In general, when you plan to make a sequel to a hit game, the idea is to improve on the original. It's hard to imagine the developers of games like Resident Evil 5 in a planning meeting saying, "Oh boy, I can't wait to half-arse this," even if that was the end result.
Perhaps it's a sequel that's been hacked out to capitalise on the unforeseen success of the original. Maybe the magic of the first game just didn't survive the process of repetition. Regardless of the cause, over the years there have been more than a few occasions on which sequels have attempted to build upon the first game's success and somehow fallen flat.
Here, I have curated an itemised list of the original games which, for one reason or another, still manage to overshadow their younger siblings.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
If you read my previous article about Arkham Asylum being my high school sweetheart, there probably shouldn't be any surprises here. Even 14 years later, it stands the test of time as one of the greatest third person action games ever made. If it wasn't for the dodgy facial animation and generic boss fights holding it back, I'd be invading the Sistine Chapel and re-painting the ceiling with the box art.
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| (Image property of Rocksteady Studios and WB Games) |
Yet, despite my propagandising, many people still hold up its sequel, Arkham City, as the peak of the franchise. Don't get me wrong, Arkham City is still an excellent game with more complex combat, a strong original story and good use of its open world design. There's just something about Asylum though that, for me, sets it head and shoulders above its successor.
In my mind, it all comes down to the subtleties and the atmosphere. Arkham Asylum feels darker and grungier. Everything from the narrative to the environments to the Metroidvania gameplay all reinforce the feeling of claustrophobia that comes from being trapped in a place where everything and everyone wants you dead. It's a feeling that I never got from Arkham City because, if I ever did feel like I was trapped, I could always throw down a smoke bomb and grapple up to the top of the nearest building like a ninja with social anxiety issues.
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| (Image property of Rocksteady Studios and WB Games) |
The combined feeling of being as powerful as Batman while also being caught in a spider's web of plots to kill you is a unique experience that the series never really got back after transitioning into open world settings. As a result, I will always hold up Arkham Asylum as being the high-point for the series, even though its sequels did so much to build upon its initial design.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
I might need to bend the rules a little for this one. You see, depending on how you wish to count them, The New Order is either the fifth or sixth proper Wolfenstein game with the series hailing all the way back to the grandfather of the first-person shooter genre, Wolfenstein 3D. As a result, it is an 'original' game in the same way that a mother's fifth child is 'as exciting as the first'.
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| (Image property of MachineGames and Bethesda Softworks) |
However, to my mind, this is the first game in the modern Wolfenstein series which went on to encompass The New Order, The New Colossus and Youngblood. After all, other than its title and the concept of fighting Nazis, The New Order borrows very little from its relatives, making it effectively an original game.
One of the most important things that The New Order does that sets it apart from not only other Wolfenstein games but other first-person shooters is its narrative. The writers took William J. Blazkowicz, the beef steak that talks like a man, and turned him into an actual character with flaws, ambitions and goals.
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| (Image property of MachineGames and Bethesda Softworks) |
After the Nazis won the Second World War, Blazkowicz recovers from his injuries to take the fight to them. However, unlike the Doomguy or a Call of Duty protagonist, he isn't just some force of nature driven to righteous slaughter. He struggles with his history of violence and has to wrestle with the sheer brutality that it takes to overcome the already brutal Nazi regime. It all feels very human and gives the gameplay's cathartic violence against faceless Nazis a reason to exist outside of expressing one's inflamed political opinions.
As a part of a series, The New Order outshines its sequel, The New Colossus because Colossus doesn't feel like it adds much to what The New Order already nails. Rather, after the rapid takeoff of The New Order, The New Colossus felt more like a holding pattern with the plane circling the runway, echoing what had already been done without making many meaningful movements itself. It was still better than Youngblood though which, in the aeroplane metaphor, was like the entire crew began uncontrollably vomiting until the weight of all the human waste pulled the plane out of the sky and caused it to crash into an orphanage. I didn't like it.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
While I'm breaking my own rules, I might as well throw in another game that's not exactly the first in its series. Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia got its start on the Apple II in 1989 so to say that The Sands of Time from 2003 wasn't the original isn't much of a clickbait-worthy hot take.
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| (Image property of Ubisoft) |
Yet again though, we're faced with an example of a game that set itself apart as being original by redefining its series' identity. It's no coincidence that none of the many Prince of Persia reboots have tried to recapture the magic of the 1989 game. For Sands of Time, this reinvention was all about the time-rewinding.
The older Prince of Persia games had a bad habit of randomly killing the player with unexpected spike traps. Sands of Time fixed this problem by continuing to kill you with unexpected spike traps. What made it work though, was the introduction of the power to reverse time which has been a key part of the series ever since. This new design choice encouraged experimentation and creative level designs because, if the player ever ran into trouble, they could always time travel moonwalk their way back to the start of the room.
On top of its gameplay innovations though, Sands of Time stands out, even today, for the sheer quality of its writing. Both the Prince and his begrudging companion Farah are likeable but flawed in a way that gives them a genuine chemistry not often seen between protagonists and their support characters. What's more, it means that when the two slowly start to build up a relationship over the course of the plot, their flaws rub together and create a unique dynamic between them that makes their bond very believable.
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| (Image property of Ubisoft) |
Thankfully, some colour did return to the series' cheeks in Two Thrones but, by then, the lightning of the Prince and Farah's relationship just couldn't be put back in the bottle and it just felt a little hollow.
Lego Star Wars
Okay, nostalgia may be a bit of a factor on this one but hear me out. Personally, while I find modern games like Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga to be impressive achievements, I just don't enjoy them as much anymore. Now, part of that could very well be because I played the original as a kid and, as an adult, I simply want to claw back some of the simplicity of that time. However, I don't think that is the sole factor at play here.
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| (Image property of Traveller's Tales Games and Eidos Interactive) |
To illustrate my point, field this question; if you had to replay either the original Lego Star Wars or The Skywalker Saga to 100% completion, which one would you choose? For me, the original is the obvious choice. I have completed that game to 100% at least twice and yet I still have not mustered the energy to do the same for The Skywalker Saga.
The lesson of this comparison is that, sometimes, less is more. When The Skywalker Saga released, it boasted thousands of collectables and hundreds of playable characters, a far cry from the original with its fifty-six strong character roster. The problem is though, so much of it felt like filler.
You could grind for hours finding collectables and unlocking characters but for what? Most players find one character for each class that they like and use those same ones every time they need to solve a puzzle. The Skywalker Saga's problem was that it took far too much effort to unlock everything in comparison to the actual benefits you saw from the unlocks themselves. Look at it this way, I can barely be bothered to do my day-job as is and I get paid for that. I'm not about to take on a whole second job when the only reward is getting to see a different colour of Lego storm-trooper.
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| (Image property of Traveller's Tales Games and Warner Bros. Games) |
By comparison, Lego Star Wars (2005) feels much more focused and straight-forward. Extra characters are included, not to monopolise your free time when unlocking them, but rather because someone on the development team thought it might be fun to have them be playable. As a result, I will always favour the simpler, snackier experiences of older Lego games compared to the bloated open worlds of more recent titles.
Grand Theft Auto III
Well, if Wolfenstein and Prince of Persia were contentious for their qualifying for the list and Lego Star Wars was contentious for its inclusion, it's probably safe to say that GTA III is contentious for both reasons. How could a game that is not the first in its series be considered an 'original' game that is better than its sequels when one of its sequels (GTA V) is also the most profitable entertainment product of all time. This really is a rhetorical David vs. a factual Goliath.
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| (Image property of DMA Design and Rockstar Games) |
Well, on the 'originality' front, GTA III can very easily be separated from GTA 1, 2 and London because it was the first 3D game in the series and has, Chinatown Wars notwithstanding, been the template ever since. Even Rockstar Games themselves seem to have forgotten every game before GTA III seeing as their website even calls the three PS2 games, starting with GTA III, 'the original Grand Theft Auto Trilogy'.
As for whether it is better than the sequels, this is where we get into the realm of personal preference. For me, it comes down to a similar issue that I feel with modern Lego games. Put simply, how much is too much when designing an open world game? GTA III made a name for itself with the freedom it offered players in an open world space. It was that freedom that both sold the game and made it controversial enough to garner media attention because Baby Jane playing her new PS2 in front of the fire at Christmas could run over prostitutes with a heavy goods vehicle.
The problem for me with GTA ever since has been that, in their attempts to build on and develop this feeling of freedom, Rockstar have ended up adding more bloat and pointless junk. Case in point, do you think that GTA V would have made any less of a profit if it didn't let you play golf, because I'm not convinced it would have. If I ever suffered the kind of traumatic brain injury that altered my entire personality in such a way that it gave me a feverish desire to play a golf game, GTA V is not going to be the first one that springs to mind and yet, the golf mini-game is still there.
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| (Image property of Rockstar North and Rockstar Games) |
The appeal of GTA has always been that you can play around in a realistic world that reacts to your actions, whether it is going on a spree shooting or randomly following real traffic laws until you get bored. The problem from my perspective though, is that very few of the innovations in the GTA formula, like golf, have done much to make the world any more responsive to your actions. As a result, I still feel like the original does things best thanks to its straightforward design philosophies and lack of unnecessary bloating.
Conclusion
If I was to tie each of these loose ends into some kind of lesson like I was directing a Saturday morning cartoon, I would say that sometimes, the best thing that you can do for a game as a developer is to stop making it. Sure, there's always more you can add and build upon but, a lot of the time, you have to wonder if it's necessary. Perhaps, by adding more to your game, you might be sacrificing what made it unique to begin with.
Personally, while I love many of these series, I wouldn't mind seeing more one-and-done games that allow developers to channel all of their best ideas before moving onto something entirely new. I think I'd rather see that than developers feeling obliged to just keep building on the same formula that has long since been buried under new additions and ideas for the sake of simply being able to slap a familiar name on the box. But then again, what do I know? I never made Wolfenstein: Youngblood! ;)
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