- One of the biggest criticisms aimed toward Batman: Arkham Origins and Batman: Arkham Knight is present in Batman: Arkham City where, despite Hugo Strange being marketed and presented as the main villain in the beginning of the game, you'll spent almost the rest of it curing the Joker from his disease to the point that the game needs to remind you who the real villain is from times to times. Making him the Big Bad of the first game was quite sensible because, well, who else would you pick? The second game was intended to be Mark Hamill's swansong for the character, which nobody would have wanted pushed to a side mission. By the third game, the promoted main villain Scarecrow (Considered one of the most memorable villains in the original game, and who had only made a full appearance there) is overshadowed by the Joker hallucination, who ends up being the final encounter while Scarecrow is defeated in a cutscene, and certain other villains who hadn't been utilized very much (such as Two-Face) are either not present or encountered only in side missions. Also, while Asylum PC port was quite good, City 's PC version came a month after the consoles ones and wasn't well optimized. Then, Origins was filled with bugs (both graphical and technicals). And then the Knight port happened.
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! has been criticized by some reviews and fans of having tedious backtracking and tiresome quest design. While some of these problems have existed since the first entry in the franchise, Borderlands 2 did mitigate some of the excessive backtracking and offered vastly improved gameplay and writing that helped distract from some of the sluggish pacing problems. However, as noted in this IGN review
, the Pre-Sequel did not correct the pacing problems despite being the 3rd main installment in the series, thus making it more difficult to ignore these issues.
- Mega Man 5 was the first game to not make any substantial change to the series formula (Mega Man 2 had items and eight bosses, Mega Man 3 had Rush and sliding, and Mega Man 4 had the charged buster shot and the Disc One Final Dungeon). The series became notorious for repetition not long after. It was also the first game to repeat the 'twist reveal' that the Big Bad was Dr. Wily all along and make it completely unsurprising; 4 had the element of Wily supposedly dying in the previous game while introducing a completely new antagonist in Dr. Cossack, making the twist somewhat surprising. For 5 to suggest that Proto Man had suddenly undergone a complete Face–Heel Turn for no real reason, most gamers could easily guess how it was going to turn out.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- It's said that Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, while worthy installments in their own right, started a number of annoying trends exacerbated in the later 3-D Sonic games, like Unexpected Gameplay Changes, Sonic (or sometimes his friends) using the Chaos Emeralds as an Eleventh Hour power up, and Eggman being upstaged by a Monster of the Week that goes out of his control. Later games started rectifying this by demoting the Emeralds back to bonus power-ups and re-estasblishing Eggman as the main villain like in the original games.
- One of the biggest criticisms labelled towards the series is the overabundance of characters with polarizing gameplay styles. This can be seen as far back as 1990's when a new character was introduced in every sequel.
- The bad ending of Game Gear version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 implies that Tails is murdered by Eggman. Which, combined with Sonic Spinball and Sonic SatAM, may have been a slow beginning to the Darker and Edgier route, the tone ending up becoming a big criticism by the time the 3D games reached Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic 2006.
- Some others thought Sonic 3D Blast foreshadowed the problems with the 3D games. Gameplay is slowed-down and running controls are loose and slippery, while the 'get to the end as quickly as possible' goal was replaced with 'find all of the birds and guide them to the exit'. This possibly led to experimental gameplay mechanics like Big the Cat's stages in the Adventure games that deviated too much from the Sonic formula.
- Some also believe that SEGA's very loose policy on canonicity of side materials (most notably the TV shows and the comics) created a Broken Base as early as 1992—one year after Sonic was introduced—as Sonic fans started siding with one particular interpretation while viciously attacking the other ones, not unlike today's Broken Base with Sonic (only with gameplay more than story). During the 90s, however, Sonic fans had a common enemy in Nintendo and Mario, so the cracks didn't become visible to most until 2001 with Sonic Adventure. At this time, SEGA exerted greater enforcement over canonicity rendering all other storylines non-canon, followed shortly by SEGA's financial collapse and subsequent alliance with Nintendo. With the barriers torn down and no uniting force, the bickering became the Sonic fandom's most infamous trait.
- The 3D games have scripted moments where Sonic goes through a spectacle of loops and corkscrews while the player holds "up" (or sometimes nothing at all), which can get complaints for not engaging the player from a gameplay standpoint during such moments. The 2D games had moments like this too, substituting "up" with "right" or "down".
- One of the most maligned elements of '06 was the character of Princess Elise, who many people remarked as looking incredibly out-of-place next to Sonic and pals, but realistic human characters had been around since Adventure 2 without too much complaining. Elise was just the first one to be a major character who regularly interacted with the cartoon animals, which threw the contrast in far sharper relief (and the romance just made it even more questionable).
- Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s was a poorly received Mission-Pack Sequel to the excellent Guitar Hero II, made by Harmonix under contract after Activision bought the series. Neversoft (under Activision) made Guitar Hero III and onward, with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Guitar Hero: On Tour — Decades, Guitar Hero: On Tour — Modern Hits and Band Hero, drowning the series in a flood of Mission Pack Sequels.
- For Rock Band, themselves Harmonix continued this trend on their own with Rock Band Track Packs (bare-bones game discs with songs taken from the game's vast DLC library, for players stuck on consoles with no DLC or who want to get the songs for slightly cheaper) and band-specific sequels with artists like The Beatles and Green Day.
- Mortal Kombat:
- The series only completely entered its Dork Age when it smashed into the Polygon Ceiling, but the third game shows at least some of the weaknesses of later installments: overreliance on dial-a-kombo,note unmemorable and often easy-to-hate new characters, the complete shattering of the Eastern-ish theme (which resulted in people realizing how ridiculous some of the characters looked), and the bosses suddenly getting cheaper. Yet there's still a lot of fans and defenders of this one because it was the conclusion of the "Outworld Trilogy" and the stakes and tone of the original game were still there.
- Mortal Kombat II introduced many fan-favorite characters, such as Kitana, Mileena, and Jax, but it also conspicuously took Kano and Sonya out for no real reason other than to have a Distressed Damsel and establish how badass Shao Khan is. The real fan favorites (Liu Kang, Sub Zero, Scorpion, Raiden, etc.) remained, however, so Kano and Sonya's losses were deemed acceptable. The third game, however, is when the absences started getting out of hand. Johnny Cage was killed off, Raiden said Screw This, I'm Outta Here!, and neither Kitana nor Mileena returned in the initial version. Even worse, Scorpion, the most popular character in the series, was left out as well. The team quickly rectified most of these mistakes with the updated rerelease, Ultimate MKIII, but within the casual market, the damage was done.
This problem continued on throughout the rest of the series, as many fan-favorite characters were arbitrarily included or dropped from each installment. Sometimes they're killed off, sometimes they switch sides, sometimes they turn into completely new characters. This has become so ingrained within the fanbase that a common question when a new game is announced is "Is [insert favorite character here] in it?".
- World of Warcraft:
- Creeping layers upon layers of retcons, the Horde/Alliance Conflict Ball, and the increasingly immersion-breaking self-aware humor. You could say that the worst excesses of Wrath of the Lich King existed in embryonic form in The Burning Crusade, and likewise, the worst excesses of Cataclysm can be found in a weaker form in Wrath of the Lich King. The Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome of Orcs is also thought to have originated in Cataclysm, and Mists of Pandaria. Most of this was present when WoW launched. The real Original Sin came in WarCraft III, where Blizzard first began to rely on massive retcons in lieu of moving the story forward in a logical fashion. At the time, the world was small enough that the retcons were a necessary evil in order to build up a setting that felt like a whole world (and could later support an MMO).
- Accusations of Horde bias on the developers part can (and by some forumers, have) be retraced way back to Warcraft 2, where the Horde was so powerful that the only reason the Alliance won was because the Horde suffered a civil war.
- Pokémon:
- Weather effects have been around since Gen II, but at the time of their introduction, Weather-based teams were not very popular because altering weather would only last five turns, and the effects were rarely worth the time spent setting up. Gen III introduced abilities, among which were several weather-related ones: Drought/Drizzle/Sand Stream, which caused weather effects that would last indefinitely until another move or ability was used to cancel them out; along with other abilities like Swift Swim that doubled certain stats in certain weather conditions. However, Drought/Drizzle were exclusive to two Legendary Pokémon that could not be used in most forms of competitive play, and Sand Stream was (at the time) weaker and harder to use than the other two, so this wasn't a huge issue. Gens IV and V, however, have since added even more weather-based abilities, moves and items, including giving Drought/Drizzle to non-banned Pokémon and introducing strong Sandstorm users such as Garchomp, Excadrill and Landorus. The result is the Gen V metagame is so dominated by weather teams a few of the larger Pokémon communities have had to place bans on certain Pokémon and combinations, and have even discussed banning weather (or at least weather-inducing abilities) outright. Game Freak nerfed weather abilities themselves in Generation VI, by limiting ability-caused weather to five turns, as a weather-altering move would do.
- "Mythical Pokémon", aka Event Legendaries (Pokémon only attainable through real life limited-time-only events) have been around since Gen I's Mew. Mew was added in at the last minute and wasn't meant to be obtainable, hence why not having it had no bearing on Pokédex completion. As of Gen VI, the number of Event Legandaries has increased to thirteen, and while they still don't affect Pokédex completion, it is still irritating to completionists due to how gratuitous their status is (these Pokémon have no valid reason to be restricted to nigh-unobtainable status nowadays as they're not last minute additions like Mew was) and how contradictory it is to the original slogan of the series (you can't "catch 'em all" if a fair number of them are all but locked off to you, can you?)note Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire seem to be taking steps to rectify this however as one of the Mythical Pokemon, Deoxys, is now available in the games, time will tell if this will last into future games.
- American Wasteland may have marked the exact moment when the Tony Hawk series' franchise zombification became irreversible, but as this episode
- Even in the very first game, the way combos are scored (powerful multipliers awarded for each little trick, losing everything for bailing) helped elevate rail-slides, which created tons of opportunities to perform little stunts, above everything else. The kicker, though, was the introduction of reverts in Pro Skater 3. Now you can do air on a quarter-pipe and link it into a manual, making the expected combos longer (and riskier, since bailing cancels out the whole thing) even for relatively casual players who didn't make as much use of the long grind and manual chains in the earlier games.
Increasingly, gameplay grew more dependent on over-the-top stunt chains than anything resembling real skateboarding, while the intricate level design of the first game, designed to get the player to hunt for the best line, was replaced with a greater focus on level exploration and creating monster combos anywhere. When Underground added the ability to walk around on foot and drive around in vehicles, it was acknowledging this growing shift in focus — and in doing so, it started the series' trend towards over-reliance on gimmicks like Project 8's "Nail the Trick" feature and Ride's use of an expensive skateboard peripheral. Every new feature made the games less focused on actual skateboarding — something that was made readily apparent when Skate came out without any of these gimmicks and proved that they were unnecessary. - Likewise, the juvenile humor and pop culture references that were criticized in later games have always been with the series. The games are rooted in skateboarding culture, which has always had a streak of countercultural irreverence, so it stood to reason that the series would reflect that. It was only around Pro Skater 4 and the Underground games that they really started to take over and, more importantly, degenerate into fratbro idiocy, with the final straw probably being the inclusion of the cast of Jackass in Underground 2.
- Even in the very first game, the way combos are scored (powerful multipliers awarded for each little trick, losing everything for bailing) helped elevate rail-slides, which created tons of opportunities to perform little stunts, above everything else. The kicker, though, was the introduction of reverts in Pro Skater 3. Now you can do air on a quarter-pipe and link it into a manual, making the expected combos longer (and riskier, since bailing cancels out the whole thing) even for relatively casual players who didn't make as much use of the long grind and manual chains in the earlier games.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 4 set the series on a far more action-packed course as opposed to the Survival Horror genre that it had pioneered. It had downed enemies dropping ammo and other loot for the first time, allowed players to use that loot to upgrade and purchase weapons, replaced the zombies with the comparatively human-like Ganados, introduced quick-time events, and featured scenes of Leon suplexing enemies and leaping through a laser grid in a manner that would make Keanu Reeves proud. While these changes were divisive even then, RE4 was still scary enough, and retained enough of past games' horror/exploration DNA, that longtime fans could ignore them and appreciate the much-needed improvements to gameplay that it made. It's not too controversial within the fandom to list RE4 as one's favorite RE game.
However, the next "main" installment, Resident Evil 5, took these changes even further and started bringing the series into Third-Person Shooter territory. It featured nearly non-stop action at the expense of scares, abundant ammunition supplies that made ammo conservation a much more minor concern (and thus reducing tension by making enemy encounters far easier to plow through), a removal of the exploration of past games in favor of a more linear progression, and over-the-top Action Hero protagonists — a shift that was met with a mixed reception - Another, and earlier, likely Original Sin may have been the film adaptation, which was, at the time, one of the most action-packed zombie movies ever made, and certainly more action-heavy than the games that preceded it. Its sequels only further amped up these elements, to the point where the RE movies came to be described strictly as action films with zombies in them. The success of the film series likely colored people's expectations of the games, leading to later installments of the latter, starting with RE4, incorporating more of the former's stylistic elements.
- Resident Evil 4 set the series on a far more action-packed course as opposed to the Survival Horror genre that it had pioneered. It had downed enemies dropping ammo and other loot for the first time, allowed players to use that loot to upgrade and purchase weapons, replaced the zombies with the comparatively human-like Ganados, introduced quick-time events, and featured scenes of Leon suplexing enemies and leaping through a laser grid in a manner that would make Keanu Reeves proud. While these changes were divisive even then, RE4 was still scary enough, and retained enough of past games' horror/exploration DNA, that longtime fans could ignore them and appreciate the much-needed improvements to gameplay that it made. It's not too controversial within the fandom to list RE4 as one's favorite RE game.
- The problem with the Tales Series and DLC all started with the PS3 release of Tales of Vesperia, which had costumes that could only be obtained by preorders, and then more that can only be obtained by paying with real money. While this upset some fans, the game overall was still very meaty and had easily the most in game costume in the series before... or since. The very next game had no more than two in game costumes per character (to compare, everyone on the Playstation 3 version of Vesperia had at least five, with Yuri and Karol having well over that), with the rest only available through DLC. The game after that had... four, not even one for each character, and two of them were for the female lead.
- Metroid:
- After eight years in rest since Super Metroid, the series was revived with two well-received games, one of them being Metroid: Fusion. Despite the positive reception, a point of criticism from fans was its stronger focus on a story, it was even the first time Samus interacted with another character. This was seen as a turning point for the entire series to shift towards more plot-driven games, like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Other M brought the debate on whether or not this is a good idea to a flame-war-stricken head, particularly due to how it characterizes Samus Aran.
- Samus has also become more and more gratuitously sexualized as the series has gone on. The series has always rewarded good gameplay with an image of Samus out of her armor and in skimpy clothing, but in the earlier games it was much more about the Tomato Surprise than Fanservice and most players wouldn't even see it because it required a very good performance. Metroid: Zero Mission introduced a skintight undersuit for her, which just barely skated by with the fanbase (because the entire point was that her armor was forcibly stolen, and she was more vulnerable as a result). Ever since then, suitless Samus has become just a thing that happens for fanservice, at times in contexts some fans consider inappropriate and/or degrading. The prominence of Zero Suit Samus in Super Smash Bros. did not help things either.
- Medal of Honor, as discussed in this article
- Mario Kart:
- The Spiny Blue Shell that debuted in Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart: Super Circuit was a quite honest and balanced weapon in those two games, since it worked like a blue shell that hit every other racer in front of the one who threw it; however, in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, the item was given an overhaul, where it was given wings, thus only hitting whoever is leading the race, and the possibility to explode, which means a damage that takes longer to recover. While normal damage (i.e. being hit by a normal shell) only takes two seconds or so to recover, an explosion flat-out stops the kart, and it takes roughly five to ten seconds to gain speed once again. Exploding on contact, alongside it only hitting the leader (although the explosion can hit nearby racers), means the only kart getting any benefits whatsoever is the one in second place, which often happens — unsurprisingly — to surpass the one at the head of the race. This 'feature', already problematic when playing MK:DD!! in single player, was even more frustrating in Mario Kart DS, and outright plagued single player races in Mario Kart Wii, where getting hit by a Spiny Blue Shell inches before the race ended was so common, that unlocking characters and/or karts requiring Golden Cups at 150cc difficulty was nearly impossible. Thankfully Mario Kart 7, while still having the Blue Shell explode upon hitting the first-place driver, also stripped it of its wings, thus reverting it to its pre-Double Dash! form: now the shell hits everyone else in the processnote .
- Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, aside from changing how the Spiny Shell worked, introduced a new gimmick that forced players to use 2 characters at once (one for driving and one for using items). This wasn't bad in single player since you did everything at once, but if you had to play with a friend, you really needed to communicate and have good timing in order to race properly. The introduction of 2 players per kart also meant the amount of items in play was doubled, leading to item spam in the whole race and increasing the chances of getting an item that screws everyone else over. Mario Kart Wii amplified the problem with items by introducing more items that can either screw everyone over or screw one person over if he/she can't shake the item off. On top of this, the game had 12 players in a race instead of the standard 8, which meant more items popping up and causing chaos. The game also introduced bikes, which became everyone's favorite thing to use because abusing the wheelie mechanic made bikes go faster than karts, regardless of stats. It wasn't until Mario Kart 7 that Nintendo balanced things again and got rid of mechanics that did not work.
- The coins mechanic was heavily disliked by players for nearly every game it appeared in. Super Mario Kart used coins as a way to boost speed and you'd lose coins for being hit or going off course and being bumped would also make you lose coins. Mario Kart Super Circuit brought the coins back and they doubled as a requirement to be met if you wanted to get the best rank. Mario Kart 7 had the coins return once more, though they would only give you a slight speed boost and you wouldn't spin out from a bump if you had no coins. However, coins were needed to unlock parts for your karts and it got really ridiculous with some parts requiring thousands or even beyond ten thousand coins to unlock. Mario Kart 8 not only retained the coin system and unlocks that the previous game used, but now coins can be an item you can pick up, which means your measly 2 coin bonus will not protect you from the red shell the person behind you will use.
- Decomposite Characters taking character slots. The Double Dash!! roster included baby versions of Mario and Luigi. Although fans were not fond of them, they mostly didn't mind as Yoshi's Island was enough of a cult game to make their inclusion justified. Wii introduced Baby Peach, Baby Daisy and Dry Bowser (Bowser Stripped to the Bone in New Super Mario Bros.). Mario Kart 7 created Metal Mario out of a power up from Super Mario 64. Mario Kart 8 has the four previous babies, Baby Rosalina, Metal Mario and Pink Gold Peach in the basic version and Tanooki Mario, Cat Peach (power up from Super Mario 3D World) and Dry Bowser as Downloadable Content for a total of 10 alternate versions of other characters, more than a quarter of the roster. All of them are Base Breakers at best or Scrappies at worst. The removal of original characters like King Boo or Birdo doesn’t help.
- Elements not from Mario games. DS had R.O.B as an unlockable character. Wii and 7 allowed you to play with your Miis. Later installments introduced as DLCs Link, Villager and Isabelle as playable characters along with tracks based on Zelda, Animal Crossing, F-Zero and Excitebike. Mario Kart 8 is one of the better received installments but there’s criticism about the game feeling more like Nintendo Kart than Mario Kart.
- BioWare:
- Romance plots originally were rather subdued, some romantic requirements having different requirements to set off a relationship (especially in Baldur's Gate where playing nice is a good way to have your advances rejected by your prospective love interests). By Dragon Age II certain party members had little or no role in the story beyond their romance, which caused the game to suffer.
- The focus on epic storylines, intricate plotting, and massive worldbuilding started hitting a brick wall as early as Jade Empire, where there were far too many characters and background for such a short game. Spread out over three games in Mass Effect, the plotlines became increasingly complex, but the realties (read: limitations) of CRPG technology led to having to railroad a Gainax Ending to the series. It's also biting them hard with Star Wars: The Old Republic, where their ambitious writing (8 character classes, each with their own story arc) and production values (top-tier voice talent) has led to a very satisfying process of leveling from 1-50, but budget cutbacks from Electronic Arts means they've abandoned the individual class stories, leaving a generic, repetitive grind (the story arc only differs by faction) for anything past the initial story arc.
- As pointed out
- They also point out that this applies to Dragon Age, as well, only to a much sharper degree; every base breaking aspect of the second game was present in Origins. There was pointless DLC, divisive or unlikeable characters, and the first expansion pack Awakening was visibly rushed and had loads of gamebreaking bugs. Thing is, there it was all kept in check and plenty of work was put into Origins to ensure it came out good. Dragon Age II was every problem with Origins made blatant due to EA forcing Bioware to bum rush the game out. As good as Bioware is, a game of the same quality level of Dragon Age: Origins being completed in less than a year just wasn't going to happen.
- Quick-Time Events, one of the biggest Scrappy Mechanics in modern video games, can be traced all the way back to the beloved Dragon's Lair, whose gameplay was nothing but quick-time events, and can be seen in its more modern form in other well-liked games like Die Hard Arcade and Shenmue before Resident Evil 4 popularized the concept.
- Grand Theft Auto III was hardly the first violent, M-rated video game to raise eyebrows; Doom, Mortal Kombat, and Duke Nukem have it beat on that front by several years. However, it was the first such game to become a mainstream pop culture sensation on the level of Pokémon or Super Mario Bros. It was both acclaimed by critics and railed against by Moral Guardians for the then-unprecedented freedom it offered to gamers, which included all manner of violence and debauchery. Ignoring the many direct ripoffs that came out in the early-mid '00s, the success of GTA III has been pointed to as a Medium Original Sin, responsible for the proliferation of Rated M for Money attitudes among both developers and gamers who demanded more 'mature' (i.e. "rated M for Mature") content in games.
- David Cage has always had great moments in his games, but even back in Fahrenheit, there was a note that the overriding plotline was just weird, and didn't fit with the previous scenes. At the time, this could be forgiven due to Executive Meddling forcing the developers to rush the game out the door before they came up with a proper ending, leading to the Gainax Ending that it ultimately had. However, Heavy Rain had the strange foreshadowing with no payoff, and in Beyond: Two Souls, the plot is in a chopped-up order and doesn't fit together at all. While Beyond still has quite a few fans, if the trend continues, the Original Sin will be revealed. Cage plots by imagining cool, individual scenes, but doesn't seem to know how to put them together in a sensible fashion.
- The first game in the New Super Mario Bros. series re-using most of the Video Game Settings from Super Mario Bros. 3note was generally not seen as a big flaw. However, all of the settings from NSMB were later re-used in three more games (maybe even four) with little variance, and as a result the lack of originality is one of the biggest criticisms for the entire sub-series.
- Square Enix's updated rereleases and ports of some of their older games once got a great deal of excitement from many RPG fans, especially those in the US and Europe. It gave many people the chance to play some of Square's classic catalog but with far less of the No Export for You, "Blind Idiot" Translation, and financial difficulties of hunting down certain SNES cartridges that RPG fans dealt with before the very end of The '90s. In some cases, Square even remade entire games for the purposes of rereleasing them. However, during the later half of the 2000s, many of these same consumers started complaining about this practice. It became viewed as oversaturation, partially due to the huge numbers of systems that these games were playable on. Between 2005 and 2011, Square Enix rereleased Final Fantasy IV alone 4 times, for example. The Troubled Production of both Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII and the lack of a game to really fill that gap did not help either.
- Final Fantasy didn't suddenly shift towards Bishōnen, Kudzu Plots, and Hallways—they were there from the very beginning.
- The characters were hard to make out due to the limitations of 8 and 16-bit graphics, but judging by concept art, many characters were intended to be ridiculously pimped-out and beautiful anyway. In fact, the simplicity of his (early) art style is exactly what led to Square giving Tetsuya Nomura character design duties for Final Fantasy VII (also, let's point out that that game's hero, Cloud Strife, was at least beautiful enough to pass for a woman). However, once technology was able to allow artists the freedom to go nuts and show off the graphical power of the game engines, they leapt at the chance. While American games were moving more towards brownish realism and military authenticity, Japanese designers decided to go whole hog with the artistry.
- The first Final Fantasy had a time-travel plot that makes no sense. By the fourth game, we were ripping off Star Wars, flying to the moon on a whale, fighting inside giant mechs, and defeating the Big Bad with the Power of Friendship. While it's true that the games became extremely long-winded and cheesy with the introduction of voice-acting and motion capture, characters were silly and expressive for a long time before that. What changed, however, is that real dialogue meant that we couldn't just mash A to speed past the bazillionth conversation and the motion-acting made it more and more obvious that the characters were conceived for Japanese audiences.
- And finally, exploration was largely an illusion even in the franchise's "heyday". Even if the game gave players two or three different directions to go, most of those directions are blocked off or don't provide them with much to do until more of the game is unlocked. Starting with Final Fantasy X, however, this illusion was completely shattered because by this point, the player wasn't even allowed to wander around pointless empty space anymore to provide the illusion of freedom. Further, around this time, open-world sandbox games had really become the norm, which meant that linear paths were much less tolerable. By Final Fantasy XIII, Square had decided to double down on their stance of "story over exploration" by flat out stating that they didn't want freedom to distract players from their awesome story. By XIII-2, Lighning Returns and FFXV, however, they abandoned that approach due to negative player feedback and featured some type of open environment for each of those games.
- As detailed in this video
- Final Fantasy VII was well-praised at the time and still often today for its dramatic and over-the-top Dysfunction Junction cast, with the main characters more complex and developed than anything Final Fantasy had managed before. The protagonist Cloud was an especially successful innovation, his arc about his cool demeanour being a fabrication of the secretly weak person he is underneath striking a chord with a mostly teenage playerbase. While in Final Fantasy VII these elements coexist with a great plot and setting and a playful, ironic, deconstructive tone that keeps it from descending into Wangst, other Final Fantasy games would go on to focus on psychological crises and Emo Teens without the lightness of touch, wit or horror of VII. The immediate sequel, Final Fantasy VIII, is often criticised for its irritating and flat cast; the developers had been trying to create a cast more realistic than the VII cast, but ended up with a cast that was more vaguely drawn and defined by superficial quirks rather than personality. As for Cloud, his success caused the entire JRPG genre to spend the next five years furiously trying to Follow the Leader with surly BFS-swinging teenagers with murky origins and ridiculous hair to the point where it's now the stereotype of the genre and has retroactively tarnished Final Fantasy VII's reputation.
- Final Fantasy VIII came up with the innovation of giving the hero a cool piece of jewellery (that could be made for real and sold to fans). Squall's "Griever" lion charm fit the character and setting (modern high school drama) well and it was incorporated into the plot reasonably well, with Rinoa wearing the Griever ring once she becomes involved with Squall and Ultimecia using it as a weapon in the final battle. Later attempts at doing this would be a lot more forced, often including characters who wouldn't have any reason for wearing flashy custom jewellery, or didn't live in settings where modern-style jewellery was a thing. In at least one case (Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children) it involves a character decking themselves out in an emblem representing the animus of their depression.
- For a third Final Fantasy issue, the numerous spinoffs and sequels have eclipsed the main series. During the glory years, there were still plenty of spinoffs and Dolled-Up Installments, but they were consistently high-quality games that brought honor to their franchise. Final Fantasy X-2, Ivalice Alliance and the early installments of the Final Fantasy VII Compilation were both relatively well-received as well, despite the complaints they've engendered. However, Square's milking of the Cash Cow Franchise has started to leave its mark, ranging from the pricing model of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, to the planning of Fabula Nova Crystalis as a series from the get-go, to mobile games built on a microtransaction model (a business model certain to drive more traditional players into a frothing rage). Meanwhile, the wait between main-series games keeps getting longer and longer, which has also helped to bleed fans away from the franchise.
- Nintendo's censorship policies have existed since the beginning of their console career. It was justified during the 1980s due to the fact that many infamous games that helped crash the industry were glorified porn (such as Custer's Revenge and Beat Em and Eat Em). Nintendo's family-friendly approach (to the point of calling their first console a Family Computer (Famicom)) arguably saved gaming. However, their continued adherence to censorship guidelines during the releases subsequent consoles has followed them in two ways. In the first case, it was what led to Nintendo having the negative reputation of being "kiddie games". The censorship of the original Mortal Kombat was especially infamous, since the Sega Genesis version was released with the gore intact (albeit hidden behind a cheat code), and was much better received by fans despite being technically inferior to the Super NES version. On the other end, Nintendo's censorship practices also showed the early signs of their strenuous relationship with third-party developers. By the time the fifth generation of gaming came, Nintendo's censorship combined with their refusal to adopt CD technology caused developers like Square to get fed up with their practices and jump ship to Sony. Nintendo's lack of strong third-party support has been a reoccurring flaw in all of their consoles since.
- While Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories was fairly well-received and popular enough to get an Updated Re-release, it embodied a number of controversial trends that helped give the series a more Unpleasable Fanbase:
- The decision to make a direct sequel to the first Kingdom Hearts game on the Game Boy Advance, rather than on the PlayStation 2, helped build a great deal of hype for the game. However, it also created a good deal of Continuity Lockout when Kingdom Hearts II was released and many people got back into the games and were immediately faced with characters and plot points they had never seen before, and led the charge for many plot-relevant games in the series to be spread across all available portable systems. Following the story became a much more challenging and expensive prospect when it required one to have a Playstation 2, a Nintendo DS, a PSP, and a Nintendo 3DS to fully understand what was going on. This was, thankfully, addressed somewhat by the 1.5 and 2.5 Remix compilations for the PS3: all the Kingdom Hearts games up to Birth By Sleep on one console... either as a full game or just as a 'movie' of the game's cutscenes so you can at least get the story. Then it was spoiled again when the 2.8 compilation and Kingdom Hearts III, both of which conclude the overall Story Arc, were put on the PS4...which is not backward-compatible with the PS3, meaning you'll still need at least two consoles if you want the whole story.
- On a plot level, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories was the debut of a slide into a Darker and Edgier plot tone and the newer antagonists, Organization XIII and the Nobodies. By the time Kingdom Hearts II was released, the Kudzu Plot and influx of original characters became highly controversial among the players and reviewers.
- This game also completely recycled all its Disney worlds and characters from the original game, with nothing new. As the game's premise was based around Sora's memories and the worlds/characters visited being figments of his memories, this made sense and was accepted. But after this, subsequent games kept on recycling worlds, characters, and scenarios to some degree or another, and it has worn thin for many players who wish Square would take advantage of other Disney movies that they haven't yet already.
- One of the biggest criticisms of Duke Nukem Forever was the character of Duke himself, who many reviewers described as a repulsively unlikeable person. Back in the days of Duke Nukem 3D, though, Duke had still been a pretty unlikeable person, but he was lauded for the fact that he had a personality at all, compared to non-characters like the Doom Marine or BJ. In the following fifteen years, however, many shooter games had been released featuring extremely fleshed-out and likeable protagonists, and Duke hadn't evolved at all — if anything, he'd become more unlikeable. Other criticized elements of DNF's humor also hail from 3D: the Take Thats to other franchises, and the pop culture references. The Take Thats worked back then because 3D was a genuinely innovative game that improved on Doom's formula, so a bit of gloating didn't feel undeserved. DNF, however, tried to deliver Take Thats to games that it was outright copying, while bringing very little to the table gameplay-wise. In terms of pop culture, 3D's jokes were either very topical or referencing sources obscure enough that people thought they were original jokes. On the other hand, DNF's infamously long development cycle meant that many of its jokes or references had already become Discredited Memes (most infamously a lengthy Leeroy Jenkins joke, made in 2011).
- X-Universe series of games had fundamentally flawed gameplay design - in the developer's own opinion - due to the Singularity Engine Time Accelerator, a device which makes the game run faster to make the long travel times bearable. It wasn't too bad with the simplistic gameplay of X: Beyond the Frontier, but as the games went on, it became more and more obvious to Egosoft that they had built up the entire game around the abuse of SETA. If they were to speed up the slow item production rate at factoriesnote , the economy would implode when the player traveled across a sector with SETA. If they were to make ships faster to reduce travel time, the AI would break (well, break harder than normal), battles would turn into jousting matches and the economy would implode from traders instantly grabbing every deal. They attempted to rectify the flaw in X Rebirth by introducing a completely different travel system and were somewhat successful, though the nigh-unplayable state of affairs at release brought up a whole slew of new issues.
- Silent Hill 2, while still remembered as quite possibly the best game in the Silent Hill series, held the origin of two trends that plagued the series in the long term.
- The first was with its monsters. SH2 was acclaimed for its creative enemy design, the two monsters most heavily identified with the game being the chilling figure known as Pyramid Head, an Implacable Man wearing a pyramid-shaped helmet, and the sexy, faceless nurses in the hospital. They weren't the main villains, but they were both incredibly popular, and became unofficial mascots of the series. However, they served a very specific purpose in that game, acting as metaphorical representations of the protagonist James Sunderland's guilt and sexual anxiety. This didn't stop the nurses from reappearing in later games (and in the film adaptations), growing increasingly sexualized in the process, nor did it stop several attempts to try and copy Pyramid Head, be it with similar "icon" monsters (like the Butcher in Origins and the Bogeyman in Downpour) who felt shoehorned in more often than not, or by simply bringing him back straight-up (as in Homecoming, the films, and some of the comics). However, the symbolism of what they represented no longer applied in these new stories. While SH2 remembered to give its creepy, cool monsters a purpose beyond just the Rule of Scary, later games took only those monsters' most superficial elements in the name of fanservice.
- Secondly, SH2 laid the groundwork for the series' Broken Base. Whereas the first game was about a battle with a cult known as the Order that's trying to bring about the birth of their god, the second game's story, about a man who had lost his wife only to receive a mysterious letter from her, was much smaller and more personal in scope. Outside the setting, the style, and a few Continuity Nods, it had little in common with the original game, and fans were divided between the original and the sequel almost from the get-go. The divide grew wider with later games alternating between continuing the story of the Order and telling stories separate from it. Today, there are essentially two Silent Hill fandoms, one which prefers the Myth Arc about the Order and the other preferring the standalone stories.
- Fire Emblem:
- As the series that overhauled Genealogy's "Love and War" system into the modern Support mechanic, fans often consider the GBA titles the gold standard when it comes to Support writing quality, character development, and proper romantic escalation when appropriate. Well, Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be. While it's true that, overall, having to write so many Supports has led to a bit of a quality-control problem for latter titles, just as many Elibe supports contained exactly the same problems: one-note characters that don't really develop, badly-written romances, or entire conversation trees that amounted to little more than broad comedy fluff. But, since any given character could only have five conversations total per playthrough, because characters in general had much smaller support pools, and, again, because of blatant Nostalgia Filter, these flaws weren't quite as obvious to their detractors as they would later become. And since children weren't part of the equation, due to losing that aspect of the "Love and War" system, every male character didn't need a romantic relationship to be possible with every female character.
- Genealogy itself counts as this. Among fans of the retro era of the franchise, Genealogy is often cited as one of the best games the entire series has to offer. However, it introduced countless mechanics that are the bane of classic fans' existence these days, namely the aforementioned "(almost) everyone can pair with (almost) everyone of the opposite gender" mechanic and the presence of a second generation of playable units, ensuring the statistically best combinations of which being a difficult balancing act in and of itself. However, their presence was entirely justified, since the first half of the game ends in fire, and the second generation picks up many years later with the now-young-adults as the new protagonists. While Awakening caught a bit of flak for the dubious quality of writing and the children, with the right parental combinations, being Game Breakers with little impact on the actual plot, the child characters were altogether still a collective Ensemble Darkhorse for their generally-agreed-as-top-notch characterization and aforementioned Game Breaker status. Fates, however, ramped all of the problems with the second generation of before and topped it off with a less-accepted excuse for why they even exist, on top of much less of the child units being well-received. And since they were conceived during the course of the game, Fridge Horror is born of leaving them alone in a Year Outside, Hour Inside dimension until whatever age they were designed to be, and the fact that several of the parent units are very young.
- The seventh installment gave players an ultimately plot-irrelevant Hello, Insert Name Here tactician who would on increasingly-rare occasions be addressed by other characters and could potentially give an affinity bonus. Expanding upon this five games later, New Mystery of the Emblem introduced a Self Insert mechanic called My Unit, putting a playable unit of the player's choice in class and gender in the game's roster. While they had a major role in the newly-added prologue and sidequest chapters, the main plot was largely unchanged beyond a few minor moments of other characters' being given to the My Unit. In Awakening, however, My Unit made a return, being vital to the plot and a Spotlight-Stealing Squad to the supposed protagonist, Chrom. Since this was met with Broken Base, the choice was to make the My Unit character the protagonist outright, like many other traditional [RPGs], come Fates.
- MechWarrior's signature MechLab - a form of Design-It-Yourself Equipment for your Humongous Mecha - was never very well balanced to begin with, but as the series went on and more mechanics were added and the games were tweaked, it became more and more broken resulting in massive Gameplay Derailment. Its first incarnation in Mechwarrior 2 was barebones and the game's many coding oddities resulted in it being balanced if only because of the byzantine design. Mech 3 is where it started to go crazy, with heavy Complacent Gaming Syndrome of identical loadouts on identical mechs. Mech 4 attempted to fix it but introduced a slew of unforeseen gameplay consequences. In Online, the game has multiple painfully Obvious Rule Patch mechanics to limit the MechLab's silliness and still fails spectacularly, resulting in players with One-Hit Kill-capable or infinite screen shake autocannon spam mechs. Living Legends avoided implementing the MechLab until the game was feature complete and balanced ("version 1.0"), specifically because the lab fundamentally broke the competitive multiplayer of every previous game, though it was never implemented due to the game being Screwed by the Lawyers in version 0.7.
- The fourth Super Smash Bros. game brought some problems to a head:
- One of the biggest complaints was its overuse of clone characters. This is something not unique to that installment — the first game already had a clone in the form of Luigi, and the much-loved Melee had over a quarter of its roster devoted to clones. The problem was that Brawl had done quite a bit to avert this, by cutting out some of the most obvious clones and Decomposite Characters (Roy, Young Link, Pichu, Dr. Mario), diversifying the rest, and making sure that its own "clone" additions (Lucas, Wolf) were pretty unique. 4, meanwhile, went back to the well of Decomposite Characters (including adding Dr. Mario back in), and made its clone additions essentially identical (Lucina is just Marth without tipping, Dark Pit is just Pit with different knockback on two moves and Zelda's Final Smash). Compounding the problem further was that 4 introduced alternate costumes to add more characters to the roster, which just made its clones feel even more arbitrary and unnecessary — why lump the Koopalings into a single character, then declare Lucina or Dark Pit to be too distinct to not get their own slots?
- Far less extensive but still notable enough to deserve a mention, Counter. It has been a staple of nearly every Fire Emblem character's moveset since Melee as a nod to their series' battle flow, with Peach having a variation in the form of Toad. However, whereas only five fighters total—and no more than four per game—in a cast of 25+ had access to moves of that nature between Melee and Brawl (Marth, Roy, Peach, Ike, Lucario), the amount suddenly doubled in SSB4 (Lucina, Little Mac, Palutena, Greninja, Shulk, Mii Swordfighter, Corrin, and Bayonetta), greatly reducing its novelty, frustrating players who had to endure fights that devolved into Counterfests, and simultaneously bypassing potentially more inventive attacks that could've been used in their place. Some characters have justifiable reasons for having a counter,note but there's been lengthy debates about who actually deserves to keep the move and sarcastic remarks that everyone might as well have a Counter in the next game.
- Chris Avellone is well-known for consistently deconstructing whatever genre, medium, or world he's working with, often through the use of mouthpiece characters. In the case of Planescape: Torment, this led to a massively-acclaimed examination of Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, Order Versus Chaos, and other core tropes of D&D. Knights of the Old Republic II was also well-liked, but his Author Avatar Kreia is a major Base Breaker because she provides him an opportunity to rant on everything he hates about Star Wars, and a lot of players considered Kreia to be almost as annoying as the buggy state of the game. However, things finally collapsed in the DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, when his Author Avatar, Ulysses, became a Creator's Pet of unimaginable proportions; not only is he a mouthpiece for Author Filibuster, everyone else who talks about him is constantly shilling him as an epic badass, the DLC about him is portrayed as a fated confrontation, and it's spent fighting through an army of tough monsters while listening to him rant about how he hates the setting and wants to nuke everything again (because Avellone dislikes how Fallout has rebuilt itself from the post-apocalyptic setting of the first game).
- Metal Gear has always had problems with its female characters, like holding onto The Smurfette Principle with an iron grip, many of them being Ms. Fanservice, Male Gaze out the wazoo, repeatedly sidelining them, and often killing them off to give a male character angst, but the earlier games always gave them interesting characterisation and at least some vital importance to the plot to make them decent characters in their own right. But with Guns of the Patriots all recurring female characters lose all the importance they previously had and the female villains exist as nothing but eye-candy, a boss fight in Peace Walker starts with numerous lingering chest and butt shots of a woman in her underwear, and the same character is killed off in the most gratuitously sexual manner possible in Ground Zeros. This eventually leads to The Phantom Pain, where the only prominent female character never speaks, has no plot importance, spends her entire screentime in a bikini top and ripped tights, and has multiple completely out of nowhere scenes that serve as nothing but excuses for her to make sensual poses in front of the camera.
- Call of Duty:
- Call of Duty: Ghosts is the game in the franchise that started the trend of nerfing kill/score/pointstreaks for future games even though the developers of those games intended these streaks to be weakened so that there would be less offensive streak-spamming and spawn-killing by offensive streaks. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making high offensive-streaks almost useless to go after. In Ghosts' case, most players just ran either the Support or Specialists Strike Packages instead of the Assault Strike Package due to many items in the Assault Package being too weak to run with (this also contributed to Ghosts' criticism for encouraging camping-style play in multiplayer).
- Call Of Duty 4 Modern Warfare's Signature Scene was, by the opinions of just about every player and gaming outlet, the nuke. It was about as big of a Downer Ending as could possibly happen for the American side of the campaign; shocking, visceral, and utterly tragic. It's very likely responsible for lifting the series from merely a well-rated set of games to a Cash Cow Franchise. Later games, however, would try to top the nuke scene over and over, with Shocking Swerve after Shocking Swerve, moments that existed seemingly solely for shock value ("No Russian"), and a few sequences that just plain repeated the nuke sequence verbatim. By Modern Warfare 3, the audience had come to expect these events, and they'd stopped being shocking and started feeling manufactured and trite.
- Assassin's Creed has recently gotten a lot of complaints about the fact that the core gameplay of social stealth and combat has barely changed since the first game with later games merely adding a bunch of features
- Assassin's Creed III is cited as the point where this became a problem, as many felt that the game's main missions was basically scripted events, even the Assassination missions which should be stealthy and open-ended. It was also seen as being overstuffed with side activities and additional features. However, this was an ongoing trend since the well-liked Assassin's Creed II and its follow-ups Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations, had moved away from the stealthy original and was filled with additional features and content. What made them acceptable was that the games were Mission-Pack Sequel and as such the additional features were condoned, and seen as part of the appeal of the touristy cities with exotic architecture. The fact that the New World setting of ACIII lacked the tall buildings and fancy architecture only brought these problems forward.
- III was criticized for its Gump Factor with the hero interacting on first name basis with all of America's founding fathers and participating in several key events of the American Revolution which to many beggared disbelief. Yet this was always part of the Franchise's appeal: Altair in ACI conversed on even terms with the very Christian King Richard the Lionheart and later fought Genghis Khan, Ezio counted Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli among his best friends, and interacted with a "who's who" of the Renaissance, Black Flag also had the hero interact with every famous English pirate of that time. In the case of III the American Founding Fathers and the events of the Revolution were perhaps too prominent, known to every schoolboy, with the setting seen by foreign gamers as Eagleland. The other historical figures and settings, while somewhat well known aren't held in nearly the same reverence nor are their memories part of current political discourse.
- Assassin's Creed: Unity is an inversion, an example of a Franchise, as a result of the divisive reaction to III, returning to the Franchise's roots — greater focus on stealth, less focus on side activities, more assassination missions, toning down The Gump — and getting thoroughly trashed for essentially repeating its original sins. Assassin's Creed I was criticized in its time for repetitive side activities, lack of additional interaction with the open world and endless collectibles. Unity returned with repititive Side Story quests, endless collectibles that dotted out the map to the extent that people became nostalgic for the much reviled flags of I. Where III was criticized for Connor being too central to the Revolution, Unity was criticized for the hero being too marginal to the events, with the game being highly criticized for its shallow representation of history. The game which followed, Syndicate received praise for making more diverse side missions, a fairer look at the historical events and having additional features missing in Unity.
- Halo
- The Halo series has been criticized for its games being too dependent on backstory from the Expanded Universe, meaning Halo 5: Guardians doesn't make much sense without having read Halo: Escalation, Spartan Ops, Halo: Nightfall, Halo: New Blood... etc. This reliance on the expanded universe for backstory goes back to the franchise's first two entries: Halo: Combat Evolved and its tie-in novel Halo: The Fall of Reach. Without The Fall of Reach, the player had no clue about where Master Chief came from, why the Covenant were attacking, where Cortana came from, what the Pillar of Autumn ship was evacuating from, and so on. But the difference was that Combat Evolved's plot was self-contained to the events on the titular Halo ring, so all the missing backstory didn't matter to the events in-game. This pattern of keeping the games' and books' plots separate was largely the same until 343 Industries took over the series, making the EU more prominent but with mixed results on its games.
- Additionally, the complaints about Halo devolving into a Call of Duty rip-off after 343 took over. Many complained about the focus on gimmicks such as Armor/Spartan Abilities, the addition of sprinting, the removal of Elites as a playable model, increasing the pace of the game, blatantly mimicking Call of Duty's class system, and finally, the addition of ADS (Aiming Down Sights) which sparked the most controversy. Many of these things, beside the ADS, were present in Halo: Reach, the last Halo game Bungie created. Reach added Armor Abilities; including the ability to sprint, reduced playing as Elites to exclusive modes, and added loadouts for each match for differentiation. Sprint was even considered for
- The Soul series had been fairly consistent with the roster until Soulcalibur V, which was the first game created by Daishi Odasima. Many complained about V jumping forward 17 years while removing fan-favorites such as Sophitia, Taki, and Xianghua, while replacing them with considerably less-liked successors. However, a smaller-scale variation of this happened in the earlier games. Specifically Hwang and Li-Long, who appeared in the original Soul Edge (Soul Blade in America), were removed from subsequent games and replaced by Yun-seong and Maxi respectively. This caused considerable outcry back then, but had since subsided over time. Additionally, Cassandra was meant to replace Sophitia in II, as she was the only one in the original arcade release. However, due to popular fan demand, Sophitia was brought back. Now that Daishi has left the team and has been replaced by Masaki Hoshino, who appears to have different views over the series, only time will tell if this remains.
- One of the biggest complaints about the Tekken roster is that the roster has become increasingly unbelievable as the years went on, focusing less on actual martial artists and more on made up styles that look cool with blatant anime-influences. It reached a sort of critical mass in Tekken 7, with Lucky Chloe, an extremely kawaii pop-idol with Gratuitous English who fights by dancing was made into an official character leading to unbridled rage in the west. While Harada said that he would replace her with a muscular skinhead in the US, it was confirmed he was only trolling. Western gamers shared a Collective Groan over having to deal with her. That's not with mentioning other unrealistic characters, such as Kazumi, Claudio, Gigas, and Akuma. However, as it turns out, this type of unbelievability was there from the beginning. The original Tekken featured Yoshimitsu, a cyborg ninja that seemed completely out of place amongst a roster of mostly martial arts-based fighters. There was also Kuma, a bear as a playable character, which was also out of place. The sequel even adding a Boxing Kangaroo and a freaking utahraptor. The primary difference here is the fact that these characters were few and far-between, instead of being shoved in as the stars of the game and taking up a sizable portion of the roster.
- Street Fighter:
- Fans became rather burned out on the series after Ultra Street Fighter IV came out, adding yet more characters to an already overcrowded roster and making the combo system even more complicated with Red Focus. Casual fans complained because now they were being asked to spend even more money on what is essentially a single game that cost roughly $100 in total (even more if you purchased all the DLC) and had now become so incredibly difficult to play that getting started now would take months of training just to learn the basics. Fans of Street Fighter since 1991 can tell you that this sounds very familiar. Street Fighter II went through the same problems—although the competitive scene reveres the Super Turbo edition as the series' best, by the time it came out, the casual fans were just about done. Further sub-series in the franchise (such as Alpha and III) increased the complexity of the fighting system, making it nigh-inaccessible for casual players, and by the time the console version of Alpha 3 hit shelves, the roster had expanded to thirty-six. These problems are why the series took such a long hiatus between EX3 and SFIV. Capcom is taking a "back to basics" approach with Street Fighter V in terms of gameplay, focusing on fundamentals and accessibility, and will start off "small" much like many of the other sub-series' initial iterations (16 starting characters + 6 DLC characters for Year 1) in response to these complaints.
- In January 2016, Capcom revealed several DLC costumes for Street Fighter V, including Laura. Laura's DLC costume is basically a pair of thong-Daisy-Dukes and a shirt so small that the bottom half of her boobs are uncovered. Due to more attention being placed these days on female representation in games, Laura's outfit predictably caused a stir—though it's hard to tell if the instigators were people legitimately offended or those mocking the idea of being offended. In the latter case, it's argued that fighting game women have looked like this for years and only became a problem recently once critics started complaining. This brings up the inevitable Dead or Alive or SoulCalibur comparisons, and also the fact that women like Elena and Poison have been underdressed for years in the SF franchise alone. The other side then argues that yes, the fact that women have looked like this "years" is exactly the problem.
- While the gameplay of the BlazBlue series is well-received for the most part, its plot is definitely something that many take umbrage with. Namely, the questionable way the Timey-Wimey Ball is handled, the over-reliance on supplementary materials to explain things within the games (said materials never being translated for US readers as well) and some... questionable actions some of the characters do. All of this can be seen in the very first game. You could argue it was even worse back then because so many things went unexplained until later sequels expanded on them a bit (only to beg even more questions). On the subject of questionable things, fans who complain about the fanservice in later games are oblivious to the fact that it's been there from the beginning, just toned down in terms of saturation.