Granted, I haven't played it myself yet, but Mega Man Star Force 2 is that for a lot of fans of that series. The first game already got a lukewarm reception because of how it was simultaneously "just more Battle Network" and "not simply more Battle Network", but it has a very heartfelt story and some people are turning around on it when they can judge it on its own merits instead of constant comparisons to Battle Network, which has better gameplay. It still sold a decent number of copies.

The second game basically killed whatever momentum the series had by then. The story got dumbed down significantly which made it feel even more like Battle Network (although it still has its moments), the space theme was lost to "lost civilisations" shenanigans that many fans weren't interested in, the gameplay changes were meh and you frequently had to navigate through a maze-like "Sky Wave" with a too high encounter rate. Sales numbers were well below expectations.

The third game has the best gameplay by far and a story close to or as good as the first game, but the damage was already done. It sold the least of the three games. But at least the series ended on a high note with very few loose ends.

Might be a hot take, but Mass Effect 2.

I love Mass effect, despite its flaws, but Mass Effect 2 was the game that derailed the series and basically forced Mass Effect 3 to have an unsatisfactory ending. So many concepts from Mass Effect 1 like the cipher, visions, Virgil, the Thorian were completely abandoned in favor of one giant video game length side mission. Sure the suicide mission was kind of cool, but at the end of Mass Effect 2 we learned almost nothing about the reapers from the last game.

But Cerberus is by far the worst mistake. From Shepard's POV, they literally witnessed Cerberus do grotesque, inhumane experiments throughout ME1 only a month before game start but the writers forced us to join these space Nazis. Cerberus is comically evil and is constantly doing cartoon villain experiments. Also, the space Nazis somehow have it in their hearts to spend billions of credits so that Shepard can save humanity.

Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. TOTK isn't a bad game, but it does feel like a 70 dollar add-on to BOTW. It just didn't capture the magic.

Lords of the Realm 3. I have no idea what they were thinking making everything real-time. Custom games were still fun for pitched battles, but the city management portion was yucky. They even had cool mechanics going on like different lords to put in charge of counties giving different abilities.

Heroes of Might and Magic VI. Five was one of the series' best entries. I couldn't even get VI to load without crashing. My fault for buying Ubisoft.

Call of Duty was a breath of fresh air when it came out in 2003. CoD2 improved the campaign, but had some mid multi-player. CoD4 was a decent "not Counterstrike." Everything has been downhill since. Moving from WWII to present day was also a mistake and I blame CoD for white supremacists taking over online spaces. At least in Battlefield, people used to get banned for slurs. By CoD4, servers weren't even bothering anymore.

Speaking of Battlefield, 1942 was GOAT. Vietnam was okay, but felt more like a mod (chasing America out of Hue was based, tho). Battlefield 2 limited how many bots you could play with...which defeated one of the main reasons to play. It's all been downhill from there and they jumped on the "Modem ~~Wehrmacht~~ Warfare" train after CoD started getting that DoD fed money.

There's more, but these were my main focuses of hate.

Overwatch 2. How they fucked up the maps, the matching, the ranking system are all case studies on how to not make a sequel.

But that's not the worst fucking part that shocks me.

The worst part that shocks me to this day, is how they got me to actually miss loot boxes.

They fucked up with the prices for skins and hid all the semi valuable stuff behind a season pass that is always 20$.

I'm not paying ~1/4 the price of an entire AAA game for one season pass.

They didn't even put the coolest skins in the season pass, those are like 10-15$ on their own.

maybe not "came to", i disliked the old republic when they said it would be an mmo and destroyed all hope of a third single player bioware rpg

does new vegas -> fallout 4 count?

Warcraft 3 was my absolute favorite game back then, I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.

Needless to say, the followup being the somewhat successful Word of Warcraft made sure there would never be an actual sequel in a genre I actually like lol. And then much later they decided to "reforge" the game and the less is said about that, the better

Does Elden Ring count?

As a follow-up to DS3 (yeah I’m not counting Sekiro in this), enemies move too quickly, boss movesets a little too erratic and the world way too open for my tastes. I’m a grown-ass person with things to do, I don’t wanna waste the two hours I have to myself each day dicking around and getting dicked-down for exploring some corner of the map, only to find loot that doesn’t apply to my build. It doesn’t respect my time.

I also don’t think I’m alone in thinking that replayability is harmed by making progression more of a slog than other Souls games. I need to grind more enemies (that are spread out, mind you) to level up my VIT stat so I don’t get 1-shot by bosses.

Build variety and boss-runs were definitely improved over other entries, I will admit. If these QoL improvements were made in a Bloodborne follow-up (peak souls imo), it might be the best Souls game made. Maybe I’ve outgrown the franchise tho; the tryhard-edgelord culture it invites is not for me.

Magicka 2 is the exception that proves the rule "yes, even pve games need nerfs sometimes." Being an unrestrained self-endangering idiot-god was fundamental to Magicka's charm, and reducing the player's threat to themselves and everything around them ruined that.

I've played a ton of Sims 4 but I hate almost everything about it except that it has group conversations. 2 and 3 are amazing games.

Dragon Age: Origins was a fantastic game and one I play to this day. Dragon Age 2 was hot trash. Dragon Age Inquisition was also hot trash. Why BioWare couldn't just leave the formula alone and improve upon it is beyond my comprehension.

Dying Light 2 is one of the worst sequels I've ever played. The first game was excellent, they just fucked everything up in 2.

The Far Cry series was good up until 6. 6 is utter pish.

I love and truly adore a niche Space RTS game called "Star Ruler" that came out ~~10-odd~~ 14 years ago. With the 'Galactic Armoury' mod, it's so fucking cool. You get to run your empire while designing and build ships of increasing complexity, and eventually insane sizes, custom fleets with a mothership with a repair bay with a big laser (or ten thousand tiny lasers) or you can harvest/blow up a star and eventually you can build giant thrusters on your planets and fly your planets around like they're spaceships and fill them with rocket silos and shield generators and ugh. The only game I've enjoyed to seriously incentivise fundamental tech tree specialisation, too.

Star Ruler 2 had none of that, and made me spend most of my time dealing with a frustrating diplomatic cards system, and it had a decent ship builder, but it just wasn't the same. It's probably objectively an okay game, but my disappointment was huge, all I wanted was a better engine, sleeker UI, tighter interfaces, nicer graphics, etc. and it was instead basically just a different game.

I still regularly replay SR1, something about it captures an aspect of my imagination nothing else has.

I love the original Halo trilogy but tbh I don’t care for any of the Halos after ODST

Dawn of War 1 & 2 were both great games in their own respective ways, then 3 came out and somehow combined the bad aspects of 1 & 2.

Guild Wars 1 was a MMORPG-lite that had instanced territories outside of towns (and even those were instanced, albeit much larger) where you could take up to 8 people with you. Crucially, every class had about one thousand skills you could combine pretty freely and you could second class. You could do some DnD-Tier bullshit combinations of stats with those, given all the weird status effect thingies it gave you to play around with

And then Guild Wars 2 is just WoW

KSP. KSP 2 was a cash grab that got abandoned before it even got out of early access.

FEAR 1 and Wolfenstein TNO were some of my favorite games of all time so it’s only natural their sequels fell short.

In FEAR 2’s case, while it’s a rock solid shooter in its own right, it’s so obvious just how much it was trying to fit in the mold of the “gritty modern military shooter” that was predominant at the time (especially MW2). Stripping the tactical shooter elements like leaning still irks me.

For Wolfenstein 2, they tried to shake up the gameplay formula of TNO/TOB but the end result was something I was never quite satisfied with. To list some issues, Stealth went from being hilariously too easy to being a convoluted mechanic that I rarely ever used after the first engagement. Them splitting the Assault Rifle of the first game into the SMG and StG took away the entire point of the AR being a reliable weapon that was competent in most situations and replaced it with a useless peashooter (on higher difficulties) and cheesable death cannon respectively.

Ooh this one is easy, Red Dead Redemption is a tight action game with a solid if sterotypical cowboy story about the end of the Wild West. Red Dead Remption 2, despite it's technical improvements in basically every way failed to draw me in even after hours of trying. I dunno what it is, maybe I just really am not interested in "the Gang in it's heyday" prequel hook, or maybe it's just how much Rockstar decided to try and make the game into a weird simulator instead of a video game. Played a ton of the MP with friends, as our own little posse rocking around, I made a cool half-native looking dude with a top hat and that was fun, but then we ran into the problem of Rockstar just giving up on wrapping any of the live stories they developed so that's a half-dead game right there. Hard to sell infinite money cards with the cowboy game I suppose.

Evil Genius is a pretty fun little strategy game from like 2004 that was an homage to old bond movies and the cold war, it was buggy as hell but it had some really neat ideas and charm to it and I really liked playing it. Evil Genius 2 is the over-polished sequel that utterly failed to live up to any of the first games energy, the art style got all the weird edges sanded off and has no character of it's own, and I feel like the new team just didn't really vibe with the classic's idea. I dunno maybe I should give it another go but it just rubbed me the wrong way.

Diablo1 had more of the rogue like roots. Diablo2 was more overtly cartoony and loot-grindy. It became no longer a question of "can you clear the game?" but "can you clear bosses quickly for good loot?". Diablo3 went even farther in this direction. I didn't play 4.

Dead space 1 is perfect and has no flaws and is one of the most visually striking games of the generation that doesn't feel like it aged a day since it came out.

Dead space 2 was meh and 3 is turbo poo

Age of empires 2 is amazing 3 is dogshit.

All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.

Supreme commander 2 is a disappointment.