I’m reeaaally sorry Mega Man…..
Many sequels reset your protagonist back to level 1, but some resets are more painful then others. This video explores a handful of sequel resets that I had the hardest time forgiving growing up, and explores why they were so good that they hurt.
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Videos we mention in this essay:
Games that Start you from nothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGLjp66kiDw&t=22s
Made My Girlfriend Play Mass Effect 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_uLOsnktYE&t=3s
Made My Girlfriend Play Kingdom Hearts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voUBs4wdE0A&t=180s
Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories Side By Side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9OzRtY3DF4&t=1s
Made My Girlfriend Play Kingdom Hearts 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEyopLgnuMY&t=508s
Games featured in video:
Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Ratchet and Clank, Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando, Metroid Dread, Metroid Fusion, Super Metroid, Megaman Legends 2, God of War, God of War 2, God of War 3, Pikmin, Pikmin 2, Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts 2, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, Golden Sun, Golden Sun: The Lost Age
Music List:
Stickerbrush Symphony (Super Smash Bros. Brawl)
Dracula’s Castle (Symphony of the Night)
Metropolis (Ratchet and Clank)
Main Theme (God of War 2)
Title Theme (Pikmin)
Title Theme (Pikmin 2)
Hollow Bastion (Kingdom Hearts)
The Opened Way (Shadow of the Colossus)
Main Menu (Baldur’s Gate 3)
Warrior’s Truth (God of War Ascension)
Mounting Efforts to Escape (Oxygen Not Included)
Sinister Sundown (Kingdom Hearts 2)
The 13th Struggle (Kingdom Hearts 2)
Waltz of the Damned (Kingdom Hearts 2)
The Final Battle (God of War 3)
The Elemental Stars (Golden Sun)
The Roost (Animal Crossing)
You Go Girl (Disgaea: Hour of Darkness)
Fuka’s Theme (Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten)
source
What when you don't reset like banjo kazooie or ff4 the after year or dead space
Sometimes I try to think of game design ideas in my free time (despite not having the programming skill or ambition to make them reality), and one idea I've always been curious to see made was a power regression system. Most games get progressively more difficult by adding stronger enemies to counteract the new powers/weapons a player gains throughout their journey. I was wondering if it would be possible to have enemies that are relatively similar in strength throughout the story, but you start with all the power and abilities and lose them through the game.
This escalates the difficulty by tying an increasing amount of hands behind your back. You can even add strategy to it by allowing people to choose what abilities they want to lose in what order, although forcing the order could be a design choice as well. By the time you reach the final boss, you will hopefully be skilled enough that you're able to defeat him despite the lack of your training wheels. People already do this to an extent when replaying games with challenge runs (pokemon nuzlockes, "no items" runs, "no healing" runs, etc.), so I would assume there would be a way to bake it into a proper gameplay system.
This video made me realize that a power regression could potentially be the perfect solution for sequel resets. Instead of losing all the Mcguffins you spent the first game collecting at the beginning, instead you slowly reset your power through the entirety of the sequel by giving your Mcguffins away (maybe leaving them behind to protect the places you save after you move on, idk). Then if they make a third entry in the series, viola it's already reset the power to do a standard progression. I suppose if people like the power regression system of the second more, you might be stuck with a power reset problem again in the opposite direction (how did you get your power back in between games?). Oh well, I guess no solution is perfect.
I don't know of any specific games that have a power regression system in them, but if anybody knows please tell me. I'd be curious to see how they play in reality.
NOT THE MEGAN MAN LEGENDS! FLUTTER FOREVER BABY
Meanwhile Pillars of Eternity 2 be like: "Remember that giant statue buried below your castle? Yeah, a fucking god who was supposed to be dead just possessed it and started walking. It destroyed e everything you had, killing you and over 300 people in the process. Oh, it also absorbed half of your soul, that's why when I send you back to your body you'll feel weaker "
Mmmm the Elemental Stars theme. Girlfriend plays Golden Sun coming?
Quest for Glory does NOT reset you EVER over the course of 5 Games. They just raise the stakes every game.
make your girlfriend play megaman legends please!
Dad-a-chum? Dum-a-chum? Ded-a-chek? Did-a-chick?
Forget that, give us Neon white already
We want to know, what's a sequel reset you can't forgive?
I like totk's reset
Honestly my favourite "reset" a sequal has would be Path of Radience to Radiant dawn where the units you promoted, level capped and had capped stats would get transfer bonuses going into the sequal game in the form of a boost to the capped stats and a weapon exp boost aswell (it also helps that the units are generally better too in that game too compared to others)
Miitopia has several resets in the one game
The kingdom hearts thing goes one step further: they dont just make a game justifying the reset, they then give sora CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT based around the reset (and all subsequent ones via dreams, norting, etc). Sora has actual character stuff going on because of the toll having to relearn everything takes on his self esteem and its kinda neat
I couldn’t forgive horizon forbidden west. Sorry, it just disrespected how ridiculously skilled and forward thinking Aloy was.
Then theres doom eternal. You keep your abilities, so you still feel like a god at first but lose your weapons but get most of them early. In exchange, the game is a fuckton harder after the 2nd level
I like Pikmin 2 but I understand the anger over the reset. The reset I'm much more bothered by OUTSIDE of that is how you never get the Dolphin back. Like, once you make a ton of money in Pikmin 2, you don't buy the Dolphin back, you get the other ship some new gold plating. When the 2nd ship showed up in Smash Bros. Brawl as Olimar's ship during the story I got embarrassingly angry (I think the trophy even calls it the Dolphin)
You finally get it back at some undisclosed point between 3 and 4 but like… you didn't get it for all your troubles, it just kinda happens offscreen.
The Metroid series really is all over the place because while some of the early ones don't bother, sometimes the loss can feel way worse when it's justified poorly. Like, I love Metroid Prime, but having your stuff lost justified by "no you don't get it, she got hit really hard by that one random explosion" is probably the worst one in the series. Probably my favorite one is the jump between Prime 2 and Prime 3, because in P2 like half your items are from the Luminoth, and it makes sense that Samus would give them back because she's a good person.
you should check out Ori series will of the wisps does the reset amazingly
I will never forgive Roll for selling the equipment i spent hours grinding to max out… 😢This is why Tron is better haha
GoW 1 to 2 to 3 : I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE
GoW2018 : I AM SAD
You know, if I didn't just happened to be browsing the GBA games in Target while Christmas Shopping in 2004, I probably would have missed Chain Of Memories for a good…several months or so.
I loving the use of the music from Ratchet and Clank 2 👏🏼
1:02 Oh hey, I see me!
More games should have save file checks to see your progression in the previous game. I know it would be hard to design but it's so cool. KCD II will be so good. I heard you can choose in the beginning what you did in the first game.
The previous gen Armored Core games all had a mechanic similar to the one in Golden Sun: The Lost Age where you could transfer parts you'd earned from a previous game in the generation to the next to give yourself more options in the garage from the get-go, and while they're definitely helpful to have, they actually weren't game-breakingly overpowered because of how the Armored Core games are balanced. Really ahead of their time, and I'm hoping to see the tradition continue with any potential follow-ups to AC6.
One game that does a reset really well is INfamous 2. In the first game, Cole builds up his super powers due to the machinations of the first games main antagonist. It is revealed at the end of the game that the main antagonist of the first game was preparing Cole to stop an all powerful entity simply called 'The Beast', where all the horrible things the final boss does was to make sure Cole could defeat this 'beast' when he finally arrives.
So the start of the second game begins with the Beast arriving in the city with Cole rushing to go and fight it, having all the abilities from the first game and…he loses. He throws everything he had at the Beast and not only does it not work as The Beast just regenerates from all the damage, it even grabs Cole and absorbs his power, resetting Cole to level one metaphorically. This opening validates the first game's final boss' fear of the Beast because even with being fully upgraded and strong, you can't defeat the Beast and he even depowers you. The fears were justified and a very powerful threat brought you back to zero, not some random thing that was never established.
Kingdom Hearts is just funny to me
CoM: We use cards here
2: Amnesia
3Ds: You have to retrain from 0
3: Training got ruined, go ask Herc how to hero
There's an odd case in God of War 3 where the game begins literally where GoW2 ended. Kratos and the Titans are fully powered and storming Mount Olympus
When gameplay starts though, Kratos only has the Blades of Athena, Blade of Olympus, and 1 magic spell. Where did everything else go?
All this is before he gets booted off the mountain and is officially level drained again
Devil may cry has dante sell his weapons between games to afford living expenses. Sadly no reasons behind why he loses his moveset
My favorite reason even though it's retroactive and not included in the games themselves is that the devs said Dante sells all his weapons between games for pizza money.
I always found it funny how there's no explanation for the reset in any yakuza game besides the first one. My guy Kiryu just keeps forgetting how to tiger drop but theres only like a year between the games
When it comes to power scaling, you can either up the power of the enemies or lower the power of the players.
To me, the biggest issue with GoW's resets was there simply wasn't a reason for it. Kratos' enemies would be stronger as the original trilogy wore on, going from mythical creatures, to demigods, to the gods themselves.
While I'll always love the original big 3, I'll never understand why they bothered to nerf Kratos when you could better explain his present weakness by simply pointing out he's a young, inexperienced god with a lot to learn coming up against greater and greater foes.
I think you should play the trails series because it has some good resets and some unforgettable one too.
Introducing a new protagonist is probably the best way to justify a reset. They're the new guy so it makes sense that they would have to spend some time catching up to the previous protagonist. The pokemon games understood this better than the show.
The first thing that came to my mind at the start of the video was the original ratchet and clank trilogy too haha, it's weird that he couldn't bring any weapon, but they brought the swing shot and the grind boots, and left them in Clank's apartment
Edit: at least when you rescue Clank he already has the helipack, thrusterpack and hydropack
To be fair to castlevania bosses hardly have hp anyway
The reason why there isn't a reset between Golden Sun and The Lost Age is that TLA isn't a sequel. It's one game split over two cartridges because they couldn't fit it all on one. This is why they put so much effort into being able to transfer your characters, djinni and items over to TLA. If the GBA could have handled the game as it were ambitiously intended, you wouldn't have needed to transfer, it'd have all just been there.
On that tangent, what I'd love to see is a Golden Sun remaster/remake which combines the two GBA titles into the one game they were meant to be, with some obvious QoL features added to update it for modern sensibilities.
Fortunately in Pikmin 3 there is a datafile of Olimar saying that he plans to buy back his ship "The SS Dolphin" after collecting enough treasure
'bout to get another amazing power reset in KC;D2
Henry at the end of KCD was a deamon of death.
19:24 you don’t talk about it but you should’ve IMO. Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor are pretty solid with it but not quite perfect. Could’ve been a great segue into the ones that did it perfectly.
The Mario and Luigi series has interesting resets, it’s mostly standard reset but there is always a narrative moment in each game of Mario and Luigi receiving their hammers.
Superstar Saga: crafted by two hammer smiths
Partners in Time: given to baby Mario and baby Luigi by two hammer bros
Bowser’s Inside Story: found within Bowser among other junk he inhaled
Dream Team: found someone’s lost pair of hammers, got to keep them because that person already bought replacements
Brothership: they are crafted
Funnily enough Paper Jam is the only game where Mario and Luigi have their hammers from the start, and despite their hammers being crafted in Brothership the hammer is an equipment piece so those handmade hammers will soon be replaced by stronger store bought hammers
Honestly, if you're playing through Megaman Battle Network it's kind of funny how he has these ridiculously overpowered Chip Folders, and Megaman has gotten to being super duper powerful and then in the next game it's like, he has a new PET, Megaman's given up his powers or something and Lan has to start over with a fresh deck and beginning chips again.
I hate whenever the game forces me to lose, even in a cutscene. It all sort of coalesces into a design prison. All fights should be winnable since every fight is a test for the player. The player character should only be punished for the players failures. This leads to a situation where whether I'm forced to lose in the cutscene or in the gameplay, I'm pissed.
In that sense, I'd prefer them to just not explain why I'm level 5 again although I also don't mind when the reason is exceptionally contrived like pikmin or megaman legends.
I think one way to get around this is to actually let the fight be winnable but insanely hard, like DMC5. This can lead to an immediate alternate ending that sort of says to the player "you did it, you beat the game, now go back and lose like you are supposed to".
Of course I'm sure this varies greatly from person to person. I see games as a series of personal tests where my rewards for passing the test is positive story progression. Thats why it creates dissonance when I'm rewarded for success with negative story progress or if I'm givin a test that cannot be passed no matter what. I'm fully aware a lot of people don't see games that way and probably think it's stupid but oh well.
The spilling of the Bag of Holdings combine the laws of Rance World.
I remember playing Banjo Tooie and being impressed by the fact that it doesn't do any of this, you start out with all the same moves you had in the original game and you get new ones throughout the game. That game went out of it's way to really feel like it takes place some time after the first game. I can't think of any more examples of the exact opposite of the topic of this video but I'm sure there's plenty more. I think maybe the Golden Sun games do it because they kinda do a Mass Effect kinda thing but I didn't really play them yet despite owning both of them so I don't know for sure
I honestly think Pikmin 2's story is pretty in line with the comedy of Pikmin 1. Its not too satisfying but the fact the ship is made up of stupid junk that he just kinda likes or he'll die, his greedy boss being like "fuck you, go back" is honestly pretty funny lol