I was a Siren main in Borderlands.

Every new game in the franchise made me hate Lilith more. I think I may have cheered at the end of BL3.

Dragon age 2, Mass effect 3

ME3 is particularly bad cause most of the game is exactly as it should have been, and then the ending is pure unadulterated trash.

A future prediction as I won't be buying it - Subnautica 2.

I know The Division 1 flirted with seasons, but I hated TD2's season pass crap.

Lords of the Realm III

1 was great, though the economy was overly complicated. 2 fixed all the issues of 1 and made combat more fun. 3 removed everything I liked and replaced it w/ a weird realtime RTS system.

Evil Genius 2. I loved Evil Genius 1 as a kid. It was far from perfect and had a lot of bugs, but it was a blast. I'm fully aware there's a lot of rose tinted goggles going on for it in my mind. But I thought the new one would fix problems and be more enjoyable. It did improve on the first in a lot of ways, but it was so so grindy.

In EG1 you could send you minions into the world to steal money and complete missions (that gave points or loot, like stealing the Eifel Tower). I'm EG2, they kept this mechanic, but anyone you send to the world map is just gone. They cannot come back. This leads to just an annoying constant flow of recruiting more minions, training them to upgrade, and them being sent to the map forever to never return. It would perhaps be slightly better if you could increase the rate you recruit minions like the first game, but instead they always come at a constant rate and there is a button to recruit more but it's buried in a menu. So many things in this game are buried in a menu.

Another frustration, they added a feature to automatically tag enemy agents that come to your base (to be killed, captured, distracted, etc) but they're all under different research tiers. Why require the research at all? Right clicking agents and saying "tag for capture" is just pointless busy work. Even in the original you could hold control when you did it and it would flag the whole group. Not anymore. You can only tag one at a time.

There are just so many little things like this that made the game so annoying to play. I wanted to like it. But I just couldn't enjoy it. The new art style is worse, too. It keeps the spy fi aesthetic but it's much more cartoonish. The game is more diverse which is nice, the original was like all men. I also liked what they did with John Steele, the main antagonist more or less. Canonically you beat him and killed him but they pass on his mantle to new agents and train them to be like him. And they're relatively weak, but like a constant threat.

Gonna be controversial but Monster Hunter World for me. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game a lot at first and put 100+ hours into it. But it marked the departure from the silly, cozy, slightly under-the-radar franchise to something that's just too big for my tastes. I feel like each entry is trying to top its predecessor in new mechanics, bigger maps and stuff and end up getting lost in the sauce.

I started playing on PSP with Freedom 2 and Freedom Unite and moved over to 3DS when the games came out for that. The games were never unpopular per se, especially in Japan where they've been a staple since the PSP days, but they always felt a little more niche and unknown. They felt more focused, more streamlined, tighter. All the new combat mechanics added in newer installments definitely help the fluidity of the gameplay and add a lot of fun and variety. But that's it for new additions that I'd miss when going back to older titles. These huge open-world-esque maps just don't cut it for me.

Rise would likely have been last MH that I could enjoy since it's a good mix of classic MH with good QoL features added in to make the game more modern, but even that one didn't quite catch my attention for too long.

I don't know, I feel like Monster Hunter kinda lots its charme in chasing industry trends of open world games and more realistic graphics and physics in favour of character, silliness, and focus.