Lost in Translation: 5 Games That Transitioned Horribly To Other Media

Yes, yes I have

Popular media often goes from one medium to the other, we've seen Star Wars become a book series, comic books become movies and books become tv shows...videogames are not exempt from this trend. The popularity of videogames have seen some of our favorite characters/franchises make the leap from consoles to film and while there are some successful jumps, it mostly tends to not work out so well for the most part...here are 5 examples of such occasions.

5. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Back in 2001, Squaresoft (yep before the Enix days) decided to try its hand at the movie making business and what better franchise to get the silver screen treatment than Final Fantasy? The movie's pitch was that it was going to be the first fully CGI film and let me tell you something: they delivered on that promise. Unfortunately, that's all they delivered on; the dialogue was bland, the action was meh and the characters weren't interesting at all. As a fan of the series I was extremely let down at how much it wasn't like Final Fantasy, if anything it was a precursor to the current string of FF games (the Lightning Saga) and just really wasn't my cup of tea...and apparently I wasn't alone in that since it only made 85.1 million and cost 137 million to make. Did I mention it had a relatively big cast too? Such unrealized potential

4. The Legend of Zelda cartoon

This 1989 tragedy ( it saddens me that I was born the same year as this) took the series we all know and love and became the animated form of the Water Temple; pure frustration. Our hero Link is no longer the selfless, silent hero of Hyrule but instead is this generic sounding teenager who decided attitude was his best weapon. It doesn't follow the series at all, had horrible action and ruined the spirit of the series; in fact it was so bad it had only 13 episodes and that is exactly 13 episodes too many. The crown jewel of this series?

I much rather play an entire Zelda game that is based around the Majora's Mask water temple than watch this series.

3. Literally any game film by  Uwe Boll 

On the one hand I admire is love and dedication for videogames, on the other I hope he is never allowed to make any more movies based on games, movies that will be games and movies that people who play games and think " you know who should make a movie out of this game? Uwe Boll". Granted his source material isn't that great (Bloodrayne, Postal) but it takes a special talent to take less than stellar games and make them into to such terrible movies that people created a petition to get him to retire. Kudos though for fighting your critics, that was probably the best thing he has done.

2. Street Fighter: The Movie

This movie holds that rare distinction of being " So bad that it's good" but as far as videogame movies go, it was 100% unfaithful to the source. Like really lets have Jean Claude Van Damme play super ultra 'murica hero Guile...because that makes sense. The only saving grace to this movie is the fact that Raul Juila over acted so much that you had to watch him in every scene that he was in. Seriously though who the hell did the casting? A Hawaiian dude playing Japanese E. Honda?

1. The Super Marios Bros movie

You knew this was going to be on the list, what can I say about this movie..hmm..maybe that it is the Superman 64 of videogame films? Never has there been a film so disrespectful to it's source material, I mean look at this

and look at this

they are supposed to be the same thing. This isn't even the worst part of it; you have Luigi's last name as Mario which makes Mario, Mario Mario, the mushrooms don't make the person bigger but just grow themselves, there is no Mushroom Kingdom, Dennis Hopper is Bowser, they have rocket boots for some reason, my god I could make an entire video on everything wrong with this movie. There is nothing "Mario" about this film, this film was my first experience in disappointment, this movie shattered my faith in humanity because who would do such a thing to children? Oh and did  I mention they used guns?

Ugh so yeah that was 5 Games that didn't transition so good, I'm sorry but I am just really upset that they thought it was ok to make this movie...like just no, someone needs to go back in time and stop this from happening because I'm pretty certain this film is directly responsible for the recession. Are there any movie games you think she be on this list? Feel free to tell me.