If you just mean the "totally invalidates" then a majority of fighting games. I mean, I don't imagine I'm ever really going to go back and play any BlazBlue game before Chronophantasma Extend since they're largely just the exact same game with less characters, arguably worse balance and a dead online community. They have different story I guess but really, it's a bloody fighting game, the way they present their stories I'm better off just checking wiki/youtube if I want to jog my memory on that
(or even just get a 'retelling' of the previous story from within Chronophantasma itself).
There's pretty much absolutely no reason for me to own the old games other than I already had them.
There's exceptions to that obviously, though usually IMO it's going back to an older game because a character didn't return, or nostalgia when a game has seen more drastic changes over the years like Street Fighter or Tekken. I mean, I'll keep going back to Street Fighter IV for Sakura and Soul Calibur IV for Talim, but otherwise I think the sequels are superior mechanically and SFIV/SCIV would be redundant to me otherwise.
As for games getting better but not necessarily making the last one irrelevant, I guess Jak & Daxter? I mean, Jak 4 sucked arse, but a lot of people also don't know it exists...So I'm counting it, otherwise I don't have another example.
I was going to jokingly say Tetris
(because like war, Tetris never changes) but then I remembered that there have been a couple of developers that actually managed to **** up Tetris...
I couldn't really disagree more with this. I don't think any newer instalments of a game series are any better than tache older ones. They're simply different. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I actually prefer the original Animal Crossing over the one we have today because of the simplicity.
But in a lot of cases, especially with the second game in a series, the biggest change is often just polishing the gameplay mechanics introduced with the first game, especially with more gameplay orientated games. That's probably why the second game in a series is a lot of the time regarded as better/the best, because the major thing its done is 'perfect' the mechanics they introduced in the first game and 'iron out the creases' making it simply more enjoyable to play, which in a lot of ways can make it objectively better since the quality of most mechanics can be judged at an objective level.
(though I guess this holds more ground with older more gameplay orientated games that weren't expected to have a story, let alone a good one...Somewhat less these days when a mediocre game can do well as long as it's a good movie...)
Street Fighter II is a fantastic example of this. Graphics and the 'combo bug' aside, it was still overall vastly superior to the first game solely on a functional level, so much so that the only thing keeping the original relevant is that it was the original. The original was a pretty crappy game with largely mixed/negative response even before SF2 came and blew up in popularity. It was just so much of a tighter, smoother game that worked objectively better than the original, which was a rather bland, basic and very broken fighting game even for its time.
Or Megaman II. It simply took what Megaman first brought to the table and refined it. Still both great games, but there's a reason you hear a lot more of the second one.
Or the example I gave first: A lot of fighting games pretty much make the old ones entirely redundant since a lot of them simply just do some balancing, add more characters and maybe improve the graphical quality a bit
(I imagine this is true for a lot of sports titles as well, though I don't play them to judge that fairly). A lot of these sorts of games aren't just 'different', they essentially make the older games redundant since the older games are almost the same thing but with less content.
