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Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Did any other "sequel" change the formula so much as this?

VGEsoterica

VGEsoterica

Member
Sure there were TONS of Castlevania games before SotN....but Symphony basically took what we all knew and loved, turned it upside down, spun it around...and made a game out of a franchise we knew and loved that was immediately wildly different than anything we were used to up till that point in time.

Levels? Nah...you get one giant castle. RPG elements? Yep throw those in! Leveling up? Absolutely! A massive inventory filled to the brim with different weapons, power ups, healing items, etc etc etc...gotta have that too!

Symphony of the Night and by extension Nocturne in the Moonlight was the hardest pivot in a sequel I can ever remember and damn did it work out for the best. Totally reinvented the Castlevania wheel and is still fondly remembered for being not only the best Castlevania games of all time...but one of the BEST VIDEO GAMES of all time. Not a small feat to accomplish.

Hell...I still play SotN yearly. It's just that good.

But that got me thinking GAF....what other sequels took what came before and totally went in a wildly different direction and was SUCCESSFUL with it. Also accepting sequels that ruined everything because thats always a fun convo too

 
01011001

01011001

Banned
Dynasty Warriors 2 (Shin Sangoku Musou)

Dynasty Warriors 1 (Sangoku Musou) was a 1 on 1 fighting game


this is also the reason why the western releases of Dynasty Warriors are a digit ahead of the Japanese versions as they started counting from the second game.

Sangoku Musou (Dynasty Warriors)
Shin Sangoku Musou (Dynasty Warriors 2)
Shin Sangoku Musou 2 (Dynasty Warriors 3)
etc.
 
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MarkMe2525

MarkMe2525

Gold Member
Sid Of Bee said:
Toe Jam and Earl 2: Panic on Funkotron

Duke Nukem 3D
Click to expand...
I feel that Toe Jam and Earl. I was a big fan of the first growing up and it was a frequent rental for me. I was very disappointed with the direction they took with the second one. I don't know if it was a bad game per say, as I only rented once, but it didn't hook me like the first.

R6Rider said:
God of War 2018 comes to mind as significantly different from the previous titles.

Fallout 3 too.
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GoW to me wasn't a sequel so much as a new thing with an established IP. Now Fallout 3 was a big change of direction. I never played the first two growing up, but followed it through PC gaming magazines.
 
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01011001

01011001

Banned
Jinzo Prime said:
Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen to Soul Reaver. From top-down, action-adventure hack-and-slash, to a third person, 3d, puzzle-platformer, with a new protagonist. Pretty freaking dramatic change imho.
Click to expand...

the correct comparison would be Blood Omen to Blood Omen 2 tho, which brings very similar changes.

Blood Omen and Soul Reaver were part of the same universe sure, but not direct prequels/sequels to eachother. they weren't even made by the same dev team.

also Soul Reaver is simply an Action Adventure, no need to add multiple genre categories here. it's as basic of an Action Adventure as it gets
 
Holammer

Holammer

Member
Mario 64, GTA 3 & Resident Evil 4 really shook up the established formula.

Played through SotN 200%+ probably 8 times or so and I keep returning to it.
It's a perfect game and I highly recommend playing the Japanese version with the English fan translation. The language is far more poetic than the 90's localization and Dracula is voiced by Norio Wakamoto, a guy known for doing the voice of manly men in anime.

 
Clear

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Not really, the way games develop structurally tends to be a product of experience in a certain genre of style combined with technological improvement over time.

Good game design is all about control, and as they gain confidence and understanding devs learn how to maintain that neccessary degree of gameplay control over increasingly large spaces.

We went from single, static screens, through uni-directional then multi-directional scrolling playfields, then expanded that out into 3D spaces when the tech matured sufficiently to display it, and later to craft good gameplay within it.

I'd add that because games are primarily visual, tech plays a huge part because it takes computational power and memory resources to render things to an adequate level of detail such that the player remains engaged with the gameplay. There were true 3d games back in the 80's but the crudeness of the visuals possible on the hardware of that time really held them back. A wire-frame spaceship in a wire-frame universe had limited appeal.
 
yurinka

yurinka

Member
Street Fighter II: in addition to highly improve visuals and controls, added many things that later became popular not only in fighting games, like a large and diverse amount of playable characters with different archetypes that included multiple rock, paper, scissors mechanics, and also introduced several concepts key for many games even beyond the genre like the combos, introduced stages and themes for each character to give them extra personality and so on.

GoW 2018: it was a revolution not only for its series but for its hack & slash genre. The change of the camera, the top tier narrative that now would play a huge focus in the game, added RPG elements, added an open worldish structure of interconnected wide linear corridors and highly changed and improved the gameplay and combat adding stuff from other genres like the Souls one.

Saber said:
I would say Mario 64.
Its the fundation of plataform, but in a very different way and presented on 3D.
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Well, in the same way that there were 2d platformers and even with scrolling before Super Mario Bros, there were also 3d platformers before Mario 64.

What Super Mario Bros and Mario 64 did was to have a way more polished game design in terms of controls and level design than the ones before them, which mixed with the very popular brand of Nintendo and Mario these games became super popular.

Holammer said:
Mario 64, GTA 3 & Resident Evil 4 really shook up the established formula.
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I think GTA 3 would also be a great example. I talked above about Mario, and regarding RE4 I think that the only important change to its formula was to change the camera to use over the shoulder one previously used in Kill Switch (which also was a reference for Gears of War) a couple of years before. In RE4 they also focused a bit in action over horror and puzzles, but that's something they already did before in the series.
 
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Mr Hyde

Mr Hyde

Member
And now very recently, I gotta say Elden Ring changed up the Dark Souls-formula quite a bit. It was a huge evolutionary step from the previous games.
 
TexMex

TexMex

Member
Agree with BotW and RE4.

Disagree with GTA3. 100% the same formula as GTA and GTA2. Just with some real production value.
 
AV

AV

We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
Jak 2.

Jak and Daxter was a light-hearted platformer collectathon. Then GTA 3 came out and Naughty Dog turned Jak 2 into an edgy, gritty story with an open world city map complete with car jackings, guns, missions etc.

Both are excellent games and Jak 3 carried on in the style of 2 but in the desert.
 
Holammer

Holammer

Member
AV said:
Jak 2.

Jak and Daxter was a light-hearted platformer collectathon. Then GTA 3 came out and Naughty Dog turned Jak 2 into an edgy, gritty story with an open world city map complete with car jackings, guns, missions etc.

Both are excellent games and Jak 3 carried on in the style of 2 but in the desert.
Click to expand...
Good example. I really hated the tonal shift in Jak 2, but it and Jak 3 are still good games.
The early 2000's Matrix inspired edge, as was the style at the time seeped into everything.
 
lachesis

lachesis

Member
I'd say Knightmare series... interestingly from Konami as well.

HfnZTHO.png

Knightmare - Vertical scrolling shooter


MubJfn5.png

Knightmare II: Maze of Galious - Prototype Metroidvania

CM0oFB8.png

Knightmare III: Shalom - (mostly) Text based adventure game
 
NeoIkaruGAF

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Holammer said:
Played through SotN 200%+ probably 8 times or so and I keep returning to it.
It's a perfect game and I highly recommend playing the Japanese version with the English fan translation. The language is far more poetic than the 90's localization and Dracula is voiced by Norio Wakamoto, a guy known for doing the voice of manly men in anime.
Click to expand...
I played the game in Japanese once.
What struck me it's the voice acting is the polar opposite of the original English one. US Alucard was the most badass baritone ever, while everyone else in the game was gloriously campy. In Japanese almost everyone sounds perfect, but Alucard himself is really unremarkable.


deriks said:
SotN is not that different from other Castlevanias. They just added the Metroid flavor on it and worked like a charm
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Can't agree. Alucard's weapon, moveset, mobility and special skills alone make the gameplay drastically different from the Belmont games, without even touching upon the level design and traversal. The difficulty is also much lower to accommodate for the very different scope of the game.


On topic, I guess The Third Birthday counts?
 
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