Under recommendation of a friend, I copy and pasted this blog post I did over at IGN here. Without further adieu:
 
Sequels. So many people hate them, yet so many people love them. Look at the NPD's best selling games of all time list, a good seven out of ten of them are sequels. But why? Are people not clamoring for originality? Are they just giving in to pressure and buying sequels even if they are fundamentally against it? The obvious logic is that if you don't support something you wouldn't give them your money. Too bad though, Modern Warfare 2 probably wouldn't have been the fastest selling game of all time had it not been for the Benjamins of said school of thought.



If something is getting a sequel, be it game or movie, there's a good chance that the first entry in the franchise-in-making was a decent product or at least sold okay. Now here's the problem; a lot of things are selling well. This would mean more original IPs, right? Not really. If market trends are anything to go by, publishers enjoy a nice, cushy killer app which they can churn out once every two years or three years that'll earn them a few million dollars. Well, that's good for publishers, but what of developers? If they're a first or second-party studio, it must be hard to spread their talents onto other projects, especially if they're central to a console and are getting pressure from every angle to make another successful entry to their successful series. That begs the question, where do they innovate?



Easy - in their sequels. While it may seem obvious, sequels are where concepts are expanded and refined. These concepts eventually become game mechanics and these mechanics can become innovations, used in games across a plethora of genres. This thought completely turns the argument of "sequels aren't interesting" on its head. As a long-time gamer myself, I'm almost always interested in how a sequel will evolve from its predecessor and it's always an interesting study to look back and see that the game you spent hours playing just isn't as good compared to where its franchise has lead. Indeed, this is why sequels continue to sell. It's a good balance of a known quantity throwing some ideas on top to enrich the experience and serving it with a side of debt. Many people claim this to be a bad thing, but with recent releases such as Mass Effect 2, Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, and many others, it's hard to stand by such a statement without logic collapsing on you.

The hate for sequels may be attributed to the seemingly natural impulse for gamers to be irrational, to align themselves with a school of thought so viciously that they'd virtually attack anyone that dare state a separate opinion (all online of course, these people are simply too "cool" to stoop to your level). However, objectively, a game can be better than another game. Opinions aside, the technical prowess it had to take to make Mass Effect 2 far exceeds that of White Knight Chronicles, this much is simply a fact(comparing two different games seems to be a common debate, even before Greg Miller's ME2 vs. U2 article). Mass Effect looks better, plays better, sounds better, and is just better. Delving into the narrative, well, there's simply no contest. To deny this is silly, only showing the ability to contradict the very definition of "better". HOWEVER, if you're level-headed you can still enjoy White Knight Chronicles more. This is where opinion comes in and where my point lies. It may be your opinion that sequels don't bring anything new to the table, but technically you'd be incorrect. This is because there's one thing that very many people don't notice, or even acknowledge, in video games. An camouflaged feature, if you will.



With a new, critically acclaimed sequel we're expecting, as mentioned earlier, a refinement of the previous game's concepts. That is, everything we see at face value. These things include improved sound, graphics, and most importantly gameplay. But there is one thing that many fans overlook - delivery. This may sound trivial, but think of Uncharted 2. Under the scope, it did nothing new yet it won dozens of Game of the Year awards from well-known publications. What reason? It did everything right. An action movie at its core, Uncharted 2's only new addition was more over-the-top action and a multiplayer mode yet it was just so fantastic and is now one of the highest-rated games of all time. Here's the kicker - it's only like that because Naughty Dog knows how to deliver their game. Sure, looking at the complete game it's hard to figure how they'd muck it up, but think about how the game all flows together. A sloppy menu system, boring combat, jerky gun handling, bad level design, any one of these things can ruin and/or cripple a game severely. In fact, many games DO suffer from these issues, which is why Uncharted 2 is so significant. It raised the bar as to what an action can and should be. That alone justifies its existence beyond what any fanboy can ever say.

So here's the point I'm getting at. I've basically written an essay dancing around the subject of sequels and how "original" they are, just so you can see how my mind is working with the subject. Are they justified? Of course they are. A game is a game, a good game shouldn't have to not exist and sequels fall under that category. While they may not be innovating on the outside, there is still  true innovation and ingenuity in them. The ability to take a great game and make it structurally more enjoyable without changing it fundamentally is an art and deserving of praise amongst the gaming community instead of baseless complaints just as much as any other game out there.