Replaying the old games is making me realize just how much they experimented with the formula in the old gens, and how much most of it fucking sucked. Like gen 1 is early days, soulful, you can forgive a lot of basic errors because it's still one of the best action games on the PS1. Even if floating cubes give me conniptions now.

But then you jump to gen 2 and 3 and they're constantly putting in new, unpopular mechanics and then removing them again because no one liked them. Heat is just awful and it's in half the games to varying levels of severity. They switched to dual stick and just fucking swap back again, why? Almost every gen 2 or 3 game has crippling balance problems, terrible missions, or awful gimmick mechanics and you get to pick at least 2 out of 3 of these to apply.

Honestly I'm coming back out of this with love for 1, 4, and 6, and the rest is just "well I guess there's some good parts?".