Which games killed their series?

[Bocomi]

While Final Fantasy X was definatly not the best game in the series, it isn't what started the downfall...
Sure the main character was a pussy... but big deal... they decided to take another route, it didn't really dissapoint me as long as it it didn't keep up too much through future games...
FFX-2 while as a FF game it was ballz bad... It was a really fun game as a whole... the battle system was amazing, and actually lets me tolerate crying through the storyline... perhaps the savior of the game was the fact that you could skip cutscenes...
People need to when playing X-2, look at it as a separate game experience the battle system is entirely overlooked by most players, It's Fluid, Fast, Exciting, Intuitive, Very interactive, And lots of pretty awesome things happen all the time. And while doing all of this... it brings us back to some of the battle aspects we haven't seen since ff7 and 9.
by no reason is ffx-2 that great of a game considering the storyline was horrible, but I think its largely underrated.

FF8 Sucked horribly while not killing the series due to FF9 revitalizing Square's Reputation as a respectable Game company instead of another 2nd rate JpRPG maker.

FF12 also horrible - Let's Introduce you to a main character... but then... you know... if you don't like him... you can chose another character to run around with at any time... oh, and let's make it possible to never actually play the game... let's introduce gambits so that the player never actually has to do any work,
making the Interactivity on the level of a Cheap Interactive Porn DVD

 

[Stammer]

I have a feeling that Starcraft II is going to kill the series when it comes out. It's really nothing more than an expansion pack with hardly-tuned graphics and very few additions. But what already have killed their series? Well, I don't know if you'd consider Perfect Dark to be a series with only two games, but I know PD64 was one of the best games ever invented and PD-Zero was one of the worst games on the 360 (or so I've heard, I'd never tried it). Brawl actually kind of killed the series for me. They made every level the exact same, took out all of the good Melee levels and put in the crappy ones. Though they added a lot of new stuff, the stuff that they added all sucked and it might as well have just been Melee with a few new characters. But come on? Pit? Sonic? And really, Snake? Has Metal Gear been on a Nintendo console since the first one? That'd be like adding Cloud Strife because Final Fantasy was once upon a time on the Nintendo console.

 

[Dalisclock]

Broken Sword 4 removed the annoying box puzzles.

I liked that.

What I didn't like was that it replaced them with most puzzles being a variation of the "There's a locked door in front of you. Find a way to open it" theme.

That and the whole vatican/mafia plot got on my nerves.

 

[hyperdrachen]

Sonic Adventure 1(though I enjoyed the gameplay) loaded the gun, SA2 shot sonic in the head, Sonic Team has been pissing on the grave with its 4 new character per game quota ever since. Sonic Heroes dug up and desecrated the body. Dear Sega, how about a sonic game where you play as sonic, and at the end the bad guy doest become a good guy...it wasnt even cool the first time. Ah who am i kidding, I'm actually studying programming so i can just make my own damn sonic games: )

 

[RTR]

While Tomb Raider sequels were nothing more than re-hashes of previous games, Angel of Darkness was the last nail on the coffin. With any luck, Lara Croft can pick herself up again (I think she has back problems. I'll let you think why.)

Final Fantasy XI was a bullet to FF's brain. FFXII brought it back to life. Mostly.

 

[hyperdrachen]

As far as the Final Fantasy line goes, FFX was cancer to the Final Fantasy line... More specifically I think it's when Square became Squenix that cancer was diagnosed. But X did not kill Final Fantasy. X-2 spread the cancer to the limbs and FF became a quadruple amputee, but it was XI that killed the line. Final Fantasy is a linear RPG, making it a mumorpger is like making Kirby into a railshooter or Contra into the next DDR.

I dont think kirby can be in a bad game, in fact...when can I play that kirby rail shooter.

 

[Mnemophage]

I'ma use this space to mourn the loss of one of my favorite game series' and the stupid shit that killed it: Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter killed breath of fire. The developers had a FF8 moment, where they decided that the old style of storytelling that had been polished to a pastel sheen with 4 wasn't good enough anymore, and decided to completely overhaul the system, make the setting unrecognizeable and, the kiss of death, add a meter that went up whenever you used your signature dragon powers. That went up whenever you ran or walked. And when it reached 100, you DIED, game over, now you get to start again. It was ugly and unfun and no one bought it, and now the series is no more.

Pity.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Pretty much every Sonic game after Sonic and Knuckles...

Also, Timesplitters: Future perfect. It's not that there is anything particularly wrong with that game. It just took timesplitters and made it too generic. The difficulty was toned down too much and it lost the clever level design in favour of having a voice in your head shouting "GO there! now DO THIS!"... it was almost as if EA had had something to do with the game...

 

[Jolly Madness]

BF2142... God I was disappointed over the gunships and the fact that I would have to play online to earn a better sniper rifle (my antivirus hates certain games).

 

[phoenixguard]

Silent Hill 4 killed the series. SH3 was the warning sign when they decided that it should be a sequel to the first.

 

[Arkeotype]

Yes, Generals did kill C&C, but let me take the opportunity to point out that Generals was the first game in the C&C saga developed by EA, and we all know how bad EA can cock-up any game they try to make that isn't a sports game. (but isn't war practically a sport now anyways?). C&C is still being developed by EA, but they got their heads far enough out of their asses to realize that having westwood's designers (who now mostly work for EA) do all things related to C&C is the best thing for the series...

C&C 3 was actually very enjoyable, once EA got the game past the million bugs and balancing problems. I haven't played Kane's Wrath, but all I've heard about it says that it's pretty good.

Best advice for EA games, dont get them until 2-3 months after the release date, it will take at least that long for them to fix all of the bugs.

 

[whatabout_paul]

The problem with Sonic games is that they haven?t worked as well in 3D as they did in 2D, but to say every game since Sonic & Knuckles does a disservice to some of the good Sonic games since. Sonic Adventure and it?s sequel were actually good. Not as good as the 2D games but perfectly good games in their own right. Sonic Heroes stumbled a bit but was still enjoyable. The Advance and Rush games have been decent enough with Sonic Rush (the first one) being my favourite Sonic game in years. Even Secret Rings had some good moments.

Sonic The Hedgehog for 360 and PS3 killed it though. It was horribly buggy, the loading screens were too much to bear and the core game play sucked. It?s ruined any faith I had left in the series and has me questioning whether Unleashed will be any good at all. It totally epitomizes everything that?s wrong with Sonic in 3D.

 

[DurandelDG]

Deus Ex 2 - I disagree with McDerek. I thought the plot was less complex and less original...but I agree that it wasn't terrible. For me, DE2 killed the series with it's bad level design, bad AI, and lack of approach options after you hit the mid-point of the game. I also think they hurt themselves a little by allowing all 3 endings in DE1 to co-exist for DE2. Now that someone wants to do DE3 (Eidos? I forget who has the license now) they can't allow all 3 endings of DE2 to co-exist. Fear of negating a player's choice in another game makes for bad plot design.

Halo 2 - Halo 2 was a stumbling step. I don't fault the ending and I enjoyed the perspective of the arbiter (gave us insite into the Covenant politics and enriched the story universe). For me, I felt trouble with the gun balance. In the end, I liked it but it felt less grand than the original, which leads me to...

Halo 3 - killed me, period. Here we have a grand, fully realized universe with an interesting story and characters and hidden secrets and agendas, and Bungie threw it out the window to focus on the multiplayer. While the gun balance was better, for single player - at least for me - the scope of the overall "set" of the game was pathetic. Covenant occupation? Where? A devasted humanity? There was nothing in the game to give us a great idea of the story universe or what was going on. Complete wasted potential in telling a grand story in this kind of media and creating a great immersed experience. And the way they delivered what 60+% of us knew, the line guilty spark says at the end, what a poor way to deliver it. Also not letting us play as the arbiter I think hurt things because we lost the rich perspective of the covenant. There was so much to tell and they could have fit it in, but they did not. You can't let novels and comics and a future "marathon" series fill in the blanks for what is supposed to be a complete series.

Mega Man X5 - Everything was prety much wrong and the story was officially fubar to me at this point.

kings quest 7 - meh, and 8 sealed it's coffin.

World of Warcraft - it's success killed the RTS-part of this series.

Final Fantasy 8 - I've played every one of the games in the series. Square had hiccups in the beginning too (play final fantasy 2 (Japan numbering)). So maybe after this string of so so titles and a mmorpg, they might fix the formula. At least they get creative with the fighting systems.

Doom 3 - horrible but pretty

Oblivion - I loved Morrowind, again for its story-universe (I really need a better word for that). When Michael, forget the last name, came up with the complex, bizarre history for that game, he created an interesting world to play in and discover. It would have been nice if Bethesda allowed us more answers, but whatever. Oblivion felt lacking though. They had the Ayleids and the Daedra/Aedra to play more with and to enrich the universe of the game, but it felt cold, unoriginal, uninspired, and flat. I think the series can recover (I liked the add-on with Sheogorath), but there definitely needs to be some major changes in both game mechanics, better storytelling, and possible retconning to fix conflicts.

 

[Atlea]

FFVIII isn't all that bad once you get to know it. It's just a little lesson in how video game designers should not write love notes to their "special someone"s with a video game. It would be less annoying then.

But yeah, Silent Hill 4. 3 just bearable enough in my opinion. Everything goes south after that.

Also Kingdom Hearts was the beginning of something that simply never should have been imo

 

[nightfish]

Quake Arena was a cheap copy of Unreal Tournament, and killed that series.

No no. Quake Arena was the best quake released so far. Fast, furious and downright solid fun...nothing like the UT at the time. Q4 mauled the series.

C&C 3 was actually very enjoyable

Indeed it is. C&C should remain in either the Red Alert or Tiberian universes. Thats where they went wrong by producing Generals. My only gripe about the series apart from this was the awful add-on packs for the orginal and red alert.

 

[RufusMcLaser]

Tribes 2 destroyed my favorite online shooter.
Oblivion has, in my opinion, dumbed The Elder Scrolls down enough to put it in a coma. That isn't to say I don't like the game- I do- but another dumbing-down would be fatal.

 

[josh797]

well splinter cell 4 looks to me like the bullet in the chamber for the series, cause Splinter cell chaos theory was the pinnacle. damnit that game rocked, and they jsut backed away from that pinnacle with double agent. im worried itll turn into a slide downward.

as for a game that ressurected a series, im gonna go with tomb raider legend. i loved it, and totally revamped the series for next gen. that game rocked, hardcore.

 

[Logan Westbrook]

Deus Ex 2 - I disagree with McDerek. I thought the plot was less complex and less original...but I agree that it wasn't terrible. For me, DE2 killed the series with it's bad level design, bad AI, and lack of approach options after you hit the mid-point of the game. I also think they hurt themselves a little by allowing all 3 endings in DE1 to co-exist for DE2. Now that someone wants to do DE3 (Eidos? I forget who has the license now) they can't allow all 3 endings of DE2 to co-exist. Fear of negating a player's choice in another game makes for bad plot design.

Slightly off topic, but Deus Ex 3 is a prequel, neatly side-stepping your concerns.

 

[Starke]

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel for the Xbox killed that franchise...

Also, Gothic 3.