I am playing Horizon Zero Dawn and haven’t gotten to the first main event, but it gives me this feeling like if I upgrade all my equipment now it might be for nothing. I know that is not the case, I looked it up, but what are some games that are the worst offenders? One I can think of is Aerith in the original FF7.
Promoting Zylo in Shining Force. He was a badass wearwolf that could sprint around the map and had huge damage output from a leaping slash with his claws.
Then I promoted him and he went from my best character damage wise to average at best. His badass wolf form replaced with just being a hary dude in blue armor. His leaping slash replaced with just gesturing whith his hand to have some blue clouds pass over the screen to damage the enemy instead. Eventually leving him up got his damage output back but man did he ever lose a ton of cool factor.