Fanon Discontinuity/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


THIS IS THE REAL SCREEN FROM THAT SCENE DAMN IT.
"There's no such thing in the world as absolute reality. Most of what they call real is actually fiction. What you think you see is only as real as your brain tells you it is.... It's not whether you were right or wrong, but how much faith you were willing to have, that decides the future."
—Solid Snake encouraging use of this trope, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Video games are by and large an interactive medium. If a game fandom plays something and finds that it doesn't add up, it's just as easy to dismiss.

Note: Do not include examples based only in Adaptation Decay unless Word of God has declared an adaptation canon. For example, the Pokémon anime is not canon to the Pokémon video game series and thus should not be listed, but applicable adaptations of Devil May Cry should.

Examples of Fanon Discontinuity in Video Games include:

  • Played for laughs with the Show Within a Show of the second Akiba's Trip game. While even the non-otaku in the cast enjoy Striprism when they marathon the series, everyone finds the last episode overwhelmingly awful for unstated reasons. Before they start the series is referred to as being 47 episodes long, instead of the 48 typical for anime.
  • Any fan of Supreme Commander and its expansion Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance will tell you that Supreme Commander 2 took everything that made the original games good and threw them away. It also horribly reversed all the events of the previous game's campaign and storyline. Due to this, many fans don't regard Supreme Commander 2 as a Supreme Commander game.
  • A small but extremely hardcore group of Final Fantasy VII fans refuse to accept the Complication Compilation as canon, for being inconsistent with and retconning a game whose fandom had been around for several years. Some fans don't like it because it threw a lot of Fan Wank out the window by establishing things like the world not being destroyed at the end of the game. Some fans don't like it because the games are simply low-quality. The rest of the fanbase was just glad to have an explanation for some of the vaguer events.
  • There are communities that declare that the Pokémon series to have ended at various arbitrary points (usually after the demarcation by which portable platform they were on), which can lead one to wonder how anyone is left to actually partake of the Cash Cow Franchise if it supposedly ended after Red and Blue/after Yellow/after Gold, Silver, and Crystal/etc.
    • Personalities also get this. May is not subjected to "Real Women Never Wear Dresses" despite the fact her NPC role as of Emerald fits Mary Sue and Team Mom. Silver is treated more like his Pokémon Special counterpart and as a Tsundere rather then the abusive Jerkass he is pre Heel Face Turn. Red is treated as The Stoic rather then his implied Hot-Blooded personality.
      • To be fair, Silver has a somewhat Tsundere personality in the remakes, although fans tend to exaggerate it.
      • Also, pretty much any of the main characters could be seen as Mary Sue, not just May.
    • Speaking of Red, he's always drawn in a Bishonen style vaguely resembling his actual pre-Gen. III design, and most fans discontinue his two canon designs. The same goes for eye colors. Silver is most often seen with red eyes due to a noticeable error in the games (the intro shows him with red instead of Gray Eyes), Ethan is sometimes drawn with gold eyes (as a throwback to his fanon name and the Gen. II game), and the Kanto trio are drawn with eyes that are the same colors as their names.
    • Fans always ignore May and Dawn's canon personalities in the games, especially May's. To a similar degree, Ethan's personality is ignored.
    • On a slight note, fanartists discontinue Lucas' canon hairstyle as he has a serious case of Anime Hair.
  • The fourth Monkey Island game was almost universally disliked, causing many to just pretend the series ended at the stellar third game. At least until Tales of Monkey Island was released, meaning there's now just a gap.
    • The gap is there even if you didn't mind Escape, considering how Tales takes place after an unspecified fifth game. The only change is how big the gap actually is to you.
  • Old-school fans of the Backyard Sports series think all games after online play was removed did not happen.
  • Dino Crisis 3 was such a Non Sequitur Scene and a Franchise Killer that the Dino Crisis fans generally treat it as Fanon Discontinuity.
  • Some rabid fans of Super Smash Bros. Melee refuse to accept Brawl because it's slower, forces players to adopt new strategies, evens out everyone's jumping gravity, and is intended for a wider audience. Some other rabid fans accept Brawl, but only if they manage to hack the game to make it play more like Melee, physics and all. Still more rabid fans reject Melee because they think advanced techniques create a rift between pros and novices and that the characters are too imbalanced, even though these problems are just as relevant in Brawl.
    • Some claim that Super Smash Bros. Brawl did not replace Mewtwo with Lucario. Fans of Mewtwo are never happy with anything that displaces it from the top of the original Pokémon food chain.
      • For what few similarities they have, you might as well say that Wario "replaced" Dr. Mario....
  • Speaking of Origin Systems games, Wing Commander suffers from this as well. Some groups will declare the series ended with Wing Commander 4: The Price of Freedom, others will only recognize the Kilrathi Saga (WC 1 thru 3) as canon.
  • Most fans of the Master of Orion franchise would rather forget about the 3rd installment.
  • For some Metroid "purists" , there is no such thing as Metroid Prime. The series is still in 2D.
    • Same thing for some of the 3-D Mario games, though to a lesser degree.
    • Team Ninja never released a Metroid game that turned strong, fierce, independent Samus into an angsty yes-woman.
    • Metroid: Other M also started the largest arguments over canon in series history with its rather cavalier attitude towards previous games and the manga. The arguments are not helped by how polarizing the game itself is.
    • It's a matter of divided fanbase all over the place with Metroid. You'll find few enough fans that will accept everything (except Pinball which was indisputably a noncanon spinoff). There are varying factions of fans, much like Star Fox listed above, who will ignore everything after the first game. Some ignore the first game in lieu of Super Metroid, many ignore the Metroid Prime series altogether, some accept Prime, but will not accept Prime: Hunters, some will ignore the first game's status in canon in lieu of Zero Mission, some will ignore all the later Sakamoto works (Fusion, Zero Mission, and Other M), and others ignore Other M alone, as also stated here.
    • The Metroid Manga, despite being stated as canon to the games by the current head of the franchise, has long since been fanon discontinuity to many gamers. Part of Other M's rejection comes from perceived similarities of its plot to the manga's that were not as strongly perceived in past games but it should be noted Other M isn't entirely consistent with the manga either, despite supposedly borrowing more heavily from it than past games.
  • Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow. Or for some, the whole second trilogy.
  • The DS version of Snowboard Kids never happened, according to fans of the first games.
  • Most of the Metal Slug sequels after Metal Slug 3 are disavowed by fans of the original Nazca-developed installments, as they were made after the original SNK went out of the business and without the involvement of the original Nazca team. Metal Slug 4 and 5 were farmed out to a Korean developer and were not as well received, especially due to their use of too much Frankensteined sprites. 6 and 7, which were developed by SNK Playmore, were better received, but still considered not as good as the originals by purists (especially 7, which was developed for the DS and ported to the PSP, despite the previous installments being arcade games).
  • Within the Mass Effect fandom, the general response to the novel Mass Effect: Deception has been extremely negative, with an almost universal refusal to accept the book as canon. The Mass Effect Wiki community even issued an open letter to BioWare that requested it be declared Canon Discontinuity.
    • BioWare has announced that they'll be re-releasing the book with corrections. Even so, it's likely to remain Fanon Discontinuity, at least.
    • In Mass Effect 3, everything after the final scene with the Illusive Man and Anderson, ultimately the last five minutes of the game, is shaping up to be this for many. Doesn't matter the reason (significant blood loss, continued exposure to Geth/Cerberus/Prothean/Reaper mind altering technology, stress from the fate of your species and the galaxy resting on your shoulders, or personal losses) just forget about it. It never happened.
      • A considerable number of fans disavow everything after Shepard gets hit by Harbinger's beam, period. Though some Fix Fics go as far as ignoring the entire final level.
      • After massive backlash from the fandom, Bioware announced that they will be releasing downloadable content to clarify elements of the ending. When this will be made and what it will consist of remains to be seen.
      • It should be noted that they have stated they will not change the ending, so further uproar may occur.
        • They didn't. And it did.
    • The photo of Tali in your quarters if romanced. It's been discovered to be a poorly photoshopped stock photo with numerous plotholes, such as the fact that lore repeatedly states "what passes for a Quarian ear", when she has human ones, the fact she is out of her suit on Rannoch, which is supposed to be impossible until they reacclimatised (taking her mask off briefly was a large risk), that Rannoch appears covered in grass when in game it appeared mostly desert-like and several more. Most fans are of the opinion that Tali is either trolling Shepard or hope that it will be fixed in the upcoming DLC.
    • It wasn't.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog: The most extreme fans of the original Genesis Sonic games disown anything made after Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Many fans however believe that Sonic Heroes and especially Shadow the Hedgehog never happened, in part because Shadow the Hedgehog has so many branching paths that nobody can tell what the story is. Considering Sonic Heroes was effectively a giant setup for Shadow, the two would go hand-in-hand. Games disowned even more often are Sonic Shuffle (which was All Just a Dream anyway), the infamously bad Play Station 3/X360 release Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 (which was so bad that it retcons itself), Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island, Sonics Schoolhouse, Sonic R, and Sonic Labyrinth.
  • Many fans of the Warcraft franchise choose to ignore the plot (if such a word can be used for it) of World of Warcraft. Here are a few common complaints:
    • Previously powerful, important and charismatic characters being reduced into the role of an Evil Overlord without any personality whatsoever. See Character Derailment.
    • Continuous sloppy changes to the continuity. See Retcon.
    • The formerly story-driven world being changed into a static place with only few permanent changes. See Status Quo Is God.
    • The villains suddenly being incredibly impotent despite the fact that their only true enemies are also feverishly fighting each other in the side of the good-evil conflicts. See Villain Decay.
    • The Warcraft tabletop RPG and computer games always seem to conflict, causing their fans to dismiss the other as non-canon.
    • Every Warcraft fan (or detractor) ignores great chunks of lore, depending on how he sees the universe. The lore's a mess, to state the obvious.
    • In many ways, the gameplay of World of Warcraft is completely at odds with the story - for example, in Wrath of the Lich King, the Horde and Alliance are allied against the Lich King, but you can still fight the opposing faction in various PVP modes, as if the Horde and Alliance were still at war.
    • Some fans refuse to acknowledge anything written by Richard A Knaak.
    • Most Horde players hold that Thrall is still Warchief. Garrosh is merely keeping his chair warm while he keeps the world from collapsing.
    • Some fans also outright refuse to count the comics as Warcraft canon.
  • The original Harvest Moon protagonist's default name is "Pete", but everyone calls him "Jack", due to a beanstalk scene in the original game and apparently due to Natsume calling him "Jack" in a manual (odd since no one cares about any other names in a manual). All the other male protagonists have default names, but few people call them by their Canon Name's.
    • A lot of fans discontinue any game that came out before "Friends of Mineral Town". As the fandom keeps on gaining new members though, it may occasionally leap to "Any game before Island of Happiness"
  • Ultima IX: Ascension? Ask a lot of the fans of the series, and they'll tell you it didn't happen.
  • A lot of arcade Pac-Man fans discontinue the fact that he has always been anthropomorphic, not a pizza shaped thing.
  • Fans of the Army Men franchise tend to not count anything after Sarge's War, which is justified since most are In Name Only, with no semblance to the 3DO series.
  • There are some Super Mario Bros fans who do not recognize the American version of Super Mario Bros. 2 as a real Mario game, mostly due to it actually being a Mario-infused version of Doki Doki Panic. This is mostly a case of the dramatically different gameplay, as opposed to The Lost Levels, which is viewed as the legitimate sequel.
    • Which, on the other hand, is exactly the same gameplay, only harder. It's the Same, Now It Sucks? That's up to you.
      • The (admittedly smaller) portion of the fanbase that throws the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 into this does so in part because it's a Mission Pack Sequel and in part because Miyamoto didn't do any work on the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 but did do work on Doki Doki Panic/the American Super Mario Bros. 2. All that said, elements of both do make further appearances in later games, which aren't subject to this trope generally.
      • Considering both games' inclusion in the immensely popular Super Mario All-Stars, I'd say the fans don't really have a problem with both games existing concurrently.
  • Even gamers who liked the original Bubsy the Bobcat games, as repetitive and derivative as they were, have disowned Bubsy 3D for PlayStation. The developers decided to take the series in a 3D direction after the much superior Super Mario 64 had been released, and failed miserably at it even by the standards of lesser 3D games. They also decided to take Bubsy's snarky commentary to a whole new level—which would have been fine, except that rather than hiring Rob Paulsen again, they hired Lani Minella, who provided what may be the most annoying voice possible for the character (think Omochao, but with a Brooklyn accent; it's literally the same voice actress!). It honestly makes the older Bubsy games look absolutely brilliant in comparison.
  • Most fans of the Phantasy Star series disown Phantasy Star III due to it being poorly made, overly difficult especially in the beginning stages, and its story having little-to-nothing to do with the main arc.
    • A small but vocal corner of the fandom ignores the Phantasy Star Online games, being that it has nothing to do with any of the previous games beyond some vestigial name-drops; a major complaint is the fact that Numans are a playable race, while in the 16-bit era RPGs, there was a grand total of three, and only one of them survived long enough to have a single half-blooded child.
  • Many Tetris fan games intentionally ignore several of the more restrictive rules in the official Tetris Guideline, such as the unwieldy Super Rotation System, the much-maligned infinite rotation rule, and the "bag" randomizer that just deals random permutations of a sequence of all 7 pieces. As far as many fans are concerned, Tetris the Grand Master 3's Classic mode (as seen in the famous "Invisible Tetris" video) provides the definitive Tetris rules and game mechanics, especially the Arika Rotation System, and most fan-made games tend to default to ARS over SRS.
    • Tetris: The Grand Master ACE, a console "installment" of TGM on the 360 released one year after TGM3, is regarded by fans as a monstrosity beyond Arika's control. Some wouldn't have minded the not-TGMness so much if it were not for the fact that proper ARS has to be unlocked through an Xbox Live update, and even then both versions of ARS now has a finite-though-still-lenient variant of infinite spin. As far as TGM fans are concerned, TGM3 is the last installment of the series.
  • Some Final Fantasy fans would like to pretend Final Fantasy Tactics Advance never happened, just because it isn't gritty or dark and depressing like the Playstation version, questioning Marche's motives on his actions in the story, or that the game is just too easy (then again, it had a ton of things that were a Game Breaker).
    • There's also a chunk of classic Tactics players who reject all the other Ivalice games from continuity. This chunk is getting smaller, however, as the remake is somewhat better-known than the original and meshes better with the other games.
    • And pulling hte "Gritty, Dark, and Depressing" bit, it's kind of laughable from some fans because Final Fantasy Tactics takes place in quite a Crap Saccharine World with colourful art.
  • Some fans choose to believe that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney never happened, mainly because of the new protagonist and what happened to Phoenix (both in terms of events and characterization), despite Word of God specifically stating it was not in an Alternate Universe.
    • There's also a good number of people who like to pretend the third case of the second game never happened. This didn't use to present many problems, as then only reference to the case was a poster in Trials & Tribulations. References to it have begun to creep into the Ace Attorney Investigations subseries, however...
  • A good number of fans refuse to acknowledge Silent Hill: 0rigins and Silent Hill: Homecoming on the grounds that they were done by an entirely different creative team, some going so far as to label them as professional fanfiction because of it. To a lesser extent, the jury is out on Silent Hill 4, due to the fact that it wasn't originally planned as a Silent Hill project and due to the claim that it wasn't very good.
    • So far, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories seems to be averting this, even while the matter of Origins and Homecoming races towards Broken Base territory.
      • That's probably due to the fact that Shattered Memories is a "re-imagining" of the first game - it's different from the "main" Silent Hill games in a completely deliberate way. Most people who worry about canon are content to just label it a side-story.
    • Actually, Silent Hill 4 was always supposed to be a Silent Hill game; it's only some fan rumor that it started off as otherwise.
  • Some fans of the original Perfect Dark consider the Prequel Perfect Dark Zero to be a horrible game that changed several things from the original game, and had a completely different style. Others accept it for being a decent game that just did not live up to how good the first one was.
  • For some of the fans of Spyro, it's the Urban Legend of Spyro series.
    • Or to be exact, anything past the first three games. Given that the fourth was by a different developer and had a sharp quality nosedive, the cut-off point is fairly clear and most fans don't care to know what happened afterwards.
    • And on the other side of the coin, the originals were never made; as if Insomniac-games-never-existed sort of thing.
    • Skylanders. Didn't. Happen.
  • The ending of Metal Gear Solid 4 features a final twist that casts, not just the events of that game, but the events of the whole franchise in a very different light, at the cost of some of the emotional impact of the events of that game in particular.
    • Additionally, ask any of the same group of fans about Metal Gear Solid: Rising, which will be on the 360. The game wasn't even announced for more than an hour before Play Station 3 fanboys in general said they wouldn't buy it even if it does get a Play Station 3 version.
      • And now that it's been picked up by Platinum Games, it's considered noncanon for completely different reasons altogether.
    • Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has left a bad taste in many fans' mouth due to its mostly Filler plot that didn't contribute much to the overall storyline (other than retconning the ending timeline of MGS3 to explain Zero's role in MGS4, explaining how Big Boss got his money, and establishing that he can't even come up with original names for his crazy eight-bit fortresses) and how it retconned Sokolov's death and Gray Fox's original back-story in order to shoehorn them into the game (considering Sokolov doesn't really do much in MPO and Null could have easily been a new character). Kojima Productions has clarified that MPO is still canonical, but they acknowledge the game's negative reception by choosing to title the next PSP game in the series Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker instead of Portable Ops 2 and promoting it as the "first true Hideo Kojima game for the PSP".
    • There are various cut-offs where groups of fans believe the timeline starts or ends. A few fans accept everything which (in the series' timeline) was before MGS2, including the Naked Snake games (or they accept all that and MGS2, but only the Tanker chapter), thereby eliminating Raiden. Others accept the entirety of MGS2 and everything 'before' it, but not MGS4. Then there are those who don't accept anything set before the original Metal Gear (which usually means MGS4 is off as well). And then there are fans who accept MGS3, but not MGS4, Portable Ops or Peace Walker.
  • Many Tales (series) fans disregard 'Tales of The World' entirely, since it attempted to make it a Massive Multiplayer Crossover, but without the multiplayer for the most part. The menus were like a bad MMO, as were the quests.
    • Many fans don't count The First Strike movie for this reason, due to inconsistencies with the source material. This post gives a good summary of this.
    • About twenty years after its release in Japan, Tales of Phantasia finally got an official English translation - which changed some characters' names from the ones used in fan translations and even some official promo materials. Most of the established fandom sees no reason to let a little issue like canon get in the way of what they've been calling the characters for two decades already, and it's hard to blame them.
  • A good majority of F-Zero fans prefer to believe that Maximum Velocity never happened for one reason or another. GP Legend is no different... despite being a non-canon series to begin with. Nintendo seems to be on a similar wavelength with both series, as all the GBA games aren't even referenced in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
  • Id Software has an odd situation with Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. Older fans often consider all work after Quake 3 un-canon or it is strongly contested.
    • Although the id games never focused much on storylines, the gameplay of their newer games is very different from their older games.
      • Quake is often considered to be a stand alone game, because no Quake sequel follows the same graphical setting. Quake II is considered to be a stand alone game, followed by Quake 4 because they share the same setting, visual style and match somewhat in pacing. Quake 3 is even weirder, since it can be summed up as "shooting people over and over again".
      • Wolfenstein suffers a lot from the large gaps between releases. The first one is a childhood memory, the second is a modern classic and the third one can't live up to the hype.
  • Fans of the Tekken, Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur fandom have largely given the finger to their series' attempts at spinoffs (Death By Degrees, Virtua Quest, and Soul Calibur Legends, respectively).
  • Mega Man X: Command Mission tends to be ignored, even by some supporters of Axl's entries in the series. Not only is it the only RPG in a 2D platformer series, but its story doesn't seem to fit anywhere in the series timeline. (Ironically, making an X9 to close the new plots opened there might bring back some who ignore the later X games.)
  • There's also the ongoing flame war debate among Mega Man Zero fans as to whether X6-X8 are Canon, Alternate Continuity, or Canon Discontinuity.
    • The official sourcebook, the Mega Man Zero Official Complete Works, subtly hints that the series post-X5 is canon: an important location in the first Zero game (Neo Arcadian Tower, effectively the "gateway" to the final level, Neo Arcadian Core) is revealed to be the rebuilt Orbital Elevator, the McGuffin from X8.
    • From the same series, the Mega Man Xtreme games are often discontinued. Say what you will about how good their gameplay is, but they don't fit well into the series' overall plot.
      • Which is odd considering that Xtreme 2 introduces us to Iris, Zero's infamous Gwen Stacy; in X4, he already knows her on a personal basis, Implied Love Interest and all. Plus, X6 specificially refers to the Erasure Incident (again, the events of Xtreme 2) near endgame. Not to mention that Keiji Inafune has stated that Zero's ending in X6 (where he seals himself away so that his viral programming can be removed, thus setting up the Elf Wars and Zero) is the final event of the X series.
    • Similarly, in the original Mega Man series, many discontinue the PC games 1 and Mega Man 3. That they're both horrifically bad doesn't help, but even within the bare-bones plot of the series, they just don't make any sense.
      • That's assuming they were ever canon to begin with; they haven't appeared in any official timelines, so it's likely they weren't.
    • The fans of Mega Man Battle Network tend to ignore the fourth game of the series, some of the reasons (A complete list would be too long) are:
      • You have to beat the game multiple times to get all transformations and best weapons, while in the past games such things simply are unlocked as you progress in the game.
      • Despite the plot of the game being a meteor going to crash on Earth, 90% of the game is centered about battle tournaments with the main characters discovering about the plot JUST BEFORE THE FINAL SCENARIO.
  • Many Star FOX fans would like to ignore Star Fox Command, made easier by the game's multiple ending chop suey and the fact that the latest Star Fox game is a remake of Star Fox 64. Some would also like to believe there was no Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet, if it wasn't for Krystal's appearance in the superior Star Fox Assault.
    • And then there are the "Snessers" who cannot accept Star Fox 64, preferring the SNES game and its accompanying comic. Or, at least, they reject the changes in 64 that contradict SNES.
  • Ignoring the uber-fanatics who thought that Fallout 2 wasn't really part of the Fallout series, Fallout fans often divide into camps about what is and is not canon. There is some agreement that Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, while a decent game, just isn't in the Fallout continuity; some things honestly don't mesh. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance clone with guns/lasers Fallout: Brotherhood Of Steel is often denied existence. Diehards have decided that shifting to first-person, Oblivion-style gameplay means Fallout 3, no matter how good it may be, won't count as Fallout (the keyword being OWG, or Oblivion With Guns). And so on.
    • For the record, Bethesda has stated that Fallout 3 disregards the storylines from Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel.
      • According to Fallout 3 itself, it seems that anything from Fallout Tactics is semi-Canon: it's canon as long as it doesn't contradict Fallout 1, 2 or 3. The existence of the rogue BOS detachment in Chicago is confirmed in conversation with some NPCs.
    • The denial of Fallout 2 as canon is funny because half of that group feels it had too much lighthearted randomness, while the other half feels it went over the top trying to be Darker and Edgier or Hotter and Sexier (See Reno, New). Clearly, Fallout 2 did something right. Or maybe they simply feel that not coming from a vault is an absolute travesty. And probably some people think it did all of the above.
      • New Reno's the perfect example of both sides, really; let's create a huge casino town filled with feuding mob families, gangsters with Tommy guns and pinstripe suits, and porn studios where the player can sign up. WACKY! And EDGY!
      • This is the primary reason why fans of the originals dislike the Bethesda sequel - it did the same thing (wackier and edgier) with every side-quest in the entire game. The first post-release review on No Mutants Allowed described the game as an amusement park set in the post-apocalypse, where each side-quest is just a ride with a different theme.
    • Though arguably Fallout 3 caught the series' intended aesthetics best. It felt very much like bands of people attempting to survive an apocalypse by fighting and scavenging, while also doing a good job of capturing a retro 50's design and atmosphere. But no, "Oblivion with guns", a sense of humour and a new kind of Super Mutant all OBVIOUSLY mean that it's got no right to be part of the franchise.
    • Heavily averted with Fallout: New Vegas which managed to largely win the hearts of old school Fallout fans by being basically what the original Fallout 3 would have been had Black Isle not shut down.
  • A good portion of Final Fantasy X fans deny its sequel Final Fantasy X-2. This game has caused quite a bit of Internet Backdraft due to how heated the franchise fanbase gets over the series.
  • Though its gameplay was well-received, the plot of Chrono Trigger sequel Chrono Cross irked many fans of the original game by heavily implying the deaths of its three main characters, and resolving the fate of Schala's disappearance by making her clone a blonde with a bad Australian accent. On top of that, the entire second half of the game consisted of a number of concepts (Chronopolis, the Dragon Gods, etc.) that were only vaguely explained, if at all, rendering it a Mind Screw by default. Compared to its predecessor, it's often considered a disappointment.
    • Some fans dislike CC enough to ignore the DS remake of CT, which includes new content that canonically ties the first game's story to the latter to the outcome seen in the latter game.
    • On the subject of CT, many fans were not pleased when the DS remake canonized Dalton as the agent for Guardia's destruction.
  • Bomberman: Act Zero for the Xbox 360 did not sit well with many fans. Aside from a Darker and Edgier makeover, some of the chief complaints against it were the overuse of Copy and Paste Environments, a Nintendo Hard single-player campaign that lasted for 99 levels, and a complete lack of offline multiplayer—a staple of the franchise since Bomberman II. Even the folks at Hudson Soft themselves were later appalled by how poorly the game was received.
  • The Command & Conquer series is heavily debated among fans, but most people can agree on three four things:
    1. The Camp heavy Red Alert 2 and 3 and the Darker and Edgier Tiberium Wars are positioned on opposite ends of the Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness and trying to fit them together is an exercise in futility. The Tiberium series has meteors Terraforming vast areas of the world into inhospitable wastelands, the bad guy is a Villain with Good Publicity Dark Messiah who turns the poverty-stricken third world into a Cult dedicated to him, and the heroes are particularly prone to Nice Job Breaking It, Hero and Moral Dissonance situations. On the other hand, Red Alert 2 and 3 (especially 3) has more Camp than Batman and Robin. Red Alert 3 has WAR BEARS that can be shot out of a cannon and parachuted down to assault the enemy, for crying out loud.
    2. Tiberium fans largely agree that the first two games in the series, Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun, are both Canon.
      • In fact, the two series are not in the same canon; they simply both start that way. Both begin with an alternate universe where Einstein assassinates Hitler, preventing World War II as we knew it but instead freeing up Stalin to invade Europe at the beheast of Kane. As of Yuri's Revenge, further time travel experiments split the timeline again. On the other hand, that seemingly means the Tiberium Universe occurred in a reality where Yuri conquered the world, so there are still some things left unanswered.
        • That's not even settled. There's no reason why the Tiberian universe couldn't just be our universe with the divergeance coming in the '90's.
      • And yet Kane is specifically seen in the theatrical scenes of the original Red Alert, and the Brotherhood is specifically stated to exist as well, by name. Word of God (see below) statements that those parts don't exist would basically means that all of the Red Alert world doesn't exist at all, either.
      • Another unanswered detail is why the Empire of The Rising Sun did not exist until the Soviets performed yet another time travel Retcon at the beginning of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. Logically, the reason Imperial Japan still exists in the Red Alert universe is because again, World War II never happened; hence Japan was never forced into a Western mode of thinking and maintained an imperial ethos into the future—in other words, no real change based on whether Einstein lived to discover Fission and Time Travel or not.
        • Of course, that in itself is a highly Eurocentric idea, that World War II was initiated by Germany, not Germany and Japan, namely with the latter going to war with the United States on their own. Would highly militant Japan have altered their geopolitical decisions, if they hadn't been a member of the Tripartite (Axis) Pact? Iffy at best. The reason that Imperial Japan wasn't present as a power of note in the earlier games is that the writers Did Not Do the Research on the full scope of global diplomatic relations, and probably didn't care to. After all, in every single Red Alert game since the start, they've shown Germany's post-WWII borders, even though Germany would've fought to the death to keep those eastern territories without a WWII as a reason to give reparations.
    3. The above two are mostly everything that the Tiberium fans agree on. Depending on who you ask they might: ignore the Word of God that Red Alert is an Alternate Continuity to Tiberium and consider the original Red Alert to be in canon with the Tiberium series, ignore Renegade for being a Genre Shift (First-Person Shooter), because of how silly it is and the minor contradictions, ignore Tiberian Wars for changing the very nature of Tiberium. The latest game, Tiberium Wars, while definitely official canon, is often disregarded for its many retcons and other details. To add to the hilarity, there is also a Novelization of Tiberium Wars, which pretty much conga-lines all over the rest of the series and even the very game it is based on, as well as throwing in mountains of Fridge Logic. One example of personal continuity could be that "Red Alert - Tiberan Dawn - Tiberian Sun" and just ignoring everything else.
    4. Recently,[when?] a fourth stabilizing element has appeared: almost the entire Fanbase regards Tiberian Twilight (i.e: C&C 4) as Non Canon. Mentioning it on any C&C forum WILL attract Internet Backdraft, and you will deserve every drop of it.
  • While there isn't much continuity to the Double Dragon franchise, fans only count the four side-scrolling beat-em-ups (and the GBA remake of the first one). Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls, a fighting game based on the Animated Adaptation, was made without Technos Japan's involvement, and disliked by players for stiff controls and poor character designs. The Neo-Geo fighting game is questionable, depending on whether or not one likes the movie, since some of its characters come from that.
    • And there are some people who wished Double Dragon 3 never existed, moreso with the arcade version than the NES adaptation (which was arguably the only decent version of the game).
  • Many Castlevania fans do a sort of reverse Fanon Discontinuity in that they refuse to accept a recent Retcon and thus count more games than Konami does. It helps their cause that the Retcon in question was apparently thought up by producer Koji Igarashi to justify a typo he made with regards to Dracula's age back when he was just a lowly writer.
    • Dracula's age as cited in Rondo of Blood wasn't a typo, being repeated in Symphony of the Night. And even if it were, it wasn't written by Igarashi, whose only role in the game's development was playing it and offering his opinion (his only credit is "Special Thanks").
    • It doesn't help that the only game to be undisputedly out of canon is Legends. (And that game even has people who still consider it official) With nods to other games in preorder bonuses, (Though of questionable official status) calling other games 'side stories' without clarification, (Official side stories? Or Alternate Universe side stories?) and the inclusion of characters in previously non-continuity games in a Crossover game, (In and of itself of questionable canon) it's hard to determine what's canon and what's not, and thus what is Canondiscontinuity, and what is disdiscontinuity... My head hurts.
  • "The Baldur's Gate series and Planescape: Torment never received novelizations. Ever." is usually considered an iron-clad rule in most fan circles devoted to discussing or modding the Infinity Engine. Heaven help you if you're talking about the Baldur's Gate games and refer to Abdel Adrian (the novels' version of the protagonist) as if the Player Character is canonically him.
  • Ah, City of Heroes. Where do we start? Players refusing to accept the end of Vivacious Verandi's story arc (After nearly unleashing a demonic plague on St. Martial, the player is informed that they're idiots and forced to clean up the mess, instead of allowing the Wailers to run rampant and destroy the island), players refusing to accept the notion that Epic Archetypes are intended to be Exactly What It Says on the Tin,[1] a whole level of Fan Dumb for the cooperative zones...
    • A large number of players were not happy with the developers' recent[when?] attempt to explain the five origins available to the player when building their character by tying them all back to Magic. Anyone can see why this irritates players who like to use the Science, Technology, Mutation, and Natural origins. Fortunately this information is quite easy to ignore as it has very little impact on the game's content.
    • Many people found the second series of tie-in comics to City of Heroes to be practically Canon Defilement. It basically takes the canon's highest tier heroes and turns them into a bunch of Out of Character bickering kids. Even though the lowest level you can fight any of them in game is at 30 (but only one of them; everybody else is 40+ and always at least an Elite Boss), they're shown to be regularly defeated by mooks intended for lower level players. The sheer level of Plot Induced Stupidity, Asspulls, Deus Ex Machina, and the utter overabundance of cliches and Dead Horse Tropes (one is expected to believe that a powerful psychic like Sister Psyche with a history of years would still not be used to Perverse Sexual Lust and still overreact to it?) rubbed players the wrong way. Sadly, it's still considered canon judging by how many elements were migrated over, but most people will just treat anything not given an in-game reference as having never happened.
    • You pretty much have to discard the given backstory for the Mission Architect if you want to use it at all. Either that, or assume your character is stupid enough to allow himself to be disintegrated and uploaded by a machine built by two known supervillain groups (the Evil Overlord's pet Mad Scientist and the local Evil Co.) and let them have read-write access to his brain. Several authors have written MA arcs in which heroes shut down this Incredibly Obvious Trap.
    • Likewise, the Ouroboros system for re-visiting old content is linked in the canon to Nemesis, which makes employing it an act of dubious intelligence.
      • Well, the first mission with Ouroboros – before you realize that Silos looks a heck of a lot like that other guy, and has a Significant Anagram for a name – does have a hidden note telling you to "Work with them for now, but don't trust them." Of course, considering who we're dealing with, that could be just another part of his Xanatos Gambit...
  • The Appaloosa-developed Contra games Contra: Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure sat very badly with fans; hell, even Konami themselves canceled plans to release them in Japan.
    • The few Contra fans who actually pay attention to the series' storyline tend to ignore the retcons made to the timeline in Contra 4, in which Operation C (originally a solo mission by Bill Rizer against a nameless nation who were cloning the aliens from the first two games) is now revised into a previous mission of "Mad Dog" and "Scorpion" (not Bill and Lance themselves, but the new characters from Contra 4 who inherited their former American nicknames) against the alien Black Viper, which ignores the fact that Operation C was actually a single-player only game and that the stages were clearly set in artificial labs and lacked usual Womb Level seen at the end of other games.
      • However, the game acknowledges Operation C by referring to "harvest facilities" and setting the final stage in what looks like a man-made environment with Black Viper suspended in a glass tube, much like Operation C's Anticlimax Boss. Only when Viper breaks free and metamorphoses into its second form does the Womb Level commence inside its body.
  • Super Robot Wars, being essentially a Massive Multiplayer Crossover Fanfic, has many exercises in applying popular Fanon Discontinuity to its subjects, such as eliminating the Martian Successor Nadesico movie and Chars Counterattack via Time Travel, saving/resurrecting popular characters, or just giving less depressing endings to Kill'Em All shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion or Space Runaway Ideon.
    • Sillily subverted in the introduction of the SRW OG OVA, which is so mediocre and runs on a Wall Banger that reduces Lamia into a Damsel in Distress only on the justification just so they can see her butt naked (against her will). Fans are thereby not impressed and declares that it was better off non-canon, and apparently Banpresto agreed... until it was ADDED into SRW OG Gaiden and cranks the Wall Banger elements up to eleven. Now fans can't even consider that Fanon Discontinuity as it will strikes out some other good events such as the conclusion of R storyline, the Compact 3's storyline, and the return of Axel Almer and Alfimi, the former pulls an awesome Heel Face Turn
    • Likewise, the OGs version somehow also retconned the death of Lee Linjun. Fans still can't accept why Banpresto chose to spare Lee in the remake, after his heavy crime of permanently killing off Captain Daitetsu Minase and would rather think he dies somewhere else after retreating.
    • Despite being a stand-alone continuity one-shot, Super Robot Wars K is the only DS entry skipped by most fans due to many aspects of the game being handled clumsily.
  • The first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers, came before there was supposed to be a series, and it shows. It was a completely different genre, having more in common with Arkanoid then with the later games (Though the Continuity Reboot pretty much wiped the PC-98 games from canon anyway.)
    • Put it in this way: Even PC-98 fans often ignore the characters in HRtP, besides Reimu and Mima.
    • Spin-off manga series Silent Sinner in Blue has largely been disavowed by the games' fans by introducing a pair of Creator's Pets and a number of Wall Banger moments usually involving the aforementioned characters. Posting a single page from it on an Image Board or merely mentioning the series at all risks causing Internet Backdraft.
    • Double Spoiler is subject to this trope a lot, with many of the conversations ignored entirely. An essential example is how the two reporter protagonists of the game discuss the character of Inubashiri Momiji and her actual relationship to her superior Shameimaru Aya (who is also one of the protagonists) and perhaps crow tengu in general. Another popular point of contention is encountering fan-favorite Kawashiro Nitori and talking about how her kind of youkai drown children for their "lifeforce ass balls."
      • For added fun, consider that they chose a comparatively less horrifying story of exactly what Kappa anally extract from their victims—other accounts suggest it's blood, intestines, or even the liver.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • Some fans of Deus Ex don't acknowledge the sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, citing that it was "dumbed-down" for a more mainstream audience.
    • By way of explanation: it really was, and it shows. The game is little more than a faint echo of Deus Ex. It features small stages, few real choices, and almost all of them are subverted by being meaningless or ridiculous. That by itself wouldn't render it Canon Discontinuity. The fact that the plot make your character from the first game a secondary character and a madman and functionally erased your choices from the first game was something of a insult. Apparently the game's creator really didn't want to do it kinda shoved it out the door so he could get on with other kinds of Awesome.
    • To give you an idea, the original Deus Ex had three mutually incompatible endings. Rather than pick one ending as canon for the sequel and cut their losses, the devs decided to make all three (or major elements of all three) endings canon.
  • Devil May Cry: There are some fans that refuse to believe that anything after the first Devil May Cry is canon, as all further entries into the series were made by a different development team.
  • When Blood Omen 2 came out, Legacy of Kain fans were pretty mortified. As it turned out, the events of the game take place in the alternative (yet canon) timeline created.
    • The official explanation was that the events of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance made the events of Blood Omen 2 happen by giving Janos Audron to Hash'ak'gik as a host, so that he could later imprison Janos in the Eternal Prison and become the Sarafan Lord. Of course, Blood Omen 2 was released almost two years before Defiance, and none of the games so far have explained how Vorador came back to life...
  • Depending on who you ask, the Halo series consists of only the games, only the games and certain novelizations, or the games and all of the novelizations. The latest book, The Cole Protocol, is generally reviled for its poor writing and copious amounts of Wall Bangers.
    • Oh, and you thought the books had it rough! Go to Bungie.net on the eve or right after a new episode of Halo: Legends comes out. Count the number of responses to They Changed It, Now It Sucks threads that are some permutation of "It's not like this crap is actually canon, so who cares?" Go on. We'll wait for you.
    • Halo: Reach has been viewed as discontinuity by fans disappointed that it retconned significant portions of the novel The Fall of Reach. There's even a fansite called "Halo Reach Is Not Canon" devoted solely to this aspect of the game.
      • Reach also gets it rough for firing an SMAC in the general direction of Reach. Up till now, the fans saw SMACs as being the most powerful weapons in space apart from the Halo Array. Then it punches a clean hole in a Covenant corvette and hits the ground with an unsatisfying thud. With everything we know of super MACs that hemisphere should have been ruble. These guns have been known to take out up to three Covenant Carriers in one shot if it can be lined up right.
  • Ask a bunch of Kingdom Hearts fans if Organization XIII is really dead. Count how many of them give you the right answer.
    • To be fair, now that Nomura opened his mouth, the previously 'correct' answer might be the wrong one, precisely because of how fans feel about the Organization in the first place. Of course, that will probably throw the next numbered game into this trope itself.
    • Well, we now know that Xemnas isn't dead. Stated in game (secret ending of Re:Coded). By Yensid. (Somewhat cryptically, but nevermind that.) If Xemnas survived or was brought back, that means everyone else is coming back too, right? Except Xaldin. No one will miss Xaldin.
  • The Shivering Isles carries The Elder Scrolls trend of elevating the player to the absolute top rank, over the top, by excising a major distinct personality from the continuity so the Mute Hero player character can take his place. The implausibility of elevating a mortal to Daedra Lord may have fun post-story perks, but the lameness of it pales compared to any Retcon required to feature Sheogorath as a character in future titles.
    • You aren't a Daedric prince, since you can die. You only act as a place holder.
      • Well, the Madgod's recent dialogue in Skyrim raises some... interesting questions about apotheosis.
    • Sheogorath is dead! Long live Sheogorath! Probably a new Sheogorath will appear in future The Elder Scrolls games, along with Jyggalag, who until now existed only in lore. The fact that this new Sheogorath is actually mortal should only make stuff involving the Madgod awesomer. No need to break the traditions and claim that the story in the Shivering Isles never happened. The end of Daggerfall was messier and they decided that all of its multiple endings happened in the end, after all.
      • Well, it's mostly because Sheogorath was just plain Made of Awesome, and no player-character-esque can be nearly that level of cool without being a copycat. Jygallag on the other hand defines the very concept of dull. really, this is a result of the sheer fandom that Sheogorath inspires (in and out of the game), and the general irritation that they removed such a character for Jygalag, of all possible people.
    • There's a great amount of time spent in the Shivering Isles demonstrating the effect they have on anyone who enters (madness). On top of that, every time Jygylag has appeared before, Sheogorath had to rebuild his realm from the ground up... INCLUDING himself. As far as anyone but the butler and PC know, this time the same thing happened, only with less destruction to the landscape.
    • This Sheogorath states the solution himself, the hero will be him. It would be a logical explanation in lore: Former hero becomes a daedric prince.
    • Rather subverted, as in Skyrim he is just as hilariously mad as ever, albeit a bit kinder, which is debatably a good thing
  • Ratchet and Clank: Deadlocked suffers from a fairly large share of people who say it never existed.
    • However the characters that appeared in that game did get a number of cameo mentions in the games after Deadlocked.
  • King's Quest: Mask of Eternity is largely ignored and/or derided by the fanbase as In Name Only, due to its drastic change in tone, reliance on violence in a series that usually rewarded you for thinking your way out of the situation, and protagonist that wasn't a member of the Daventry Royal Family.
  • Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat is a prime example of this, as the only three things that even relate to previous Donkey Kong games are DK himself, the bananas, and the Jungle Hijinx music. Everything else is completely new and one of the directors said that it was because the old characters weren't fresh enough for a modern audience.
  • Most Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War fans deny that the Soulstorm expansion ever happened, due to the absolutely staggering ammount of Game Breaking Bugs (including one for unlimited resources) and the ridiculous unit imbalances that made it unplayable, the sheer amount of Narm (SPEHSS MEHREENS!), and the utter butchering of the background material (humans freely using Xeno technology, Alpha Legion portrayed as Khorne fanatics, 100 Baneblades, Necron Lord sounding like he needed a cough drop, etcetera). Dawn of War II, however, states that it actually is canon, but as Cyrus says in the campaign, the whole Kaurava campaign was "best forgotten".
  • Many Crash Bandicoot fans prefer to pretend that any games beyond Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped/Crash Team Racing doesn't exist due to differing developers post-Naughty Dog (although mileages vary on Crash Bash).


  1. ↑ Peacebringers and Warshades are humans fused with alien energy beings, not angels or unicorns or other things with light/dark powers. An Arachnos soldier... is an Arachnos soldier.
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