10 Gaming Franchises That Suffer From Extreme Over-Complication

6. Mario

Never has a series of awesome games been doomed by their dumb and confusing naming conventions. For a company that targets primarily kids, Nintendo has done a particularly poor job of making their various Mario games easy to discern for the parents that buy those games for their kids. New Super Mario Bros. debuted on the Nintendo DS, then its sequel New Super Mario Brothers 2 came out on the DS, too followed by New Super Mario Brothers Wii, then New Super Mario Brothers U, a title that made it seem like it would it share shelf space with edutainment games like Mario Teaches Typing. There' also Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World - two titles pretty much any non-gaming person could easily get confused, and the Mario Kart series which recently ran out of creative names and just started using numbers - with the recently released Mario Kart 8 technically being the 11th entry in the series if you count the arcade titles. The whole thing sits funny, like a couple of aspirin on an empty stomach. With so many major Mario games being released in different genres with easy to confuse names - it's easy to blow him off entirely, which really hurts. There are so many games on so many platforms with so many similar titles that it's easy to not only confuse yourself, but really easy to confuse anyone attempting to buy a specific game for a specific person as gift, and getting the wrong Mario game entirely.