Franchise Graveyard Thread

Climax was actually the last game, but it was a good one too. At-least it bowed out without a single shitty game under its belt (though some people question the GBA games' quality).

That's what I meant by "as far as anyone cares". Most people seem to not even be aware that the GBA ones exist. I'm hazy on what they're like myself, but weren't they the ones where they tried to semi-reboot the series by skipping forward in time?

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Kinda. They coincided with the anime show they made with the infamous falcon punch scene.

Star Fox's history has been a sad, long, winding road.
It was undercut by the Wii U and maybe if Nintendo gave a shit about it, it would have been a great game on the Switch

I dont have the proofs on my current device, unfortunately. Some autist here made a few posts about it tying everything together. There are screencaps floating around, i know that. Maybe the autist themselves will show up.
Offtopic

I don't get the love for Starfox.
It's a few hours long on rails shooter, there's nothing else to it. Don't come to me saying "oh but there's alternative routes", the stages that you don't play are still minutes long. I could MAYBE understand if the gameplay was absolutely fucking amazing, but it's not. You're just on rails, moving around and shooting at things that barely can hit you. It's one step above the Gummy Ship segments in KH.

And even if you do unconditionally love it, Starfox Zero is shit because there's nowhere to go from there, motion controls or not the game would have just been the same exact thing with a few annoying additions to pad out its length.

You mean to tell me that series was dead-on-arrival?

Can you give me the short version?

Because Nintendo made it.

Star Fox Zero was a pretty mediocre-to-okay game right up until the final boss, and then the controls weren't just slightly quirky, they were a goddamned infuriating liability.

The game sold like shit in Japan is why. Never broke 20k units IIRC. They decided to cut their losses. You can get it on the Wii U VC though, which is something. I wasn't a fan of the story mode focus. GX is where it's at.

Maximum Velocity was good, it just didn't have any of the characters or tracks that were familiar to the series. The justification was that it was a prequel set a century or so before the Captain Falcon era but still…

Star Fox is just the same game constantly remade, which wouldn't be a problem since the core of it is so good, all it really needs is a generous remix every other generation. But Nintendo can't seem to not want to fuck with what is already a great formula.

Anyway, after the debacle that was this piece of shit I don't see Pit returning any time soon. The controls killed it, most people never bothered to git gud with them, and it ended up as a bargain bin Nintendo title which they have done only a handful of times ever, one of the others being Other M. If it could be remastered as a twin stick shooter on Switch it would probably be amazing, but it won't and so this will be the end of Pit.

It could have been so much more if Nintendo wasn't so stubborn about their stupid retarded-ass fucking gimmicks nobody likes.

what is good about it

It's almost like a form of guilt on their part. They run their entire marketing campaigns on these gimmicks and then the best games they make never use them in any significant way.

going with how OP phrased it as once beloved and now bastardized
your last image would be the bastard

It certainly is. The Crystal Bearers was a piece of SHIIIET.

I was never a big fan of the series to start with but that one in-particular perfectly encapsulated everything that was wrong with the Wii.

rip in piece future of dinosaur games

Nothing. Just autists being autists.

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To this day not a single genre has been sodomized so brutally.

People like to say Microsoft kills things.

This is not true.

Microsoft is a sadistic predator. It prefers to mutilate its prey, watch it struggle, smack it around a bit, toss it to its friends for them to brutalize before taking it back and just kind of throwing its broken body into a dark corner to be forgotten for a while. But only for a while. Inevitably Microsoft comes back and starts it again. And again. And again.

Battletech/Mechwarrior fans are to the point where they just want it to be over. Just let it die. Please stop hitting it. Please stop raping it and pulling it apart and stitching it back together wrong. Please stop hurting it. Please stop hurting us.

I only played 2 and the snow expansion. How bad were the later games, did I dodge a bullet?

I could go on, we all can.

At this point, given what's been happening with other older series suddenly getting a new game and/or rebooted for a new customerbase, I'm actually kind of glad that Aruze continues to sit on the rights to Shadow Hearts in favor of doing absolutely nothing with it (and continuing to pump out pachislot crap, thankfully not involving the franchise). Fuck them for dissolving Nautilus though.

That isn't in the graveyard anymore. Capcom took its rotten corpse to the reanimator and set loose a zombie. Just like Sony is doing with Wild Arms and Arc the Lad (only Sony has even less excuse for mobile rebooting, since unlike Capcom, they own their own fucking systems they should by all rights be putting franchises they own on, instead of resorting to the mobileshit audience).

I'd honestly be curious to know how much of the team from Paper Mario 64, TTYD, or even Super Paper Mario were even involved with Sticker Star and Color Splash.

MechWarrior Online: Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Initial visual quality was decent, everything (and I do mean everything) rapidly deteriorated as it became clear PGI didn't know what the fuck they were doing (Smith and Tinker/Jordan Weisman were probably responsible for most of the decent stuff we saw in beta).

Other honorable mentions:
MechCommander: Good fun. Not perfect, but good.
MechCommander 2: Horrifically dumbed down. Retarded AI. (MechCommander Omnitech fanproject still kind of fun, if you can find it.)

Other assorted stuff:
MechWarrior (the PC version): has not aged well. Still actually sort of fun to play if you can stand it.
MechWarrior (the SNES version): Pretty bad, not very fun.
MechWarrior 3050 (SNES)/BattleTech (Genesis): Dumb, pointless. Not worth playing. Not very fun.

Some other older ones (like the Crescent Hawks games) but haven't been able to play, so can't really give an opinion either way. MechWarrior 5 (before it was killed dead) looked really promising. MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries (PGI's newest way to destroy our hopes and dreams) does not give me good vibes. BattleTech (new one by HBS) might be good, but Harebrained Schemes is probably pozzed as fuck, so not holding out much hope.

Damn, I really liked that series. Such a shame.

Oh, nearly forgot:

I'm planning on pirating the fuck out of Battletech, fuck paying a company to try and brainwash me into letting shitskins fuck my sisters without a fight.

Why didn't you save them, Holla Forums?

cuz their game is shit

First vid was the MechWarrior 5 teaser (which was not to be, thanks in no small part to Harmony Gold having a bitchfit over the Warhammer being present.
(Minor sperging: you knew there was another mech nearby why did you advance blind like that, why are you taking a Warhammer 6R into an urban environment, why didn't that Atlas hit you with an SRM barrage ever, why the fuck did the Atlas' LRMs do jack and shit that has to be well within minimum range for them)

Now look at the MW5 Mercs teaser vid.

It looks like hammered shit compared to the MW5 trailer.

Same, but I'd rather it have gone out with a mechanically solid, if hit-and-miss game (FtNW; I don't exactly count crossover stuff like Chaos Wars as a proper entry in ANY of the series combined therein), than be turned into mobile shit, outright rebooted, or be further milked and developed by people that weren't the prior devs at Sacnoth and their later incarnation as Nautilus.

To be honest though, I'm kind of surprised it got as many games as it did. Not because it didn't warrant more games back then, but because Nautilus had a cheeky way of nipping at the hand that fed them, and Aruze's own annoyance at how the series didn't get Final Fantasy-tier sales (an interview with Kato and Machida didn't state "what" series outright, but given the mention of SH1 and the comparison to other "big fish" at the time, I'm about 99% certain Aruze was looking to compete with FFX). Why Aruze even wanted to publish a JRPG series, and a rather niche one at that, given their preference for pachislot, I don't know.

Keep in mind there's a very good chance MW5 Mercs will never even fucking happen anyway. But just look at the difference in quality between the MW5 trailer and the MW5 Mercs teaser.

PGI is hopeless. Smith and Tinker (and Jordan Weisman) were the only chance MechWarrior had of being good again.

I will in a few years. Not banjo, but something a little more banjo-esque.
Spewka-Killme was a piece of shit.

(more sperging)
I just realized that that Atlas' loadout makes no sense. Atlas C is NOT an urban fighter. The Atlas in the trailer appears to have an AC20, not a Gauss Rifle, which would make it an Atlas D. So what the fuck.

Yes it was, but now vidya in general is so bad the trash of yesteryear is suddenly good in comparison.

Mechcommander Omnitech and Assault Tech 1: Battletech are excellent additions to the Battletech franchise. Both are free too, but were planned on having multiplayer that both still do not have. AT1:BT really had potential, until it was either PGI or Harmony Jew(Gold) destroyed the potential that it was going to have. A real fucking shame too, since right after the Firemoth build the devs were ready to release multiplayer support. I would really pay good money for AT1:BT to get revitalized or a complete reboot/remaster of Mechwarrior 2 and Mechwarrior 2 Ghost Bear's Legacy.

Still waiting on MechCommander Omnitech getting that multiplayer/coop access any day now….

You push this meme in every thread. Kill yourself.

Check this out.

Because the people in charge of it couldn't stop jacking off over making bigger and bigger worlds to make a fucking consistent game. Every 3D platformer they made after BK had worlds too big for what you ended up doing in them. M$ didn't make them do Nuts N' Bolts, Rare admitted they couldn't stop making worlds bigger to the point you needed vehicles to get around in them. From what I hear, they still haven't learned their lesson since Yooka-Laylee is also massive expanses of nothing for the sake of big worlds. Fuck those devs.

It was just a harmless shitpost. Pls no bully

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The series had potential. It was a fantasy/comedy in classic Taito humor going on an adventure to kill the four mad gods threatening to take over the world. It eventually delved into details which made great depest lore moments.

THEN FUGGIN SQUARE ENIX REBOOTED THE SERIES WITH THIS PIECE OF SHIT GAME THAT BOMBED SO HARD IT EVENTUALLY KILLED NEVERLAND, WHOM MADE RUNE FACTORY.

THIS GAME SUCKED SO HARD IT TOOK RUNE FACTORY WITH IT.

Bully this nerd.

Stabbed in the heart and shot in the head

kind of hard to see what sort of joystick they used. Neat, regardless.

The thing that gets me about giant robot sims and joystick/throttle setups is that while the joystick/throttle gives you infinitely better immersion a mouse will always be better for precision. You can do pretty well with a joystick/throttle/etc. but assuming all other things are equal a mouse user will probably outshoot you.

I keep trying to think of a way to make it so that the mouse user doesn't get that fine aiming advantage but I'm not sure there's much point in such an exercise anyway, what with giant robot sims pretty much having one foot in the grave (at least, Western giant robot sims)

Series isn't dead, they're rebooting it now, but yeah those games killed the original saga.

didn't know that. Whos making it? will it be 80's this time?

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There are worse fates.

Ass Defect was always trash kys

Fuck Grunty's industries

Final Fantasy XV

Star Fox Zero was very disappointing, but I wouldn't call it shitty.

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First one was legitimately good.

Second was okay but took the series in the wrong direction.

Three was a piece of shit.

Andromeda killed all hopes of redemption and assured the series will be forgotten in the years to come.

They were all shit, sorry.

As shit as that game was; Neverland died because of Nintendo's licensing fees were too fucking high that they barely made a profit. Rune Factory 4 was one of their best selling games but because of Nintendo's bullshit fees it lost money.

JUST

Crystal Chronicles did not deserve to go out the way it did.

I see potential here but the dialogue frightens me because I feel like I'd hate the fuck out of it.

Some of us tried to bring about revival by ourselves, Some of us thought we can let them redeem themselves, others thought to leave to their own demises. It's sad but perhaps much like TWEWY, it's better to have it contained than violated for further milk.

A moment of silence for the fallen
(Ex-Troopers counts as Lost Planet btw)
Square if any of your Zodiac Age shills are by some miracle lurking pls hear an old boy's wishes out and please bring back Ivalice Allaince and Tactics if you do that I might forgive you for Toriyama's shitty waifu

Outcast.
Far more interesting, fun and important a game.

#2, company died inexplicably.

Severance 2 - first was really fun, skillful play.
Developed suddenly gone.

RIP Custom Robo

F

The lore was never that good in the first place. The whole setting with the houses/clans is obviously designed just to sell little figurines and rulebooks, yet only about 12 of the 600+ mechs have fluff that's any fun to read.

If Square does have shills lurking here, chances are they have no real weight on what the Japanese branches develop, being that they'd most likely be from the NA and EU branches, this being an English oriented site and all.

What a sad world we live in. I still remember some company, I want to say either Square-Enix or Capcom, bitching that some game they'd releases was a failure to make a profit, despite having sold multiple millions of copies.

kys famalam
You're actually fucking retarded and have no idea how TT BT even worked
Take a miniature, paint it in house/unit colors, presto, it's a Genyosha mech or whatever gets you going. Certain mechs (and other units) were more LIKELY to be found in certain house armies/merc units/Clan toumans than others, but nothing was really off the table. It's not like Sperghammer 40K.

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Both, actually with the new Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 6.

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Huh, guess that was correct either way. I suppose one of the issues (though I'm not sure either confirmed what the problem making "poor" sales was) facing some games these days is just how much fucking money gets pumped into marketing, rather than development. It strikes me that there's a point where marketing something any further is just going to be a waste of money due to diminishing returns on sales, if not losing them potential sales because of how pervasive the campaign is. Thus you get cases where sales figures that would otherwise be incredibly good (especially in the past) wind up considered to have underperformed.

Perhaps not the best example (as to my knowledge the game was by no means a failure), but there's something that feels really wrong when a company drops $200,000,000 just to market a game that cost them a quarter of that to actually create.

What? Uprising is supposed to be one of the top games for the 3DS and it was extremely popular. Other than the controls, pretty sure fucking everyone loved it.

With Tomb Raider it was because the game was scrapped and essentially developed twice over.

I actually quite liked it honestly, but oh my god, that game was a buggy pile of shit. I guess all the money went to voice acting.

is paper mario color splash as bad as I think it to be? I can get it for $31 do you think it's worth it?

No. If you really need a Mario-themed game with "funny" writing, just replay Super Paper Mario.

The same with Punch Out and Wario Land.

Get educated this is embarrassing fam.

The more the years go by the more I am convinced this series should have ended with Super. What greater of a finale could a series possibly have asked for?

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Several former Neverland employees found work at Marvelous (publisher of Rune Factory) and made at least one game so far (Lord of Magna).

WAKE ME UP

Really? Aruze pisses me off for having SHadow hearts and doing NOTHING with it. Not saying that I want them to pump out pachinko crap with the franchise, but…doing nothing isn't exactly good either. It's same reason why I'm pissed off with Konami…as long as such companies have such franchises we know we will never see a new Shadow hearts. A new Suikoden. And that hurts.

To be fair, in this case I'm glad that happened. You don't just pick a classic turn based rpg series and reboot into this fucking travesty of a game and expect to make a good profit out of it. Whoever had this idea deserve to be shot and never get close to a game company again if he survives. That said, I still hope for a new reboot in like 20 years and that they get it right this time! Maybe a remake of the Lufia for the gameboy color or for the gba one.

Nobody actually likes Suikoden though, just 2.

That's all of them, OP. That's the destiny of every single franchise.

Everything you love will one day fall to ruin because all that exists will ultimately be destroyed. That is the nature of life.

Be glad you got any good vidya in the first place.

That meme doesn't work on Dragon Quarter because it was actually a good game, furfags just don't like it.

You should be glad for that in case you loved the original game. Anything beyond 2 sequels is just pure cancer anyway and usually even that is too much. There's nothing that I hate more than the fanboys who get excited about the 15th Mario game. They're the reason why there's a remakes and reboots of absolutely everything.

5 is legitimately the most difficult Japanese RPG I've ever played. To be turned into a mobile game is just….man…What would it take to make a new bof game that's GOOD? An official fan project called Breath of Fire Mania?

Mario Party after Hudson died.

mass effects was always shit

I'm afraid to ask, but just how bad were they? I really liked destroy all humans one, but not two.

They fucking got rid of ragdoll physics.
They were made at the same time by two separate companies
3 was made by Locomotive games and was absolute garbage. I beat it in like 3 - 4 hours.
4th was slightly better but was still pretty meh. It was made by "sandblast games", google it
i haven't played these in ten years but they had quite a bit of mechanical problems as well.

Breath of Fire is dead Capcom cannot make games anymore anyway so even if they make a new proper one you probably will not want it. They cannot even make a fucking fighting game anymore let alone a JRPG. Even Monster Hunter the one thing left they have that makes money is starting to falter and losing fans.

I see it cited a lot as one of those cases where the localization/dub was flat-out better than the original. I can see what they mean since none of the voice-acting or dialogue in Uprising strikes me as out of place or forced, and the actors don't sound bored or like they're just reading a script at any point.

The horseshit controls are a pretty solid criticism though.

They're slippery and weird, but it's not impossible to get used to them or even make them work to your advantage. I definitely agree with the sentiment about it probably working better as a twin-stick shooter, though I wish Citra had gone anywhere in a decent timeframe so I could give the game a try with a proper trackball.

I'd rather let Lufia die and a new IP take it's place. To bad "spiritual successor" right now is a hipster buzzword.

Yeah, bullshit fees are one thing. However the company didn't go red until after Lufia DS's massive flop (which was published by Square Enix in Japan). The fees are expected to be paid. It's just that Rune Factory 4's success wasn't enough to keep the company afloat due to Lufia's massive bomb before hand.

Welcome to AAA game development. Games that cost millions have to sell billions in order to make bank. And if Final Fantasy's development costs during the generation says anything is that Square Enix can't keep a count of their budgets. That's why they're doing episodic AAA games instead of full releases with Hitman and FFVII remake. They don't want another FFXV.

Uprising was better and more fun than any of the original games.

Remember that Autistic Aardvark rip-off of this game?

Fuck twin stick shooter, the game should have been on the fucking Wii like it was originally intended to be. The concept was fucking made for the Wii and they pissed it away.

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The games were simple as fuck to make. Why didn't they poop out 2 or 3 for the Vita?

Maybe the move game flopped so hard, they couldn't bother to make a shit spin off for what would be a dead handheld.

What are you thinking user I'd expect Nintendo to put out a game for the thing before Sony does at this point.

Switch's gyroscopic controls apparently work rather well as a replacement for the Wii's cursor going by World of Goo's port, I could see them offering twin-stick and Wii-style control schemes.

for the love of fucking god, don't
I don't need another tactics game that shoves dog shit characters into it like vaan and penelo and forces them into my party
god save us all when they make a tactics with the ff15 cast

just give me adult marche or his kid and mont blanc going on adventures in ivalice

Mario Party died after 4 and ever since Nintendo refuses to bring it back to it's roots and just shit's on it's fanbase for not accepting their bad decisions.

God I fucking hated any part that had to do with FF12's characters being shoved down your throat, especially when none of them are unique enough in stat-growth and skillset to warrant their appearances or their custom jobs. I recall Vaan just being a shitty combination of Monk and Thief for instance.

It was just a train wreck. Forced to accept characters into your party that are absolutely of no value whatsoever.

But at least you got to have this qt and Mont Blanc if you did all quests and got all brooches

Speaking of Vita god damn ex-troppers would have been one of the best titles on the vita but instead capcom/inafune decided to put it on the 3DS. It makes zero sense.

I don't want them to make another fuckawful FFA game though, to hell with that and to hell with you.

Frimelda was actually funny as hell to see them acknowledge the "dual-wield Paladin" gamebreaker, you do these sidequests and you get one free of charge. The very moment I pick up Dual Wield with Luso is the very moment the game completely breaks, God help you if you pick up Parivir's Flair along with it to have access to every element in the game but water as a paladin.

I fucking loved the dual wield paladin
You can have Parivir side abilities, or the Fighter abilities that give you range.
Combine that with Peytral and Sequencer and you've made yourself a god.
I really liked the Moon Towers. They were still hard as balls to get through.

The swift death of the Ape Escape franchise would suggest otherwise famham. It didn't help that they thought the cute little niggers were Mario-tier marketable and overextended the brand.

This.
If you think about, the Analog Dualshock controller belongs to what makes Ape Escape what it is.
Most of those spin offs fit in the same field as any game about the Rabbids.

Similar with Tales of the Abyss. I have no clue why Namco opted to port the PS2 game to the 3DS of all things, and not the Vita, given how big their local fanbase is on Sony as a system (prompting every main series entry to either get an extended port to a Sony system or have been on one to begin with) and the better output capabilities. Not like they didn't already have the local fanbase into the Vita already with remakes of Innocence and Hearts on it (while at that point the 3DS had no Tales other than via DS backwards compatibility). My only thought is perhaps they wanted to hit a different market with it.

the controls were a big part of why it was so fun. it took the "gimmick" of dualshock and owned it.
its a shame we never got a mainline ape escape game with motion controls. i always wanted a wii ape escape.

(Checked)
Good thing Ape Escape is dead so that it cannot be turned into something like the Rabids.