of Time sages, enemies and bosses, etc.) in the series thanks to this game.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is the first Zelda game where the titular princess has no involvement in plot (the only other one being Tri Force Heroes)^note the Oracle games technically count as well, but linking the games has the princess appear in the Golden Ending, the first game to allow you to shoplift (the only other one being Twilight Princess)^note and even then, Link's Awakening has the bonus of Link getting killed if he ever returns and being renamed "THIEF", and the first have a Golden Ending (the only other ones being Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom). It holds numerous explicit references to other Nintendo franchises, with appearances being made by characters and enemies from titles such as Super Mario Bros., Kirby, and even SimCity. Finally, most of the bosses are pretty chatty, engaging Link in short pre- and post-battle conversation.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask focuses heavily on "Groundhog Day" Loop mechanics, gameplay has a bigger focus on Link using alternate forms rather than items, and the overall structure places great importance on sidequests, with the game only having four main dungeons. Ganondorf, the Triforce, the Master Sword, and Hyrule and its mythology go completely unmentioned and the game instead introduces an entirely new mythology with many of its elements intentionally vague and left up to the interpretation of the player. It is also Darker and Edgier and more surreal (aliens appear at one point) than most of the other Zelda games to date.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, and The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes are multiplayer games with both competitive and cooperative elements, though all of them^note sans the original release of the first allow for a single-player campaign by controlling all the Links at once or switching between them. All three games also rely on discrete levels rather than the connected worlds of the rest of the series; Four Swords even randomly generated the levels. Link's inventory is significantly more limited than in the rest of the series, only allowing each player to have one equippable item at a time in addition to the standard sword and shield, and these items would not persist between levels, though Tri Force Heroes at least included a separate form of persistent progression by including collectible materials that could be crafted into permanent new outfits with unique effects. Tri Force Heroes is also much Denser and Wackier in tone and presentation than any other mainline entry in the series, as the plot revolves around saving a princess cursed to wear an unfashionable outfit in a kingdom where fashion is Serious Business.
  • If The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games weren't already completely ignored by Nintendo, they would also be considered this. Two of the games, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon are platformers like Zelda II, and are host to (poor) voice acting and animated cutscenes; meanwhile, Zelda's Adventure, despite bringing back the top-down perspective, is also the only game to have live-action cutscenes and digitized sprites. The latter two games also have the player take on the role of Zelda rather than Link, something that wouldn't happen in a mainline entry to any degree until Spirit Tracks fifteen years later.
• Most Lemmings games have the same general gameplay, except for two — Lemmings Paintball is an isometric Third-Person Shooter, while The Adventures of Lomax is a platformer.
• LEGO Adaptation Game:
  • LEGO Indiana Jones 2 is decently different from every LEGO game made before and since, due to being an experiment for how all future games would work, especially the introduction of fully explorable Hub Levels. All the core mechanics are still the same, but all main levels are split into combat, puzzle, and vehicle categories, while also all taking place in a single continuous area each, similar to the bonus levels, minikit pieces are not collected during levels but instead rewarded one at a time by completing non-story levels, completed minikits grant access to the bonus levels instead of granting characters, vehicles, or viewable builds, and each hub has its own separate selection of characters, with level free-play requiring you to find, buy, and swap to two characters wandering in the hub that have the required abilities, instead of selecting an assortment of them when you enter.
  • The LEGO Ninjago Movie Videogame deviates from the series' standard formula in a few notable ways: the game is more combat-oriented with various moves that the ninjas and other martial artist characters can perform, rather than one hub, most levels become available as hubs once they're first completed, the fusion of levels and hubs means that minikits are completely omitted, studs are no longer used for buying unlockables or for maxing out the gauge in every level, instead being used to fill one continuous gauge that gives rewards at every level and to rebuild destroyed landmarks for Gold Brick rewards, and because of the way studs work being changed, Red Bricks and unlockable characters are granted automatically and the latter are depicted as being found in blind bags.
  • The adaptation of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part isn't even the same type of game as the others, instead being reskinned from LEGO Worlds, which is its main criticism.
• Life Is Strange 2 increasingly stands out in the Life Is Strange franchise, for a number of reasons. It's the only full-length game in the series with a male protagonist; the only game without a fixed location and recurring cast across all of its episodes; and the only one without a central mystery and a single individual as the Big Bad villain. It's also sometimes cited as being the only Life Is Strange game where the player character doesn't have a superpower of their own, although people seem to be forgetting Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (and indeed, all the series' DLC episodes, including LIS2's own side story the The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit). Fairer to say it's the main game in the only stand-alone arc in the series where none of the playable characters have a real superpower.
• Like a Dragon:
  • Yakuza: Dead Souls is a Zombie Apocalypse-themed spinoff that inserts elements of Survival Horror into the series: combat is done primarily with guns, much more so than in past games^note While guns can be found and used in other games, they're not common to find and factor little into the combat, the series's emblematic use of environmental objects as weapons is downplayed, and the game's main plot is decidedly sillier than the other games. Since it was developed during a period of time when zombie games like Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising were enjoying a day in the sun, Sega of America decided to release the game stateside and promote it prominently in the hopes of riding the zombie wave. This decision almost proved to be a Franchise Killer, as the game performed so poorly that Sega nearly ceased supporting the series outside of Japan.
  • Judgment and Lost Judgment, in comparison to Dead Souls, are much more akin to the main series games, but with distinctions that make the stand out: in addition to being the first games to feature a new protagonist aside from Kazuma Kiryu, they show the series' setting through the eyes of those who work for law enforcement with a protagonist who is a Private Detective.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon represents a massive Genre Shift, swapping the series's real-time Beat 'em Up combat for turn-based RPG-style battles, along with other RPG trappings like a Job System and a four-person party for the protagonist (a Mr. Imagination who played, and even name-drops, Dragon Quest). This style, however, became a permanent change, being retained for the sequel, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Like a Dragon also marked the series' transition from its original title of Yakuza in Western territories to Like a Dragon (a literal translation of Ryū ga Gotoku, what the series is known as Japan), hence the subtitle.
• Lode Runner's Rescue is an isometric game akin to Crystal Castles, starring the lode runner's daughter. Unlike her father, she can jump and swim, but not dig.
• Lunar: Dragon Song is, like the rest of the Lunar series, an Eastern RPG... but it adds a bunch of experimental (i.e. annoying) gameplay mechanics paired with a rudimentary plot and shallow characters. There's also zero cutscenes or voice acting. The other games in the series are known for old-school gameplay with well-developed stories and characters, as well as TV-quality traditionally animated cutscenes.
• Madden Football 64 is notable for being the only Madden game to lack the NFL license (which was the norm for the main games up until Madden NFL '94) but have the NFL Players' Association license. As a result, the game can't show the names, logos, or other trademarks of real-world NFL teams, instead using just the city names (and in some cases, names of cities that aren't represented in the NFL, but in order to get around the "no NFL trademarks" restriction) with fictitious team colors... but it features the names of real-life players.
• In the Mana Series, Legend of Mana stands out as a bit of an oddball game for having not one, but three primary plots, tied to themselves as a collection of loose sidequests (with plenty more on the side), as well as a system which all but guarantees that a player cannot do everything in one go. Combined with the fact that it practically enforces Guide Dang It!, it ultimately feels like a very different monster from the earlier titles — and the later, too, but for a very different reason.
• MechAssault to the MechWarrior franchise, being a primarily a third-person action game with on-foot sections where prior MechWarrior games were predominantly first-person cockpit view mech simulators with no infantry gameplay. It also utilizes a very different combat system compared to MechWarrior and omits the popular customization function. The first MechCommander was considered the oddball for a while, being a real-time tactics game in a primarily action/simulation franchise, but after both games, fans have come to accept it due to its broad similarities to the tabletop game.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 8 is this, since it drastically alters several Mega Man gameplay staples. There are no Energy Tanks, Rush Coil is gone and Rush Jet can't be called by the player, stages come in two parts (with Continue only booting you back to the halfway point), all weapons are refilled whenever you die, and Bolts are finite. It all takes getting used to. It's also the first and only mainline Mega Man game to come out exclusively for not only a non-Nintendo console (until it was collected for Mega Man Anniversary Collection years later), but two consoles (near-)simultaneously (Sony's PlayStation and the Sega Saturn).
  • Mega Man & Bass is the only main Classic title to recycle two previous Robot Masters from a previous game in its group of eight (granted with new attacks and weapons to obtain), rather than having all eight be totally new. It's also the only game to have a tree-like stage select rather than the option to choose from all eight stages at once or in two sets of four, require a "weapon trial" stage in order to unlock the fortress stages, and not depict the fortress stages on a map with a visible path.
  • Mega Man X7 is the only X (or original series) game in full 3D. As such, it plays very differently, and sadly not very well — camera control in particular is a huge problem. X7 also made the bizarre decision to withhold X himself as a playable character until about halfway in; his place in gameplay is taken by a new character, Axl, who plays about the same. While later games made him more distinct and well-rounded, Axl has yet to be (completely) forgiven by the fanbase for his debut.
  • Mega Man X: Command Mission is the X series' first and only foray into the RPG genre.
  • Mega Man Network Transmission: The only 3D Battle Network game, an interquel between 1 and 2, and it plays more like a conventional Mega Man sidescroller instead of the BN virus-busting RPG format.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon is completely different in structure from the rest of the series: it's basically one long Tournament Arc consisting of three Inevitable Tournaments, and it requires at least three playthroughs to unlock everything, including the Bonus Dungeon. This isn't quite as tedious as it sounds, given the increasing challenge on each playthrough and the random elements involved, but the main plot is exactly the same each time.^note And the third playthrough is largely unnecessary — the multiple playthroughs are justified because there are six bosses in each version of the game who, after being defeated, the player can perform "Soul Unison" with. The problem is, you only fight three of those six bosses in one playthrough, and in the second playthrough it's guaranteed that you will fight one of the three you can already combine with again. BN4 also has a really sloppy English translation, which wouldn't stand out in many game series, but does in this one.
  • There is also an uncommonly mentioned Mega Man Battle Network 4.5 interquel that had an actual working BattleChip-loading device to go with it, and a Japan-only release of mobile Battle Network games playable on a phone.
  • The obscure Rockman EXE WS, a Mega Man Battle Network title for the WonderSwan, feeling like a cross between the traditional BN style and Transmission gameplay, and another WonderSwan game, Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousensha^*Mega Man & Bass: Challenger from the Future, with exaggerated-Japanese-esque-looking Robot Masters and only seven Robot Master levels because two of the eight Masters are a pair of twins — the Clock Men.
  • Street Fighter X Mega Man is the only official Mega Man fan game, and the only official game (besides Mirai Kara no Chousensha) in the Classic series where Dr. Wily isn't The Man Behind the Man.
  • Within the Mega Man Legends series, The Misadventures of Tron Bonne is the only one to feature Tron as a playable character, has multiple gameplay types (including a puzzle game, a first-person dungeon crawler, and a casino), a mission-based structure rather than an open world, and is the only game in the series where Mega Man himself does not appear.
  • The obscure DOS games (Mega Man and Mega Man 3: The Robots are Revolting) aren't even ports of their namesakes. The Robot Masters are different, it features omni-directional scrolling, highly non-linear level design, a complete lack of music... and that's not even the half of it.
• The Metal Gear franchise boasts quite a few examples. Despite being known as a stealth action series, Metal Gear Ac!d is a Turn-Based Strategy/Card Battle Game, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a Hack and Slash game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a Wide-Open Sandbox game (all of the previous games were completely linear), Metal Gear Survive is a zombie survival game.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid II: Return of Samus plays quite differently from the rest of the games in the series. In contrast to the more non-linear exploration in other titles, Metroid II only allows the player to progress to the next area after they've killed all Metroids in the current one. The game's plot for exterminating the species also leads to every boss other than an optional one being some form of Metroid.^note Metroid: Samus Returns, its remake, would add in two more mandatory bosses. It also lacks a Self Destruct Lair Escape sequence, something that's present in every other 2D game (and Other M): instead, when you defeat the Queen Metroid, you just peacefully return to your ship accompanied by the baby and leave the planet without even encountering any enemies... but only in the original.
  • Among the Metroid Prime Trilogy, ignoring the multiplayer-focused entries and a pinball spin-off, there's Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. It's the only entry to have an ammunition system for beam weapons, makes uses of a dual world mechanic more in line with fellow Nintendo franchise The Legend of Zelda, and is one of the very few Metroid games where Ridley is absent. In fact, the antagonistic role of the Space Pirates is largely overshadowed by the Ing, and even Phazon — the main plot point of the original trilogy — plays a secondary role.
  • The fandom still hasn't decided what Metroid: Other M is, as it's the first 3D non-Prime entry in the entire Metroid series, making it awkward to cleanly categorize between the two halves of the franchise since Other M doesn't play like either half.^note Most wikis, including this one, ultimately group it with the other 2D games since they were made by the same team. The game boasts a dialogue and cutscene-heavy narrative that dwarfs the other 2D games, which tend to favor silent acting and minimal dialogue through periodic narration, to the point where one of the features unlocked after beating the game is "Other M: The Movie" (all the game's cutscenes and some contextualizing gameplay edited together into a movie). Gameplay-wise, it differs from the Prime sub-series by playing in a third-person perspective, and differs from all Metroid games by being even more linear than Metroid II/Samus Returns; backtracking and exploration during the main story is mostly replaced by intense melee combat and action set pieces, as well as the aforementioned heavy story focus. As for the series chronology, it is the only game whose plot elements don't contribute heavily to subsequent entries, if at all.
• Although it's usually rated highly among the fanbase, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge is this for the Monkey Island series. Usually the games will limit each chapter to a specific island, but the second chapter of 2 allows you to travel between three islands instead. The next two games would also continue some form of insult fighting, which is absent in the second game. There's also a story gap between both the game and its predecessor and sequel which is never fully explored, which leaves the plot feeling a little odd too.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Monster Hunter 2 (dos): Though the game retains the gameplay and style of the previous installments, it also features a nonstandard progression system that is tied to a Seasonal Baggage mechanic (and is also the only game outside Monster Hunter Frontier to have said mechanic to begin with). It is also the only non-handheld installment in the franchise to feature subspecies in Low Rank quests (the other home console games either don't have subspecies at all or restrict them to High Rank, as well as G/Master Rank when available). Lastly, until Generations Ultimate (released 11 years later), it was the only game to feature an Elder Dragon as a flagship monster (Kushala Daora), and until Monster Hunter: Rise (released 15 years later) the only one to introduce a Variant in the same game where its parent species debuts (Rusted Kushala Daora). In comparison, the other installments in the franchise's second generation (Monster Hunter Freedom 2 and its expansion Freedom Unite) are more akin to the first-generation games as well as those released ever since.
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) does a lot of things differently compared to games before and after it (including, to a lesser extent, its own expanded version Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate):
    • It was the only game in the series prior to Monster Hunter: Rise with motion controls, although it is also compatible with the Wii's Classic Controller.
    • Until the introduction of Palamutes in Monster Hunter: Rise, this game and its Updated Re-release 3 Ultimate were the only mainline games (i.e. not Frontier, Stories, etc.) to have non-Felyne AI companions, and remain the only games to have Shakalakas as companions, as well as the only ones to have underwater mechanics.
    • It is the only game to remove weapons (Dual Blades, Gunlance, Hunting Horn, and Bow), and in which Bowguns come in mix-and-matchable parts rather than being entirely-fixed weapons. It is also the only game to have Medium Bowguns.
    • A lot of mainstay monsters that appeared in previous generations of games were removed for this game, with some of them being brought back for Portable 3rd and/or 3 Ultimate. As a direct consequence, and much like the very first game in the series, no subspecies or variants are featured at all in this installment, not even those of Rathian, Rathalos and Diablos (the only veteran monsters to appear); this is another omission that was rectified in Portable 3rd and 3 Ultimate. 4 would bring back a lot of the usual 1st- and 2nd-gen monsters, including subspecies (and, in a reversal, ditches all monsters from 3 except Great Jaggi and Deviljho, though more of them would return in subsequent games).
    • Its flagship monster, Lagiacrus, lacks a specific Battle Theme Music (instead, the battle track from Deserted Island is named after it). The only other flagship monsters in the series to lack a proper battle theme are Rathalos and Azure Rathalos (from the very first game and its expanded version respectively), having instead the otherwise normal boss music of Forest and Hills typically associated with them.
• The Monster Rancher series of monster-raising simulation games has Monster Rancher EVO, a traditional RPG with dungeons and a party-based battle style that happens to use the Monster Rancher series monsters. Oh, and stat-raising and money-gaining are now based on your performance in a rhythm mini-game. While not necessarily a bad game, the fact that so little of it is traditionally Monster Rancher makes it very divisive for fans.
• Monty is Innocent is an isometric 3D adventure game, rather than a platformer like the other Monty Mole games.
• Mortal Kombat has a few of these.
  • Most notably are Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Special Forces. Both of these are action/adventure games, Sub-Zero in particular being a platform game, whereas this is a series known for its brutal one-on-one fighting mechanics. Their reception among critics and fans is subpar due to their flawed gameplay. The series later branched back out into action/adventure with the better-received Shaolin Monks.
  • As far as the mainline Mortal Kombat games go, there's Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Not only is it a crossover with DC comics, featuring characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, but the blood and Fatalities have been severely toned down (thanks to Executive Meddling on the DC side). As a result, it is the only game in the series to be rated T by the ESRB, and due to its premise it's subject to Canon Discontinuity.
• Within the Nancy Drew series of adventure-mystery games, The Secret of the Old Clock stands out as a bit of an oddball. Not really in terms of gameplay, but in aesthetics; while all the other games are contemporary to the modern day, Clock is a 1930s period piece paying tribute to the character's origin (it also doubles as a Milestone Celebration for the character's 75th anniversary.)
• Oddworld: Most of the games are Puzzle Platformers with Stealth-Based Game elements, with the main character being resident Almighty Janitor Abe, except for Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, which is a Third-Person Shooter with platformer elements and stars all-new character Stranger as the main character. The game received critical acclaim, but sold poorly due to Invisible Advertising.
• Pac-Man:
  • Pac-Man World 3, which was developed by Blitz Games rather than Namco, is often seen as this by fans compared to the previous two games due to the increased emphasis on combat over platforming.
  • Baby Pac-Man is notably odd due to being a stand-up arcade machine which is half-video game, half-pinball game. Players are required to steer Baby Pac down one of two openings at the bottom of the maze to "enter" the pinball playfield, and you have to play the pinball part in order to get any Power Pellets in the video maze or move up to the next "fruit level". The machine became an expensive lesson to Bally/Midway in what happens when you try to please everybody, and end up pleasing nobody — video game players found the pinball part too hard, and pinball players found the video game part too hard, and nearly everybody who played it wound up frustrated as a result. (The fact that the video game portion has simplistic graphics that smack of the infamously rushed Atari 2600 Pac-Man port didn't help matters either.)
• Paro Wars, a turn-based strategy game amongst a family of completely silly shmups. Yes, it is a fairly serious and difficult military strategy game not unlike the Nintendo Wars series, with all the goofy Parodius characters such as Moai heads, penguins, octopi and dogs in business suits! What were they thinking?
• Petz is a series of Raising Sims. However, Petz: Catz - Dogz 2 is an RPG/adventure game where you play as the animal and have to Save the World from an evil wolf.
• Phantasy Star III is the black sheep of the Phantasy Star series, with a plotline unrelated to the rest of the original Phantasy Star tetralogy, decidedly weak mechanics, and visibly less effort put into it overall.
• Pico: Of the canonical games starring Pico, Pico V.S. Überkids is the only installment where Pico picks a fight with the antagonists rather than fighting back or being hired to kill. Not only are the Überkids' roles relatively benign (they were merely supposed to learn from the smarter kids), but whatever the Human Genome Project was planning with them goes unanswered, amounting at best to a mention of scrapping the project entirely if they lose.
• Pikmin: The mainline titles are all top-down strategy games with an emphasis on managing a large army of Pikmin in open levels. The 3DS spinoff Hey! Pikmin is a sidescroller that is more of a puzzle platformer where Pikmin are given as a set army per level, instead of chosen at the base, and have to get from one end of a level to the other.
• Pokémon:
  • Mainline games:
    • Pokémon Black and White stands out in a number of ways. Outside being the first region not to be based on a Japanese prefecture (being mostly inspired by the New York City metro area), the game is notable for having absolutely no Pokémon from previous generations appear at all in the main game, only appearing after you've beaten the game.
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon removed the "eight Gyms" structure and replaced it with Island Challenges, where the player partakes in a variety of tasks before fighting a Pokémon boss, with these "Totem Pokémon" being larger than the average Mon and having boosted stats. The closest thing to a Gym Leader are the Island Kahuna, who are fought after completing all Trials on an island.
    • Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! is a mash-up of the traditional series formula and that of Pokémon GO. Among other things, wild battles are nonexistent outside Legendary encounters (replaced by the catching mechanics of GO), Gyms now have various different requirements for entry (such as having a certain type of Pokémon or having reached a particular level), and it features local co-op multiplayer wherein two players can work together to capture Pokémon and partake in Double Battles.
  • Spin-offs:
    • The Game Boy Color adaptations of the Trading Card Game come off as odd as they apparently take place in a world apart from the Pokéverse; it's still not our world, but it's nevertheless a Pokémon-less place where the series is at least a trading card game.
    • The Pikachu-centric spinoffs such as Hey You, Pikachu!, Pokémon Channel, and Pokepark Wii Pikachus Adventure definitely qualify as this, as all three of these games involve the player interacting with Pikachu in a semi-virtual pet simulator while talking casually with other Pokemon and playing fun minigames. Hey You, Pikachu! is also the only game in the entire series to not have the "Poke" prefix in its name at all.
    • Out of the other spin-offs, Colosseum and XD. While they play the most like the main games compared to Mystery Dungeon, Ranger, and the various other spin-offs, unlike the main games, all battles are Double Battles (with the exception of a very early battle in XD, solely because you only have one Pokémon, an Eevee, to begin with during it). Also, while they're Spiritual Successors to the Stadium games, they actually have a story mode along with tournament modes and lack a few things that Stadium had (the Gym Leader Castle, minigames, etc.).
    • The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series is known for being much Darker and Edgier than most other spinoffs, so the Lighter and Softer WiiWare-exclusive Adventure Squad games can come as quite a shock. For starters, they use the same Super-Deformed art style as My Pokémon Ranch; for another, the in-depth and often quite sinister storylines of the other Mystery Dungeon games are missing in favor of an Excuse Plot where the player has to find a land of infinite chocolate so their village will stop fighting over the last cookie. (Perhaps because of this, they were never translated into European languages.) While it still plays by One Game for the Price of Two, each version makes much more of an attempt to differentiate itself, featuring different starters, different wild Pokémon, and different dungeons — by comparison, the Rescue Team and Explorers games just move some Pokémon and items around.
    • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, right off the bat, completely removes the previously standard personality quiz, and the player simply chooses their starter outright, like they would with their partner. It has, by far, the fewest number of starters in the entire series, with only 5 — the Unova starters plus Pikachu and Axew. It's the only non-remake Mystery Dungeon game to not feature every Pokémon revealed at the time of its release, instead having a modest selection of Pokémon from Generations I through V (leaning towards Generation V). Finally, it's the only Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game where hunger is not a constant game mechanic — instead, it's limited to certain dungeons.
    • Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon brings the quiz back, but eschews the traditional system of recruitment and job hunting in favor of the Pokémon Nexus — a large star map-esque screen where the player can take on requests from other Pokémon in exchange for them joining their party — and introduces a mechanic where Pokémon the player has recently used (outside of the player and their partner) can go on break and be unavailable for the next mission or two in an effort to avert Complacent Gaming Syndrome.
  • Several of the manga come off as this, such as How I Became a Pokémon Card or Magical Pokémon Journey as they don't focus on the same dynamics as most titles in the series but are, respectively, a Slice of Life and Shojo set in the Pokémon world. Pokémon RéBURST stands out even more, ditching the dominant Duels Decide Everything formula in favor of Hot-Blooded Shonen fisticuffs... between the human characters themselves.
• Prince of Persia is a well known platformer series. Battles of Prince of Persia on Nintendo DS is a turned based strategy game. Even the narrative is unusual because you switch from the perspective of other factions instead of staying with the Prince.
• Quest for Glory V played like a RPG with Adventure elements, rather than vice versa as the other four games in the series. It also didn't have as much input from the series' creators.
• R-Type:
  • R-Type Leo has no Force pod and no charge shot. Its plot and art style are also significantly Lighter and Softer; instead of fighting the Bydo, you're trying to save a planetary climate control system gone wrong.
  • There's also R-Type Tactics, which changes genre to turn-based strategy.
• Ratchet & Clank is, for the most part, a 3D platformer with gun-based combat, but a few games have steered away from that:
  • Ratchet: Deadlocked downplays the platforming elements to be more focused on combat and vehicles, and divides planets into missions rather than each planet being continuous. It's also one of the two games in the series without a version of the RYNO, instead having the Harbinger, its Vox Industries equivalent, which instead of launching missiles calls down an orbital strike.
  • Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One retains the platforming, but goes from a single-player experience to a 2-4 player co-op adventure more akin to Gauntlet. Instead of a BFG, this game's RYNO is a suit of Powered Armor.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault retains the platforming and weaponry as well, but its base gameplay combines that with a 1-2 player Tower Defense game, and the levels are more open-ended to explore. Like Deadlocked, it also lacks a version of the RYNO, or even a superweapon at all to fill that role.
• Resident Evil:
  • There's the Gun Survivor spinoffs, which play like first-person light gun games yet rarely have light gun support in all territories.
  • Resident Evil Gaiden is the only 2D game in the franchise. It's played more like a turn-based RPG (or as one YouTube commenter described it, a "mad man's golf game") than anything resembling a Resident Evil game, though it's fun in it's own weird way and good luck getting that battle theme out of your head.
• Saints Row IV is quite different from other Saints Row games, taking more cues from the Infamous series, as opposed to the GTA series, unlike the other games.
• Regarding the SaGa games:
  • The third one is by far the oddest one out. It's the only game in the series to utilize a conventional leveling system, and it does away with many of the unusual game mechanics that made the first two games unique (such as breakable weapons and the ability to carry more of them at the cost of being able to carry less other equipment). It also features a number of rather... weird things - even by the standards of Saga's typical medieval/techno settings - that never appeared in any of the other games, the least of which is a sentient time-traveling battleship.
  • The DS remake of Final Fantasy Legend III is no longer an oddball; it was changed to use mechanics much more like the first two games. Note that Final Fantasy Legend III was developed by the same team as Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
• Shantae:
  • The titular character is a half-genie Dance Battler who has the ability to magically belly-dance into various creatures... except in the third game, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, where she enters an Enemy Mine and must instead use the pirate gear of her Arch-Enemy Risky Boots due to having lost her magic powers at the end of the previous game. Half-Genie Hero would later add a "Pirate Queen's Quest" DLC campaign where you play as Risky using those mechanics.
  • While Shantae: Half-Genie Hero maintains the exploration and backtracking elements present in every game, the world is structured more like a standard action Platform Game than a Metroidvania, ditching the interconnected worlds and dungeons of the other entries in favor of levels consisting of platforming challenges.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • The franchise is mainly a bunch of turn-based, Nintendo Hard RPGs. Then you have Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army and its sequel, which have an action-based battle system.
  • There's also a Virtual Boy spinoff titled Jack Bros., which is a top-down action game.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne is a minor example in the main series thematically, ditching all of the Cyberpunk aspects of the other games (your character being half-demon, there's no need for a COMP to translate or summon demons) to make it a straight post-apocalyptic fantasy game instead. Additionally, unlike the other mainline games, which allow you to equip weapons, armor, and accessories, Nocturne ditches all of that, leaving Magatama as your only class of equippable items. It also lacks the traditional Law/Chaos/Neutral Alignment-Based Endings, instead going for Faction-Specific Endings representing philosophies, with a more traditional Chaos route serving as the Golden Path. Finally, it's the only mainline game that is not available on a Nintendo platform (until the remaster was announced for 2020 in Japan, 2021 worldwide, some seventeen and a half years later).
  • The Digital Devil Saga duology is notable in that it doesn't use the famed system of recruiting and fusing demons that the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise uses, instead giving you 5-6 fixed characters that you pick up over the course of the early game.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is another minor main series example with regard to theme; you're fighting to prevent an apocalypse, instead of already being in one. It's also the only mainline game to have a mostly non-Japanese cast (this time, your team is an international task force) and avert Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe (instead, it's set in Mysterious Antarctica). Furthermore, said human cast consists entirely of working adults in the military who are all veterans of their craft, and not youth in an urban or fantasy setting expected to take up the fight like typical SMT fare.
  • Persona:
    • There is Persona 4: Arena and Ultimax, Fighting Games in the Persona 4 continuity (with some extra characters from Persona 3).
    • Persona 4 would spawn the Persona 4: Dancing All Night rhythm game spin-off, which would later in turn result in Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight and Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, dancing game spin-offs based on Persona 3 and 5.
    • Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth and its sequel are basically "Etrian Odyssey and its gameplay recycled with Persona 3/4/5 characters."
    • Persona 5, in adition to Dancing in Starlight, has Persona 5 Strikers —an Dynasty Warriors-style Action RPG game co-developed with Koei Tecmo— and Persona 5 Tactica —a turn-based strategy RPG—, both of which are plot-wise sequels to the original Persona 5.
• Silent Hill:
  • Silent Hill: The Arcade is an arcade rail shooter in a series comprised only of Survival Horror entries on non-arcade platforms.
  • In the regular series, Silent Hill 4 sticks out. It features a much heavier emphasis on melee weapons as opposed to guns, first-person segments, almost no boss battles or puzzles, and unkillable ghost enemies that attacked you through the levels. It's so different from what came before (and in some ways, what came after) that a long-standing rumor in the fandom is that this title was meant to be completely unrelated to Silent Hill at first, being changed partway in development. This rumor has since been debunked, but that it still has its believers stands to prove how odd it is in comparison.
  • Though the gameplay is strictly standard for early survival horror games, the story for Silent Hill 2 stood alone for years as the sole game in the franchise that completely ignored the cult and its related elements, central to the plots of most of the other games, in favor of a highly personal story of love and loss.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is different from the other games in the series in that you have no offense. There's only one type of monster that you can't defeat and can only throw off of yourself and ward off with inexplicable flares. The characters are all different. Michael Kauffman, who you may know from the other games to be an evil psychiatrist and Dahlia, who is a creepy old woman, are a normal shrink and a slutty young girl respectively.
  • Taking the crown, though, is the upcoming pachinko machine based on the series.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The series is famous for the fact that the main lead is "the fastest thing alive". This is true of the main series platforming games... and then you get to some of the platformer spinoffs. You get games where he is slowed down and forced to go through mazes to collect keys (Sonic Labyrinth) and birds (Sonic 3D Blast), which make perfect sense.
  • The 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is weird in several ways: there are no special stages whatsoever, with the Chaos Emeralds being hidden in the regular zones (the Game Gear version of the original game also had the Emeralds placed this way; however, it did have special stages as well). The Green Hill Zone is the fourth stage rather than in its usual place as the first zone, which is instead occupied by the Underground Zone, whereas the final zone (Crystal Egg) is a very bright and upbeat level rather than the usual Eternal Engine/space station style final level for a Sonic game.
  • Sonic Eraser is a puzzle game that entails two players clearing blocks to make their Sonics attack each other. The game was never officially released outside of Japan and was developed specifically for the Meganet add-on.
  • Sonic Spinball is notable for being a pinball game with platforming elements (a complete inverse of the Genesis Sonic games, which are platformer games with pinball elements) and has cameos by characters from Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM). Sonic Blast for the Game Gear is also strange as it has only 5 zones (and thus only 5 Chaos Emeralds) as opposed to the usual number of 6 or 7, as well as being the only Sonic game on the Game Gear with pre-rendered graphics. There's also SegaSonic the Hedgehog, an arcade game where you use a trackball to navigate Sonic and two friends, Mighty and Ray, through a series of deathtrap levels in Eggman's fortress. Mighty and Ray would both be subject to Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Mighty made one more appearance in Knuckles Chaotix (listed below), while no one would see hide nor hair of Ray until he and Mighty returned decades later in Sonic Mania Encore.
  • Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is unique in that it not only doesn't feature Sonic himself in any capacity, but is also a puzzle game in a series that falls under the aforementioned "pinball-esque platformer" genre featuring many characters from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, including that show's version of Dr. Robotnik. This is mainly due to the game being a reskin of the Sega Genesis port of the original arcade version of Puyo Puyo, which would later get a Call-Back in Sonic Mania in the form of a mandatory boss battle.
  • Sonic R is also unique as it is a racing game that has the characters racing on foot and features platforming elements. All other racing games starring Sonic have had "the world's fastest hedgehog" strictly using vehicles.
  • Sonic the Fighters once again takes the Dolled-Up Installment route by taking a different Sega franchise and replacing the cast with Sonic characters, in this case, the 3D arcade fighting game Fighting Vipers. That's right, what we have here is a slapstick arcade fighter starring Sonic the Hedgehog and company.
  • Out of the 2D Sonic games released in the early 1990s, the least known is Sonic the Hedgehog CD, perhaps because it was originally released for the relatively unpopular Sega CD system. While the game added its share of staples to the franchise (namely Metal Sonic and Amy Rose), it also diverges quite a bit from its Genesis counterparts, both in terms of aesthetics (perhaps being more surreal and colorful than — almost — any other Sonic game to date) and gameplay (in the time-traveling gimmick, slightly altered mechanics, more open and nebulous level design, optional sub-goals within levels, and the implementation of the rarely seen Super Peel-Out).
  • Even more obscure is the 1995 Sega 32X game Knuckles Chaotix, which focuses on rubber band co-op mechanics and featured even an even more surreal artstyle not unlike Sonic CD. It also featured Knuckles, the Chaotix (prior to their Heroes branding), and Mighty (from the aforementioned SegaSonic) and like Sonic Blast featured five zones, only with five acts each instead of the standard two or three, complete with a menu hub with day/night transitions every time you entered the area.
  • The post-Adventure Sonic games aren't immune to oddballs either. There's Sonic and the Black Knight, which gives Sonic a sword to fit with the medieval setting of the world he is dragged into. There's also Shadow the Hedgehog, a Darker and Edgier Spin-Off where gunplay and vehicles are major elements, and Sonic Heroes to a lesser extent, which has teamwork-based gameplay mechanics and a Lighter and Softer plot compared to Sonic Adventure and its sequel.
  • Sonic Lost World throws out a lot of staples from the previous games in its gameplay and visual aesthetics. The gameplay switches up the game mechanics by having two versions of the homing attack (both of which don't operate like how the older games controlled them) and having enemies that have various ways on how they are supposed to be defeated. The visual aesthetic goes for more stylized and simplistic designs akin to the 16-bit titles, compared to the more photo-surrealistic designs of the recent Unleashed era of games. The game features planetoid levels a la Super Mario Galaxy and features a lot of one-off gimmick levels that contrast with their respective zones they appear in and don't appear elsewhere in the game (a motion-control tilt-based level where you guide Sonic in a snowball and hit billiard balls for starters). The 3DS version in particular also focuses on having Sonic do several tasks to proceed through the level, such as moving objects to certain spots in order to open gates.
  • Sonic Chronicles is a turn-based RPG (developed by BioWare, of Mass Effect fame) that took a lot of inspiration from the Archie comic series.
  • And then there are the spinoffs starring Tails. Tails Adventure for the Game Gear is a slow-paced Metroidvania with mild RPG elements which, to say the least, is a drastic change of pace for the series. Even weirder is the other Game Gear spinoff Tails' Skypatrol which has absolutely no platforming at all and is a puzzle-like rail shooter with very little elements from the series besides Tails, and the edutainment music game Tails and the Music Maker for the Sega Pico.
  • The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a visual novel focusing on a nameless Player Character participating in a murder mystery with the other characters. The fact that it was released close to April Fools' Day with a shout-out to the day in the ending credits shows that the oddness was intentional, though.
• Soulcalibur V is the first game in the Soul Series to take place after a 17-year Time Skip meant to create a Soft Reboot for the franchise and introduce a new generation of fighters in the place of the old, with the intention that this would be the launch point for a new Soulcalibur series. However, due to a series of issues^*a rushed development that lead to most of its story being axed, most of its new characters being poorly received (especially Patroklos), the esports crowd (to whom the game was supposed to appeal) rejecting it on sight..., it ended up being the only game set in this era, since the series subsequently returned to the previous setting with a Continuity Reboot starting from Soulcalibur VI. This makes V, with its emphasis on the "new generation of fighters", seem odd compared to everything else surrounding it.
• Spud's Adventure is part of the Puzzle Boy franchise, and while the others are puzzle games without a story, this one is a dungeon-crawling action game with puzzle elements and a plot.
• Had they ever finished it, StarCraft: Ghost would have been a stealth-based third-person shooter in an RTS series.
• The Star Fox series has two oddballs, both released for the Nintendo GameCube:
  • Star Fox Adventures is an Action-Adventure fantasy game in the Zelda mold. The main reason for its oddness is that it started out as a totally unrelated game known as Dinosaur Planet, which was to star two Funny Animals named Sabre and Krystal. After Shigeru Miyamoto saw the game in action and compared Sabre's appearance to Fox McCloud's, it was retooled into a Star Fox title, with Fox replacing Sabre and Krystal turned into a Decoy Protagonist.
  • Star Fox: Assault introduces Third-Person Shooter elements, with so many missions based around them that there are only a small handful of the on-rails segments that the series is known for.
• Street Fighter also has two games (fortunately, it's already a Fighting Game series) based on the live-action movie, with Mortal Kombat-style live-action sprites. There's also Street Fighter 2010, a sci-fi action game, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, a Falling Blocks puzzle game with Darkstalkers characters (and Devilot) thrown into the mix. Probably the oddest of all is Street Fighter Online: Mouse Generation which was played on a PC using a mouse as a controller and served more as a Crossover than an actual Street Fighter game.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels: While it's almost exactly identical to the first game, that itself is a departure for a series that usually tries to introduce new ideas and mechanics with every new installment.^note In fact, it took 23 years for Nintendo to release another sequel of this kind. This is part of the reason why it wasn't originally released outside of Japan, the other being its unusually high level of difficulty (even by that time's standards). This, plus it being made by only half of the developers of the original game, gives it the feel of an official Rom Hack more than anything else. It's also the only 2D Mario game to have more than nine worlds (with a total of thirteen), and the only game in the franchise to have regressive warp zones. This installment's infamous Poison Mushrooms would also not reappear for another twenty-five years. This game has gained a resurge in popularity over time, especially among speedrunners who aim to complete the game as fast and optimal as possible.
  • Super Mario Bros. 2: The game replaces the mechanics and presentation of the first game with new moves (like throwing vegetables at enemies or picking up enemies and hurling them at others), enemies and assets. You also get to play as all four major Mario characters (Mario himself, his brother Luigi, Princess Peach, and Toad) rather than just Mario and usually Luigi. These differences are justified, as SMB2 is a Dolled-Up Installment of another game, while the intended sequel (The Lost Levels) fell under the No Export for You status until the remake included as part of Super Mario All-Stars came along. This game is also living proof that Tropes Are Not Bad, since many of its elements quickly became indispensable parts of the Mario franchise, and the game itself got its reputation improved over time during The New '10s.
  • Both Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, which were developed by Gunpei Yokoi's R&D1 team rather than by Shigeru Miyamoto and the Super Mario EAD staff.
    • The first game, instead of taking place in the Mushroom Kingdom or some other similar locale, takes place in some real-world lookalike locations, such as Egypt and China. On top of this, all the enemies are new, with returning enemies having odd attributes, such as the Koopa Troopa (although he is called Nokobon) having its shell explode when stomped on. Other differences include the Fire Flower making Mario throw Superballs (which bounce off surfaces at 90 degree angles) instead of fireballs, the invincibility theme being a remix of the Cancan Song, and two stages being Unexpected Shmup Levels. It also features Princess Daisy, who wouldn't be seen or mentioned again for over a decade. Despite the changes, the game still plays as a typical Mario game and it has been well liked by most fans.
    • The second game has Mario as the ruler of a big Mario-themed kingdom, complete with his own castle and a giant toy robot in his image. Instead of Bowser from the more typical games, or even Tatanga from the previous Mario Land (who still returns, but only as a regular boss), the Big Bad is the newly-introduced Evil Counterpart Wario. It's also one of the only two games, alongside the western Super Mario Bros. 2, where coins don't grant lives directly, but instead through a minigame. And until Super Mario Bros. Wonder, it was the only Mario game not to utilize any sort of Damsel in Distress plot (instead of rescuing someone, Mario has to take back control of his own land from Wario).
  • Super Mario Sunshine features a water pack named FLUDD for Mario to spray enemies and clean up dynamically generated goop with. Many common enemies in the series are either replaced or redesigned with a unique look for the game. The levels are based on touristic locations instead of the usual Video Game Settings like deserts and ice worlds. It's also the only main title to have full voice acting instead of Voice Grunting with occasional short lines of dialogue.
  • Super Paper Mario: While the Paper Mario series got hit with a Retool with the release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Super Paper Mario doesn't really fit in with either the first two titles or the later ones. It completely discards the turn-based RPG formula that both the pre- and post-retool games adhere to. Instead, the game is a 2D sidescrolling platformer where Mario can "flip" into 3D for a limited time to exploit Perspective Magic, although it does still keep a few RPG elements. It's also the only game to have multiple playable characters, as opposed to followers and/or the resident Exposition Fairy. That being said, the story still fits right in with the original games; certain recurring characters show up, albeit with drastically different roles and appearances, and some optional collectibles even portray the partners from the previous games.
  • Mario Kart: It's telling of how close to the formula the series has stuck that these three count as "oddball" for its unusual features:
    • Mario Kart: Super Circuit has many unique traits that make it stand out from the other games, especially the later handheld games, likely due to having been developed by Intelligent Systems: It was the first game post-Mario Kart 64 to bring back some Super Mario Kart gameplay elements, such as flat, 2D environments and having (visible) lives in Grand Prix mode; and for a long time, it was the only game other than Super Mario Kart to include coins, before Mario Kart 7 brought them back to the series for good. There are five separate cups of new tracks unlike the others, which only have four^note Not counting retro cups and DLC.
    • Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is the most odd game out of the whole sub-series due to the "two characters per kart" concept the game was based on. Each kart has a driver and another person to use items and both characters can swap places on the fly. Each character also has their own unique items that only they can get, a Continuity Nod to Super Mario Kart where the AI has characters with unique items. The item tosser also has the ability to punch other players to knock them out of the way and steal their items, whereas the other games that have item stealing have it relegate it to the Boo item. In addition, Double Dash!! is the only Mario Kart game to do away with hopping entirely and has heavier, more realistic steering and drifting compared to the cartoon-like turning physics the other games have. Lastly, it's the only installment where the All-Cup Tour (a marathon that involves all tracks in the game) is disputed.
    • Mario Kart Arcade GP and its sequels take some pretty strong liberties too, thanks to being co-developed with Namco. Among other things, it introduces a number of items not seen in other games (such as the square wheel attack and the "broken steering wheel" attack), excludes many series-traditional items (such as the humiliation-inducing Spiny Shell), there are no mini-turbos for powerslides, powersliding grants you a shield for the duration of the slide, and in a single race you only get three different kinds of items — pre-selected in grand prix mode, randomly-selected if you're playing versus on a machine with no card slots, and selected by you if you're playing versus on a machine with card slots.
  • Mario Party:
    • Mario Party 9 was a total game changer compared to the previous eight games in the series. Rather than moving individually on the board, all four players move together at the same time, but most events only happen to the player who is taking their turn; this creates strategies where sometimes moving a certain amount of spaces can screw over the next player when it's their turn. Collecting stars to become the winner was a staple in the series, but the 9th installment does away with them in exchange for mini-stars, which are quite common and thus result in far less game-changing moments. Predictably, this divided the fan base, with the series experimenting alongside these lines for the following six years, until returning to the classic formula with the reboot Super Mario Party and the Megamix Game Mario Party Superstars.
    • The Mario Party games for handheld systems change the game's formula drastically, with the only handheld game that sticks to the original formula being Mario Party DS. Ironically, this in turn makes DS the oddball among the handheld titles for not making any major changes and maintaining the original formula. Among the other games, Mario Party: The Top 100 takes it the furthest due to eschewing almost completely the board gameplay in favor of showcasing the minigames in various special modes. The main mode is Minigame Island, which is exclusive to single-player and plays more in line with similar progression-based modes from past games that were only conceived as side content.
  • The New Super Mario Bros. sub-series has New Super Luigi U, which despite technically being an expansion to New Super Mario Bros. U (thus, reusing many of the game's assets), stands out from the rest, by having Luigi as the star of the game, while Mario himself is nowhere to be seen.
• Tales Series:
  • In general, what you see as the oddball games depends on which game you played first. If you played a game following the Destiny system (PS2 remake of Tales of Destiny, Tales of Destiny 2, Tales of Hearts, Tales of Graces), any game without CC/SP/AC points is an oddball. If you didn't, any game with the points (especially those without TP) are the oddballs.
  • Tales of Rebirth does not use either of these systems, instead using four gauges that fill for each attack depending on how charged up your character is (cool, normal, or hot). It is also considerably harder, due to the lack of control over your NPC allies, the Early Game Hell in which you have no reliable sources of healing and no powerful attack skills to compensate, and the battle system in general requiring a lot more thought put into how you wish to approach your battles.
  • Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 3: Dungeon exploration is done with four three-person parties, in a manner similar to a Strategy RPG. At the start of each turn you assign a destination point for each group, and then both they and enemy groups simultaneously move towards their goals. Battles themselves, however, are more in-line with the rest of the series.
  • Tales of Legendia is the only game in the series to use 3D models on a 2D battle plane. It also misses Mystic Artes, calls the Artes "Eres", has spellcasters learn spells by collecting Random Drop, makes no distinction between Water and Light elements, and features Grapple Moves as a major mechanic for the protagonist. The game is also split between the story proper and "Character Quests", essentially a huge post-game story expansion with a new Big Bad.
  • Tales of the Tempest features an unusual battle system, in which you have to chain basic artes in order to execute stronger ones, as opposed to just using the stronger arte right away, like in the rest of the series. Mystic Artes do not exist, replaced by a MP-draining Super Mode for your hero, and there's also a three-line battlefield system, not unlike the one from Rebirth. The game wasn't well-received, and was demoted to a spin-off for over a decade.
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is less of a real sequel to Tales of Symphonia, and more of a spin-off. Instead of real party members you have a slew of Monster Allies, who can fight alongside the main duo. Cooking is only done for these monsters, and serves the sole purpose of getting them to evolve into a certain branch of its species or to devolve.
• Tekken 4 is odd compared to the rest of the Tekken series. The game attempts to introduced "realistic" elements, such as the removal of almost every non-human character save Kuma/Panda. Its setting is much more urban compared to the variety of locations found in other games. The story features plenty of Doing In the Wizard with the Deal with the Devil being retconned as a mutation. It's also the only game in the series to feature different ground levels, such as stairs. The fourth game is often noted for being a black sheep and all games afterwards backpedaled on its more contentious elements by doing away with the realism, bringing back all the "wacky" characters, and retconning the Doing In the Wizard aspect of 4 by instead Doing in the Scientist (most notably, the Devil Gene carried by several members of the seemingly supernatural Mishima bloodline being revealed as a genetic curse passed along from generation to generation).
• Tetris: The Grand Master ACE takes "The Grand Master" out of Tetris: The Grand Master courtesy of Executive Meddling, being more in line with traditional Tetris. To its credit, it does retain a variant of TGM's signature rotation system.
• Thunder Spirits is the only game in the Thunder Force series to appear on a Nintendo system. However, it's not an original game; it's a port of Thunder Force AC (the only arcade release), which in turn is a port of Thunder Force III on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
• Tomb Raider:
  • For the PlayStation era of the series, Tomb Raider II falls in line with the rest of the series while having several quirks that make it stand out from the rest:
    • Along with her pistols, Lara starts out with a small and large health kit, flares, and a shotgun, making her Crazy-Prepared. No other game has her start out with that much inventory.
    • The game has a very minuscule amount of cutscenes compared to the other games. You can go through several levels before a cutscene will appear. This also makes Lara come off as quiet since she only has a grand total of three scenes where she actually speaks (excluding her voice lines used for the tutorial level).
    • Lara and Bartoli barely interact with each other and they don't even speak to each other either. Other games has Lara interact with the main villians more frequently.
    • Compared to the other bad guys she faces, the second game has her facing off against a cult and this concept wouldn't be used again until Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
    • The M16 is the only fully autmoatic assault rifle she uses in the whole franchise and doesn't use one again until Tomb Raider: Legend.
    • Lara's home being an actual level wouldn't be featured in any other game until Tomb Raider: Underworld.
    • The game has a lot of potential underwater combat with the harpoon gun. Underwater combat had a reduced precense in Tomb Raider III and wouldn't be fully used again until Underworld.
    • Lara, who is about to disrobe before the credits, breaks the fourth wall by telling the player that they seen enough before she shoots the camera. No other game abuses the fourth wall.
  • Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness is usually seen as the black sheep of the series due to its status as half-finished. It has many mechanics and design choices that are never seen anywhere else in the series such as dialogue options, a second playable protagonist and a lack of Lara Croft’s iconic dual pistols. The setup is very different from early titles, starting with Lara as a wanted woman trying to clear her name by hunting down a murderer rather than a thrill-seeking Adventure Archaeologist. Only two different countries are visited (although at least two more were planned) and there are very few actual tombs — the first few levels include the streets of Paris, an abandoned nightclub and a heist in the Louvre. Even the graphics stand out, as it was the first game made for the PS2 before the series was rebooted.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 is considered to be this because it combines the gameplay of the first three games with the goal system that would later appear in Tony Hawk's Underground, but doesn't allow you to get off your board to talk to people, so you have to slow down and brake, which can often be difficult. Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, Ride and Shred are also considered to be the series oddballs mainly because they are considered terrible (in the case of the latter two, rely on a peripheral that rarely works and makes them nearly impossible to play).
• Touhou Project:
  • Anything with a decimal point in its number is a spinoff that plays unlike the main games.
  • Within the main series there's the Phantasmagoria games, which are versus shooters.
  • Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers, the very first game in the series, isn't a danmaku game. It's a Breaking Out game with some danmaku boss fights.
  • While well-received, Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night has a number of odd mechanics that hadn't been seen before or since — 'familiars' that can only be damaged unfocused, a heavy focus on bullet cancellation, stage quotas for the multiplier, the ability to gain continues, scoring based on a gauge that is altered by being focused/unfocused, alternate stages...
  • Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom is the only game in the series to let you use a Checkpoint system instead of the traditional limited lives.
  • In a sub-series example, there's the first of ZUN's music CDs (or, rather, the story attached to said CD), Dolls in Pseudo-Paradise. Completely disconnected from the setting and cast of the rest of the sub-series, and just plain weird.
• Trails Series:
  • Trails in the Sky the 3rd which does away with towns, traveling the nations of Western Zemuria, and talking to people, and instead has the party trapped inside a single very large dungeon for the entire game after the prologue. Sidequests now take the form of optional Doors spread throughout the dungeon that you can enter, usually to learn more about the characters backstories.
  • The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails is a spin-off title that has almost nothing to do with the main series (taking place in a world separate from the mainline games) and rather than having the series’ turn-based combat, instead opts to have Action RPG elements, similar to Falcom’s Ys series.
• The Ultima series has had a bunch of black sheeps:
  • Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress is the black sheep of that franchise, being, for reasons poorly explained in the manual, set on several time-shifted versions of Earth instead of in Sosaria/Britannia.
  • Ultima VIII: Pagan is likewise set not in Britannia but on the eponymous alien world and lacks all the mainstays of the series, such as Lord British, the Companions of the Avatar, and the Eight Virtues.
  • Ultima IX: Ascension is set back in Britannia, but stands out due to the heavy liberties it took with Ultima canon.
• Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble is a fighter in the vein of Super Smash Bros. instead of a Beat 'em Up platformer like the rest of the series.
• Season Three of The Walking Dead is the only season in which Clementine is a side character. In season one, she's the main character's sidekick and primary motivation for all his actions. In seasons two and four, Clementine is the main character herself. By contrast, in season three, she's just an occasional ally with the main character's group who goes in and out of the story.
• WipEout Fusion takes many drastic departure from the rest of the series:
  • The game has a much greater emphasis on combat. There are much more weapon pickups than the rest of the series and racers are rewarded with ranking points for taking out competitors.
  • Competing in races earn the player credits, which can be used to upgrade multiple stats. As the ships are upgraded, their appearance will change.
  • Good Technology was responsible for the game's graphic design rather than the Designer's Republic, shifting from the slick minimalism of the PS1 installments to a more grungy feel.
  • Only three of the PS1 installment's racing teams returns, with the remaining 5 being brand new.
  • It is the only game in the series to feature a Ridge Racer-esque segmented tracks mechanic where each track has 3 variations with sections extended or cordoned off.
  • The handling and physics are very different from the rest of the series.
  • The game has by far the most contestants on the track at once: 16. To that end, the game brings back the "each team has two pilots" mechanic from the original game, although unlike there where the difference was purely cosmetic, the back-up and lead pilot have better stats.
  • Tracks are wider and longer.
  • As an acknowledgement of Fusion's oddball status, the next installment Wipeout Pure would be made more similar to the PS1 installments and its backstory include multiple, often-unflaterring, references to Fusion's departure from the series formula. However, the popular Zone mode would become a fixture of the series.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The game was originally an MMORPG in, of all things, an RTS franchise. Then, it proceeded to sell millions of copies, became the template for a new generation of MMOs, spawned a number of expansion packs, and generally displaced the original games.
  • Also cancelled by Blizzard, Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was a comic-art point-and-click adventure game following two RTS games.
• XCOM has one Mission-Pack Sequel in the form of Terror From The Deep, followed by Apocalypse, which keeps the core genre (isometric Turn-Based Tactics controlling a squad of soldiers) but significantly overhauls the "strategic layer" of the game, with an expanded Resource Management system that is affected by your reputation with various factions and other iterative changes. After that was an experiment with a completely different genre, action-oriented Third-Person Shooter (sometimes derisively referred to as a "corridor shooter") XCOM: Enforcer. XCOM: Interceptor came out a couple of years later, and is something of a Zig-Zagging Trope example: The resource management and semi-random nature of missions from the previous games are brought back, but combined with the gameplay of a Wing Commander-style Space Fighter sim. None of these games met with much critical or commercial success, and when the license was revived with a Continuity Reboot in 2012 it was by Revisiting the Roots with XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
• The Xenoblade Chronicles series has Xenoblade Chronicles X. X is the only game in the series to be explicitly set in our reality rather than in a Constructed World, and eschews most of the Magitek and mythological elements of the other games in favor of being a mostly straight sci-fi story about humanity trying to rebuild itself on a new planet after Earth is destroyed. Aside from the Nopon, none of the other races from the other games appear, and instead the game introduces several new alien species that don't appear in any of the other games. It's also the only game to have no direct^note the protagonist, Elma, does appear as a DLC character in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but the two games are otherwise unrelated plot ties to the other games in the series, being a thematic sequel instead.
• Yoshi's Story mostly plays like Yoshi's Island and its sequels in the basic mechanics, but with significant differences. For starters, there is no "end of level" target; you keep playing a level until Yoshi eats enough fruit. The game has a hard set number of lives, as each Yoshi is captured if you run out of health or fall into a pit, and can only be rescued through the use of a White Shy Guy. While other Yoshi games rate you by how much "health" you have at the end of the level and how many of the level's limited number of major collectibles you find, Yoshi's Story has a more complex scoring system involving things like the colors of the fruits and monsters Yoshi eats (compared to Yoshi's own color) and how many Yoshis are still available, with no set "max score". Eggs travel only a limited distance and cannot ricochet off walls. Bosses are, by and large, unique creatures instead of mooks grown under the effects of Kamek's magic. You only need to complete a quarter of the game's stages to reach the final boss. And it is one of only three major Yoshi platformers (the others being Yoshi's Woolly World and Yoshi's Crafted World) where Yoshi has a standard health meter, instead of a timer that ticks down whenever Baby Mario is off Yoshi's back.
• Ys:
  • Ys III: Wanderers from Ys is the only side-scrolling game in the series. It also differs from its two predecessors by having a dedicated "attack" button, rather than attacking by ramming.
  • Ys: The Oath in Felghana is a remake of Ys III: Wanderers from Ys built using the Ys Origins engine. It plays much more like a traditional Ys game, but still has a dedicated attack button.
  • Ys IV is also unique in that it wasn't created by Falcom. Instead, you have Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys by Hudson and Ys IV: Mask of the Sun by Tonkin House. In the mid 2000s, Falcom finally made their own version of Ys IV named Ys: Memories of Celceta.
  • Ys V: Kefin, The Lost City of Sand: On the surface it sounds great, elaborating on a relatively unexplored portion of the world and backstory. But it was only released for the Super Famicom in its first release (taking the series completely away from its PC roots and even from its TurboGrafx-16 following), is hugely limited graphically as a result of being cartridge-based (with many complaining that "it looks like every other Super Famicom RPG ever, but blander", which is particularly impressive given the intended exoticism of the game's particular setting), and the music is all synth and pseudo-orchestral rather than the CD-quality rock tracks the series had become famous for. Although Ys V does establish some things that would later become standard procedure in later games (jumping, fast-paced button-mashing as opposed to just running into dudes, etc), ultimately the single (non-PC) platform and comparatively awful music caused a full-blown fan revolt in Japan as former fans absolutely despised the game. Ys III may have taken some heat, but Kefin was nearly a Franchise Killer. Falcom had to spend the next seven years developing other games and remakes of the first two games just to repair their reputation before daring to try and release another new Ys game. To this day, Kefin ranks pretty squarely at the bottom of polls when the games are ranked; only the pretty cool story prevents it from being completely rejected by fans.
• Zork:
  • The original trilogy is a series of interactive fiction adventures by Infocom. Beyond Zork is an interactive fiction/RPG hybrid that lets you roll stats for your character, with a higher emphasis on combat.
  • Zork Nemesis is a serious, Darker and Edgier, Myst-style puzzler. It was followed by Zork: Grand Inquisitor, which goes back to the comedy of the earlier games but sticks with the Myst-style gameplay.

---