How to Title Your Stupid Sequel

[Hyakunin Isshu]

If you think FF13 is the only game that actually uses colors... You just made YouTube comments look intelligent.

Should I flag you for your rude comment?

Okay, poor choice in words. But Square Enix is the only game developer that tries to be weird, different, outrageously colorful, while most games are just 'dark' gray or brown, or just go for goofy silliness. Everyone else is going for the same old, same old sci-fi, fantasy,or modern warfare shooters, and Square is the only group that takes a chance on something weird, like, adding a car engine on a sword. Do you know any other games that would do that?

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

I thought Halo 4 was a good title for the game, as it reminded potential buyers that they would be returning to the gameplay style of Halo 3, rather than continuing the innovations introduced in Halo: Reach. If they'd decided to make a game more similar to Reach, perhaps they would have called the game Halo: Requiem, or even Halo: Infinity, which I think is the name of the Spartan Ops campaign.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

I'd rather have numbers than all that other shit because it's just confusing. If you aren't a fan of the franchise, it becomes harder to learn the order and whatnot. You might have known that Magnum Force, The Enforcer and Sudden Impact are sequels to Dirty Harry, but how the hell are people who aren't already familiar with that series of movies supposed to know that first, they're sequels, and second, what order they go in without doing extra research? At least with Halo I can tell that it goes Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4 without doing an extra research as soon as I see the titles. There's other stuff like ODST and Reach in there as well, but they have fuck all to do with Master Chief so you aren't missing out on anything by not having them immediately fit in. They're just backstory games. The numbers in the main games work fine if you consider the numbered games to be the adventures of Master Chief, regardless of if he's still working on the same threat to humanity in each game or not. Huge difference to that stupid shit Assassin's Creed did:

Assassin's Creed - Main Story
Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles - Backstory
Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines - Backstory
Assassin's Creed II - Main Story
Assassin's Creed II: Discovery - Backstory
Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy - Completely Unimportant
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - Main Story
Assassin's Creed: Revelations - Main Story
Assassin's Creed III - Main Story
Assassin's Creed III: Liberation - Completely Unimportant

How the fuck are you supposed to tell the important games from the backstory and the completely pointless bullshit at a glance? There are non-numbered games that are important parts of the plot, non-numbered games that are just backstory, and non-numbers games that contribute fuck all to the story being told in the rest of the franchise. You would, again, need to look that up, like I just had to on Wikipedia to sort all that bullshit out. Basically, the problem is that Assassin's Creed 3 isn't Assassin's Creed 3, it's Assassin's Creed 5. Brotherhood is 3 and Revelations is 4, because if you don't play them you'll be missing important parts of 5.

But it's even more confusing! Assassin's Creed 2 Discovery and Assassin's Creed 3 Liberation still have the numbers in, so they must be important, right? WRONG! They're the least important mother fuckers in that mess. And yet Brotherhood and Revelations have no number despite being required playing if you want to know what's going on? So stupid. They could have at LEAST done this:

Assassin's Creed
Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles
Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines
Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed: Discovery
Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy
Assassin's Creed II: Brotherhood
Assassin's Creed II: Revelations
Assassin's Creed III
Assassin's Creed: Liberation

That way all the important games still carry a number that signifies they are part of the main story that you NEED to play in order to understand what's going on, and the completely unimportant games have no number so they don't look important when they aren't. Obviously, the easiest thing would have still been this, though:

Assassin's Creed
Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles
Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines
Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed: Discovery
Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy
Assassin's Creed III
Assassin's Creed IV
Assassin's Creed V
Assassin's Creed: Liberation

Creative, no, but at least you can tell what the important games are and what order they go in without having to run off to Wikipedia to look it all up.

Ugh. It's like how he complains about how games should have more colors to them, then totally insults FFXIII (see mind jack) for looking "S***" because it's the only game that actually uses colors.

If you think FF13 is the only game that actually uses colors... You just made YouTube comments look intelligent.

This right here is why I stopped caring about Assassin's Creed. And now I know that there are way more unimportant garbage games in the series than I have even been able to keep track of. The sad thing is that I really like a lot of the game play, but hate the story and characters. This unfortunately means that any new IP that comes out that attempts to present similar gameplay but without the horribly mangled and unimportant story will be met with Ubisofts legal team instead of being praised as succeeding where Ubisoft has failed.

Captcha: Carbon-Copy (creepy)

 

[II2]

Good read.

One thought on game sequel naming, as opposed to other media, is in it's association with computer software does lend to game.exe v2.0

I guess that's kinda an old outlook, but it is relevant as far as the incremental mechanical additions and improvements (assuming they ARE improvements), perticularly to games like Halo, Mario, CoD, whatever.

That said, there's no accounting for narrative in that angle, which is really the fleshy context and body of presentation around the bones of gameplay. Also the main contention of the article.

 

[FoolKiller]

Well, then there's Criterion, naming their first NFS just Hot Pursuit while there was already a Hot Pursuit and Hot Pursuit 2. And then they reboot Most Wanted. For chrissake! It was out in 2005... oh, wait, now I feel old. Damn!

Unfortunately, you've only gotten the silver medal for finding naming idiocy. I win the gold. While it may be confusing that Most Wanted 2005 and 2012 are both titled the same thing in the same gen, EA Sports takes the big victory in stupidity.

This gen there are two FIFA Street games on the Xbox 360:
FIFA Street and FIFA Street 3

Where's part 2 you ask?
It's on the previous gen of consoles. They decided to reboot the series halfway through the gen. so if you go to a store and find FIFA Street and FIFA Street 3, the older game is 3. What the ...

Damned EA.

PS. While I've always been an advocate of creative naming without numbers, it does get harder to keep track of where any title is in the order of things. This is why people refer to things like Gabriel Knight 3. The numbers are for the file systems in our heads.

 

[TheomanZero]

Another benefit to not using numbers is avoiding region-inconsistent numbering. The most famous example of this is Final Fantasy (where, until recently, Japanese IV was American II and Japanese VI was American III -- to this day, when someone says "Final Fantasy III", it's still not immediately clear which game they're talking about), but it also applies to the Clock Tower and King's Field series.

In both of those cases, the first game was not released outside of Japan, but the second game and onward were. So the game called "King's Field" in America is the game called "King's Field II" in Japan, different from both the game called "King's Field" in Japan (which was not released in America) and the game called "King's Field II" in America (which is called "King's Field III" in Japan). The Clock Tower series has a similar situation, and if each game had its own title then nothing would have needed to be changed and we could have avoided all this confusion.

 

[phlip]

For whatever reason, when this article is still loading, and most of the assets are missing, for a few seconds (for me at least) it looks like this [http://www.mrphlip.com/tmp/haloading.png]. At first I thought that that was in fact the entire article as intended by Yahtzee, and my response was pretty much "Yeah, that sounds right".

 

[bafrali]

Wish we had that reboot=death penalty thing in real life. It would be a cleansing i would look forward to anyway.

As for the names, subtitles would have helped with distinguishing sequals from each other.

Half Life 2: Aftermath would stand out more among its bigger brothers if it hadn't been named Episode 1.

are you sure you want to establish some nazi regime kind of rulebook regarding game developement?


go and play black mesa and rethink your "genius" idea.

not all reboots and remakes are bad.

I played and it is was awesome. But it was a free fan remake made with love, not a cynical attempt at rebooting a franchise and messing it up to "broaden the audience".

No i do't think anyone should be killed but i do think that reboots should be banned.

 

[maninahat]

Don't forget The Dead Pool is also a Dirty Harry sequel.

Who could? That's the one where he shoots a guy with a colossal harpoon gun. No one could forget that.

 

[jmarquiso]

Bravo, Yahtzee. But how then do we classify the Final Fantasy series, which has numbered sequels that have buttfuck all to do with each other?

Despite the numbers, that's sort of a James Bond or Halo thing as well. I prefer to think that Final Fantasy is actually the story of Cid (just as the Star Wars movies is the story of two droids, or Mass Effect is the story of weird gravity powers).

 

[jmarquiso]

Don't forget The Dead Pool is also a Dirty Harry sequel.

Who could? That's the one where he shoots a guy with a colossal harpoon gun. No one could forget that.

And Jim Carrey as Axel Rose.

 

[jmarquiso]

For whatever reason, when this article is still loading, and most of the assets are missing, for a few seconds (for me at least) it looks like this [http://www.mrphlip.com/tmp/haloading.png]. At first I thought that that was in fact the entire article as intended by Yahtzee, and my response was pretty much "Yeah, that sounds right".

That's hilarious. You must post this EVERYWHERE.

 

[jmarquiso]

My personal hated "sequel" title - X-Men Origins: Wolverine, who's sequel is called "The Wolverine"

Mainly cause marketing people don't know how to do spin-off franchises, as it seems to be a relatively new-ish thing, sorta.

What are we going to do for the Bourne sequels, now that there's Bourne Legacy (which has no Bourne in it?), Bourne Legacy 2: The Bourne Reckoning?

 

[Shodan666]

I think the elder scrolls series does naming ok. Underneath the game is named the elder scrolls I,II,III etc. But it is advertised as, Morrowind, oblivion, skyrim and so on

 

[CardinalPiggles]

This article could be summed up with 'Back in my day'.

I agree of course with most of it, even if I'm not totally familiar with most pop culture before the 2000's.

Although I can't say it bothers me really.

 

[Vohn_exel]

This was great! I really enjoyed it...but trust me as someone who actually still likes some of the Sonic games: No, you wouldn't want to play Sonic 2006.

 

[Kahani]

After playing Dragon Age: Origins, I was really looking forward to playing the original Dragon Age. Then they managed to take things to the next level with Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening. Just thank god Activision didn't go the same way with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 3: Black Ops 2.

 

[Bindal]

Halo 4 is a confusing title numerically as well, as it is the sixth fps in the series. Seventh game, if you count Halo Wars.

Well, it is the fourth game with the Master Chief, if you count "Combat Evolved" and "Combat Evolved Anniversarry" as the same game (as the latter is just a remake) while ODST, Reach and Wars were Spin-Offs starring other characters. So, if you see it that way, Halo 4 is a very justified name. Granted, they COULD have named it something different (as it's a new trilogy entirely) like "Halo: Prometheans" and the two sequels "Halo: Prometheans 2" and "Halo: Prometheans 3", respectively. But they decided not to and called it simply Halo 4. No Subtitle-nonsense, just a plain number.

And yes, it is a sequel - so having SOME knowledge of the previous game is kind of expected. Which Yathzee didn't have because he didn't bother to pay much attention to the story from what I could gather from any of the previous Halo Reviews. Your fault, pal, don't blame the game for it.