It needs to be the immediate sequel, not a few down the line. Final Fantasy VI is a lot better than Final Fantasy I, but there games inbetween that gradually improved the series.
Biggest jumps in quality I’ve seen are:
Zelda Breath of the Wild - I was a huge fan of the series, but the amount of things improved in this sequel are so huge, it relaunched and made the series amazing again
Witcher 3 - Witcher 2 actually gets a middling to negative review from me. The third Witcher game improved almost as many things as Breath of the Wild did. It’s an incredible leap in quality in all areas.
I think Assassin’s Creed 2 is often on these lists and it is a huge improvement, but it actually feels more like a finished game while the first game is just a demo. I also find Assassin’s Creed frustrating to control and kind of un-fun a lot of the times, so I still can’t give it much credit here.
What other sequels improved tremendously on their predecessor?
Have you played Witcher 1? I’ve only touched a few minutes of Witcher 2, but it and the third are every different. Definitely a jump from 2 to 3, but I can’t help but think there’s a bigger gap from 1 to 2.
As a suggestion for another game, Street Fighter 2.
There has to be a first one, but I don’t think I’ve even seen it.
It might be cheating because of the change in developers, but no one cares about Treyarch’s Call of Duty 3 whereas Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4 was such a masterpiece that Activision continues to invoke the name “Modern Warfare” for its subsequent sequels a decade later. Call of Duty 4 is the pivot point that turned Call of Duty from a series of lacklustre 7/10 shooters to the modern juggernaut it is today.
Out of the games I’ve played in the past 20 years, I might vote for GTA Vice City as a big improvement over GTA 3. I also tried playing Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, but I found it almost unplayable compared to ES: Morrowind, which I played for many, many hours (back in the day).
For older games, I remember thinking Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was a big leap forward from Ultima III.
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin was a huge improvement over Hitman (1). The second game was a fully realized Hitman game as we’ve come to know them, while the first game was so raw it was almost just a demo. Even the developers thought the first game was so crappy, they essentially remade it for the next sequel, Contracts.
Mass Effect 2 vastly improved upon the original by getting rid of the need to upgrade your weapons and armor all the time. The characters were even more relatable, and bigger things happened.
I don’t play a lot of video games, but this is the one I was going to mention. I started with Mass Effect 2 and loved it, then went back to play the original. I was expecting it to be a less technically polished game with older graphics, but while it wasn’t a completely different game, it had a lot of substantially worse gameplay. There’s one mission in particular where you’re supposed to drive a ground vehicle with counter-intuitive controls around a planet that’s boring, frustrating, and doesn’t tie into the plot or characters, which are the strengths of the Mass Effect franchise. I rarely even play this sort of video game, yet I’ve played through Mass Effect 2 and 3 multiple times. I never got past that ground vehicle mission in 1.
I actually liked Witcher 2 over 3. I found the third one too large, and frequently ended up doing quests for 1xp, the story meandering and 25 minute cutscenes with absolutely no way out (being captured for the vikings one I do remember playing late at night and going “THERE’S MORE OF THIS”?). 3 ended up being one I’ve taken forever to complete (still haven’t but its on a laptop in my work) wheras 2 was much more coherent, felt part of a story and I remember a whole lot of it.
On same scale, I prefer Batman: Arkham Asylum over all the rest. Not sure why. Just worked better for me.
To me it’s Quake 2. That’s modern gaming to me, pretty much germinated.
I did play GTA 2, and loved the style, but GTA 3 was such a jump (though it kept the humourous style of 2, along with the VC and San Andreas, but it was lost by GTA 4 though).
Portal 1 was a short but interesting game. Portal 2 was such a huge improvement that I have heard many people say that Portal 1 is just training for Portal 2.
The Mako is one of the central game mechanics in ME1. You spend about half the game driving that thing around, unless you completely ignore planet exploration.
They did improve the handling a lot in the Legendary edition, though.
I was considering saying this one, but I love Portal 1. It’s simplicity and conciseness and humour in itself was needed before the much more complicated Portal 2.
The speed and bounce and “portalable” paint made Portal 2 much more of a mind bender, so there was need for a simpler start up.
Final Fantasy is a weird one, since most of the games in the series are stand-alone stories (though they frequently use recurring character and place names).
That said, the original release of Final Fantasy XIV (which, unlike most of the FF games, was an MMO) was a hugely disappointing mess, and one of the few titles in the series which wasn’t successful. Square Enix then developed a “reboot” of XIV (called “Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn”), which was set in the same game world, with some of the same characters, but set five years after the “original” game was concluded; unlike the original version, A Realm Reborn was far better realized, and became a hit (and has grown in popularity with each of its expansions). I don’t know if that techncially qualifies as a “sequel,” however.
Ha, I remember I got through the first one, and then had another one of those missions like 30 minutes later. That’s when I realized ME wasn’t for me. I’ve thought about playing 2 or 3 but never gave them a chance.