10 Sequels That Are Better Than The Originals (2)

Yep.  It's time for the second part of my 10-part series-a-majig. Where I count down a list of sequels that are a million times better than the games that came before. So, what game will we be looking at this time?

#9: Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (PC)

That's right, it's none other than the sequel to one of the stranger games to ever exist (but no less entertaining because of it), Abe's Oddysee!



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You know...Abe's Oddysee!



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By Oddworld Inhabitants?

You play a skinny blue alien guy who escapes a meat factory? Get shot at and eaten a lot? Any of that ring a bell?

You sorry excuse for a human being.

In Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, you play as Abe. A Mudokon slave in a gigantic meat processing plant called Rupture Farms. Rupture Farms is run by the evil cigar-smoking Glukkons who are in a panic because of falling profits due to dropping populations of the local wildlife they've been chopping up for their meat products. Molluck the Glukkon is the CEO of Rupture Farms and knows just what to do about that little problem. Chop up the workers!

Abe overhears their plan while working late at the factory, and is understandably a bit freaked out. Thus, the goal for the first part of the game is escaping from Rupture Farms and rescuing your fellow slaves along the way. You do this by utilizing the interesting "Gamespeak" function. Each of the number keys is assigned to a different phrase that you can make Abe say. 1 is "hello," 2 is "follow me," 3 is "wait," etc. When you come across a Mudokon, you alert him by saying "hello," then get him to follow you to a portal where you can free him. In most cases this is easier said than done, as getting them to said portals often requires navigating a multitude of death traps.

Abe also has the ability to chant. Chanting opens the escape portals, and allows Abe to take control of certain enemies, most notably the Sligs. Sligs are the security guards of Rupture Farms. They carry machine guns and will shoot you (and any Mudokons who happen to be following you) on sight. Fortunately, they're extremely vulnerable to each others' bullets. UNfortunately, another part of Rupture Farms' security involves floating orbs that painfully zap Abe whenever he tries chanting. Sometimes they can be destroyed, but other times the lack of chanting is part of the puzzle.

You get infinite lives, so you're free to experiment with each area for as long as you need. But be careful if you've recently rescued some particularly difficult Mudokons. If you die before reaching a checkpoint, they'll get reset and you'll have to do it again.

And again.

And again.

AND AGAIN.

AND AGAIN.

Even when you have a certain puzzle DOWN TO A SCIENCE,  you'll end up getting killed by your own carelessness inches away from finishing it and having to do it all over again five more bloody times. This is a TREMENDOUS pain in the ASS if you're going for all 99 Mudokons. Hell, it's hard enough just FINDING some of the little bastards. There's a secret area with 2 of them HIDDEN ON LITERALLY THE VERY FIRST SCREEN OF THE GAME. I'm talking the MINUTE you get control of Abe for the first time.

I never even beat the game without cheating until a couple years or so ago, and I still got the bad ending for not rescuing enough Mudokons. 

Everybody who's into video games always has that one obscure game that defined their childhood and nobody else had heard of. (Sure, we had Nintendo, SEGA, and all the other big titles, but these are different.)  Abe's Oddysee was mine.

So. We've established that the first game was already amazing to start. How does Abe's Exoddus manage to top it?

Well, it's about 3 times longer, to start. That's right. In Abe's Oddysee, you had to rescue 99 Mudokons. In Exoddus? There's three. Fucking. Hundred. And they're just as deviously hidden.

Abe's Exoddus, takes place minutes after the good ending of Abe's Oddysee. Abe gets a whack on the head following an accident and has a vision of 3 Mudokon ghosts, who warn him that ancient Mudokon burial grounds are being plundered by another Glukkon-owned company, Soulstorm Brewery. One of Soulstorm Brew's main ingredients is Mudokon bones, hence the grave robbing. The objective of the game is to rescue the rest of the Mudokon slaves and send Soulstorm the way of Rupture Farms. To do this, Abe makes use of quite a few new abilities.

You can chant to control nearly every enemy you encounter, barring the presence of an anti-chant orb. The vicious monsters that tried to eat you in the first game? You can use them as weapons now. And you can also control the Glukkons themselves! They even have their own Gamespeak commands. (Abe can also chant to take possession of his own farts.)

The cutscenes are also more character-focused than the previous game. There's a lot more voice-acting, and the dialog puts this game in my Top 3 funniest games to ever exist. (Right up there with Psychonauts and the Portal games.) Oddysee had an overall fairly dark story with a few little jokes here and there. Exoddus is pretty much the reverse of it. Less dark, more dark humor.

Oh, and the Mudokons have feelings now. Sad and angry ones won't follow you unless you give 'em a pat on the shoulder, but slapping them will drive the sad ones to suicide and the angry ones will fight back. Crazy ones need to be slapped or they'll keep running around like idiots and waking up any nearby Sligs. There's also the blind Mudokons, who will keep walking in a direction until you tell them to stop, regardless of any present dangers.

And, of course, they improved a number of game mechanics that made the original game a right pain in the ass. You can now speak to ALL Mudokons on the screen by using the "All o' ya!" command. So instead of painstakingly guiding each Mudokon to the escape portals, you can lead an army of them! If you die shortly after rescuing them, there is no longer any need to worry about doing it all over again, because there is now A QUICK-SAVE FEATURE. This option may easily be the best addition ever.

Graphics and gameplay-wise, Exoddus is actually not too noticeable an improvement over Oddysee, but in this case, all the subtle changes and improvements definitely make it a worthy sequel.

10 Sequels That Are Better Than The Originals (P1)

Well, I'm back. By which I mean my computer's working again and I have access to Photoshop and all the images I wanted to use for this post.

My original plan was to make a simple Top Ten list (expanding on one I sent in to GameFAQS a while ago) and post all of these in one go. But I realized that even while I was trying to keep each entry relatively short, it still would have been quite a bit of reading.

So I figure I'll get some more updates out of the idea by posting them as a 10-part ongoing thing.

So. Without further not getting to the point...Leko presents...

The idea of this may seem a little redundant. After all, isn't a sequel supposed to be better than its predecessor? Well, yes. But very few actually are, and some turn out to be even worse. 

The intent of this list is to highlight 10 examples of sequels that I feel completely outshine the game that came before. Sequels that are so much more than a simple number tacked on to the original title.

I will now begin.


#10: Dragon Ball Z: Legacy of Goku II (GBA)

Yes, yes, I know. It's a game based on a pre-existing franchise, so of course the original sucked ass!

But MAN did Legacy of Goku suck ass!

Imagine the first Legend of Zelda with Goku in place of Link. Now imagine it slower and clunkier. Imagine the enemies aren't knocked back when you hit them, but rather they stay within attack range and continue hitting you for much higher damage at the same time. Imagine you can't tell important items apart from the background, and  that the very few sound effects the game has are ear-bleedingly terrible.

Congratulations. You've imagined Dragon Ball Z: Legacy of Goku.

 It's a basic adventure game that actually does a fairly decent job of condensing an entire 1/3 of the Dragon Ball Z story (From Raditz to Frieza) into a few hours of gameplay, but that doesn't mean a damn thing when that gameplay is absolute crap.

You've got your standard leveling system where you get stronger by beating up enemies, but there's really no way of telling of how strong you actually are. You level up several times before it simply says "YOUR STRENGTH INCREASED," and the only way to measure how high your strength is is to count how many times you need to punch each enemy. The enemies themselves have no health meters, nor any indication that you've actually done any damage at all to them until they drop dead.

And when I say "no indication," I mean NO. INDICATION. They don't flinch when you hit them. They don't make any sound. And most annoyingly, they DON'T FUCKING MOVE. This leads to numerous situations where you're literally standing on an enemy's toes, hitting him while he hits you. You will lose ridiculous amounts of health fighting the most common enemies.

BUT WAIT! DOESN'T GOKU HAVE ENERGY ATTACKS? LIKE RANGED ONES EVEN?

Yes. But they suck. What a shock, right? You can run from an enemy until they stop chasing you (usually about half a screen's worth of distance) and hit them with an energy blast. Unfortunately, doing this is like trying to knock over a Jenga tower with spit wads. It'll come down eventually, sure. But it takes FOREVER. The famous Kamehameha wave has embarrassingly short range and isn't even worth charging because if you're in range to hit your target, your target is in range to hit you. And he will. There's also the much more useful Solar Flare, which temporarily stuns enemies based on how long you charge it.

You can restore your own health by using herbs and Senzu beans, both of which blend annoyingly well into the background unless you know what you're looking for. The herbs could easily be mistaken for bushes, and the beans are about 3 pixels big.

I would go so far as to say that its only redeeming quality is that the chibi character sprites look awesome, and even those get massively improved in Legacy of Goku 2!

Speaking of which, Legacy of Goku 2 is EVERYTHING the first game should have been.

It continues the story from where the first one left off to the end of the Cell arc, but it seems like it goes a little more in depth than the previous game. It gets more from the story without resorting to an obnoxious number of unnecessary side-quests. It still has them, but they're not so obviously being used for padding.

The art is improved, the sprite animations are smoother, the combat is improved, the save system is improved, the leveling system is improved, everything about it is just better. But if I talked about EVERYTHING that was better, you'd be reading a short novel here. So I'll get to the most important points.

Enemies actually react when hit, and a number appears above them showing how much damage you've done. This means that not only can you better understand how strong you are, but you can actually keep beating on an enemy while approaching him if you carefully time your punches.

As you level up, your stats increase. Rather than just YOUR STRENGTH INCREASED, you have 3 stats: strength (how much damage melee attacks do), power (how much damage energy attacks do) and endurance (how much damage enemy attacks do to you.)

Also, THERE'S MORE THAN ONE PLAYABLE CHARACTER. Which makes the game's title a bit inaccurate, but still! Not only that, but EACH character has their own special energy and melee attacks. Piccolo's Special Beam can go through multiple enemies, Gohan's Masenko acts somewhat like a grenade, Trunks's Burning Attack stuns enemies like the Solar Flare, etc. Saiyan characters can also go into Super Saiyan mode, which increases their stats and speed until their energy meter runs out.

If you're already familiar with the Dragon Ball Z storyline, I suggest skipping Legacy of Goku and going straight to Legacy of Goku 2. If not, I suggest looking up a summary online and THEN skipping to Legacy of Goku 2.

(There is also a 3rd game in this series called Buu's Fury, which further improves the gameplay, but it's not as big a jump in quality as between the first two.)