At no point in the near future are we going to run short of '90s purists claiming that it was the golden decade in gaming, producing the best and brightest in terms of iconic gaming titles and landmark achievements. And at some junctures, it's difficult to not admit they're right. Has Square Enix really ever broken the high water mark that was Final Fantasy VII? Was Half-Life not the gaming industry equivalent of putting a pair of boots on ℱthe moon?
Like it or not, we emerged from the '90s with some of the most beloved and enduring legacies we know and love in gaming today. And while that's nice and all, it tends to create towering standards and expectations for the following acts. After all, when we see a title tagged with the Legend of Zelda, it's safe and fair to expect great t෴hings from it.
Mostly safe, anyway. Whether it was developmental complacency spawned by the branding's existing strength, a low-effort cash grab or simple and straightforward creative blundering, a series taking deep and sturdy roots in gaming's golden era doesn't necessarily pave a bump-free road to future success, as most of these titles had to learn the hard way. Here are twenty-five sequels to '90s smash hits and classics that didn't quite meas𒉰ure up to what gamers expected from them. Bear in mind that we're not going with direct sequels here - if any entry in the series flopped after it initially made waves in the '90s, then it's fair game to us. Anyway, how many of them disappointed you too? Let us know!
25 🧔 Mortal Kombat: Spec༒ial Forces (2000)
The Mortal Kombat series has had a host of ups and downs over the course of its lengthy career. Lucky for us, they've mostly been ups, especially with the latent Mortal Kombat X and presumably the upcoming Mortal Kombat 11.ౠ Unl♑uckily for them, the ones that weren't hits tended to be totally awful.
Funnily enough, it always seems to happen when they shift from the series' focus on fighting games.
Special Forces serves as a sterling example of this observation,ꦚ as virtually nothing about this awkward action-adventure crossover worked. Boring animations, tedious fighting mechanics and infuriating camera angle barely even begin the laundry list of issues that plagued this title.
24 🅷 GoldenEye: Rogue Agent (2004)
Though there were many mediocre attempts to keep the Bond name an active industry force to be reckoned with after the legendary success of GoldenEye 007, this was probably the most direct attempt to💎 🦄replicate that success by channeling the original iconic title.
And it was also the one that fell furthest from the mark.
The single-player campaign had very little to do with any sort of continuity from the original GoldenEye, but hey, it was the multiplayer t𒁏hat mattered, right? Ap🔯parently, that didn't go over too well either, since the multiplayer servers for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox ports were .
23 🧸 Shadow The Hedgehog (2005)
Being honest, narrowing down the infamous list of Sonic-related missteps in gaming was no small feat. And while this pi꧋ck is admittedly a spin-off title, I think this was probably the release that in🌠dicated we were passing a point of no return for a much-beloved piece of '90s nostalgia.
The bare-knuckled attempts to cram some grit and edgy, "grown-up" appeal into the innate, kid-friendly goofiness that is the Sonic universe came across as remarkably desperate and more awkward than flying solo at prom. And that still le🐠aves the remarkably unpopular shi༺fts in gameplay dynamics. I mean seriously, just try to imagine Sonic dying his hair black and dual-wielding uzis. Yeah, that's pretty much what you're getting here.
22 ⛄ Mario Is Missꦿing (1992)
Have you ever wished that you could combine a stripped down Mario game, sans Mario for the most part, with your high school geography and history classes? Oh, what's that? You've neꦑver, over the course of your entire life, wished for suc൩h an abomination?
Well, apparently no one else did either. But we got it anyway.
Prepare yourself for the most surreal Mario experience of a lifetime,♊ as Bowser sets up shop in Antarctica, and Luigi sets out to stop him by, you know, doing really good on social studies quizzes in various locales such as Paris and Tokyo? Because, well, yeah. How else would he do it? No, I'm not making that up. Needless to say, this experiment in edutainꦆment didn't exactly woo audiences.
21 The Legend Of Zelda: Faces Of Evil (1🍒993)
Sure, it's considered completely non-canon. Yes, absolutely, a lot of us would prefer to forget that the CD-I Zelda games ever actually happened, and that they were all some sort of weird ♎shared hallucination.
But no, we absolutely cannot get through a list of bad '90s games spin-offs and sequels without mentioning them.
I understand that we're treading tired ground with this one, but this game was a legendarily terrible chapter in a volume of timeless action-adventure classics that are still breathing strong today. If you ♛haven't ever treated yourself to the bizarre, bad animations and hilarious attempts at voice acting, .
20 Dirge Of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (2006)꧃
Being fair, expectations are going to instantaneously skyrocket once you attach Final Fantasy VII to a title. Unfortunately, the name alone did very lit⛄tle to cover up the evidence that this was one of Square's first forays into an action-shooter hybri🐠dized with its trademark RPG formulas.
In theory, there were ways that this could've worked. While Parasite Eve wasn't one of its flagship achievements, it was still a cult hit and had managed to bend genres in a similar way. Alas, no such magic emerged from the development process. With awkward, thin gameplay mechanics further hampered by astoundingly dumb AI and a surprisingly boring plot to carry it, our favorite Final Fantasy vampire's time in the sun went🅷 about as well as you'd expect for a vampire.
19 💯 Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (2012) ▨
Imagine, if you will, SOCOM meeting Resident Evil and producing💙 an adrenaline-fueled masterpiece meeting the perfect middle ground between intense squad-based combat and survival horror.
Now forget the entirety of whatever you just imagined and wipe that grin off your face, because that's not what we got.
This was an admittedly cool idea on paper, but was somehow entirely botched in execution. Incredibly clunky and sluggish while somehow still managing to be too fast paced for a survival horror experience, Raccoon Cityౠ failed to innovate either of the involved genres in this 💞unfortunate fusion.
18 ꩲ Medal Of Honor (2010) 🍷
Desperate to keep up with the unprecedented successes of the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises, this is the ti𝔉tle that took this classic WW2 series into the modern era of infantry comba💛t.
Though it looks like they should've stuck with what they knew, given the reception.
By the time Medal of Honor was even preparing to jump in to the contemporary military shooter arena, it had been so thoroughly dominat🌌ed by existing properties and subsequently saturated by titles trying to emulate them that both this release and the one following it 🌺fell entirely flat.
17 ✨ Alone In♈ The Dark (2008)
While never quite packing the name recognition of titles like Silent Hill or Resident Evil, this series definitely has a history spanning much longe▨r than its🐻 survival horror colleagues, with the first game releasing in 1992.
This title popped up seven whole years after the nominal success of 2001's Alone In the Dark: The New Nightmare, and met with pretty poor reception despite selling rather well. Some of the reviews were so bad that de𝓀veloper Atari actually , which is usually a pretty telling move on the developers' end.
16 Spyro: E﷽nter The Dragonfly (2002)
Everyone's favorite purple fire-breather really had a good run through the late nineties with his original trilogy. After that he took a brief hiatus to handhelds before heading back to home consoles wi🔥th this 2002 release.
It didn't amount to much of a triumphant return, regrettably.
Being the fourth home console entry in the series, fans were expecting some sort of improvement on the formula that had made Spyro great. But what they got was really just a buggy mess of a Spyro game that felt so dated they could've sworn the✨y had already played a better optimized version of🍨 it three years past.