I'm with Lord Golbez here. Trying to add onto a story that has no where left to grow is just a headache. That's not to say I'm against sequels and spin-offs, but I feel there are rules you have to follow to make it work. The simplest being that if you're going to make a franchise work, you have to lay the foundation first. You can't just make a contained work and then after the fact, trying to expand on it. It rarely works out well.

The MCU works because it was established from the first Iron Man film that they were building an expanded universe with the films with other non-Iron Man characters being referenced or popping up. That's why the multiverse element works for the film because Marvel had planned on every film in Phase 1 to climax with the Avengers film.

Contrast this with FFX and Kingdom Hearts, which both had teaser trailers hinting to a sequel with their International Editions. These teaser trailers were made to discern if fans would be interested in one, not necessarily because the staff actually had a story in mind. Now look at the sequels they produce and notice how the feeling of them is dissonant from the originals. KH's narrative did have room to grow, but the sequels took a decidedly different path with the franchise that alienated the first title. X-2 didn't really have anywhere to go and its plot is a muddled mess because the staff never had a clear vision to begin with and simply wanted to explore the characters without purpose. Which is probably a lot of the reason why the game has a love it or hate it relationship among the fans.

The other issues with tacking onto the story is that the writers have to change things around to build conflict that can often cause continuity errors or retcons to the original premise. This works based on the strength of the writers and the fans willing suspension of belief. Retconning Big Boss's past in MGS works because half the information concerning him was Japanese only for awhile, and frankly, it as never detailed enough to begin with. So the few continuity errors in MGS3 work because the details it smudges were never terribly important to begin with. Contrast this with the Compilation of VII's retcons concerning the Great War or Kingdom Hearts retconning the rules of its own universe. You can quickly see how these changes now change the context of earlier works in a way that doesn't work for them. Everything mentioned about Shinra and even Wutai's history is retconned in Crisis Core as it changed the entire purpose of the Great War backstory. Likewise, KH1 now has a lot of inconsistencies concerning the nature of the keyblade, Kingdom Hearts, and the issue of Donald and Goofy not knowing what a Keyblade was despite the prequel games clearly showing they do. This is why you shouldn't tack on new concepts and rules without checking for the inconsistencies they may cause.

Remakes are different story, and I've grown to accept them as a chance to do something new and different with them as opposed to just updating a few aging components. Granted, I do feel remakes can be excessive. I'm tired of seeing Spider-Man get rebooted, and lord knows that Capcom and Konami need to stopped from remaking Resident Evil and Castlevania titles, especially as they struggle to make good sequels. The largest issue I do have with remakes is that I inherently disagree with the idea of remaking a good title. I don't want a Chrono Trigger remake because I don't feel like it can really be improved by one. On the other hand, I would not be bothered by Chrono Cross getting one because the game had a lot of glaring problems that I feel could be smoothed out with a second attempt at the game. The Secret of Mana remake from last year was a poor one because it really didn't do anything but update the graphics and music with questionable quality. Contrast this with the Trials of Mana remake coming next year which looks like they are actually changing around things to fit the 3D world being added in, and hopefully re-balancing the game's questionable control and UI issues from the original. That's how you do a smurfing remake. It's a large part of why I'm still on the fence about the VII Remake because honestly, I don;t feel like the Midgard sequence could be improved much outside of a few technical changes, and I'm worried that the new content will hurt the near perfect balance the original sequence possessed just to overload the game with some of the worst excesses of the genre that has become predominate in the last decade or two. I don't want to explore the rest of Midgard if it's just going to be relegated to silly fetch quest/monster farming nonsense. I'd rather just leave the splendor of those sectors to my imagination if they are not going to do anything meaningful with it. That's always the issues with remakes or adding new stuff into an old IP. How well does the new content blend in with the old? One of the reasons why I felt the new VI Advance content worked so well for the game was because it was done so seamlessly that you would have had to play the original to even know some of those quests or espers weren't in the original. Same deal with Persona 3 FES whose new content worked seamlessly to make the original feel more like a beta than a finished product. Whereas Golden feels awkward in P4 because we're shoving in a new character not from the original and giving a social link to another one that is a bit too *wink wink, nudge nudge* to fans of the original P4. It's practically telling you to look at all the changes we did and making it more obvious to old fans that it doesn't really fit in.