What are the most disappointing games from your favorite franchises?

Aeander

With most long-running, popular franchises, there is usually that one game that fans don't want to talk about. Which games from your favorite franchises disappointed you the most? Why did it disappoint you? If it was a recent title, what are your thoughts on the future of the series.


Mine are as such:

Fire Emblem - Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
Fire Emblem is my overall favorite franchise. I would go as far as to say that there are no bad Fire Emblem games, but Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia would be my personal most disappointing game in the series. It's effectively a case of a great story, great characters, and great artwork/cinematics holding up the worst map designs in the series. This is ultimately the fault of it being a remake of the series' black sheep - Fire Emblem Gaiden. Gaiden's maps were effectively non-maps in that almost all of them feel less like thoughtfully designed levels and more like groups of enemies spread at random over flat terrain; and the lack of story surrounding all non-plot essential maps make these encounters feel even less engaging and impactful than they otherwise would. I would give this game a 7/10. Good, but not great. 

As a runner up, I would say that Shadow Dragon comes as a close second for literally the exact opposite reasons to Shadows of Valentia. In retrospect, I was too harsh on this game when it released. As a remake of the original Fire Emblem, it has very solid map design, but virtually no story or character personality at all. It desperately needed the love that Nintendo and Intelligent Systems gave to Echoes: SoV when they built on its existing story and characters. 

At any rate, I have high hopes for the franchise's future and believe that they will continue to impress. 

Dynasty Warriors - Dynasty Warriors 9
To say that I am disappointed with Dynasty Warriors 9 would be a gross understatement. I hate this game and everything it stands for. Musuo/Warriors games are my guilty pleasure. The power fantasy and cheesiness absolutely drips from this series and makes it my ultimate stress killer. Dynasty Warriors 9, on the other hand, doesn't fall into the "so bad it's good" category that I love the other games for. Instead, it's a soulless, crappy, boring open world game with no significant redeeming qualities. I would have legitimately preferred that the series die outright than have disgraced itself with one of the worst games I've ever played. I would give this game a 1/10. That score comes from tough love for a franchise that I desperately hope can not only return to form, but meaningfully iterate on that form for once.

Omegaforce showed that they are capable of great work with Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors, Dynasty Warriors 8, and Samurai Warriors 4. With that in mind, there might be hope for Dynasty Warriors yet. But perhaps it is time that the mainline Dynasty Warriors series died in favor of a similar new franchise with a new take on the Musuo formula and a different setting. 

Mass Effect - Mass Effect Andromeda
While I actually like the improvements to the TPS combat and tech trees in this game, I genuinely felt like every other aspect of the game was a step down. None of the companions stood out to me. The story never impressed me. The exploration and questing was just as boring as it was in Dragon Age: Inquisition, if not worse. And let's not even get started on the bugs and facial.... quirks. Bioware's game quality has truly dropped into the gutter. Still, it was at least playable and wasn't exactly my worst purchase last year (that would probably be For Honor). I would give this a 5 or a 6/10. I worry for the future of the franchise, but part of me wishes it would have died with dignity. 

Guild Wars - Guild Wars 2
My statements here will hopefully show the balanced manner with which I view my main MMO. One can love something while still being critical of it. While I love Guild Wars 2 for its beautiful artstyle, horizontal progression, player-friendly model, and fascinating universe, I have to acknowledge that it lacks the depth of the original game. It seems to me that, like most developers in the past decade, Arenanet does not believe their community to be intellectually capable of handling complex mechanics. As such, they've dumbed down their skill system, their build system, and their buffs/debuffs from the original game. That was a huge loss, as Guild Wars 1 represented the peak of intelligent, diverse, deep buildcrafting in my eyes and I wonder if we will ever see anything on its level in that regard. I give Guild Wars 2 an 8/10, for failing to respect the intelligence of its legacy players, but also simultaneously providing one of the few truly innovative, player-friendly games in the MMO genre. I still view the franchise's future with hope, but that comes with the unfortunate caveat that I doubt the franchise will ever return to form in the ways that I wish it would. 

Devil May Cry - Devil May Cry 2
Say what you will about DmC - Devil May Cry. DmC was a reboot that no one asked for with a Dante that no one liked, but at least DmC was mostly tonally consistent with the rest of the series and had clear passion put into its misguided development. Devil May Cry 2 was the dark, edgy, boring cousin of the other games in the series. Give me Devil May Cry 3 or Devil May Cry 4 any day. I would give this a 4/10. It's amazing that the franchise saw its best entry after this title, and while it appears to be a dead franchise thanks to the poor sales of DmC, perhaps it will see a rebirth now that Capcom is starting to turn its reputation around for the better and revitalize its core franchises. 

But enough about me. How about you?

Tiller

Monkey Island: MI4 Escape From Monkey Island

This was a terrible attempt at modernizing a classic point and click adventure game by utilizing the engine from Grim Fandango. They touted it as featuring "Scurvy inducing 3D" They weren't wrong. It was terrible, the story was bizarre "even for Monkey Island standards" and controls were wonky as hell.

One puzzle I will never forget ( and the reason I have only played it through only once) was this stupid mini game that was supposed to be fun called "Monkey Combat". It was kind of a play on Mortal combat but more along the lines of rock paper scissors. Walk throughs would not work because ever time you failed it reset what actions beat what and left you open to guessing through tial and error, most times ending in failure. 

Terrible game and the humor wasn't even close to being funny like the rest of the games in the series. I honestly like MI1-MI2 and I thought MI3 was a step up from both of them even though Ron Gilbert was a bit butt hurt over the fact that he had no role in 3 and to this day does not consider it a true successor to the series which I think is bs. It was a great game and the first Monkey Island game to have voice acting.

There was also Tales From Monkey Island done by Telltale games, which was OK, not as bad as MI4, but a bit of a departure from the original series due to the episodic nature of it. It wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible like 4 was.

They have since revamped all Monlkey Island games but MI3 and MI4, also  added voice over with Dominic Armato (who is pretty much Guybrush Threepwood). I'm still waiting for HD update for Monkey Island 3 since it hasn't aged well at all and looks pixelated as hell running  on Scumm VM. MI4 can just stay buried for all I care.

I hope Disney does something with this series, movies, games, tv shows, anything would be fine by me.

sumdumguy1

I love Star Trek.  Star Trek Online is such a massive and utter disappointment.   I was so excited for this game and like so many others let down.  I hoped it would improve and while there were some minor improvements, it still easily qualifies as the biggest disappointment for me.

What makes this even worse is there is a mobile version of Star Trek I play on my iphone sparingly and the game is miles better than STO.

Cleffy

Final Fantasy X-2. I get the premise, Charlie's Angels. It just wasn't well done and was created quickly as a means to capitalize on the popularity of Final Fantasy X. The story was shallow and in shambles. The gameplay mechanics were poor. The mini-game was Blitzball manager. The overall length of the game was short. I ended up finishing the game by the end of the day in which I bought it. Sold it back to the same store for almost retail.

I do think it's interesting that Final Fantasy X-2 made that arc bad, but Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns made that series of games good.

Ridelynn

FFXIV 1.0 - I was so hyped for that. I tried for two months after release to convince myself that it was a good game. ARR helped turn it around though.

SWTOR is a close runner up.

Dragon Age 2 and/or Diablo 3 are tied for a distant third.

Po_gg

Mars_Orbital said:

Age of Conan, was nothing like what was promised

Really good video, a blast from the past   that UI with the circular combo bar in the middle... and necro had scorpions as base pets instead of mutilators. The part with "how you handle the lag" when he said "we have great coders"  I just /facepalm

Not really a fitting answer to the OP though, it is not part of a long-running, popular franchise, it has no prequels, unless you mean the few action games on console of course...

When I saw the thread title, without even reading the detailed OP I instantly thought about UO. First timers are the heaviest hitters I guess... (at least for me, like Auto Assault as my first cancelled game)
Ultima was a massive series, the start was a bit rough but from IV it really took off, just to Ascension botch that momentum while UO takes a huge dump right into the middle of it.

It is probably the curse of online-ification, that's why I usually avoid the threads about "which game you want an mmo"   There's ES, when you thought Skyrim is the bottom of the pit, ESO proved you're wrong.
There's SW:TOR as Ridelynn mentioned, there was WO just to drag the Wizardry name through the mud, there's the years-long halt on the GTA series just because of the crappy online part... still, none of them was as harmful as UO. Garriot flushed down the whole Ultima franchise in the loo with UO.

cameltosis

Star Wars - SW:TOR

Game failed to deliver on pretty much everything. I was following it closely through development, was in closed beta, then played it at launch. The amount of lies we were told was astonishing. The one that disappointed me most was throughout development, we were told that PvP was going to have equal importance to PvE and equal content. There was supposed to be proper world RvR and this was backed up by the remaining Mythic devs who were still working at EA. But yeh, actual launched game was pretty awful, missing all their marks except for having full voice acting. Unfortunately, with EA holding the license for SW, they've completely lost me as a customer now. 


Final Fantasy - 13

I'm not a superfan of the series, but 7 is my favourite game of all time and 9 was also great. I've tried some of the others, but 13 (and it's followups) was truly atrocious. The combat system in particular was a joke, the characters really cheesy and irritating. You had to play through 20 or 30 hours of boredom before the game finally opened up and allowed you to start exploring and leveling properly. I tried the first followup but only lasted a few hours as it was even worse. The direction SE have taken with FF has pretty much lost me as a customer. I tried 14 but it wasn't for me. 15 also looks awful. I'll have to wait and see about the 7 remake, I want it to be good but hold little faith in it. 


Total War - Rome / Rome 2

I love the total war series in general but was massively disappointed with the two rome games. Main thing was lack of diversity. With each army I tried you just had a tiny selection of troops and not enough upgrade options so that game felt very shallow, basically just repeating the same fights over and over and over. Luckily, Creative Assembly redeemed themselves with the Warhammer games. 


Lord of the Rings - Shadow of Mordor

Mechanically, this game was quite fun. I enjoyed the combat and it was really satisfying getting long combos, similar to the Arkham games. But, it was extremely repetitive and at no point did it feel like I was in middle earth. I also didn't like the setting, spending that amount of time in a dark and dingey environment just bummed me out. It meant I didn't bother with the sequel. But, its Lord of the Rings, so I'll just spend some time researching future releases as they may be worth it.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Cuppett5

Asheron's Call 2. Elder Scrolls Online. SWTOR.

psychosiz1

As someone else mentioned above, STO was bad and never got much better.  Why can't they make a decent and immersive Star Trek game?  It seems like a match made in heaven.

Honorable mention to ESO.  Another gamer that failed to live up to my expectations.

Amathe

Warhammer

I did not enjoy Warhammer Online at all. Easily the most over-hyped and under-delivered mmorpg I have played.

Star Wars

While I enjoyed portions of both original SWG and SWTOR as things standing alone on their own merits, neither felt like Star Wars to me other than a nice screenshot here and there. 

Dungeons & Dragons

This is the game you want someone to get right, because it's the granddaddy of them all. But, I didn't care for it. 

Daikuru

StarCraft 2

I loved StarCraft and StarCraft Broodwar, but StarCraft 2 was a big disappointment for me.

World of Warcraft Post-WotLK

Warcraft 2 and 3 were amazing games, WoW was a very good game too, until it became more and more ridiculous.

exile01

Everything past FF9. I played FFX and bought only for it the ps2 bundle but beside some great music and some awesome cinematics, the game was just not up to the quality of his ancestors.
Never touched anything after FFX, it was my last Squareenix game. I did play FF15 MMO but that is also a miserable product, shallow in his core, filled with mindnumbing chain quests with superior music, artstyle and fanboyism.

Lets see how they will ruin the my love FF7 with their cashgrab remake. 
Also on top for me is Xenogears, wich i hope oneday they will tell the full story.

Amathe

Oh. How could I forget? SOE and then Daybreak completely WHIFFING on Everquest Next. 

Theocritus

Just about everything since WoW was released in 2004?

lahnmir

OP, finally someone who understands how bad DMC2 actually is. Then again, after the phenomenal DMC3 I found DMC4 pretty average too.

Then I went with Bayonetta and never looked back.

And huge stinkers in series? How about Ultima 8 and M&M 9? Horrible games in amazing series.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

Aeander

lahnmir said:

OP, finally someone who understands how bad DMC2 actually is. Then again, after the phenomenal DMC3 I found DMC4 pretty average too.

Then I went with Bayonetta and never looked back.

And huge stinkers in series? How about Ultima 8 and M&M 9? Horrible games in amazing series.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

I understand that DMC4 was a mixed bag because of the ridiculous degree that it recycled its own bosses and content, but in terms of actual gameplay, I liked it the best. 

I especially liked Nero. His sword charge mechanics and devilbringer made him, IMO, even more fun to play than Dante or Vergil. 

Also, the bosses were among the best in the franchise... the first time you fight them.

AlBQuirky

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was the "stinker in the series" for me. Arena was a good starting point with Daggerfall making many great improvements. Morrowind topped Daggerfall for me and then Oblivion hit. For the life of me, I just couldn't get into it at all. I tried and tried, too. I waited to buy Skyrim remembering what Oblivion was like. I finally got it and while fun to play, still not what I look for in the Elder Scroll games.

PS: How many games make a "series?" Is EverQuest or Asheron's Call a series with 2 games each?

Aeander

AlBQuirky said:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was the "stinker in the series" for me. Arena was a good starting point with Daggerfall making many great improvements. Morrowind topped Daggerfall for me and then Oblivion hit. For the life of me, I just couldn't get into it at all. I tried and tried, too. I waited to buy Skyrim remembering what Oblivion was like. I finally got it and while fun to play, still not what I look for in the Elder Scroll games.

PS: How many games make a "series?" Is EverQuest or Asheron's Call a series with 2 games each?

I would say that yes, an MMO would constitute a series, even on its own. The reason for this is that expansion packs and major updates create controversy. In the case of WoW, many prefer the vanilla game or favor a particular expansion, for example.

In a case like this, you could say that *insert expansion* is your most disappointing game.

Shaigh

I avoided playing most of the stinkers in a series so I have to pick a game I never played. Since this is an MMO site I have to pick warhammer: Eternal crusade, I base it on the MMO they promised and the arena shooter they eventually released.

A game I did play in recent years that truly pissed me off was Telltales: Game of thrones. Telltales choice mechanics while having forced events didn't work at all with that one.

lahnmir

Aeander said:

lahnmir said:

OP, finally someone who understands how bad DMC2 actually is. Then again, after the phenomenal DMC3 I found DMC4 pretty average too.

Then I went with Bayonetta and never looked back.

And huge stinkers in series? How about Ultima 8 and M&M 9? Horrible games in amazing series.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

I understand that DMC4 was a mixed bag because of the ridiculous degree that it recycled its own bosses and content, but in terms of actual gameplay, I liked it the best. 

I especially liked Nero. His sword charge mechanics and devilbringer made him, IMO, even more fun to play than Dante or Vergil. 

Also, the bosses were among the best in the franchise... the first time you fight them.

I think DMC4 was a great 3 hour game, repeated about 5 times. And then that dice part near the end, horrible, horrible and uninspired design. I do agree on Nero, he played awesomely. Too bad you had to slog through it all again with Dante after that...

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

Sovrath

Master of Orion III

Octagon7711

Mass Effect Andromeda, by itself it's not a bad game but could not fill the shoes of the previous three.  They put as little into as they could and milked the theme for all they could.

Aeander

lahnmir said:

Aeander said:

lahnmir said:

OP, finally someone who understands how bad DMC2 actually is. Then again, after the phenomenal DMC3 I found DMC4 pretty average too.

Then I went with Bayonetta and never looked back.

And huge stinkers in series? How about Ultima 8 and M&M 9? Horrible games in amazing series.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

I understand that DMC4 was a mixed bag because of the ridiculous degree that it recycled its own bosses and content, but in terms of actual gameplay, I liked it the best. 

I especially liked Nero. His sword charge mechanics and devilbringer made him, IMO, even more fun to play than Dante or Vergil. 

Also, the bosses were among the best in the franchise... the first time you fight them.

I think DMC4 was a great 3 hour game, repeated about 5 times. And then that dice part near the end, horrible, horrible and uninspired design. I do agree on Nero, he played awesomely. Too bad you had to slog through it all again with Dante after that...

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

In that case, we are completely agreed.

It seems to me that, had DMC4 been developed today with a design philosophy more akin to Nier Automata in which optional repeated playthroughs give you different playable characters and perspectives (oh, and no dice rolling abortion of a mechanic at the end), it would have been a truly great game. Perhaps not of comparable scope to the excellent DMC4, but a highly refined, shorter experience worth playing.

cameltosis

AlBQuirky said:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was the "stinker in the series" for me. Arena was a good starting point with Daggerfall making many great improvements. Morrowind topped Daggerfall for me and then Oblivion hit. For the life of me, I just couldn't get into it at all. I tried and tried, too. I waited to buy Skyrim remembering what Oblivion was like. I finally got it and while fun to play, still not what I look for in the Elder Scroll games.

I never played Arena or Daggerfall, but the pattern Bethesda seemed to set with Morrowind -> Oblivion -> Skyrim was that each game got big improvements mechanically, but each game got worse in terms of world building. 


With Oblivion, what I found was that if you cheesed the leveling mechanics it made the game much more enjoyable. So, I would select conjuring, blade and heavy armour and then just spend an hour or two summoning stuff, killing it with a dagger or letting it him me. 

Doing nothing else, you'd hit level 20/25 quickly. That meant everything in the game scaled up, so instead of facing endless hordes of scamps and other crap stuff, you'd be fighting proper daedra from the start, finding daedric armour and glass armour etc. 

I also found that the Dark Brotherhood quest chain was the best out of any of the series. 


Morrowind remains my favourite though :P

Hashbrick

Shadow Hearts: From the New World

The whole modern world theme just killed it for me, I never was able to finish it or stomach through it.  Series is fantastic up to that point though.

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

It just didn't feel like elder scrolls and felt very flat. They had a lot of pressure though to make a masterpiece that could beat the almost perfect Morrowind.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

It should have been my MMO home for a long while, sadly the game just didn't have enough moments to keep me going. The story choices just made me wish I was playing a new KOTOR game instead of the MMO.

Dungeon Siege 3

To go from an ARPG to a third person action was a decision no one wanted.

Sacred 3

WTF!

There's a ton more I'm sure but those are the ones that hurt me the most.