Franchises with the Lowest Percentage of Bad Entries

[Tanooki | 4,950]

An uniquely interesting way to look at Kirby and hard to disagree with.  It's a fun franchise on the whole, but also on the whole it is like water without the ice, not bad, just there, uninteresting.  Kirby tends to fall into that quite a few times, it's there, not great, not even maybe really good, but fine, yet never terrible.  You can get bad water(poisoned) but Kirby never went toxic terrible, maybe just warm plastic bottled water flavor at worst.

[Ankos | 463]

Smash is a weird case. On the one hand, I think that I can enjoy every entry in the series to some extent, on the other hand I view some changes from title to title to be downgrades. Me personally, I wouldn't count Smash as a series that has enough entries to make it established enough for the topic. To me a series should have at least ten entries total, and should have spinoffs to be considered established. Otherwise there is just not enough room for things to go catastrophically wrong. F-Zero  might be a contender for this list as well, but I have not played the series so I can't say for certain

[Ankos | 463]

Something else about Smash is that it is one of those series where some of the charm comes from the player instead of just playing it default. A few of its entries have strong modding scenes, players usually look for their own way to play the game instead of just rolling with default settings and single player, and it gives the player the ability to have their own artistic creations starting in Brawl through stage creators. I think that a series that got better due to enthusiasts of the series should be judged by its form after fans got involved. Just to level the playing field a bit between older and newer games

[Tanooki | 4,950]

What @Ankos said makes sense with both F-Zero and Smash.  Smash it doesn't have per say a bad game, but to me it wasn't good enough to be great once the third(Wii) one hit, just felt like one janky addition and downgrade after another to the point now you couldn't pay me to play the games, yet I still retain the great N64 starter and peak fun Gamecube title.

  And F-Zero falls not into that bucket, but one of like Kirby, not really any bad entries, a few that could be seen as err... 'present' but not awesome, due to quirks or weird choices but as racers they're not bad or even average, they're pretty decent (the two on GBA we did get would be those.)  Climax is magic, and of course, got screwed out of that release so I imported it.

[Sumez | 2,993]

On 1/18/2022 at 7:13 PM, RH said:

Any RPG series that fit this bill?  I wish I could say this about Final Fantasy but, eh, you can't.  I've only played maybe 3 Dragon Quest games and they seemed to all be excellent.  I'm not sure if there's an out-right dude in the list, but at least of the mainline franchise, those might all be top-notch.

If you ignore the spinoffs (though most of the spinoffs are cool), Dragon Quest definitely has a pretty good thing going with 11 main series titles and zero blunders.

Shinobi is a bit of a wash, with a lot of odd offshoots. I like maybe half the entries at best.
If that one goes though, the Makaimura series definitely goes. Ultimate Ghosts n Goblins isn't my cup of tea, but some people like the Kai version. The res tare all brilliant.

[Ankos | 463]

It seems like a series with no bad entries generally isn't a super ambitious series. F-Zero and Kirby were not exactly known for having games super outside the box for them. Would Tetris count for this? There are lots of Tetris games, and I don't think many are "bad" just not innovative. It seems like the greatest series that has been around for a while will have a few bad entries because their games tried new things, sometimes finding stuff that worked, and sometimes creating something that would be bad in an interesting way

[Ankos | 463]

For how many things the Mario series has tried, it is amazing it does not have more bad games. What would be the obvious ones? Some educational stuff and Hotel Mario are the ones that jump out at me the most

[Sumez | 2,993]

1 hour ago, Ankos said:

Would Tetris count for this? There are lots of Tetris games, and I don't think many are "bad" just not innovative.

There are, in fact, an amazingly huge amount of absolutely horrendeous Tetris implementations, unfortunately.

The Tetris Company kinda tried to counteract that with the official guidelines in recent years though, but unfortunately that's just resulted in all of the game becoming essentially the same (and one I don't particularly like either, given it's designed to only challenge you in a multiplayer game).

27 minutes ago, Ankos said:

What would be the obvious ones? Some educational stuff and Hotel Mario are the ones that jump out at me the most

I don't think it's fair to consider those a part of the Mario series.

[Ankos | 463]

9 minutes ago, Sumez said:

I don't think it's fair to consider those a part of the Mario series.

They star Mario and have his name in their titles. That's more than enough for me to count them. They're spinoffs, but I think that spinoffs should count. If I was kid growing up on Mario titles and was handed one of those, I'd call it a Mario game. I could use my hindsight as an adult to find some way to justify not counting them, but that is not how I would've experienced them if I was the target audience when the games first came out, so I feel like it'd make more sense to count them than to not

[Lynda Monica | 350]

Punch Out has had five games since its inception in 1984, (six if you want to count Teleroboxer) and they've all been fantastic.

I'd also argue that Wario as a series has been pretty consistent, though it's had some clunkers. I'm not counting WarioWare Snapped though, as it's a two minute tech demo rather than an actual game.

Other than Game & Wario, Wario Master of Disguise, and the Game Cube port of the original WarioWare, the series has been pretty solid. Even WarioWare D.I.Y is really fantastic if you're a creative type. If you're able to figure out how to use the game's tools to their fullest, you can make some genuinely great microgames in it. Wario was even good on Virtual Boy!

Somehow that's two Virtual Boy shout outs in the same post. I miss that old thing so much.

Edited August 17, 2022 by Lynda Monica

[Sumez | 2,993]

Ehh I played Mario's Is Missing with friends as a kid (you know, when you're trying to find some kind of entertainment, and the only thing resembling video games on the PC is weird edutainment stuff) and I guarantee you no one called it "a Mario game".  

Yeah, it's prominently built around the Mario franchise, but that's about it. You can talk about whether "any game with Mario in it" is bad, but I think it's topical to look at whether every mainline Mario platform game is good, which I think is absolutely true. The only one that's even remotely stinky is the first NSMB.

Edited August 17, 2022 by Sumez

[Ankos | 463]

The mainline Mario platformers are a subset of the Mario series called the "Super Mario" games. The first Mario games were not platformers, they were Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. I'm not saying any game that has Mario in it is a Mario game, but when its clear that it was branded around him I think it should count. Keep in mind, the title of this thread is "Franchises with the Lowest Percentage of Bad Entries", so the franchise should be judged as a whole. Throwing out half a franchise's games just because those aren't the games that represented your experience with it is in my opinion giving that franchise too much slack. Also, I would argue that Super Mario Bros Special is worse than NSMB DS. NSMB DS was the first 2D Mario game to have wall jumping (unless you count clipping into the wall in older entries as wall jumping) and triple jumping, it introduced fun new movement mechanics, and had some pretty cool power-ups. I don't think that it is an alltime classic of the series, but it really isn't a bad game

[Dr. Morbis | 2,091]

14 hours ago, Ankos said:

The first Mario games were not platformers, they were Donkey Kong and Mario Bros.

If those aren't platform games, then the genre doesn't exist...

[Ankos | 463]

1 hour ago, Dr. Morbis said:

If those aren't platform games, then the genre doesn't exist...

In my head I was thinking of sidescrollers, but yeah you are correct in that those are platformers. I'd still say that they play differently enough from the Super Mario games that I'd call them a different genre though