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Now while this list mostly consists of sequels I haven't played I've heard more then enough horror stories surrounding them to draw a decent conclusion. You may be asking why you would be talking about bad Sequels that you haven't played acting like you know what you're talking about. One reason, I value my time and my money and like to avoid spending either on entertainment that isn't worth it. Besides sometimes you can just tell a sequel is going to shit the bed just by looking at it. So let's go down the list of lost time and investment shall we?
#10 Final Fantasy XIII (All of them)
Yes I'm cheating with these but the internet mostly agrees that Final Fantasy's time during the 7th console generation was nothing short of a monumental disaster. From the boring combat system, the nonsensical leveling, the criminally bad writing to the most unlikable protagonists we've ever seen in a Final Fantasy game it all just amounts to a horrible pretentious mess. Every game in the 13 line had their own problems from the first game being stuck to a giant hall way, 13-2 having a god modding Gary Stu villain on top of one of the worst time travel stories ever created. (Even considering Japan's apparently horrible track record with Time travel stories, for every Madoka Magica and Crono Trigger there's at least 20 Inuyashas and of course the infamous Endless 8 fiasco!) Lightning Returns even takes the message of FF 7, shits all over it and turns Lightning already one of the most unlikable and boring protagonists and turns her into a god damn robot. Supposedly removing all of her emotions and creating a loli version of her to cause chaos whose origins are horrible contradictory and; ugh the more I try to discuss Lumina the more my head starts to split from all the convoluted and contradicting information.
Needless to say FF13 and its sequels seems to have almost killed my interest in the FF franchise which was pretty small to begin with. For the record I've only played 6, 8 (the worst i've actually played) 9 (aka the best one) 10, and some of 10-2. I just hope that Lighting and none of the characters from 13 ever make it into Kingdom Hearts 3. Whenever that'll come out which of course was delayed because Square for some horribly dumb reason pushed that game back to focus on shitting out these turds. So yes Final Fantasy XIII is to blame for Kingdom Hearts 3 being pushed back for so long, fuck you Lightning and the robot horse you rode in on!
#9 Mass Effect 3
Two words can describe every single thing wrong with Mass Effect 3, Electronic Arts. Once again the Unicron of the gaming industry has claimed another victim by getting rid of Mass Effects head writer, replacing him with a guy who hated Mass Effect with the passion of a million flaming hemorrhoids, let him take the franchise and flush it down the toilet by chucking your Shepards history out the window, retconning almost everyone and giving one of the absolute worst endings in recent history. On top of all that they slammed in Multiplayer and online passes to really piss everybody off. Also if you signed onto EA's servers you've most likely been hacked because their security is absolute flaming monkey poop.
Now the reason this is so low on the list is that I was never into Mass Effect in the first place. I'm a Sony guy and since Mass Effect 1 didn't come out on the PS3 until the collection pack was released I never bothered to care. I mean I tried the Mass Effect 2 demo and was repelled almost immediately, from the intimidating character creation screen to the mountains of data logs dumped onto my lap with all these terms and events that I had no idea about it was just the absolute worst way to entice someone new into the franchise. It was like you were transferred to a new class and on your first day you were given a test that you had no prior knowledge about and the teacher hates your guts and couldn't give a shit whether you knew the material or not.
Like "who the hell is Cerberus, why was I brought back to life, why did that bitch shoot that guy, why are robots after me, what is going on?!" Personal history with the franchise aside I do know a bad sequel when I hear it and when EA is involved you know it's going to suck something fierce. Now before you even ask, no I am not getting Mass Effect Andromeda because I refuse to give EA my money. All that's left is to paraphrase Spoony and say this "oh fuck you EA you killed Mass Effect fuck you!"
#8 Sly 4 Thieves in Time
As I said before I'm a big fan of Sly Cooper and I really was enjoying this Game, especially since it gave my PS Vita something to do aside from playing Persona 4 Golden and PS1 rpgs. That is until we got to the fourth level. The villain in that level was a robot called the Black Knight and we later find out the Knight was just a suit controlled by Bentley's girlfriend Penelope. Yep she betrayed Bentley, sold their time travel technology to Le Paradox the big bad for this game and was going on about how she and Bentley could have made a fortune in weapons development but figured that since Sly was holding Bentley's potential with his moral code she decides to help Le Paradox destroy the Cooper family line. Now considering everything that happened in Sly 3 this twist comes out of nowhere and feels like a slap in the face to Bentley and fans of his, that it just drags the whole game down with it.
Personal issues aside there's another narrative problem, namely with some of the ancestors you play as. Aside from Bob and Tennessee Kidd the rest of the ancestors have techniques that they shouldn't know namely Rioichi, Sir Galith and Salim knows Tennessee's rail run and slide techniques and Gallith and Salim knowing Rioichi's ninja spire jump. The ancestors also know their own exclusive techniques which are never mentioned before in the Thevius Racoonus. I mean if the ninja spire jumps are used before Rioichi you think they'd be written before his time where he could have transcribed how to perform his dragon jump instead of something everyone in the Cooper family would have known and perfected before him?
This game also has gameplay problems on top of everything else. I know most people have problems with the motion controls but you can just turn them off. But the developers clearly were trying to do something with the six axis function of the PS3 and Vita, so all that effort can just go out the window. But the biggest problem is the final boss fight. Now the Sly games have had varying degrees of success with their final bosses, the best being Dr M in my opinion. But Le Paradox, just some platforming and quick time events. Your final boss is a quick time event, that gets this spot on the list just for that. Now to wait until Sly 5 shows up and hopefully fixes this mess, you all know it's coming the secret ending makes it clear as crystal, so all that's left to do is wait and see.
#7 Batman Arkham Knight
The PC version was complete guano and that alone deserves a spot on this list. Though there are some other reasons on top of that, most people didn't like the Batmobile and the repetitive fights against the tank drones. The two main villains aren't as interesting as the true villain of Arkham Knight AKA Joker. Scarecrow just drones on and on about fear and what not and as for the titular Arkham Knight, anyone who knows anything about Batman can tell who it is from the first time he opens his mouth. Yep angsty boy himself Jason Todd, though this is one of those cases where they use him correctly, as a villain who stands as a living reminder of one of Batman's greatest failures instead of trying to make him an anti-hero who never shuts his mouth.
His depiction here isn't as good as "Batman Under the Red Hood" but it's still good. Also the Season Pass and DLC was crap. Though thankfully the Riddler Challenges were nowhere near as taxing and numerous as Arkham City. As a conclusion to the Arkham trilogy it's passable but the PC version was simply unforgivable and it would be unprofessional of me to ignore such a horrible crime inflicted on 1 3rd of your paying customers. So WB can choke on the Jokers ashes as far as I care for the horrible butchering of the PC version of the conclusion to one of your biggest franchises.
#6 Kingdom Hearts RE:Coded
Sorry I know this is technically a spinoff but there are events in this game that are cannon to the whole franchise so yes it's a sequel as much as Kingdom Hearts 2 so it's on the list. Gameplay wise this is the weakest game in the franchise and also the ugliest looking. Though considering that the game involves removing bugs from the data in Jiminys journal I can't help but think that was part of the joke. We don't even play as Sora in this one just a data copy of him that eventually becomes his own being. The only saving grace for this is that they remastered all the relevant cutscenes and plot points of this game in the 2.5 collection as a 3 hour long movie so now people don't even have to go through the trouble of hunting down the old DS game on Amazon anymore. And really when the only redeeming feature of your game is not having to play it, you know it sucks.
#5 Mega Man X6
I know people would have expected X7 to take this spot but I can't since at least X7 experimented with the 2d to 3D gameplay. It didn't work and they hid the ability to play as fucking X behind the grinding busy work of rescuing Reploids in the Maverick stages. But guess where that mechanic was taken to its absolute worst degree? You guessed it X6, my spot for this list.
Keiji Inafune cleary wrote and planed for the Mega Man X series to stop with X5 and holy crap does it show here. The plot is uninteresting, the maverick bosses are boring and unnecessary as if you take out High Max in any of the stages you can jump straight to Gate's stages. But since you have to get all of X's armor parts to make it through the bosses are still required to be beaten so why even give us the option to skip them? Also yes the Reploid rescue system is back and even worse since not only do some of them have upgrade components but there's the new Nightmare Virus that turns them into enemies if you take too long. Also if they turn bad they're gone for good and so is their potential upgrade, and since most of the ones that do have them are hidden in very hard to reach places and the Nightmare is more often then not very close once you see them, you're screwed.
Not to mention every two stages or so Dynamo shows up to fight X and Zero if nothing else because Capcom didn't know what to do with the guy after X5 and they wanted to pad the game out. Speaking of reoccurring bad guys Sigma is easily the worst he's ever been in the series here. Now narratively I get why he's all broken and crazy here but still why did you include him here anyway? I mean in X5 it was very heavily hinted that he was working with some remaining figment of Dr Wily so why not go with that? Have Wily be the real mastermind as he pretended to be loyal to Gate, stab him in the back and and admit to using Gate and Sigma as part of some grand final world domination scheme as well as completing his revenge against Light by destroying X as well as Zero, himself a failed experiment in Wily's eyes?
Batman Arkham Knight is owned by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Rocksteady Studios and DC Comics
Final Fantasy 13 is owned by Square-Enix, Motomu Toriyama and Yoshinore Kitase.
Kingdom Hearts is owned by Square Enix, Disney Interactive Studios, Tetsuya Nomura, and Shinji Hashimoto.
Mass Effect 3 is owned by Bioware and Electronic Arts.
Mega Man x 6 is owned by Capcom and Tokuro Fujiwada.
Sly Cooper: Thieves in time is owned by Sony Computer Entertainment of America and Sanzaru games.
