The series Zig-zags this. Assassin's Creed II was a major improvement over the first one, but Brotherhood and Revelations, while adding some cool new weapons and mechanics, were more or less Mission pack sequels to II. Assassin's Creed III added even more to the map, and offered some new mechanics, such as crafting. IV followed on III's footsteps by having even more map, but much of it was water to sail on, and a few on foot weapons were removed. While Assassin's Creed: Unity didn't restore everything that IV threw overboard, it focused more on the smaller details, greatly improving the graphics, Parkour animations and cities.
Inverted with the Hidden Blade. In the first game, it offered one hit counter-kills even on bosses, having a very small countering window, and blocking and normal attacks weren't possible with the blade. The sequel allowed blocking and attacking, as well as one hit-counter kills, but not on bosses anymore. Brotherhood expanded the countering window, as did revelations... From ACIII to Assassin's Creed Rogue it was just an another weapon, losing it's uniqueness. From Unity forward, it lost it's combat abilities, as became an assassination-only weapon.
The first game only has five towers: Dart, Tack, Bomb, Ice, and Super. The second adds Boomerang to the mix, while the third adds the Spike-o-pult (later fused with Dart) and the supportive Monkey Beacon.
The fourth game doubles the tower varieties by adding Glue Gunner, Ace, Mortar, Wizard/Apprentice, Buccaneer, Dartling Gun, Spike Factory, and the money-generating Banana Farms.
The fifth game adds six towers on top of all the previous ones: Sniper, Ninja, Engineer, Bloonchipper, Heli, and Submarines.
The sixth game tones it down with only two new towers, the Druid and Alchemist. On the other hand, it introduces heroes, which are capable of levelling up by themselves. As of version 11 of the game, there are eight heroes in the game.
Tower upgrades:
In the first two games, each tower has two separate upgrades and that's it, with fairly basic effect like "attacks faster" or "more range".
The third game adds "second tier" upgrades that need the first tier upgrades to be bought first, for a total of four upgrades per tower. The effects are still pretty basic, such as "attacks even faster".
The fourth game only have one upgrade path per tower, but with four tiers. The third and fourth tier upgrades usually affects the tower in a pretty significant way. For example, the Tack Shooter turns from shooting small tacks into larger saw-blades, and then further into emitting rings of fire. The Buccaneer's final upgrade triples its attack speed, massively increasing its power.
The fifth game also have four tiers of upgrades, but now each tower has two upgrade paths to choose from. In addition, the top upgrade in the second path also gives the tower an activated ability. For example, the Glue Gunner can choose whether to upgrade into shooting highly corrosive glue or shooting normal glue faster with an ability to glue all bloons at once. In addition, because the upgrades are split into two paths, the overall power level is higher than the fourth game. The fourth tier upgrade that grants Buccaneer triple attack speed above? Now it's now only a third tier upgrade, with the fourth tier turning the boat into a carrier that shoots miniature planes.
The sixth game improves the upgrade choices into three paths, as well as having fifth tier upgrades that are so powerful you can only have one of each type. Think the Juggernaut's giant spiked ball is impressive? Now you have the Ultra Juggernaut, which shoots even bigger spiked balls, which then split into multiple spiked balls. The Tack Shooter in 5 can choose between shooting flames or a storm of buzz-saws. Now it has a third choice: Keep shooting tacks, but a lot more tacks and a lot more faster.
Bloons:
In the first game, the strongest Bloon types are the Black and White Bloons. They're unique that they're immune to explosion and freezing, respectively.
Second game introduces the Lead Bloon, which is immune to sharp attacks, and contain Black Bloons inside them. The strongest, however, is the Rainbow Bloon, which has no immunities but spawn two Blacks and two Whites when popped.
Third game introduces Ceramic Bloons, which actually need multiple hits just to break the ceramic layer, after which it spawns Rainbows. It introduces the first blimp of the series, the MOAB, which takes a lot of hits to be destroyed, and spawns into Ceramics.
The fourth game upped the ante with BFB. It's slower, but much tougher than a MOAB. But when destroyed it spawns four MOABs. It also inserts the very fast Pink and the multiple-immunity Zebra into the Bloon hierarchy and introduces the Camo mechanic.
The fifth game topped it up with the ZOMG. As you may guess, it's much tougher than the BFB, and spawns into four BFBs when destroyed. It also introduces the Regrow property besides Camo. The spinoff Bloons Monkey City introduces the DDT, which in a subversion is much weaker than the ZOMG, but much faster and has all of Camo, Black, and Lead properties at once.
The sixth game now has the BAD. Not only it's five times tougher than ZOMG, it can also shrug off any attempts at slowing its progress. It pops into two ZOMGs and three DDTs, which can catch players off guard. In addition, it has the Fortified property, which doubles a Bloon's health, and can be applied to blimps.
In Boogeyman, the titular monster has four ways to get into the Player Character's room. A vent, a closet, a door, and a window. In Boogeyman 2, all those entryways remain, but a small tent has been added as a means of entrance for the boogeyman.
Dead Rising is a series that strives for a bigger arsenal of weapons each game.
Dead Rising 2 allows you to combine objects (even the more useless ones) and turn them into lethal combo weapons. It also has a slightly bigger map than the first game.
Dead Rising 3 adds more combo weapons (some being upgraded versions of pre-existing ones) and introduces destructive combo vehicles, which are necessary for traversing the huge map.
Dead Rising 4 dials back on the amount of combo weapons and map size, but makes up for it by introducing Powered Armor that can be equipped with different loadouts.
EXA_PICO: The first game has you fight a single rogue Reyvateil that caused the end of the world, the second one has you create a floating continent, the third one has you restoring the planet to its past self... and in Ar nosurge, you create a planet. The trend is broken in Ar nosurge's prequel Ciel nosurge, as you do nothing but keep an amnesic girl company and restore her memories.
Each Hobo game is progressively more complex than the previous one by adding more enemy types, weapons and attack combos. To wit:
The first game's enemies consisted mostly of mundane civilians and police officers who are pretty easy to take down. The only weapons available were the throwable trash cans and bottles, which can only be thrown once, and there were 6 simple combos that only involved the use of the usual A and S keys to attack.
While keeping the same enemies as before, Hobo: Prison Brawl introduced chairs, which work the same as trash cans and bottles but can be thrown as many times as you want, and pistols with limited ammo. It also introduced 3 new combos, which are longer and more powerful but still use the same A and S keys.
Hobo 3: Wanted converts ground vehicles from bosses to regular enemies, introduces shotguns and SMGs as a step-up from pistols, and adds combos with the D key to the combo roster.
Hobo 4: Total War converts the previous helicopter boss to a regular enemy type and introduces grenades and bazookas as explosive weapons.
Averted by Hobo 5: Space Brawls, which doesn't include any new combos, and removes the vehicle enemies and throwable and explosive weapons. That said, it replaces the bullet-based guns with more powerful laser ones.
Hobo 6: Hell re-introduces the vehicle enemies with vehicle-equivalents, and adds Cephalothoraxs as a type of Elite Mook. It also replaces the other weapons with whips, and includes the first combos with the W key.
Hobo 7: Heaven includes angels as a new dose of elite mooks among the types, and re-introduces the throwable weapons. The most powerful combo that the game introduces is also the only one involving use of all four keys used for combos (S-A-D-W).
Portal started out as a simple proof of concept with some witty writing and some brand new gameplay. In other words, a test. Now look at Portal 2: the full-length single-player campaign is 3-4 times longer than the original, has a lot more areas to explore, a lot of new gameplay mechanicsnote laser redirectors, propelling platforms, roads made of light, bouncing gels, accelerating gels, gels that create surfaces where you can shoot portals, a very well written story without saying outright what happened, some very memorable characters, and some scenery that will make any other laboratory feel insecure (admit it, Lower Aperture Laboratories took quite a few elements from fictitious 1960s nuclear bunkers, the Modern Laboratories have bottomless pits [still above the older labs] and testing rooms that might remind some people of the floating mountains from Avatar.) Now this is just single player, the co-op missions have two players with two portals of their own to shoot, and as a result, the puzzles are a lot more complicated.
Resident Evil 2 mostly takes place in the city's police station, but Resident Evil 3: Nemesis allows you to visit more places such as the Downtown and Uptown portions of the city, a Hospital, and a Park.
Granblue Fantasy: The Anniversary / Birthday Milestones annually introduce or tease plenty of gameplay mechanics and additions, as well as quality-of-life improvements, and changes based on community feedback. Such mechanics like the Eternals, and Seraphic Weapons were released during these anniversary events.
Lore-wise, What Makes the Sky Blue: Paradise Lost, the 2018 sequel to the 3rd Birthday event escalates things by starting with Lucifer's defeat at the hands of Beelzebub, and his head severed. Gameplay-wise, the 2018 event is also evident of the changes made since the game's state on March 2017 - The free event character is an SSR, compared to the 3rd Birthday's SR. Paradise Lost also introduced free and gacha SSRs that have Sub-Auras (something that only the Arcarum Summons introduced in Late 2017 have), the Honor / Badge rewards now give Arcarum-related items, as well as the inclusion of Impossible-difficulty raid battles.
Grand Theft Auto started a Sequel Escalation after taking the jump to full 3D. Grand Theft Auto III and Liberty City Stories take place in a very small Liberty City, Vice City and Vice City Stories take place in a larger Vice City, and San Andreas finally ups the ante and places the action in an entire state. Then it seems to have crossed something akin to the Bishōnen Line and shrank back down to a Darker and Edgier version of the small Liberty City with Grand Theft Auto IV. Grand Theft Auto V is bigger than the maps of San Andreas, IV, and Red Dead Redemptioncombined, however. The GTA4 version of Liberty City is of comparable size (but not quite as big) as San Andreas, though, but with greater detail in the area depicted.
The first Gran Turismo had at least 150 cars. Then Gran Turismo 2 came out and they added a whooping 500 cars to the list. Gran Turismo 3 however inverts this due to the Generation Jump, but 4 does it again. Then 5 came up and managed to have a total of 1000 cars. AND THEN 6 got released and had 1200 cars. There are some drawbacks of this, such as in 5 they imported a lot of the cars from the previous games with no change at all and most of the cars being Japanese and from Nissan.
Hideo Kojima did this semi-purposely in the Metal Gear series to keep it from getting stale. The villains in the games up to the original Metal Gear Solid were basically just extraordinary soldiers. In order to keep fans interested he gave the villains in Sons of Liberty superpowers. In the next installment, Snake Eater, the player fought World War legends, one of which attacked the player with bees. This maybe an accidental subversion as well, since in Snake Eater the player takes control of the future Big Boss, the antagonist of Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, meaning that Solid Snake has already beaten the toughest character in the series all along.
There are super-soldiers in the first game, too; in fact, if anything, FOXHOUND is more impressive than Dead Cell, as only Vamp has genuine super-abilities (and Fortune isn't technically a "boss fight" in any meaningful sense). In FOXHOUND, Vulcan Raven is a giant Shaman, Psycho Mantis is a powerful psychic, and Liquid is a literal super-soldier genetically engineered for the purpose (Solidus, from the second game, is also a such a person but Liquid was designed to be the superior). You also have to take on a cyborg ninja version of another legendary soldier, whereas in the sequel a lesser version of this character actually helps you out. As far as the villains go, the first lot were superior to the second, in terms of supernatural abilities.
The latest model of Metal Gear itself was always the penultimate boss in each game up until Metal Gear Solid. In Metal Gear Solid 2, Raiden fights not just one, but a whole bunch of them that were built to overpower the last model from the previous game. In Metal Gear Solid 4, Old Snake fights a pseudo-Metal Gear model called Gekko as a common enemy in the very first level.
In Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake fights a HIND helicopter piloted by Liquid Snake. In Metal Gear Solid 2, Raiden fights a Harrier Jet piloted by Solidus Snake.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance throws logic to the wayside and has Raiden fight armies of cyborg mooks, plus a Metal Gear RAY, and near the end of the game, Metal Gear EXCELSUS, a Metal Gear big enough to eat other Metal Gears for breakfast. The final boss, EXCELSUS's pilot, is, in short, the most absurd and over-the-top thing in the Metal Gear series: a fusion of man and nanomachines. However, this could be excused due to this game being partially developed by PlatinumGames, who is used to developing over-the-top games.
Gears of War did this to phenomenal effect, largely because the first game was already over-the-top, but it also left many fans wanting so much more. For example, the first game hinted at a major boss battle featuring a bipedal dinosaur-like creature called a brumak, but you never got to fight it until the PC version. In the sequel, one level has five of these ... at once. But they not only ramped up the scale, they also included a surprisingly powerful character story with Dom searching for his wife.
Gears of War 3 keeps things rolling by fleshing out an entire new faction only previously mentioned (the Lambent Locust). It also shows humanity to be in widespread disarray and on the verge of collapse with no real government remaining. The final parts of the campaign are the resolution of the question of which of Sera's three sentient species will annihilate the other two — and it's a very close race.
Every game, in one way or another, ups the scale of the combat; for example:
Halo 2 gave you one Scarab to fight, which already took half a level to defeat. Halo 3 gives you four.
A vehicle combat example; in Halo: Combat Evolved, you're the only good guy who can drive, there isn't much dog-fighting, and even in a tank you're mostly fighting scattered infantry and a few vehicles. In Halo 2, there are a few allied vehicles fighting besides you, some extended dog-fighting moments, and vehicle sequences where you're taking on small armies. In Halo 3, you're often leading your army of vehicles against theirs, with massive vehicle battle sequences (both on the ground and in the air) that can flow right into each other.
Halo 4's Spartan Ops was an effort to one-up Halo: Reach's Firefight by turning the four-player-vs-environment mode into an entire campaign. People ended up missing Firefight, but Halo 5: Guardians's Firefight made up for it by dramatically upping the scale even compared to Spartan Ops, with tons more players, weapons, enemies, while still keeping the traditional Firefight format.
The first game was a straightforward and relatively small-scale story about the Chief preventing largely impersonal enemies from taking one ringworld in an obscure corner of the galaxy. Halo 2 widens the scale of the plot considerably; it has fighting in multiple worlds ranging from Earth to a giant alien city-ship to another ringworld, the politics of an entire alien empire, massive scale battles going on just in the background, two galaxy-saving protagonists, two galaxy-ending Big Bads, and galaxy-shaking events where Nothing Is the Same Anymore.
The scale of threat was practically exponential in the original trilogy. Your main threats in the first game are a single small Covenant fleet and an early stage Flood infestation, and no one (except you, really) comes close to destroying the galaxy. In Halo 2, you're fighting a massive combined Covenant fleet and an advanced Flood infestation on the verge of breaking out, and Earth itself comes under attack. In Halo 3, you're fighting the personal fleet of the Covenant's head honcho and a space-capable Flood infestation, with both on the verge of killing every one; as one character points out, "The fate of every sentient being in the galaxy rests in your hands." But y'know, no pressure.
Bungie's final two games may be on a slightly smaller scale compared to the main series, but they still have this trope going on relative to each other: Halo 3: ODST is a Lower-Deck Episode focusing on a squad of Badass Normals fighting against an already weakened Covenant, and taking place in a single city over the course of the day. Halo: Reach focuses on a squad of Super Soldiers fighting against the full might of the Covenant across an entire planet (and in space) over the course of an entire month.
Turrican II took the first Turrican's already large levels and made them ludicrously enormous. It worked amazingly.
Tetris: The Grand Master peaks out in speed and difficulty when pieces start dropping instantly. Tetris: The Grand Master 2 made the game even faster and more Nintendo Hard than its predecessor by gradually decreasing the delays for piece appearance and piece lock delay, shortening the line clear animation after you reach instant-drop speed, and adding an invisible credit roll challenge to get the titular Grand Master rank. Tetris: The Grand Master 3 shortens these even more, and scores you on finesse during the credit roll challenge, in addition to requiring you to get a Grand Master-worthy score 4 out of 7 games before giving you the Promotional Exam in which you can actually earn the rank.
Supreme Commander was fairly involved in terms of creating and managing your army, with the final mission putting you up against one of the Aeon experimental units as a sort of Boss Fight. The Forged Alliance standalone expansion sics a Serphim experimental on you in the very first mission, and it only gets more intense from there.
The console installments of the F-Zero series crank up the maximum speed with each new installment. In the first installment, you normally can't go faster than 478 km/h, but dash arrows allow you go up to about 970 momentarily. F-Zero X sets the norm to 700-800 km/h, with boosts enabling you to reach about 1,300-1,400. F-Zero GX brings average speeds to the 970-1,100 range, with boosts speeds going beyond 2,000.
Kid Icarus (1986) is the story of Pit the angel fighting to defeat the evil goddess Medusa. Kid Icarus: Uprising features more-or-less the same story ... for the first third of the game. After Medusa's defeat, Hades promises to make Medusa look like "a cute, cuddly bunny" compared to him. From there, Pit must butt heads with a nature goddess with an arsenal of Fantastic Nukes at her disposal, an alien race determined to consume the world, an ancient monster that possesses his goddess Palutena, and various members of the Greek pantheon of Gods on his way to fight Hades. It's almost like they crammed the stories of several games into one to make up for the 25 year Sequel Gap the series had.
The first superfighter, the XFA-27 in 2, didn't have anything particularly OTT apart from being able to launch four missiles in one salvo. If we skip over the planes from 3, the X-02 Wyvern from 4 is next, still not OTT in weapons although it has switchblade wings now. The ADF-01F Falken from 5 was the first (ignoring 3, as aforementioned) to mount a laser weapon. The ADFX-01 Morgan from Zero added the nuke-like MPBM. Then the CFA-44 Nosferatu from 6 swaps the MPBM out from the cluster missile ADMM. X may fit in there somewhere...
When it comes to the amount of enemies and the scale of battlefields, the series has zig-zagged all over the place, but 04 and especially 6 both played this trope straight (being the first installments for the PS2 and the Xbox 360 respectively is no coincidence), and both also had the followinginstallment heavily inverting the trope. However, when it comes to the amount of flyable aircraft, they invert it, particularly 6 which has the lowest amount of aircraft in the main series.
Etrian Odyssey Nexus: Granted, it's a Megamix Game, but this game notably crams in a lot more content compared to other Etrian Odyssey games. There are 19 classes to choose from (compared to the roughly dozen classes in past games), there are thirteen main dungeons in the main, non-postgame portion of the game (as opposed to five labyrinths/strata in previous games), and the level caps have been increased from 70 base cap and 99 max to 99 base cap and 130 max. In terms of story, the game's stakes are raised even further, as not only do many supporting characters from previous games get involved, but the Big Bad is planning to break the seal containing a monster of exceptional might that can destroy not only Lemuria (the game's setting), but also the entire world.
The first Glider was a 15-room adventure (1 room = 1 screen). "The House" of Glider 4.0 went on for 62 rooms. Finally, Glider PRO's "Slumberland" filled 403 rooms, including outdoor areas which previous games had nothing like.
Rhythm games tend to do this with their "boss" or "extra" songs:
The DanceDanceRevolution series does this with a majority of its entries. (For simplicity, since the ratings scale was completely overhauled partway through the series, the descriptions below will use the new ratings scale only. Otherwise this would overlap too much with Broke the Rating Scale.)
1st Mix had a difficulty scale that is now 1 to 12 (1 to 8 old-scale). 3rd Mix introduced the first 13s (9s).
DDRMAX (aka 6th Mix) features increased difficulty. It introduced MAX 300, the first level 15 (10) chart, and going up two (new-scale) levels from 5th Mix would already be very difficult. But MAX 300 is also locked to the newly introduced Extra Stage system, which puts on additional constraints and limits you to one try per credit. You have to earn the Extra Stage by scoring a 93% or better on Final Stage (usually your 3rd and last song of the credit), giving you one chance at MAX 300. But Extra Stage also turns on three modifiers (1.5x Reverse Pressure), forcing you to read backwards, at a much faster scroll speed than you're probably used to, and with a life bar that never replenishes, guaranteeing that you'll fail with just 4 misses or so. This isn't the hardest song to pass in the game. If you not just pass, but ace MAX 300 with a 93% score or better after fighting through all the special conditions, you'll earn the One More Extra Stage, another exclusive song (Candy☆) that's much easier but on a Sudden Death lifebar (anything less than a Great step fails the whole song instantly). Hope you don't get too many nerves at this point...
DDRMAX 2 (7th Mix) makes several small steps up. The Extra Stage is now the slightly harder song MaxX Unlimited (at 320 BPM instead of 300), Dark is turned on as a fourth Extra Stage modifier (the target row of arrows is invisible), and the One More Extra Stage-exclusive song is now Kakumei with a 3x scroll speed modifier, suddenly making you play on sudden death with a reading speed nearly as fast as Max 300. Kakumei also features a nasty slowdown gimmick near the beginning that's easy to mis-time slightly, causing an instant fail.
DDR Extreme changes up the "a song is only accessible a certain way" mechanic - the hardest chart in the game is no longer Extra Stage-exclusive. The Extra Stage (The legend of MAX) isn't too much harder (at 333 BPM). The real hardest chart in the game is Paranoia Survivor Max Oni, which is already objectively harder than The legend of MAX even under normal conditions (rated a 16 instead of a 15 on the new scale). The new twist is that PSMO is only accessible by selecting Legend Road under Challenging Mode, which...forces you to play all three previous Extra Stages back-to-back with only a few seconds of loading screen time in between, all of them under the "4 misses anywhere and you automatically fail the song" condition. Complete them all to get one shot at PSMO (also under the "no time to catch your breath" and "4 misses = fail" conditions, of course). (By now, all DDR Extreme machines have long since put in the unlock codes to make PSMO available for normal play.)
DDR SuperNOVA takes the Extreme mechanics and spikes them up again. The Extra Stage is now Fascination MAXX, which runs at a top speed of 400 BPM and is rated a 17 on Expert on the new scale. Oh, and the grade requirement to see it has been increased from 93% to 95%. But the real hardest charts to pass in the game are Fascination MAXX's Challenge chart (a new-scale 18) and Healing-D-Vision's Challenge chart (also an 18). Thought Legend Road's 15-15-13-15-16 and 4 lives each (20 lives total) was tough? Now go to Challenging Mode and pick Boss Rush episode IV, which goes 13-16-14-18-18...and only recovers a single life after the 13 and a single life after the 14 (6 lives total). That's right, after a game where only 16s existed, you're suddenly 'expected' to beat two 18s in a row, with no breathing time in between, and only 4 misses allowed combined across the two charts.
DDR SuperNOVA 2 started the infamous trend of making the Encore Extra Stage (rename of One More Extra Stage) harder than the Extra Stage despite sporting a 1-life lifebar. The hardest Extra Stage in SuperNOVA required you to clear a level 17 with 4 lives? Now try a never-before-seen level 17 with just 1 life (hi, Pluto Relinquish). There are infamous videos and forum discussions floating around from this time period, with players exclaiming that "there's a chart so hard that no one even knows what the ending looks like" (because no one can get that far without missing a step somewhere).
The Challenging Mode mechanic rears its head for the last time here. Of course Pluto Relinquish has a level 18 Challenge chart only accessible here. Of course the boss rush has to be an utterly unprecedented 18-18-16-16-18. This was literally so hard that zero people cleared it with proof for nine years. (Long before then, it had already been unlocked for regular play - but this counts because the exclusive nonstop course came first.)
Despite DDR X being well-known for creating the new expanded difficulty scale, there was very little difficulty escalation in this entry, especially compared to the massive towering spikes of the previous few entries. The most you could say is that it introduced the first level 18 Extra Stage, but whether a 4-life level 18 is harder/easier to pass than a 1-life level 17 depends a bit on personal opinion.
DDR X2 increased the Extra Stage requirements to demand a 95% score on all three of your stages, not just the last one, and it first introduced the idea of Extra Stage events and event progress being connected to player accounts. If you've completed a variety of miscellaneous event unlock steps, you gain access to the event-exclusive Replicant-D-Action folder only on Extra Stage, which contains six songs that can't be heard anywhere else. Getting a 95% or higher on Expert earns you a medal for each one. After you earn your sixth unique medal, you must spend them to immediately (with only a loading-screen break) play the event-exclusive Encore Extra Stage, Valkyrie dimension...the series' first level 18 Encore. As you might expect, this was "no one knows the ending to Pluto Relinquish" all over again, except with some people now accusing Konami of pulling a cash grab since it requires six credits to just try Valkyrie once. (You have to stick six more credits into the machine to play six more Extra Stages to earn six more medals...)
Valkyrie dimension is infamous for one more reason, which had been speculated ever since it was revealed as the first level 18 on Expert instead of Challenge. When the Challenge chart was finally revealed, it was DDR's first level 19 - the first new ratings scale expansion in five years! There was no Extra Stage requirement though, giving players a regular up-and-down lifebar to pass which made it much easier to just struggle through instead of being forced to nail every step or fail.
DDR X3 vs 2nd Mix broke three records with its final few boss songs:
Paranoia Revolution (Expert level 18) was at first only unlockable in the game's deliberately retro-style 2nd Mix mode, which means good-bye to thirteen years of quality-of-life updates. Specifically, the whole song is forced on 1x Flat, squishing the pile of arrows together and making them all monochrome (no colour difference to tell apart nearby arrows by rhythm, and no double-spacing etc. to read close-together arrows better). And as "Expert level 18" implies, this song had the series' second ever Challenge level 19, tying with Valkyrie dimension and breaking the DDR record of fastest interval between notes (16ths at 360bpm!).
Tohoku Evolved broke the record for highest reading speed at 1020 bpm - for a single corner jump that is random each time the song is played.
LOVE IS THE POWER -Re:born- is the game's last Encore Extra Stage, and at first glance it looks like a suspiciously easy level 10. That is, until the song begins and its music video prominently gives you fancy golden text: "ATTACK!! PERFECT FULL COMBO!" Yup, for the first time in DDR history, hitting every note in the Encore stage isn't enough to pass it. You must get all Perfects or better note This is an anachronism from the game's 1998 origins, when the arcade cabinets ran at 30fps and Perfect was literally frame-perfect. When the cabinets were upgraded to 60fps, a new rating above Perfect was introduced in order to keep old scores fairly comparable., and a single Great will fail you instantly (which, yes, makes it hilariously possible for the results screen to simultaneously show a failing grade and a Full Combo award).
For once, DDR 2013 had no sequel difficulty escalation whatsoever. DDR 2014 on the other hand...
Welcome to the series' second Extra Stage event. Yes, it's much, much harder than Valkyrie dimension in X2 ever was. The 'medal system' is made more stringent: the new Replicant-D-ignition folder contains five songs and clearing each with a 95% or better on Expert earns you a coloured orb. Hold all five, and a sixth song appears in the folder next credit, which is an Expert level 18 and costs all five orbs to attempt once. You must also 95% this song on your one attempt to earn a single attempt at the Encore Extra Stage...which scrolls backwards at 900 BPM which is almost literally humanly unreadable without missing a step. This seems to have been an intentional gimmick by Konami, watching players use creative workaround strategies such as literally printing out a copy of the chart elsewhere and taping it to the arcade machine to read that instead. As with the last event, people have accused Konami of creating another cash grab - the price for an Extra Stage credit has increased to ¥120, so six credits now costs ¥720 instead of the last event's ¥600, and you have two chances to lose it all instead of one (the Encore stage, and the sixth Extra Stage just before it).
Is that all? Not even close! Three weeks after players first beat all of the above, Konami released the "second phase" (last phase) of the event, which ends on a different sixth Extra Stage that is also a level 18. Getting a 95% on this new Extra Stage earns a single attempt at a brand new...level 15 Attack Perfect Full Combo Encore Extra Stage. Suffice to say, getting all Perfects on a level 15 song you've never heard or seen before, and requiring 30-48 minutes of expert-level gameplay and ¥720 worth of credits between every individual attempt, basically guaranteed that 0 people would ever pass it before the event ended, which is exactly what happened.
DDR A had two escalations compared to DDR 2014. First, the Rinon's Adventure Extra Stage event required 8 credits to fill up a meter to attempt the special Extra Stage, which increased the cost to ¥820 per attempt (Konami, those cash grab complaints aren't getting any quieter...). Second, the last phase of the event featured the series' first ever level 19 Extra Stage, followed by another level 15 Attack Perfect Full Combo Encore Extra Stage.
beatmania IIDX started with a 1-7 difficulty scale. 5th Style had the kanji for "forbidden" for some harder 7's, which were later displayed as "flashing 7's" and even later named as "7+". Eventually, the 7+ difficulty became an 8, and the 8+ was introduced. The scale now ranks up to 12.
For most of the series' history, Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania have had a scale with a 2-digit number for difficulty, with the boss songs usually having a rating in the 90's on Extreme difficulty. In V5, performing well on the Extra Stage earns you the Infinity Stage, with the song Rock to Infinity, which is rated infinity on Extreme and gives "Through the Fire and Flames" a run for its money.note For those only familiar with Guitar Hero or Rock Band, a note on how Guitar Freaks works, which will help appreciate the video: even though there are only three buttons on the guitar, you must never be holding extra buttons, even for single notes (forget about hammer-ons and pull-offs). Also, those white icon things on the rightmost side of the track are where you are required to raise your guitar neck into the air. Finally, there is no star power equivalent, and your accuracy is graded in a similar manner to Beatmania or DDR, adding another level of difficulty to the game.
Rock Band 2 ups the ante by having more metal than the first game, pushing the boundaries for drums and guitar, but the maximum difficulty is really pushed in Rock Band 3, which introduced the pro modes (while keeping the normal ones). The number of buttons on the guitar fretboard jumped from 5 to 102 (68 for bass), with the other hand handling six (four) 'strings' instead of one. Drums just added cymbals, jumping from 5 inputs to 8, and Keyboard, which was new anyway, jumped from 5 keys to 25. Moreover, some of the drum charts in RB3 (pro or not) are just insane. The main Rock Band games also present an inversion of this trope storyline-wise. The final challenge (barring the Endless Setlist) in the first game has you playing to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, whereas the second has you playing to be featured in Rolling Stone magazine.
The Ace Attorney series keeps upping the odds and the drama with each case.
The first of the Phoenix arc is simply rescuing your long-lost best friend from a false murder charge, the second involves intrigue in show business and the kidnapping of your assistant/friend Maya as insurance against the (guilty) client being found guilty, and the third has Phoenix facing off against the vengeful spirit of his serial killer ex-girlfriend before the true murderer is even found. Apollo Justice deals with a seven-year-old Batman Gambit and pushing through a completely new trial system, while Investigations puts Edgeworth against a smuggling ring that is responsible for or connected to every murder in the game.
Investigations 2 starts off with the assassination of the Zheng Fa president. It ends with a successful one. Of a body double, that is, who pulled a successful one on the real president years ago. And you get to solve that case too.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice starts with Phoenix taking on trials in a country that made being a lawyerpunishable by death, and deals with a full-on revolution. Oh, and who's the Big Bad of the game? The current Queen of said country, who controls the entire legal system and can re-write the law whenever she wants. By the end of the trial, everyone is held up at gunpoint by her guards. And yes, you do get to take her down.
The combos. Getting a 100 combo in DoDonPachi is an achievement, while in DoDonPachi it simply takes some effort. DoDonPachi dai ou jou's Hyper system makes that trivial, and in DoDonPachi Dai-Fukkatsu? Come back when you get a 10,000 combo.
In an inversion of this trope, most players regard Dai-Fukkatsu's first loop as easier than those of its predecessors. No one's listening, though.
Final Fight 2, the straight-to-Super NES sequel to the original Final Fight, changed the setting from Metro City to various cities around the Eurasian continent. Despite this, the game is barely that different in terms of gameplay compared to the original game and was mostly made to make up for the lack of a 2-Player Mode in the original SNES port.
Mass Effect 2 is kind of an aversion: the first game has the fate of all organic life in the Milky Way at stake, whereas the second focuses on attacks that only target humanity; sure the Collectors kill hundreds of thousands of people, but if Sovereign had succeeded, the death toll would have been at least in the hundreds of billions. Played straight when comparing 3 to its predecessors: while the threat to the galaxy is the same throughout the series, it's much more direct, and the odds of success much worse, in the third game.
There are now more "human" NPCs and side characters in this game than the previous ones which have completely Minimalist Casts. According to behind-the-scenes sources such the 3142 Graphic Arts artbook, this was due to DMC4 being primarily developed for the next-generation PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles that have the necessary processing power to render more NPCs at once, which wasn't possible in the older Devil May Cry games and their console generation.
This game didn't just buff many of the returning moves and mechanics outright, but also improved their hit count, animations, utility, and/or visual effects. For example:
In Devil May Cry 1, the Kick13 move was a single roundhouse and its Devil Triggered version was a punch-kick combo. In here, the combo is now a standard move and the Devil Trigger version has even more hits.
In Devil May Cry 3, the Drive move was a single, somewhat slow shockwave, while in here, it comes out faster and Dante can use three in a row.
In Devil May Cry 3, an enemy-pullingGrappling-Hook Pistol skill was only available as a situational part of the Gunslinger Style and Kalina Ann, while in here, it becomes integral to the combat and exploration via Nero's "Snatch" and "Hell Bound" abilities, which meant you'll be grappling a lot than before.
Dante's Million Stab is now faster and has more hits than its predecessor versions. His stabs also move so fast they create several pseudo-after-images.
With the Special Edition, there are now up to five playable characters to choose from, unlike the previous two games which only had up to two or three playable characters.
Tons of new core gameplay mechanics or moves are added to Dante, Trish and Vergil's playable versions, which aims to raise their skill ceiling and complexity than their previous playable counterparts. Vergil plays this straight, but Dante and Trish zigzag this a bit because they also lost a few of their old gimmicks.
Dante can now switch betweeen all of his Styles on-the-fly instead of being limited to just one at a time. However, his Styles lost some of their trademark abilities from Devil May Cry 3; Trickster, for instance, no longer allows him to Wall Run. As a further compromise, Dante also has fewer Styles in total here than the previous game.
Trish's Sparda and bare-handed movesets are greatly expanded. However, she no longer has the ability to fly (ala "Air Raid") and all other moves associated with it.
Vergil similarly gains a lot of new moves for all of his weapons, a Concentration mechanic that enhances his moves, and even a Limit Break for his Yamato.
Nero only had the Red Queen, Blue Rose, Devil Bringer, and Yamato at his disposal in Devil May Cry 4. While he still retains the first two, the loss of his original Devil Bringer in this game allowed him to equip a variety of Devil Breaker arms in its place, and several more can be purchased as DLC. In New Game Plus, Nero recovers the abilities of his original Devil Bringer, and can also manifest a spectral copy of the Yamato for some of his moves.
Playable Vergil only had one Limit Break in the Special Edition of Devil May Cry 4 - Judgement Cut End. Here, he has four super moves; one for each of his three weapons (including the aforementioned move from DMC4), and another which involves summoning V and his familiars.
The Devil Sword Sparda was considered one of the strongest weapons in the previous games (it gave Dante an 11th-Hour Superpower in DMC1, and the Order of the Sword sought its power in DMC4). It turns out the sword has a direct upgrade - the Devil Sword Dante.
In going from Modern Warfare to Modern Warfare 2, the killstreak rewards got bigger and better. There's also the fact that America gets invaded, you get to play as more people and the plot takes you to locations all around the world. And of course, the Twist Ending.
In the first Metal Slug, basic enemies were limited to the usual Rebellion Army soldiers, the only Slug you used was the basic tank, and the final boss was Morden in a helicopter. By the time Metal Slug 3 rolls around, that very same final boss and level are only the halfway point of the game, and you've already fought zombies, mummies, man-eating plants, and the Mars People. The final fight of 3 takes you to space to battle the Mars People mothership, and to even access the interior you have to fight Metal Slug 2's final boss again. The actual final battle is a free fall to Earth versus Rootmars, the alien commander.
In the first game, the main characters had about 30 HP to start, which grew to about 500-750 by the end. The final boss here had exactly 4000 HP. In Final Fantasy VIII, the starting HP is about 500 and it's about 2500-3500 HP near the end. This game's final boss has over A QUARTER MILLION HP, and you can only hit four digits of damage. And that's not even counting Final Fantasy XIII — there are trash mobs with health in the millions.
The magic and summon animations also have gotten flashier and longer as the series progresses. What used to take nothing more than a few seconds to watch Bahamut blast every enemy on the field in the earlier games evolved to an extended sequence showing Bahamut flying up high in the sky, charging his attack, and then watching the attack shoot down to the ground and explode on all enemies. Depending on the game, some players may find it easier and faster to level grind and just smash everything with swords than to use powerful magic that takes a while to finish its animations.
Final Fantasy XIV started off having relatively little story content at launch (but one of the many criticisms leveled against the original release). Near the end of the 1.0 version's run, The Empire came knocking while summoned Primals formed another threat against the world. The relaunch, A Realm Reborn, continued the story from a near-apocalypse inflicted upon the realm of Eorzea, with each expansion thereafter adding more areas to explore and new threats to contend with: a Corrupt Church and an army of dragons in Heavensward, the aforementioned Empire's conquered territories in Stormblood, The Multiverse in Shadowbringers and the homeland of the Empire plus the Moon which is only the Disc-One Final Dungeon in Endwalker.
In terms of sheer content: Theatrhythm Final Fantasy has just over 70 songs, not including DLC. Its sequel, Curtain Call, has more than three times that number at 221.
Kingdom Hearts does this to a smaller extent than Final Fantasy. The first game has bosses that have about 300-1500 HP (according to the Guide) which are represented by bars. A boss with four was considered a lot, and the Superboss Sephiroth has about six. Meanwhile in Birth By Sleep? There are enemies with a lot more than just four health bars, even if the health bars deplete faster after II. (this includes Chain of Memories)
Compare any of Sora's limits from the KHI or KHII to what Ven, Terra, or Aqua can do with their normal fighting styles. Sora's Trinity Limit almost pales in comparison to some of their attacks, and it was the strongest move in the original game and took all Sora, Donald, and Goofy to use, the BBS trio travel alone all the time, and perform moves that make the Maleficent dragon boss battle seem like a cake walk compared to her first dragon encounter from the first game. This is at least justified since Aqua is a Keyblade Master, Terra is only a few good deeds short and all three got training from an actual Keyblade Master, where as Sora learned from his own experience.
The game is all about destroying a single battle droid construction factory and then moving to help out at the Battle of Naboo. Jedi Starfighter is about shutting down all production of a synthetic virus that could wipe out beings in mere seconds, and then moving to prevent the Separatist scientist who invented it from using it in the Battle of Geonosis or after.
You can't destroy the Trade Federation landers no matter what, and the last level revolves around the battle against the Droid Control Ship, the only capital ship in the game. In Jedi Starfighter, you destroy one TF Lander in the first level, and several capital ships over the course of the game, including three in the last level alone.
During Nintendo's E3 2010 Presentation, while Reggie Fils-Aime mainly placed emphasis on the social element of Dragon Quest IX, he does have this to say about the rest of the game's content:
Fils-Aime: You could describe it just by the numbers: with 120 mini-quests and additional wi-fi mini-quests, over 300 monsters, over 900 items to customize your character, and an infinite number of randomly generated treasure maps. But that would be selling it short.
The SimCity series was originally developed with this in mind. While the games share a lot of the same core gameplay elements, the range of facilities that could be built and the size of land at the player's disposal grew exponentially, peaking in SimCity 4, where utterly large regions containing significant numbers of connected cities could be created. Will Wright would later comment that the series has ended up being inaccessible to new players due to its sheer complexity, which led to the reformulated but simplified SimCity Societies.
The Sims changes significantly with each sequel. Even customization options and the way the Sims can change themselves is dramatically different: in the first game, there are adult Sims and child Sims, and never the twain shall meet. In the second game, your Sims age and die, and can also gain and lose weight in a "pop" effect. In the third game, your Sims can age and die and changes due to weight gain and loss, muscle gain and loss, and pregnancy are subtle and incremental. And that's not even including the expansion pack options...
BioShock is an interesting case. The sequel has an equally good story, but the villain has the opposite philosophy as the first one. The combat, on the other hand, is so far escalated to be ridiculous. Dual Wielding, playing as a Big Daddy with equally scaled up weapons (from crossbow to spear gun for instance), and the plasmids... The Incinerate alone goes from tossing fire, to tossing exploding fire, to being able to shoot a solid stream of fire. Word of God even states that Jack wouldn't have survived Rapture if he came at this time.
Mega Man 2 upped the number of bosses and special items, but also gave a massive increase in the size and variety of the regular enemies you fought. Compare the Mooks of Mega Man 1 to Mega Man 2.
Back in Pokémon Red and Blue and Pokémon Gold and Silver, the villains were a bunch of common thugs, with the focus of what little plot the games had being on beating the Elite Four in Gen1 (and Red in Gen2). The Legendaries generally stayed Out of Focus in favor of the To Be a Master/Gotta Catch 'Em All messaging of the marketing, except for Suicune in Crystal. Then we hit Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, where the villains were out to expand the land or sea, and where the Legendary Pokémon played a role in that plot. But it wasn't over yet: Cyrus, head of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl's Team Galactic, was actively out to destroy the universe and remake it in his own image. Beating him involved, depending on your version, catching either the god of space, the god of time, or an Eldritch Abomination personification of antimatter that had a few parallels to Satan. And then you could catch God Himself, if you attended a Nintendo event or used a cheating device. Every generation after than has since zig-zagged in the level of world-ending disaster that the villain's schemes will cause, from Pokémon Black and White wanting Pokémon and humans to be forever separated, to Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon having the entire multiverse at risk of destruction.
Each generation adds new mechanics to gameplay, but most notably, the number of Pokémon that are catchable greatly increases as well. Pokémon Red and Blue started it off with a total of 151 Pokémon. Gold and Silver upped the ante with 100 new mons. Ruby and Sapphire began the trend of starting the player with a Regional Pokédex of over 150 mons, the majority of which being new additions to the franchise, with all other Pokemon from previous generations being catchable during the post-game. To date, the installment to add the most new Pokemon was Pokémon Black and White with 156 brand new monster, while Pokemon Xand Y has the largest regional at a whopping 450 Pokémon. Oh, and the total number of Pokémon in the series? 807.
In terms of Pokémon abilities, the game added new features like latent abilities, weather effects, and so forth over the course of the series. Come Pokémon X and Y, however, a major addition was made in the form of Mega Evolutions, a Super Mode usable by some species of Pokémon that ramps up their capabilities considerably, in addition to changing their appearance. Pokémon Sun and Moon retained Mega Evolutions while also adding Z-Moves, special attacks that, like Mega Evolutions, are only accessible to a certain selection of Pokémon and are far more powerful than other moves, but at the cost of only being usable once per battle. Pokémon Sword and Shield would consolidate Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves into Dynamax, a new Super Mode that allows Pokémon to grow to the size of a building, their stats also skyrocketing with their size while their moveset is temporarily replaced with powerful Max Moves. Unlike Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves, every Pokémon can Dynamax and use Max Moves, although a few species are capable of Gigantamaxing.
The names of the games themselves were an escalation from primary colors to increasingly precious metals and stones. Eventually, they couldn't go any further than Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, so the next game series were simply Black and White, which also served as a reboot with a more scaled down plot, and the subsequent games were based on concepts other than colors or minerals.
Not necessarily a "sequel", per se, but the continuation of the Spider-Man set of games: In Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, the final mission revolves around blowing up a single S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, an aircraft roughly the size of a small building, to take down Venom once and for all. In Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, the Carnage level has one Helicarrier pre-crashed as an integral part of the first fight with Carnage, and Ultimate Spidey has to outrun another crashing Helicarrier later in the stage.
Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening has a smaller scope story-wise than the original game (the Wardens are mopping up the stragglers from the already-defeated hellish legions), but the Power Levels of everything are through the roof—regular bandits in Awakening have more HP than endgame Origins bosses.
Dragon Age: Inquisition takes it right back to the epic lands, with the new protagonist building up an international power base (the eponymous Inquisition) to uncover the mystery of why every major faction on the continent suddenly stopped taking its meds and went to war against everyone else all at once.
Diablo. Your most powerful attack is a fireball followed by a magical sword and Nova is forbidden magic relegated to scrolls only, while a mob of six enemies is trouble on the highest difficulty. In the sequel, multishot arrows, chain lightning spear attacks and screenwide frost spells are commonplace. And in Diablo III, even warrior characters are capable of causing avalanches and earthquakes, and you get rewarded for killing 50 demons in a few seconds. Meanwhile the scope of the hostilities escalates from a cursed cathedral in the first game, the entire world in the second game, and the High Heavens in the third.
Bug Too! to the original Bug. It did take out certain elements (especially the zap cap) but added many new ones in, such as curved platforms, ability to run and hover for the characters, and level selection for each world. It may not have been a good thing, though.
Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter will start in the Cruiser-Fusion era and have a "tech forest", multi-planet systems, even bigger ships and generally lots more options to play with.
Paper Mario has enemies with HP averaging from 10-20 points for most of the game while bosses hovering around the 50s more or less and the Final Boss and Superboss having 99 HP. Mario's HP and FP can only max out (without the use of badges) to 50. The sequel, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, ramps this up greatly; Mario's HP and FP can reach higher than 50 thanks to the level cap being raised, but boss enemy HP is beefed up as well, pushing near 70 by the last quarter of the game. The Final Boss has 150 HP and the Superboss has 200 HP! By Paper Mario standards, that's a crapton of HP. It's stretched even further in Sticker Star. All bosses after the first have at least 300 HP, and the final boss has 500 HP!
The plots of the game are also escalated. The original has a fairly standard Bowser-kidnaps-the-Princess plot, and other than Mario none of the characters are in much danger (though the Star Spirits are concerned this might change if Bowser keeps the Star Rod for too long). Thousand-Year Door features a group of scientists trying to release an Eldritch Abomination, believing she will reward them with money and power, but who really just wants to Take Over the World (and can rule alone). Super Paper Mario features a villain who wants to destroy the entire multiverse.
In the first game, you're a nobody in a downtrodden neighborhood who gets caught in a gang fight, joins a new gang and buys a pistol to "clean up the hood".
The second game features lots of explosives, radioactive waste, chainsaws, a gang boss with a minigun, and eventually you fight a private military contractor.
The third game features regular mooks with miniguns, airstrikes, hoverbikes, battles against entire enemy platoons of tanks, laser guns everywhere and you blow up two aircraft carriers, including a flying one that's bombing the city into rubble.
The fourth game features a full-scale alien invasion where you play as the president of the United States who gets kidnapped by the aliens, is put in The Matrix and then fights them with superpowers.
Generally speaking, Fighting Game sequels — especially those created within a couple of years of each other — like to increase the number of fighters from one game to another. Street Fighter Alpha is a perfect example. There are exceptions — the Soul Series seems pretty consistent at around 20 characters per game, and the Marvel vs. Capcom series stayed between 15 and 16 non-pallete swap characters for the first 3 games — but an increased headcount is usually on the menu for a sequel.
The original Super Smash Bros. features only twelve characters. The sequel, Melee, features over double that number, with the third game, Brawl, having 35 characters, including third-party Guest FightersSonic The Hedgehog and Solid Snake. The fourth game has 50 characters, or 52 if you count each Mii fighter type as a different character, with more characters released as DLC. The fifth game - appropriately titled Ultimate - takes this even further by bringing back every character who was ever in a previous game, and then adding new ones on top. The count is at 74 official fighters (many of whom are from non-Nintendo series), plus Echo Fighters (such as Daisy and Dark Pit) and functionally identical reskins (such as the Koopalings and Leaf) who increase the total even further. And that's not counting all the stages, items and extra modes each game adds!
Banjo-Tooie is this compared to its predecessor Banjo-Kazooie: The latter was a kind of enhanced Super Mario 64, with more transformations, more collectibles, the ability to shoot eggs, and some other moves. Then Banjo-Tooie retained (almost) all the old moves of the first game since the beginning, introducing more new moves than the total number of moves in the previous game, five new types of eggs, transformations in every level, and these aren't even all the new gimmicks of the game. The size and scale of each stage also increased dramatically, making the first game's stages feel claustrophobic by comparison.
The second Devil Survivor game is this. While the first one started its gameplay with the protagonists suddenly being attacked by demons spawning out of their COMPs, the second one kicks off the main storyline by having a subway de-rail and nearly kill off the main characters (after showing them their horrific deaths before it happens). The second game also has FAR more on-screen deaths (one instance being the Eldritch Abomination-of-the-dayincinerating four bystanders), a more epic scope (complete with a shadowy underground organization dealing with Japan's paranormal issues over the years and Eldritch Abominations wreaking havoc), more characters, more locations (taking place in multiple cities as opposed to the first one's single place), more cursing, more difficulty, and bigger cup sizes.
Devil Survivor 2 got an Updated Re-release that includes a full-fledged second campaign taking place after the first. Where the original campaign ended with the protagonists taking on the Administrator of the Akashic Records, the second campaign has a being of identical power as only the third boss, with the final boss being the system that created the Administrators and the Record, which involves turning the main characters into gods as step one for fighting it.
Quest for Glory I has few particularly powerful threats for you to deal with. There's the Kobold Wizard and Baba Yaga, but the ominous Brigand Warlock turns out to just be the local court jester, who has little real magical power and left the castle to find the Baron's missing daughter. There's not even really a Big Bad to speak of, unless you count Baba Yaga, as the Brigand Leader is the Baron's enchanted daughter, and is "beaten" with a dispell potion.
In Quest for Glory II, the Hero must square off against four powerful elementals, each of which can destroy the city of Shapeir, before confronting the wizard attempting to release an evil djinn on the world.
Quest for Glory III raises the stakes even further, with the plot of the game being manipulated by a demon attempting to cross its master over into the world (the Quest for Glory series is RIFE with Sealed Evils attempting to be released). Notably, the Coles have specifically said that Wages of War was not part of the original story, and was added specifically because the Hero would not have been strong enough to face the enemies of the next game.
Quest for Glory IV, in which the Hero now faces undead in spades, the resurrected Ad Avis and his Dark Master, the vampire Katrina. Oh, and now he's trying to stop a full-blown Eldritch Abomination from being freed! Notably, Baba Yaga, who in the first game pretty thoroughly outmatches the Hero, by the fourth is no longer quite so menacing.
Quest for Glory V at first seems like it's going to be an inversion, as the Hero arrives to effectively investigate a murder plot. At least until the world-destroying Dragon of Doom is unleashed by the Big Bad (have we mentioned the series' love of Sealed Evils?)
Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel Batman: Arkham City. From the scope of the plot to the cast to the playable area to the combat mechanics to the sidequests, everything got bigger and more complex. City even started Batman out with almost all of his gadgets from the end of Asylum before throwing even more his way. Batman: Arkham Knight has at least triple the playable area City had. Asylum had two (PS3) playable characters; City had four; Knight has eight, with one being a Palette Swap of Batman with harder challenges and less gadgets.
There are exactly two things which New World Computing did not escalate between Heroes of Might and Magic I and II: the number of campaigns (four to two — but see below) and the scale of the war (the sparse story of I was a free-for-all war over the throne of Enroth between four contenders, II was a war over the throne of Enroth's succession with two claimants). Everything else — the number of towns, how many artifacts there are, how much actual story there is in the campaigns, how different the campaigns are from each-other (I's were literally the same except for your starting town and each campaign lacking the map about attacking your own stronghold), the number of creatures, the complexity of the skill system, how many spells there are, etc — gets escalated.
Sonic Lost World takes a step back by returning to Sonic saving animals and maintaining the beauty of the world, but still manages to escalate that by having Sonic now saving animals in the hundreds and thousands per zone instead of dozens and magnifying the threat to the planet from Eggman building resource-destroying factories to the entire world being sapped of its life energy by the Zeti, killing it and everyone on it including Sonic's friends, and the plan actually goes off without fail to the bitter end before Sonic can fix things.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: The setting of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 featured a massive world, but planet Mira is five times as big. It's so massive, there were doubts as to whether it would all fit on a Wii U disk.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The first game had a party member limit of three, and each member had their own unique arts that couldn't be changed. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 also had a three member limit, but also allowed party members to change their attacks by switching Blades, which were their own characters in and of themselves. The third gameups the party member limit to a whooping seven, six main party members, who can all change classes at will, and one interchangable "Hero" character.
The first game had a lot of neat boss fights, decent story with an OK villain, an intimidating final boss, and a neat Bonus Boss in Crawmerax. Then Borderlands 2 came along and... totally blew it out of the water. The boss fights were more intense, often had hazards littered about them with extremely inventive fights, a story that plays out amazingly (so much so you'd swear they purposely wrote everything very basic in the original just to expand it further with its incredible plot twists, a Big Bad to top all Big Bads, Handsome Jack, the manipulative sociopathic monster who is always two hundred steps ahead, a final boss that is far harder to kill and is NOT a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, and a new bonus boss in Terramorphous, who makes Crawmerax look like a chew toy. They increased the guns, increased the areas, and total went balls out on making everything new.
This applies to the DLC as well. General Knoxx, Island of Dr. Ned, Moxxi's Underdome, and the Claptrap invasion were okay, but Captain Scarlet's, Campaign of Carnage, Big Game Hunt, and Assault on Dragon's Keep clearly had way more effort put into them, and the last one especially seems to be taking the game engine and what they can do with it as far as they can, playing with the characters themselves and just having fun exploring how nuts the gameplay can get when they go all out on it, along with trying out how silly objectives can get. Additionally, the four campaigns from two seem to be more generally received by critics on websites like IGN and Game Informer, whereas General Knoxx had the unfortunate inability to make multiple fast travel stations in the DLC, forcing you to painstakingly make your way back to where you were every time you needed to get there, and Moxxi's underdome was often far too difficult for a solo player to handle, giving an individual much less incentive to play it unless with friends... and they dragged on and on.
The Metroid Prime Trilogy invokes this trope in regards to the scale of the adventure. In Metroid Prime, Samus must contain the threat of Phazon and the mutated Metroid Prime on Tallon IV and prevent the Space Pirates from exploiting it, but the planet itself is mostly scenery. In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Samus must reverse the outcome of a war and save Aether itself and its inhabitants from its Phazon-created dark twin. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption involves the rescue of several such corrupted planets from Phazon itself, with the fate of the entire galaxy at stake. Gameplay-wise, Echoes shifts the balance between puzzle-solving and action towards the latter, and Corruption introduces Hypermode, with represents both a significant power boost for Samus and a personal stake in the outcome, as she has been corrupted as well.
A meta-example with Blizzard Entertainment games — with every new game, the game engines' capacities have increased, and thus the Level Editor has gone from Map Editor (War Craft II), Campaign Editor (Starcraft), World Editor (War Craft III), to Galaxy Editor (Starcraft II). For the games themselves, WarCraft II featured Cosmetically Different Sides, a Good/Evil divide, missions consisiting of "kill the enemy base", and Isometric Projection. WarCraft III had four completely different factions, some murkiness on the good/evil, extremely varied missions and a lot more dungeon crawls, cutscenes, leveling hero units, mercenaries, and was in 3D.
Each World of Warcraft expansion has pushed all conceivable limits of stat escalation. In classic, with a level cap of 60, even the absolute best geared raiding tank had only a few thousand HP, the hardest raid bosses had a couple million HP, and individual raid geared DPS was measured in hundreds (800 was considered good for Patchwerk, classic's preeminent DPS check). By the end of the 4th expansion, level cap 90, non-tanks were breaking 1 million HP, bosses were dancing around a billion, and individual DPS was easily several hundred thousand and could burst into the million range. Things got so bad the servers couldn't handle crunching all the numbers involved and Blizzard was forced to implement a "stat crunch" which cut everything for current content to roughly 10% of what it had been (though you could still pull the same DPS against legacy content). Two more expansions later, level cap 110, and things went and surpassed the pre-stat crunch levels once again. Tanks pushed past the 3 million HP mark and everything else just increased to keep up.note Gets funny when you remember that during classic Blizzard claimed Arthas to be the most powerful being in Azeroth, a Physical God, and he would require 40 players at a minimum of level 90 to face him. He was released at level 80 and fought by 10/25 players. By the time players were level 90 anyone decently geared could solo him.
The Shockwave games increase in scope with each installment:
Invasion Earth is a defense of Earth against an invading force; the Omaha does not go further than the moon.
Operation Jumpgate sees the Omaha traversing the solar system to go on the offensive and fight the aliens back through the jumpgate before they finish preparing for a second invasion.
Shockwave 2 opens twenty years after the Omaha has been lost been lost through the jumpgate, and has the crew of the Cortez exploring other solar systems, searching for the jumpgate code that will send them home.
Pikmin 2 has five types of Pikmin that need to be managed, a far larger array of enemies, much longer gameplay in the form of caves, introduces powerups in the form of sprays, and removes the day limit. The number of collectable items shoots up from 30 to 201.
Pikmin 3 increases the number of Onion-grown Pikmin the player has to manage, has a more flexible day limit than the first game, balances out the usefulness of the types, and has areas so large that even the Distant Spring from the first game (the biggest map of the first two) feels claustrophobic by comparison. However, it also removes some of the additions from the second game, toning down on the enemy types and axing the caves.
Every game in the Five Nights at Freddy's made the animatronics worse and worse. The first were (mostly) normal-looking, and all their creepiness came from their behaviour and murderous intent. The second had the new, shiny "Toy" versions as well the old ones — who have been used as sources for spare parts and are mutilated as a result. The third had Springtrap, who looks like he literally rottedas well as "Phantom", hallucinatory versions of past animatronics. The fourth features nightmare-esque corruptions with more mutilations and sharp teeth.
Persona 3 and Persona 4 run off the same basic engine framework, have no proper cutscenes (all dialogue sequences consist of the characters Going Through the Motions with a camera angle that rarely changes) apart from the rare, 2D-animated ones, and are simplistic in their exploration, with randomly-generated dungeons that have few setpieces or puzzles. Fun, but rather basic and very obviously held back by limited budgets. Persona 5, which is almost certainly going to be Atlus' biggest game yet, is a completely different beast, with proper cutscenes, a larger overworld with minigames and masses of NPCs, a protagonist that seems to have a real personality, and actual dungeon designs with new methods of traversal like stealth and platforming.
The original Nexus War was one battle in an eternal cycle of universes ending and beginning anew. The second game made the death and rebirth of the universe a repeatedly occurring event in game mechanics terms.
Each Mortal Kombat game is Bloodier and Gorier than the last. The first game already managed to drum up some controversy with its Fatalities, of which each character had one. Mortal Kombat II not only added more characters, but gave each of them two different fatalities (three to Shang Tsung), as well as the more humorous Babality and Friendship finishers. By the time the series went 3D, fatalities had turned into longer cinematic sequences that mutilate the loser in increasingly creative and gruesome ways.
Bayonetta significantly toned up the action by its sequel. The first game already had large-scale, intense fights against giant enemies, but the second one gives a first boss from the Prologue that could pass as a Final Boss in another game. Bayonetta goes from exclusively fighting forces of Paradiso to fighting both infernal demons and the god of the human world (which is a distinct plane from heaven or hell) in addition to both old and new angels, and we finally get to see what Inferno looks like after the first game never revealed it. The Mirror Boss fights are significantly flashier: Jeanne from 1 summoned portions of demons for her battles, while the Masked Lumen in 2 summons the bosses in full-scale as they fight with Bayonetta's own demon summons in the background.
The first BoxxyQuest game, The Shifted Spires, was a simple gag RPG made in a few months for the members of a small forum. Its sequel, The Gathering Storm, is an utterly massive, commercial-quality game, despite still being freeware. This change is also reflected in the narrative. The first game’s plot involved saving one forum from a moody guy and his robot henchmen. In the second, we’re dealing with threats to the entire Internet, and an increasingly convoluted pileup of Mechanical and Eldritch Abominations hellbent on consuming all of reality.
In Spires, no enemy ever had more than five digits of health, not even the final boss. Meanwhile, in Storm, the True Final Boss has 540,000 HP, and the most difficult Superboss has a whopping 790,000.
Telling Lies, a Spiritual Successor to Her Story, has the same gameplay, but in broader scope: about five times the video footage, four central characters instead of one, and several central mysteries.
The Souls franchise as a whole has been gradually ramping up in terms of both difficulty and spectacle. In Demon's Souls, Flamelurker was considered a "wall" for being the first boss most people fight that comes close to matching the player's movement speed or reaction time, compared to ones that are either Mighty Glaciers or even Stationary Bosses. By Bloodborne, the bosses start that fast and ramp up from there, with the exceptions being more significant. Fortunately, the player character also starts with more stamina than the Demon's Souls protagonist typically has by mid-game.
The Trails Series goes from a fairly straighforward though dense coming-of-age story in Trails in the Sky FC, to a multi-game spanning story arc knee-deep in ancient civilizations, beings of great power and political intrigue, the scopes of the games becoming larger and larger. This is also seen in gameplay in games that are direct sequels, as the characters become stronger both in-universe and retain their level from the previous entry; even if you don't carry over save data, the level you start with in Sky SC is around the range in which you would finish FC.
Golden Sun: The Lost Age takes everything from the first game and amps it up. The world is much larger, there are more summons, more weapons, more equipment, more characters to play as, more puzzles, harder puzzles, stronger enemies, more Djinn, more dungeons, more sidequests... and the game is quite longer, about ten more hours on average.
Endless Ocean is set in a single location with some sub-areas, only features two characters of any real substance besides the protagonist (and one of those, Alfred Thorman, is The Ghost), and touts a little over 200 creatures to identify, all within a paper-thin narrative regarding finishing some research and doing some photoshoots for magazines. Endless Ocean: Blue World, its sequel, let you travel all around the globe with an entire troupe of coworkers researching mystical phenomena, lets you hitch a ride with your dolphin companions and put on shows for clients with them, offers an entire economy to purchase cosmetics and upgrades from, and boosts the creature count to around 340 not including juvenile variants. The most recent game, Endless Ocean: Luminous, is advertised as allowing online play for up to 30 players in a single lobby, has a randomly generated environment to explore, and even further boosts the number of creatures to over 500.
Left 4 Dead 2 intro video.