Poll: MGS4 is a bad example of a sequel.

[SyphonX]

It was my first MGS and now I've played all but MGS2. Granted, I don't get all of the story, but the story itself is lame. It's the gameplay and characters I like.

Bummer that you didn't get to experience the first 3D MGS on PlayStation 1. Back when it Was a Stealth Action game instead of an Action game with stealth essence. MGS3 went away from this also which is a shame because Action games are a dime a dozen.

I also couldn't stand the story either. The Metal Gear series never exactly had a realistic plot, but MGS4 was way out there and didn't hold back on anything. Like a sandwich with too much mayonnaise.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

People keep stating that "yes its a sequel so its going to be confusing, what did you expect". So that leaves a few crappy options either waste time on a game you may or may not like at all by reading up on it before hand, or rent all the previous titles and play through them? MGS as a series really is more pretentious in its convoluted storry telling than any other game ive played. I played about 45 mins of the entire series, including MGS4, and had friends fill me in on the story and i gave up on the series all together. Picking up a game in the middle of a series should definitely encourage you to pick up the earlier games, not turn you away because you havent been initiated into the fan club.

Fair enough, but that's still not a great idea. If you want to see if you like a series, wouldn't you try the first one and not the 10th one? If anything, someone playing Fallout 3 or MGS4 and then going backwards, is going to be quite disappointed. If you hate the MGS series, then you hate it, end of story - it's not because MGS4 was a "bad sequel" - you just aren't into it.

 

[Worr Monger]

To the OP:

I'm surprised you expected to be able to avoid the previous games and understand MGS4's story.

I'm sure it isolated players that are unfamiliar with the MGS series... but honestly, I highly doubt that Hideo Kojima gives a damn.

My PS3 came with MGS4... and I honestly NEVER touched an MGS game before that. But I took it upon myself to play the previous 3 because I knew that going into the 4th of the franchise would be retarded since I would obviously be lost in the story.

And this is before I knew just how complex the MGS story was.

I thought MGS4 was a great sequel, and wrapped up many things.... though it was easily the most confusing... which made it a little rough. It is also the 2nd best in terms of gameplay next to MGS3 (which I consider to be the best).

Expecting MGS4 to welcome you with open arms without playing the previous games was your mistake.... doesn't make it a bad sequel.... sequels are meant to continue a story in progress... if you miss that previous storyline... your problem IMO.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Now dont go berzerk, i only wanted to point out that the last installment of the Metal Gear series didnt do its job as a sequel.

a sequel is supposed to not only cater to hardcore fans, but draw in and engage new players as well. for me it didnt do so well. it brought so much stuff that was unexplained and assumed i knew what happened to make plot point A matter when plot point Q comes into play. for example. the girl who was in the plane with the otacon guy. who was she? i must have missed the memo. my next example is when snake goes into the base in the fourth act, the game kept trying to make it seem like this was important, but it just seemed like an abandoned base. maby another (yes, another) cut scene could have filled in the blank, or, it could have been avoided altogether with snake and otacon reminiscing about it since it seemed that they were all together in whatever went on there.

my point is that instead of making a game that would draw in new blood and keep the old hands, they made MGS4 a game that is so inaccessible to new players that i cannot honestly recommend it to people who have not played the previous games.

im getting a bit off topic. i used MGS as an example of how a sequel shouldnt be. but good examples of sequels are Fallout 3, Oblivion, and in the movie world, The Empire Strikes back.


please refrain from making this a big "oh, lets defend MGS" thread, i simply used it as an example. feel free to post your own thoughts on what makes a bad sequel, be sure to use examples to explain it.

edit: i noticed that some people are making fun of my good sequel examples. while i would like to defend them i am not because this is not a discussion on what is a good game and what is not. i wanted this to be a discussion on what makes a bad sequel.

Did... Did you even play the first god damned game? That old base is the entirety of the first Metal Gear Solid! Why the hell should they explain that to you? YOU'RE the one deciding to pick up THE FOURTH GAME IN and deciding it doesn't explain itself.
Dude, use your brain. Sequels are made to continue a story, not tell you the first story all over again.

You sum it up better than I ever could.

And anyway, you should have played the previous ones. Not just to understand MGS4, you should have played them. They're awesome. Truly.

 

[TheGreenManalishi]

Bummer that you didn't get to experience the first 3D MGS on PlayStation 1. Back when it Was a Stealth Action game instead of an Action game with stealth essence. MGS3 went away from this also which is a shame because Action games are a dime a dozen.

I think that all this 'MGS4 isn't as stealthy as MGS1' isn't true. You just have to focus on using the camera instead of the soliton radar, OctoCamo instead of boxes, etc. I find it to be just as stealth oriented, only with different stealth tactics and too many guns on the pause menu, not enough on the R2 button.

 

[PhoenixFlame]

Unfortunately, using a game as an example, whether good or bad, opens you up to being argued against on that front, because if you can't cite proper examples, ones that make sense, the credibility of your argument suffers. Your examples are fair game.

Case in point, you claim you are using MGS4 as an example, since you believe it wasn't how a sequel is supposed to be. I'd argue you could do much much worse than MGS4. Sequels to the Shinobi games of old got progressively worse. Phantasy Star 3 was an example of a game that tried to do too much and didn't go back to its roots. Of your three examples - only one, The Empire Strikes Back, is worthy of mentioning as a good sequel, and that's not even a game - it's a movie. Fallout and Oblivion are terribly episodic and are only "sequels" in the sense that they carry the name of their predecessors.

The point of sequels is not to explain the previous story - if they do that at all it is in summary. What they should do is establish good continuity from the previous title while introducing new elements. Sequels, by their very nature, are catered to "older" fans of the series, not new ones, so the argument that they are obligated to bring in new fans is also not as strong.

In short, I don't think a sequel can be properly judged as good or bad based purely on the criteria you're providing.

 

[SinisterDeath]

Now dont go berzerk, i only wanted to point out that the last installment of the Metal Gear series didnt do its job as a sequel.

a sequel is supposed to not only cater to hardcore fans, but draw in and engage new players as well. for me it didnt do so well. it brought so much stuff that was unexplained and assumed i knew what happened to make plot point A matter when plot point Q comes into play. for example. the girl who was in the plane with the otacon guy. who was she? i must have missed the memo. my next example is when snake goes into the base in the fourth act, the game kept trying to make it seem like this was important, but it just seemed like an abandoned base. maby another (yes, another) cut scene could have filled in the blank, or, it could have been avoided altogether with snake and otacon reminiscing about it since it seemed that they were all together in whatever went on there.

my point is that instead of making a game that would draw in new blood and keep the old hands, they made MGS4 a game that is so inaccessible to new players that i cannot honestly recommend it to people who have not played the previous games.

im getting a bit off topic. i used MGS as an example of how a sequel shouldnt be. but good examples of sequels are Fallout 3, Oblivion, and in the movie world, The Empire Strikes back.


please refrain from making this a big "oh, lets defend MGS" thread, i simply used it as an example. feel free to post your own thoughts on what makes a bad sequel, be sure to use examples to explain it.

edit: i noticed that some people are making fun of my good sequel examples. while i would like to defend them i am not because this is not a discussion on what is a good game and what is not. i wanted this to be a discussion on what makes a bad sequel.

edit again: look, i dont care whether MGS1 was a good game or not, it probably was, but lets leave it at that. i like to give any games that i have not played the benifit of the doubt to a certain extent. while i should probably get around to playing the first 3 MGS game, but i probably wont. because from what i played in MGS4, i wasnt impressed. it wasnt all the overly long cut scenes that frustrated me, it was the pointless stelth sections. in the beginning of the game they gave you a dart gun that you found ammo for everywhere, so i would shoot everyone i found with that and then just walk to the next room. also, you were loaded down with a bunch of useless crap and way too many guns. i got the impression going in that this was a stealth game, so why do i need a machine gun? on top of that, the controls handled awfully, if im in the open when a firefight starts, i want to sprint for cover, but it seems like snake is afraid of breaking his hip.

Sequals aren't meant to draw in new players, Sequals like MGS4, are meant for the people who have played 1-4.

Its like lord of the rings.
Lets say you read book 3.
Are you going to say, LOTR, Return of the king was a HORRIBLE Book/movie, becuase you don't know what happened in 1-2, or the hobbit? Would you rather they increase the books size, REHASHING the first 3 books!? You seriously want them to add every little detail that you would know if you read the first two books, in the last book, just because you are to damned lazy to read them yourself?

If they did sequals the way you propose, THe first book/movie/game would be 6 hours long, the 2nd would be 9, and the last would be 12. Because they 'have' to spend at least 3 hours 'rehashing' what happened in the previous game to know WTF happened.


So no, MGS4 is not a poor sequal. Its a damned good one. It ends an epic series with homages through out it to the best games in the series (1&3)...

And if you truelly played MGS4. You would know that you have access to the complete history of MGS. HELL theres a downloadable & Free 'guide' that litterally tells you WORD FOR WORD, who EVERYONE is, WHAT They did, and WHY its important. Same for locations Timelines, everything! Hell, afteryou beat the game, it'll go BEYOND the initial timeline of MGS1-3, but up to MGS4, completing the 'story' for people like 'you' who need the story 'explained' to them.

 

[slipknot4]

Shame on you, it's the best sequel ever. You have to play the previous games to understand the plot, that why it is a sequel.

 

[TheBadass]

good examples of sequels are Fallout 3, Oblivion, and in the movie world, [b/]The Empire Strikes back[/b].

So, the middle chapter of a trilogy is a good example of accessibility.

yes, because some consider it to be the best in the series and it prompted people who hadnt seen the original to go and watch it.

Metal Gear Solid 4 did that for me.

 

[Yvl9921]

To be fair, I played the previous 3 games, and still didn't know wtf was going on. Like, when did they rescue Sunny?

 

[scnj]

To be fair, I played the previous 3 games, and still didn't know wtf was going on. Like, when did they rescue Sunny?

I think Raiden promised Olga in MGS2 that he'd rescue her daughter from the Patriots, so it happened in the years between 2 and 4.

 

[Nigh Invulnerable]

I'm more of the opinion that the MGS series is a bad example of writing and storytelling. There's so much repetition of points we figured out after five minutes over the course of the whole game that I just get bored. Once they started making the cutscenes longer than the actual gameplay segments I stopped being interested in this series.

 

[Yvl9921]

But it never happened. They skipped over so much that you're going to be missing part of the story regardless of your experience with the series.

And I really don't buy the "repetitive cutscenes" argument. The longest cutscene was in the third act, and I really wasn't seeing anything besides adequate story progression there. As for other times, where you were being briefed or whatever... any stating the obvious there I saw as moving slowly so that newcomers could understand, which is exactly what this thread was supposed to be about. You're setting double standards here.