The best part was how they followed that game up with a grittier brown and gray title that was more down to earth and conventional (since the previous game was so divisive) involving the protagonist getting ambushed at the start and then recovering, meeting a deceptive female lead who is at first manipulating the protagonist for her own gains, then slowly comes to genuinely care for him, especially after a sequence where he carries her to safety after she's badly injured. There's also a sequence before the final boss fight where the protagonist and a woman ride together where one steers and the other shoots at the main villain, leading up to a 1v1 confrontation in a field.
Then they went in a weird direction. There was a divisive portable game that seemed like garbage from the B-team, a continuity heavy mainstream followup on the next gen hardware that was full of wayyyy too many gimmicks and cutscenes, then they did a way more better received handheld game that got a lot more promotion, then an action game spinoff farmed out to a different company, and finally they're coming back around with a 2015 next gen game where the protagonist has a pony tail and explores an open world on their horse (it's heavily inspired by the direction that the better handheld game went in).