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Sequelitis / Video Games

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  • The Hub's Adventure Ponies! is an amusing little retraux Flash platformer that, while not amazingly good, was a fun way to kill an hour or two. Adventure Ponies 2: Wait! There's More?! wasn't as warmly received; besides the loss of the colorful backgrounds of the first game in favor of brown forests and caverns, the game is essentially a Mission-Pack Sequel to the original game with different characters. Even looking past that, it's a lot buggier than its big brother (the game has been known to crash to a sprite sheet or debug menu on occasion).
  • Alone in the Dark:
    • The second game is generally seen as one of the worst in the series, due to a combination of rushing it out to try and capitalize on the original's success (the director later acknowledged in an interview that they knew the game was buggy and unbalanced but weren't concerned about the quality) and attempting to cash in on the success of Wolfenstein 3-D. The end result is it's essentially a shooter, but it made no attempt to change the base gameplay (you'll often end up getting shot at from offscreen, and in the unlikely event that you do manage to get an enemy in your view, good luck aiming at him) and ends up borderline unplayable. The entire "horror" thing is also completely absent, with it taking the little moments of silliness that were common in contemporary horror games and cranking them up to eleven until the game became a self-parody. It really says something when the most famous part of a "survival horror" game involves bludgeoning zombie dwarf cooks to death with a frying pan while wearing a Santa outfit. Fortunately, the third game reintroduced the adventure elements from the original and took itself a bit more seriously.
    • The 2008 reboot received fairly mediocre reviews, but many suggested the game's main problems owed more to trying to do too much and being an Obvious Beta; the common line was "it has a lot of interesting ideas but they aren't well-realized." It was followed years down the line by Alone in The Dark: Illumination, regarded as a fifteenth-rate Left 4 Dead knockoff with impressively broken combat and a metric load of bugs. The poor reception finally put the franchise to rest.
  • Another World wasn't intended to have a sequel, but Interplay, who brought the game to the U.S. (as Out of This World), decided they really needed to produce one. The result was Heart of the Alien, a mess of a game that only confirmed Eric Chahi's initial doubts.
  • Arc the Lad: End of Darkness is widely considered inferior to Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits and is one of the worst-rated PS2 RPGs. The game features a new, but slow and clunky, Action RPG battle system, and most of its maps and character models are cut-pasted from its predecessor. The reception was so bad that no new game was announced until Arc The Lad R, a mobile game, in 2018 (14 years later).
  • Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel. The first two games didn't break much new ground in the Third-Person Shooter genre but still garnered a fanbase by embracing the macho "bro" culture for all they were worth. Devil's Cartel strips away the few unique elements the other games did havenote , robbing the series of its charm.
  • The Army Men franchise was initially insanely popular. Then somewhere the lackluster spin-offs and In Name Only sequels slowly choked off sales until 3DO finally went bankrupt in 2003. Even with the parent company dead, other companies are still trying to make cash off of the brand, the latest entries getting some of the worst reviews in shooting games; even a similar attempt at a game like it in The Mean Greens has, at best, received glowing reviews but no lasting playerbase.
  • The fourth game in the Avernum series switched from the antiquated engine and sketch-like, endearing graphics of the first three to something more powerful and more realistic, and hence got hit with They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. Since the new engine was taken from Geneforge, it also got hit with They Copied It, So It Sucks!. And since the plot was quite similar to that of the third game, it was also subject to It's the Same, Now It Sucks!. Then there were the complaints when the game was taken on its own merits...
  • Backyard Sports started off as a decently enjoyable game series with clever characters and a good sense of humor. After Atari's buy-out from Humongous Entertainment, the series began a noticeable drop in quality.
  • Battlefield:
    • Battlefield V. Over time, many fans came to view it as weakest installment in the mainline games (1942, 2142, Vietnam and the 5 numbered titles) with much criticism aimed at its historically inaccurate aesthetic, botched launch and weak post-launch support. Upon release in November 2018, the game had game-breaking bugs, deviated from the realistic look of previous games, and lacked advertised features like the much-touted battle royale mode. While past Battlefield games improved with updates, BFV was riddled with problems throughout its lifecycle and whatever updates it received took too long to implementnote . Many fans have compared the game unfavorably to its predecessor Battlefield 1 as that game was released in a functioning state and improved over time whereas Battlefield V lingered in mediocrity for its entire lifespan. It's widely accepted as a very missed opportunity as DICE & EA took what was a highly anticipated game that was going back to the series' World War II roots, and instead created a buggy, controversial mess.
    • Battlefield 2042 has run into this too, with its launch being even worse than previous Battlefield games, suffering from tonal issues of soldiers cracking jokes and wearing silly outfits despite the bleak dystopian setting, lack of weapon variety, and having many controversial changes to the formula like the Specialist system replacing classes.
  • The arcade version of beatmania IIDX 9th Style didn't go so well with fans. The judgment timing windows are inconsistent from song to song; one song may be ridiculously easy to score on, another may feel very tight, another may be off, etc. In addition, 9th Style took out the Effector, a staple of the series, and a Game-Breaking Bug sometimes causes the game to crash upon selecting "Quasar". DanceDanceRevolution X and X2, especially the console versions, suffered from similar problems.
  • Blood was a major cult hit and is still often considered the best shooter to ever run on the Build Engine. However, the second game hit major Troubled Production woes and was given a mandate to be programmed in under a year—even the game's director told the publisher that the game was simply not finished and needed another month of time at the least. They shipped it anyway, and it showed, leaving the franchise strangled in the cradle.
  • Bloody Roar peaked early with Bloody Roar II, and every game since that one hit a drop in quality that ended with Bloody Roar 4. By then, the series had devolved into a mindless Button Mashing game and was hard to take seriously.
  • Bubsy was never the most well-received franchise, but it really dropped the ball on the 1996 Bubsy 3D, considered one of the worst games of all time. It was one of the first 3D platformers released... a few months after the much better-received Super Mario 64. Bubsy 3D caused the franchise to lay dead for 21 years, until it got revived in 2017.
  • Call of Duty got into this with its business model of new games getting released yearly, resulting in ten-plus games so far. It hit especially hard after the dev-team shakeup surrounding series creator Infinity Ward in the midst of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's development, as the first game fully developed by the "new" team, Ghosts, sold less than many of the previous Call of Duty games before it (quite noteworthy considering the series had annually broken sales records for several years in a row before then). Actual attempts to innovate have been made since, but some years' iterations still fall to this, particularly Infinite Warfare, which was seen as too out-there for taking the series into pure Science Fiction territory, on top of being saddled with the terrible luck of being released alongside a remaster of one of the series' most-beloved entries.
  • Call of Juarez: The Cartel, riding off the successful Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, shifted the series from the Old West into a more modern setting and brought with it unresponsive controls, graphical glitches galore, and uninspired level design that penalizes you for going off track. Thankfully, the series was able to quickly get back on its feet with Gunslinger.
  • Chibi-Robo! was a decent little Gamecube-original platformer-adventure game hybrid, known for its large open world and charming concept of being able to explore a house as a tiny robot. It sold satisfactorily, got good reviews, and developed a small but devoted fanbase. However, the franchise seemed to have an odd aversion to just making a newer installment, with most of the results being small-budget spinoffs that failed to impress. It all culminated in Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash, which ditched the franchise's entire aesthetic and most of its gimmicks in favor of a depressingly bog-standard and mediocre 2D sidescroller, with the baffling gimmick of requiring the player to roll a roulette wheel to determine whether or not they could advance to the next stage after beating a level. Paradoxically, despite the massive overhaul, the producers essentially said that if the game failed, the franchise would probably never see another entry. It did, receiving poor reviews, alienating what little fanbase the franchise had left, and having copies marked down to clearance levels.
  • The first ClayFighter was a modest success — while it was terribly unbalanced, most were willing to look past that and appreciate the game for taking a comedic spin on the fighting game genre. Its sequel Judgement Clay wasn't approved as much, with its cast being far less varied in movesets, a dingier and uglier look, and lacking several features that the preceding entry had. Then came 63⅓, which, while improving on the gameplay area, still showed signs of being unfinished that had to have Sculptor's Cut to partially rectify, alongside bringing in annoyingly frequent voice acting and several Ethnic Scrappies. The series has been dormant since, with any attempts of a official revival quickly being Quietly Cancelled, and fan efforts such as ClayFighter: Infinite Clayfare being Screwed by the Lawyers.
  • Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight was such a step down it killed the franchise, which has barely had releases ever since. The biggest problem was its dramatic departure from the traditional C&C experience, having removed many of the series' trademark gameplay elements for no discernible reason. Its infamous ending, intended to be the conclusion of the overall series, ultimately failed to answer many of the central questions that drove the main story, and as such is widely considered a tone-deaf entry that undermined the once-popular RTS series.
  • Contract J.A.C.K. was a Mission-Pack Sequel to No One Lives Forever 2, created solely as a side project so that the artists and level designers at Monolith would have something to do while the programming team worked on the next iteration of their in-house game engine that would power the later and much better Condemned: Criminal Origins and First Encounter Assault Recon. The end result shows it, in its lack of concentrated effort or polish; as just one example, there are several pickups for an ammo type used by a gun that is never acquired in the game except by cheating - which resulted in the series getting canned.
  • Sony's former two PS1-era platformer franchises, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, share a similar fate of both being franchises that started out with a solid first game, followed by two sequels that were better than the first, and then afterwards succumbing to Franchise Zombie territory after being mishandled by the same parent company (Universal Interactive Studios/Vivendi Games). Crash's first outing without Naughty Dog, The Wrath of Cortex, was considered to be average at best, but it was more playable compared to Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly, Spyro's first outing without Insomniac Games. An Obvious Beta that suffered from uninspired level design, Loads and Loads of Loading (they even had loading screens for the loading-screens!), terrible graphics, terrible voice acting (which shows how much they cared, almost the entire voice cast didn't reprise their roles), and being so glitchy in the PS2 version that achieving 100% Completion was near impossible.
  • Xaviant's The Culling was released in 2017 with a fairly solid early foothold in the nascent Battle Royale Game genre, but The Culling 2 — announced and released the following year — turned out to be an extremely costly mistake. Its predecessor — while generally well-received — faced early criticisms for changing core mechanics too often to be a stable experience, and the sequel only doubled-down on changing the gunplay, melee combat, aesthetic (making it appear more like its competitor, Player Unknowns Battlegrounds), and overall feel for the worse, with many reviews slamming it for feeling outright unfinished. The sequel died an early death with little to no players to support it, forcing Xaviant to pull the game entirely from digital storefronts, instead refocusing efforts on its predecessor as a free-to-play title, but the bad will combined with the increasingly oversaturated BR market caused it to fold as well in 2019.
  • The Dark Parables series of hidden object games have fallen victim to this, with ten games in the series. It's generally considered that the first four games in the series are the best, with original storytelling and gameplay. Starting with the fifth game, The Final Cinderella, the reviews weren't as positive as the games began to repeat game mechanics, dropped in art quality, and shifting story focus; however, the next game, Jack and the Sky Kingdom, was well received. It also hasn't helped the following installments that Blue Tea Games eventually sold the game series to another developer, Eipix; the eighth game, The Little Mermaid and the Purple Tide, was a collaboration between the two in order to transition the series to Eipix, and this is considered one of the weakest games in the series. The fandom is divided over the quality of the series as it progresses.
  • The Dark Tales series has been experiencing this since its sixth game, with player opinion of the quality varying widely. The eighth game, The Tell-Tale Heart, has unquestionably the worst reviews of any game in the series, thanks largely to the ending which does nothing to resolve the mystery.
  • Dawn of War and its expansions are generally agreed to have suffered from this.
    • The original Dawn of War was quite liked. The combination of hard counters and the ability to customize individual units with various upgrades was hailed as a brilliant move, and though the balance was far from perfect (due to every race but one mostly comprising heavy infantry and thus being especially vulnerable to the Eldar race's focus on hard counters), it was a decent game.
    • Then came Winter Assault, which was originally anticipated for its addition of the Imperial Guard and several units for the existing sides. And then it hit, and the fanbase raged. Fresh out of the gate, Chaos players were severely miffed that their Chaos Marines had all their heavy weapons ripped out in an attempt to streamline the tech trees, the hard counter system was gone, and special fury was caused by the fact that Terminators and Obliterators had been nerfed hilariously. Unit obsolescence was also a large problem here.
    • Following Winter Assault, Dark Crusade promised fixes on several problems with the original game and Winter Assault, and it was a very bold attempt after the failure of Winter Assault, including an addition of a hard cap system, the return of some CSM heavy weapons, and several problems with Space Marines were fixed. Unfortunately, the game remained riddled with problems, and it introduced one of the most hated "fixes" in the series. Apparently having decided that firing on the move was overpowered, Relic introduced a flat accuracy penalty for firing on the move... of 15%. No Dreadnought ever saw a weapon upgrade again, as the assault cannon was not only functionally useless (and all other units intended to fire on the move became useless as well), it hindered the Dread's melee ability, and the Eldar Fleet of Foot ability became tantamount to godmode. This was an ability on practically all Eldar infantry that boosted their movement speed beyond everything in the game, and with the accuracy reduction, there was no reason at all not to use it. A plethora of other glitches also existed. Then, after a 7-month wait for a patch, it came. And not only did it leave many things unchanged, it nerfed practically everything but Eldar, the race that was even before the patch decried by numerous fans as overpowered. In addition to all this, the two new races introduced were also blatantly broken on release.
    • And then Soulstorm came out and balanced a great many things, thanks to Iron Lore. Unfortunately, it was not to be: THQ and Relic forced the addition of flying units, something the engine was never designed to accommodate, in the process cutting the addition of many greatly demanded units like Ork Wyrdboyz, the Leman Russ Demolisher, and the Wraithguard, for example. The game's voice acting and script were also greatly criticized. And then it happened. 19 hours after launch, a game-breaking glitch for the Sisters of Battle was found that effectively killed all multiplayer until after a 9-month wait for a fix, and by that point, the game was well and truly dead. The game also suffered from multiple other glitches and bugs, and the Eldar remained blatantly overpowered.

    • Dawn of War III is considered a serious step-down from its celebrated predecessor, downgrading to only three playable factions in the base game instead of the traditional four, and adopting a cartoonish, exaggerated art and gameplay style that drew plenty of Narm and unfavorable comparisons to StarCraft. Few of the returning characters from previous games had their original voice actors, and the campaign's bare-bones plot and Generic Doomsday Villain left a sour taste in a lot of mouths. The backlash and lack of sales that were generated by these factors caused Relic to announce ten months later that support was ending for DOW III, and all planned content for the game was cancelled.
  • Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, a girls-only spinoff of the main DOA fighting games, offered a decent volleyball game to go with its heaping helping of fanservice. While Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 boasted better character models and a few more minigames, much of its content was recycled from the first DOAX, the volleyball was made worse through a fixed and unhelpful camera, and the new content wasn't compelling enough to justify its initial cost. The third game Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Fortune/Venus (depending on its console) fared even worse as it took the meager plot out entirely, and simplified the gameplay further - for instance, the rather well-liked jet skiing was taken out, and one of its replacements was a simple button-input rock climbing minigame that defined low-effort.
  • The Destroy All Humans! franchise. It started off with a well-liked game set in the 1950s, followed this up with a decent game set in the 1960s, and then two games set in the 1970s, Big Willy Unleashed! and Path of the Furon, that received such bad reviews (this was mostly due to them not only being rushed to release but suffering from many signs of Obvious Beta and Flanderization of the main characters) they shot the franchise down with a seeker missile.
  • Devil May Cry:
    • Devil May Cry 2 is generally considered to be far inferior to the first game with its lousy story, bland combat, and greatly lowered difficulty level.
    • DmC: Devil May Cry is despised by fans due to its "Westernized" approach, overly simplified combat system, and Dante's new immature and unfunny characterization. The negative reaction to DmC led Capcom to shelve the reboot continuity altogether and eventually release a new game set in the original continuity, to considerable acclaim.
  • Die Hard: Vendetta actually has an In-Universe example with the "Galaxy Thief" trilogy, a movie series which Jack Frontier, The Dragon - a disgraced Hollywood actor-turned-terrorist - used to star in. The first Galaxy Thief was a success making Jack a star and leads to a sequel being greenlit, only for Galaxy Thief II to receive mediocre reviews despite making plenty of money; the studios' decision to replace Jack in Galaxy Thief III leads to Jack's Start of Darkness and eventually eventually attempting to commit a terrorist attack on Holmes Observatory at the premier of Galaxy Thief III.
  • Double Dragon:
    • The original game was a fairly innovative beat 'em up that introduced some of the conventions used in later games of the genre like two-player co-op and obtainable weapons, while the arcade version of Double Dragon II was mostly a Mission-Pack Sequel with a fairly improved NES version. Double Dragon III on the other hand, featured crappier "realistic" graphics, replaced half of the original game's moves and weapons with ineffectual new ones, and added a gimmicky shopping system where you can purchase power-ups for your character (including a replacement character) by inserting more tokens to the machine. There were a few more Double Dragon games after the third one, but the series never achieved the same level of popularity it once had with the first two games.
    • On home consoles, the NES edition of Double Dragon III is still seen as a very good game despite its absurdly high difficulty. The series didn't really go downhill until Super Double Dragon, which was rushed out to store shelves as an Obvious Beta. Then came the dismal Double Dragon V which, despite being a numbered sequel, wasn't even by the original developers, threw out the beat 'em up formula and swapped it for lackluster one-on-one fighting.
  • Duke Nukem Forever, thanks to its long development that sought a worthy if not better follow-up to Duke Nukem 3D, wound up falling short instead, as the gameplay was less fun in both the addition of clunky minigames and an attempt to incorporate mechanics from all shooters that came out in the decade as Vaporware, the humor didn't work as well with its outdated references, Duke felt more like a chauvinistic, sociopathic douchebag instead of a cool badass, and the writing showcased very outdated views on race and sex.
  • While the Dynasty Warriors series has long been accused of Capcom Sequel Stagnation, even longtime defenders found it hard to say much good about 2018's Dynasty Warriors 9. One of the biggest points of contention was the new open-world map design, which failed to add anything meaningful to gameplay but made it trivial to bypass enemy soldiers to take down the commanders. Combat was also stripped down and homogenized, with the combo system being completely altered to give every character a set of attacks that only differ aesthetically. Weapon diversity was similarly butchered, ostensibly in the name of realism; more cynical individuals posit that the actual reason was to sell DLC weapon packs later on.
  • Earnest Evans isn't so well regarded as El Viento, in part due to poor gameplay and design and most infamously, poorly done graphics, especially on the titular hero, who is made up of multiple sprites put together to create the illusion of more fluid movement, but only succeeded in making Earnest look like a deranged marionette. The cutscenes in Earnest Evans are commonly poorly done, though they were removed completely from the American version, which tried to make it a sequel rather than a prequel to El Viento. The Earnest Evans trilogy ended with the Japan-only title Annet Futatabi, a Golden Axe ripoff whose most outstanding points were cutscenes and copious Fake Difficulty.
  • Earthworm Jim was a weird and well-received game. The second game was even better in nearly every aspect. Then the series changed developers, and anything resembling quality went out the window. Then Shiny Entertainment themselves threw their own quality off their windows some time after dumping Jim.
  • Epic Mickey was an average game at worst, suffering mostly from Camera Screw, janky controls, and not living up to the (admittedly impressive) hype. Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two took all the problems the original had and left them unchanged (if anything, they got worse), and added co-op play with a broken AI, grating voices and song sections, and boring puzzles. The resulting game collapsed with a quarter of the original's sales and took its developer with it.
  • The first two episodes of Eye of the Beholder, while not revolutionary, were excellent dungeon crawlers and the second is recognized as an Even Better Sequel. Then Westwood went on to work on Lands of Lore, but SSI decided to make another sequel anyway. The result was a game that brought back many of the flaws of the original and amplified them, with absurd mazes and frustrating difficulty, and suffered from poor programming too.
  • Fallout 76: In what seems to be a trend for Fallout spinoffs, the game is generally considered by gamers and critics to be the worst game in the series since Bethesda bought the franchise. Dated visuals, buggy gameplay, an outdated engine, the absence of a story and human NPCs, and insipid and asinine gameplay all add up to a game that has been savaged by review outlets and fans alike. The result is a game that seemingly pleases no one. It's worth noting that many fans and critics agree that the idea of a multiplayer Fallout game is a great one, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
  • While there's a lot of flame wars out there about whether and which Final Fantasy this applies to, there are two prominent examples largely agreed upon, however:
    • The first release of Final Fantasy XIV was universally considered to be subpar upon release. The reception for the game was so bad that many of the staff working on it were laid off, and Square Enix had to make the game free to play in order to keep fans around. Because of this, the game underwent a complete overhaul in order to fix the many problems that were addressed by reviewers. It paid off, and Final Fantasy XIV became known as one of the best MMOs on the market.
    • While not a direct sequel, Final Fantasy All the Bravest was poorly received by critics and fans alike due to its shallow gameplay and lack of story, consisting of little more than watching sprites fight sprites while being hounded by Freemium Timers and predatory microtransactions. The game scored an infamous 25/100 on Metacritic, the lowest of the franchise.
  • The first two FlatOut games were well-known for their destructible environments and ragdoll driver physics — the most amusing parts being the mini-games that involved the player launching their driver out of his car into various targets and watching him flop around in pain. Five years separated the second and third games, and development was taken up by Team 6 Games (of European Street Racer infamy) while Bugbear Interactive worked on Ridge Racer: Unbounded. Unfortunately, Team 6's FlatOut game looks ugly, is riddled with bugs, and none of the tracks are fun to navigate. That said, a fourth game has since come out and while it's not as good as the original two, it's at least an improvement over the third one.
  • When Activision took over the Guitar Hero franchise from Red Octane, they released a ton of sequels in a very short time. While the quality of the sequels varies, the constant stagnation between those games choked the life out of the genre for several years.
  • Harry Potter: The first two games are seen as fun and enjoyable games that while not great, avert a lot of the issues that plague movie licensed games of the era. The third is also well-liked but not to quite to the extent of the first two. However, starting with the fourth, most people feel that Electronic Arts got lazy with the license and just started cranking out subpar releases that are more in line with the quality that you'd expect for licensed movie games. The 7th and 8th games, in particular, are more or less considered unplayable.
  • Surprisingly, the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA series has managed to largely avert this despite the existence of ten main series games, two spinoff series with four games between them, two arcade installments, and two mobile game installments. The only real stumble the series has experienced was with the 10th main series title, Project DIVA X, which is considered a significant downgrade to the highly-acclaimed F subseries due to recycling a lot of questionable design choices from the very first game that 2nd fixed, such as a Randomly Drops acquisition system, none of the short story videos that made the series iconic, and an incredibly small tracklist. In addition, it suffers from Sequel Difficulty Drop and a "story" that was very hyped up in trailers but ultimately boils down to an Excuse Plot. Fortunately, Project Diva Future Tone came shortly afterwards, which is considered the best in the series due to its massive song list and difficulty.
  • The Hex has this as an In-Universe plot point. The game Super Weasel Kid was a platforming classic, regarded fondly by players and made by a young prodigy. The Totally Radical sequel Super Weasel Kid: Radical Road recieved harsher criticism by people believing it not to be as good as the original. The final nail in the coffin was the third installment, Super Weasel Kid '09: Super Redux, an Obvious Beta with missing textures and buggy enemies. This game wasn't made by the developer Lionel, but rather a game company he sold SWK's rights to. Fans disparaged it.
    Review: Worst Super Weasel Kid game ever. WTF GameFuna. WTF Lionel. ***.
  • Homeworld averted this, barely, with 'standalone expansion' Cataclysm, despite it being a literal Mission-Pack Sequel. It caught some flak for the dramatic shift in narrative tone and the new tech and ship designs were a bit hit-or-miss, but it did some pretty cool stuff with the existing graphics engine and generally came across like the development team at sub-contractee Barking Dog had at least played the original. Homeworld 2 was a bit less fortunate, however; a lot of the original creative team had moved on in the interim, and Relic massively over-extended themselves trying to create game environments with 'megastructures' straight out of the best kind of Space Opera and generally go Serial Escalation, and much of the more awesome stuff failed to make the final cut. The end result was by no means bad -the graphics stand up quite well six years later and it's a lot more mod-friendly than the previous two- but the finished product had several minor but annoying bugs and balance issues and generally felt rushed. The gulf between Relic's original vision and the final release version didn't help.
  • For being such a guilty pleasure, HuniePop still had a rock-solid puzzle gameplay and a nice animesque visual style. When the pseudo-sequel HunieCam Studio came out, many disliked how it ditched all of its most popular features. The puzzle/Dating Sim hybrid was substituted by a shallow and repetitive Tycoon-style management game, the animesque style replaced by a more cartoony "Western" style that clashed with the game's erotic themes and, while the offensive humor abounded and in some cases was turned Up to Eleven, the actual explicit content was reduced to a minimum. The girls received little to no characterization outside of the fetishes they embody, unlike the previous game. And, all in all, HCS is really not that different from the browser and Facebook games it's meant to parody. Thankfully, the actual sequel was much closer to the predecessor.
  • Initial D Arcade Stage started to suffer from this after Ver. 3, not necessarily because of game quality, but because the game changes way too much with each new game in a series where the player can transfer their personal data from one installment to the next, and as a result playing a new version is like relearning how to walk in an adult body.
  • While many that consider themselves a part of The King of Fighters fandom will hotly debate which game is the best of them all, it is agreed upon that the following two are not up to snuff with the rest:
  • The first game in the Kunio-kun series was localised for western audiences as Renegade (1986) and considered to be a fine Beat 'em Up, enough so that Ocean Software made their own separate sequels to it. The first sequel, Target: Renegade, combining the original game with cues from the then-nascent Double Dragon franchise was also well received and considered a worthy sequel. The third game, Renegade III: The Final Chapter, with its Denser and Wackier premise, cutting several features (including Target: Renegade's multiplayer), and low-quality graphics, received a very poor reception, was widely considered to be an In Name Only entry in the series, and ended up prophetically being a Franchise Killer — no new Renegade games were released after it.
  • Nearly any Lemmings game after Lemmings 2: The Tribes, as that set a bar so high that they felt more akin to boiled down versions of the latter rather than trying to innovate further.
  • LEGO Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge is somewhere between this and Contested Sequel. It was beyond rushed to the shelves, and the final product a very extreme case of Loads and Loads of Loading, dull and lifeless voice acting, painfully linear gameplay, no replay factor, a removal of a lot of characters, little explanation to anything, and mediocre animation.
  • The LEGO Adaptation Game suffered from this on occasion, be it for installments like LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars or LEGO The Hobbit, that continued on already used franchise without enough novelty to make it worthy, or others like LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean, which were using the exact same gameplay and simply applying it to different licensed themes, consisting of levels loosely based on scenes from the original work (with cutscenes that are just cheesy re-enactments with no dialogue) and some hanging out in a notable location from the respective franchise in between. Tellingly, the ones based on DC and Marvel fared better because while the characters were existing ones, the stories were wholly original.
  • Madden NFL and similar sport game series are notorious for being continued every year, usually with next to no changes in gameplay or even graphics. The main difference is updated statistics and players. EA bought an exclusive license from NFL and, while they don't own the rights to football and football games, EA has the exclusive rights to a huge number of real teams, players, and stadiums, giving them a monopoly on mainstream football games.
  • Manhunt was a well-received game for its creepy tension, innovative use of sound, complex enemy AI, and wide variety of kill moves. Manhunt 2 was a step back from that, with less intelligent enemies, less menace and tension, and a confusing story. At least the gorn is still good — or at least it was until Rockstar was forced to censor it to avoid an AO rating since none of the major console manufacturers allow AO-rated games on their systems.
  • Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games: Reception for the games that followed on the Wii releases has been increasingly negative. Sochi 2014 was criticized for recycling the majority of Vancouver 2010's events and having a less engaging single-player, while Rio 2016 was bashed for having the least amount of minigames out of all entries up to that point. Though Tokyo 2020 fared a little better critically, it's still considered lackluster due to the bare-bones Story Mode and the lack of Dream Events.
  • The Marvel vs. Capcom series is widely agreed to have peaked at Marvel vs. Capcom 2, with Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and its Ultimate edition, while praised for its fidelity to the comics and having a wide range of franchises represented as opposed to Street Fighter and X-Men composing most of the roster as in 2, facing criticism over X-Factor and switch to 3D graphics. While Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite's gameplay was applauded, it quickly became infamous for poor attempts at realistic graphics, a ham-fisted story, a lacklustre roster missing a significant amount of series mainstays (especially on the Marvel side), and numerous instances of Executive Meddling.
  • Opinion differs on whether Master of Orion or Master of Orion II is the better game, but almost no one thinks Master of Orion III is anything but unmitigated crap.
  • BIONICLE's Mata Nui Online Game is a rough around the edges, hastily made and not too challenging, but charming Point-and-Click Game that many fans consider the franchise's best piece of media for its memorable characters, commendable writing, great world establishment, and fantastic atmosphere. Mata Nui Online Game II is a step up in technical terms, it looks more polished and the gameplay is a lot more involved, but has none of the original's story element and likable characters. Grinding is a massive chore, the bartering system is tedious, world-building is replaced with walls of exposition that read like religious mantra, and the ending is unfulfilling: you don't get to play the championship you trained hours for, because LEGO forced the developers to tie the game into their then-upcoming animated film. It is also unplayable without fan patches thanks to Lego losing some gamefiles. The Voya Nui Online Game, a Role-Playing Game unrelated to the previous two in all but name and a few characters, is either an improvement for being more fun or even worse for being more tedious in its later parts and not being canon to the franchise's story.
  • Mega Man X7 is generally considered the worst mainline installment in not just the Mega Man X series but the entire Mega Man franchise due to its terrible gameplay in the 3D stages, awful English voice acting, and Axl being a whiny Replacement Scrappy to X who hogs the limelight. The next game thankfully improved matters by removing most of the 3D stages (aside of two vehicle levels, X8 was almost entirely 2½D) and making Axl more tolerable in terms of both gameplay and personality, but X7 did significant damage to the series' sales and reputation — there have been no new X games since 2006's Maverick Hunter X (save for DiVE, a Crisis Crossover of questionable canonicity, in 2020).
  • The NASCAR games from the same publisher (EA Sports) and developer (EA Tiburon) as Madden suffered a particularly bad case of this, with sales dropping off with each increasingly sub-mediocre entry. The series was eventually killed outright after having a particularly awful faceplant onto seventh generation consoles.
  • The first three games in Sony's NFL GameDay series (especially GameDay '98) were highly innovative in both their realism and gameplay; one reviewer predicted that GameDay would displace EA's well-established Madden NFL franchise. In fact, the opposite occurred; Madden grew more sophisticated over time, while subsequent GameDay installments were criticized for having mediocre graphics and uninspired gameplay. Gamers evidently agreed as sales declined until Sony cancelled the series in 2005.
  • Some fans of the Need for Speed series argue the series got really bad after the third or so installment, especially when it started drifting into GTA territory.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 is seen as an unspectacular WRPG. Mask of the Betrayer, its expansion, is seen as one of the best-written games out there and usually gets compared favorably to Planescape: Torment (it was made by many of the same people). The second expansion, Storm of Zehir, ditched the story-driven aspects (possibly because of Mask being a Tough Act to Follow) in favor of an open-world retro dungeon-crawler in the style of Icewind Dale. Though it's not considered bad by the standards of retro dungeon-crawlers, including one of the best applications of the skill system, it's nowhere near as well-regarded as its predecessors.
  • NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams is widely considered inferior to the original, partially due to being spearheaded by Takashi Iisuka, instead of Yuji Naka & Naoto Oshima, creators of the original title and partially due to averting the minimalist aspects of the first game along with gameplay changes.
  • Ninja Gaiden III was a major departure from what made the first two Xbox/PS3 entries memorable, stripping Ryu of most of his arsenalnote  and nerfing the previous games' punishing difficulty to the point that battles are no longer challenging or fun.
  • After the release of Painkiller and its expansion pack, developer People Can Fly moved on to greener pastures and the publisher hired a revolving door of developers to produce a slew of sequels, which were generally buggy and suffered from amateurish graphics and game design (one of them, Overdose, started as a Game Mod before being upgraded to a full-blown retail game). The last game in the series, Hell & Damnation fared slightly better due to being a remake of the first installment with some of the original developers on board, but even then it faced harsh criticism for its decision to withhold levels that were in the base game and make them paid DLC.
  • Perfect Dark is considered one of the best Nintendo 64 games. Prequelitis ensued with Perfect Dark Zero, you can essentially call it an In Name Only prequel. The continuity of the first game is only glanced upon, Joanna is a spunky, oddly-clad girl with red hair and a penchant for one liners. The Carrington Institute makes an appearance... with Carrington himself having become 200% more Scottish, complete with a kilt, and Jonathan sounding and acting like he's 15. The aliens are non-existent and only hinted in one cutscene, the main antagonist being a company connected to dataDyne being run by a small stereotypical Chinese man. The gameplay? The game was developed by a different team (because the original developers left Rare), which speaks for itself; it plays more like Gears of War or Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter than a follow-up to the original Perfect Dark.
  • Planet Puzzle League is generally disliked by longtime fans of the series for having slower, floatier mechanics than previous games, cutting out popular features from previous games such as 3D mode and four-player multiplayer while adding very little in return, and most notoriously almost completely removing the mascot characters, excising the story in the process, in favor of a bland, generic "techno" motif. The only trace of the franchise's roots is Lip's stage as an unlockable - and the Western releases didn't even get that much!
  • In spite of being the most story-driven of the Puyo Puyo series, Yon and 7 are often seen as this due to their usage of Scrappy Mechanics.
    • For Yon, the pacing was noticeably slowed down from Tsu's pacing, from the base gravity speed to the time it takes for Puyo to split when placed on uneven piles. It also attempted to introduce special abilities for each character, but it falls flat due to the lack of competitive balance and potential for dragging out matches. The issues are absent in the Pocket version, but the console's flaws are often brought to the forefront.
    • 7 attempted to bring a twist to the "Fever" mode introduced in the Fever games by introducing "Transformation", which would eventually be split and called "Giant Puyo Rush" and "Tiny Puyo Rush" in later installments. On paper, it does bring a fresh take on an already-established mode, but in practice, the balance is absolutely busted. Giant mode in particular attempts to balance itself by having short chains caused by a smaller field and being lower on the chaining power curve, but with how easy it is to perform an All Clear, it's possible to cap out the timer, allowing the player to chain at leisure while sending copious amounts of garbage in bursts. Oh, and its chain is cumulative until it goes without popping Puyo for long enough, unlike Tiny mode which resets chain setups like standard Fever mode.
  • Resident Evil:
    • The series was heading this way starting with the third game which re-hashed the second game only giving more emphasis on the Raccoon City outbreak. Resident Evil – Code: Veronica (the technical fourth game) hardly added anything new to the formula save some improved camera angles. The remake of the first game picked up some interest but that fell with Resident Evil 0 which coasted by on a gimmick that let you switch between the two characters. After a few side games (Survivor, Gaiden, Dead Aim, the Outbreak games), the series did an overhaul with Resident Evil 4 which was praised as one of the better games. Then part five came and it was considered more of the same only with co-op added. The less said about Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City the better, though this was mitigated to a degree by Resident Evil: Revelations, which was seen as a decent attempt to bring the series more in line with its Survival Horror roots.
    • Resident Evil 6 received an overall mixed reception compared to previous installments, with most of the professional reviews being extremely polarized as really positive or really negative. This critical schism (and RE6 falling short of Capcom's sales expectations despite the game selling close to 5 million copies in less than a yearnote ) led to the series Revisiting the Roots for its next several installments (Revelations 2, RE7, remakes of RE2, RE3, and RE4, Village), with 7, the remakes, and Village managing to Win Back the Crowd — though the ill-received Umbrella Corps (another multiplayer-focused tactical shooter in the vein of ORC) was also released during this period, and the third game's remake was seen in a less favorable light compared to the ones before and after.
  • The general fate of the RollerCoaster Tycoon series. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 is generally still well-regarded, but gets some accusations of being an unambitious Mission-Pack Sequel with less creative scenarios. 3 switched developers to Frontier Developments, and while it was eventually Vindicated by History, it was a somewhat buggy Contested Sequel at launch and spawned many arguments. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3D, released eight years later as a 3DS exclusive, did not split fans, being viewed as excessively limited even taking the handheld's limitations into account and bogged down by constant tutorials. 4 is viewed as a straight-up bad game for being "free", and as such being the perfect embodiment of all the things people hate about the freemium business model. Atari tried to Win Back the Crowd with World, but it flopped with unimpressive reviews due to being even buggier than 3. RollerCoaster Tycoon Touch was better received than 4 (not like that was hard), though still not viewed as much better than So Okay, It's Average; it was followed up by the low-effort Switch/PC port RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures, which had an investment strategy handled so poorly and so bizarrely that some suspect it may have been part of a tax write-off scheme. Even these games' defenders have nothing nice to say about RollerCoaster Tycoon Story, an In Name Only mobile Match-Three Game that was universally panned as a cheap cash grab and had fans clamoring for Atari to either sell the IP or put it out of its misery already.
  • The Shining Series really was the fantasy series in the Sega Genesis era topping off with an amazing if little-known three-part finale on the Sega Saturn. Attempts to branch off into the action-adventure genre have varied between mediocre-but-passable (SF Neo, SF EXA, Shining Soul II) to forgettable (Shining Tears, the original Shining Soul). Atlus and Sega did a competent job with the Game Boy Advance Enhanced Remake of the first Shining Force. Fans have been waiting for years to see if a remake of Shining Force II will surface, but it's looking increasingly unlikely every day.
  • Silent Hill:
  • SimCity already faultered with SimCity Societies, which tried to put a new focus on social development but the community found it disappointingly easy and shallow, while its 3D engine was prone to grinding even hulking great PCs to a halt at higher zoom levels. And then SimCity (2013) was an outright disaster, specially as upon launch the very controversial decision to make the game always online led to the servers becoming so overloaded that getting into the game was nearly impossible, and thus the game was effectively unplayable for anyone who bought it on day one. And that's not counting unpopular changes to the core mechanics (an expansive, sandbox single player game became an always on multiplayer game with heavy restrictions on the size of a city) and some ambitious ideas that wound up not working in the game itself (the inhabitants of the city having their own lives, the agent system that was supposed to handle resource distribution). Even if EA did their best to fix the bad first impression, including creating an offline single player, the fanbase eventually migrated to Cities: Skylines, and along with The Sims 4 coming out severely lacking content, it spelled a death knell to Maxis, as well as for the series aside from the mobile version SimCity BuildIt.
  • SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS, despite its much wider variety of playable cards compared to its two Neo Geo Color Pocket predecessors, is commonly perceived as having a weaker and more easy-to-break battle system. First-run English copies also contained an unavoidable Game-Breaking Bug that prevented completion of the New Game Plus.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • The first four titles on the Sega Genesis (as well as the obscure installment for the Sega CD add-on) were highly praised at the time of their release, and are still largely considered the best titles in the series. The series was largely out of the limelight during the Sega Saturn era, with Sonic Team pursuing different projects and Sega making new Sonic games without them to little success (with the cancellation of Sonic X-treme, what would had been the Video Game 3D Leap for the series, being the most notorious example of this).
    • The franchise eventually made its 3D leap (with questionable results) through the Sonic Adventure series on the Sega Dreamcast. While they are regarded as good games (particularly the sequel) they are widely considered to be a step down from the classics, due to various bugs and glitches, a poor camera, and the contentious alternate playstyles. From there, the series continued its first decline, with Sonic Heroes being considered to be average, the Shadow the Hedgehog spinoff being mostly panned, and the series hitting its low point with Sonic 2006, a rushed, glitch-ridden mess that is near-universally despised by gamers and critics alike. The trend initially started to reverse with Sonic Unleashed, with the subsequent console versions of Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations being lauded by fans as the best 3D titles in the franchise; only for another decline to occur with Sonic Lost World seriously dividing reviewers and fans alike, the Sonic Boom spinoff games being outright duds, and Sonic Forces considered an unremarkable disappointment. (With that said, the retraux side-game Sonic Mania, developed by a different team, received widespread praise as the best Sonic game in years, indicating that there may still be some hope for the Blue Blur as of yet.)
    • Sonic the Hedgehog 4 compared to its direct predecessors (the aforementioned Genesis titles), upon which its two episodes are considered anything but worthy follow-ups. The main points of contention are the gameplay and controls being virtually nothing like the original games, while the game at the same time heavily recycled content from its predecessors as opposed to bringing new material to the table.
  • The Soul series got hit with this pretty hard in The New '10s. Soul Edge was a respectable 3D fighter, though it wound up being overshadowed by its sister series and then displaced by its sequel Soulcalibur, which became a major Killer App for the Sega Dreamcast. Soulcalibur II continued to improve upon its predecessor's refinements and is considered one of the best fighting games of all time. The third and fourth Calibur games aren't bad, but couldn't match the standards set by II. Then came Soulcalibur V, which was full of balancing issues and a number of changes to the story that were met with a lot of derision from the fanbase. Major League Gaming, the crowd that V was meant to appeal to, rejected it outright. Then, the series shifted focus with Soulcalibur: Unbreakable Soul and Soulcalibur: Lost Swords, which got even more backlash from the inclusion of microtransactions and online DRM, respectively. note  Couple that with all three of those titles coming out in a twelve-month period, and for a long time, the subsequent fall from grace had left the fate of the series up in the air. Subverted with Soulcalibur VI, which fortunately managed to reverse the downwards spiral and won acclaim from critics and fans alike.
  • The Spider-Man: The Movie games demonstrated much the same path as the movies: the first one is good, the second is awesome, then things go a bit downhill. Fortunately, Web of Shadows was there to fix matters after the rather polarizing Friend or Foe.
  • Being a remake of a game that was a meta-commentary about video game narratives, a lot of the new content in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe naturally centers around Sequelitis and sequels in general.
  • Star Control was a fun turn-based strategy game. Star Control 2 was an epic action-adventure Even Better Sequel. Star Control 3, made by none of the people involved with the first two, is a game most fans try to forget about.
  • The general consensus of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is that while the original game's controller was bulky and gimmicky, at least it worked. Heavy Armor's hybrid Kinect/traditional controller setup was meant to mimic this feeling without the use of as many buttons, but the implementation is sloppy and the game is barely playable as a result.
  • Street Fighter X Tekken, despite a lot of early excitement among the fighting game community, never caught on as well as Capcom's previous Intercontinuity Crossover games did (with the exception of Capcom Fighting Evolution, which is perceived to be just as bad), mainly due to its slower pacing and gimmicky "Gem" system that granted temporary status buffs. The decision to lock most of SFxT's content behind a paywall (most infamously including a dozen fighters that were coded into the game discs at launch, but not officially added to the roster until months after the game's release) drew even heavier criticism, along with derisive jokes about future Capcom games shipping with disc-locked DLC.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • The New Super Mario Bros. series. While they all received a generally great critical reception and were huge commercial successes for Nintendo, the sequels (particularly the latter two) have also fallen under criticism for not bringing much to the table. The biggest point of contention are the games' static presentation, with the games reusing the same music and level tropes (as well as the same sequence order of level tropes), and all having a similar artstyle (though the fourth game, New Super Mario Bros. U, is generally credited to have at least significantly tweaked the aesthetics and level tropes, along other additions). The third game in particular, New Super Mario Bros. 2, is usually considered the weakest entry in the series, due to the only real major addition to the formula being a coin-collection gimmick.note 
    • The Mario Party series is filled to the brim with this trope. Every sequel has had a few new gimmicks and mini-games to stand out from the game before it, but eventually, the games started to rehash older mini-games/boards/gimmicks with a slight tweak to them. Fan-favorite Donkey Kong was quickly demoted to an NPC starting with the fifth game and wouldn't return until the tenth game, with each entry having a wildly varying roster of characters. Since the party games kept being released on a near yearly basis, fans started to notice just how stale the series was getting, which may explain why Mario Party 9 came out nearly five years after 8 and revamped the basics of the game. It was poorly received by the fanbase, viewed as neither interesting nor unique. That being said, even detractors preferred the Mario Party mode it introduced over 10's Bowser Mode being weighed heavily in Bowser's favor, to the point where it's almost impossible for the other players to win. The handheld titles, on the other hand, were largely exempt from the scorn the home console installments received, with Mario Party DS generally being seen as legitimately good. However, it wouldn't be until Super Mario Party was released on the Nintendo Switch that a Mario Party installment would be generally warmly received by the fanbase, and Mario Party Superstars was seen by and large as a true return to form.
    • The Paper Mario games have this. The second is usually considered superior to the original and is seen as the high point of the series. Super Paper Mario is generally agreed to be a step down in gameplay, but it's said to have the best story out of all the games. Paper Mario: Sticker Star, however, is considered to be a complete step down in both story and gameplay by revamping combat and making battles redundant. Paper Mario: Color Splash and Paper Mario: The Origami King are polarizing, but the general consensus is that they're at least much better than Sticker Star, particularly the latter.
    • A Super Mario World hack series, Super Sig World, has, as of 2023, thirty-nine installments, mostly released in a span of two or three years. They're considered terrible, with the best ones being merely average as the amount of reused content is kind of staggering. Just making a 70-level game every three months is perceived as overkill.
    • The Mario Tennis subseries hit this trope with its Wii U installment, Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash, getting significantly worse reviews than its predecessors for its abysmal lack of content. Many of its players have noted that, in some respects, it feels more like an open beta for the significantly more abundant in content and much better-received Mario Tennis Aces.
    • Regarding the Mario vs. Donkey Kong subseries, after the third game in the series, Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! was released, a fourth game sequel was released in just a little over a year, Mini-Land Mayhem!, afterwards three more sequels were released between the 3DS and Wii U in less than three years: Minis on the Move, Tipping Stars, and amiibo Challenge. The majority of the time, these games are forgotten or ignored in terms of the subseries as a whole, and those that do have an opinion on this set of games usually consider those reactions to be pretty reasonable for Minis on the Move (which tried to be innovative) and the final game amiibo Challenge (which added many playable characters with different gimmicks), the others not so much (which were mostly the same with only minor changes to the gameplay or slapping a new mini character, even reusing the Video Game Settings and plenty of musical tracks/leitmotifs outright).
  • Sword of the Stars II got a lot of flak from the original's fans for dramatic shifts in the mechanics and unneeded extra complexity for no obvious good reason.
  • Thunder Force VI. Released over 10 years after Thunder Force V, it came to be a massive disappointment amongst fans. Very short game length (even by shmup standards), the lack of the "direct" control scheme from V, bosses that are made pathetically easy thanks to a certain ship's Limit Break, excessive Internal Homages, and stages that pale in comparison to the rest of the series; the last stage, for instance, looks like a cheap version of Thunder Force V's Stage 4.
  • Tomb Raider II was generally considered almost equal or an Even Better Sequel on release. By Chronicles, the Tomb Raider series had firmly fallen into this and The Angel of Darkness was the last straw before the series began recovering by being moved from Core Design to Crystal Dynamics. The reason the franchise fell into the trope was due to the huge success of the first Tomb Raider I. Because the game sold so well, Eidos demanded that a new Tomb Raider should be made every year. This caused a big burnout with the developers and they killed off Lara at the end of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation in the hopes of ending the series and going to do something else. It didn't work.
  • The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series started off as a unique concept to the industry and garnered hundreds of fans, with the PS2 port of the third installment being one of the most critically-acclaimed games of its time. As the series progressed through the Underground titles, however, the changes became minimal and predictable, the over-the-top tone got stale really quickly and the series declined in overall quality, with the peripheral-based RIDE and SHRED installments getting intense lashings from critics and fans alike. It didn't help that EA's Skate had stolen the market from Activision, too. Like the hip-hop examples, they tried to rekindle interest with a Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5, which was very incomplete and slammed hard by fans and critics alike. It wasn't until the release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2, a remastered compilation of the first two games for eighth-generation consoles, that the franchise truly regained its magic.
  • Undertale has an in-universe example. Alphys, the geeky royal scientist, spends a great deal of her social media posts ranting about how terrible Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2 (a parody of Tokyo Mew Mew à la Mode) is compared to the original. One of the signs that things are very different in Deltarune is that she considers 2 to be a Surprisingly Improved Sequel instead.
  • X-COM: UFO Defense:

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