6 Games That Are Clearly the Black Sheep of Their Series

Metal Gear Survive

After Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain came out, Konami decided to continue with the MGS series without Hideo Kojima –big mistake on Konami’s part.

It led to Metal Gear Survive, a multiplayer survival stealth action-adventure game with tower defense elements built into it as well, yeah it’s a mess.

It takes place in an alternate dimension between the events of Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain, following a Captain who is trying to solve the mystery of a virus that is turning people into zombies.

Metal Gear Survive could have been a decent multiplayer survival game to sink plenty of hours in with some friends, but the game not only tarnished the MGS name but it was ultimately boring and a quick cash grab for Konami after Kojima’s departure from the studio.

Konami even charged players $10 to make a second save file for the game; if that’s not corporate greed that I don’t know what is.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) was intended to act as a reboot for the blue bomber, but it ended up being one of the worst Sonic game of all time. It was so bad that Sega even began to delist subpar Sonic games from retailers just a few years after the reboot’s release.

Critics knocked off points for pretty much every aspect of the game. There were technical issues, camera problems, load times, a terrible plot, and ridiculous characters that made no sense at all.

In the open areas, you would talk to an NPC to take on a quest, but first, a loading screen would appear to then bring on another loading screen once you completed the quest –it plagued the game and sucked the fun out of everything (if there was any fun to be found).

This failure made the Sonic Team rethink about the future of Sonic, leading them to develop Sonic and the Secret Rings. It wasn’t a fantastic new direction, but it was certainly better than ’06 that’s for sure.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

One of the biggest challenges that Aliens: Colonial Marines faced was the fact that Gearbox had their hands in too many projects at the same time.

While they were developing Colonial Marines, they also had people working on Borderlands 2 and Duke Nukem Forever, forcing the developer to outsource the first-person shooter to outside teams.

When you lose that focus and drive on a video game, you can bet that the finished product would not be solid at all, and that is what happened to this Aliens game.

The animations were poor, a bunch of technical glitches were present, and the graphical quality was not as it promised or shown during demo events, and the worst part –it just wasn’t that much fun.

Sega was even sued by two players because of the lack of polish in the finished game.

You see, when the first gameplay was shown off, the graphics were much better than what they eventually ended up looking like, causing fans and critics to be confused and just disappointed in Gearbox and Sega.

Umbrella Corps

As a huge Resident Evil fan, I always feel somewhat angry and disgusted towards Capcom whenever I remember that Umbrella Corps exists.

Seeing how Capcom is handling their properties nowadays, I shake my head at the company’s past when it comes to stuff like this.

Umbrella Corps is a military shooter that is a spin-off of the Resident Evil series and released in 2016 for PC and PS4. We don’t blame you if you forgot that this existed. It’s for the best.

There are zombies and there are guns, but that’s pretty much the only similarity that it shares with Resident Evil, and the strewn in plot, if you even count it as a story, as the game doesn’t even have a proper campaign.

The single-player mode is simply 24 stages that have you killing waves of enemies, round after round, with no compelling plot or exposition at all.

Anyways, the shooter was met with nothing but negative reception, with Umbrella Corps sitting at a cold score of 38 on Metacritic –ouch.

Final Fantasy II

We always hear about Final Fantasy X’s touching story, Final Fantasy 13’s lovely soundtrack, and Final Fantasy 4 setting the standard for role-playing games, but we never really hear too much about the black sheep of the long-running franchise, Final Fantasy II.

You see, FFII isn’t a “bad” game by any means, but one of the only good things that the game did for the series was the introduction of Chocobos –the adorable yellow-colored chickens that are usually used as a means of traversal.

The game just did some weird things. For example, your party didn’t level up and gain experience points as you did in the first Final Fantasy. You also couldn’t upgrade your classes and you would increase your stats by performing specific actions in battle.

These combat changes didn’t make it into future FF titles, as you can probably imagine why, but FFII was just an “okay” video game that didn’t improve much on FF1’s fantastic design and in most areas, was a step back.

Ninja Gaiden 3

The Ninja Gaiden series used to be the “Dark Souls” of hack and slash character action games due to their high difficulty, but Ninja Gaiden 3 fell hard critically when it first released back in 2012.

Critics slammed the ninja action game for being way too streamlined. The game was way too easy and felt as if you’re playing an action movie but with loads of technical issues and without the challenges that the series was known for.

The reason we’ve yet to see a Ninja Gaiden 4 is probably because of the low reception that the game saw, but maybe we will see Ryu make a return sometime soon –who knows.

Seeing games like Sekiro and Nioh finding a place in the action genre, a new Ninja Gaiden would be rad to see.