More often than not, the decision to develop a sequel is motivated by financial incentives, without paying much thought to whether continuing the game’s story makes sense, plot-wise. The titles that come out as a result of these decisions often damage the whole franchise by doing away with the legacy of the previous titles’ endings and invalidating their conclusions.
8 Chrono Trigger
To this day, Chrono Trigger tops many “best of all time” lists, primarily thanks to its unique, engaging story and the way the game plays around with the concept of time travel. It continues to wow gamers today, just like it did back when it was first released in 1995. Many argue that Chrono Trigger deserves a remaster so that the mainstream audience can rediscover its story.
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The release of Chrono Cross in 1999 split the franchise’s fanbase. Although most people agreed that mechanics-wise, Cross was just as good as Trigger, many players were unsatisfied with the way it tried to tie up its predecessor’s loose ends. A proportion of the fans felt as if it undermined the powerful ending of Chrono Trigger, which should have been left as a standalone title.
7 Final Fantasy
There are a few series with more sequels than Final Fantasy. With fifteen main (numbered) entries and countless related titles, it can be safely said that the trend of “sequelization” didn’t hurt this beloved Square Enix franchise. It does, however, carry a pretty heavy sequel-related scar, one that players still complain about to this day.
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In the eyes of many, Final Fantasy 10’s somber ending fit the game’s overall mood and storyline perfectly, with Tidus heading off to the Farplane, leaving Yuna heartbroken. Final Fantasy 10-2 makes this ending slightly irrelevant, completely transforming Yuna’s personality and leaving Tidus’s impact out of the story. The subsequent Final Fantasy games have managed to avoid repeating 10-2’s mistakes, but many fans struggle to forgive that game’s inexplicable change of direction.
6 Assassin’s Creed
It may be hard to believe, but Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series will be turning fourteen in 2022! However, some people might claim that it should have ended many years ago, along with the Desmond Miles trilogy. The five games that were a part of it told a complete, cohesive story of the conflict between the Assassins and Templars, both hundreds of years in the past, and the present.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the subsequent titles shouldn’t have seen the light of day. Games like Black Flag, Odyssey, and Valhalla definitely deserved to be published and are all great open-world titles in their own right. However, a strong argument could be made that they would have benefited from not having the Assassin’s Creed lore and plot points shoehorned in, and focused solely on the historical narrative instead.
5 Resident Evil
This one is a little more complicated. Die-hard fans will probably disagree with this statement, but the overarching Resident Evil storyline starts to become convoluted and illogical once the plot leaves Raccoon City after Resident Evil 3.
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While the story of the fourth game holds up as a good standalone tale, the rest of the series would have been better off if it didn’t desperately try to fit the characters from past titles into the plot. Many of their stories reached natural conclusions in the original trilogy and keeping them in the cast for so long really didn’t make much sense. As Resident Evil 7 has proven, introducing new protagonists can work out very well for the franchise.
4 Prince of Persia
The Prince of Persia trilogy has earned itself a spot in gaming history’s Hall of Fame for introducing gameplay mechanics that are now staples of most action platformers (and not only) nowadays. Although it enjoyed a great run between 2003-2005 with The Sands of Time trilogy, the latter days of the franchise weren’t all that well-received, to say the least.
Despite some pretty good reviews, the 2008 reboot can be considered a failure, as it never managed to rekindle fans’ interest in the series. However, the main culprit behind Prince of Persia’s downfall was The Forgotten Sands, a 2010 title whose story happens between the events of The Sands of Time and Warrior Within. The game has some questionable events that derail the plot of an otherwise concise, self-contained trilogy.
3 Silent Hill
The first two entries to the Silent Hill franchise were masterpieces of horror game design. Harry Mason and James Sunderland’s stories of seeking out lost loved ones in the fog-ridden, terrifying town of Silent Hill both had their logical conclusions and from the storytelling point of view, a sequel wouldn’t really make much sense, especially if the same characters were to be the protagonists.
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The financial success of the franchise pushed the publishers to fund the development of Silent Hill 3, which returns to the Harry Mason storyline by making Cheryl (the baby he took out of Silent Hill at the end of the first game) the protagonist. The third Silent Hill makes the first title’s canon ending obsolete by reintroducing the horrors of the Otherworld to the life of the Mason family and killing Harry off right at the very beginning, shattering his deserved happy ending from the first game.
2 Mass Effect
The original Mass Effect trilogy was the pinnacle of the seventh generation of consoles. BioWare’s space opera was truly a series to remember, thanks to its clever writing, deep, complex characters, and a larger-than-life doomsday plot. Despite the third entry’s ending being quite underwhelming to many fans, it was still a logical conclusion to the series (especially with the Extended Cut DLC).
By the time Mass Effect 3 wasreleased, the franchise was already a global phenomenon, and it was to be expected that its publishers over at EA would try to keep it alive for as long as possible. Set 600 years after the trilogy, Mass Effect: Andromedawas an attempt at reviving the franchise with an open-world game, but it fell short. With a forgettable cast of characters, poor writing, and too much focus on the exploration of a dull open world, Andromeda was the antithesis of what made the original trilogy great in the first place.
1 Splinter Cell
The iconic espionage series was once one of Ubisoft’s most prized IPs. It could be argued that its plot was satisfactorily concluded with 2005’s Chaos Theory and that Sam Fisher’s story was artificially stretched out to accommodate for future releases. While Double Agent, released a year after Chaos Theory, was still a good enough game, the sequel that truly ruined Splinter Cell was Conviction, which came out in 2010.
It departs from the series’ well-defined style by taking up a more action-oriented approach. While the majority of the game can be played stealthily, it is clear at many points that sneaking around is not the best way to go about achieving the objective. That alone is a move that goes against everything Sam Fisher stands for, and while Conviction’s gameplay was fun enough, it didn’t really feel like a Splinter Cell title anymore. Thankfully, Blacklist was a step in the right direction.
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