Bad Representative Games

[Maniakkid25]

So, given the current game taking the world and my attention by storm, I'm reminded of something that I once said long ago on the old forum. In a review of Resident Evil 4 (2005), I said...

Resident Evil 4 is what happens when you take Resident Evil, and remove everything that makes it Resident Evil. Whether this is a good or bad thing is still being debated by fans very, VERY heavily.

While this quote has not aged well (it turns out I'm the only one who thinks its still controversial), it gets to the heart of what this topic is about: games that, good or bad, are TERRIBLE representatives of the series they come from. Stuff like Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts and Starfox Adventures. These are the games were you can legitimately say "It's a fine game, but it's a BAD [insert series here] game."

As implied above, I think the poster child for this is Resident Evil 4 2005. Before this point, Resident Evil was a horror game, about choosing your battles and keeping yourself alive in the tensest situations. But then Resident Evil 4 went "Survival Action" (as it proclaims on the back of the box), and became a game of mowing down goons! But, because the core gameplay loop was GOOD, it changed the face of Resident Evil for a decade to resemble that, and we all eventually forgot that this was, by all accounts, a BAD Resident Evil game! It's a good game! But not a good Resident Evil game.

Can you think of any other games that fit this mold? I've probably posted the most notorious ones, but I'm sure there are plenty of other games that you could fit this on to.

[ShiraNoMai]

A lot of people throw this line around with Breath of the Wild (Zelda). It's actually kind of exhausting to hear at this point, and I personally disagree with the take. I genuinely believe that game to be the modern remake of Zelda 1: go out in the world and kill Ganon. Open world and all, dungeon order optional. The sole caveat I'll give that is the lack of actual proper dungeons does give room for opposition. There are 120 "shrines" (mini dungeons/dungeon rooms) and 4 dungeon-adjacent areas a la The Divine Beasts.

It became a new benchmark for open world titles in the style/aesthetic, in addition to its many discoverabilities and sandbox-like mechanics via the Sheikah Slate.

Many argue that strayed too far from the linearity of the dungeon-to-quest/plot prior games in the series, in addition to the loss of traditional tools like the hookshot, sword and bow (as standard/non-interchangeable). Thus, a bad Zelda game. But a good game nonetheless!

[Moonface]

Not what I expected the thread to be about when I saw the title, not that the title is at fault at all for that.

RE4 was the first Resi game I played, but I'm not sure if I'd view that as a bad representation of Resident Evil as a whole or give that honour to RE5 instead. While RE4 definitely changed things, the campy humour was still present and it did have moments that I felt were pretty tense and bordering on horror, especially within the castle areas. RE5 meanwhile strips out whatever things RE4 kept from the identity of earlier titles and feels like the game equivalent of the majority of the live-action RE movies with Milla Jovovich.

BotW I would say is a bad Zelda game, even though I have very little experience with Zelda as a whole. The Divine Beasts are pathetic as dungeons, and the Shrines are a mixed bag; the ones that are puzzles feel very much like what I'd expect to find in the dungeons of older Zelda games, but a lot of them are also really repetitive or just dull. I love BotW as a game but I can understand how long-time Zelda fans could have been turned off of it.

[Maniakkid25]

[...]While RE4 definitely changed things, the campy humour was still present[...]

I'm highlighting this specific section because this is exactly the sort of thing that RE4 basically retconned about the series. That camp humor you talk about? It never existed. Not in 1, 2, 3, or even Code Veronica. This humor that people point to was, much like the movie "The Room", meant to be taken seriously, but the garbage acting absolutely tanked it (and yes, I'm saying Steve Burnside is supposed to be taken seriously. Stop laughing!). It isn't until REmake (the Resident Evil 1 remake in 2002) and RE0 that we see Capcom leaning into the humor it accidentally created. And then RE4 came out and solidified Capcom being completely aware of what everyone wanted, and did effectively a 90 degree turn on Leon's personality, making him a wisecracking one-line machine with a heart of gold. And it's at this point I feel I have to re-emphasize: I like RE4. I LOVE RE4! It's an amazing game! I wouldn't necessarily put it in my top 10 of the decade list, but it's a solid contender!

I'll say I understand where people are coming from with BotW, but I actually see it as a natural extension of what the games wanted to be, rather than a bad representation of what the games should be. While yes, the Zelda formula was absolutely solid for a good 4 generations of gaming (from SNES with LttP through to Twilight Princess), it's very clear in the later generation games that Zelda WANTED to be more open and free, and it wasn't until BotW that they really had the ability to stretch into that freedom. What's my evidence for this? The maps of Hyrule expanding from game to game, and it didn't hurt that Wind Waker was a massive sea that you could explore and find all sorts of secrets in. They WANTED to make the series more open, but for whatever reason (maybe Nintendo was purposefully tying the series down, maybe they felt they didn't have the memory capacity to do what they wanted, or maybe something else entirely), they couldn't. So I think BotW is much more the natural conclusion than an exception.

[Moonface]

[...]While RE4 definitely changed things, the campy humour was still present[...]

I'm highlighting this specific section because this is exactly the sort of thing that RE4 basically retconned about the series. That camp humor you talk about? It never existed. Not in 1, 2, 3, or even Code Veronica. This humor that people point to was, much like the movie "The Room", meant to be taken seriously, but the garbage acting absolutely tanked it (and yes, I'm saying Steve Burnside is supposed to be taken seriously. Stop laughing!). It isn't until REmake (the Resident Evil 1 remake in 2002) and RE0 that we see Capcom leaning into the humor it accidentally created. And then RE4 came out and solidified Capcom being completely aware of what everyone wanted, and did effectively a 90 degree turn on Leon's personality, making him a wisecracking one-line machine with a heart of gold. And it's at this point I feel I have to re-emphasize: I like RE4. I LOVE RE4! It's an amazing game! I wouldn't necessarily put it in my top 10 of the decade list, but it's a solid contender!

Ah, I didn't realize that the approach to the humour was actually different in RE at one point. I figured maybe it was trying to be serious in the first game but probably fell flat due to bad acting that could be expected in games back in the early 90's, but I never knew that the campy humour wasn't actually meant to be that and just thought it was already campy and made funnier by shit acting. XD

I'll say I understand where people are coming from with BotW, but I actually see it as a natural extension of what the games wanted to be, rather than a bad representation of what the games should be. While yes, the Zelda formula was absolutely solid for a good 4 generations of gaming (from SNES with LttP through to Twilight Princess), it's very clear in the later generation games that Zelda WANTED to be more open and free, and it wasn't until BotW that they really had the ability to stretch into that freedom. What's my evidence for this? The maps of Hyrule expanding from game to game, and it didn't hurt that Wind Waker was a massive sea that you could explore and find all sorts of secrets in. They WANTED to make the series more open, but for whatever reason (maybe Nintendo was purposefully tying the series down, maybe they felt they didn't have the memory capacity to do what they wanted, or maybe something else entirely), they couldn't. So I think BotW is much more the natural conclusion than an exception.

From a world standpoint I agree it's a natural progression of Zelda, especially when the original game is trying to be pretty open, and OoT tries it with Hyrule Field. I just think it maybe lost or diminished a lot of other core Zelda components as a result though such as the puzzles, dungeons and items and that sense of progression you get in Zelda games. BotW only has progression at the start with gaining abilities and then once you get into the full world that progression disappears because the developers approached the game with the idea of letting the player go anywhere and do anything in any order, or even not do it at all and just go fight the final boss. I've not played it but I imagine Wind Waker found a good sweet spot of being open but not having to dial back on other areas that make up the Zelda formula as a result.

[Moonface]

Was reading a report/interview about Marathon and got reminded of this thread after one commenter said "Marathon fans don't want this Marathon."

Having thought on it for a while, I realized I never mentioned The Legend of Spyro series and that might be the most whiplash I've ever got from a game. The LoS games were a reboot that had to have been influenced by the success of the recently released The Lord of the Rings movies; they even had Elijah Wood voice act Spyro! Instead of the brighter tone and simpler story telling the Spyro series had been known for to this point, the LoS games shifted to a very dark fantasy vibe with an incredibly heavy focus on story telling; think of it like how the visual tone of The Legend of Zelda drastically changed between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, to give an example folks can easily think of. Now, the change in tone and story telling might have been fine if the gameplay of pre-LoS games had been retained. However, instead of an open platformer collectathon, LoS completely switches to linear corridor levels that strip away most of the platforming and focus so heavily on combat that the games are essentially beat-em-ups. Spyro has a full suite of melee attacks that the game encourages you to use because the elemental breath attacks he has are absolutely useless in comparison. I think this old trailer might do a better job of showing just how different the Legend of Spyro series was:



I actually forgot until I watched that that gems are just used to fill up elemental attack meters and stuff, but gems had already become a consumable rather than a collectible back in A Hero's Tail. AHT at least had other collectibles to find though (albeit not much compared to the Insomniac trilogy); the LoS games from what I recall have absolutely nothing to collect, it's just more or less non-stop combat.

My memory of A New Beginning (the first LoS entry) isn't that it was an outright terrible game, although I expect if I were to replay it or at least watch a playthrough of it I'd be quickly corrected. The second entry, The Eternal Night, was absolutely dog shit though. I remember trying to write a review of that game years ago and couldn't actually do it because I had nothing good to say about the game and it felt bad to write a review that was so wholly negative on something. I have no idea how Dawn of the Dragon is because TEN was so bad I dropped the series, but considering DotD was followed by Skylanders I'd have just dropped the series after DotD had I played it.

[Maniakkid25]

Still can't believe they thought reviving the Doom Clone as an extraction shooter was a good idea...

I can understand why they did what they did to Legend of Spyro, even if I disagree with it. Collect-a-thons, as they are often known as, had been out of vogue for several years at that point. I mean, just look at what they did to Jak and Daxter for those sequels, and those games were still good! So, they wanted to evolve Spyro in a similar vein, and went way too hard in the combat direction. I understand why they did it, but I still think that if collect-a-thons were as dated as they thought (and games like A Hat in Time clearly show they are not), they should have just retired Spyro as a game series, but this is Vivendi Games we're talking about. They wouldn't know a good idea if it shot them in the face.

[Moonface]

Still can't believe they thought reviving the Doom Clone as an extraction shooter was a good idea...

Oh dang that's what the original Marathon was like? I didn't know what sort of shooter it used to specifically be.

I can understand why they did what they did to Legend of Spyro, even if I disagree with it. Collect-a-thons, as they are often known as, had been out of vogue for several years at that point. I mean, just look at what they did to Jak and Daxter for those sequels, and those games were still good! So, they wanted to evolve Spyro in a similar vein, and went way too hard in the combat direction. I understand why they did it, but I still think that if collect-a-thons were as dated as they thought (and games like A Hat in Time clearly show they are not), they should have just retired Spyro as a game series, but this is Vivendi Games we're talking about. They wouldn't know a good idea if it shot them in the face.

Oh I don't blame them for trying something different. Like you say collect-a-thons were a dying genre and Spyro didn't help its case by releasing Enter the Dragonfly, and then A Hero's Tail was criticized for being too childish and an overemphasis on platforming which I suspect contributed to the total 180 shift for the LoS series.
The thing that makes LoS a bad representation of Spyro for me while I don't view Jak 2/3 in the same way is that despite the big shift the series took after Jak & Daxter: TPL, a lot of the core gameplay still felt like Jak & Daxter. None of Jak's moves were removed and even changed how guns fired if you used them together, whereas Spyro just feels like a complete shift similar to how Tomb Raider 2013 compares to the original Tomb Raider games.

I'd say Vivendi really just didn't know how to handle Spyro or Crash properly at the time, because Crash also took a beat-em-up approach with the Titans series of games, going so far in at least the first one to entirely remove his spin attack, making it a reward for 100% game completion (at which point, who gives a shit about having the ability?). LoS at least has its good points, which is more than can be said for the Titans games.

[Maniakkid25]

Still can't believe they thought reviving the Doom Clone as an extraction shooter was a good idea...

Oh dang that's what the original Marathon was like? I didn't know what sort of shooter it used to specifically be.

Yeah, the original game came out in '94, so it's not just a Doom Clone in style; that's literally what FPSes were called before the term FPS was codified. But there's no need to take my word for it; the original Marathon Trilogy is available on Steam right now for free, with online support for multiplayer. Yeah, Bungie made the original series' assets freeware 20 years ago, and combined with a source code release, this allowed fans to reverse engineer the game off the Macintosh platform and into other places, and now to PC on Steam. It's as faithful to the original as you can get short of digging out a Macintosh circa '95 and playing it on that.

Oh my god, this conversation has unlocked a memory, and I will happily share it another time, because I'm at work, but it is so good in how awful it is. I remember being in middle school, and downloading this one video and JAMMING to it. It's so bad.

[Mr EliteL]

Ah, geez the Titans games for Crash, I knew it was a good choice to completely avoid them and not just for the designs which was what turned me away from trying them initially, but also gameplay, did not want to give it a chance.

I also didn't know Marathon was a Doom clone *checks* ah it's just considered that and not a proper clone as it was a successor to a previous game.

[Maniakkid25]

I also didn't know Marathon was a Doom clone *checks* ah it's just considered that and not a proper clone as it was a successor to a previous game.

Well, you say that, but it's got all the hallmarks of what we'd now call the "Boomer Shooter". While it does have limited story elements within the game, the core gameplay loop is "explore, find enemies, kill enemies, find secrets, kill more enemies". You have all your weapons at all times, and can switch between them with a button press. There's plenty of alien gore, movement is fast and frantic, arenas connected by tight corridors; if you've played the original Doom, you'll be right at home here. Though, one of the biggest advancements is that you can aim up and down freely (you have auto aim in Doom). Hell, the modern Steam port supports controllers! Though, from experience, I wouldn't recommend it; the right stick is way too sensitive. While the original term may be "Doom Clone", given the wide variety of shooters even back then, "Doom Clone" had a little more nuance than the term implies. After all, think of how many games nowadays we call "Roguelikes". Rogue is an actual game! How easy we forget, sometimes...

[Moonface]

Ah, geez the Titans games for Crash, I knew it was a good choice to completely avoid them and not just for the designs which was what turned me away from trying them initially, but also gameplay, did not want to give it a chance.

Oh if you think it's only the character designs and gameplay that you dodged a bullet on, I bestow upon your poor soul this utter ruination of Tiny's actual character:



Also I guess I must have really found Tiny bad when I played CotT because I actually thought this moment was in the game that followed, Mind Over Mutant, and that I had never seen it before until I first stumbled upon a YouTube video of it.

So, given the current game taking the world and my attention by storm, I'm reminded of something that I once said long ago on the old forum. In a review of Resident Evil 4 (2005), I said...

Resident Evil 4 is what happens when you take Resident Evil, and remove everything that makes it Resident Evil. Whether this is a good or bad thing is still being debated by fans very, VERY heavily.

I don't know how it never crossed my mind until now, but although RE4 is the first in the series that departed from what prior games did, I think RE5 is the one that actually fits better to being a bad representative RE game. RE4 to me at least kept the environmental atmosphere, puzzles and whatnot whereas RE5 in my memory has no creepy areas and I can't recall any decent puzzles in it either.

[Maniakkid25]

You actually have mentioned before that you think RE5 is the real odd one out. In this very topic, no less!

RE4 was the first Resi game I played, but I'm not sure if I'd view that as a bad representation of Resident Evil as a whole or give that honour to RE5 instead. [...]

The first time, I disagreed because you mentioned the humor that Resident Evil "always had" was still there in RE4. I still think that that "humor" people found in the games was not an intended consequence on Capcom's part until the Gamecube releases. This time, I'm going to disagree on progression. See, RE5 built upon what RE4 laid out, so I still think that RE4 is the game that does the disservice to the series, simply because it came first. There's no worry about ammo conservation, the inventory management is WILDLY different given the attache case system, stuff like that. In fact, RE5 reverted a few of the changes to force more inventory management (and to streamline online play). I've said it before, but Resident Evil 6's Leon campaign is what I think Resident Evil 4 should have been.

Also, I'd make a point about the atmosphere, but it would really just be rambling and make no sense. The point is that RE4 is the original sin here. And with me pointing that finger at RE4, I cannot help but reiterate that I love RE4. It's genuinely a good game. But playing RE2 Original before it (on emulator, granted, but still) really puts the game in perspective as to how massively different the series became because of it. The problem was that Survival Horror was seen as a dying market, so Capcom pivoted into what RE4 through Revelations 2 became. Just like with Collect-a-thons before it, and just like with turn-based RPGs after it, the gaming world decided that Survival Horror was old hat, and not worth the time. It took Amnesia: the Dark Descent to prove them wrong. Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened had we got the "Hook Man" version of RE4 rather than what we got. Do I think it would have been the better game? Probably not. Do I think it would have been better for the genre? Probably yes.

Granted, if we took my timeline argument to its extreme, the first real "What the hell is this?" is Resident Evil Survivor, given it's a goddamn Light Gun game. But lets be honest: who cares about Resident Evil Survivor (even though it is canon)?

[Moonface]

You actually have mentioned before that you think RE5 is the real odd one out. In this very topic, no less!

RE4 was the first Resi game I played, but I'm not sure if I'd view that as a bad representation of Resident Evil as a whole or give that honour to RE5 instead. [...]

The first time, I disagreed because you mentioned the humor that Resident Evil "always had" was still there in RE4. I still think that that "humor" people found in the games was not an intended consequence on Capcom's part until the Gamecube releases. This time, I'm going to disagree on progression. See, RE5 built upon what RE4 laid out, so I still think that RE4 is the game that does the disservice to the series, simply because it came first. There's no worry about ammo conservation, the inventory management is WILDLY different given the attache case system, stuff like that. In fact, RE5 reverted a few of the changes to force more inventory management (and to streamline online play). I've said it before, but Resident Evil 6's Leon campaign is what I think Resident Evil 4 should have been.

Also, I'd make a point about the atmosphere, but it would really just be rambling and make no sense. The point is that RE4 is the original sin here. And with me pointing that finger at RE4, I cannot help but reiterate that I love RE4. It's genuinely a good game. But playing RE2 Original before it (on emulator, granted, but still) really puts the game in perspective as to how massively different the series became because of it. The problem was that Survival Horror was seen as a dying market, so Capcom pivoted into what RE4 through Revelations 2 became. Just like with Collect-a-thons before it, and just like with turn-based RPGs after it, the gaming world decided that Survival Horror was old hat, and not worth the time. It took Amnesia: the Dark Descent to prove them wrong. Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened had we got the "Hook Man" version of RE4 rather than what we got. Do I think it would have been the better game? Probably not. Do I think it would have been better for the genre? Probably yes.

Granted, if we took my timeline argument to its extreme, the first real "What the hell is this?" is Resident Evil Survivor, given it's a goddamn Light Gun game. But lets be honest: who cares about Resident Evil Survivor (even though it is canon)?

Aww bollocks of course I would have said it before and thought I hadn't...

Yeah, I'd say my use of the word humor in that post was the wrong one, and that camp might have been better. Granted, RE5 still has it, although less overall.

On atmosphere, I guess RE4's sticks with me a lot because there were a lot of times in my first playthrough of it where I was cautious or even on edge from it. The village at night in the rain with poor visibility and the dogs, the sewer section in the castle, and the lab with the regenerators all did that for me. Whereas RE5 didn't have anything that felt creepy or anything like that for me, but it also wouldn't have mattered as much because having a co-op partner you could send ahead or have revive you took a lot of the risk out of things unless you faced an enemy that could kill you in one hit.

I agree though that even if RE5 or certain campaigns of RE6 are worse in comparison to it, none of those departures happen without RE4 doing it first and being successful at it. The game could probably even be seen as the root cause of other games moving away from their original style, like Dead Space 3 being a borderline cover shooter and adding in co-op, likely because Resident Evil was the biggest series on the market making changes to its horror formula and finding success with it so others tried to follow it. Not that that trend is exclusive to horror nor RE; I lost count long ago of how many games start implementing a mechanic that another game introduced just because that game was wildly successful.

[Mr EliteL]

Ah, geez the Titans games for Crash, I knew it was a good choice to completely avoid them and not just for the designs which was what turned me away from trying them initially, but also gameplay, did not want to give it a chance.

Oh if you think it's only the character designs and gameplay that you dodged a bullet on, I bestow upon your poor soul this utter ruination of Tiny's actual character:

[video]

Also I guess I must have really found Tiny bad when I played CotT because I actually thought this moment was in the game that followed, Mind Over Mutant, and that I had never seen it before until I first stumbled upon a YouTube video of it.

Christ Almighty, that's not Tiny Tiger, that's Tingly Tiger. Just...no.