That doesn't always happened. The history of gaming is littered with the husks of sequels which, for one reason or another, remain overshadowed by their forebears; they were just too similar, too different, or too bad.
Here are ten of them.
Meeeeow! Chahi got clawz.
Unfortunately, Fade to Black was a stark departure from its predecessor, swapping the slick, stylised, cut-scenes for ugly CGI, and replacing the side-on platforming with third-person, 3D shooting. It was reasonably forward-thinking for the time, but it irritated many fans of the original by tossing aside what made it so good. Thus: where dat game gone now?
Answer: Toiletland.
It wasn't a total travesty, but has been proved by the success of the recent Crash anthology release... people want to see the Bandicoot in his default environment; Swansea.
The blood shall run like Tubbycustard (tm).
With much of the gameplay built around Mario cleaning up sentient diarrhoea, and flying around on a water-powered jetpack, it was something of a departure. Hindsight suggests that it lacked some of the polish Mario games are known for. The sprawling, non-linear levels were a feature of Super Mario Odyssey, but at the time felt at odds with Mario's traditional focus.
It sold well at the time, but Nintendo admitted later that it had failed to live up to expectations. Consequently, it finds itself filed alongside Super Mario Bros. 2 as one of the less-remembered entries in the main Mario series.
Worse still, it has become synonymous with a review score-fixing scandal dubbed DRIV3Rgate. You probably remember that; it became part of the justification for the embarrassing drip-stain on gaming history that is GamerGate.