Sequels that are up to the Original/1st !
 

It commonly to see sequels always way below the Original Game , when a sequel is released i cross my fingers and wish it would be better or at least equal to the Original.
of course there are exceptions ,Riven was much way better than Myst (just an opinion) same with LeChuck's Revenge, Day of the Tentacle,The Beast Within ...!

But on the other hand Sequels like Still Life 2 and Dreamfall , Secret Files 2... (endless list of Sequels) were very disappointing , maybe they would had been great Games on their own, but in this situation you just can not avoid comparison .

The only Adventure Series that maintained a proper value for each Sequel was Monkey Island , even the Taletale episodes were up to them.

Surely the Quest's Games from Sierra's had their up and downs too, i can not put my hands on one title that gave me always reliable Sequels ALL the way.

P.S: Surely i have mentioned my taste here ,games mentioned cannot be taken as absolute , some will agree and some would recommend/suggest others.

The Frogwares games. Sherlock Holmes keeps getting better and better in my opinion and I cannot wait for Testament to be released.

I think the best example of the sequel being better than the original is Day Of The Tentacle, which you already mentioned. But there are others as well:

Black Mirror 2 and 3 were better than the original, which is quite impressive, because I thought Black Mirror was so great, there was a little room for improvement, but Cranberry really did it!

I think Discworld II was slightly better than it's predecessor in some ways. Definitely not worse, that's for sure.

Then there is the Legend Of Kyrandia series, and I think it's rather crystal clear that Hand Of Fate was a big improvement over book 1.

As the opposite side of coin... there's much more examples of the sequels that were absolutely worse than original. Still Life 2 is perfect example of that. Also the Runaway-series I think sinked statically from 1 to 3. Yes, 3 was worst of them IMO.

Still Life 2 was terrible compared to Still Life 1 -- yes, almost everyone would agree with that statement. However, I'll bet almost all of those folks would agree that Still Life 1 was better than Post Mortem.

Black Mirror / Sam & Max / Runaway / Tex Murphy
 

I agree that Black Mirror II and III were way better than the original, which was already quite good itself. The same could be said for the second and third seasons of Sam & Max when compared to the original season. I do think the second and third Runaway games were a little better than the original though, which was already an excellent game.

Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum were good games, but not great games. Then Under a Killing Moon came and blew them both away to smithereens in both technology and gameplay. UAKM was a nearly perfect game, and then The Pandora Directive came along and was even better than UAKM. Before Pandora was released, I wondered if a sequel to UAKM could possibly be anywhere near as well done as UAKM, but Pandora greatly exceeded all expectations. It’s the best game ever!

I like this thread :)

It's sad what happened to the Simon the Sorcerer series. The first one was great. The second was good but not AS good... everything that came after that was just worse and worse. I find the new ones fairly boring and uninspired.

Syberia 1 was also a great game with a perfect ending and making a sequel to it just took away all of the mystery. Again the 2nd one was still OK but really not needed.

This makes me glad that there are also games like Grim Fandango and (thank GOD) Full Throttle with no sequels that just leave a bad aftertaste. They just stand on their own in perfection.

i agree, but shouldn't that claim that Sequels Must Die? :D

Prisoner of Ice, a sort of sequel to one of my favourite ags - Shadow of the Comet - was a big disappointment. It is probably one of the earliest examples of "dumbed down" adventures, with simplified puzzles and interface, extreme pixel-hunting and lots of non-interactive scenes. Bad game, which is strange considering it was made by the same people.

As for better sequels, I actually think the Runaway series improved with each game, from mediocre to very good. King's Quest 6 is arguably the best in the series, as well as Larry 7, Quest for Glory 4 and Goblins 2-3. And Simon the Sorcerer 3D is my personal favourite and one of my TOP-20 ags :)

With video games it's a lot easier to find good sequels compared to books or movies.

Yep, in my opinion it is better in some ways. "Higher resolution - a wizard must look the goods you know!" "Better sound - after all my voice isn't just supplied by just anybody you know!" "Longer rest periods between quests. Less walking. That sort of thing." (Rincewind's opinion of the sequel's improvements) :D

So basically yeah, I agree with the pencil headed wizard! lol The quality of the sound and visuals are better, and the game is a lot more logical/easy that the the first game - A LOT MORE LOGICAL. :D

But, I still much prefer the first. You see, I already know the puzzles' solutions since I have played it so many times so that doesn't bother me, however, in my opinion the quality of the script differs in the two games drastically - I like the first game's writing SO much better, although the second game's is still great stuff. :)

Nice thread!

I disagree with Discworld, I enjoyed the first one more. In the sequal sometimes it looked as though Rincewind was walking on the backgrounds, rather than through them. It was a little off putting and took me out of the storyline. In my opinion CMI is the best sequel in the Monkey Island series but the ending was a little... meh. I'm also one of the few who LOVED ToMI and thought TellTale give the francise justice. I also think Broken Sword 2 definiatly lives up to its predecessor, I wouldn't call it better as the storyline is brilliant in Shadow of the Templars.

Journeyman Project is a shining example of sequels being on par with its predecessors. Art of Murder series might be average, but sequels were at least as good as the previous games. Dark Seed 2 was equally good to the first one. As for Runaway, i feel like Runaway 2 wasn't as good as 1st, but 3rd was equally good or better than the original.

Well I do have to say (and I know I may be a lone in this) that the Gabriel Knight games got better with each sequel. And that even though they moved into 3D. They are all very awesome but I think the 3rd one may be my favorite. I just love the "small village" atmosphere and walking around exploring the mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau.

I know Leisure Suit Larry 7 is heralded as the best Larry game but Leisure Suit Larry 6 makes me laugh harder. I also think it was the raunchiest title particularly with some of the situations involving the women. That beach scene...

I also want to bring up Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island, which is surprisingly a really strong entry in the series. I'd say it's even slightly better than the third game because of the way it goes pretty dark halfway through without losing its Monkey Island-mess.

I can't wait to see how they tackle a Sierra property with King's Quest.

I doubt you're alone, Schneckchen, but for me they got progressively worse. That ham, Dean Erickson, was a terrible choice for Gabriel in 2, and 3 not only had 3D (ugh) and that stupid cat's hair puzzle, but the business with the computer was way too long and drawn out and Gabe was once again acting like a 3 year old and treating Gracie, who certainly deserved better after saving his hide in 2, as if she were brainless. No way would I say the sequels were as good as the first. Too bad since I really liked Baron von Glower. :P

Dreamfall by far surpasses TLJ imo. Every frogwares SH game that came after Mystery of the Mummy is also an improvement. Chronicles of Mystery the Tree of Life was way better than The Scorpio Ritual. And that's just from the top of my head. So yes sequals can exceed the original

about DreamFall;
i am not sure considering improvements in graphics to realtime-3d could be marked as a feature or a credit to make it exceed the previous anyhow , i guess its not fair to praise these elements as it is only a matter of some updated technologies and Techniques, a matter of a time release .

SQ4 is the better one of all the Series though the 6th part was (at that time) such a great improvement for adventure gaming, same with KQ6 and KQ7!

To be quite honest I haven't got the foggiest what your talking about. In my opinion it by far surpasses the original because it has much better developped chracters and has a much more rich and meaningful story making it a much more moving game with more depth. Which unfortunately is rare with AGs imo.

i mean that i loved gemini rue :P

Hmm guess I should try out Dreamfall again. Between the crappy controls and horrible action segments, maybe there was a good story somewhere in there that I forgot about.

I'm not sure if I prefer Dreamfall over TLJ but I wouldn't go and say that it's in any way worse. The games are a bit different though so I can't really compare them properly. Dreamfall was very playable after some fiddling with the controls and the action and sneaking sequences were not hard. In any case I would definitely say Dreamfall's strongest point is indeed the moving story, not any technical issues if that's what some people were hinting at.

All the Gabriel Knights are great and basically people complaining one of them being worse than the others usually have a very subjective take on some rather unessential part. Disliking 3D, disliking the actor, etc. Which is all fine but doesn't really mean the game would be bad. Whereas pretty much everyone agrees that Still Life 2 clearly is worse than the original. (I don't think Post Mortem is really worse, at least not by much.)

Personally I have nothing against any sequel. I don't really get the people thinking a mediocre or bad sequel "ruins the experience". I certainly would prefer an excellent sequel but decent one is still another decent game and doesn't make the earlier parts any less good. I really disliked that Still Life 2 but I can enjoy PM and SL1 just fine, I even tend to forget the bad sequel altogether.