Pick A Franchise And Give It To Another Developer

Easy. Whether it's because you admire the sterling job that a new upstart has done with a similar game idea, or because you feel a favourite franchise of yours has gone a little stale under current development, or even if you just never want to see it again, pick a franchise - any franchise! - and hoof it to another developer.

Be as unrealistic as you like. If you want Rockstar to handle the next Animal Crossing or Retro Studios to take on Halo 5, just shout it out. And let us know why, natch.

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I'd love to see Treasure get their hands on some of SEGA's old franchises, like Streets of Rage and Space Harrier. Imagine what they could do with those. Wacky shenanigans all over the gaff.

I'd like to throw Pokemon to Monolith Soft myself. I wouldn't want them to change the core battle gameplay, but I imagine they could completely transform the game in to a epic with first class production values and an ambitious story and progression to the game. Just imagine Xenoblade's presentation, with Pokemon roaming around everywhere in awe inspiring landscapes, and when you choose to engage them you transition in to battle mode where it plays like the normal series.

That would be what I want from such a combination.

I'd like to give Prince of Persia to anyone, I love Prince of Persia and Ubisoft are letting it waste away. No idea who would make a good one though.

I'd love a Toy Commander reboot too, give it to DICE and we can have it all looking rather pretty as we fly around in our toy planes and helicopters.

Ooh boy.  That's a can o' worms opened...

• Star Fox to Treasure is the obvious, oft-repeated one.  My Treasure library consists of Gunstar Heroes and Wario World, but if they can do a Gunstar job on Fox and pals I will cry tears of happiness.  Kid Icarus comes under much the same bracket.
  
• Paper Mario to Level-5.  I think it's fair to say that this series has lost its way.  Level-5 certainly have experience with stylised RPGs (Ni No Kuni), and the Professor Layton series shows that they can do good dialogue when they want to.  They might just need a bit of supervision when it comes to the ending.
  
• Yoshi to Retro Studios.  Odd?  Not a bit of it.  Retro can certainly do platforming (DKCR), and they can certainly do shooting (the Primes), and that's Yoshi in a nutshell.  Goodness knows they can't do worse than the last few DS attempts (that's my opinion, Phillips!).
  
• Infinite Space to Monolith Soft.  Maybe this is cheating: Infinite Space is a single game, not a franchise.  But it had promise, and it had scale; and if Monolith can do one thing well, it's scale.  Scale and philosophy.  Bring IS to a home console, thus fixing the graphical roughness, and you'd have a bona fide hit.
  
• Final Fantasy to Monolith Soft, for similar reasons.  I'd trust them with pretty much any epic JRPG.  Plus, it might mean that future FF games made it to Nintendo consoles (only, heh heh heh), which would be nice.
  
• The Mana series to... yes, Monolith Soft.  I've never played these games, but I always hear about how Secret is great and the others are rubbish.  Time to give the series a jolt?
  
• Animal Crossing to Level-5.  Not the main series, maybe, but I'd like a story-driven spin-off, and I reckon Level-5 could do that job with panache.
  
• Wario to Suda51.  I'd love to see a mixture of these brands of madness.  Hopefully Nintendo would keep watch to prevent Peach showing up in a leotard.
  
• Ashes Cricket to Camelot.  See Ian Bell set the ball on fire, give it wings, then whack it for a six... if he can avoid the giant flying gloves of Brad Haddin!
  
• Hotel Dusk to Nintendo EAD.  Or anyone else who would do something with it.

Pre-post EDIT: Pokémon, oddly, is one I'd rather give to Level-5 and Studio Ghibli.  I can't help but think that wandering Pokémon where an encounter dumps you into your ordinary turn-based battle is a waste of the developer's potential (already tapped to the maximum in my dream universe).  Instead, I want the Pokémon world to look like Ni No Kuni's.  Aaaaah, lovely.  Also, din't NNK's battles have a sort of Pokémon-like element?  There's experience in the field there!

Naa Ni No Kuni had pretty much no strategy in battle  There was kind of meant to be one there but the combat was pretty dodgy.

Oh. Oh well. Imagine how pretty it would be!

I could see how a combination of it with Pokemon would be good though. I always though Ni No Kuni's battle system had a bit of potential, unfortunately it was a tad flawed. If they took the moves from Pokemon and made them work better than NNK's it could be something special.

I'd say... Little King's Story to a Intelligent Systems - that Vita version looks like a s**t sandwich. The only trouble is that it would clash with Pikmin a bit, but if anyone can create a magical but funny world, it's the Paper Mario dudes. Failing that, give it back to Wada-san at his new studio.

And the Jetman franchise to ANYONE.

I'd give F-Zero to sumo digital & while we're at why not give them Mario Kart as well.

Just to see what they would do,

Uncharted to Nintendo
Zelda to Irrational
Pokemon to Monolith
Final Fantasy to Bioware

Balladeer wrote:

Wario to Suda51.  I'd love to see a mixture of these brands of madness.  Hopefully Nintendo would keep watch to prevent Peach showing up in a leotard.

They couldn't stop Sega doing it for the olympics, they definitely won't be able to stop Suda.

Besides, Princess Daisy's the sexy one

Star fox to platinum. Kamiya is desperate to do it, so you know he'd pull out all the stops. It could be a graphical power house, if nothing else.

Here's a wild one: F-Zero to Rockstar. I wouldn't want them to change the racing, F-Zero GX in HD would be fine. But I'd love for them to work captain Falcon's insane storyline into the actual gameplay.

I'd like to see Fallout change hands again.

I have no developer in mind, but a lot of the fun of 3 was, having enjoyed the first one, seeing Bethesda's take on the series. The fact that Oblivion With Guns turned out to be actually pretty good on its own merits was a bonus.

With that in mind, given how rich and open to interpretation the RPG is as a genre there's a lot of scope for many different developers to all create wildly different games in the same universe, given VATS and SPECIAL as tools.

beemoh wrote:

Besides, Princess Daisy's the sexy one

What!? Is her voice alone not enough to kill any lewd thoughts?

The_Jaster wrote:

I'd give F-Zero to sumo digital & while we're at why not give them Mario Kart as well.

Seconded! Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed made me fall in love with karting games again - the last really good Mario Kart was possibly 64.

In the meantime, let's give Darksiders to Monolith Soft (gosh, they're going to be working hard by the end of this!). They might be able to turn the epic storylines into something sensible whilst retaining the grandioseness (Google Chrome hasn't underlined it, it's a word... unlike storylines  ) of the landscapes.

Another two I would like to see.

Final Fantasy goes to Atlus

My reason for this is simple, Atlus know how to make actual rpgs, Square Enix seems to be stuck in the rut of stripping all the charming old fashioned type things out of the jrpg genre without making them any closer to a rpg in return. As such I would like to see the franchise handed over to a developer who makes a actual rpg, while also still being true to what makes a jrpg a jrpg.

The Legend of Zelda handed over to Retro Studios

This has, I believe, long been a match people have generally salivated over the mere thought of. I myself would like to see this happen, I don't much like the Metroid Prime games however there are some aspects I would love to see in a Zelda game. One such thing is the scanning ability, which allowed the games to tell a story about the world, its cultures, its peoples, and its past, while also telling a story about the present, all in a very detailed fashion without breaking in to the gameplay for cutscenes and the like.

Balladeer wrote:

What!?  Is her voice alone not enough to kill any lewd thoughts?

A little bit, but being the less successful of the Mario series princesses would make her bitter meaning she'd do anything just for the attention.  

Anyway, actually managing to cross my own line aside...

ZeroJones wrote:

In the meantime, let's give Darksiders to Monolith Soft (gosh, they're going to be working hard by the end of this!). They might be able to turn the epic storylines into something sensible whilst retaining the grandioseness (Google Chrome hasn't underlined it, it's a word... unlike storylines  ) of the landscapes.

Personally, I'd want to keep that series out of Japanese hands- part of the charm of that series- at least the first game- was that it was a very western take on the Zelda structure, a genre that is generally associated with Japan- giving it to Monolith would just make it another Japanese game amongst Japanese games.

Who are Monolift Soft, by the way?

Phillips wrote:

Who are Monolift Soft, by the way?

They made the cult 60's spoof FPS No-One Lives Forever and went on to do F.E.A.R., based on the Ian Brown song.

In all seriousness, are they the folks that did Xenoblade on the Wii a few years ago? Makes sense if a few of you seem to want them to develop everything.

Yep I'm sure most here mean Monolith-soft of Xenoblade fame & not monolith productions who like to release games (gotham city impostors) then not support them properly despite having a great community.

They're best known for the Xenosaga/Blade series, but they also had a hand in Brawl, Skyward Sword, New Leaf, and Pikmin 3.  They also co-developed the 70%-on-Metacritic Project X Zone, so they're not above criticism; but Xenoblade. Just... Xenoblade.