deuxhero
Arcane
2 is great follow up. After that the company that owned the IP went bankrupt due to a lot of unrelated things and the franchise sat in legal limbo. The result was legally distinct Metal Saga from another company (it's pretty good). While this is going on a company somehow makes a GBA port of Metal Max 2 and it's horribly broken and unplayable. After the IP stuff was sorted out the new purchaser of the IP made Metal Max 3, which is fine (overly linear, some bugs, but entirely worthwhile entry) then a remake of 2 (which is excellent and fan translated). Problems came when they made Metal Max 4 and made the tone way more "generic anime" (as in big titted robot girl who transforms into a bike and named spiky hair protagonist) instead of horrible post-apoc world intersperced with brief periods of anime whackiness and that bombed and put an assload of DLC (gameplay is apparently still pretty good). Then rather than learn their lesson they made Xeno, which is lacking in game and plot quality. Convinced Xeno's failure was that turn-based was obsolete, they retrofitted it into Xeno Reborn in a desperate attempt at sales. That failed and they sold the IP to a new company with at least some of the original staff.
Meanwhile the separate Saga got trapped in spinoff hell: There was an I-Mode phone spinoff that's apparently pretty decent and frequent request on I-Mode Archives. a DS spinoff and it was pure waggle gimmick and horribly broken, and some mobage. A new proper game is in development and had a trailer a few months ago, but it's clear it was announced way too early (while the game looks good, the battle footage looks like they dropped the player into the world and used debug codes to set stuff because you've got stuff like all party members being level 1 at multiple different points), and it's still a lot further into development than the initial announcement (a teaser with some concept art)
