Tell GR: What game series have you fallen out of love with?

Growing old is tough. You don’t understand the stuff that younger people like. Grey hairs start popping up in unusual places (or those hairs fall out altogether). Things that you used to love, you no longer love. Considering that video games were part of many of our childhoods, it’s inevitable that some series we used to adore eventually fall out of favor with us.

With this in mind, and with two big nostalgia-inducing games around the corner in the form of Resident Evil 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3, we asked our editors which game series they have fallen out of love with. As always, leave your own opinions in the comments section below, and we’ll feature the best response in tomorrow’s Tell GR!

Paul Tamburro, executive editor: “Smash Bros. This is one of those weird instances in which I recognize that the most recent entry in the series is arguably its best, but it’s just no longer for me. I put countless hours into Melee and Brawl, but the Wii U and 3DS entries left me cold. Smash Bros Ultimate is more of the same but better, and while I can appreciate that, it’s not exactly what I want anymore. The floatiness of the combat didn’t matter too much to me back in the day when beating up Yoshi as Pikachu was enough to grab me, but now I find that it feels difficult to have a truly exciting match. It’s mostly just accidentally punching the air and occasionally pulling off a nice move. It’s fun, sure, but I don’t love it like I used to.”

Jason Faulkner, senior editor: “I’ve slowly fallen out of love with the Battlefield series. I played Battlefield 1942 heavily when it came out, and the series was pretty great up to BF4. BF4 wasn’t a terrible game, but it had a terrible launch, and it was apparent that EA DICE cut corners when developing it. I played a ton of Battlefield 1, and I really did enjoy my time with it. However, it had a myriad of problems that never got addressed and EA released the DLC way too slowly. Then Battlefield 5 came out and showed what a mess a BF game could be. I don’t think that DICE and EA even really have a plan for the game’s future. As made evident by how much time they’ve wasted making TTK higher, then trying to introduce “core” servers with the old TTK, and then removing the changes completely. I think games as a service is just code for “we’re going to wing it until people stop paying and then we’re going to drop support” and since BF5 adopted the model I don’t really find myself looking forward to logging in and playing.”

Mack Ashworth, lead editor: “I loved the first three Assassin’s Creed games. Unfortunately, the annual releases were too much to keep up with, what with other great games to also play. With that said, now that Ubisoft has now slowed down production, it’s perhaps time to give the series another chance…”

Michael Leri, features editor: “Kingdom Hearts is something I went from replaying over and over to not giving Disney-branded shit about. The wait between first and second game was long enough but the gap between the second and third game is just ridiculous. Packing a bunch of anime trash storylines into handheld games doesn’t help either because it’s become too convoluted to care about. Waiting this long is already dumb but waiting and having to do homework to connect the dots on an ever-expanding corkboard of corny nonsense is not something I want to do.”

Bradley Russell, news editor: “It’s a dead series now but Metal Gear Solid 5 felt like the death knell anyways for that franchise. Hideo Kojima was in desperate need of an editor come MGS 4 anyway and 5 felt like Konami at first kowtowing to the auteur’s every whim and then pulling the brakes when things got too zany. MGS 1-3 were, by far, the peak of the series, and it’s difficult to look back and say I have any affinity for MGS anymore after everything that went down both in 5 (why did we have to play the hospital mission twice?!) and the breakdown between Kojima and Konami. It all feels like a memory you’d rather not revisit anytime soon rather than one you look back on fondly.”