Sequels and Fan Opinion

[TheWill]

So, a recent trend I have noticed with a lot of different series is that people are becoming disappointed with the most recent games of a lot of different series, or that trend has had happened in the past games that pertain to the series . With that said, we are looking at popular (or rather, vocal) fan opinion..

With a number of series having their second, third, fourth (and so on) instalments released for their series, what are people's opinion on sequels being worse than the original? In the case of a number of games, some from the top of my head being Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Star Fox Adventure, Metroid: Other M, Final Fantasy 13, Soul Calibur 5, Fire Emblem 13: Awakening and many more, what is the general consensus of sequels not living up to their predecessor? In more extreme cases such as Sticker Star, people have abandoned the series in question and in relation to the lesser extreme, people are disappointed in Awakening's direction and if it becomes the 'norm' of the Fire Emblem franchise, people have expressed that they'll drop the series.

Heck, even games like Super Smash Bros Brawl have its own controversy as some fans found Melee to be superior.

Of course, this is by no means statistical and is purely conjecture. I'd just like to see other peoples opinions on the matter.

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

Personally, I think that most people expect their series to stay exactly the same. I loved Soul Calibur 5, Final Fantasy 13, and Other M because they were steps in the right directions. Sticker Star and Awakening are God awful.

But honestly, it's about trying something new. It's either successful, or it's not. The only way to know for sure is to try. A video game is an expensive Litmus test, though.

[NinjaMonkey]

I liked Sticker Star, Adventures and Awakening. It's nice to see series go in new directions, instead of rehashing the same tired ideas over and over again.

[Lord Glenn]

I'm evenly split on the issue. On one hand, I want developers and creators not to be locked into a single way to make a game - it's their project, if they should decide to want to take things in a significantly different direction for a sequel, that's their prerogative. On the other, a vast majority of such examples have not been well received (for good reason). (And, honestly, if I were a developer, I'd want to have my projects, especially sequels, not be exactly the same with chunks of stuff (be it story or models, etc.) swapped out: see Pokémon as an example of what I would NOT want to do.)

The other point to consider is the development staff and time between games. In the case of Soulcalibur V, the game was headed up by someone different and wanted to focus on a much more competitively-viable fighting system. And, according to all reports I've ever read, the engine is apparently the best in the series. However, that doesn't excuse the fact that Bandai Namco shortchanged the developers and forced the game to a deadline, making it only like 25% complete when it was released. Because of this, the story mode is an absolute joke. So, for this particular game, I'd say the only reason it was so vehemently "disliked" was because of the fact that they were selling a barely cobbled together game as a full, complete game for the standard price of $60, basically charging you that much for a watered down story, the character creator (which you had to supplement with DLC to get new parts!), and online multiplayer for a full price game.

Then, you have games like Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Now, I don't know if the gap between the development of The Lost Age and Dark Dawn played a role in how much of a... mess Dark Dawn was or not, but it's a possible theory. Or, the developers could have been absolutely scatterbrained and thought that it was a splendid idea to start out with a routine fetch quest, bombard us with events and terms in the first hours of the game, and then never speak of them again until the very last minutes of the game before the ending scene, all the while hijacking the game with an extremely convenient plot that's initiated by the villains almost perfectly right from the start. Now, I know from the Golden Sun thread that there's plenty of unused data in the game that would seemingly point to the fact that deadlines played a serious issue in the development of the title, but as a creator, you have to understand the product that you're putting out. And if that product turns out to be an extremely average title for reasons squarely falling on the development team, well, I think that that generally means that you've failed somewhere down the line. And in Dark Dawn's case, it was probably from having too huge of a scope for the project, starting to run out of time, and then having to cobble together something that made a small iota of sense, and pushing it out.

So, tl;dr, while I'm absolutely for developers making sequels to their projects, they also have to deal with a group of supporters that is very attentive. And while I'm also hugely in favor of trying new directions, I think that as a developer, you better have a pretty good idea that you know is going to work (or can back up with WHY you chose to do it) before attempting as such. Sometimes, it'd have been better if some sequels just hadn't existed in the first place for those reasons.

[kingddd]

It always depends on how the sequels are handled. Fans always judge a game by comparing what worked before and what does not in the newer versions. The biggest issue is that in reality we as fans don't really know what we really want. We can claim we desire to have a certain thing changed in a sequel but in reality, it could of executed so poorly that we are disillusioned by it. One thing that happens often when we get older is that our minds starts getting conservative. Therefore, we start longing for a nostalgic experience to come back to us and therefore causing people to not want to have drastic changes and this also applies to video games. Since you get older, you want to have that same experience as you did when you first played that certain game and when get older and you get hooked on that nostalgic desire so much to the point that it can blind you psychologically. For example, people clamor about how much better the Fire Emblem GBA animations are compared to the 3D animations in FE9, FE10 and FE13 but by technical perspectives, it is not all that impressive.

Of course this becomes a split when you have people keeping telling the video game companies to stop rehashing and making the same games like New Super Mario Bros and they should work on new IPs but the question is how many of those people actually support those new IPs? Not very many. They'll claim that they want to support new things but in many cases, they'll just go ahead and buy whatever worked before anyway. From a business perspective, the demand is from the sequels itself.

However fans will notice that if you keep churning out the same thing like how New Super Mario Bros keeps by reusing assets, musics, graphics and gameplay engine, then it will have a negative perception on the development of the games. Which is why there needs to be a balance of changes and keeping somethings traditional that are needed in order to make the game more desirable. Drastic changes are a huge risk to sequels no matter how it's done. In the end, we need to strike a balance between changes and while at the same time keeping some parts traditional.

[Zera]

There are 3 kinds of sequels.

Good sequels know what worked in the original and provide more of it while eliminating the flaws and improving everything in general. They will often include more good features in addition to what made the original great. This includes games like:

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

Pikmin 2

Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury

...and many others

Bad sequels aren't necessarily bad games; they just tend to forget everything that made the original good without making up for it. Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a great example.

I'd also like to make a particular note about Metroid: Other M. It gets a lot of negativity from fans not because it's bad game (I've seen much worse), but because it is inferior to the previous game. And the one before that. And the one before that. It's one thing to have a temporary dip in quality for a series, but another one for a new game to let down the previous three.

The third kind of sequel is rare and unusual. It's a good game, but it is not well received by everyone simply because it has almost nothing to do with the original. This includes games like Alundra 2 and Worms Blast.

[Ike-Mike]

Humans are habitual animals.

What I mean with that, the interpretation is up to you.