Topic: Gilding the Gaming Lily

Discussing sequels, prequels, remakes, demakes, remasters, ports - next-gen or otherwise; games that you thought just added excess to an already refined experience.

Suspending the reality of the business of iterating on products that sell well for a publisher, I'd say two such games for me were Demon's Crest (SNES) and Crashmo (3DS). While both good games, I felt the original games in their respective series had the gameplay experience down to a tee and the 'new and improved' or 'bigger and better' aspects didn't make me forget the simpler joys of the originals.

What are you guy's thoughts here?

I think Demon's Crest is one of the best SNES titles and that it improved every aspect of the previous games in the franchise without reaching the point of feeling excessive. While I enjoy Gargoyle's Quest 2, it doesn't have the replay value that Demon's Crest had. Still, Gargoyle's Quest 1 and 2 have aged great even by today standards, specially fora Gameboy and a NES game.

I'd like to support your point with an example but... I can't think of any franchise where I felt that they added too much to an already complete game. I think I enjoy games more as they get complex, however I'm sure that there's a point where even I would feel it's too much.

Going with the opposite position about a follow up game is cool too

I have zilch by way of relevant experience for this topic, but the recent flurry of Street Fighter 2 reviews for 3DS I find disheartening. By having so many slightly different versions, I feel it dilutes the legacy somewhat. If you're going to iterate on something but release it under the same name, I think there really needs to be a definitive version, rather than a muddle of variants.

@gcunit In hindsight you are right. Buying Street Fighter 2, then buying Street Fighter 2 Hyper would be the equivalent today of buying Mario Kart 8, then buying it again for the 200cc mode. Mario Kart 8 Hyper Edition £49.99. Erm...yay for dlc I guess!

Well both of the 3DS Zelda remasters totally messed up the lighting (granted, there wasn't much lighting to begin with, but you could still tell which rooms were supposed to be light and dark). That and Majora's Mask 3D changed many of the mechanics for the worse.

Adding the stamps and amiibo to Twilight Princess didn't change that game at all, and I'll have to play it to tell if I dislike the lighting changes in Skyrim: Special Edition.

...I don't know. A lot of the games I'm into haven't been remastered very eventfully yet. We'll have to see when Metroid Prime Trilogy HD inevitably comes out.

I feel Yoshi's Island is basically the epitome of this 'unnecessary sequels' thing. The first game was great, and had a perfectly done story that was wrapped up well at the end.

And then for some reason, Nintendo decided to let people make a ton of sequels to it. So we get Yoshi's Island DS (which is basically the original x 0.5), Yoshi's New Island (which completely kills the ending of the original) and other stuff like Yoshi's Topsy Turvy and Yoshi's Touch and Go.

Worse, it felt like they didn't really differentiate or improve anything in most cases. They just took the original concept, took out a bunch of complexity, switched up the graphics and music and said it was new.

@CM30 I knew that I would agree about that in some cases but I couldn't think of any series. Yes, Yoshi's Island is a great example of sequels falling short to the original and adding unnecessary stuff.