As for Dark Dawn, that was a mixture of them being unable to follow up with how good Lost Age was (because Lost Age was the shit), overloading you with characters/Djinn/powers to use so that it felt like a clusterfuck, the fact that the plot/villain reveal was entirely predictable if you played the previous games, and the fact that after you start the eclipse; certain areas become cut off, which kept you from attaining 100% completion if you weren't extra careful. Lost Age let you go back and revisit literally anywhere; encouraged it even (Iris tablet/Dullahan boss fight, man).
It's not a BAD GAME, exactly, so much as it just felt like a lot of wasted potential after the previous games.
I agree with this. I don't think Golden Sun needed a sequel, especially a direct sequel with much the same characters. I think it could've worked set as a prequel or in a different world entirely but a big problem with the game overall for me was how it felt like a rehash.
Saints Row: The Third
My lord they butchered everything that made 2 great and changed the franchise forever moving it into the LOL SO RANDUMB XD territory.
SR2 had so much silliness too of course but they pulled it off well. Oh and let's not forget dumbed down customization.
This
Maybe it's just me, but I liked Saints Row the Third - even though the storyline was incredibly short.
Saints Row 4, however... that was quite a disappointment. The devs threw away pretty much anything related to the previous games and decided to imitate Prototype for some reason. The meta throwbacks to previous games and the return of Johnny Gat were nice, but they didn't make up for the rest of the game.
Saints Row the Third is one of my least favorite games to revisit. It's a game where the developers clearly had a lot of apathy toward the project and had neither the talent nor budget to see it to it's conclusion. This goes beyond the stylistic decisions.
Almost everything in SR3 is a downgrade from 2, apart from arguably the upgrade system but it brought it's own problems. Especially in terms of story. Say what you will about the storyline to Saints Row 2, but one thing it was, was effective.
In Saints Row 2 one aspect of the game a lot of people don't consider is that the main character is a true villain protagonist. There is nothing redeemable about the protagonist in Saints Row 2. He is more villainous than the actual antagonistic characters, especially the main antagonist of the game Dane Vogel. There's several scenes in the game where the protagonist does a lot of disturbing things to characters in the game gratuitously. There's a moment in the game where the protagonist interrogates the tattoo artist of one of the gang leaders Maero, and after getting the information he needs burns the flesh off his hand and walks away smiling. In the same mission line, the protagonist decides to put radioactive waste in Maero's tattoo ink so he gets radioactive burns on his face. And to get revenge on Carlos the main character forces Maero to murder his own girlfriend unknowingly.
Ontop of this you bury a character alive, and joke about it later. And by that character's own admission he didn't actually commit the murder you're punishing him for.
By comparison the main villain of the game, Dane Vogel, is only trying to get rid of gangs in Stilwater so he can remodel the part of the city your headquarters is in.
In interviews about Saints Row 3, the developers stated moments like this, and Carlos's death especially were "too dark" and that they deliberately avoided doing this because it came off as too mean and disturbing. As a result they designed the story of Saints Row 3 to have no weight to it.
None of the villains in Saints Row 3 are interesting. None of the story has any actual point to it. Missions often are just activities. And the ones you do go on don't actually have any bearing on later missions. The main villain of the game, Phillip Loren, is killed off before he can actually do anything other than kill Johnny Gat. For the first quarter of the game you mostly just waste time until you finally decide to actually assault Phillip Loren's headquarters.
After that you're left with the noticeably less interesting Killbane and Matt Miller. Both of whom aren't threatening. It's worth noting that they got Hulk Hogan to portray your companion Angel but not Killbane, which was a huge mistake and was one of the biggest miscasting opportunities the game had. Killbane does very little during the game apart from blow up a bridge the main character is on, kill a side character and wait until you finally decide to fight him. And by the time you fight him he is just annoying.
The protagonist lets Matt Miller go after a surprisingly decent mission called Deckers.Die. Which made no sense to me, and still doesn't.
In Saints Row 2, the player makes all of his decisions. The protagonist is a pro-active character. He/She actually feels like a leader and someone who leads a group of people, who has a clear goal and motivation. In Saints Row 3 the protagonist is just told what to do and frequently has to ask other characters what he/she should be doing.
I could really go on for ages about how the storyline to Saints Row 3 made no sense to me, and had zero weight to it. Almost everyone I know doesn't remember anything that happened during the game apart from the actual good missions like the Penthouse assault at the start or Deckers.Die. Nothing happens during the game.
Most people tell me "just ignore the story" but that's not an excuse to me because both previous Saints Row games had storylines I could actually follow and understand. It was the moment I just lost faith in Volition to actually deliver since people just came up with excuses as to why their games weren't good enough.
There was also how bullet spongey the game's gunplay was and how player customization was limited. And the latter was something Volition came up with excuses over, like they had to make the player customization more limited because they wanted to make the game look prettier. Which was proven wrong later because GTA5 came out 2 years later and looked better and had deeper customization on the same console generation.
The game also lacked a true day/night cycle. The day to night cycle was removed to save on processing power. Instead the skybox would change every time you started/ended a mission. This was something Saints Row 2 and almost every sandbox game had.
Every interior location in Saints Row 2 was explorable outside of missions. You could return to the prison you escaped at the start of the game and find collectibles and side missions. You could visit Mr. Sunshine's factory, the headquarters of the Brotherhood, and even Dane Vogel's office before and after you were supposed to outside of missions. In Saints Row 3 there is none of that.
Shaundi, just... Shaundi.
