Franchise Follow-Ups No One Expected

Every once in a while a game comes along that catches people off-guard.

Every once in a while a game comes along that catches people off-guard. Whether they’re good or bad, unexpected games are always interesting to explore and discuss, especially when they’re part of a long-running series. Whether it’s because the games differ greatly from their predecessors, or weren’t how anyone expected the series to continue, these are some of the most surprising follow-ups in the video game world. First up are the pleasant surprises.

Fallout 3

The Fallout franchise started its life in the hands of Interplay as an isometric, tactical-RPG. Unfortunately, Interplay eventually spiraled towards bankruptcy after a series of big projects were canned, one of which was Fallout 3. Not to be confused with Bethesda’s open-world epic, Interplay’s Fallout 3 was codenamed Van Buren and canceled when Interplay laid off most of Black Isle Studios’ PC development team in 2003. When Bethesda bought Fallout from the ailing company a few years later, many people assumed the team would either finish Van Buren or start from scratch; after all, a tech demo of Fallout 3 had already made its way into the wild, showcasing just how close the game was to completion. Instead, Bethesda did a little bit of both. Fans of the series got Fallout 3, but it wasn’t exactly what they envisioned when Black Isle Studios was hard at work behind closed doors. It’s not a bad thing that Bethesda took the series in a new direction though, as their version of Fallout 3 is easily one of the best RPGs from the last generation.

Battlefield: Bad Company

The Battlefield franchise has always had a large PC following, having originated on the platform in 2002. However, in 2008 the series took a sharp turn with Battlefield: Bad Company. In concept alone, Battlefield: Bad Company wasn’t actually that surprising. Call of Duty had proven the viability of both the console segment of the shooter genre and strong single-player campaigns the year prior. Meanwhile, the PS3 and Xbox 360 were technologically outperforming PCs, and Battlefield’s strongest market was shrinking as the online features of consoles finally caught up.

The surprising part of Battlefield: Bad Company was how good it ended up being. The game recently made the top five in our listof the best Battlefield games, along with its sequel. However, nothing in DICE’s track record suggested they were capable of turning out anything close to that level of quality for consoles. Their previous endeavors in the space were shaky at best, including things like the dog-eared port Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and the GameCube version of a terrible licensed Shrek game. Bad Company fell on the complete opposite end of the spectrum though. Its campaign was witty and well-formed, its technology far surpassed anything DICE had previously created, and its multiplayer Gold Rush mode was excellent.

Hyrule Warriors

Hyrule Warriors is the strangest departure Dynasty Warriors and Nintendo have taken in years. Dynasty Warriors is a niche franchise, and in most cases its spinoffs are bad. Nintendo is already conservative with its major franchises, rarely handing them off even for things like Capcom’s well-regarded Legend of Zelda games, so seeing it associate a hallmark brand with an inconsistent series was rather strange. That the game ended up being good enough to receive mostly positive reviews, including an 8 from Game Informer’s Kyle Hilliard, is a welcome surprise. Hyrule Warriors struck a chord with its blend of action and fanservice, and even though it’s not perfect, fans snatched it up at a rate that had Nintendo crediting itfor increased sales of the Wii U.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Everyone was excited to jump back into the shoes of the world’s greatest super-spy following hands-on time with the now infamous Tanker sequence prior to release. Sons of Liberty seemed set to deliver on what fans were hoping for, with numerous gameplay and visual refinements tightening up Solid Snake’s stealthy adventures. There was a problem though: Snake was missing in action. Though Solid Snake was still involved during the opening sequence and as the hardly-subtle Iroquois Pliskin, newcomer Raiden took center stage as the player-controlled character. Perhaps the most devious bait-and-switch the industry has ever seen, Metal Gear Solid 2 made fans furious at the time. In the years since its release, Sons of Liberty has been regarded as unexpected for another reason. While the original Metal Gear Solid was certainly full of weird things, the series didn’t introduce its craziest elements until the A.I.-fueled final act of Metal Gear Solid 2.

Majora’s Mask

It’s rare to see a Zelda game get a sequel of any kind. There have been a lot of spiritual or stylistic successors, and Nintendo has attempted to chronologically order the series, but for the most part each release exists in a vacuum. The most surprising exception to the rule is Majora’s Mask. Despite being a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, the game completely changes how Link’s approaches his quest. Instead of leisurely exploring Hyrule, players are forced to race against the clock as a freaky moon descends towards the planet’s surface. The game also came with a massive shift in tone that, when paired with the repetition in its design, produced one of the most divisive entries in the entire series. We love Majora’s Mask here at Game Informer though, having awarded the original a 9.75and the remake a 9.25, so it’s safe to call it a pleasant surprise.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

A Realm Reborn shouldn’t, by any logical measure of how the MMO space has operated over the past decade, exist. In a world where the crippling weight of MMO development cycles are enough to bankrupt studios and grind ambitions into paste, Square Enix somehow rebuilt one of the behemoths from the ground up and ended up with a good game. To top it all off, A Realm Reborn’s predecessor wasn’t just bad, it was one of the biggest MMO disasters to ever hit the open market. Unplayable for large swathes of the community at release, the original Final Fantasy XIV never got fixed over the two years it limped along prior to its shutdown in late 2012. Rebuilding the game ended up requiring more than just fixing problems, as Square Enix translated the entire game to a completely new engine. Despite the massive amount of money sunk into it, A Realm Reborn received a fairly warm reception, was credited with helping pull Square Enix out of a fiscal nosedivein early 2014, and recently surpassedfour million registered users.

Up Next: The not-so-pleasant surprises.