In the world of movies, prequels have a somewhat mixed reputation. There’s the ones that enrich their existing worlds and stories, like X-Men: First Class. There’s the ones that ruin the mystery, like the heinous Hannibal Rising. And then there’s the ones no one can actually agree on, like the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Over in the world of games, though, prequels tend to fare better than their cinematic counterparts. Just look at the recently released Mafia: The Old Country, an enjoyable romp through the early 1900s that chronicles the formative years of the earlier games’ criminal empires.
Prequel games often benefit from better technology and development tools, making them visually and technically more impressive than their predecessors. But truly great prequels aren’t just remembered for how they look or play, but by how they transform the way we experience the original games we fell in love with and add to the stories we already hold dear.
With that in mind, the following prequels were chosen not just for their technological and gameplay achievements, but because they forever changed the way we look at some of our favorite characters and worlds. That extra chance to develop and deepen what we already hold dear means some games on this list are even considered the best in their entire series. So without further ado, here are the 10 best video game prequels ever made.
10. Batman: Arkham Origins
Released in an effort to shorten the wait between Rocksteady’s Arkham City and Arkham Knight, Batman: Arkham Origins is described as a “Year Two” story, taking place on Christmas night, eight years before the events of the first game. Developed by WB Montreal, it stars a 27-year-old Batman facing off against eight of Gotham’s deadliest assassins, including Bane, Deathstroke, and Deadshot, who have all been hired by Black Mask to kill the Bat for $50 million. These events also serve as an origin story for The Joker, who makes himself known to Gotham for the first time and introduces the city to his unique brand of criminal lunacy.
At the time of release, Arkham Origins was perhaps unfairly compared to Arkham City. But this comparison was a disservice to Arkham Origins, which acts as a fantastic accompanying act to Rocksteady’s second chapter rather than one-upping it. WB Montreal took everything that made Rocksteady’s games so great, held them faithfully in place, and used them to create a compelling early story for the Arkham-specific versions of Batman and the Joker. More than that, Arkham Origins sets the stage for the main Arkham trilogy by introducing TN-1, Bane’s super soldier serum that’s eventually used as the basis for Titan, a more powerful drug that has major consequences over the events of Arkham Asylum and Arkham Knight.
9. God of War: Chains of Olympus
Despite arriving on a handheld, the PSP’s God of War: Chains of Olympus was no smaller in scale than the original home console trilogy when it came to story.. A prequel to 2005’s God of War, Chains of Olympus takes Kratos and his Blades of Chaos to The Underworld and back on a foreboding tale that sets his’ story in motion, laying the building blocks for his disdain for the Gods.
By fueling that fire of hatred, developer Ready at Dawn not only created an entry steeped in exciting God of War lore, but performed borderline witchcraft in getting a PlayStation Portable game to both look so handsome and play so responsively. Perhaps the most visually impressive release to hit Sony’s first handheld, the studio managed to translate God of War’s breakneck action and signature head-splitting combos for the tiny device, ensuring those blades felt just as satisfying to swing with abandon despite the lack of a second analog stick. It’s a short, stylish burst of ungodly violent action that could easily stand alone, but as a prequel to one of PlayStation’s landmark trilogies, it serves as a fantastic expansion of Kratos’ blood-soaked Greek saga.
8. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
Following the release of Super Mario World in 1990 and with the 3D revolution looming on the horizon, Nintendo needed one last, great, side-scrolling Mario platformer for the SNES. So, with Miyamoto’s blessing, Yoshi creator Shigefumi Hino received the green light to develop a game starring his popular dinosaur creation. The result was Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, one of the greatest 2D platformers of all time.
Nintendo’s headline act is not typically concerned with timelines and canon, but Super Mario World 2 jumps backwards to tell a story about how a group of Yoshis rescued Baby Mario before they all set off to rescue Baby Luigi from Kamek. It’s a cute origin tale that explains how an infant plumber became friends with a dinosaur, but narrative is really beside the point. With Yoshi’s Island, Nintendo set out with a goal to make a more “gentle and relaxing” game that encouraged exploration over precise platforming. To do this, Nintendo removed time limits for players so they can progress at their own pace, and Yoshi’s specific moveset, like the flutter jump, made it easier to control the character in the air.
But beyond just Yoshi’s unique abilities, Super Mario World 2 is an iconic send-off to the SNES era. The beautiful, marker-like art style was drawn by hand and scanned digitally, and Koji Kondo’s Yoshi’s Island theme is an earworm so perfect you can’t help but hum along with it whenever it comes on. It may show us some of Baby Mario’s very first steps, but as a full package, it is the culmination of a 2D-platforming development team putting all of their exceptional visual, audio, and technical design experience on display.
7. Divinity: Original Sin
While Divinity: Original Sin isn’t technically the earliest point on the Divinity timeline (that would be Dragon Commander, an unusual marriage of role-playing and strategy game systems) it is the only game in the series we’d genuinely consider a prequel. Taking place over a millennium prior to 2002’s Divine Divinity, this RPG charts the early years of Rivellon, Larian Studios’ original high-fantasy world. While not an essential foundational chapter of the land’s lore, Original Sin does a fantastic job of establishing the dangers of Source magic and the motivations of those who use it. And thanks to Divinity’s immortal wizards, longtime fans get to meet much, much younger versions of characters like Zandalor and Bellegar.
But Original Sin’s story is not what makes it special. Instead, this prequel’s triumph is in how it spun the fate of the Divinity series on its head, taking it from a struggling cult curiosity and putting it on the road to becoming an all-time RPG heavyweight. Larian developed a brand new turn-based combat system for Original Sin, fuelled by an elemental approach that allows you to combine effects to produce exhilarating results; freeze liquid with an ice spell and force your foes to slip on the blood that they spill, or bolster forked lightning with the help of a little electricity-conducting rain. All this makes battle a deeply tactical, flexible affair, and the same attention to detail is afforded to the RPG elements, too. With the freedom to approach quests in almost any manner you can think of, Original Sin laid down the rules for not just its exceptional successor, Original Sin 2, but also Larian’s multiple Game of the Year-winning Baldur’s Gate 3.
6. Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening
Set several years before the first game, Devil May Cry 3 features a much younger Dante, once again sporting the cool and arrogant persona that had been lost in the moodier, more serious second game. Going back in time allowed developer Capcom to restore the personality that fans fell in love with in the first place. More than that, Devil May Cry 3 even retcons the early life of Dante’s twin brother, Vergil, ensuring a teenage version of the fan-favorite character could be alive for the events of Dante’s Awakening.
Devil May Cry 3 had the unenviable job of salvaging Dante’s sullied reputation and did so with aplomb. What’s more, while Devil May Cry 2 is still technically canon, the events of Dante’s Awakening serve as the foundations for all later DMC games, and explain important character motivations while fixing plot holes.
Beyond returning Dante to his cool roots and resurrecting Vergil, Devil May Cry 3 delighted fans by being wickedly difficult. To put things into context, Capcom famously made the Japanese version of the game’s hard mode the normal difficulty for the North American release. That posed a hurdle for some, but many fans relished the extra challenge, especially given how popular the changes to the battle system were.
While Dante was always able to mix-and-match melee and ranged weapons to chain stylish combos, DMC 3’s biggest improvement was adding different combat styles that changed the way Dante controlled. You could focus on either melee (Swordmaster), ranged (Gunslinger), dodging (Trickster), or parry (Royal Guard) styles and play using your most preferred playstyle, an overwhelmingly popular choice for a game that challenges you to chain the biggest, coolest combos.
5. Halo: Reach
For 10 years, fans journeyed alongside the silent Master Chief as he fought and ultimately defeated the alien invaders known as the Covenant. But for its final Halo game, Bungie rewound the clock to the early days of the intergalactic war, when humanity was very much on the losing side.
Set during the weeks before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Reach casts you as a member of Noble Team, a special-ops Spartan unit, on a fateful mission to protect the planet Reach from falling to the Covenant. The fully self-contained prequel feels almost liberated by the absence of Master Chief, with the varied personalities of Noble Team highlighting how different other Spartan soldiers can be from the series’ most famous character, despite their shared heritage.
This team’s doomed but nevertheless vital final mission sees them escort Cortana from a lab on Reach to the UNSC Pillar of Autumn ship, thereby kickstarting the events of the first Halo. It’s both a perfect send-off for Bungie and an excellent closing-the-circle moment for the Halo story. But those triumphs are tinged by tragedy; Noble Team’s actions may trigger Master Chief’s quest to save the universe, but their final mission demands heavy sacrifices. Noble Six remaining on the dying planet in a last-stand fight against the Covenant is now a legendary moment in the Halo franchise – its own Rogue One moment that arrived years before Star Wars did it – and one of the greatest final levels ever made.
4. Yakuza 0
Yakuza has long been one of Sega’s biggest Japanese series, but only relatively recently has it gained traction in the West. This surge in popularity can be traced to Yakuza 0, a prequel that reintroduces heroes Kazuma Kiryu and Majima Goro to a new generation of fans who may have missed out on the first Yakuza game back in 2005.
Yakuza 0 is set nearly two decades before the events of the first Yakuza game, and tells the curious story of a small vacant property lot that somehow drags all of Kamurocho’s biggest crime families into an unlikely turf war. To say anymore would spoil a wild story full of Yakuza bosses jockeying for power, Chinese assassins, and head-spinning betrayals. Luckily, due to its prequel nature, players need no prior knowledge of the series to jump right in.
While Yakuza 0’s engrossing story will please any fan of Japanese crime dramas, it’s the chance to see a younger Kazuma and Majima, who act quite differently in their youth compared to their later years, that delivers the game’s biggest surprises. Kazuma is more hot-headed, not yet the stoic elder gangster he eventually becomes, while Majima’s wild dog persona has yet to fully form, so the Joker-like gangster is instead more of a silent and cool protagonist. Their evolution into the characters they eventually become forms the backbone of Yakuza 0’s sprawling narrative, and makes this prequel the perfect starting point for anyone looking to get into Sega’s now massively popular series.
3. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
There’s an argument to be made that Deus Ex: Human Revolution watered down a lot of what made the original Deus Ex a landmark success. It’s less flexible and more streamlined than its incredibly freeform forerunner. Despite this, Human Revolution earns its place among the greats, in part due to how its prequel story takes a deeper, more personal look at the series’ transhuman elements.
Protagonist Adam Jensen is robbed of his arms in an early-game disaster, his limbs forcibly replaced with mechanical prosthetics. But while they save his career, they unwittingly force him into a cultural war between the world’s wealthy, augmented elite and the deprived working classes. As both Jensen himself and his broken bathroom mirror tell you, he “never asked for this.” While the game’s central tale successfully takes on the conspiracy-fuelled sci-fi of the original, it’s the cultural and ethical questions posed by Human Revolution’s augmented society that really lift it high. Every character has their own take on the world’s dividing issue and, despite some slightly hamfisted racism metaphors, the story makes salient points on the dangers of unrestrained, capitalism-fuelled science.
Deus Ex’s Matrix-coded, nanotech-fuelled world was a far-fetched fictional future at the turn of the millenium, but it has only grown increasingly realistic with each passing year. Human Revolution successfully bridges the gap between the original’s almost satirical approach and something more knowingly serious, resulting in a deeply compelling cyberpunk dystopia.
2. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Hideo Kojima played the ultimate prank in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, making newcomer Raiden the surprise protagonist instead of everyone’s favorite spy hero, Solid Snake. Three years later, Kojima performed another variation of this prank by having Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater be a prequel starring Naked Snake, the man who would eventually become the series’ main antagonist, Big Boss.
We didn’t know when it was first announced, but Metal Gear Solid 3 would become arguably the most important game in the series, both from gameplay and story perspectives. It revolutionized the stealth genre by putting Naked Snake out in the open jungle and fulfilling Kojima’s dream of having a Metal Gear game take place in an expansive setting. A technical triumph, the PS2 hardware-pushing Soviet jungles were a major departure from the walled corridors of Shadow Moses or Big Shell, with a smart adaptive camouflage system replacing static hiding places like lockers. As a result of this new design, everything from stealth to boss fights is dramatically different in Metal Gear Solid 3 compared to previous games, with plenty of room to experiment with how to defeat a boss or infiltrate a compound.
But it’s not just in how you fight each boss that magic can be found, but in the story that each of them tells. The events of Metal Gear Solid 3 set the foundations for everything that came before and after it. Not only does Snake Eater reveal the origins of the Patriots, the shadow organization and ultimate antagonist of the series, but also the tragic origins of Big Boss. The aftermath of his face-off with The Boss forever changed the way we view Kojima’s iconic villain. As his mission progresses, Naked Snake transforms from CIA spy into a tragic figure, whose betrayal at the hands of his country sets him on a path that leads through every Metal Gear game, all the way to the saga’s chronological ending in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
1. Red Dead Redemption 2
How do you follow up a masterpiece? Well, if you’re Rockstar Games, you simply make another masterpiece.
Taking full advantage of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Rockstar created one of the most breathtaking, expansive open-world games ever put on a disc with Red Dead Redemption 2. The level of detail the studio put into it is simply head-spinning, from the way new protagonist Arthur Morgan’s weight fluctuates depending on how much he eats, to how animal carcasses will decompose almost in real-time. And yes, Rockstar may have gone a bit overboard when they made it so your horse’s testicles shrink and grow depending on the temperature, but it all goes towards fully recreating a beautiful(?) vision of the Old West.
But the technical achievements almost pale in comparison to Red Dead Redemption 2’s epic story of a dying Wild West on the cusp of a new, industrial century. Arthur Morgan is a man whose time is coming to an end, not because of his criminal lifestyle, but because he’s slowly being made redundant by the rapidly changing United States as it evolves into a modern nation. Roger Clark’s performance as Morgan is frankly staggering, portrayed with equal parts confidence and vulnerability as his accomplices, lifestyle, and own body continue to betray him. Across the twilight years of his criminal career, Arthur sees firsthand how his beloved gang disintegrates due to the negligence of its leader, Dutch, and that downfall provides a strong platform for the passing of the baton from Arthur to John Marston, the original game’s protagonist.
Red Dead Redemption 2 does everything you could ever wish for from a prequel — from improving on every aspect of a series’ gameplay, to telling a story that builds out its world’s mythos to incredible effect — and is why it tops our list of the greatest video game prequels.
And there you have it, our picks for the best prequels in video games. Was your favorite included? Let us know what you think of our choices, or share your favorites in the comments below.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. Additional contributions from Matt Purslow and Simon Cardy.
