10 Sequels That Are So Terrible Fans Pretend They Don't Exist

Every beloved franchise eventually has one. A sequel so disconnected from what made the original work, so poorly made, or so deeply misguided that the fanbase collectively decides it's easier to pretend it never happened. Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 is probably the most famous example – a game so broken and so far removed from what fans wanted that it became shorthand for franchise self-destruction. But every genre has its own version of that story.

What makes these ten particularly interesting is how differently they each manage to fail. Some were rushed to meet a deadline. Some had developers who genuinely didn't understand what made the original special. Some launched into technical disasters they never recovered from. And some made confident, deliberate decisions that turned out to be completely wrong, which is the most painful kind of failure, because there's nobody to blame except the people who thought they were doing the right thing.

10 Postal III

So Bad It Was Literally Retconned out of Existence

Postal III is not just a bad game. It is a bad Postal game, which requires a particular kind of failure given the series' baseline. The UI feels lazy even by Postal standards. The jokes never land. The crudeness misses the specific register that made Postal 2 work – instead of feeling transgressive, it just feels unpleasant. The gunplay is floaty, the melee is weak, and the occasional jumpscares are both baffling and incessant.

The developers eventually made the boldest possible statement about their own sequel: the Postal 2: Paradise Lost DLC literally retconned Postal III into a dream sequence. Not a soft retcon. Not a quiet distancing. A direct, canonical declaration that the events of Postal III did not happen. I respect the commitment to damage control, even if it took a DLC of the previous part to do it.

9 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

The Levels Have No NPCs. Not One

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is a game that feels like it was made by a team who had access to a list of things Tony Hawk games contain but no real understanding of why those things worked. The controls were wrong at launch – the Slam button was placed where players instinctively reached before a grind, meaning you'd repeatedly miss rails by slamming instead. That got patched eventually. The more fundamental problems didn't.

The level design is either uninspiring or built from elements of existing levels, with Bunker and School III being the most obvious offenders. But the thing that really gets me is the absence of NPCs. Not reduced. Absent. THPSHD had more life in its levels than this did. Previous games had populated streets, moving vehicles, a world that felt inhabited. THPS5 has you skating around what feels like empty props. For a game that leaned into online play as the focus, the single-player experience is completely hollow.

8 Payday 3

An Identity Crisis Launched Into a Server Fire

Payday 2 had a chaotic launch of its own, and the devs famously crunched for months to get it into a state people could actually enjoy. Payday 3 launched always-online – which, for a game that is fundamentally playable offline, makes no sense – into servers that immediately collapsed, making the game literally unplayable for the first several days and unstable for weeks after. The launch momentum was dead before most people had finished downloading it.

What remained after the servers stabilized was a game having an identity crisis. It couldn't decide whether to stay true to Payday 2's arcadey, chaotic roots or become something more grounded and tactical, and by pulling in both directions it ended up with the worst of each. The infamous WiFi Circles appeared across heist after heist. Skills had almost no meaningful synergy. The challenge-based progression meant you could finish a heist and have nothing to show for it. People who wanted Payday 2 but better got something that felt like a step back in almost every direction that mattered.

7 Dead Rising 4

A Game That Didn't Understand Dead Rising

The thing that made Dead Rising work was tension. The timer. The constant awareness that NPCs were dying while you decided whether to go for a weapon or save a survivor. Dead Rising 4 removed the timer entirely. With it went the tension, the urgency, and most of what made the series feel like anything at all.

Frank West – previously a likable, cynical journalist with a specific energy – was turned into a dad joke machine. The psychopaths are gone. The combat has sound effects that don't quite match the hits. The story is horrendous. Dead Rising 3 looks significantly better visually. What makes it particularly galling is the marketing, where developers apparently said things like "for the fans" and "loving the originals" while releasing a product that felt like it was made by people who had never played them. At least the people making the game seemed to be having fun. I'm not sure who else was.

6 Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

The Sonic 06 of the Spyro Franchise

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly isn't bad on a design level so much as it is broken on a technical one. The actual level design is fine. Short – one hub, eight levels, one boss – but solid enough. The game around that skeleton, though, is a technical disaster: absurd loading times, sluggish movement, lag, an unstable and low framerate, and glitches that range from minor inconveniences to full crashes. I once had it crash on the options menu. The options menu!

It feels like a game that needed another year and didn't get it, which is a particularly unfortunate fate for a Spyro entry. The multiple breath types it introduced – including lightning – were genuinely interesting ideas that later games used better. The kernel of something decent is in there. What shipped was an unfinished broken mess that its own fanbase has quietly agreed to bury.

5 Saints Row: The Reboot

Not Just a Bad Saints Row Game, A Bad Game

The Saints Row reboot has two problems. The first is that it doesn't feel like a Saints Row game. The second is that even setting that aside entirely, the controls are genuinely unpleasant. Nothing feels satisfying. Not the driving, not the shooting, not the melee. Playing it is a chore in a way that's hard to fully describe but immediately apparent.

On top of that: the cast has no charisma. The story makes no sense – the characters become a gang because they want higher wages, spend several missions at a live-action LARPing event for reasons the game never adequately explains, and the actual villains are so undeveloped that one of them dies in his first real confrontation. The older games weren't afraid to have their characters act like adults, commit to the premise, or lean into genuine absurdity. The reboot's characters are nonchalant, endlessly sarcastic, and ultimately unconvincing as gangsters. They don't want to be gangsters. They want better pay and are fine with their hobbies. That's not Saints Row.

4 Paper Mario: Sticker Star

They Made Fighting Pointless

Paper Mario: Sticker Star removed experience points from a Paper Mario game. Think about what that means. Winning a fight gives you coins. Coins buy stickers. Stickers are used to fight. There is a perfectly circular loop here where the reward for combat is the ability to do more combat, and no meaningful progression comes from any of it. The optimal strategy, which the game essentially forces you toward, is to avoid every optional battle and save your good stickers for mandatory encounters.

My favorite moment in the game is the mine cart level, where you can wait in line the entire time without fighting a single enemy. That was my highlight. Waiting in line. The sticker rules are inconsistent, the towns are populated exclusively with identical Toads, there are no partners, and some levels are completely gated behind having a specific sticker that you might have used or not picked up, forcing you to backtrack throughout the entire level to find it. Credit where it's due – the final boss being made of cardboard is genuinely clever. That's one good idea in an otherwise deeply misconceived game.

3 SimCity 5

They Promised a City Builder and Delivered a Server Error

People had been waiting ten years for a new SimCity game when SimCity 5 launched in 2013. It launched always-online, crashed immediately, and remained effectively unplayable for nearly a week. An anonymous Maxis developer later confirmed that the always-online requirement was essentially just DRM – the servers weren't doing any meaningful simulation work, they were doing cheat detection and saving files. EA's general manager described not having enough server capacity as "dumb." She was correct.

When you could eventually play it, the city sizes were a fraction of what SimCity 4 offered. The agent-based simulation system – which was meant to be a sophisticated modeling of how cities function – turned out to simulate residents with no fixed homes, no fixed jobs, children who attended a different school every day, and traffic that was best handled by building a single long road, so agents had fewer chances to get lost. The game also introduced region-level resource exhaustion, meaning a city could eventually run out of resources entirely and become a dead zone. SimCity 5's failure directly led to Paradox greenlighting Cities: Skylines. That might be the most useful thing it ever did.

2 Mega Man X7

You Can't Even Play as X for a Long Time

Mega Man X7 was Capcom's attempt to take the series in a bold new direction after X6 was poorly received. The bold new direction was a cel-shaded third-person perspective blending 2D and 3D elements. The result was a game with unbalanced weapons, lazy level design, forgettable music, tedious gameplay, and a mechanic where dialogue frequently skips mid-line, causing players to miss information entirely.

Most infamously: you cannot play as X for the first half of the game. He is the title character. The game is called Mega Man X7. He is unavailable. The boss that best captures the entire game's energy is Flame Hyenard, who spends the entire fight screaming "BURN TO THE GROUND!" on a loop while a janky animation cycle plays and his AI behaves erratically. It is the most accurate microcosm of everything wrong with this sequel.

1 Bomberman: Act Zero

Every Level Is Identical

Bomberman: Act Zero attempted to take Bomberman – a series built on a bright, charming aesthetic and creatively designed arenas – and reimagine it as a grimy dystopian shooter. The new look is so far removed from the source material that if you didn't know better you'd assume it was an unrelated game using the Bomberman name without permission.

The gameplay does nothing to compensate. Collision detection is dreadful. The AI is unbalanced. Loading times are unbearable. The music is awful. And every single arena in the game is identical. Not similar. Not reusing a tileset with variations. Identical. There is nothing to distinguish one match from the next, no variety in environment, no reason to keep playing. It is an impressive achievement in the wrong direction – a game that managed to remove everything that made Bomberman worth playing and replace it with nothing.