Agree about FF7. That game is legendary in my childhood memories.
I suppose with Dead Space 2 I just felt a lot of the gore and scariness was forced. Everything in the first game flowed so well, fit with the atmosphere, progressed naturally. My expectations could have been overly high too, since I enjoyed the first one so much. I enjoyed some gameplay elements they added with the second one though. And yeah, I played the third one once, laughed, and forgot about it.
I mean, it definitely wasn't as good as the first game. But, there were some intense, brutal moments in the game and some very interesting and fucked up enemy concepts. The introduction of the necromorph babies was pretty messed up to me at the time, and I also remember the introduction to the game being pretty unexpected, since you have a guy with a melting face turning into a monster on your ass in about 45 seconds, haha.
There were a decent amount of memorable moments in DS2 as well besides the intro, like reexporting the Ishimura, encountering the stalkers for the first time, going through the maternity ward area, the eyeball section, and then trying to cut your way through the army of never ending necromorphs at the end. I think it was still a successful horror game with some good atmosphere, fun combat, interesting enemy designs, and I liked the introduction of an actual personality for the protagonist. The space dementia was pretty cool, too :P
Yeah, I played about 6 hours into DS3 and then just said fuck this, I'll finish it later on and never got around to it. I thought it was still a competent game and everything, but it just was not the same as the other 2 games at all.
I think it would have been okay to transition it into more of an action game, but they had to keep the core horror elements as well which they didn't do. If they were going to do what they did no matter what, they should have aimed to do something like what Resident Evil 4 did. Instead, they just went with more of a Resident evil 5/6 approach and fucked it all up.