FC4 is far more FC3 than FC5. Though the magical realism stuff features in all of them. I’d say FC4 is the peak of the games, with FC5 being more technical but far more meh to me.
SR2 was my entry point, and I liked it a lot. I can’t remember many issues with it.
FC4 is my favorite. FC5 was okay excerpt for that horrible kidnapping mechanic constantly stomping all over the pacing. However, for purposes of the thread, FC3 was a much more significant change from FC2 than any of the later games. Setting or story aside, FC4 was basically the previous game but with gyrocopters and elephants.
Rocket League is a tremendous improvement on Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars.
For me, I’d use Arkham City as my example of an extremely improved game sequel.
Arkham Asylum had great graphics (for the time but I think they mostly hold up), a fantastic story, very innovative gameplay, and a totally broken combat system. At least on the Xbox where I played it, the “attack” button meant “attack some random enemy”. It didn’t attack the nearest enemy, or the one you were facing, or anything. It attacked someone at random. So it often had me going out of position, putting myself into the way of an attack, and so on. I really liked the game despite that and struggled through it until toward the end of the game before finally giving up on it. I tried so hard to love it but it was broken.
Arkham City fixed it. I think that the technology finally caught up to their vision. Other games with the same combat system (Mad Max, Shadow of Mordor/War) work very well. I feel like Arkham Asylum was the prototype and as a result it was a buggy, horrid mess. So again I consider Arkham City to be a dramatic improvement.
I’m mixed on these. I loved the mostly enclosed environment of the first game, but it was also super fun to fly around the city.
I played Arkham Asylum on Xbox when it came out, and it was one of about a dozen games that I got 100% completion on. I never noticed any problem with the combat system, or that there was a significant change to it between the first and second games. I replayed it on Steam during quarantine (not to 100%, but I beat the game) and still found the combat to be fun and intuitive.
Weird. To me it felt like night and day. Like a light switch that actually turns the light on compared to one that doesn’t.
Interesting. I had a similar experience to Miller, in that they both played the same for me. Have you gone back and played Arkham Asylum again?
I’d say Diablo 2 and WarCraft 2 were night and day improvements over their predecessors (not so much Diablo3 or WarCraft 3 or StarCraft 2 though). Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 also significant improvements. Freespace 2 is a damned masterpiece of a free space shooter that’s still in the top of the genre (albeit with mods for modern hardware) today.
Agreed with all of Tie Fighter, Street Fighter 2, GTA3, and Super Mario Bros 3 above.
I would say Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past but I don’t think it’s fair to judge this one across console generations. Likewise, series like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy don’t really have sequels per se (except stuff like X-2), so I’m not sure they should count.
I’ll do you one better… two second games which were markedly better than the first and the third.
Art of Fighting: Abortive effort done primarily as a giant middle finger to Capcom by a jilted Street Fighter developer, and it showed. Incredibly rough, clunky controls, rough graphics, especially the near-far scrolling, crude sound and voice effects, and a dose of SNK Boss Syndrome. On top of that, there were some bizarre design decisions (Have to get to Mr. Big and Mr. Karate before playing them in vs.? WTH?). Remembered for the “shocking” reveal of King’s bra and pretty much nothing else.
Art of Fighting 2: Huge improvement, actually felt like a complete game. Smooth, intuitive, rock-solid controls, specials that worked, faster-paced, tighter gameplay, and plenty of humor in the character interactions. Topped by undoubtedly the best incarnation of Yuri Sakazaki, back at the time when fighting game heroines were allowed to be tall and powerful. One of my favorite Neo Geo games ever.
Art of Fighting 3: Richer graphics, but that’s about the only good thing I can say about this. Combat was slow and awkward, and it seemed like I couldn’t even do what I wanted half the time. New characters were bland and completely forgettable. The story was largely nonsensical, with none of the humor of 2. The backgrounds were generic. Yuri was reduced to a lame sidekick. This is one of those games where I asked “Who thought this needed to exist?”
WWF Super Wrestlemania: The first ever WWF game for the Super NES, which represents the grand total of its positives. Featuring ten crude representations of WWF wrestlers, each with the exact same moves and numbers…not even a single finisher! The animation was super-clunky, the gameplay was like an 18-wheeler in quicksand, the sounds were what you’d expect from a 9-year-old playing with an electronic keyboard, and there were three, count 'em , three options, single, tag team, and Suvivor Series (i.e. 4-a-side tag team). One of those games that made me extremely grateful that “rental” was a thing back in the 90’s.
WWF Royal Rumble: The closest thing to “endless replayability” I’ve seen in a console game. What can I say, not only did it fix all the problems from Super Wrestlemania, it is a romp. The greatest thing about it is the dominance meter, which makes this one of the extremely few games where you can literally make it as hard as you want by adjusting your control settings. Can you imagine even a PS3 game giving you this kind of freedom, much less PS4 or XBox One? I’ve conquered every challenge hundreds, hundreds of times, and to this day it’s still a blast fighting through a tournament or Royal Rumble. Best SNES game ever! I mean it! 
WWF Raw: Played this a few times when I was young and foolish, but even mid-20’s me soon came to realize what an utter pile of crap this was. LJN took everything that was fun and free and wonderful about Royal Rumble and destroyed it. Throws now went all over the place and slammed into ropes all the time, leading to frustrating, ineffectual grappling, strikes were now utterly worthless since the computer just dodged them all the time, high damage throws had crippling restrictions and/or could be timed with a calendar, and the computer got a massive advantage on the dominance meter. Oh, did I mention the “sleeper hold”, a massive-damage, completely indefensible and inescapable hold the computer would slap on you completely at random? And that sometimes it would throw a second full-health opponent at you completely out of the blue? Holy crap. “Raw” must have referred to how everyone felt after playing this.
I would also say identical between all four games.
Star Control (1) was a good game, innovatively combining strategy with arcade space combat.
Star Control II came out 2 years later and it was a massive leap forward. Most of the strategy elements from the first game were removed and replaced with free space exploration and an actual story. It was basically the pixelated 2D Mass Effect of its time. Many gamers and game publications still include it on their lists of the greatest video games ever made, and rightly so.
I haven’t. I own it so I should go check it out again. Of course, I have it on PC so I wouldn’t be having the same experience as I did playing it on my Xbox 360.
Either way, I do have fond memories of everything outside of combat, and if the combat is fine I would probably really enjoy a replay.
I seem to recall the “flow” of the fights in Arkham City being smoother, but I could be misremembering. At any rate, I don’t remember a night-and-day difference.
I’ll admit that both of those games, like most of Squeenix’s releases over the past decade, have fallen victim to having so more lore and backstory written into them that they can’t fit it all into the game. There are parts of the plot of FFXV that I didn’t really understand at all until I read the summary on the wiki, parts that only get explained in the DLC, and parts that would have been explained in the unreleased DLC that got cancelled when the head of creative left the studio (and which subsequently got published in a novel I’m not sure ever got an English release.)
That being said, the finale of FFXV is still one of the greatest endings of any JRPG I’ve ever played, to the point that just thinking about it gets me teary-eyed, and it’s forever recontextualized “Stand By Me” in my mind. It’s a game where the destination really makes the journey worth it.
Heck, I even named one of my cats Lunafreya.
The PC version was, frankly, terrible. Horribad. Terriblight. It was a minimal-effort console port. You needed two different sets of keys to navigate the menu system, and they were really weird choices by default as well.
There was a memory leak big enough to endanger all of Holland, and the game was so badly optimized that it ran poorly on a nearly top-tier computer of the time. I almost wonder if it wasn’t running through a console emulator.
It was, on one hand (especially compared to SR1) bold, audacious and ambitious. It was, on the other hand, one of the worst-written games for PC by any studio working out of a proper office.
(But yet coop, and I can forgive a LOT for coop. And I did, because my wife and I spent a long time being freeform psychopaths with games we made up that I probably shouldn’t name.)
I bought it many years down the line, and perhaps finally fixed by then. I remember 3 being much more weird and the progression sort of broke and looped around at one point leaving me without finishing the story. I think. It’s not clear.
Riven was a huge improvement on Myst, not just in gameplay but most especially in visuals. No subsequent sequel made as big of a leap from its previous than those two, even though they largely all improved as they went.
Fallout 4 was far better than whatever you think is its predecessor, FO3 or FONV. Fallout 4 is literally a game without any limitations. It can be enjoyed without touching the main quest. The world is massive both horizontally and vertically. You can play as good or evil as you please. You can roleplay as a person intent on reestablishing civilization for the people of the wasteland or as a raider lord destroying everything. And of course you have your loyal dog Dogmeat by your side.