The sequel to Naughty Dog's cuddly open-world hopper and bopper gave players guns, cars, spikes, torture, buxom barmaids, goatees, demonic transformations and a hero whose opening line is "I'll kill that Baron Praxis!" Bit of a shock for the tots, that one.
Out with sunlit valleys and meadows! Out with horses! Out with cheekbones, noses and textures! In with oceans! In with talking sailboats! In with chibi-style character models! Might we add: WTF?
LEGO videogames have met with considerable success, but quite what sticking plastic bricks together has to do with strumming guitars we can't fathom.
Konami must have been hitting the crack-pipe particularly hard the day they turned a world-renowned stealth action franchise into a collectable card game.
If there's one thing an arcade icon like Pac-Man doesn't need, it's a backstory. So Namco gave him one. He doesn't need relatives or pets either. Namco gave him those too. Ditto dialogue, a giant robot adversary and the ability to butt-slam. Pac-Man World was, quite simply, out of its tree.
Sega's done some terrible things to poor old Sonic the Hedgehog in its efforts to keep the ailing franchise alive. Morphing him into a "werehog" isn't the worst of them, but it's easily the oddest.
The sort of conceptual tomfoolery only Nintendo is capable of. "All right team, new challenge: we're doing yet another Mario game, but this time he's a 2D paper cut-out. So is everything else in the game, for that matter. No it doesn't make sense, but screw it."
Perhaps the reboot to crown all reboots. The first two Wolfensteins were top-down adventure games. Wolfenstein 3D was the earliest "modern" first-person shooter and the slickest example of real-time 3D yet seen. Talk about conceptual leaps.
The first four Breath of Fire RPGs were solid, unadventurous blends of high fantasy plotting and turn-based battling. The fifth took half its artistic cues from Blade Runner and transformed character death into a means of progression. That's right, you die to win.
FFX-2 was the first "proper" Final Fantasy sequel, retaining characters and plot points from FFX. Extraordinary in itself, but not as extraordinary as the new sugar-coated "girl power" theme. You fight battles by dressing up, for Odin's sake.