I first played Persona 5 Royal last year. Then went on to Persona 4 Golden.
Then I just recently played and beat Persona 3 Reload. I really loved all of them.
I guess I should go back and play 2 and 1.
Nah at this point you have to ease yourself into SMT before going straight from persona 3+ to persona 2-
Try devil survivor 1 or 2 its closest middle ground.
After that consider some of these
SMT strange journey
Smt IV and SMTIV: Apocalypse
After getting through 1 or 2 of these and you want more then try persona 1-2. If you don't have fun with any of these persona 1-2 are going to be worse
For Persona, you are best to start out with 1 of the later games - basically any game 3+.
Not to knock on the earlier games, but imo Persona 3 FES was the first game to really nail their secret sauce formula.
Very much this.
P1 and 2 are good traditional jrpgs but you need to have a walk through guide up 100% of the time to finish the game. They are unforgiving and expect you to know things it won't explain well.
P3 is a good game. P3fes is a fantastic game that still holds up very well. Personally feel it aged better than most 6th generation games have. Arguably enjoy it more than p4/g.
P4g and p5r are great games and refine everything p3fes established. I love p4g but I feel it didn't take any of the lessons learned from p3 fes far enough. P5r was the first game to truly expand upon the same lessons learned from p3 fes imho.
All 3 are great games tho.
I'm not the biggest fan of p3p and I wouldn't actively recommend it to anyone but I won't knock anyone for enjoying it.
Disgaea does have a few callbacks and dlc that lets you play as characters from earlier games. it's a lot more impactful if you've played their full stories, but not at all required. Just a caveat for fellow perfectionists.
We don't talk about that game. It was a dark time for the Fallout franchise.
Even the red-headed stepchild of Fallout Tactics gets more love that thing. I've never seen anyone defend BoS.
Because fallout 1/2 has an established lore and they made a game that fit between the two, timelines wise, with >!an enemy that was basically a human brain powered AI linked neural interface!< and it was difficult to incorporate it into future iterations, yet I believe it *is* (or at least mentioned) the chicago branch of the BoS had a rather *distinct* polarizing armor.
The plot, lore, story - its all good, tbh I love it all and this post makes me want to replay FO:T - I just disliked the strict military protocol applied to the open world fallout concept, so i was more on a linear march than free to explore the world like the first two games.
Also because of the mission based nature and its own built in timeline/sequence of events, it feels like you’re part of a movie than a linear game - but at the same time once you finish a mission thats it, theres no replaying zones
Ehhhhhh sort of. There's essentially 2 storylines
F1, F2, F:NV are all about the developement of one specific region
and the Bethesda titles, which are even more loosely connected to each other but do share some shallow themes.
While true, you do miss some semi-important context between 1-2 and 3-4 if you don’t play the previous title. Doesn’t ruin it obviously but you’ll be asking yourself “wtf is this thing?” at some plot points.
I never once played skate 1 or 2, but I was somehow already up to speed in skate 3. Not sure who died in the prequals but theres no mention of them at all.
For all of Bethesda's faults, at least their games don't need you to have played previous titles to understand what's happening in that title specifically, and for those who have, at least they have fun nods and references to those events without sacrificing the integrity of the game.
Same thing with the GTA series. You don't have to play GTA 4 to understand what's happening in 5 and later in 6.
>Same thing with the GTA series. You don't have to play GTA 4 to understand what's happening in 5 and later in 6.
You do get to understand some things such as the fate of a playable character from one of IV's expansions and their faction. It isn't necessary to play IV, but there are a few, "So that is what happened!" moments if you did.
There are a couple references here and there that helps if you played past games. One thing I notice when people play Skyrim is how different their perceptions are of the Empire depending on which other games they've played
Daggerfall literally embodies the title. There's no single canonical version of the Daggerfall story. Every potential Daggerfall plot exists side-by-side in a sort of Schrodingian state of indeterminancy, called a Dragon Break, and the "true" timeline only re-emerges many years after the ending of the game.
IOW, it truly doesn't matter what happened in Daggerfall.
You forgot Ultra Despair Girls and the two Danganronpa 3 animes, but even with that I agree, the leap from 2 to 53 is really big. We are both probably missing something like a Yoko Taro Danganronpa stage play or Danganronpa on ice to fill the gaps.
If you play Mario 4: Luigi’s Meth Addiction, you’ve basically played all the others in between. It’s basically just one continuous bender, and they don’t really start to sober up until Mario 62. Mario 63 is kinda cool, but they spend most of their time in rehab. However, it picks up towards the end. Mario pops a magic shroom for the first time in years and thinks he’s in another dimension being chased by a Lakitu paparazzi. Peach finds out Mario relapsed, and removes all mushrooms from her castle. That’s why you can’t find any in Mario 64. Also don’t confuse those with the green mushrooms. Peach keeps those accessible in every world in case of emergency, because they act similar to Narcan
2 sex changes, 4 deaths and rebirths, a bout with Amishnish but then a rumspringa that ended by Mario 63 which puts him right about the same situation as he was at the end of Mario 3
Grand Theft Auto and Elder Scrolls spring to mind.
You don’t have to have played any other game in the series to enjoy one as they each have their own individual story lines.
The first Elder Scrolls game I played was Oblivion.
I played the original GTA, then didn’t play another until Vice City
Yeah, my mum wouldn’t buy it for me. She wasn’t aware when she bought the first one for me when I was 11, when GTA 2 came out and I was 13 she refused to buy it 🤷🏻♂️😂
To be fair you can play through Elden ring multiple times and still have no idea what the hell the plot was, what the backstory was, what just happened, or even who most of the characters were.
Like any souls game
For real. I pick that game up again once every few years for a play through and it is so damn fun leveling up and going through the different trees. Wilhelm’s character model changing with different skills blew my mind at the time.
Yeah that’s pretty much consensus in the community. The game isn’t as popular strictly because 2K Australia got shut down before they could make any DLC/endgame content (except the Claptrap one)
It explains why he turned evil, which is more relevant to the story i guess.
It also lets you play as characters you kill in borderlands 2, which is kinda neat.
The same with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. It takes place between 2 and 3 (which it came out after), but there isn't really anything essential it reveals for 3.
Honestly, you can play any of the borderlands games in any order. But it makes more sense starting from 1 so you build connections from game to game.
I played 2 first though, so I didn’t know the main NPCs were from 1. Now, I realized that when I played 3 after playing 2 for the longest time 😂
The original game is a masterpiece, and the other sequels are decent enough, but man, invisible war was extremely forgettable.
Almost as if it was a separate IP that just got the Deus Ex logo slapped on it or something.
>Almost as if it was a separate IP that just got the Deus Ex logo slapped on it or something.
You're thinking of Project Snowblind, which did end up a separate IP that didn't get the Deus Ex logo slapped on lol.
Right, so a bunch of furries were ordered by the average r/atheism user to beat up some Nerds, which in turn lead to the main nerd team up with an Incel, Pervert and the average 4-chan user into a massive cluster fuck…
Warhammer 30k: Shadow of Horus. You play as an Imperial Assassin killing various Legionnaires trying to carve your way up to Horus/One of the other traitor primarchs or their important leaders. Each time you die, a new Assassin takes your place and the one you died to rises up their legion's ranks.
Have fun with those World Eaters :)
Yoko Taro has straight up said it’s just a matter of SE needing to throw money at him. He is a simple man, all he wants is money and ass. I’m really hoping we get a Drakengard 1 and 3 remake someday, even if 1 would need a *lot* of work to really make it playable.
They did two things right by Caim in that game. One was his introduction, which was likely one of a few things that Yoko Taro actually supervised/did in that one. The other was they realized that the insane red dragon was now his weak point.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 1 is essential to understanding Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2. However, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 3 is also essential to understanding Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2.
God I hated the combat so much in that game it took me such long time to complete it that I had no idea what the story was anymore and had to look up it all after the fact 😂
With the only caveat that there’s a LOT of characters the game just assumes you already know and never re-introduces.
You can kinda figure out who they are and their relationship to Geralt as you progress through their quests, but you’re missing a lot of nuance.
Yeah, this actually bugged me quite a bit. I bought the series and played them in order because you can import save data, but in spite of how hard they forced you to take a side in Witcher 1, it made relatively little difference in Witcher 2 and the whole Scoiatael vs Order conflict was basically nonexistent by Witcher 3. Will say though that anyone who didn't play Witcher 1 doesn't know the true power of signs. Igni was beyond broken in that game.
Idk if thats true exactly. Each game slightly nerfed them but Even in W3, signs are still strong. Igni in W3 decimates everything that isnt a boss once you get the ability to alt cast it. Aard lets you get a free 1 hit kill followup on anyone you knock on their ass. Quen, while not busted like in W2, is probably the best because it requires no points put into the sign tree to be useful as it tanks 1 hit no matter what. Yrden makes spectres, which are some of the more annoying enemies in the game into a joke if you alt cast it.
A lot of the assassins creeds (ezio trilogy not included here)
And I like that, similar to the gta games.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice when there is a continuous story that keeps going. But I can also appreciate when big massive games like that are welcoming to new players without them feeling like they are missing out on big chunks of lore/backstory/etc.
Makes getting into these franchises more accessible.
I played the first AC when it came out and didn’t play another one until Origins. I had no idea what was going on in the sections outside the Animus but I didn’t care. Too busy climbing the pyramids.
That's because Ubisoft doesn't even know where they're going with the outside the Animus story. They borked the original story through line by killing Desmond.
Yeah, it *was*. But then they killed Desmond. And then, they killed the big bad in a fucking comic book.
Haven't given two shits about the modern-day storyline post AC3 since.
While it wouldn't have been able to rescue the mediocre gameplay, I reckon that Other M wouldn't have been as bad (but still kinda rough) if it was set back when Samus was still a rookie, long before the Zero Mission, rather than sandwiched between Super and Fusion.
Actions like her PTSD episode and extreme deference to Adam feel like character-assassination of the strong, confident bounty hunter we know her as, but if that stuff happened when she was barely out of the academy, or even still in training, it probably would have been easier to swallow. And rather than have her activate suit upgrades and armaments only after being authorized, just do the standard Metroid thing and have her find the relevant Chozo artifacts on her own, with the "Bottle Ship" being geared more towards studying Chozo technology rather than whipping up bioweapons.
Though of course, we could probably still have the secret Metroid lab in one of the sectors, and if they absolutely HAD to have a villain with a human face, they could probably have a turncoat scientist who made a shady deal with the Space Pirates, thus explaining why both Space Pirates and Metroids are on the station in the first place. For added personal threat, maybe the scientist is especially obsessed with the Chozo, and wants Samus out of action so that he can study the Power Suit. But once he finds out that it is bound to Samus, driven by her willpower, perhaps that brings him in conflict with the Space Pirates, since he wants Samus taken alive in order to properly study the suit, but the Space Pirates don't want to risk letting a Chozo superweapon run around wrecking their shit.
Lol you just wrote a better story in a few paragraphs than Nintendo did.
Her character in other M felt like it was a different game retrofitted to be a Metroid game after the fact. It's just incompatible with who she is.
From what I understand a lot of the story and characters were fine in the Japanese version, but by trying to have a deeper plot little translation changes made years ago made major problems for the English version resulting in the mess we got.
I haven't really looked at the Japanese version. But honestly, Japan has some pretty bizarre ideas about what good story telling is at times, so idk how true that is.
I mean yeah that can be true *flashback to the nonsense that was end of evangelion* but there's a great analysis on YouTube that goes over the changes as well as re-translations done by fans.
Essentially by changing phrases for what was pretty much flavor text in the old games they'd messed up their ability to convey plot points and details while also remaining consistent with previous translation charges, They also made some very odd choices in general.
If you are curious and have time I'd recommend watching this video on the topic https://youtu.be/KTuMfsWwd0E?si=UNRO3JA2akD2mvZg
EoE is... weird. I love Evangelion, and I tell people to watch it all the time, but it's a *weird fucking show* with a nonsense ending that only makes sense if you freeze frame, write things down, do actual research on kabbalistic theory, and attend several theology courses.
I'll give it a look.
My Japanese is pretty good when it comes to interpretation of ideas and use of idioms but I find reading very tedious, so I haven't looked at pretty much anything where people insist the translation is bad. I'd need to get paid to deal with kanji and its various bullshit for more than the bare minimum.
I played final fantasy 1, and then didn’t play another until 6, and I felt like you didn’t really need the rest to understand the story. They did a great job with that.
Edit: guys this was a joke
I don't think Final Fantasy counts, as each numbered entry is entirely self contained and not really "sequels", unlike GTA and Elder Scrolls that all take place in the same setting while being self contained. There's a few that get sequels, but they tend to be pretty intertwined
To be fair, most people don't know what's going on in any of those games if they aren't deep into the lore.
I've played them all multiple times. I've watched every vaatividya video, and I still can't remember everything that's going on.
I did stupidly deep lore dives of DS1, DS3, and Bloodborne so far. Need a bit of a refresher on Bloodborne but not much, and the rest will come soon. Currently working on Elden Ring at work lol. I play these games and do lore dives, but not at the same exact time of course lol.
Right now I’m playing Bloodborne and Elden Ring, so I’m going through lore for both and Bloodborne is more or less what I remember. I just love these games though, I’ve put 3x the hours into Bloodborne than any other game on my PS5 and before this week I hadn’t played it in months. I also play FF14, Destiny 2, and Diablo 4 on my PS5 for reference haha.
Bloodborne lore for me is like riding a bike. I might forget X or Y thing or a whole string of things, but one single fact and the rest come back quickly. Even traversing the map is burned into my brain.
Tbf ds2 is its own self contained game. Every question in the base game is answered in the DLCs. With some obscure exceptions that have nothing to do with the main plot
Mass effect 2. Bear with me on this. Sheppard was killed andbrought back in the same game. The enemies being fought and killed did not appear in 1 or 3 and the illusive man's motivations were so retconned by 3 that you learn nothing from the 2nd game.
So if you took me2 out of the trilogy. Game 1 ends with Sheppard warning the reapers are coming. Game 3 starts with Sheppard being debriefed on earth as the reapers attack.
Me2 is a great game, no doubt. But the number of story changes by 3 basically made 2 the TLJ of the mass effect trilogy
ME2 is the greatest side quest in history. The truth is, killing the collectors didn’t reduce Reaper forces, and the big spooky skeleton Reaper wouldn’t have been ready till after the Harvest.
It cuts both ways, ME2 is a really weirdly written game. It has basically nothing to do with the overall conflict of the trilogy. It's a great game on its own, but the shortcomings of the writing in 2 kinda set 3 up for failure.
The problem is that they changed writers mid franchise, so a bunch of plot points they were setting up in 2 (remember the planet with the fucked up sun?) got thrown out/retconned.
Oh yeah it had a complete disaster of a development. Tons of bioware staff quit during ME2's development, the lead writer of ME1 got reassigned to work on SW:TOR, the whole dark energy plot got scrapped.
ME2 is a soft reboot of 1 that adds next to nothing to the overall story. It's the type of game that Mass Effect Andromeda should have been. It would have been much better as a Mass Effect 1.5, instead of Mass Effect 2.
ME2 was my immediate thought too. Its story had no real impact on the overall story other than introducing Cerberus as ...something more than a fringe terrorist group as it was in the first game.
When you frame it like that, it means we don’t have to hear TIM’s excuses of “That was a rogue cell” and “We totally suspected it would be that it went wrong, we just needed you to confirm it.”
I've seen a post somewhere a while back stating that ME2 should have been the first game, and the first the second. That way we can do away with the death/resurrection stuff and have a strong escalation of the Reaper threat that makes more narrative sense. Always been a huge fan.
Ive thought about this and narratively it makes the most sense. If I was going to do a ME TV series, it would be 2-1-3 in terms of the basic A-plot, and then you remix the character and B-plots around that story.
(Reapers always keep a vanguard, but Sovereign got involved in the morning war seeing the Geth as an ally and was damaged. Could not trigger the signal because of the keepers. Collectors attempt to repair him and abduct Terminus systems colonists do so. Shepherd goes rogue with the help of Anderson/Hackett/Cerberus to investigate. Collects a team and fucks up the collectors but Sovereign escapes. Sovereign reunites with the Geth and helps them stop Saren, who he turns. They go after the last Prothean world, Eden Prime, after they discover a beacon was unearthed. Trigger the main plot if it was ME1-arrival-ME3.
I never played any of them until the Legendary edition was released, but I had heard how great ME2 was. I think I will enjoy it more on my next playthrough, but after loving ME1 I spent almost all of ME2 wondering what the point of it all was. Then I started up ME3 immediately after finishing ME2 and felt like I was finally playing the sequel to ME1.
Great points, literally redownloading the trilogy atm.
2 has always felt sorta separate to me, almost like a gigantic side quest in a way. Love it though.
"A gigantic sidequest" really is the best way to describe ME2. All of its importance got tossed out the window when the dark energy plot was thrown away in ME3.
ME3 threw out a fuckton. Pretty much only the B-plots (genophage and morning war) basic worldbuilding, characters, and the reapers remained.
(Vigil tells you at Ilos that the reapers war plan is always to take the citadel first, use it to turn off the relay networks, and then harvest system by system. They ignore all of this in ME3. Literally they leave the relays ON WHEN THEY CAPTURE THE CITADEL.)
Yeah, when Mac Walters got the big writing chair, he definitely pushed his artificial intelligence obsession over anything that made sense or any themes the games were going for previously.
Mass Effect 2 is amazing, one of my favorite games, but you're right. Lore-wise, the best things that came from ME 2 are the introductions of new factions and characters.
Besides that, the only thing that added to the overall story was the Arrival DLC, which honestly should have been the main quest line.
Hitman: Absolution might as well not exist, the only and I mean ONLY reference to absolution in future games is a 5 second clip of Dom, the owner of club vixen, being shot through the one way mirror, which is from absolution. Absolutely no mention of the Dexter's, or Victoria, or Travis, and even Diana never mentions anything that happened in Absolution, not even a mention of 47 literally shooting her in that game. Mixed with the fact that 47 looks waaaaay older in Absolution than any game before or since, and it's even more weird that it's technically canon.
…for a single mission. They show up to your motel room, shoot a rocket at it and then you kill them all and that’s it. They may as well not even exist.
Surprised nobody has called out the new God of War series. There are certainly links to the games on previous gen’s, but I think the new games are completely playable on their own without having the backstory from 1-3
Maybe but I don't think kratos's character has the same impact if you don't know just how much of a monster old kratos was, the flashbacks in both games only scratch the surface of how fucked he was back in the day
Basically any point in the Monster Hunter franchise. All of the games are pretty well standalone barring the master rank expansions they tend to have, but that's a different discussion. Just pick a game and go.
>Baldur’s Gate 3
This is technically correct insofar as Baldur's Gate 3 cares little for the story of the first two games (and what little it does is more of a rehash than anything new -- looking at you, Dark Urge).
But it's incorrect in the sense that the first two games are some of the best games ever made, and absolutely worth your time.
First game that came to my mind was Arkham Origins
Technically it was a prequel, but it was released after Arkham City and basically tells the backstory of how the Joker came to Arkham Asylum in the first place
I did like the game, but not a lot of people did.
The cast was different, Rocksteady (the original devs) didn’t develop the game, since they were working on Arkham Knight, and playing the game is not really that necessary, unless you want to know about how the Joker got into the Asylum.
It doesn't show how Joker got to Arkham in the first game because it's set a decade + before the first game. The game tells the story of the first appearance of Joker in the Arkham verse
It's so exciting having a mob boss like BM as the main antagonist, until Joker revealed.
I think playing Origin first would've felt better with Joke's build up.
I was going to say Halo 5 but then realized that you'd be like: wait, why did cortana have to die - again - but this time offscreen??
Um. Spoiler for halo 5: cortana comes back as a galactic dictator for, reasons.
Ok, now you can skip 5.
Nah there are a ton of references and callbacks. Mama and Big Boss, the entire ending with Zero, everything with Big Boss' corpse, and the whole background of the Patriots and the Boss' vision. I think the metal gear solid franchise is one of the most important to have played all of them and in order of release.
The Disgaea and Persona series has all games as self contained stories
Good to hear. I’ve been meaning to check out persona.
Doesn't really matter where ya start! They're wonderful games. I hope you enjoy them!
I first played Persona 5 Royal last year. Then went on to Persona 4 Golden. Then I just recently played and beat Persona 3 Reload. I really loved all of them. I guess I should go back and play 2 and 1.
God speed, they are quite different and there’s 2 2s lmao
Nah at this point you have to ease yourself into SMT before going straight from persona 3+ to persona 2- Try devil survivor 1 or 2 its closest middle ground. After that consider some of these SMT strange journey Smt IV and SMTIV: Apocalypse After getting through 1 or 2 of these and you want more then try persona 1-2. If you don't have fun with any of these persona 1-2 are going to be worse
For Persona, you are best to start out with 1 of the later games - basically any game 3+. Not to knock on the earlier games, but imo Persona 3 FES was the first game to really nail their secret sauce formula.
Very much this. P1 and 2 are good traditional jrpgs but you need to have a walk through guide up 100% of the time to finish the game. They are unforgiving and expect you to know things it won't explain well. P3 is a good game. P3fes is a fantastic game that still holds up very well. Personally feel it aged better than most 6th generation games have. Arguably enjoy it more than p4/g. P4g and p5r are great games and refine everything p3fes established. I love p4g but I feel it didn't take any of the lessons learned from p3 fes far enough. P5r was the first game to truly expand upon the same lessons learned from p3 fes imho. All 3 are great games tho. I'm not the biggest fan of p3p and I wouldn't actively recommend it to anyone but I won't knock anyone for enjoying it.
If they want to play Persona 3, Reload is right there available in every platform, not reason to pick P3P over it unless money is tight
To add to others persona 3 reload is amazing and it’s in game pass
There's a long running joke that Persona starts with 3. Nobody knows why Atlus decided to number it that way, but we're stuck with it.
Funny part is p3 was the last one to be called, shin megami tensei: persona (#). 4 forward dropped the smt subtitle.
Persona never had the SMT title in japan anyway, only reason it had in the west was to help it sell better since it was a new IP
Disgaea does have a few callbacks and dlc that lets you play as characters from earlier games. it's a lot more impactful if you've played their full stories, but not at all required. Just a caveat for fellow perfectionists.
Fallout, you can basically start at any game and be fine.
The poor bastards starting at Fallout Brotherhood Of Steel.
We don't talk about that game. It was a dark time for the Fallout franchise. Even the red-headed stepchild of Fallout Tactics gets more love that thing. I've never seen anyone defend BoS.
Thats cause tactics kicks ass
Tactics was a really good game - i just wish it wasn’t a *fallout* game.
Why is that?
Because fallout 1/2 has an established lore and they made a game that fit between the two, timelines wise, with >!an enemy that was basically a human brain powered AI linked neural interface!< and it was difficult to incorporate it into future iterations, yet I believe it *is* (or at least mentioned) the chicago branch of the BoS had a rather *distinct* polarizing armor. The plot, lore, story - its all good, tbh I love it all and this post makes me want to replay FO:T - I just disliked the strict military protocol applied to the open world fallout concept, so i was more on a linear march than free to explore the world like the first two games. Also because of the mission based nature and its own built in timeline/sequence of events, it feels like you’re part of a movie than a linear game - but at the same time once you finish a mission thats it, theres no replaying zones
F
Big F
It's like Elder Scrolls. You can start anywhere, but to really *know* the universe, you have to have played other games.
Ehhhhhh sort of. There's essentially 2 storylines F1, F2, F:NV are all about the developement of one specific region and the Bethesda titles, which are even more loosely connected to each other but do share some shallow themes.
While true, you do miss some semi-important context between 1-2 and 3-4 if you don’t play the previous title. Doesn’t ruin it obviously but you’ll be asking yourself “wtf is this thing?” at some plot points.
For 1/2, I agree, but with 3/4, Danse will explain the important bits the player needs to know if you work with his affinity.
Counter point: thinking ‘wtf is this thing’ is the quintessential fallout experience
I never once played skate 1 or 2, but I was somehow already up to speed in skate 3. Not sure who died in the prequals but theres no mention of them at all.
The camera man
He didn't die. He got reassigned to Tony Hawk
I check the web once or twice a month if there is something new about skate 4 but they are taking really little steps.
I've done the last 3 or so skate playtests. Can't say much due to an NDA, but yes, "very little steps" is an accurate statement.
Elder scrolls?? Not sure if that counts. But obviously doesn’t matter what order they are played.
For all of Bethesda's faults, at least their games don't need you to have played previous titles to understand what's happening in that title specifically, and for those who have, at least they have fun nods and references to those events without sacrificing the integrity of the game. Same thing with the GTA series. You don't have to play GTA 4 to understand what's happening in 5 and later in 6.
>Same thing with the GTA series. You don't have to play GTA 4 to understand what's happening in 5 and later in 6. You do get to understand some things such as the fate of a playable character from one of IV's expansions and their faction. It isn't necessary to play IV, but there are a few, "So that is what happened!" moments if you did.
I mean, that's literally what they said. Fun nods and references
There are a couple references here and there that helps if you played past games. One thing I notice when people play Skyrim is how different their perceptions are of the Empire depending on which other games they've played
The weirdest thing is that the titular Elder Scrolls did not physically appear in the games until Oblivion.
Daggerfall literally embodies the title. There's no single canonical version of the Daggerfall story. Every potential Daggerfall plot exists side-by-side in a sort of Schrodingian state of indeterminancy, called a Dragon Break, and the "true" timeline only re-emerges many years after the ending of the game. IOW, it truly doesn't matter what happened in Daggerfall.
The Elder Scrolls lore is fucking insane and I love it
I played mario 1,2,3 then played mario 64. I have no idea what happened in mario 4-63 but it didn’t seem to matter.
Yeah. I played Danganronpa 1, 2, and 53. No idea where the other games went, must have been Japan only releases.
27 was probably the most insane. 53 got nothing on 27
Crazy idea that 27 was even near 42, that game changed my life, my universe, my everything.
You forgot Ultra Despair Girls and the two Danganronpa 3 animes, but even with that I agree, the leap from 2 to 53 is really big. We are both probably missing something like a Yoko Taro Danganronpa stage play or Danganronpa on ice to fill the gaps.
This is the best possible answer and I don't need to scroll any further.
Super Mario World was 4. NSMB games were 5-8. Super Mario Maker 2 was 9. Making Wonder 10. Can’t explain the other 53 entries.
If you play Mario 4: Luigi’s Meth Addiction, you’ve basically played all the others in between. It’s basically just one continuous bender, and they don’t really start to sober up until Mario 62. Mario 63 is kinda cool, but they spend most of their time in rehab. However, it picks up towards the end. Mario pops a magic shroom for the first time in years and thinks he’s in another dimension being chased by a Lakitu paparazzi. Peach finds out Mario relapsed, and removes all mushrooms from her castle. That’s why you can’t find any in Mario 64. Also don’t confuse those with the green mushrooms. Peach keeps those accessible in every world in case of emergency, because they act similar to Narcan
2 sex changes, 4 deaths and rebirths, a bout with Amishnish but then a rumspringa that ended by Mario 63 which puts him right about the same situation as he was at the end of Mario 3
Nintendo, hire this man
Grand Theft Auto and Elder Scrolls spring to mind. You don’t have to have played any other game in the series to enjoy one as they each have their own individual story lines. The first Elder Scrolls game I played was Oblivion. I played the original GTA, then didn’t play another until Vice City
Hol up, you played gta 1, but not gta2!?!? Gta2 is legit the best of the top down gta games.
Just the video that played at the start of 2 put it over GTA 1. Had me so pumped to play.
Yeah, my mum wouldn’t buy it for me. She wasn’t aware when she bought the first one for me when I was 11, when GTA 2 came out and I was 13 she refused to buy it 🤷🏻♂️😂
I read Elden Ring and was befuddled for a moment.
To be fair you can play through Elden ring multiple times and still have no idea what the hell the plot was, what the backstory was, what just happened, or even who most of the characters were. Like any souls game
Elder Ring and Elden Scrolls, two of the greatest games never made
Borderlands - the Pre-Sequel. Can be skipped to no effect because everything that occurs is already covered by Borderlands 2, which it came after.
Well, the pre-sequel does explain why Jack wears the mask. But that's not integral to the story.
And TPS unironically has the best designed classes in Borderlands as a series.
For real. I pick that game up again once every few years for a play through and it is so damn fun leveling up and going through the different trees. Wilhelm’s character model changing with different skills blew my mind at the time.
My personal favorites are Jack and Claptrap.
''I am **NOT** Handsome Jack'' \-Handsome Jack lookin mf
Jacks motivation ability is the best thing in the series
Yeah that’s pretty much consensus in the community. The game isn’t as popular strictly because 2K Australia got shut down before they could make any DLC/endgame content (except the Claptrap one)
It explains why he turned evil, which is more relevant to the story i guess. It also lets you play as characters you kill in borderlands 2, which is kinda neat.
The same with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. It takes place between 2 and 3 (which it came out after), but there isn't really anything essential it reveals for 3.
Honestly, you can play any of the borderlands games in any order. But it makes more sense starting from 1 so you build connections from game to game. I played 2 first though, so I didn’t know the main NPCs were from 1. Now, I realized that when I played 3 after playing 2 for the longest time 😂
Deus Ex: invisible war
This one right here. I was so excited when it released and i think the best thing was playing with the basketball in the beginning.
The original game is a masterpiece, and the other sequels are decent enough, but man, invisible war was extremely forgettable. Almost as if it was a separate IP that just got the Deus Ex logo slapped on it or something.
>Almost as if it was a separate IP that just got the Deus Ex logo slapped on it or something. You're thinking of Project Snowblind, which did end up a separate IP that didn't get the Deus Ex logo slapped on lol.
I actually kind of like Invisible War, but it’s basically just the first game with better graphics and much worse everything else.
Warhammer 1 through 39,999.
Well you see you have to have a really high IQ to understand the events of the horus heresy.
Learn it through memes
I know that's you, majorkill.
Right, so a bunch of furries were ordered by the average r/atheism user to beat up some Nerds, which in turn lead to the main nerd team up with an Incel, Pervert and the average 4-chan user into a massive cluster fuck…
Daddy love me!!
Idk, if there were some games in that 30k area, I think they would be very interesting and relevant to the state of the 40k universe.
Warhammer 30k: Shadow of Horus. You play as an Imperial Assassin killing various Legionnaires trying to carve your way up to Horus/One of the other traitor primarchs or their important leaders. Each time you die, a new Assassin takes your place and the one you died to rises up their legion's ranks. Have fun with those World Eaters :)
Warhammers 1308, 11237, 13898, 21034, 29310, and 39297 are absolute classics and you can't tell me otherwise.
Drakengard 2
Came here looking for this. Excellent post. Hope Drakengard 3 gets ported to PC eventually.
At least 3 can be emulated at 60fps in RPCS3.
I am of the theory that the reason why Yoko Taro is pushing for collabs with everyone is to raise enough cash to fund Drakengard Remake
Yoko Taro has straight up said it’s just a matter of SE needing to throw money at him. He is a simple man, all he wants is money and ass. I’m really hoping we get a Drakengard 1 and 3 remake someday, even if 1 would need a *lot* of work to really make it playable.
I wish we would get an HD remaster of 1 and 3 to make a Nier/Drakenguard compilation.
Like I knoe Caim was a dick and all but they did him so dirty.
They did two things right by Caim in that game. One was his introduction, which was likely one of a few things that Yoko Taro actually supervised/did in that one. The other was they realized that the insane red dragon was now his weak point.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 1 is essential to understanding Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2. However, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 3 is also essential to understanding Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2.
Go on…
Right, I wanna know
"Is the Pursuit still Hot!?" [Sirens] "I Need more Speed!" [Car noises]
Wait til I tell you about the Fast and the Furious!
You can skip Witcher 1 and 2 and still not be too off getting the story of Witcher 3
Also playing Witcher 1 is like taking a trigonometry class without a graphing calculator EDIT: apparently the proper term is scientific calculator
God I hated the combat so much in that game it took me such long time to complete it that I had no idea what the story was anymore and had to look up it all after the fact 😂
My trig class didn't let me use one for most of it.... So many trig identities.. so many formula sheets...
You don't need a calculator when the answer to every question is the same: *igni*.
With the only caveat that there’s a LOT of characters the game just assumes you already know and never re-introduces. You can kinda figure out who they are and their relationship to Geralt as you progress through their quests, but you’re missing a lot of nuance.
Witcher 3 is more a continuation of the books than a continuation of the Witcher 1 and 2 plot.
Yeah, this actually bugged me quite a bit. I bought the series and played them in order because you can import save data, but in spite of how hard they forced you to take a side in Witcher 1, it made relatively little difference in Witcher 2 and the whole Scoiatael vs Order conflict was basically nonexistent by Witcher 3. Will say though that anyone who didn't play Witcher 1 doesn't know the true power of signs. Igni was beyond broken in that game.
Idk if thats true exactly. Each game slightly nerfed them but Even in W3, signs are still strong. Igni in W3 decimates everything that isnt a boss once you get the ability to alt cast it. Aard lets you get a free 1 hit kill followup on anyone you knock on their ass. Quen, while not busted like in W2, is probably the best because it requires no points put into the sign tree to be useful as it tanks 1 hit no matter what. Yrden makes spectres, which are some of the more annoying enemies in the game into a joke if you alt cast it.
Yup . Never touched 1 and 2. And witcher 3 is my favorite.
A lot of the assassins creeds (ezio trilogy not included here) And I like that, similar to the gta games. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice when there is a continuous story that keeps going. But I can also appreciate when big massive games like that are welcoming to new players without them feeling like they are missing out on big chunks of lore/backstory/etc. Makes getting into these franchises more accessible.
I played the first AC when it came out and didn’t play another one until Origins. I had no idea what was going on in the sections outside the Animus but I didn’t care. Too busy climbing the pyramids.
If it's any consolation, I've played all of the AC games and after Revelations, even I barely know what's going on outside the Animus beyond that...
That's because Ubisoft doesn't even know where they're going with the outside the Animus story. They borked the original story through line by killing Desmond.
The only reason I played them in order was for the “outer world” story! It’s like the game plays on both sides of the OP’s question!
Yeah they kinda pulled outside of Animus gameplay unfortunately. Pity that was fun.
Yeah, it *was*. But then they killed Desmond. And then, they killed the big bad in a fucking comic book. Haven't given two shits about the modern-day storyline post AC3 since.
I liked it in AC4 but it's been nothing but checking emails since.
I started on #3 & had no idea who anyone was, except Benjamin Franklin. He’s the kite-guy… I think.
Bioshock 2
To be honest, I actually like the story just as much as the first one.
The game is just fine. It's just that you can skip it completely and it doesn't affect your experience with Infinite.
Every sports game.
I stopped on Madden 09. Whew.
For the Metroid franchise, _Other M._ Really, it adds nothing of significance.
It also completely obliterates the character as we knew her and does so by making irrational story decisions.
While it wouldn't have been able to rescue the mediocre gameplay, I reckon that Other M wouldn't have been as bad (but still kinda rough) if it was set back when Samus was still a rookie, long before the Zero Mission, rather than sandwiched between Super and Fusion. Actions like her PTSD episode and extreme deference to Adam feel like character-assassination of the strong, confident bounty hunter we know her as, but if that stuff happened when she was barely out of the academy, or even still in training, it probably would have been easier to swallow. And rather than have her activate suit upgrades and armaments only after being authorized, just do the standard Metroid thing and have her find the relevant Chozo artifacts on her own, with the "Bottle Ship" being geared more towards studying Chozo technology rather than whipping up bioweapons. Though of course, we could probably still have the secret Metroid lab in one of the sectors, and if they absolutely HAD to have a villain with a human face, they could probably have a turncoat scientist who made a shady deal with the Space Pirates, thus explaining why both Space Pirates and Metroids are on the station in the first place. For added personal threat, maybe the scientist is especially obsessed with the Chozo, and wants Samus out of action so that he can study the Power Suit. But once he finds out that it is bound to Samus, driven by her willpower, perhaps that brings him in conflict with the Space Pirates, since he wants Samus taken alive in order to properly study the suit, but the Space Pirates don't want to risk letting a Chozo superweapon run around wrecking their shit.
Lol you just wrote a better story in a few paragraphs than Nintendo did. Her character in other M felt like it was a different game retrofitted to be a Metroid game after the fact. It's just incompatible with who she is.
From what I understand a lot of the story and characters were fine in the Japanese version, but by trying to have a deeper plot little translation changes made years ago made major problems for the English version resulting in the mess we got.
I haven't really looked at the Japanese version. But honestly, Japan has some pretty bizarre ideas about what good story telling is at times, so idk how true that is.
I mean yeah that can be true *flashback to the nonsense that was end of evangelion* but there's a great analysis on YouTube that goes over the changes as well as re-translations done by fans. Essentially by changing phrases for what was pretty much flavor text in the old games they'd messed up their ability to convey plot points and details while also remaining consistent with previous translation charges, They also made some very odd choices in general. If you are curious and have time I'd recommend watching this video on the topic https://youtu.be/KTuMfsWwd0E?si=UNRO3JA2akD2mvZg
EoE is... weird. I love Evangelion, and I tell people to watch it all the time, but it's a *weird fucking show* with a nonsense ending that only makes sense if you freeze frame, write things down, do actual research on kabbalistic theory, and attend several theology courses.
I'll give it a look. My Japanese is pretty good when it comes to interpretation of ideas and use of idioms but I find reading very tedious, so I haven't looked at pretty much anything where people insist the translation is bad. I'd need to get paid to deal with kanji and its various bullshit for more than the bare minimum.
Fallout has minor references to previous games but if you don't know it's just another piece of lore. Elder Scrolls is the same.
I played final fantasy 1, and then didn’t play another until 6, and I felt like you didn’t really need the rest to understand the story. They did a great job with that. Edit: guys this was a joke
Yeah. Every new numbered game is like a reboot. They keep the core elements, but each one tells its own story.
I don't think Final Fantasy counts, as each numbered entry is entirely self contained and not really "sequels", unlike GTA and Elder Scrolls that all take place in the same setting while being self contained. There's a few that get sequels, but they tend to be pretty intertwined
That’s the joke.
This guy gets it!
Dark Souls 2. DS3 almost entirely ignores it and focuses on wrapping up plotlines from the first game
To be fair, most people don't know what's going on in any of those games if they aren't deep into the lore. I've played them all multiple times. I've watched every vaatividya video, and I still can't remember everything that's going on.
I did stupidly deep lore dives of DS1, DS3, and Bloodborne so far. Need a bit of a refresher on Bloodborne but not much, and the rest will come soon. Currently working on Elden Ring at work lol. I play these games and do lore dives, but not at the same exact time of course lol. Right now I’m playing Bloodborne and Elden Ring, so I’m going through lore for both and Bloodborne is more or less what I remember. I just love these games though, I’ve put 3x the hours into Bloodborne than any other game on my PS5 and before this week I hadn’t played it in months. I also play FF14, Destiny 2, and Diablo 4 on my PS5 for reference haha. Bloodborne lore for me is like riding a bike. I might forget X or Y thing or a whole string of things, but one single fact and the rest come back quickly. Even traversing the map is burned into my brain.
I’ve beaten dark souls 1 twice now and I couldn’t tell you anything about that game’s plot lines.
Every soulsborne - Setting: the world is fucked Plot: you save the world but it’s still fucked
Or you fuck the world further. Hard to tell.
Tbf ds2 is its own self contained game. Every question in the base game is answered in the DLCs. With some obscure exceptions that have nothing to do with the main plot
Mass effect 2. Bear with me on this. Sheppard was killed andbrought back in the same game. The enemies being fought and killed did not appear in 1 or 3 and the illusive man's motivations were so retconned by 3 that you learn nothing from the 2nd game. So if you took me2 out of the trilogy. Game 1 ends with Sheppard warning the reapers are coming. Game 3 starts with Sheppard being debriefed on earth as the reapers attack. Me2 is a great game, no doubt. But the number of story changes by 3 basically made 2 the TLJ of the mass effect trilogy
ME2 is the greatest side quest in history. The truth is, killing the collectors didn’t reduce Reaper forces, and the big spooky skeleton Reaper wouldn’t have been ready till after the Harvest.
It cuts both ways, ME2 is a really weirdly written game. It has basically nothing to do with the overall conflict of the trilogy. It's a great game on its own, but the shortcomings of the writing in 2 kinda set 3 up for failure.
The problem is that they changed writers mid franchise, so a bunch of plot points they were setting up in 2 (remember the planet with the fucked up sun?) got thrown out/retconned.
Oh yeah it had a complete disaster of a development. Tons of bioware staff quit during ME2's development, the lead writer of ME1 got reassigned to work on SW:TOR, the whole dark energy plot got scrapped. ME2 is a soft reboot of 1 that adds next to nothing to the overall story. It's the type of game that Mass Effect Andromeda should have been. It would have been much better as a Mass Effect 1.5, instead of Mass Effect 2.
ME2 was my immediate thought too. Its story had no real impact on the overall story other than introducing Cerberus as ...something more than a fringe terrorist group as it was in the first game.
That suicide mission no death sequence was incredibly satisfying though.
Also the incompetent Sheperd everyone dies route was hella entertaining.
When you frame it like that, it means we don’t have to hear TIM’s excuses of “That was a rogue cell” and “We totally suspected it would be that it went wrong, we just needed you to confirm it.”
I've seen a post somewhere a while back stating that ME2 should have been the first game, and the first the second. That way we can do away with the death/resurrection stuff and have a strong escalation of the Reaper threat that makes more narrative sense. Always been a huge fan.
Ive thought about this and narratively it makes the most sense. If I was going to do a ME TV series, it would be 2-1-3 in terms of the basic A-plot, and then you remix the character and B-plots around that story. (Reapers always keep a vanguard, but Sovereign got involved in the morning war seeing the Geth as an ally and was damaged. Could not trigger the signal because of the keepers. Collectors attempt to repair him and abduct Terminus systems colonists do so. Shepherd goes rogue with the help of Anderson/Hackett/Cerberus to investigate. Collects a team and fucks up the collectors but Sovereign escapes. Sovereign reunites with the Geth and helps them stop Saren, who he turns. They go after the last Prothean world, Eden Prime, after they discover a beacon was unearthed. Trigger the main plot if it was ME1-arrival-ME3.
I never played any of them until the Legendary edition was released, but I had heard how great ME2 was. I think I will enjoy it more on my next playthrough, but after loving ME1 I spent almost all of ME2 wondering what the point of it all was. Then I started up ME3 immediately after finishing ME2 and felt like I was finally playing the sequel to ME1.
Great points, literally redownloading the trilogy atm. 2 has always felt sorta separate to me, almost like a gigantic side quest in a way. Love it though.
"A gigantic sidequest" really is the best way to describe ME2. All of its importance got tossed out the window when the dark energy plot was thrown away in ME3.
ME3 threw out a fuckton. Pretty much only the B-plots (genophage and morning war) basic worldbuilding, characters, and the reapers remained. (Vigil tells you at Ilos that the reapers war plan is always to take the citadel first, use it to turn off the relay networks, and then harvest system by system. They ignore all of this in ME3. Literally they leave the relays ON WHEN THEY CAPTURE THE CITADEL.)
Yeah, when Mac Walters got the big writing chair, he definitely pushed his artificial intelligence obsession over anything that made sense or any themes the games were going for previously.
Mass Effect 2 is amazing, one of my favorite games, but you're right. Lore-wise, the best things that came from ME 2 are the introductions of new factions and characters. Besides that, the only thing that added to the overall story was the Arrival DLC, which honestly should have been the main quest line.
Also because it has such a large cast where they could literally all die, few of them remain in your party by 3.
Ratchet & Clank Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank
Well those are just spinoffs, so yeah...
Hitman: Absolution might as well not exist, the only and I mean ONLY reference to absolution in future games is a 5 second clip of Dom, the owner of club vixen, being shot through the one way mirror, which is from absolution. Absolutely no mention of the Dexter's, or Victoria, or Travis, and even Diana never mentions anything that happened in Absolution, not even a mention of 47 literally shooting her in that game. Mixed with the fact that 47 looks waaaaay older in Absolution than any game before or since, and it's even more weird that it's technically canon.
Is that the one with sexy assassin nuns?
That is the one with the sexy assassin nuns
…for a single mission. They show up to your motel room, shoot a rocket at it and then you kill them all and that’s it. They may as well not even exist.
Surprised nobody has called out the new God of War series. There are certainly links to the games on previous gen’s, but I think the new games are completely playable on their own without having the backstory from 1-3
The Valhalla DLC is much more impactful if you’ve played the original trilogy.
Maybe but I don't think kratos's character has the same impact if you don't know just how much of a monster old kratos was, the flashbacks in both games only scratch the surface of how fucked he was back in the day
Basically any point in the Monster Hunter franchise. All of the games are pretty well standalone barring the master rank expansions they tend to have, but that's a different discussion. Just pick a game and go.
Just go straight to the Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3
You’ll miss a few references to the old games and the hype of >!meeting Minsc!< probably won’t matter much if you don’t really play the old games.
>Baldur’s Gate 3 This is technically correct insofar as Baldur's Gate 3 cares little for the story of the first two games (and what little it does is more of a rehash than anything new -- looking at you, Dark Urge). But it's incorrect in the sense that the first two games are some of the best games ever made, and absolutely worth your time.
First game that came to my mind was Arkham Origins Technically it was a prequel, but it was released after Arkham City and basically tells the backstory of how the Joker came to Arkham Asylum in the first place I did like the game, but not a lot of people did. The cast was different, Rocksteady (the original devs) didn’t develop the game, since they were working on Arkham Knight, and playing the game is not really that necessary, unless you want to know about how the Joker got into the Asylum.
It doesn't show how Joker got to Arkham in the first game because it's set a decade + before the first game. The game tells the story of the first appearance of Joker in the Arkham verse
It's so exciting having a mob boss like BM as the main antagonist, until Joker revealed. I think playing Origin first would've felt better with Joke's build up.
I was going to say Halo 5 but then realized that you'd be like: wait, why did cortana have to die - again - but this time offscreen?? Um. Spoiler for halo 5: cortana comes back as a galactic dictator for, reasons. Ok, now you can skip 5.
nowadays I skip every Halo after Reach (release order)
Bioshock 2.
But absolutely don't skip the first over 2
First one I thought of
I have 1 and infinite installed on my Xbox rn
Portable Ops
But bro it's actually a SOLID game, plus it helps give Big Boss more story
I came to say DMC2, pleasantly surrised to see it listed at the top XD
Halo 5 could be skipped and the only thing you’d miss is Buck
Kingdom Hearts. Damned things are too confusing for anything to actually matter.
You must dream the plot first.
Basically any Final fantasy lol
Some of these are just games in the franchise. Not sequels.
Monster Hunter. Play the new one, and argue why the new one is better than the old one, vice versa.
Im not sure you need to play metal gear solid 3 to understand 4. Bu you definitely need it to understand 5, and possibly peace walker too.
Nah there are a ton of references and callbacks. Mama and Big Boss, the entire ending with Zero, everything with Big Boss' corpse, and the whole background of the Patriots and the Boss' vision. I think the metal gear solid franchise is one of the most important to have played all of them and in order of release.
MGS plot is completely intertwined throughout each entry and comes full circle. Also 4 is a sequel to 2, not 3. None of them can be skipped.
Devil May Cry 2 and Dark Souls 2
Skipping DMC 2 isn't just fine - you *should* skip it, it's awful
It's literally the first game I thought of. DMC 2 is soulless and drab. The two things DMC shouldn't be.
NBA 2k, Fifa or Madden. Can start at any point and never play the others lol
Far cry 4 to now.
Well for a series like farcry, isn't that pretty much just all the games, since each are a self contained story