I have some bad news, people. It’s been staring us all right in the face for years, and it’s time to come to terms with it. Your favorite game series? The ones where you eagerly wait weeks and months after preordering, the ones where you squeal when you read the announcements, the ones that have a nearly religious significance to you and helped shape your upbringing? They won’t ever be as good as they were. The best chapters in those series are long gone, and all we have left is empty hope and nostalgia. Yes, there will still be competent, very good, and even downright excellent games in your favorite series, and they’ll keep coming. Unfortunately, the absolute best games have come, gone, and been played to death years ago. Most Nintendo series fans are aware of this. Every Sonic fan is painfully aware of this. It’s time to come to terms.

Read on, pick out your favorite game series, and strap on your nostalgia goggles. We’re gonna go in.

Let’s start with the big guy, Mario. I won’t deny that both Super Mario Galaxy and both New Super Mario Bros. games were excellent, but can you honestly say they can compare with Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and Mario 64? The NSMB games felt downright flat and cramped compared to Mario 3 and SMW. The variety and balance we loved in the 8- and 16-bit games just felt absent in their DS and Wii counterparts. The Super Mario Galaxy games were also great, but the whole space conceit only justified an interesting gravitational aspect (which caused some irritating camera and control issues at certain points in the games). Even Super Mario Galaxy 2 tacitly admitted the excellence, if not superiority, of Mario 64 with the Throwback Galaxy, a recreation of Thwomp’s Fortress from Mario 64. After playing through that, can anyone deny that they wouldn’t love a Wii-graphics, challenge-enhanced version of Mario 64 more than, say, Super Mario Galaxy 3?

Let’s go on to gaming’s favorite elf, Link. If you were to poll 100 gamers on which Legend of Zelda game is the best, it would likely be a tie between Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. Every single Zelda game made by Nintendo has been excellent, but the best of the best remain the SNES and first N64 titles. Twilight Princess had great moments, but the Wii version was bogged down by the waggle controls, and it just felt too cluttered. Fantastic game, but not as good as Ocarina or Link to the Past.

The last member of Nintendo’s trinity is Samus Aran and the Metroid games. As excellent as the Metroid Prime trilogy was, Super Metroid remains the greatest Metroid game to date. I hold it up as a perfect example of the genre. Retro Studios translated the explore-and-backtrack-and-explore pattern of Metroid very well into 3D, but it felt so much slower and more confusing in 3D. On a 2D plane, it’s the best mix of open-ended exploration and focused direction. There’s a reason it’s been repeated so many times, in great games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and even this generation’s Shadow Complex. Hell, Shadow Complex was just a modern-day, Orson Scott Card-written reskin of Super Metroid, and it refused to apologize for it. Meanwhile, Metroid: Other M sucked. I’m sorry, but it sucked. It took the strong, silent galactic hero we’ve known for decades and turned her into a brain-damaged daddy’s girl who’s too stupid to turn on her shields when she’s running through a volcano. It might have been forgivable if the gameplay was as good as Super Metroid or Metroid Prime, but it simply wasn’t. It lacked the exploration, problem-solving, or action finesse of either game.

That brings us to Castlevania. It’s had a pretty rocky history, with its great games after Symphony of the Night basically relegated to portable systems, while home consoles have gotten repeated failed attempts to bring the series into 3D. However, we can nail Castlevania down to a handful of great NES, SNES, GEN, and PSX games: Castlevania 3, Super Castlevania IV, Symphony of the Night, Rondo of Blood, and Bloodlines. Most gamers will say SotN is the best of the series, but hardcore fans tend to go five-way-split. In the home consoles, Castlevania games after SotN have ranged from horrible to mediocre, and even Lords of Shadow is only a competent God of War ripoff. Meanwhile, portable systems have gotten all of the Metroidvania follow-ups, and while they’ve stuck to the formula very well and have all been fun, they don’t quite hit the excellence of SotN.

Sonic the Hedgehog is without a doubt the saddest example, though. While in the Genesis days Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles aptly demonstrated that Sega does what Nintendon’t, the blue insectivore has been down in the dumps since the days of Dreamcast. Whether you think Sonic 2, Sonic 3/Knuckles, or Sonic CD is the best chapter in the Sonic series, or even think Sonic Adventure was a great translation of the series into 3D, it’s hard to deny that Sonic hasn’t seen a truly great game since 1998 at the latest. He’s been going through a decade-long drought, putting out some remarkably terrible and forgettable games on home consoles and some capable but lackluster side-scrollers on portable systems. Even Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which many Sonic fans hoped would rekindle the series, turned out to be a disappointment.

Final Fantasy. All I have to do is say those two words to get cringes, sighs of nostalgia, arguments, and outright anger. While the question of which Final Fantasy game was the best has many answers, for 99% of people that answer is going to have a single digit. Maybe it was 6. Maybe it was 7. It certainly wasn’t 13, or 14, or 11, and arguably even the PS2 chapters can’t come close to the SNES or PSX Final Fantasy games.

Mega Man has arguably avoided this problem, if only for Capcom’s sudden and fanatical embrace of the retro. While the Mega Man series died, to many, at Mega Man 4, Mega Man 9 and 10 turned out to be great throwbacks to the second and third games, considered by many to be the best. Of course, Mega Man has gone through many permutations, and has met with some unexpected successes through history. The Mega Man X series was excellent through the 4th chapter. The Mega Man Zero series was a refreshing return to Nintendo Hard. The Mega Man Legends series was memorable to the point that fans are still demanding a sequel, and they’re actually going to get one. Even the Mega Man Battle Network/Star Force games turned out to be enjoyable, lighthearted CCG RPGs.

Franchises that have popped up in the last generation or two have had a shaky time, themselves, but they’re not really the same as the super-franchises of the 8/16/32-bit era. Halo? Great, but it’s come and (supposedly) gone, and now we’re waiting for Bungie and Microsoft to separately create the Next Big Things (or, in the former’s case, reboot Marathon).  Devil May Cry? Confused and prequel-rich to the point the new one’s going to be some kind of reboot/uber-prequel. Call of Duty? Well… okay, Call of Duty’s still running damn strong, and Modern Warfare and Black Ops are both as good as CoD2. Still, you get my point. For the old, big franchises, the Marios, the Castlevanias, the Final Fantasies, even when we wait for new games with bated breath, we know they won’t come close to the old classics.

Am I just being a geezery old bastard here? Am I missing the forest for the trees, or not giving the newer games in these series a fair shake? Please, offer your opinions, examples, and hateful screeds below!