10 Most Sacrilegious Video Game Moments
The character redesign NOBODY asked for.
The creation of art, no matter its medium, is not only an exercise in expression, but also in moderation, of ensuring that the end product reflects what paying customers expect when they fork over their hard-earned cash.
And while it's certainly great to see artists cleverly subverting expectations in ways most players enjoy, it's an incredibly tough balance to strike, and one which often results in the most hardcore fans feeling burned by unnecessary creative changes.
These 10 video games all made bold, swinging-at-the-fences attempts to switch things up, with unique tonal shifts, jaw-droppingly unexpected storylines, character re-designs, and so on, but in each case fans largely responded with a vocal outcry.
Running with the ball and trying something different is admirable to a point, but with these games the developers clearly didn't know the extent of fans' tolerance, and the result was an embarrassing backlash - if not commercial failure, also.
In most instances it saw the next game in the series pivoting to reflect those understandable concerns, confirming just how ridiculously misguided it all was in the first place...
10. Fighting Wesker In An Active Volcano - Resident Evil 5
The Resident Evil franchise has never exactly been a bastion of serious storytelling, but things certainly took a turn for the unbearably goofy in Resident Evil 5.
It's the tipping point at which the series began to lean too heavily on action at the expense of atmosphere and tension, exemplified no better than by the hysterically over-the-top final battle against the series' ultimate baddie, Albert Wesker.
Not only does the fight see Chris Redfield and his sidekick Sheva taking on another grotesquely mutated form of Wesker, but it takes place inside a freaking active volcano, complete with a sequence in which Chris has to repeatedly punch a boulder blocking his path.
This is the moment which transformed Resident Evil from silly sci-fi into fantasy cartoon nonsense, ahead of the series' excessive low-point in the wildly bloated Resident Evil 6.
Staging such an absurd final fight inside such a ridiculous location was the point at which Resident Evil just felt too far divorced from its survival horror roots.