The PS1 has been considered a launching pad for a lot of franchises going forward, with games like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot, Grand Theft Auto and even Persona all starting life on the original PlayStation. However, there are plenty of games that were released on the PS1 that deserved some kind of sequel or follow-up, yet never received another game. With that in mind, here are our picks for the PS1 games that should have had a sequel. We all know that Vagrant Story should have got a sequel, but we’ve spoken about it a fair bit in other PS1 lists, so here’s some other suggestions.
1. Silent Bomber
The PS1 was awash with beat ‘em ups or shoot ‘em ups that followed the same basic pattern of “enter room, kill everything, repeat”. Fundamentally, is Silent Bomber any different? Not really, as you’re still clearing room after room of bad guys until the credits roll, but instead of using guns or fists to get the job done, you’re dropping bombs on your enemies like Rabbit in 8 Mile. No “mom’s spaghetti” here.
You control Jutah, who must bomb their way through the defenses of the spaceship Dante as the ship is threatening his home planet of Hornet. Apparently, the only way to stop a planet-wide explosion that could wipe out the entirety of Hornet is by setting off a series of smaller explosions on a spaceship. Who knew?
What stops Silent Bomber from becoming a mindless series of explosions is the fact that the player has complete control on when they detonate their bombs. Naturally, this means you can chain your explosions together to deal a wide amount of damage, or stick all your available bombs on one target to maximize the level of damage dealt in one area. You can also find E-Chips throughout the game’s fourteen levels to upgrade the amount of bombs you can plant, the range in which they can be planted or your resistance to enemy attacks.
Shoot ‘em ups and beat ‘em ups would continue long after Silent Bomber launched on the PS1, so the fact that this game didn’t get another chance to do things in its own way is quite the shame.
2. The Legend of Dragoon
We’ve made a big deal in the past about how many RPGs the PS1 had, largely from Square or Enix, so it’s not surprising that Sony and Japan Studio decided to have a go themselves. The result was The Legend Of Dragoon, a turn-based RPG with some real-time battle elements. The Legend Of Dragoon follows a hero by the name of Dart, who’s gathering a party of characters in order to stop the destruction of the entire world. As RPG premises go, The Legend Of Dragoon is about as generic as the genre gets, but it’s the impressive CGI cutscenes and approach to gameplay that allowed The Legend Of Dragoon to sell over a million copies worldwide on the PS1, despite heavy competition from the likes of Final Fantasy.
The Legend Of Dragoon uses a pretty standard turn-based combat system, but with the added benefit of something called Additions. During every attack, you could tack on Additions to your damage by succeeding in timed button press minigames, with the player being able to add more as the game progresses. In later moments though, enemies are even able to counter your Additions, forcing you to change your button inputs and strategy. These days, most turn-based RPGs feature some kind of real-time element or mini game to keep players engaged during the combat, making The Legend Of Dragoon quite a forward thinking game at the time.
Perhaps a sequel to this from Sony, or just a large scale remake, would make for a nice bit of diversity in PlayStation’s exclusives catalog. Which makes it all the bigger shame and oversight that they’d shutter Japan Studio in 2021. A legendarily dumbass move.
3. Snatcher
We might be cheating a little bit in calling Snatcher a PS1 game, considering the title originated on the PC-8801 and MSX2 back in 1988, before being ported to the PS1 over eight years later in 1996, but the fact remains that Snatcher’s lack of sequel is kind of baffling. Especially considering
Is that because creator Hideo Kojima, along with publisher’s Konami, found massive amounts of success with the Metal Gear Solid series not long after Snatcher’s third re-release by that point, so chose to follow the money instead? More than likely, even though Snatcher has been widely regarded as some of Kojima’s best work. The fact that there was no follow up between 1996 and the very public bust-up between Konami and Kojima in 2015 is shocking, because now we’ll never get anything beyond a prequel radio drama. Interesting tidbit: Snatcher actually has a few nods to Metal Gear, but whether they were intended to be part of the same universe before Metal Gear 2 retconned the connection is a little unclear. There’s even a Meryl in Policenauts, who probably wouldn’t have married the diarrhea man in that universe.
A precursor to the visual novel games, Snatcher is like a cross between Blade Runner and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. As you control Gillian Seed, you’re part of a police force in Neo Kobe City designed to hunt down Snatchers, robots that have killed people and assumed their place in society. Gillian is an amnesiac unsure of his own history, but he knows it’s got something to do with those gosh-darned Snatchers. Players move around the world and interact with characters via a series of text commands, though there are a few action sequences thrown in where you get to shoot some hostile Snatchers.
Again, a sequel to this is nearly impossible at this point, but if Blade Runner could get a sequel despite never being a huge commercial success, maybe Snatcher could too?
4. Chrono Cross
Trying to escape the shadow of your previous game is certainly tricky, but that’s especially true when that previous game is Chrono Trigger, one of the most beloved and celebrated RPGs of all time. Every time someone tries to say Final Fantasy VII is the best RPG ever, a Chrono Trigger fan teleports behind them.
Even the absolute best of follow-ups would struggle to get as much love as Chrono Trigger has over the years, and while Chrono Cross is still an incredible RPG in its own right, it never quite gets the recognition that Trigger has over the years. While arguably smaller in scope, given that Chrono Cross deals with just one alternate dimension instead of hopping through several different time periods, Chrono Cross continues on the tale of Chrono Trigger while following a new cast of characters and stakes.
Players control Serge, a 17 year old boy from the village of Arni who, through some weird mystical nonsense, is transported into an alternate dimension where Serge actually drowned ten years earlier. With a mystery to solve, Serge meets a wide array of characters while being pursued by an anthropomorphic panther that’s strangely called Lynx. Why did they get the cat names mixed up? Because of the dual dimensions, players can often find two different versions of the same character, and even have these versions meet each other. There’s even a New Game + mode to allow players to accumulate the full party of 45 characters, as it’s impossible to gather everyone in one run.
It’s a shame that this was the last entry in the Chrono series, though it’s not like there wasn’t effort spent in making a third game, with a trademark for Chrono Break going live in 2001, 45 years ago.
5. Wild 9
You’d think that a game made by some of the parties involved in the creation of the Earthworm Jim series would have been given a second chance to shine, but unfortunately for those who loved Wild 9, that never came to pass. Maybe that has something to do with the absolutely ludicrous names for some of the characters you encounter in this madcap adventure, from main character Wex Major to his motley crew of fellow adventurers that include the likes of Pokkit, Boomer McTwist and B’Angus. The “B” is silent, apparently. What’s your Wild 9 name? Mine is Gun John Creed.
Like Earthworm Jim before it, Wild 9 is a run and gun affair with combat and platforming taking place on a 2D plane, but instead of shooting everyone in sight until the credits roll, Wild 9 has a pretty decent gimmick.
Wex Major finds himself equipped with a weapon known as The Rig, which sends out an electrical beam that allows Wex to essentially carry and throw enemies into various obstacles and hazards. Wild 9’s marketing leant into the sadistic aspect of it, giving the game the tagline of “torture your enemies”, so if you wanted some platforming action that gives you the same mean thrills that a Mortal Kombat fatality gives you, Wild 9 was a solid pick. Plus, it meant you didn’t have to play MK Mythologies: Sub Zero, which is always nice.
Reviews for Wild 9 were solid enough, but Wild 9 launched in the West a few months after the first Klonoa, which had a similar idea of using enemies to solve puzzles and platforming challenges. Klonoa fared way better critically, which perhaps meant Wild 9 struggled to get out of the starting blocks, but the ideas, character designs and humor in Wild 9 could have been fleshed out further.
6. Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi
No, for real. The actual idea here isn’t bad. Just the game itself is bad, and playing it makes you feel bad.
Star Wars: Masters Of Teras Kasi was a 3D fighting game that saw a bunch of recognizable faces from the films, along with a few original characters and a couple of random jobbers, gathering together to have a big scrap. Perhaps one of the more blatant attempts to cash in on the success of Tekken on the PlayStation 1, with Teras Kasi translating in Finnish to “steel hand” in reference to Tekken’s “Iron Fist”, MOTK even featured similar UI elements to Tekken. Masters Of Teras Kasi was considered a pale imitation though, as the sluggish pace of the gameplay couldn’t hold a candle to the lightning fast action of Tekken or even Virtua Fighter.
Reviews of Masters Of Teras Kasi would reflect that negative sentiment, and while sales for the game weren’t terrible, it clearly wasn’t enough to warrant a sequel of some kind. However, LucasArts were clearly on to something, as the idea of a Star Wars fighting game holds a lot of merit. Heck, even Yoda and Darth Vader were featured as DLC characters in Soulcalibur IV, and they were both decently fun to play, so there’s a chance some can take the Teras Kasi ball and run with it.
Maybe the best solution would be to follow a Bushido Blade style route and have players able to chop off limbs with lightsabers, earning kills with proper strikes to the body. How Force powers would factor into it is anyone’s guess, we just think it’s a neat idea. And by “we”, I mean Jimmy.
7. Hogs of War
Perhaps the game that came closest to receiving a sequel on this list, and also the game that might even get a sequel at some point in the future, Hogs Of War was something of a European cultural phenomenon when it launched on the PS1 in the year 2000.
Essentially a Worms-inspired send-up of the First World War, replacing all of the humans for pigs and pig-related puns, teams take turns moving a single member of their squad around the map, using a variety of weapons and tools against the opponent. While the arsenal on offer doesn’t quite match the level of silliness that Worms’ Concrete Donkey and Holy Hand Grenade reach, the voice acting from comedy legends Rik Mayall and Marc Silk help ensure that Hogs of War is just as funny as Worms is.
With a full single-player campaign, along with support for local multiplayer, Hogs Of War was quite the hit in Europe, but it’s been noted by lead programmer Jacob Habgood when speaking to Retro Gamer that Hogs Of War never managed to sell well in America. Infogrames did try to get a sequel going in 2008, which would have launched on the PS2 bizarrely, but Infogrames were going through dire financial straits at the time and it’s possible that Hogs Of War 2 was their “break glass in case of emergency” plan.
It was too little too late though, as Infogrames would rebrand as Atari SA in 2009 and experience even more money woes for the next decade. Fair play to Atari though, as they seem to be on a comeback tour at the minute. Meanwhile, an official remaster, Hogs Of War: Lardcore, is set to land on PlayStation and PC at some point in the future.
8. Evil Zone
Another 3D fighting game, Evil Zone was ahead of the curve of a lot of fighting games at the time. Sure, the home ports of games like Street Fighter and Tekken would feature cutscenes and endings for each character, but Evil Zone went a step further with full anime sequences, narrated with full voice acting by each character, with the animation of the scenes and characters provided by the animation company AIC.
Evil Zone was designed to be an anime fighting game, years before the likes of Dragon Ball Z Budokai or Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm. Both of these series have had nine new games in the time it’s taken to say this sentence. Was Evil Zone a good fighting game, though? Reviews would suggest “not really”, but there was definitely something to the formula of Evil Zone that could have been explored in follow-up games.
The story follows a powerful being known as Ihadurca, a powerful being that’s been locked away in a dimension known as the Evil Zone. Because Ihadurca exists across all dimensions and is a threat to them all, a tournament is held to determine who will be strong enough to take down this threat once and for all. The game features 10 playable characters, each with their own moves and abilities, but what separates Evil Zone from other fighting games is the fact that most of the attacks are ranged. Players can get up close and personal to land some grapple attacks, but for the most part, you’re lobbing projectiles and hoping you don’t get hit.
Again, it’s hardly the greatest game ever made for the PS1, but its storytelling approach to fighting games would have been appreciated a lot more in the modern era, so a sequel developing its ideas could have gone somewhere. Or, you know, it could have flopped. We’ll never know.
9. Rapid Reload
We’ve made a point of celebrating shoot ‘em ups that dared to do things a little bit differently, so Rapid Reload’s presence on this list might seem a bit strange.
At first glance, Rapid Reload looks and plays like your bog standard clone of Contra or Metal Slug, with reviews at the time even comparing the game unfavorably to Treasure games like Gunstar Heroes. On closer inspection, you’ll find that Rapid Reload does take inspiration from other brilliant shoot ‘em ups released at the same time, attempting to create something that feels like the best of everything. If you’re looking for one of the PS1’s many hidden gems (cheap plug), consider Rapid Reload among their number.
Offering the choice between characters Axel and Ruca across the game’s six levels, you control treasure hunters on a quest to find a legendary stone known as the Valkiry, running afoul of a terrorist organization known as the Pumpkin Heads (no, not that cutie) in the process. With a selection of four weapons for each character, you’ll tear a path through the Pumpkin Head forces, while using other tools like a grappling hook to maneuver across the levels or obtain a better position for blasting people in the face.
Rapid Reload could have had more a chance of succeeding, but perhaps due to a supposed mandate from then-Sony US president Bernie Stolar about not selling 2D games in the region, Rapid Reload didn’t see a full worldwide release, never officially coming to America. You guys see the sun more than 5 minutes per decade, but we got this PS1 game. Who wins, really?
10. Future Cop: LAPD
We love games where you can play as a cool robot of some kind. Just look at us gush about Titanfall 2 if given the proper opportunity, so it’s a shame that Future Cop: LAPD never got the love it deserved.
Is that because EA were asking players to control a member of the LAPD a few years after the LA riots? We’re not sure, but the game did receive a healthy smattering of positive reviews upon launch, with many praising the gameplay and abilities that Future Cop: LAPD had to offer. Originally conceived as the next installment in the Strike series, joining games like Desert, Jungle and Urban Strike, Future Cop: LAPD leans more towards the bombastic, producing something that feels like Demolition Man crossed with RoboCop.
It’s 2098 and the “Crime War” has taken over Los Angeles, so the police are forced to deploy the X1-Alpha, a transforming robot that’s able to switch from a fast moving pursuit vehicle to a bipedal mecha complete with an arsenal of weapons. I’m still thinking about the Crime War, which suggests people are doing crimes to see who comes out on top. Would there be a points system? 5 points for jaywalking, 50 for murder, 100 for making Lost in Space?
Interestingly, Future Cop: LAPD has two main modes, with the Crime War mode functioning as the story campaign as you move from district to district trying to liberate Los Angeles from the chokehold of the gangs. However, the Precinct Assault mode is where Future Cop: LAPD gets really interesting, as it’s been considered by some to be the start of the MOBA genre.
The fact that Future Cop: LAPD’s legacy has arguably spawned an entire genre, but the game can’t get a damn sequel, is pretty sad honestly. We’d cop a sequel to this in the future. Los Angeles. Lakers.
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