Just give it a new name

So while on my way home from working thinking about things that piss me off, the thing that sprung into my head today was how much I hate it when developers just slam a big established title name on something just go generate sales.

Once again I'm going to use Silent Hill: Book of Memories as my example, god I hate this game so much and I've not even played it.  Why does this have Silent Hill written on the cover?  What does it have to do with Silent Hill?  Throwing in some monsters from the series does not just make the game a Silent Hill, you need to follow certain themes and game play styles for it to qualify.

Origins and Shattered Memories were different, but at least they both retained something that fans of the series are familiar with.  This, is just a completely different game, and the only reason the Silent Hill title is there, is so you can try and dupe fans into buying your probably shitty dungeon crawl.

Silent Hill is not the only series guilty of pulling this shit though, Final Fantasy is another one.

Final Fantasy XII, despite being an RPG, barely qualifies as a Final Fantasy game.  Gone is all the exploration and levelling and the kind of battles that you expect with a Final Fantasy game.  It doesn't bare any resemblance to what were used to, and the only reason it's been labelled as "13" is so that fans of the previous 12 will go out and buy the fucking thing.  Lost Odyssey is more of a Final Fantasy game than Final Fantasy 13 is, hell, if you just changed the names round people would have been a lot less mad about 13 being a bunch of corridors strung together by a stupid plot.

I'm not saying don't make spin offs, I mean look at Crisis Core, that game is fucking great, but the reason it works is because even though the game play is drastically different, it still has strong links to Final Fantasy 7s plot and certain things that we got used to using, like Materia, have been adapted to work in interesting new ways. 

The point on a sequel is to improve and expand on what you've already got, if you're going to change everything up then just give it a new fucking name.  Remove Silent Hill from the Book of Memories title, and suddenly I'd want to play a horror themed dungeon crawl, but because you put that name on there you're just ruining things for no reason.

It'd be like me developing a new Mirrors Edge game, but making it an RTS.  That's not a sequel or a spin off, that's me putting a established name on something so that fans of the first will buy it, and all I'd really be doing is pissing people off.

So just call Book of Memories "Book of Memories", and just call the next Final Fantasy "Badly Written Idiot Adventure" because people will still buy it. I don't think companies realise we're not scared of new IP's, in fact I'd say the majority of people want more of them, so stop ruining good series, let them die and give us new shit.