For a medium that is built upon sequels and player customization, there are surprisingly few games that allow you to take the progress that you made in one game and transfer it directly to the next. Oftentimes this can be put down to the massive system changes that can take place between games, or because it is easier to onboard new players to the series if there is some form of soft rebooting of the central character and their abilities.
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Cross-game progression has of course become a hot topic with so many studios talking up their version of a metaverse where players can take their characters from one game world to another. While the promise of such a thing remains a distant (and mostly unwanted) reality, here are some games that have already found ways of letting you carry forward your progression.
10 Mass Effect Trilogy
BioWare’s trilogy has you making important choices that greatly impact not just your character’s development, but also the way the story unfolds. One reason why Commander Shepard has proven such a fan favorite is due to the ability to import your character’s profile across all three games in the trilogy.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition did away with the hassle of having to transfer your save data, with your appearance and story decisions automatically carrying across all three games.
9 The Walking Dead Series
With the game being built around its branching dialogue options, it’s unlikely that your experience in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead will be the same as another player's. The choices you make in the post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world will follow you across all four seasons of the game.
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Like Mass Effect, all these seasons (as well as the standalone seasons 400 Days and Michonne) have been compiled and remastered as The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series, making it easier than ever to play through this sometimes-heart-breaking slice of modern adventure gaming in its entirety.
8 The Witcher 3
Rather than import data from a save file, The Witcher 3 allows you to alter the world according to the decisions you made in the preceding game by having you answer a series of questions. This novel approach was particularly useful as The Witcher 3 was the first game in the series that was available on PlayStation consoles.
This meant that if you had played The Witcher 2 on Xbox 360 or PC but wanted to play the sequel on your PlayStation, then you could still set the game up to reflect the way your actions in The Witcher 2 had shaped the world.
7 Hitman 3
The World of Assassination trilogy has you trotting around the globe as Agent 47, with each game in the trilogy building on his impressive skillset. With the launch of Hitman 3, all three games became accessible from the same menu hub.
While the trilogy doesn’t have the kind of character development and customization that the RPGs on this list have, the way that IO Interactive has incorporated each game’s new content to be compatible with the one that came before offers a great sense of unity.
6 Destiny 2
When Destiny was announced, there was an expectation that your playable Guardian would be the hero of all future content in the grand sci-fi universe that Bungie was creating. While that wasn’t quite the case, with the launch of Destiny 2, a character migration event prior to the sequel’s launch did allow those who had been playing the first Destiny game through its three years since launch to take their Guardian’s appearance and achievements into the new game.
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This one-time-only opportunity to link your progress between the two games was met with disappointment from fans and those who came to the series later. As such, Destiny 2 was created with a much longer lifespan in mind.
5 Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2
Xenoverse is something of a genre unto its own, incorporating RPG elements with an online overworld hub and instanced quests that you can either complete solo or cooperatively. As with Destiny, the original game was somewhat short-lived, but the sequel leaned harder into the live service elements of the original and has run for much longer.
While the hero character in Xenoverse 2 is different from the one from the original game, you can use save data from that game to import your own Dragon Ball character’s appearance and items into the sequel. A holographic statue of your hero from that game will also appear in the center of the hub world.
4 Guild Wars 2
Sequels to MMORPGs are not all that common, as players would mostly rather stay in the game where they have already established themselves rather than move to a new one. The original Guild Wars however lacked many of the features that would have it classified as a fully-fledged MMORPG, so it made more sense than most when ArenaNet announced a sequel to the game.
The Eye of the North expansion pack for the original game was announced alongside the sequel, with one of the main features being the Hall of Monuments. This allowed players to gain titles and rewards that would transfer over into Guild Wars 2 when it launched.
3 Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
One of the stretch goals for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes crowdfunding campaign was for a spin-off game that would act as a prequel to the main title. That game was Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, a side-scrolling action game that introduced us to a handful of the promised characters that comprise the roster of Hundred Heroes.
The development team behind the games has promised that there will be some way of linking progress between the two, but what that is hasn’t been specified. The game has plenty of collectibles, as well as customizable weapons, so it’s possible that these might carry over.
2 Looney Tunes Collector: Martian Revenge
Released only months after the first Looney Tunes Collector game, Martian Alert, this sequel had you playing as Marvin the Martian rather than Bugs Bunny. To progress through this Zelda-like, you would have to recruit new characters to your party and use their unique abilities to traverse further across the map.
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Not all characters could be unlocked in either game alone, meaning that you would have to trade between the games if you wanted to acquire the full set of 47 characters. This was a totally original concept when it came to portable games and definitely didn’t take any inspiration from another massive franchise that had taken the world by storm in the late 1990s. Speaking of which...
1 Pokemon
The absolute pinnacle of carrying your progression across games. The concept of transferring between Red, Blue, and later Yellow was revolutionary in itself, but being able to move your favorite Pokemon over to Gold and Silver was something else altogether.
Since the third generation of games, which began on Game Boy Advance, you've been able to technically transfer your Pokemon all the way to the very latest games in the series on Nintendo Switch. Many have tried to emulate this ambitious formula in the decades since, but there’s something special in the bonds that players have been able to make with the Pokemon they’ve stuck with through so many years.
NEXT: Pokemon: The Biggest Differences Between Generation I And Other Generations
