Most disappointed sequel?

[Canadamus Prime]

Chrono Cross does it in for me.
Chrono Trigger was just pure awesome. Great story, every character made you feel for them, battles were well done.

Then Chrono Cross comes along and back flips into a pool of suck. Countless characters that just became copies of previous characters, a story that is convoluted, and an entirely new battle system that just feels like it was done on the cheap.

Chrono Trigger was too awesome to count Cross as it's sequel, I am waiting for the real one to come out!

Actually I thought Crono Cross was a decent game on it's own. However as a sequel to Chrono Trigger, I will agree that it's a massive disappointment. One part that really irks me is how the killed off the 3 main characters form Chrono Trigger and the implied fall of Guardia. I refuse to accept either of those despite how subsequent remakes of Chrono Trigger added shit on to the main ending mentioning the fall of Guardia to tie it into Chrono Cross, I still refuse to accept it. How in the name of hell could Guardia fall when Prince Crono (he married Marle so he's a Prince), Marle, and Lucca are hanging around. The ones who defeated Lavos, the giant planet devouring parasite with the power to destroy entire civilizations? No I don't buy it. Esp. when in Chrono Trigger DS it's implied that said fall is supposed to come at the hands of Dalton, the Saturday Morning Cartoon villain.

Spoiler

Nor do I accept that Crono and co. could be taken out by Lynx.

 

[Hero of Lime]

Just to name a few:

Super Paper Mario, a good game, but compared to the first two Paper Mario games there's just no contest, the same could be said for Paper Mario: Sticker Star.

Resident Evil 5, not a terrible game but compared to Resident Evil 4 it was pretty bland and lacked the atmosphere of a horror game, even if RE 4 wasn't really scary, but the setting and atmosphere were excellent.

Soul Caliber III, maybe I was spoiled by having Link and Weapon Master in Soul Caliber II, but Soul Caliber III had a bunch of forgettable characters, a terrible character creator system, and that weird RTS that replaced Weapon Master.

 

[Legion]

Mass Effect 3 is easily my answer. It is not the worst sequel I have played, but definitely the most disappointing. I shouldn't have been too surprised after seeing the Space Terminator, but like a fool I thought they'd learnt from Dragon Age 2. The only reason DA2 doesn't get quite as much disappointment is because it wasn't a direct sequel. The fact that it was a stand-alone game made it less of an issue as it doesn't affect Origins. Whereas with ME3 it's a trilogy, so it kind of sours the whole experience because the series never got a satisfying conclusion.

As for why I found it disappointing?

Auto-dialogue to the brim. I did not feel that Shepard was my character any more. She never said what I thought she should and she expressed opinions that were completely contradictory to the character I created in the games before. But when we did get to pick the dialogue options, they were often the same thing with a very slight word or tone difference.

The plot was stupid. Shepard basically travels the galaxy trying to convince the other species that Earth is far more important to defend than their own home-worlds. The Quarians have chosen the time when organic life is on the brink of destruction to try and retake their home-world, when they'd be annihilated by the Reapers not long afterwards anyway. Even if you play as a goody two shoes Shepard, the Virmire survivor will still believe you to be a bad guy purely for having the audacity to work for Cerberus. Despite the fact that the Alliance refused to believe the threat of the Collectors, so you didn't have a choice anyway.

None of the decisions they said would matter made the slightest bit of difference. No matter what you chose in the previous games, you still did the exact same thing, with the only changes being the occasional line of dialogue and a replacement character if somebody died. The events themselves did not change at all.

I could go on, but I will just leave it with the Starchild and the ending.

Sequels that would be high on the list if I wasn't expecting them to be "okay" at best would be Dead Space 3, Halo 4, Assassins Creed Brotherhood and Assassins Creed Revelations. None of them are bad games, but they pale in comparison to the game before them.

 

[synobal]

Dragon Age II

Oh my god!!!! Way to get our hopes up to take a giant crap on them, Bioware!

This.

I wanted a top down strategic RPG with deep combat. They gave us the awesome button.

I wanted a large range of conversation choices and a range of backgrounds. They gave one specific protagonist with the 3 vague choice conversation wheel. (That isn't a slight on Mass Effect, that was a justified for that series)

I wanted to make decisions that had an effect on what happened. They gave us a plot that railroaded every major plot point.

I wanted to explore the world of Thedas. They gave us one city and one dungeon.

I wanted interesting characters and mind messing dilemmas. They gave us people with only one defining trait each and not much to think about.

The sequel to "the spiritual successor to Baldurs Gate 2" took a great big whizz on its gravestone.

Yep so much of this. It was a total cash grab and ruined what was an exciting new IP for me.

 

[Anathrax]

inb4 Thfourief cause new Garret sounds like a strained arse farting violin cords.

Erm. I'd say Portal 2 in terms of single player. It's still one of the best single player experiences I've had but it was too short and too... meh in terms of puzzles.

 

[AgentLampshade]

My second wife.

OT: Just in the past year, the two games that disappointed me the most were Assassins Creed III and Resident Evil 6.

ACIII was just a boring, unlikeable mess of a game. Main character sucked, side characters sucked, setting absolutely sucked and even the missions were completely forgettable.

RE6 is a different story, I liked RE5. Seriously, I did. It was a solid action game with some lovely cutscenes (shutupitsavalidpoint) and from the little I saw of RE6, it looked good. It looked like it would mix the horror of previous titles with the action of RE5. I was wrong on both counts, there was no horror and its action was a convoluted mess that retain no charm of 4 and 5. Lovely voice acting though, even if Jake is just Snow Villiers of the RE world.

 

[Pink Gregory]

I was surprised when XCOM:Enemy Unknown called me on the phone and told me how disappointed it was in me for not finishing it on "impossible" difficulty with "marathon" mode switched on. Also, I think Devil May Cry 3 was horribly disappointed in me when I stopped playing halfway through. I could hear it whimpering on the shelf at night.

But I think the worst of all was when BioShock took offense at my criticism of its rather heavy-handed take down of Randian philosophy, then emailed my literature professor in college and told him to give me a failing grade.

*applause*

Assassin's Creed 3.

I was one of those perverse people that liked Revelations, and didn't find Assassin's Creed the first boring (in fact it felt near-perfect to me). Oh my god Assassin's Creed 2 was fun. Just seeing Venice for the first time blew my damn mind, I enjoyed Ezio's swashbuckling assassin adventures (Brotherhood not so much, but I still enjoyed it), the movement mechanics were perfectly improved from the first game; it was a good sequel in the truest sense.

AC3...ehh...didn't seem to want ME to do anything. I appreciated the setting, sure; that's probably what made me hold onto it for so long (I got it on release), and I didn't hate Connor like so many other people did, but...

As I've said many times, for every thing it did I liked, it did two that I didn't like. Streamlined movement too far, killstreaks (why oh why oh why oh why...), near impossibility of playing with the HUD off; admittedly Connor's story was ridiculous in a bad way (crystal ball, really), but it was immersive until all the bugs and graphical glitches pulled me right out. So many thing seemed pointless. Nothing to discover, everything was marked on the map right away. Who actually wants to play a game and expend no effort.

Traded it in for Frozen Synapse. I don't harbour any ill will towards it (I don't really 'hate' games so much), but I was disappointed that Assassin's Creed was no longer for me.

 

[Feylynn]

I wanted a top down strategic RPG with deep combat. They gave us the awesome button.

I need to clarify that I'm not denying any other point you made, the game was not at all what Dragon Age should be.
That said I think the combat is more tactical and far more difficult than both Origins and Awakening. The only difference being that you had to play it on Nightmare from square one because the other difficulties removed vital features like Force and Friendly Fire. Then again I did decide not to exploit Avaline nor healers so that may have added another layer of depth to surviving.
[hr]
I have to go with a couple of typical answers. Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age 2.
I'll put the honorable mention on Skyrim for cutting out my favorite part of Oblivion (Acrobatics/Athletics), and managing to have almost zero interesting quests. Still really like Skyrim but expectations are our enemy. Skyrim's enemy...? Something like that.

 

[FalloutJack]

And, obviously, Final Fantasy 8.

Can you really call a Final Fantasy game a sequel?

(Y'know, apart from the direct sequels to X onwards)

Not per se, but my hatred of the game has reached legendary status by now, so I threw it in as a running gag.

 

[scorptatious]

Well there's FFX-2.

I enjoyed the first game. So I thought I'd pick up this game and play it.

I hated it. I didn't like how big of a departure it was from the first game. From the tone, the way the characters acted, the mission like structure of levels, ect. Everything just felt off to me. Plus I didn't like how they just completely rip the first game's environments and just pasted them onto here. With little to no updates. Just felt lazy to me.

I couldn't really bring myself to play very far into the game before I stopped.

Then there's Valkyria Chronicles 2.

Now, I didn't hate this game per say, in fact, I kinda liked certain aspects of it. However, it sort of lacked several things which to me, made the first game a classic.

First off, the story and characters aren't nearly as engaging as the first game's. The game is set in a school setting and the main character Avan is your stereotypical hot headed leader of Class G. (Nice touch with the name of the class though, G is the seventh letter of the alphabet, and the group of militia soldiers you led in the first game was called Squad 7.)

But my main gripe with the game is how you level up in the game. In the first game, you had a system in which you spend exp points to level up everyone by class. Which cuts down on grinding by a whole lot, and a major reason why I loved the first game. Not that I mind grinding too much, so long as the game is fun, but still, I thought it was a great feature.

While the second game does have this feature as well, it also added a class system in which every individual character needs to collect certain credits in order to upgrade to a certain class. You can only get certain kinds of credits through doing certain kinds of missions, and even if you do them with the character(s) you want, there is still a chance that the game will not reward you any and you'll have to redo the mission over and over again.

To me, this was probably the most frustrating aspect about the game, as it completely goes against what the leveling system was created for, to cut out needless grinding and farming. I almost quit the game because of how tedious this process was.

I will admit though, I do like the added mission variety and the clever use of using gateway camps which connect to other parts of the battlefield to make up for the PSP's lack of level scale.

Overall though, I just felt VC2 was kind of a disappointing sequel to a fantastic game.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Oh I just remembered one. Star Ocean: Last Hope. The main protagonist was annoying and his sidekick was even more annoying. The other characters were dull and lacked depth. The gameplay was overshadowed by overly long cutscenes one of which was so long that my Xbox 360 controller shut itself off in the middle of it. And the story didn't make any sense.

Spoiler

How is it that Faize could turn out to be the main bad guy when the evil army of shadow monsters shows up before he even starts turning to the "dark side" without time travel goblty gook being involved? (Well there is a time travel segment, but it's the alternate dimension sort of time travel and besides Faize doesn't get left behind or anything)

Considering I loved Till End of Time, I was extremely disappointed. Also the scaled down the item creation system which was one of the funest parts of Till End of Time.

 

[JagermanXcell]

Uncharted 3

Ok I really wanted to like this game, but my god the whole "lets write the story around the set pieces we started off first making" was a HORRIBLE idea. I was half way through the cruise liner chapter of the game wondering to my self: "Why the hell am I here again?" "Oh wait I was kidnapped. Sully is here? Oh wait boring pirate guy lied." And by the end: "Wow, Nate happened to survive the poorly written pirate man's army of bullet sponges and washed up on Yemen's shore because... scripted." Also Marlowe, what a boring antagonist. Talbot was far more interesting but unfortunately the writers wanted to focus on Marlowe more, but failed miserably giving Talbot the most screen time and giving him the most to do at the same time making him a hollow character. I mean Talbot could have been a supernatural master of deception that survives bullets to the chest because [Insert cool interesting plot twist not actually in the game here] but he isn't, instead we got... Marlowe. A poorly written, dull, cliche villain that does NOTHING and is the most uninteresting in the entire series.

Also the gameplay wasn't any better, it was good but it was just Uncharted 2's minus the compelling story and memorable villain.

 

[Trueflame]

Dragon Age 2. Oh god, Dragon Age 2.... It was boring, it was dull, it was like they took the first game and just gutted it. Even the graphics, the one thing that consistently improves over time, were either the same or actually worse in DA2 than they were in Origins. How the hell does that even happen? It's just mind-boggling how much they screwed up on that title. It ended up being an okay average game, which for obscure and starting companies would be great. But Bioware is neither obscure nor just starting out, making it a major black mark on their record.

ME2 was also disappointing, but not nearly as much. I still liked the combat, so I didn't mind that, but I hated the mission structure and the ending? That was ridiculous and dumb. When I saw the new Reaper being created, that was when I stopped caring about the ME storyline.

Xenosaga Episode 1, and especially Episode 2. I started Xenosaga when only episode 1 was out. Being a huge fan of the PS1 game Xenogears, I played it eagerly... And was very disappointed. It just wasn't at all as good as its spiritual predecessor. A few years later I gave the game another shot though, and ended up loving it. Xenosaga Episode 1 is now one of my favorite RPGs, and definitely one of the most cinematic and beautiful to watch games. Unfortunately, then came out Episode 2, which managed to destroy all of that by completely changing the art style and many of the voice actors, making everything feel utterly foreign and strange. Imagine watching a beloved tv show, where the characters feel like your old friends, only suddenly they've all been replaced by slightly worse versions of themselves. Imagine having to watch a whole season of that. That's what Xenosaga Episode 2 felt like, and I still haven't managed to bring myself to complete it, despite hearing great things about the third game in the series.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time gets a lot of crap for having the big "twist" in its storyline, but that never bothered me. The things that did bother me were the at times atrocious production values and terrible voice acting that the game featured. But despite these issues, it had a very fun combat system, fun world, fun characters, and fun storyline, and I loved it anyway. The Last Hope fixes some of these problems, at least in terms of production value. Unfortunately, the english version of the game features even more terrible voice acting than Till the End of Time, only this time the voices aren't for minor characters but some of the most major ones! Even worse, the storyline is frequently ridiculous and stupid, particularly toward the end when you learn what and who and why the bad guys are. Again, this isn't bad to the extent that DA2 is, but it was still highly disappointing, and these flaws kept a good game from being a great one.

Other notable candidates are Prince of Persia Warrior Within, FFX-2, FFXIII, and FFXIII-2.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Uncharted 3

Ok I really wanted to like this game, but my god the whole "lets write the story around the set pieces we started off first making" was a HORRIBLE idea. I was half way through the cruise liner chapter of the game wondering to my self: "Why the hell am I here again?" "Oh wait I was kidnapped. Sully is here? Oh wait boring pirate guy lied." And by the end: "Wow, Nate happened to survive the poorly written pirate man's army of bullet sponges and washed up on Yemen's shore because... scripted." Also Marlowe, what a boring antagonist. Talbot was far more interesting but unfortunately the writers wanted to focus on Marlowe more, but failed miserably giving Talbot the most screen time and giving him the most to do at the same time making him a hollow character. I mean Talbot could have been a supernatural master of deception that survives bullets to the chest because [Insert cool interesting plot twist not actually in the game here] but he isn't, instead we got... Marlowe. A poorly written, dull, cliche villain that does NOTHING and is the most uninteresting in the entire series.

Also the gameplay wasn't any better, it was good but it was just Uncharted 2's minus the compelling story and memorable villain.

Add to that, the villains' search for the mcguffin being totally pointless. They already had the ability to poison people with hallucinogenic drugs. Why risk all their resources to find a fucking urn that grants the same effect?

It also basically turned Sully into a giant fucking asshole for nuturing a misguided child into a murdering criminal.

 

[momijirabbit]

Ratchet and Clank 3, it's not that it's a bad game, they just added like one new thing and I was honestly expecting more.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I pretty sure I had said this before in a similar thread but I will say it again-

No More Heroes 2

I loved the first game so I was hyped up when I first saw the trailer for it but once I got and played the game, it was a huge dissapointment. The problem itself is that it was canter to the fans too much. Sure I can get why he did it as the only became a success was when the game was release outside of Japan as it was originally a flop.

Everyone hated the entrance fee needed to fught the boss so they got rid of it, this is not the solution as while the fee was annyoing to gather but it help to prolong the game. By removing that the game itself became shorter, sure I could of gather the cash anyway to buy more clothing but I just didn't feel like that now that they removed the main reason to save up your money.

The minigames were fan so by making them retro bits minigame was suppose to make it more fun right? Wrong! The minigame just no longer feel fun at all.

The town Santa Destroy was a ghost town and a poor attempt of a GTA map, no problem! Let remove the travel aspect of it and making it more like a point and click sort of town! This also add to making the game alot shorter too!

To sum it up, they were trying to pleased the fan too much without thinking for themselves if these changes itself would still benefit the game as a whole with or without the fans.

 

[Tyrant_Valvatorez]

Metroid: Other M ... people have complained about it to death but for good reason. One thing people seem to miss about the story is, even if by some miracle it had turned out to be the best story ever written it still would have ruined the game since that style of story telling is not suited for Metroid.

The best way to explain this point is to look at what is the most important aspect of the series discovery: pretty much with the exception of Fusion each game had a minimalistic plot which took a back seat as the real focus was exploring alien worlds, with the real reward being the discovery of little details or hidden items heck at times a lot of the story was told through the gameplay itself.

To cut the rant short pretty much instead of giving another game that allows us to discover and explore an alien world without being beat over the head with the story, they gave us a grand space opera that not only lacked subtly but overly relied on bringing back past enemies and ironically said plot has so much irrelevance despite it being forced on you.
Basically the only thing the story did was retroactively screw with past games and make aspects of Fusion make no sense whilst at the same time contributing nothing at all, Im even trying my hardest to not rant about screwing up Samus herself but the saddest part is this mess came from the same man who brought us Super Metroid... I guess this is what happens when he has full control.

Yeah, I got to agree with this one. The story was an atrocity. How is it for example that Samus, who although very little characterization had been done up to this point, was established to be at the very least to be a farily seasoned bounty hunter, be suddenly be breaking down and becoming this subservient little whiny *****? "Adam's words pierced my heart" What? We're talking low level fan fiction levels of bad here. Never mind that the story was shot full of holes. How is it that Adam figured he was saving Samus' life by shooting her in the back while a Metroid was hovering overhead ready to snack on a Samus sandwich? And then he gives some bullshit story about Metroids being engineered to be immune to cold and he needs to go blow up the Metroid wing to the ship with him inside. Ok, putting aside the amount of bullshit in his story, couldn't he have just shot the Metroid before going "Hey Samus, don't go in there!" instead of shooting her. What's worse is that she eats up his story without question, not even questioning why he had to shoot her to stop her going to the Metroid wing of the damn ship. ...oops sorry now I went off on a rant.
Anyway the gameplay wasn't so bad, except for the absence of health and ammo drops and that the first person missile thing didn't really work during boss fights.

Yeah the gameplay was decent but flawed. It was more the extreme linearity that annoyed people.

On note of the story yeah absolute train wreck that is so badly written it has extremely bad implications about Samus and Adam's relationship, never have a saw a character who the author clearly wants you to like become such an irredeemable douche and thats through bad writing alone. One thing that must be pointed out Sakamoto is to blame alone since there was 3 companies working on Other M and he ruled over everything with an iron fist. Team Ninja for example wanted to use wiimote and nunchuck controls to allow for more direct control and sakamoto essentially bitched at them until they agreed with him.

The infamous Ridley scene is not only a character destroying moment but just plain bad storytelling since even if you buy into the whole PTSD thing (which is a load of crap) even then the scene still fails as it serves no purpose other than to make Samus look weak (funnily enough a recurring theme in the game), since the scene requires you to understand Samus's backstory which has never been officially revealed except in a japan only Manga and a brief description on a Super Smash Bros. trophy. So the scene pretty much annoys fans and confuses newcomers.

I have rarely seen this mentioned but some of Sakamoto's comments about Samus before the game came out were down right creepy, such as the whole "Only I know where her beauty mark is" comment. It actually makes a lot of the unfortunate implications make a whole lot more sense, minor conspiracy theory moment Adam Malkovitch is Sakamoto's self insert perhaps ?

 

[thethird0611]

I was going to come in and say Bioshock 2... But hell, Fable 2/3 are up there to. I had my hopes up on both of those series, and they came back to bite me. Blah. Still gotta play infinity though.

Something that I think is kinda stupid is people callin out ME2 and saying ME1 was WAY better... To me? Nah. ME2 wasnt a sparkling diamond, but it did a hell of a lot to remedy a lot of the problems in ME1... And dont even get to ME3... I see it as a fucking beautiful game to end the series to, ending and all.

 

[Dark Prophet]

There are quite few sequels which disappointed me a bit although I generally knew that they were not going to be that good, but the one that totally crushed me was C&C 4, I had such hopes for it but it just did not have any redeeming features.