“We Want More” vs. “Enough Already!”, Volume I

In my last column, I discussed the Orwellian attitude of doublethink that has pervaded today’s gamer’s attitudes towards sequels – talking about how we can manage to complain about how there are too many sequels out there, yet buy them in droves at the same time.  Today, I’d like to put that schizophrenia into action, and hold my initial edition of We Want More vs. Enough Already! – a discussion of games that don’t have sequels but deserve them, and long-running series that need to be mercifully put to sleep.

 

 

We Want More Crimson Skies:  I’ve loved flight games ever since my halcyon days of youth, whether I was trying to land on the damned aircraft carrier in Top Gun for the NES or taking aim at the Luftwaffe in Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat.  However, I must admit that the last flight game I played before the original Xbox’s Crimson Skies was – you ready for this? – Air Force Delta for the Dreamcast.  Modern flight games just don’t do it for me – you can tell me all you want about your Ace Combats and your H.A.W.X.es, but I just can’t get behind any genre where a supposedly realistic fighter jet can carry 60 freaking missiles at once. 

Besides, the real fun of any good flight game is found in dogfights, and most flight games I’ve tried these days are all about “lock on missile, fire, score kill, rinse, repeat.”  The fact that Crimson Skies had one of the more intriguing settings I’ve encountered in recent memory – an alternate world of the 1930’s where prop planes and zeppelins became the dominant mode of transportation, that I would love to see explored further – is just icing on the cake.

Enough Already with the Final Fantasy:  Before I get hordes of angry Squareheads calling me biased and clamoring for my head on a pike, let me assure you that back in the late 90’s I was probably in the top 2 percent of FFanboys in the entire world.  I was borderline obsessed with Final Fantasy VII, and bought so much merchandise I probably put at least one Square staffer’s kid through college.  I paid through the nose for import copies of Brave Fencer Musashiden solely for the FFVIII demo, and the not-that-great 3D fighter Ehrgeiz just because it had FFVII characters as playable fighters.  I dressed up as Locke Cole for Halloween one year, going so far as to comb talcum powder in my hair so that it would turn gray, and I even spent an off-and-on three years in my late teens writing a fanfiction prequel to the original Final Fantasy, which I am in no way brave enough to link to here.

Seriously, though, enough is enough.  I stuck with the series up through Final Fantasy X, but when X-2 turned out to be “Let’s Play Dress-Up With Yuna and Friends!” and XI ended up as an MMO (which I have thus far avoided like the plague), I bailed and haven’t looked back.  Square can still go ahead and make RPGs (from what I heard about FFXII, they’re still pretty good at that) but at the very least, please change the name – I’m not the first to point out that a sequel to something called “Final” makes absolutely no sense, and I certainly won’t be the last.

We Want More Okami:  Cel shading, when done poorly, is an excuse to cover up the fact that you didn’t want to make any decent textures.  Cel shading, when done correctly – like in the Jet Set Radio series, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, and yes, Okami – is a stylish, artistic statement and is absolutely gorgeous.  Aside from the beautiful visuals, Okami was a great game in its own right with Zelda-like gameplay, amusing characters, and a fun story.  I’m sure there must be hundreds of legends they could base a new game off of, and I’d love to see what Okami’s cel-shaded feudal Japan would look like in current-gen technology.

Enough Already with The Legend of Zelda:  On the flip side, the Original and Best is now the Old and Busted.  After the all-time classic that was Ocarina of Time and the bold, charming experiment of Wind Waker, the Zelda series has hit a bit of a bump in the road as of late.  Twilight Princess stayed a little *too* true to the old formula, not to mention providing the world’s furries with enough yiffing material to last them the next five years; and Phantom Hourglass, while giving a stylistic nod to Wind Waker, got bogged down a little too much by the overly passive ship travel and going through the Temple of the Ocean King over and over and over again.  Personally, I’d like to see Miyamoto get out from the shadow of Nintendo’s sequel factory and make something really new, wouldn’t you?

We Want More Chromehounds:  In the boiling summer of 2006, when it was so hot some nights I had a fan blowing on my 360’s power brick, Chromehounds introduced me to the joys of clan-based online gaming.  Thanks to a stalwart group of fellow Something Awful forum goons, I always had plenty of people to play with in the ENORMOUS WAR, and despite the inexplicable scores of douchebags who ruined the multiplayer by doing everything they could to win at all costs and avoid actually playing the game as the developers intended (pilerushers, double-doubles, base dialers, etc.), it was still a ton of fun.

The nearly unlimited creativity you had when creating your Hounds, and the design challenges you had to overcome (BattleTech-style Hounds, with their exposed cockpits and symmetrical weapon layouts, were laughably ineffective) made Chromehounds an incredibly deep and enjoyable experience.   I’d love to get another crack at those Tarakian, Morskovian, and Sal Kari bastards with new parts to use, fewer bugs (who else got the -$999,999,999 bug?), and some better design protection against exploits.

Enough Already with the Armored Core:  However, for From Software to be able to make a new Chromehounds, they need to can it with the boost-happy, laser-laden, micro-tuning-obsessed Armored Core series.  The AC games never really appealed to me, with an unfavorable reputation of a game where you spent more time tweaking your mech than actually fighting with it, and now, 13 games in, the AC series is stagnating badly.  The Metacritic scores for the recent AC games show a long yellow streak of mediocrity, whereas Chromehounds was a game with noticable flaws, but great promise.

 

What say you, Bitmobbers?  Got any lonely, neglected IPs that are begging for a sequel, or want to complain about a series that’s way past its prime?  Comment away!

 

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