Forgotten Sequels in Beloved Video Game Franchises

Metal Gear Acid 2

A lot of games come out every day. As I write this, Steam just got 56 new simulation games. And there are also more franchises that cater to particular people than ever in the online melting pot. But there are plenty of sequels and spin-offs that don’t even start uh cooking in that melting pot.

 

Onimusha Blade Warriors

Yes, I own this one, and I still don’t think it’s real. I have never seen Onimusha Blade Warriors be mentioned anywhere else online to the point where I feel like there must be an aurora borealis localised entirely within my game collection.

But it is real. And also really obvious why it’s been pretty much forgotten, just like Capcom seems to forget about the Onimusha IP as a whole. That anime, man. What happened there?

If your first thought upon completing Onimusha 2 was “damn, that was fantastic, but I wish it was more like Super Smash Bros and also Mega Man Zero was in it”, boy did Capcom have you covered by 2003.

Onimusha Blade Warriors is to Smash Bros and a bit of Power Stone what Palworld is to Pokemon, except without the equaliser of making slavery fun.

Choosing from iconic characters from across the first two Onimusha games, including Samanosuke, Jubei, Kaede, and uh Grunt, you fight across platforms in stages influenced by settings from those initial games, with the game’s story, which is apparently canon, seeing you take part in what is essentially just a load of event matches with the excuse of making Samanosuke and Jubei fight.

Onimusha Blade Warriors does have a neat trick up its sleeve, in that when you damage your opponents in multiplayer, you can then harvest their souls to replenish your HP, resulting in a bit of aggro and laughs if you and three friends want to pick up the blade. But there’s not too much else here, as you can really sense it was made quickly by a small crew to keep the Onimusha pipeline going.

However, any game in which Mega Man can beat up a zombie can’t be all bad, right?

Onimusha as an IP was last seen in that already forgotten anime, with a remaster before that that doesn’t seem to have done well. Our Jean Reno in 4K chances have never looked dimmer.

 

Okamiden

Slight spoiler here: there’s going to be a good bit of Capcom in this video, because if there’s one thing you can count on the House of Redfield for, it’s random spin-offs that nobody really asked for.

However, you have to credit Capcom for really trying to give Okami, which is one of the hardest sells for a mainstream audience you could imagine, another chance with a forgotten spiritual successor on the DS by the name of Okamiden that released in 2010.

Let’s ignore them shutting down Clover Studio because Okami did so poorly for my own uh narrative purposes.

Due to the fallout from that closure, there was of course no involvement from always angry auteur Hideki Kamiya, but Kuniomi Matsushita, who oversaw the Wii port of Okami and was also the director of the PS2’s miracle port of Resident Evil 4, stepped in alongside the rather unconvincingly named Game Studio Corporation Ltd to paint another picture for the IP on Nintendo’s dual-screened wonder, where a creative game like Okami should fit right in.

Okamiden retains the celestial brush from the original game, which allows you to create items by drawing them on the DS screen, the kind of mechanic the handheld was designed for. However, Amaterasu is out, replaced by her son Chibiterasu and young sprog Kuni, who rides around on his back.

Together, you’ll be once again fighting back the demonic forces encroaching on Nippon in a Zelda-esque adventure with buckets of storybook charm. Okamiden does make brilliant use of the DS, allowing you to do things like draw secret paths for Kuni to go and get you loot while using the second screen as a map, but it does aesthetically suffer a little due to the “jaggies” of the DS.

Okamiden was a mild commercial success, contributing to the franchise selling over 4 million copies. We’ve had Okami on every platform going, but how about one more port that bundles both games together?

 

Escape Dead Island

You don’t get publishers going full tilt immediately on a new IP after initial success much these days, launching a whole new universe with sequels, spin-offs, comics, uhh cereals and much more. Like, did you know Dante’s Inferno had a whole ass animated movie?

It was all the rage back in the 7th generation, with Dead Island being a major culprit, even if a lot of its huge success at launch could be attributed to that misleading but still amazing trailer. Best video game trailer ever, though. 

While there’s a whole other video to be made on the canceled MOBA, because why wouldn’t Dead Island also be a MOBA, let’s today talk about Escape Dead Island: a cel-shaded game that looks decidedly more shit-shaded.

In this third-person adventure starring a nepo baby by the name of Cliff whose main personality trait is absolutely hating normal length clothes, you travel to Narapela to discover the truth about some corporate blah blah insert Umbrella comparison here blah blah oh look here’s zombies.

It’s not just Resi that Escape Dead Island calls to mind though, as Cliff is armed with a camera like your average war coverer, you know. Cliff collects evidence, but bafflingly you will collect very few weapons for a Dead Island game, avoid zombies wherever you can because the combat is just really arse, put up with a whole host of glitches, and take the longest ways around to every objective over and over again.

Escape Dead Island was made quickly and cheaply, and you can tell. It didn’t even come to PS4 and Xbox One despite the fact that it was released in November 2014, a year after the eighth gen had started.

Escape Dead Island was pretty much dead on arrival, but a neat little curio is that, at the time, pre-ordering the game would get you beta access to a version of Dead Island 2 that never came out. A revamped version of Dead Island 2 did come out almost a decade later in 2023, and, you know what, that is a fun ass video gamey video game.

 

Fear Effect Sedna

The 90s and early 2000s were a different time. We traded Charizards for lunches like the idiot kids we were, got humbled by asbestos, and had an awakening of some kind every time we opened a games magazine. Again, a different time.

While franchises like Tomb Raider were bolstered pretty well commercially by leaning on, um, specific attributes, Fear Effect is to video games what Tatu is to music. The marketing was wild and pretty aggressive for these PS1 games, but if you could stop staring for a bit, you’d realise that Fear Effect 1 and 2 were both solid, stylish action adventures with tank controls, incredible visuals, sound and atmosphere, and absolutely brutal difficulty.

Fear Effect was very much its own thing in the early 2000s, and pretty proudly stood out from the crowd.

So it was a bit odd to see Fear Effect Sedna in 2018, an isometric tactical stealth game in the style of Desperados.

Making a new game in a series mostly powered by cleavage after 17 years of nothingness is admirable, but changing the game’s whole genre? If it didn’t work for Pac-Man, it probably isn’t going to work for everyone’s favourite Ruthless Aggression Era legends.

Fear Effect Sedna did retain the lovely visuals from the original games, along with the fear meter to interesting effect, but Sedna just about scraped by its Kickstarter goal, and it shows in the finished product. AI is poor, the battle system is constantly just irritating, and the actual tactical elements of this tactics game are pretty much missing.

Sedna was a critical flop and didn’t connect with fans at all, so much so that it may have harmed the chances of a planned remake that was seemingly canceled after nearly seven years of development. Fear Effect is coming back to modern platforms thanks to Limited Run Games though, so that’s something?

 

Deus Ex: The Fall

As a great philosopher once said: “it ain’t easy bein’ cheesy, and it ain’t easy being a Deus Ex fan either.”

An IP that’s in a state of limbo more often than Hermes Conrad, Deus Ex has struggled to catch a break since it basically changed gaming forever way back in 2000. Invisible War was released with consoles in mind first and foremost in 2003 and suffered for it, then the series went pretty much on ice until 2011 and the release of the pretty good Deus Ex: Human Revolution, before the commercial failure of Mankind Divided in 2016 meant that Square Enix had no choice but to become the Illuminati themselves.

There were a few side projects in between all that, including one of those many Go games that were being churned out on mobile for a minute there, but few games have ever been as rightly forgotten as Deus Ex: The Fall.

Not a documentary on what happened to this franchise once it stopped printing all of the money, Deus Ex: The Fall took everything you enjoyed about Human Revolution and just made it really, really bad. And also, on mobile.

Focusing on Reno-alike Ben Saxon instead of new hero Adam Jensen, as he is having a big nap during the course of the story here, The Fall follows Saxon as his body rejects his augments, leading the ex-mercenary to have to dive back into the seedy underworld to keep himself alive.

If that sounds interesting, choom, it kinda is, but sadly you also have to play the game.

The Fall is less than Diet Deus Ex, and it’s barely even Deus Ex Zero. Basically all of the immersive sim elements have been pulled right back, with the game being built first and foremost for mobile, meaning that it is very unfortunate to look at, even on its PC version, with terrible AI, bad UI, and awful controls to boot.

Deus Ex: The Fall is an ugly game that is a Temu imitation of its main series counterparts, with it being so poorly received that planned follow-ups were mercifully canned. Rather unmercifully for its long suffering fans though, a new game was planned by current license holders Embracer Group but it too got canned not far into development.

Actually, as I was writing this, that sequel to The Fall, Icarus Uprising, did get dumped online. It was like someone knew. A quick Google search is in order if you really feel like you need to check it out.

 

Silent Hill: Book of Memories

If you think you have it rough as a Deus Ex fan, Silent Hill is proof that even the foggiest of franchise futures will eventually clear up. Probably. Maybe. To be honest, this is being recorded before the new game comes out, so please delete one of these as necessary.

The Silent Hill 2 remake sure was OK.

The Silent Hill 2 remake would only have been saved by comic sans.

It’s wild just how desperate Konami seemed to get with the Silent Hill franchise for so long after Team Silent’s magic stopped working following years of incredible crunch. Four games in 5 years is crazy.

From prequels to remakes to ill-advised installments pawned off to Czech developers who’d only ever made a kinda bad metroidvania before it, Konami did everything — apart from giving the people responsible for it the time and money they actually needed.

You won’t find any better examples of Konami’s buck fucking wild attitude to the IP than Silent Hill: Book of Memories, a PlayStation Vita exclusive spin-off released in 2013 that played like baby’s first Diablo game.

Yes, WayForward, who have made some real whippers like Aliens Infestation and Shantae in the past, were entrusted with turning Silent Hill into a dungeon crawler. Silent Hill, the same IP famous for themes of guilt and trauma, now infamous for making you feel guilty for missing your critical hits.

Book of Memories follows your own created character that you choose from across a bunch of Breakfast Club stereotypes as they have the worst birthday of their life, with them being sucked into a series of randomly generated dungeons in their dreams. Imagine Persona, but bad.

To give it its due, Book of Memories honestly looks pretty solid for a Vita title with a lot going on, and the action itself isn’t that terrible. It’s just that this is neither a particularly good or deep dungeon crawler, and absolutely not what anyone comes to Silent Hill expecting. It’s not as bad as hitting the lever, but there’s a reason why this hit the Vita and absolutely nobody cared. No, it’s not because it was on the Vita, leave my sweet child alone.

If we’re discrediting industry-shifting demos, this was the last real game in the Silent Hill universe until The Short Message, which we can all universally agree was very OK.

 

Dead Space Extraction

We’re back to the seventh generation of gaming, a truly blessed time when everything not nailed down would get its own wider universe. It makes sense for Dead Space, because space, universe etc, but there’s so much room to maneuver within this IP and its canon that it really would be a shame not to, especially when compared to Dead Island, whose whole thing was “zombies in tropical shirts”.

Along with that greatgreatnot-great original trilogy, we got a pair of fairly underrated animated movies, a random puzzle game, novels and comics, and also a one-time Wii exclusive in 2009 that really stood out on the console for, well, being Dead Space in the middle of threats of violence from random fitness mannequins.

Ultimatum? Are you Jason Bourne, Jillian Michaels? I don’t even know what a Jillian Michaels is.

Dead Space Extraction is a first-person rails shooter set before the events of the first game, with you playing as five separate characters aboard the USG Ishimura as the Marker leaves its, well, mark. From detective Nathan McNeil to doctor Karen Hollwell, Extraction offers a pretty interesting insight into the final hours of the people aboard the Ishimura through a fun Time Crisis lens, with players able to shake the Wiimote to get some distance from necromorphs, while you can use series staples like stasis to pick up ammo and kineses to chuck things around.

The real reason to check out Extraction, though, is for the ability to use the Wiimote to shoot off necromorph limbs, which is simply always a fun time. Extraction is also really one of the best looking games on the Wii, with some brilliantly moody environments and detailed character models, and that same iconic crunchy, squelchy Dead Space soundboard we all love.

Extraction would later be ported to the PlayStation 3 in 2011, while the IP as a whole was most recently seen in the fantastic remake from 2023, which, unfortunately, will probably be the last we ever see of the franchise as it didn’t make all of the money.

That sucks, honestly. EA has done a really poor job of preserving this franchise over the years — you can’t even play Dead Space 2’s Severed DLC on PC. I’d personally love it if Dead Space got the Legendary Edition treatment at some point.

 

Resident Evil Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica

While they’ve rarely ever missed with the main installments, Capcom has constantly been guilty of what analysts dub “dumb shit” when it comes to the spin-offs in the Resident Evil series over the years.

From Umbrella Corps (nobody asked for it) to Resistance (nobody asked for it) to RE:Verse (nobody asked for it), Capcom has tried their best to throw their remake money in the toilet with just completely misjudged side quests over the years. Especially when Outbreak is right there. Guys, it’s right there.

But the Survivor spin-offs are a little different. They’re not terrible ideas, as basically every House of the Dead game and every other VR shooter will tell you that shooting zombies is a lot of fun, but this Resident Evil offshoot has to have some of the most terrible execution ever.

Resident Evil Survivor honestly deserves a video all on its own, but it did actually get a follow-up for Japanese and European arcades that must have been successful enough to get a PlayStation 2 port, which, again, curiously skipped the United States. You guys missed out on at least that sick box art, which was kinda traumatising to see as a ten year old.

A spin-off of the game that Capcom should really be remaking next, Resident Evil Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica is a 2001 light gun shooter that has significantly more going on than the original Survivor game, with players controlling Claire Redfield as she unfortunately teams back up with Steve on Rockfort Island.

What makes Survivor 2 a touch more exciting than the original game is that the clock is always ticking down until Nemesis is set loose on the island. If you think that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, everything that takes place here is just a dream. As for how Claire even knows what Nemesis is, considering it was Jill that encountered him, please stop asking questions.

While Survivor 2 is certainly a good deal less boring than the original Survivor, its total lack of voice acting, total playthrough time of around an hour, and totally bogus decision to keep Dream Steve alive means it’s worth playing as solely a curio of RE history.

Is it worth digging out the GunCon and CRT for, though?

No.

The Survivor series would again spin-off for a third time into the Dino Crisis series with Dino Stalker, which could end up in a follow-up video, and the final game in the sub-series, Dead Aim, released in 2003, which to become clinically insane for a minute, was actually alright.

 

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles

Here’s one final seventh gen breakout franchise that quickly just exploded into a new universe, but somehow Assassin’s Creed has barely ever let up.

We’ve been getting Assassin’s Creed content pretty much solidly since 2007. In fact, unless my maths is off, there hasn’t been a single year since 2007, some 45 years ago, when there hasn’t been either a new game, spin-off, or DLC.

Even when Ubisoft was supposedly taking a break to let it reset in 2016 ahead of the launch of Origins in 2017? Two DLC for Syndicate, a remastered collection, a mobile game, an OK movie, and an almost totally forgotten spin-off subseries called Assassin’s Creed Chronicles.

While Chronicles did start in 2015 with China, two new entries released in 2016, with India and Russia coming out one month apart early in the year. Perhaps inspired by the absolutely brilliant Mark of the Ninja, while also dipping into the vaults to take a leaf out of Prince of Persia’s books, the Chronicles games were all 2.5D side-scrollers that each featured a different protagonist in different countries across the globe.

Chronicles: China, probably the best of the bunch, follows Shao Jun, a character first introduced in a 2011 short film, who must eliminate a group of Templars running China behind the scenes.

Chronicles: India, meanwhile, is set during the Anglo-Sikh Wars, and focuses on Arbaaz Mir, a character first introduced in the comics, who must save his mentor from those no good Templars who are searching for more MacGuffins to put in their deus ex machina machine.

Lastly, Chronicles: Russia is centred on Nikolai Orelov, a Russian assassin first introduced in a comic book — are you beginning to see why casual fans maybe struggled to get into these games? — who finds himself taking a young royal under his wing after tragedy.

As well as being more impenetrable in terms of lore than if you were trying to figure out exactly how much time has actually passed in The Simpsons, the Chronicles games suffered from poor controls, really barebones combat and, well, being 2.5D stealth games when Assassin’s Creed was the posterchild for 3D open world game indulgence.

They aren’t terrible, especially if you can buy the whole trilogy for like a fiver, even for the Vita, my beloved, but they really don’t excel at much of anything and have been largely forgotten, like Ubisoft forgetting about keeping on Kristen Bell’s character when she asked for more money. We could really quite easily do a whole video on forgotten Assassin’s Creed spin-offs and tie-ins. Let us know if you’d like to see that down below.

 

Metal Gear Acid 2

From one series that does too much to one that does nowhere near enough these days — seriously where’s all the merch? — Metal Gear is one of those franchises where it got really, really weird on handhelds. You don’t get much weirder than the Acid sub-series, the criminally underrated second game in particular.

Directed by Shinta Nojiri, he who also blessed us with NeverDead before disappearing from the planet, his work seemingly done, Metal Gear Acid 2 follows up the much more widely known Metal Gear Acid, a grid-based tactical card game we’re going to assume Konami frantically gave to Sony for the launch of the PSP while they tried to figure out how to exactly make magic happen with the hardware later.

Even as a big Metal Gear fan, I just have to say that the first Acid game? Not that good, especially when you play it these days. I’d honestly prefer to play Portable Ops. The story is nothing special while also just being needlessly complicated just because the devs thought it probably had to be as a Metal Gear game without any of the sauce, while the art style is kind of flat. It’s not a bad game, but it’s one of the more skippable games in the franchise.

I wouldn’t say the same of Metal Gear Acid 2, the far less commercially successful sequel that is also alternate timeline nonsense, except this time it’s cel-shaded (which instantly makes every game better) and tightens up the gameplay a lot to just generally be a bunch more fun.

For instance, now you can sell your cards to allow you to buy better cards, and it’s a small thing, but not having to stop specifically on an item tile to pick up said item is a total angina saver.

Following Snake and newcomer Venus, the pair investigate a shady corporation (as if there is any corporation that isn’t shady) called Saintlogic after Snake is coerced by the FBI. Metal Gear Acid 2’s story goes in some fantastically goofy, dreamlike directions that you can appreciate without having to have played any of the earlier games.

It’s also easy to appreciate just how experimental Konami got with this game, as you could even use an accessory that came with it by the name of the Tobidacid to play in 3D in certain sections, a full five years before the 3DS came out, and if your PSP happened to not be connected to the internet, you could also help yourself out by unlocking certain footage for certain tastes, and I won’t elaborate.

Metal Gear Acid 2 really didn’t seem to sell well unfortunately, but it did get a mobile port in 2008. If Konami wants to keep biding their time until they release Metal Gear Solid 4 again, I absolutely wouldn’t turn my nose up at Master Collection Volume 2 being focused on the portable spin-offs, including Acid 2.

Hey, a man’s gotta play the N-Gage’s iconic Metal Gear Solid Mobile in some way that doesn’t involve the N-Gage, right?

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