What direct sequel to a game has actually been worse than the first?

What direct sequel to a game has actually been worse than the first?

I’m talking the 2^nd game in a series, not any of the other subsequent entries later down the road.

Ex: Street fighter 1 and 2

Mega man 1 and 2

Resident evil 1 and 2

(LOL! I just realized those were all Capcom games, I didn’t intend for that. Honest.)

The reason I ask is because it seems (at least from my point of view.) that unlike many other fields videogames seem to be one that is for the most part immune to the “first direct sequel curse”.

Don’t believe me? Look at how pretty much every movie sequel is received compared to the first in the series. It’s true you have successful juggernauts like Terminator 2, The dark knight, or even Star wars: the empire strikes back but for every one of those there is at least 100 other series that were completely panned/destroyed on their second attempt.

The funny thing is that in the videogame medium this seems to be the opposite case.

Games sequels like the aforementioned above, as well as a whole slew of others, seem to be better received than their predecessor.

A part of me reasons this is due to the simple fact that the developers just take what works from the first game and add on it. Something like a movie or a book on the other hand is a much more difficult process than simply copying what was “right” in the first go around and adding a few additions here or there.

It’s not uncommon for some of the great game sequels to just up the boss counts, features, weapons, upgrades, or in some cases the size of levels/worlds all while not really adding much to other elements like the story or characterization (this is especially true of the NES era.).

Essentially it becomes a case of “Hey, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” while adding in other features to give it a new coat of paint so to speak.

So the question stands.

How many/What direct sequels (the 2’s.) were actually worse than the originals that spawned them?

Personally speaking one game off the top of my head that I know for a fact was not as well received as its predecessor was, yup, you guessed it… Super Mario Bros 2. In fact most people I knew growing up never even played it. They just skipped from 1 to 3, arguably two unbelievably industry changing games in their own right.

It didn’t help that at the time it was seen as a huge letdown compared to the first but I often wonder if part of the reason why was the incredible amount of pressure it had placed upon its shoulders. C’mon, how many games have to live up to the expectation of a game that literally changed the entire landscape of gaming?

So Giantbomb community, what direct sequel gaming titles in your own opinion failed to live up to the lofty heights set by their predecessor?

-1 & DONE NINJA APPROVED-

Titanfall 2. I know a lot of people like it and thats cool but I hate it and I believe its inferior to the first game in most ways.

All the Batman games after AA are worse too. AC is still a damn fine game but Origins is medicore and I didn't like much about Arkham Knight. AA is still the best game in the series.

The first Hotline Miami was basically a perfect experience for me, so it would've been near-impossible to beat that anyway, but Hotline Miami 2 failed royally.

Dark Souls 2. Hey, I like that game just fine, but playing it directly after DS1 felt like wading through a pit of molasses. Not to mention the boring/lackluster level design, the adaptability garbage, the repetitive/easy/filler bosses, and the hitboxes on enemy grabs.

I was going to mention Hotline Miami 2 and Arkham City.

Devil May Cry 2 is probably always my first thought for this category though. There hasn't been a game that's disappointed me more than that.

I am shocked that I'm the first to say Deus Ex: Invisible War. While not actually a bad game it had a bad combo of being very much cut down to fit a console and not filling the impossibly big boots of the original game. I liked it at the time but it really isn't anywhere near as good as the first.

• Deus Ex: Invisible War
• Dragon Age 2
• Lost Planet 2
• Devil May Cry 2
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
• Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
• Crysis 2
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• BioShock 2
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
• Crackdown 2
• Perfect Dark Zero
• Final Fantasy X-2
• NBA Hangtime
• Driver 2

While most of those games are still great games in their own right, I still think their first entries were better.

Hotline Miami 2

Arkham City

Halo 2

Doom 2

The Walking Dead Season 2(Telltale)

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2. I've had trouble trusting Obsidian Entertainment products after those two, so much so that I hesitated to pre-order South Park: Stick of Truth because they were making it and am still surprised that Fallout: New Vegas worked so well.

KOTOR2 in particular was botched in a way I wasn't used to seeing at the time. The ending of the game was literally unfinished, concluding with a fragmented final mission that just spun its wheels, going nowhere fast. They added a bunch of bells and whistles to the game engine but didn't account for the drain on the Xbox console, so the framerate was screwed. On a superficial, silly note: they added in Jedi robes and armor that was more aesthetically similar to the original movie trilogy... but one of the reasons that Bioware made the less flowing robes of KOTOR was to cope with the technical limitations of the first Xbox. Instead, Obsidian dove into the cesspool Bioware had avoided and gave us cardboard capes and stiff, goofy looking gear that was lamentably bad. Oh, and the dialogue... the awful dialogue. The endless, soulless dialogue. Throw in some bizarre glitches, for good measure. KOTOR2 was the full package.

Of course, the fans came out and blamed the publisher for rushing the product out. If only so-and-so had given Obsidian the time they needed... it would have come out perfectly. Then Neverwinter Nights 2 was subpar, and the chorus kicked in again about the awful, cruel publisher poor Obsidian had apparently been hamstrung by. Then Alpha Protocol and... well, actually, no one bothered defending that one. :-P

@jtb123: Yup. I clicked into this topic to throw Devil May Cry 2 into the mixing pot. What a disappointing game. Fortunately, they totally redeemed themselves with DMC 3!

Dragon Age 2.

Portal 2 (I liked Portal 2 a lot, but I still think the first game was better overall)

I also think a similar "the sequel was still very, very good but the original was impossible to live up to" argument could potentially be made for StarCraft 2.

*edit: Oh, and this one may or may not be controversial, but I'll throw Metal Gear Solid 2 in for the sake of discussion*

A lot if pwrsonal subjective opinions so far when the OP asked more for games that were received more negatively in the community.

To say things like HALO 2 and Portal 2 would just be wrong because although there are plenty of people that don't like them, you can't say beyond reasonable doubt that they were absolutely worse.

I feel like a large majority of fans of Dragon Age: Origins disliked Two. Whenever I hear that game brought up, it's that it didn't live up to Origins at all.

Bioshock 2 also falls into that same boat.

The reason games are less likely than movies to experience this is because they're mechanics driven. Like you said, it's easy to tack onto what's already worked. Movies are 100% creative and rely on 100% subjective opinions about it. There's a better way to word that.

So much formatting... :|

Anyway:

• Fallout 2 - When the setting, story, and characters are one of the main draws of a game, it's a little disappointing to see the sequel delve so heavily into 4th-wall breaking and pop culture references.
• Crysis 2 - Sure, the graphics were still nice, but the game was a mess and lacked the open-endedness of the original.
• Mass Effect 2 - They smoothed out the rough edges, but then just kept on going...
• Lemmings 2 - Perhaps some nostalgia talking, but I think it's worse in pretty much every way: graphics, music, and the new skills they added.
• Borderlands 2 - Worse guns, trying a little too hard to be funny/edgy.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within will likely always be the icon of this relatively rare occurrence in gaming for me. It was such a hard tonal shift and remains a great example of developers taking the one knock on their previous game and trying entirely too hard to course correct that glaring flaw, rendering nearly everything else in their game unrecognizable as well.

Mercenaries 2.

I see your MGS2 and I raise you...MGS3! Come at me bro

• Bioshock 2 (solid game but worse story and atmosphere)

• Super Mario Bros 2 (good game, not as good as previous)

• Mercenaries 2 (........)

• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 (Not even sure how this game was released)

• Deus Ex: The Invisible War (underated, not great)

• Dragon Age 2 (.....)

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 (just kind of a big bag of meh)

• Devil May Cry 2 (total crap game)

• Crackdown 2 (boring, bad game that didn't remember anything that made the first special...other than the Halo 3 online test)

• Duke Nukem Forever (seriously, how has noone said this lol)

• Myst Revelation

• Goldeneye: Rogue Agent (again...)

• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (bad game)

• Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor (again, noone? )

• Epic Mickey 2 (I liked the first one :|)

• Perfect Dark Zero (not a good game, even at the time it was released)

• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (instead of making a better game let's inject the last game with a dose of Hot Topic)

• FEAR 2 (Not awful but not as good as one)

• PacMan 2: The New Adventures (still unsure why I played this so much as a kid)

• Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (literally nothing about this game is better than the first that I can remember)

• Lost Planet 2 (I don't think any of these games are good but the second one was definitely worse than the first)

• Mafia 2

• Batman: Arkham City (I liked this but definitely more steps down than up)

• Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (terrible, terrible, boring game)

• Far Cry 2 (don't care, I think this game is worse than the first one. I get why some people like it but I think its the worse of 1-4)

• Ninja Gaiden 2

• Halo 2 (I think this is the weakest entry in the Bungie quadrilogy of Halo games. Yes, the online was cool to have BUT they fixed the series with 3)

• X-COM 2 (the newer one. With the amount of launch bugs, glitches, and the fact its basically the same game just with 75% more cheap BS...no thanks)

• Final Fantasy Dirge of Cerberus (Does this count? I mean, its a direct sequel to FFVII and FF games aren't true sequels to each other, so this is truly a sequel to 7)

These are all the ones I could spitball, and that I also have played. Surprised at some of the games people haven't mentioned in this thread thus far...

F.E.A.R. 2 basically call of F.E.A.R. remember when the Doom devs where going to make a Doom game that was more or less a a call of duty clone or bro shooter this happen to F.E.A.R. 2 but unfortunately the game got released and the series is dead now.

Crysis 2 same story as F.E.AR.2 development.

Battlefield 3 shallow gameplay compared to BF2, basically another game affected by COD syndrome

Hotline Miami 2 felt too ambitious. More secret behind the curtain Russian / crime stuff, bigger levels that made it harder to have a sick flow, etc.

Halo 2 felt like it shouldn't have been able to run on an Xbox. Beside its technical shortcomings, it lacked a good campaign, did that bait and switch so I (and a lot of other people) got a different game than what was advertised, and a couple of friends and I did that...hack...I don't know what you call it, where you can trick the Xbox into performing a LAN connection over the Internet. So I already played Halo online before Halo 2, so even the Xbox Live part of that game wasn't impressive.

Portal was short, sweet, and hilarious. Portal 2 was bloated and not as funny. Also, the last gameplay mechanics they added was the ooze and gravity tunnel things, so a lot of the final moments in that game was gestimating where this liquid was going to fall out of these tubes.

Devil May Cry 2

Bioshock 2

Ninja Gaiden 2(xbox era)

Kotor 2

Dragon Age 2

Mass Effect Andromeda (Direct Series sequel IMO)

Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 was a bad, bad game.

Also, not a direct sequel, but Goldeneye was followed up with a N64 game for The World Is Not Enough. It wasn't terrible, but it was no Goldeneye. The best thing about it was that it came on a blue cartridge.

I feel like most of the games listed are definitely not worse than their predecessor. It's more that they don't live up to the original and it left people salty.

Older games off the top of my head:

• Space Harrier 2 (I still love it!)
• Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars
• Final Fantasy 2
• Mercenaries 2
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
• Toejam & Earl: Panic on Funkotron

XCOM 2- While it improve a lot of things. The overall game to me is worse. I still hate you only have a limited amount of moves/time limit in most missions. I like the overwatch feature and it was crucial to me finishing missions on the hardest difficulty. I haven't even finished it which is disappointing because I have put an absurd amount of time into the first one.

Mercenaries 2... man that game was nowhere near the gem the first one was.

Bioshock 2, more Bioshock in Rapture but not as good the first.

Arkham City- Still a good game, but the weakest of the 4.

Halo 2 is not as good as Halo. Halo 2 is the worst Halo (except maybe 5 which I haven't played).

BF3 is a weird example to bring up I think, especially considering it was the 7th (or even 8th if you count Codename: Eagle) game in the series, and wasn't exactly a direct sequel even to BF2 considering it had been almost 10 years between the mainline games.

Oh, I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who found Doom 2 really underwhelming. Feels like it's often talked up as this perfect follow up (with Doom 3 seen as the point where it all fell apart), but to me it had pretty much all the signs of sequelitis that tend to be brought against other franchises - I found the level designs much worse - with less of a sense of place, secrets placed in locations you'd only find by pressing the use key on every wall in the game or straight up noclipping - and sometimes the key/skull you need to open the color coded door to the exit is hidden in one of those secrets. It also only added one new weapon (a pretty good weapon admittedly) and a small set of new enemies.

Doom 2 was one of those games I pretty much entirely played for the user created content, as I found the official levels pretty dissatisfying. Thankfully the user created maps and mods were and continue to this day to be absolutely amazing, but that was true for the first Doom and even Wolfenstein 3D too.

Jak & Dexter 2 - loved the first game, did not like the tone shift in the second game.

/Viktor

I don't understand your distinction.

Gotta ask, why do you think it's inferior? Main complaints I usually see is number of maps and the changes to titans.

@vg132: Jak 2 and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within both represent such a weird time in gaming. The Attitude Era, if you will. I remember as a young man being so confused as to how the sequel to one of my favorite games ever made looked like an interactive Godsmack video. Both of the games ended up still being pretty good actually, but man, what the hell.

Dragon Age 2 is the very obvious answer here for me. I had a very venomous reaction to that game. Such a simpler time. Nowadays I just don't care about anything Bioware puts out. Saves a lot of heartache.

Deus Ex 2

I guess I'm in the minority who thinks Hotline Miami 2 is better than 1

People bringing up Dragon Age 2 are totally wrong, it's actually the best game in the series. Those brining up Mass Effect 2 are not only totally wrong, but also totally super duper wrong, as it's one of the best games ever made.

The obvious answer is Bioshock 2. Also Rise of the Kasai, which is the totally mediocre sequel to the insanely good Mark of Kri.

XENOSAGA 2.

Also I want to slap all of you that said Zelda II, it is not a bad game.

Pretty much every sequel ever actually.

Bayonetta 2 isn't as good as the original. Its not terrible or anything ,but its not a good sequel. Its a bit too easy, more visually messy, and the tone isn't nearly as fun as the first. It feels more like a level pack with some new weapons. Also the ending is super weak, especially considering how the first ends.

I think what he means is that sequels may be overall of a quality at least as good as the original game, or better. But when it comes to the things that people liked about the original game, the sequel didn't strike those same notes as well.

Easy example: Star Control and Star Control 2. The first game was a crazy 3D RTS with a fun vs mode. The second was a massive RPG, a space opera (also with a fun vs mode). The second one is the one usually universally regarded as a classic, but is a totally different genre from the original and totally fails to live up to any expectations that the first one might have set (except for that fun vs mode). The RTS of the original was very creative and unique and I could definitely see people being disappointed that there wasn't more of that. But overall, most people are happy with Star Control 2.

Dragon Age 2 was inferior for a number of ways. Origins had an incredibly deep and expansive story that always took into consideration where your character was from and what they did. It even affected the final outcome of the game. Though people rag on the combat, it was actually incredibly deep and satisfying to master (Warrior Mage was so amazing it's practically broken). The game was full of some amazing moments and sequences, too, with the jailbreak part sticking out.

DA2 took a big expansive world with many different races and cultures and shoehorned you into one city and one main character. Some of the characters were fun and memorable, but they mostly seemed to fit a Bioware stereotype. The combat was faster and snappier, though, but that really wasn't something that mattered in a story-heavy game. It was like they ignored what everyone loved about the first game.

So we're on the same page, which of the following qualify as "first direct sequels"? (note: I'm not asking if or suggesting that they are "worse" games)

• Modern Warfare 2 (also, Black Ops 2)
• Assassin's Creed 2: Brotherhood
• Yoshi's Island (because it was marketed outside Japan as "Super Mario World 2")
• Dynasty Warriors 2 (because DW2 wasn't a sequel to DW/Sangoku Musou in Japan, it was the start of a new Shin Sangoku Musou series)
• Dynasty Warriors 3 (because DW3 was a sequel in Japan, as Shin Sangoku Musou 2)

• Super Mario Bros. 2, a.k.a. lost levels. (Japanese)
• Devil May Cry 2
• Batman: Arkham City
• Final Fantasy 2 (Japanese)
• Another World 2
• Mario Kart 64
• Ninja Gaiden 2 (the xbox 360 one, not the nes one)
• Not to mention the most egregious example of all: Chess 2.

Also, any sequel that moves from console to handheld is usually disappointing. Stuff like Chibi Robo, and Valkyria Chronicles.

This person speaks the truth!

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance definitely falls into this category. The first one was a dark tale of a corrupt political and religious elite exploiting the masses for their own ends. It had a very traditional SNES-era Final Fantasy artstyle. The second one was a fairly lighthearted Peter Pan-esque story with an equally bright artstyle about not wanting to grow up and running away from your problems. They also boogered up the combat system with an extremely annoying "laws" mechanic and everybody's favorite "learn your abilities from your equipment" system.

KotOR II's one of my favourite games of all time - and quite possibly my favourite story told within the Star Wars universe, as well - while the first is just, y'know, good, so needless to say I'll be contesting that one. (I loved Alpha Protocol too, for the record--Obsidian are probably my overall favourite dev.)

I'd say it's gotta be Halo 2, for me. Still a good game, and the multiplayer was substantially better than CE's - the whole 'popularised online multiplayer on consoles' thing was a pretty big deal, too - but I still hold up the Combat Evolved campaign as the best in the entire Halo series - at least, in singleplayer; 3's the best co-op experience - and since I mainly come to Halo for the campaigns... Yeah, Halo 2.

I had to rack my brain for a while, but now that I remember it: Crackdown 2 was maybe the most disappointed I've been in a game in a long time.

NBA Jam TE was the direct sequel to Jam, not Hangtime. It's also funny you mention Kotor 2 as many people would argue the story is actually better. I'd say mechanically it is far more interesting as well, but it is riddled with bugs. Either way I'm not going to argue about it, especially since I never finished it (game-breaking bug without a save far enough back to recover).

Dragon Age 2 was really bad, it's the worst Bioware game I've ever played. I hated how all of the dungeons were just copy and pasted. Origins was a mastetpiece and a better game in almost every aspect.