Over the years, there have been a whole lot of acclaimed video game franchises, many of which have come to include enough games to keep you entertained for years to come. However, even the biggest game series can still have some unusual or forgotten entries. These range from games that didn’t fit cleanly into the rest of their series’ genre to games that are straight-up not available anymore, leaving them to fade into relative obscurity.
Some of them are obscure because they’re just not any good, of course, but there are many others that just didn’t fit with the rest of the series. It could be a change in genre compared to the other games, an experimental game mechanic, or even landing on a platform it usually didn’t appear on. Would we expect a Sonic the Hedgehog role-playing game to be remembered as much as the platformers, or a Tetris game that focuses on sabotaging your opponent more than actually playing Tetris? Probably not, but many of these games are still worth playing, even if doing so isn’t always so easy in 2023. Or, in some cases, practically impossible. Here are some big-name franchise games you might not have played–or heard of.