Franchises That Were Tainted by the 7th Console Generation

[Thief]

The seventh generation kind of ruined a lot of great franchises for me. There are good games to be found in the PS3/360/Wii era, but Christ did it ever do some shitty things to a lot of franchises I love.

These are the ones that got ruined for me:
- Resident Evil and its shift towards sucking dick. (to be fair the shift started with RE4, but RE4 is RE4)
- Metal Gear Solid 4: What A Mess
- Silent Hill... all of it after 4.
- Final Fantasy 13 and its eight million spin-offs
- The Legend of Zelda w/ Skyward Sword (AKA fuck this piece of shit game)
- Metroid: an underwhelming third prime installment (that abandons the intricate world design for more linear progression) followed by Other M.
- 3D Mario: I hated how they abandoned the style found in SM64 and Sunshine for one more in line with "2D Mario in 3D" (aka linear and boring - no exploration).

Those are the big ones for me.

I know some of y'all don't like negativity, but I wanna hear it! Let your hate flooooooooooooow!

[Monkei]

I always enjoyed playing the Tekken games at friends' houses, especially Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag Tournament. Tekken 6 on PS3 was the first Tekken I actually owned myself, but I found it so incredibly boring and lame and weak on a technical level (the graphics, the pseudo "we're trying to be a little bit more like Dead or Alive" arena interactivity).. all the characters were unlocked from the beginning, there was just no value in playing it. It'll take the long overdue Tekken X Street Fighter to bring me back to that franchise.

(lol @ dick sucking shift)

[AnimeGamer183]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-disappoin ... -its-fans/

Read this little article about Final Fantasy just today, most of it is pretty spot on. This being the highlight of the article "They Forgot How To Tell A Story In A Single Game".

Notice how a lot of these are franchises from japan. I do know one thing though, you absolutely cant trust these franchises anymore, and its a bit frustrating.

And just for the record I just wanna say I cant stand "new school" Final Fantasy fans.

[MiTT3NZ]

Pro Evo. Nuff said.

[Mr357]

Fallout: New Vegas
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 onward
Edit: Mortal Kombat

[Shin Pan Tzee]

Hitman. Before a brilliant series about big, sandbox stages where you run free and play with your creativity to get away with murder, making it almost an art form.

Then the 7th gen happened, and the big scenarios were chopped into tiny, linear ones. Freedom and creativity were cut down because of stupid checklists and a condescending voice in your head, and the gameplay took a back seat in favor of a cinematic approach and a fucking AWFUL story.

And yes, i'm aware Blood Money was also on the 7th gen, but it was very early into it, and it was also present on the 6th.

[KidMarine]

Might be easier to list franchises that weren't ruined. I can only think of Mario and Yakuza.

[Henry Spencer]

Metal Gear - series should have ended with 4 but they kept making them and 4 was abysmal. MGSV was such a mixed bag for me, as was Peace Walker. I enjoyed the spin offs more like AC!D and Rising waaaaay more than I did any of the mainline games.

Resident Evil - Resident Evil 6 wasn't a terrible game but it was really disappointing to me after how fun and underrated 5 was. 6 just felt like too many cooks spoiling the broth and even if I didn't know that like 600+ people worked on it, it was still just a mess of a game. I enjoyed Jake and Sherry's campaign and that was it, did not enjoy Chris and Leon's campaigns at all and their "partners" in that game were really boring and forgettable compared to previous protagonists (even Leon and Chris themselves were dull in RE6). RE6 is the closest game in the series to being legit "bad" to me since I've enjoyed pretty much every game, even the spin offs (Oh yeah, never touched Operation Raccoon City which looked pretty damn generic and bad). Not played Revolutions 2 yet. Hope RE7 and REmake 2 are both good.

Rocket Knight - Generic platformer that doesn't even hold a candle to the 16 bit series.

Deception - Deception IV was honestly pretty damn disappointing. It just tries too hard to be "funny" and light hearted when the series was previously so gothic and macabre (and therefor ethe traps didn't have the same "oof, that's got to hurt" to them that previous games did, since they were so brutal). Not a fan of the direction Tecmo has taken it now. It will have to take the series creator's return (my man, Makoto Shibata) for me to be interested in a new Deception game.

Sonic - Need I say more? Only Generations was okay and even that was overrated as hell. I tried Unleashed and wasn't a fan of that either or of Sonic Colors...didn't even bother with the other atrocities they brought out that gen like Sonic '06 and Sonic Lost World because of the horror stories of how bad they were and looked by YouTube footage.

Final Fantasy - XIII was everything I didn't like about the aesthetics of FF games in one game (or JRPGs for that matter) previously and why I don't think of myself a fan of the series. I love Ivalice and loved the look of Versus XIII but they kept putting all of their manpower into XIII and those spin offs/sequels that nobody wanted and FFXIV has made a good comeback for the core fans but for mainstream audiences I don't think the FF brand is what it used to be at all now thanks to the reception to both vanilla XIV and XIII and its spin offs and how long it's taken them to get XV out. I'd happily be wrong though.

Persona - all that Atlus made last gen was Catherine on console and a bunch of cool handheld games and unnecessary Persona spin offs but no original Persona games. Which was weird. P5 cannot come out any sooner since the series has been on the back burner for a long while now.

Konami and Capcom were both really bad at managing their game IPs last gen between them they killed/diminished sales for the following: PES (fuck up after fuck up), MGS (Peace Walker being handheld only made it the worst selling mainline entry in the series), Silent Hill, Castlevania, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Mega Man (I'll never forgive Capcom for Legends 3 cancellation, never), Rocket Knight, Goemon, Vandal Hearts (that shitty PS3/360 game, yuck), Resident Evil (as good as RE5 was, Operation Raccoon City and RE6 are NOT the direction I want the series to go in), Bomberman, Devil May Cry etc. They all took weird turns for me.

To be fair though, a lot of series have bad games, it was just really prominent last gen the most for some strange reason.

[Let's Get Sweaty]

For me, it has to be WWE games, for the utter lack of progression since the PS2 days, and well documented examples of regression for good measure. Not even a change in publisher appears to have made any significant difference, with the same developer kept on board to churn out barely incremental sequels, if you can call them that, on an annual basis.

The franchise is clearly a money spinner that its owner has no incentive to invest time and money on revitalizing, so I don't anticipate these complaints being left behind with the last generation of consoles unfortunately.

[Yokosuka]

Splinter Cell : They destroyed everything the older episodes had cool. Disappearance of humour, no feeling from the gameplay, too fast-paced level design, horrendous HUD, no light & sound captors, annoying hollywood plots and acting. Blacklist is a good game though but I don't view it as a SC.

[Mr357]

Splinter Cell : They destroyed everything the older episodes had cool. Disappearance of humour, no feeling from the gameplay, too fast-paced level design, horrendous HUD, no light & sound captors, annoying hollywood plots and acting. Blacklist is a good game though but I don't view it as a SC.

Not to mention the lack of Michael Ironside (quite possibly the best VA in any game ever in my opinion). Chaos Theory was a masterpiece, but Double Agent kinda sucked and then it went totally downhill from there. Ubisoft in general has been horrible for the last few years.

[FlagshipFighter]

You're both wrong. Double Agent was great, Conviction was a good game but a shit Splinter Cell game, and Blacklist is potentially as good as if not better than Chaos Theory in many aspects. Story, characters, etc. have never really mattered in Splinter Cell, it's all about the gameplay, though I do missIronside and hid back-and-forth over the comms.

[ShenGCH]

Fallout: New Vegas
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 onward
Edit: Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe wasn't very good, but Mortal Kombat 9 (or whatever you wish to call it) was excellent.

Also, New Vegas and Bad Company 2 are games, not franchises

[Mr357]

Fallout: New Vegas
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 onward
Edit: Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe wasn't very good, but Mortal Kombat 9 (or whatever you wish to call it) was excellent.

Also, New Vegas and Bad Company 2 are games, not franchises

Of course, but New Vegas was the "bad" Fallout game of the 7th generation. I said BC 2 because I wasn't sure if it was the first 7th gen Battlefield game (could've looked it up I guess).

[Calshot]

Of course, but New Vegas was the "bad" Fallout game of the 7th generation.

I thought Fallout 3 was worse.