What's a game you loved that got a sequel you came to dislike?
For me it's Diablo II. Granted I've played my fair share of D2 since launch, and also recently on a private server with a comrade from hexbear, but I still feel like years later the game didn't grab me as much as D1 did.
Granted I don't hate D2, but for a game that I keep coming back to, D1 takes the prize.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. TOTK isn't a bad game, but it does feel like a 70 dollar add-on to BOTW. It just didn't capture the magic.
I like TotK but the engineering mechanic is pretty laborious. You have a lot of freedom but only a small percentage of what you try works, and because of the clunky interface it takes a LONG time to make multiple attempts.
Only having 2 of the 3 axes to rotate things on is the worst part of that imo
As much fun as it was building ridiculous vehicles and crucifying Koroks, it got tiresome pretty quickly. It actively dissuades me from going back to it as much as past Zeldas.
That's one that didn't really vibe with me, an interesting case of my hype going down the more I actually learned about the game before it came out.
I was feeling it until about half way through and then it fell off for me really hard. I think the building concept was cool as hell but felt like it wasn't incorporated into the game. I feel if it had to be a Nintendo franchise maybe something like Pilot Wings could have gotten a boost with that idea, PW has usually doubled as a tech demo anyway. Have an open world with stuff you can build with, maybe some light combat for raiding materials or whatever and then make the rest of the game based around those vehicles. Have it be about racing the vehicles you make. You could even fo a multi player that's like City Whatever from Kirby Air Ride where all the players get dropped into a space and have a certain amount of time to get a vehicle together before a series of races with that vehicle.
For totk once I built a good hover bike I never had to be resourceful again. I didn't try a second play where I didn't get the paraglider or auto build and that did make the game better. Just not being able to paraglide makes it so you need to build stuff and no auto build means you have to use what's around you. There were a fee things I couldn't so but I manages to do the main quest and most side quests with it
It's such a fucking shame that the discourse around TOTK is completely dominated by stupid shortsighted "70$ DLC" arguments. TOTK is one of the most exciting sequels I have ever played. It's everything people want when they buy a new console generation, except on the same old hardware. The toolset the game gives you to solve puzzles is absolutely insane, ascend and recall alone are genius ideas and they all fit together absolutely perfectly. They could not have made that game had they also made a new map and I am so glad they didn't.
tbh I don’t care for any of the Halos after ODST
I beat Halo 1 yet to beat 2. Used to play it at parties at my cousins house couch multiplayer.
Warcraft 3 was my absolute favorite game back then, I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.
Needless to say, the followup being the somewhat successful Word of Warcraft made sure there would never be an actual sequel in a genre I actually like lol. And then much later they decided to "reforge" the game and the less is said about that, the better
I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.
yesssssssss there is another
I’d love to buy Reforged just for the fantastic-looking Warcraft 2 mod but I feel dirty paying any sort of money to reward that lousy attempt of a remake (and I don’t think it’s been cracked). Plus, I absolutely despise Battle dot net, so there’s that.
"Get yer finger outta that bunghole"
And the ever popular: "I think I'll use my human call. I'm so wasted, I'm so wasted"
I've played a ton of Sims 4 but I hate almost everything about it except that it has group conversations. 2 and 3 are amazing games.
the saddest, most depressing thing about the sims is that ultimately the community just... laps it up. sims 4 is eternal now because its the most lucrative and popular the sims has ever been.
the upswing is that i like paralives' artstyle.
They're also currently running one of my least favorite thing, a FOMO event. Its all actually like, free. Its not a battlepass (for now, lol). But I still hate the feeling of being FORCED to play a game I dont really feel like playing right now out of fear of missing stuff.
They also had a login bonus event a few months ago but at least all that required me to do was open the launcher like 6 times in the space of a month.
Does Elden Ring count?
As a follow-up to DS3 (yeah I’m not counting Sekiro in this), enemies move too quickly, boss movesets a little too erratic and the world way too open for my tastes. I’m a grown-ass person with things to do, I don’t wanna waste the two hours I have to myself each day dicking around and getting dicked-down for exploring some corner of the map, only to find loot that doesn’t apply to my build. It doesn’t respect my time.
I also don’t think I’m alone in thinking that replayability is harmed by making progression more of a slog than other Souls games. I need to grind more enemies (that are spread out, mind you) to level up my VIT stat so I don’t get 1-shot by bosses.
Build variety and boss-runs were definitely improved over other entries, I will admit. If these QoL improvements were made in a Bloodborne follow-up (peak souls imo), it might be the best Souls game made. Maybe I’ve outgrown the franchise tho; the tryhard-edgelord culture it invites is not for me.
Agreed. I love the world’s aesthetics and each area is peak game design but I’ve found myself not wanting to replay the game at all just because of how much of a chore it is to get through it all. I’ve played through DS3 about 30 times and I could play 30 more times and have no issue, Elden Ring I’ve only played about 7 times and that’s only to see how hard the NG+ cap is. The balance in difficulty is all over the place and I’m severely disappointed that some major bosses are weaker than others whereas Souls bosses always had a linear difficulty, if that’s the right way to put it.
Like you said about the weapon variety and skills being one of the best parts of the game, it still doesn’t get me to want to keep playing because of how huge it is and for little reward. Miyazaki said they won’t be as ambitious with further projects and I think that’s a good choice, I think they proved they could make an open world and they did but it just has many flaws. I’m kind of in a predicament between enjoying the world itself but also wanting that world to offer more in terms of enemy variety and things to explore and having been rewarded for that exploration because on one hand, you have a stellar game design that just fits perfectly with the lore, that being a world in decay for 5000 years until you reach it. From that level of discovery and detail to architecture they really did a good job. But on the other hand traversing through these areas on a new run just becomes tedious and most of my time is spent using Torrent to rush to a place I need to get to in order to progress the story which is all I want to do.
I think open worlds are a fad and give credit to FS for attempting it, they did a good job imo with every aspect of world building and design. But coming from DS3 where it’s more linear and you actually feel a solid progression I feel Elden Ring was lacking in that feeling of satisfaction. I think playing it for the first time was the best time I’ve had with the game but every other time I’ve played it I’ve just been turned off by how much traversal the game requires especially with how sparse areas are with items that don’t even fit with your build. I think the DLC being more compact helped solve this issue and brought back some of that Dark Souls-esque level design but at the detriment of again, having too many sparse areas with no reward at all. There were too many areas with little to no reward and you’re just left dissatisfied.
But it’s like I said, as a fantasy game taking in every detail and traversing the world is spectacular but when all I want to do is fight things it just becomes much more of a chore and also the difficulty spikes is just over the top. Bosses are too overpowered, weapons, spells, incantations are overpowered too which can sometimes trivialize the game entirely. It just feels like an overall unbalanced tragedy for a game with peak design. But I hope they do learn from it with future titles. I don’t want an open world souls game again but if they’ve learned from Elden Ring then I hope they improve from the mistakes they did the first time around. But all things said, it is genuinely the best open world fantasy RPG you could play right now.
A smaller Elden Ring would have been a less bad game but also a considerably less good one. When I played through that game at release I had absolutely no idea where the edges of that gameworld were, and it allowed me to be lost in it in a way no other game has managed to. I'd not trade that feeling for any amount of replayability.
maybe not "came to", i disliked the old republic when they said it would be an mmo and destroyed all hope of a third single player bioware rpg
does new vegas -> fallout 4 count?
Magicka 2 is the exception that proves the rule "yes, even pve games need nerfs sometimes." Being an unrestrained self-endangering idiot-god was fundamental to Magicka's charm, and reducing the player's threat to themselves and everything around them ruined that.
Dragon Age: Origins was a fantastic game and one I play to this day. Dragon Age 2 was hot trash. Dragon Age Inquisition was also hot trash. Why BioWare couldn't just leave the formula alone and improve upon it is beyond my comprehension.
I didn't mind it being smaller in scope either. I liked that. The main issue I had was with the gameplay. It was action oriented and really removed the strategy from the game aside from a few minor things. Spawning enemies out of nowhere and constantly using the same map over and over and over again. It was a half-baked game unfortunately.
Might be a hot take, but Mass Effect 2.
I love Mass effect, despite its flaws, but Mass Effect 2 was the game that derailed the series and basically forced Mass Effect 3 to have an unsatisfactory ending. So many concepts from Mass Effect 1 like the cipher, visions, Virgil, the Thorian were completely abandoned in favor of one giant video game length side mission. Sure the suicide mission was kind of cool, but at the end of Mass Effect 2 we learned almost nothing about the reapers from the last game.
But Cerberus is by far the worst mistake. From Shepard's POV, they literally witnessed Cerberus do grotesque, inhumane experiments throughout ME1 only a month before game start but the writers forced us to join these space Nazis. Cerberus is comically evil and is constantly doing cartoon villain experiments. Also, the space Nazis somehow have it in their hearts to spend billions of credits so that Shepard can save humanity.
The main writer of ME dropped off during the writing of ME2 and they abandoned a lot of his ideas.
I loved the ME trilogy, but after ME1 it really wasn’t about the themes and ideas, just the characters.
Also looking back they’re some of the most lib propaganda games ever like jeez
I cosign this hot take 100%. All these years later ME1 is the only entry in the trilogy I can replay start to finish.
Hotter take: I've never even played ME3 because ME2 was such an off putting slog.
Diablo1 had more of the rogue like roots. Diablo2 was more overtly cartoony and loot-grindy. It became no longer a question of "can you clear the game?" but "can you clear bosses quickly for good loot?". Diablo3 went even farther in this direction. I didn't play 4.
Diablo1 had more of the rogue like roots. Diablo2 was more overtly cartoony and loot-grindy. It became no longer a question of "can you clear the game?" but "can you clear bosses quickly for good loot?". Diablo3 went even farther in this direction. I didn't play 4.
Pretty much nails what I came to get burnt out on in 2.
KSP. KSP 2 was a cash grab that got abandoned before it even got out of early access.
I was one of the eople who bought into the hype. Not enough to buy the game luckily, but I figured if I just waited 5 years or so it would be great. Sucks what happened, but on the other hand the originial with the vast amount of mods available should be able to keep anyone entertained for a few decades.
Overwatch 2. How they fucked up the maps, the matching, the ranking system are all case studies on how to not make a sequel.
But that's not the worst fucking part that shocks me.
The worst part that shocks me to this day, is how they got me to actually miss loot boxes.
They fucked up with the prices for skins and hid all the semi valuable stuff behind a season pass that is always 20$.
I'm not paying ~1/4 the price of an entire AAA game for one season pass.
They didn't even put the coolest skins in the season pass, those are like 10-15$ on their own.
Dead space 1 is perfect and has no flaws and is one of the most visually striking games of the generation that doesn't feel like it aged a day since it came out.
Dead space 2 was meh and 3 is turbo poo
Yeah his cursing was really cathartic. Particularly after being abused by necromorphs that were unkillable.
Ooh this one is easy, Red Dead Redemption is a tight action game with a solid if sterotypical cowboy story about the end of the Wild West. Red Dead Remption 2, despite it's technical improvements in basically every way failed to draw me in even after hours of trying. I dunno what it is, maybe I just really am not interested in "the Gang in it's heyday" prequel hook, or maybe it's just how much Rockstar decided to try and make the game into a weird simulator instead of a video game. Played a ton of the MP with friends, as our own little posse rocking around, I made a cool half-native looking dude with a top hat and that was fun, but then we ran into the problem of Rockstar just giving up on wrapping any of the live stories they developed so that's a half-dead game right there. Hard to sell infinite money cards with the cowboy game I suppose.
Evil Genius is a pretty fun little strategy game from like 2004 that was an homage to old bond movies and the cold war, it was buggy as hell but it had some really neat ideas and charm to it and I really liked playing it. Evil Genius 2 is the over-polished sequel that utterly failed to live up to any of the first games energy, the art style got all the weird edges sanded off and has no character of it's own, and I feel like the new team just didn't really vibe with the classic's idea. I dunno maybe I should give it another go but it just rubbed me the wrong way.
The game is incredible the first time. I want to replay it, but the thought of needing to play over a dozen hours of slow railroaded cutscenes/shooting galleries during the mountain prologue, and then the exceptionally long Guarma chapter, just throws me off ever wanting to replay it fully
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Age of empires 2 is amazing 3 is dogshit.
All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.
Supreme commander 2 is a disappointment.
All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.
TW:Warhammer 2 was good, provided you pirate it and get all the factions. I feel like Total War really shines with a bunch of weird variety and radically different core mechanics for factions instead of the more historically focused titles' "these guys with spears are 5% better at doing spearman stuff than these other guys with spears because of their brainpans being more optimized for poking people with sticks or something" gamification stuff. It's just their model of hacking up the game into little pieces to then sell each piece individually on top of the full price of the game sucks.
The dinos are cool. But then you charge at the goblin square and a few of em are sent flying and they are dealt no damage at all, because the algorithm says the dino can only deal damage to like 5 models, and ends up killing like 3 because of how damage is calculated.
There is also very little difference between goby gobos and gunpowder, because all attacks deal at least 1 damage regardless of armour. One you notice that you can't go back.
The the campaign is very limited, just the Rome 2 mechanics.
Age of Empires 2 is still so good.
If anything it's better than ever. My only complaint is the lack of lan in the new version, wich means I can't play multiplayer.
Medieval 2 was the best Total War. I have so many fond memories of trying to break the game in different ways. Making heresy the majority religion, doing opposite colonialism by only sending diplomats to the New World to gift all of Europe to the Aztecs, getting the pope to declare a crusade against himself. It was great.
A new build of eb ii for medieval 2 dropped like a month ago. Haven't played it but it says it solves many of the stability issues thar were due to lack of ram utilization.
All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.
3K isn't fantastic but damned if I don't absolutely love it. A good mix of historical themes and over the top gameplay in Romance mode, and the unique diplomacy system only for 3K absolutely rules
But the battles don't work quite well because it's the Rome 2 system. So while it's not as bad as Warhammer or Rome 2, it's not good. The fish scale formation does not work last time I played
Ooooh, I am gonna fight you over Total War Attila, but I recognize I'm like one of dozens who think that game is good.
Dying Light 2 is one of the worst sequels I've ever played. The first game was excellent, they just fucked everything up in 2.
The Far Cry series was good up until 6. 6 is utter pish.
There was so much I loved with New Dawn, but then they padded out the gameplay to MMO levels of grinding and refused to add a NG+ to play with all the superpowers. Shame, I actually liked the basebuilding, but running oil back and forth sucked.
Guild Wars 1 was a MMORPG-lite that had instanced territories outside of towns (and even those were instanced, albeit much larger) where you could take up to 8 people with you. Crucially, every class had about one thousand skills you could combine pretty freely and you could second class. You could do some DnD-Tier bullshit combinations of stats with those, given all the weird status effect thingies it gave you to play around with
And then Guild Wars 2 is just WoW
I do like some GW2 but I totally understand. Hell of a game that was, wish I could find my account info lol
Guild Wars was one of the only MMO's I didn't hate. It was a unique world, with cool as hell classes like Paragon in my favorite expansion. Then 2 just turned into standard high fantasy. A beautiful world to be sure, but I liked the flavor of the old one.
I'm in the same boat, GW1 was my favourite as a kid, I put truly staggering hours into it and ruined my development probably
But GW2 just has zero charm. The Mesmer was my jam in GW1, with its broad build variety from high DPS to caster shutdown, whereas GW2 has them as a clunky melee/ranged hybrid
I enjoy GW2 a lot but they really should've called it something else.
Dawn of War 1 & 2 were both great games in their own respective ways, then 3 came out and somehow combined the bad aspects of 1 & 2.
I remember. Relic saw that people generally liked the first game (and expansions) better but could not stick to a direction and came to an unsatisfying compromise between both. And because of that flop, we’re still resorting to modding DC and Soulstorm.
I’ve been holding onto hope for another shot with the successes of Space Marine 2, Darktide and Mechanicus showing that W40K has a future in games, but RTS as a genre has been mired for the past decade. Relic’s less than stellar reception with CoH3 hasn’t helped.
Do the resident evils after the first three count? I was pretty young when the first game for ps came out back in '96 and it scared the shit out of me. Loved everything about 2 and 3. Even loved the remake of the original for GameCube and code Veronica was...alright?
I know everyone loves 4 but my opinion at the time was that it was a good game but not a good resident evil game. That's prob my most boomer take but I grew up playing the first 3 so I wasn't a big fan of the action elements of the game.
Just finished playing the remake of 2 and, I mean it's fine I guess? I liked some things about it but they left so much out. Probably won't play the rest. Yeah, that's my old man take.
But if we're gonna stick with the main themes of the thread: Parasite Eve. The first game was a masterpiece. The second one is indeed a game.
I liked PE 2 though. I get why it's not everyone's cup of tea compared to the first. I liked Biohazard 4 but yeah 1-3 are the best.But if we're gonna stick with the main themes of the thread: Parasite Eve. The first game was a masterpiece. The second one is indeed a game.
You're not wrong about 4. It's a fantastic game in my opinion but it's so far removed from resident evil, even the games that came after when it comes to the story, it could have been it's own thing and sold a lot less. It was needed at the time for sure, the series was getting real stale real fast but it's a major departure in style and story. I've actually still got my launch GameCube version of the game. I usually play the wii version since I've got both and my GameCube is a wii. I love an arcade shooter and it's kinda the best arcade shooter ever.
Dungeons Keeper.
That mobile game thing.... Ugh
War for the Overworld is a modern Dungeon Keeper if you're looking to scratch that itch.
Thanks!
liked Final Fantasy 13 and 13-2. Lightning Returns is trash.
Dead Rising just got worse and worse with each outing. I eventually came to like DR2 (thanks to Off The Record) but I couldn't bring myself to care about 3 and when they changed Frank for 4, I gave up on believing the series could be good again.
Love DR1 but I wasn't wowed by what I saw in 2 so I never continued on with the games.
I love and truly adore a niche Space RTS game called "Star Ruler" that came out 10-odd 14 years ago. With the 'Galactic Armoury' mod, it's so fucking cool. You get to run your empire while designing and build ships of increasing complexity, and eventually insane sizes, custom fleets with a mothership with a repair bay with a big laser (or ten thousand tiny lasers) or you can harvest/blow up a star and eventually you can build giant thrusters on your planets and fly your planets around like they're spaceships and fill them with rocket silos and shield generators and ugh. The only game I've enjoyed to seriously incentivise fundamental tech tree specialisation, too.
Star Ruler 2 had none of that, and made me spend most of my time dealing with a frustrating diplomatic cards system, and it had a decent ship builder, but it just wasn't the same. It's probably objectively an okay game, but my disappointment was huge, all I wanted was a better engine, sleeker UI, tighter interfaces, nicer graphics, etc. and it was instead basically just a different game.
I still regularly replay SR1, something about it captures an aspect of my imagination nothing else has.
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FEAR 1 was fun. FEAR 2 was fun.
FEAR 3 was a lil too wacky and had a goofy coop thing going on. I didn't like it.
I really ought to go back and play FEAR the whole way through. I remember playing the demo for FEAR 1 over and over and being blown away by the graphics and the bullet time[^I know Max Payne did it first, but it was my first exposure to the mechanic] as well as the enemy AI. Idk if I'm remembering right, but I think the individual bullet casings would stick around? Also, there's was something really visceral about the guns in that game.
It's spooky season, so I guess now's as good a time as any to rescue it from the depths of my Steam library!
Lords of the Realm 3. I have no idea what they were thinking making everything real-time. Custom games were still fun for pitched battles, but the city management portion was yucky. They even had cool mechanics going on like different lords to put in charge of counties giving different abilities.
Heroes of Might and Magic VI. Five was one of the series' best entries. I couldn't even get VI to load without crashing. My fault for buying Ubisoft.
Call of Duty was a breath of fresh air when it came out in 2003. CoD2 improved the campaign, but had some mid multi-player. CoD4 was a decent "not Counterstrike." Everything has been downhill since. Moving from WWII to present day was also a mistake and I blame CoD for white supremacists taking over online spaces. At least in Battlefield, people used to get banned for slurs. By CoD4, servers weren't even bothering anymore.
Speaking of Battlefield, 1942 was GOAT. Vietnam was okay, but felt more like a mod (chasing America out of Hue was based, tho). Battlefield 2 limited how many bots you could play with...which defeated one of the main reasons to play. It's all been downhill from there and they jumped on the "Modem Wehrmacht Warfare" train after CoD started getting that DoD fed money.
There's more, but these were my main focuses of hate.
Yeah what the fuck happened with HoMM 6?
Five was one of the series' best entries.
Second only to 3.
Castlevania Lord of Shadow. I only played about 2 hours of 2 but it was such an awful departure from LoS. We’re due a new Castlevania…
World of Warcraft, everything after Legion. Not that some parts weren't bad before that.
I'm glad I never got into competitive PvP or hardcore raiding since I had lots of fun as an enh shammy. Sure, the only time I was actually a force to be reckoned with was wielding a Corpsemaker in Level 20-29 Warsong Gulch, but goddamn those Windfury proc multicrits were satisfying. Also Spirit Wolves are cute. When I did some casual raiding I would occasionally get grumbles about my DPS, but whatever, that was never why I played the game. It was just a way to have fun with my buddies...once they quit, there was nothing keeping me there. Glad I got out before they jumped the shark.
And also: Tomb Raider Crash Bandicoot Mario bros. Diablo Age of Empires 2
Turns out most games I used to love I ended up disliking the sequels. Can't think of one that has gotten better.
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World had an absolutely infuriating story which was too bad since it had one of the most fun pet collection mechanics in any rpg game I've ever played.
Also obligatory Bioshock 2 good, Bioshock Infinite bad
I love that game purely because it's an excellent monster collector and I love monster collectors. I haven't played the original.
Ratchet & Clank (2 had some atrocious levels, and 3 was rushed with a story only an amerikan could have written)
Trails in the Sky (I didn't like Trails from Zero that much, the game was easier, the quality of life was gone, and the steampunk qualities of the setting that I liked were gone as well. Also I thought the writing was weaker in general)
Blaster Master Zero
Azure Striker Gunvolt
Kingdom Hearts (2 has better combat for sure, but I can't stand the large number of cutscenes and the disney worlds)
The only thing I remember is that you go from planet to planet, and one atrocious fall damage platforming section
Azure Striker Gunvolt
I was having a hell of a time thinking of my answer but this might be it.
FEAR 1 and Wolfenstein TNO were some of my favorite games of all time so it’s only natural their sequels fell short.
In FEAR 2’s case, while it’s a rock solid shooter in its own right, it’s so obvious just how much it was trying to fit in the mold of the “gritty modern military shooter” that was predominant at the time (especially MW2). Stripping the tactical shooter elements like leaning still irks me.
For Wolfenstein 2, they tried to shake up the gameplay formula of TNO/TOB but the end result was something I was never quite satisfied with. To list some issues, Stealth went from being hilariously too easy to being a convoluted mechanic that I rarely ever used after the first engagement. Them splitting the Assault Rifle of the first game into the SMG and StG took away the entire point of the AR being a reliable weapon that was competent in most situations and replaced it with a useless peashooter (on higher difficulties) and cheesable death cannon respectively.
Midtown madness 2 didn't feel the same as the original to me.
Grow home. I loved and still adore that game but for whatever reason the sequel grow up doesn't feel the same. It feels like it has less soul than the first
Same, it's lost something important
Darkest Dungeon
Rebel Galaxy. First was great while second was not only a different genre but also bad.
Every The Settlers game except first 2 and remake of 2.
Space Marine
Fantasy General
Diablo (probably unpopular opinion but i loved first Diablo but second bored me so much that i stopped plaing the entire hack & slash genre for 22 years)
The Sly Cooper series. I just didn't like Sly 4.
I was ok with them tweaking the gameplay a bit, as there was a huge change from sly 1 to sly 2. But some of it never sat well with me, like some of the art and UI seemed off (although I loved the animated cutscenes, they were very well-put-together and felt like I was watching an actual cartoon on TV).
But what really condemned it was the story, they left it on a cliffhanger and then decided to never touch it ever since and it's been more than a decade. They should have just made Sly 4 complete the entire story.
Granted, I haven't played it myself yet, but Mega Man Star Force 2 is that for a lot of fans of that series. The first game already got a lukewarm reception because of how it was simultaneously "just more Battle Network" and "not simply more Battle Network", but it has a very heartfelt story and some people are turning around on it when they can judge it on its own merits instead of constant comparisons to Battle Network, which has better gameplay. It still sold a decent number of copies.
The second game basically killed whatever momentum the series had by then. The story got dumbed down significantly which made it feel even more like Battle Network (although it still has its moments), the space theme was lost to "lost civilisations" shenanigans that many fans weren't interested in, the gameplay changes were meh and you frequently had to navigate through a maze-like "Sky Wave" with a too high encounter rate. Sales numbers were well below expectations.
The third game has the best gameplay by far and a story close to or as good as the first game, but the damage was already done. It sold the least of the three games. But at least the series ended on a high note with very few loose ends.
For me, every single armored core game after last raven. Like there is just a lot lost when the series becomes designed around a regular twin stick control setup over the "bad" control scheme that the game was designed around before 4/FA.
Like it just feels much more rewarding to play and beat, and every time I play 4/FA or 6, I almost always want to go back and play 3 and Silent Line again.
I haven't played formula front, and I don't remember when that released.