How Do You Feel About "Spiritual Successors"?

So, I just posted this on the comment section of an AlphaOmegaSin video.

+AlphaOmegaSin Good thing about "Spiritual Successors" is that we get to see some old ideas and old gameplay come back to life. The bad thing about them is that the characters and everything that the spiritual successor is built from cannot be used in the new game. No continuation to the story, no cameos from old characters, nothing that you want to see from the older games will ever be put into the new games. It's awesome that we'll get new characters and everything but, that want that we have for the characters and stories that we want to see continued won't ever be met. I doubt MNo.9 or Bloodstained will stop me from wanting to play as Mega Man again in a new game or will stop me from wanting to see another Belmont, Alucard etc. vs. Dracula standoff.

Who else feel my pain?

I'm with you.

A huge part of a games identity is in it's characters, worlds and art, even if the gameplay is just as good they'll always lose something in trying to recapture the same feeling with a mostly different team and often less resources available.

Yeah I like them and all but for me the original characters, world, and storyline are still very important to me.

I love em, but I see the issue you are describing. However, for many of the spiritual successors that -I- like, that doesn't matter because they weren't character based. War for the Overworld is an SS of Dungeon Keeper, so while I miss some of the specific monsters they had in the original it's more the core game that I cared about. Satellite Reign is nearing completion and is an SS for the original Syndicate games, which also had no real "characters". Star Citizen carries forward the Privateer-type games, but I'm not really bummed at not bringing forward the Wing Commander universe which had at least 7 games that I know of.

-Byshop

Gaming is about the only medium i can think of where 40+ sequels to a franchise is okay (i know Megaman is well over that mark and people still want more). You get a movie to five sequels and you have people clamoring for it to die. Gamers just can't let anything go.

I look at it from the standpoint of sympathy for the developers...seems like i'm always reading these interviews from new devs with questions about why they started this new studio and them giving answers like "so we could something that wasn't Warcraft" or insert overdone franchise of choice. Give a guy a break and let him do something new. The reason we have these spiritual successors in the first place is because devs move on, but gamers make publishers feel like they're not allowed to, so the franchise gets handed off to some new set of poor bastards who will spend the next 10 years slaving away on the same franchise for a group of gamers acting like a five year old with their favorite muppets episode - "again, again!"

On the other hand, I wouldn't mind seeing creative franchising where the same world was explored with multiple gaming genres. Problem with that is every time you try it, you get people bitching..."that's not a real Syndicate/TES/whatever game." As if it can't be fun unless it's exactly the same game design.

It is nice to see ideal comes back like Pillars of Eternity. It was great to have a RPG that you could Role play in unlike most current day RPGs.

Yet, I find it disheartening to see developers riding the coat tails of their older games.

"I doubt MNo.9 or Bloodstained will stop me from wanting to play as Mega Man again in a new game or will stop me from wanting to see another Belmont, Alucard etc. vs. Dracula standoff."

Too bad? These game aren't made to help you with your "can't let go" problems. It's a video game, have fun.

Actually, some are. Inafune created MNo.9 to be as close to Mega Man as possible. There is a game on the 3DS called Mighty Gunvolt which features and is the first official appearance of Beck in a video game. His gameplay is exactly, 100% the same as Mega Man on the NES. The only difference is that the sprite is not Mega Man. If you look at MNo.9 footage, you'll notice that a bunch of characters are borderline copyright infringement.

You are also assuming I have some kind of heavy nostalgia preventing me from moving on, I think that is rather cute since that is not the case. If I want to play old video games, I will play old video games. I have absolutely no problem with new games. My comment to Alpha were the ups and downs of these "spiritual successors". Making the games look and play almost exactly like the games who's foundation is built upon will still have people wishing it were the actual old game rather than one that is almost completely the same. Apparently that point was missed and I got a douche response for it.

Sometimes they feel good, e.g. Dark Souls. Other times they look extremely derivative, e.g. Might No. 9 . It probably depends largely on how many games were in the previous series there are already 20+ Megaman games; I have no desire to play another one.

I apologize if I came off as a douche (internet anonymity got the better of me). It makes sense what you say. MNo9 is so close to megaman in gameplay and look that it is almost the same but the name. I remember some folks thought that capcom would take legal action against inafune.

I admit defeat.

I think it all depends on "Are they good?". If game can pull off to feel and play like something you enjoyed, then I don't see any problem with it. It dose not need characters and story, it just needs atmosphere and gameplay.

i'm lifting this up, because i can haz opinionz!

a lot of talk around lately about how these old pieces of crap should be left rot in piece, and they will only be crappy revivals of boring gameplay from the old days, and i mostly agree with it. only exception being Bloodstained. metroidvania was born from Castlevania SotN, and died with that title right after. that game defined how great a 2D game can be, and it's downright baffling that it hasn't been used properly after it. sure, some handheld titles were made, but i don't play on handhelds, so i was left cold and bitter. now, almost 20 years later, STILL no ambitious metroidvanias have emerged. few half-assed indie attempts, and one semi-great one (it was really short) in the form of Shadow Complex, but that's about it.

we are only getting crap-loads of simple and straight-forward action/puzzle side-scrollers, indies or remakes of the originals, but who the f*** wants them? we played them more than enough back in the days. if you do 2D games in this day and age, please for the love of goddammnhellshit, DO IT BY THE HIGHEST COMMON DENOMINATOR, WICH WAS SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT!

and FINALLY, mr. Igarashi himself has stepped in to punch all indie-hipster-devs into the face and show how 2D games (2,5D, but i mean gameplay-wise) are supposed to be made! about goddamn time!

end of rant. good day, dear fellow nostalgy junkies.

edit: honorable mention to Ori and the Blind Forest. it had some actual substance. i enjoy a lot of modern indie titles' visuals, but i always end up thinking "looks nice, but... i wish the gameplay would be as ambitious. like good ol' sotn... *hrrh*"

TLDR: i have really fond memories of many, many 2D titles, but only Castlevania SotN is the one relevant enough even today, that i'm dying to get back into it.

It's the safest way to avoid copyright issues. I'll take Spiritual successors over waiting for a new game from stubborn publishers who'd rather let their IP die than make a new game.

Are we only talking about unlicensed spiritual successors, or are we also including "official" spiritual successors like BioShock, Dark Souls, and whatnot?

Both.

I think they're important in that they allow developers to continue on with their own concepts with a greater degree of creative control than is allowed under a publisher who actually holds the rights. We're seeing an entire movement within the industry based on this, not just with Mighty No 9 and Bloodstained, but other titles like Formula Fusion and Yooka-Laylee.

Yeah. Bravery Default is another spiritual successor to Final Fantasy The 4 Heroes Of Light as well. There are actually a lot of spiritual successors out there that I don't even know about yet, pretty cool stuff.

I feel those are two vastly different categories, and my feelings for one are much stronger than the other.

"Legit" spiritual successors like Portal or BioShock where the developers had access to the original IP and could have made a straight-up sequel, but decided to go a whole new direction for whatever reason is something I love. That's how we got Devil May Cry, Assassin's Creed, and to a certain extend Shadow of the Colossus.

The big problem with some of the "illegitimate" spiritual successors like M#9 and Yooka-Laylee is that, since the developers don't have the original IP, the only way they can make their games feel like successors is to copy the same gameplay and themes from the originals. Whereas someone with the Mega Man license can make games like Legends or Battle Network and still have the spirit of Mega Man, developers without the IP can't do that without them feeling like entirely different games. So they have no choice but to copy the gameplay and themes directly, which makes those games closer to rip-offs like True Crime or Dante's Inferno than it does spiritual successors.