Franchises that took the most iterations to reach their potential?

Spec Ops: The Line was the tenth game in the Spec Ops series. I think it's safe to say that the majority of people hadn't heard of / couldn't have given the slightest shit about Spec Ops before The Line. Are there any other franchises that have taken longer to reach their potential or find an wide audience?

Rainbow Six?

I hated Assassin's Creed until IV. I feel like the parkour in those games is just the movement mechanic. It's not challenging or exciting like it was in Prince of Persia, and as such I found absolutely nothing exciting about AC until The Black Flag.

Advance Wars?

There were several Japanese only games in the series before then going back to the NES but I think they made an effort to make that one accessible to sell to Western audiences.

What a fine game.

@paulmako: Yeah, it's a huge bummer that they never released any of the Nintendo Wars game outside of Japan until Advance Wars. I'd love to check those games out.

@frodobaggins: and yet I think the series has gone downhill since the original... Tho Ghost Recon 1 and the X-com like 3DS games were pretty sweet.

My vote would be the From Software action-rpg series of games.... Sure saying that Kings Field and Dark Souls are in the same series is a total stretch, but they are all just evolutions of the same mechanics.

@monetarydread: yeah, I was more referring to finding a wider audience more than anything. I too preferred when Rainbow Six was a tactical squad management game.

In that Rainbow Six 3 was the best one yes. They've all been considerably worse since.

Fire Emblem sure took a while to find any kind of popularity. Very unusual for a series to become suddenly popular at such a late stage.

Hm... I didn't know Spec Ops: The Line was part of the Spec Ops series. I only played of demo of Spec Ops: The Line on Steam. I have Spec Ops on the PlayStation. It's crap. To me, I'd say GTA. I mean, it started out as something not interesting at all in my opinion, went to three, Vice City, and San Andreas. They had a lot of superb qualities, but it was at times frustrating to play with its lack of checkpointing, and some bad control mechanics. GTA 4 even had some of those designs choices, at least the checkpointing. In five, it started getting better (though, on the 360, it was disappointing due to Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3 having a simple mechanic of switching over the shoulder when it comes to aiming the weapon), and then it became one of my favorite open world games to actually play when the 'remaster' came out. Now, this is from a personal point of view, because we all know GTA has been huge since three, but for me, when it comes to a franchise finding the right foot in terms of how to make it the funnest it could be, it was the remaster of five that did it. It was the one that reached its potential, though not the one that got the franchise an audience.

I'll focus on "reach a wider audience":

Fire Emblem: Awakening's was the 13th game in the franchise before everyone started playing it a few years ago.

Dragon Quest: It took 7 games before the 8th one took the critical world by storm.

Final Fantasy: 6 sold just under 3.5M to date. 7 has sold 11M to date.

@gaff said:

I was going to say that is more of these series finally gaining some popularity outside of Japan, but then I remembered that the original Final Fantasy actually sold better in North America (700k to Japan's 600k), so saying that would not have been quite right.

However, Dragon Quest VIII still had the same problem of not being popular outside of Japan. Of the 4.4 million units shipped, only 400k were shipped in North America. Sales in Europe were only slightly better. Which is too bad, as I have some fondness for the series, but there are some very clear reasons why the game is more popular in Japan than elsewhere.

Seriously? Wow, I had no idea. I loved that game. I always assumed it got a much bigger reception, seeing as it was also well-received critically.

Persona 4 has to be up there, right? SMT has been around since forever, but I don't think any game in the series has gotten as many spinoffs - especially ones that are available outside of Japan - or mainstream attention?

I'm going to say-and I know this isn't a popular opinion-the Uncharted series. I've found the first three games to be very shallow when it comes to fighting mechanics and characters. That is until Uncharted 4. Uncharted 4 deepens both these things immensely. I know a lot of people think 2 is a landmark game-which it is in some ways. But 2 and 3 are so not fun to play for me and the characters are so one note an predictable that I could never get into the story.

I think a good example of this, in terms of a studio, is Telltale. It was with The Walking Dead that they figured out how to best present and design their modern take on adventure games.

@hans_maulwurf: I would say that persona 3 was the start of that.

hmm, the witcher might be up there I enjoyed the first 2 but no doubt 3 is the best IMO. I would also say maybe tekken, I think 3 pretty much solidified what that series was. Possibly mass effect even though i loved the first one i don't think it fully formed until 2, even if 3 was a bit of a let down as far as single player.

Oh and, Tomb Raider. TBH i didn't enjoy any of the tomb raider games until maybe around anniversary for 360? Even then i don't think the series came to full potential until 2013 so that's a pretty goddamn long time IMO.

@paulmako: If you're talking about Super Robot Wars, whichever one I played on the SNES was pretty awesome actually, I would phrase it more Advance Wars on the GBA was the first game to reach a western audience.

@gaff: I would argue (without any statistics on hand) that Dragon Quest may have actually been a bigger thing in the west on the NES with Dragon Warrior than with VIII. For a lot of people that was their first JRPG.

I'd say it's BECAUSE of Tomb Raider 2013 that the series will never reach its potential. It could have been something really fun and adventurous. The masses have spoken...

Maybe The Elder Scrolls? Now I love all those games up to Skyrim, but a lot of people didn't. Personally I think Skyrim isn't the best one in the series by a long shot, but you can't deny that it's masterfully streamlined and designed and the huge audience that still exists for that game is insane. It's also the first one of those games that I actually think looks good which must have been a big part in it massing such a large audience.. The others I played for their scope and overlooked the less-than-stellar visuals.

If you count all the side stuff there were like 18 Final Fantasy games before XIII which is the clear peak of their battle system's evolution.

Sony's Major League Baseball franchise. It has been developed by the same core personnel (or, at the least, is rooted in that same 989 Sports team) from its inception in 1997, and they had made nine games in the series before Sega made the licensing deal with MLB bullying EA out of baseball in retaliation for their Madden deal in 2005. That same year they rebranded the studio as San Diego Studios, rebranded the game MLB: The Show, introduced what would soon evolve from "The Show" to "Road to the Show" just a year later, and by the time the PS3 generation was in full swing two years later the game had gone from the greatest after thought of all the baseball products to one of console gaming's beacons of game design, period.

It's really an amazing turnaround for the studio, in my opinion. Back when sports games were far more prolific the only reason I cared about 989 was NFL Gameday, and that game quickly became rubbish once Madden 2000 released on PS2. I'm very surprised they pulled themselves out of that rut in such a major way, even if they're obviously a much smaller, far more focused studio than they were in their heyday.

Weren't there like a dozen Tomb Raider games until the reboot came out in 2013? So many shitty Tomb Raider games and finally a legitimately good one (though not without it's problems).

Madden, they have yet to realize their potential and they are on....27 now?

There's a big difference between realizing the potential in an existing formula, and switching the formula radically.

Resident Evil 4 didn't realize the potential of the series. It changed the gameplay mechanics significantly, creating a game I greatly preferred to the originals, but not one that reached for the same goals as the previous entries.

Meanwhile Saint's Row the Third kept a lot of SR1-2's mission structures and open world antics, but weeded out some redundant activities, and greatly increased the zaniness to become something I'm literally re-playing for the fifth time right now, and will totally play again. It reached its potential of being something much more humorous and colorful than just a Grand Theft Auto knock-off.

Sports games are good for this when they hit real, real barren spells. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 - 2013. Took almost an entire generation to get back on track.

Hmmmmm. Call of duty franchise. Modern warfare was great but modern warfare 2 is the only cod where I enjoyed the campaign and I played the multiplayer for more than 20 hours. Haven't purchased cod since

Also I would say mortal combat 9. I don't care for fighting games at all but that game was enjoyable plus I got to learn a couple characters. Smoke for the win. Yes sir

I seem to be one of very few who actually enjoyed the first Spec Ops: Ranger Assault on PC. I mean, I didn't get around to the Delta Force series until a few years later, so in comparison with that maybe it wouldn't have been as impressive in 1998, but it wasn't broken, and felt fairly rewarding as a stealth-ish military shooter of that era. I never played the PS1 entries though.

I'm actually have a bit of a hard time thinking of series that got progressively better through iteration. Tomb Raider has already been mentioned. Most franchises I can think of probably hit their peak potential around the second installment and went downwards from there.

I guess Wizardry could fit, I liked the previous entries, but it was with the new interplanetary storyline introduced in Wizardry 5, and which didn't reach its conclusion until Wizardry 8 (with the option to keep your characters throughout the series) that the series became something really unique and wonderful. And I'm a little bummed out that all the Japanese Wizardry games just retread the ground from the first four Wizardry games, often also being really serious due to how the humor in those early games got lost in translation when they got popular in Japan.

Dragon Quest VIII is the only Dragon Quest that isn't god awful. Front Mission 3 is like the second best Tactical RPG ever, the previous 2 are just okay. RE4 is the fourth best game ever, every other resident evil other than the REmake doesn't crack the top 100. Super Metroid is the best game ever other than Vagrant Story and Metroid 1 and 2 are just solid games.

@starvinggamer While FFXIII has the best combat system I think almost every Final Fantasy has good to great combat for JRPGs and other than 2 and 3 (and maybe 9) each one is one of the best games of its era.

Yah, they've spoken and now we have two really awesome Tomb Raider games. It's more than those poor Resident Evil fans have to show for.

I mignt put Metal Gear V on this list. Not to say that the first games weren't great, they were. I think the gameplay in V delivered on things that that series had been trying to do since 1

The Tomb Raider reboot kind of disgusts me. It's so many bad habits of modern gaming rolled into one. Every time I think about picking up Rise of the Tomb Raider, I remember how dull and embarrassing the previous game was, how much I dislike the protagonist and how dumb I felt (like I was knowingly wasting my time) when replaying it. Sequel looks the same. I'd rant, but I've talked about the game so much that it's not even fun shitting on it anymore.

Well! I'll just sit over here with my PS4, extremely excited for a new Tomb Raider game for the first time in my twenty years of gaming...

@lostoddity: While I agree some would say it came at the expense of the story and pacing which were things many MGS fans held dear.

I thought Splinter Cell: Blacklist was by far the best game in the series. (not the most popular opinion) Granted I didnt complete Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory because they felt like very incremental improvements on the original, which had it's fair share of problems. But Blacklist took the more polished style of Conviction and gave you back all the tools that had been missing and it felt great. (could do without the FPS sequences though)

I dont think it sold very well though, and may have killed the franchise. (damn you Ironside! we needed you!)

More than anything it sounds like you just don't like Tomb Raider and thats fine. Whats more worrying is that you seem to not like good games because they adhere to modern standards, but hey man you do you. If you think Tomb Raider was "embarrassing" and "disgusting" then I'm almost scared to ask what game in your opinion is "great" but fortunately there are plenty out there to choose from.

I gotta agree with Humanity, here, I thought the 2013 Tomb Raider was one of the best games of that year. And I'm someone who generally thinks the Uncharted-esque school of video game design is pretty terrible. A better question @ezekiel, might be... why were you replaying it if you hated it so much?

I don't really have an answer. If we're talking about popularity, Shin Megami Tensei games are way less niche than they used to be thanks to Persona 4. Persona 3 got the series started on that ramp to popularity, but I don't think it was until after Persona 4 that Atlus became... well, less of a niche company than they were. I'd say they're still somewhat niche.

As far as quality goes, I really can't think of anything. Most video game series that kick off with a bad game don't really keep going. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim might be a good example. I can imagine someone playing Skyrim five years from now and enjoying it. I can't really imagine someone playing Oblivion or Morrowind five years from now and enjoying it without understanding the context in which those games came out (meaning, there was literally nothing else like Morrowind and Oblivion upon release so everyone was willing to ignore the mountain of problems those games had).

@lostoddity: I'd say MGS4 already did that but MGSV definitely made the controls even better.

What? I like Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and Legend is okay. Underworld is mediocre. The only others I played were Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, which I enjoyed, and the 2013 reboot. I liked this series for what it was with Anniversary. It wasn't great, but I think it had amazing potential before selling out and losing its identity.

I think I preferred the controls of MGS4. The auto-lean in V is pretty annoying. It screws with your aim/camera every time you get close to something and the animation takes a second. You had more CQC options in 4. Shooting was pretty much the same. They're both over the shoulder TPS. Although, I think in 4 the accuracy of full auto machine guns might have been tighter. I also preferred just having all my weapons available in 4. It's a drag always calling in for a weapon drop when you need to switch to sniping or rockets. The linear design and "procure on site" exploration served MGS better. The only thing V has over 4 for me in terms of controls is that it can be played with a mouse and keyboard.

@ezekiel: I felt like MGSV's movement was snappier/more responsive than MGS4, which is great for a more action-oriented, guns-blazing Metal Gear. Not that I actually play it that way, always more of a stealth guy so the simplification of CQC was something I lamented. I'm fine either way with the weapon selection stuff, I can certainly see both sides of the argument though. I've never gone into a mission with anything other than the compulsory assault rifle and the tranquilizer, unless the mission dictated otherwise.

What I missed most from MGS4 that didn't carry over to MGSV are the little quirks like the ground humping or flipping Snake onto his back with a button press and other shenanigans they thought of.

Strange. I would say that if Tomb Raider had sold out and lost its identity at any point, it was with Anniversary and its grappling hook style platforming.

@ezekiel: How in the world did it sell out and lose it's identity? It was always about exploring and that is exactly what you do. You explore. There aren't as many hands-down tombs and temples in the 2013 version but you had a ton of amazing levels to traverse that still had the tried and true shimmy along a ledge and jump from A to B platforming. They added a ton of new stuff with the gear you collected introducing physics puzzles and so forth. The combat for the first time in TR history felt great and you had a ton of upgrades. I know this is all personal taste and I hate getting into a back and forth like this but c'mon man.. disgusting? Embarrassing? Selling out? Not realizing it's potential? When I and a bunch of others played those Tomb Raider games in the late 90's and early 2000's we dreamed of it playing and looking as good as that reboot. To have movement be that fluid, to have all those cool upgrades, to have that awesome combat. Levels that felt organic instead of yet another dilapidated temple cut from 90 degree polygons with blocks to move around onto pressure plates. Back then Tomb Raider was fine because thats all we had. You put up with the stiff controls because those were the norms. That sideways hop that was required for some platforming sections was awful. The swinging didn't feel much better. To infer that the reboot, which refines all those shortcomings and polishes them to a fine diamond sheen, is something ruining that heritage or selling out is so incredibly absurd. Say you don't like the controls, say you don't enjoy cinematic gameplay, say all that stuff but don't go and put the blame on the game itself which did nothing but elevate that series and bring out it's true potential after years of being known for those stupid shorts first and gameplay second.

I'd say hitman 2016 is one, at least for me. The older games always seemed sooooo up my alley but playing them was never actually fun in my experience. Especially when it comes to the locations hitman has finally reached its potential with the new one, the old games felt like they tried to create actual locations but it always just felt like a videogame level build around the one thing you could do to kill the target in an interesting way to me. Shit like sapienza in the new hitman is just everything I'd ever wanted out of a hitman location. I may have missed some great locations in the old games though as I don't think I've made it much more than 5 or 6 missions into each of them.

@ezekiel:Double agreed, Everyone forgets how much control you had over snake in mgs4 (though I sadly wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't even touch like half of the mechanics in that game, especially considering how little actual 'game' there is in 4).

And I can't keep it in: tomb raider 2013 is one of the most boring games I've played last gen. Its INSANE to me how that game gets even considered as the best of the generation, I mean if you think the gameplay of uncharted is where its at its a fine game but nothing else about it is.... is really anything.... In uncharted you practically autojump around and kill fools in small portions to see where the stupid fun likable summer indiana jones knockoff is going all the while enjoying top of the line computer graphics on a console. The automatic climbing/jumping to stuff or stilted combat arenas on their own were never challenging or fun at all to me and at least in uncharted come off more as a means to an end, its building anticipation for when the next story-beat drops. In Tomb raider 2013 it felt like shooting and autoclimbing was all I was doing with no payoff in any way except for maybe being able to semi-explore that boring ass mountain a little more because the story sure as hell wasnt doing much for me (never finished it though, I think I got close to the end before just giving up on it). I'd go as far as saying Tomb raider 2013 has nothing I like about the old games. Its obviously not a bad game either, all the mechanics and stuff are totally serviceable, I just dont see whats special about it.

I guess the real question would be what is tomb raider to you?

To Humanity its about the exploring of temples, shooting some guys and seeing lara jump all over the place. Doing that better is the series coming to its full potential in his eyes.

I actually kinda like the old games now that im older (hated them back in the day when the games were new and I was younger),and to me tomb raider is all about having all these different jumping mechanics you need to use appropriately in conjuncture with the 'physics'. The temples and exploration were never more than set dressing to me.. It being hard to make a jump is the challenge and is what makes it fun imo, I get its not for everyone though. But as I see it tomb raider reaching its full potential would involve it finding a way to make platforming actually challenging again instead of making it as good as automatic. Or finding a way to still keep booby trap filled temples but make them less trial&error so you can actually better avoid them. More puzzles maybe (the couple puzzles in the new one were totally ok, now just a lot more)? I dunno, I feel theres a ton of typical Tomb raider stuff that never reached its potential and never will now that they just turned it into uncharted with exploration-light,. Im guessing ezekiel feels somewhat similar despite also disliking the old games :p.

I thought I was the only one who actually still likes the controls of TR! Lara moves like a tank, but a very precise tank. You have to actually size up an area and make decisions about how you're going to get around it rather than just holding 'Forward + R1' or whatever and letting the character do all the work for you.

Final Fantasy...They've made what, 56 games and none of them are any good.

;)

First of all, I'll go ahead and say that I don't think the original Tomb Raiders are all that great, but I certainly had a lot of fun playing them (particularly the first 2 games). It took a while for me to get into them, but once I got into them, I really got into them.

One way to think about the movement in the original Tomb Raiders is to consider them a 3D counterpart of games like Another World / Prince of Persia 1 / Oddworld 1 & 2. There's something very engrossing about meticulously planning out your movement

Speaking of Tomb Raider Legend was the first good one that controlled well enough to be playable. I don't know how people can play the previous games. I really tried playing TR2 back in the day and I wanted to love it but just like RE and frankly many PS1 3D games the controls were just awful to the point of pretty much being unplayable. I'm so glad we don't have that problem anymore. Even mediocre games these days are lighyears ahead of the shit released in the early 3D era. Of course it is understandable since making games in 3D was still a new thing.

My vote goes to FIFA. I didn't like FIFA until FIFA 2012 which makes it the 20th game or something.

I've not played Uncharted but I really like TR2013 because it plays well, the bow is nice and running and jumping works better than previous games. And it gets very intense so it is very exciting. I don't know if TR did anything really special since I have not played Uncharted or games like it. I can only compare to previous TR games and TR2013 plays really good. It made me care about TR in a way I have not done since Legend.

Okay, so the "xeno" games aren't really a series per se, but there's so many overarching elements and themes, plus they're all made by the same guy. The point I want to make about this is that it took until Xenoblade Chronicles, technically the fifth game in the "series", for Takahashi to tell a complete story from beginning to end without any executive meddling (maybe not the best way to put it but both Xenogears and Xenosaga have history of being perhaps too ambitious).

Game design wise, Tomb Raider was more different from Uncharted than its detractors like to think it is. It has a more Metroid-like structure, with Lara doubling back to previous areas after acquiring new tools to access other points on the map, both bonus items and mission critical paths. The entire island works on a loop and she traverses or fast travels across it; Uncharted only scratched the surface of that style of gameplay with the 9th level of Uncharted 4, and even then it's one isolated play field that simply obstructs its linearity through sheer scope.

Not making a value judgement, I'd consider Uncharted 4 a better game than Tomb Raider (its story and characters were pretty subpar) but Tomb Raider did a very different thing with regards to its actual level design and mission structure. It had other miniature open world / RPG touches as well such as hunting and item upgrading via a crafting system, again something Uncharted has never done. Tomb Raider borrowed some of Uncharted's signature set piece bombast but mostly flubbed that aspect; its success comes from all the things it did that Uncharted didn't do nor ever wanted to do.