61 Frames Per Second : the ten most adventurous sequels in gaming history

The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:32:00 GMT

Jak II

As Amber recently mentioned, Jak's personality changed between Jak & Daxter and Jak II. This wasn't an, "Oh look, he's got a new hat!" sort of change either. Jak went from being an unassuming, Pixar-styled young-and-plucky hero to a gun-toting, tortured prisoner of war in the span of two credits sequences. But Naughty Dog's decision to frame the sequel around a loss of innocence isn't what's adventurous about Jak II. In Jak & Daxter, Jak is mute, but following his fall from grace at the beginning of II, he chats up a storm. As significant as the shift from a silent vessel for the player to inhabit to a defined personality driving story are the changes made to Naughty Dog's original play design. Jak & Daxter was a hub-based platformer in the vein of Super Mario 64 (albeit more linear) that featured basic melee combat. Jak II has more in common with Grand Theft Auto than Spyro the Dragon, eschewing platforming arenas and challenges for a mission based structure and vehicle play with more gun combat than melee. Naughty Dog have established themselves as one of gaming's most reliable developers, but few of their titles have the sheer balls of Jak II. — JC

Star Fox 2

"Star Fox... 2?" you ask incredulously. (Or maybe you don't, because you are a gamer with an internet connection, and you probably know more about Star Fox 2 than we do.) In any case — yeah, there was a Star Fox 2, and weirdly enough, at the time it was cancelled it was just about finished. Star Fox 64 became Star Fox's first released sequel, and it's a lot closer to the original Star Fox than its miscarried older brother. Star Fox 2 was an innovative oddball, with multiple distinct characters and (most notably) a lot of gameplay on a non-linear map where the player's team can intercept enemy forces before they reach Fox's home planet. It's sort of like a Command & Conquer-style strategy game where traditional Star Fox action kicks in once opposing characters engage. Some of these concepts were reused in the 2006 Nintendo DS title Star Fox Command. But if your heart belongs to the 16-bit era, Star Fox 2 is a real lost gem, and a truly ambitious sequel. — PS

Resident Evil 4

In all fairness, Resident Evil 4 plays almost identically to Resident Evil: Leon Kennedy moves like a tank, turning with none of the grace or precision a trained US Secret Service agent should have (though he becomes downright acrobatic when prompted to jump off a building.) Items are collected and, technically speaking, zombies are shot. But, oh, the difference a shift in perspective can make. Bringing the player’s viewpoint behind Leon’s shoulder as opposed to the dramatic but fixed camera angles of early Resident Evils not only made for more dynamic gunplay but changed the entire tone of the series, making for a more claustrophobic and less generally ominous atmosphere. Resident Evil 4 also made survival horror more about fight than flight, providing copious amounts of ammunition but even more dire odds in its hordes of glaring enemies. More than any other game on this list, Resident Evil 4 could not be more different than its predecessors at the same time as being undeniably rooted in the series. It is the essential adventurous sequel: everything’s different but feels like home. — JC

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

There's a probably-apocryphal internet story about the development of the 1995 masterpiece Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Asked by Nintendo management to develop a Mario title with pre-rendered graphics (in vogue at the time due to the success of the otherwise generic Donkey Kong Country), the ever-contrary Shigeru Miyamoto instead moved the visuals in a radically different direction, ordering up the lush crayon world that eventually became Yoshi's Island. Whatever the truth of the story, I remember being thrilled at the time because a) I thought Donkey Kong Country was overhyped bullshit, and b) I thought designers were getting obsessed with graphic "realism" when it really wasn't appropriate to their games. (The latter complaint was borne out by the subsequent half-decade of gaming.) Besides being visually stylized to a degree that games have only recently re-approached, Yoshi's Island also brought in Miyamoto's usual boatload of gameplay innovations, from the protect -a-shrieking-baby mechanic to the unique projectile system. Super Mario World was essentially a tarted-up Super Mario Bros. 3, but Yoshi's Island was a strange and wonderful beast. — PS

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The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:31:00 GMT

Super Mario 64

If you'd asked a young me to imagine a three-dimensional Mario Bros. game, I'd have pictured a screenshot from Super Paper Mario — essentially, the point-A-to-point-B linearity of classic side-scrolling Mario, shot from a different camera angle. Instead, Shigeru Miyamoto's first 3D adventure completely rewrote the rules of platforming, replacing the "get to the end" format with a variety of challenges set in one, open physical space. To a generation weaned on linearity, this was pretty overwhelming at first — I remember being plunked down in Bob-Omb Battlefield and wandering around like a chump for an embarrassingly long time. 64 was so different from its precursors that you arguably wouldn't call it a sequel, but bear in mind that no one knew at the time what the next generation of games would look like. Early 32-bit games like Bug and Clockwork Knight dressed 2D gaming in 3D clothes. As usual, that nut Miyamoto had something different in mind. — PS

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest

This game is full of fucking liars. That's the least of its eccentricities but it's worth pointing out up front. Up until the late '80s, Konami's bread and butter was short arcade games, heavy on action and reflex based play as exemplified by well-known staples like Contra and Gradius. The original Castlevania was no different, just six linear stages of unforgiving reaction play that demanded careful attention to the game's weighted attack/jump timing. As home consoles strengthened their grip on players, Konami followed the growing trend of creating longer, deeper play experiences. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest has only superficial similarities to Castlevania. You jump over platforms, whip monsters, and move from left to right. But the world is persistent, requiring you to revisit most locales, and it's littered with towns. Towns are full of non-enemy characters selling items and offering "advice" on how to proceed through the game's barely defined obstacles. Simon's Quest also introduced one of gaming's first night-and-day systems. During the day, towns are safe. At night, everything kills you in two seconds and towns are full of zombie chicks. Konami retreated from Castlevania II's experiments for almost a decade, but the series has never since done anything quite so daring as having its lead die after beating the game. — JC

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

We are aware that this list is populated almost exclusively by games designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. What can we say? He's an adventurous guy. [Shouldn't that be "adventuresome guy?" — PS] The first Legend of Zelda is, arguably, Miyamoto's true masterpiece, the culmination of his first design era. His benchmarks: Donkey Kong created context and narrative, Super Mario Bros. brought speed and an expanding world beyond a single screen, and the Legend of Zelda created an actual world to explore, an organic place peppered with secrets. After its release in 1986, the next decade of Miyamoto's career was one marked more by refinement than creation. But, in 1987, Miyamoto got experimental. Alongside the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. 2 is Zelda's sequel, The Adventure of Link, a sequel so bizarre in its design choices that it's still seen as a blemish on a series considered unimpeachable by gamers and designers alike. While Zelda II doesn't eschew the original's birds-eye-view perspective entirely — travel and world exploration is presented this way, albeit with a much more expansive view — all the action takes place in multi-tiered scrolling stages (not dissimilar to SMB2's.) Items were replaced by spells learned from chatty townspeople, heart containers and swords replaced by role-playing style attribute growth, and link himself grew from a diminutive elf into a teenager with a peculiar, post-lobotomy stare. Unlike some of the other games on this list, very little of Zelda II's design has been used in subsequent adventures. I've found it only gets better with age, a diamond in the rough of a series that's become bloated and stagnant after twenty years of little revision. — JC

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The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:30:00 GMT

More than any other creative medium, videogames rely on sequels. Unlike serial fiction (television, comics) or film franchising focused on continuing narrative and familiar characters, videogame sequels — at their best, mind you — are not just the next chapter of a story or the return of a popular protagonist. The most successful gameplay designs are perfected through revision. Practice, as they say, makes perfect. And while sequel-as-business-model more often than not leads to stagnation, sometimes pandering to the audience reveals a vein of creativity richer than that found in the source material. Sometimes, a good idea needs to be demolished and rebuilt over its original foundation to become great. This week, 61 Frames Per Second takes a look at gaming's ten most adventurous sequels: direct successors that significantly alter the fundamental design, aesthetically and mechanically, of their predecessors. Some of the entries on this list are great successes, others failures. But they all broke the mold to change our ideas about play. — John Constantine

Adventure Island IV

Even as an old-school die-hard I've always been pretty indifferent to the Adventure Island series. Sure, it's solid hop-and-bopping, but without much aesthetic or architectural distinction. Does anyone feel passionately about Adventure Island, really? More people might if Adventure Island IV had come out in the States. IV melds the series's standard run-around-whacking-stuff-with-other-stuff mechanics to an ambitious Metroid-esque superstructure, in which newly acquired items must be used to open previously inaccessible sections of a large, continuous map. (The snowboard you pick up in one area gives you passage through a snowy field, and so forth.) This is a familiar tactic today — see recent Castlevania games, for example — but at the time it was unusual, and certainly not where you'd have expected a staid platforming series to go. — Peter Smith

Super Mario Bros. 2 (Super Mario Bros. USA)

Quiet down. I know Super Mario Bros. 2 is Doki Doki Panic. As soon as those sprites were transplanted into Shigeru Miyamoto's platforming follow-up to Super Mario Bros., it became a Mario game, and SMB's first true sequel. Even Nintendo went on to re-categorize Takashi Tezuka's Japan-only Super Mario Bros. 2 as little more than an expansion of SMB (it was re-released in 1993 as Super Mario Bros: For Super Players in Japan and Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels in the west.) What's remarkable about Super Mario Bros. 2 is not its unorthodox development; it's how it warps the fundamentals of SMB (and even J-SMB2) while maintaining familiarity. The aesthetic shift from SMB risked alienating Nintendo's still-growing fan base but it made Mario and his friends even more recognizable as icons. Play wise, it expands on the multi-character abilities of J-SMB2, and re-defines progression through levels. In SMB, the goal is merely to get to the end of a series of stages and then get past Bowser at the end of castle. In SMB2, the completion of levels is usually tied to items, whether it's procuring keys to get past locked doors or retrieving a magic orb. The game also has multiple antagonists that have to be physically defeated as opposed to just avoided as with Bowser. It was also pretty adventurous to have a transgendered dinosaur in a game for kids. Risky! — JC

Final Fantasy II

The old joke is that, by rights, Final Fantasy II shouldn't even exist. In 1987, Final Fantasy was intended to be a young Hironobu Sakaguchi's swansong, an experiment in the rising role-playing genre made popular by Yuji Horii just a year before. Its success has kept the Gooch making games for two decades now, but the series, and JRPGs broadly, owes many of its enduring characteristics to the sequel that never should have been. Final Fantasy II was designed by Akitoshi Kawazu, best known for the SaGa series. While the first FF, with the exception of a few aesthetic flourishes, was more or less a clone of the first two Dragon Quests, Final Fantasy II placed an emphasis on story and character that was absent from the genre previously. Rudimentary as the tale of empire and resistance was, the story of Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon in Palemecia was a drastic shift from the western-style hero-epics that typified the genre in 1988. Kawazu also made some decidedly ill-advised changes to play. As opposed to the traditional system of gaining experience points through battle to build character's statistical attributes — a foundational aspect of role-playing games, digital and non — each action in the game improved only through use. Increasing defense requires defending against attacks, increasing attack power requires attacking, and so on and so forth. This system of growth was applied to every interactive aspect of the game and quickly became tedious. But it was one more new idea in a game full of them. — JC

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