Your thing is actually kinda confusing... I thought for the Smash Bros thing, you ment that Smash Bros didn't have ring outs and I was like what... But yea, I think I get what you mean and I agree mostly but if a company were to blatantly copy a game, they would get super trashed which was almost the case for Battle Royal but least they had something different (for worse) than being a complete clone

You should add in some examples right next to the names imo

Ah.  Missed the word clone in the OP.  My bad.

Trashed by haters, praised by sony fans.

I would have bought it if it were actually MORE similar to Smash. I don't care that it's its own game. I think the health system and ringouts are so crucial to the gameplay.

That happens when your eye is on the money instead of the game code.

A) you'll never get everyone to agree on what is "the most important".
B) developers especially have a different perspective on "what is great". the developers i work will highly prize the features that were fun develop over the features that are useful. i'm not in the games industry but i'll bet the same viewpoint exists in games.

How about Resident Evil, as when I played Tomb Raider, I felt like it was Resident Evil 4 II.

Resident Evil 4

If you have supernatural enemies (or super-normal for that matter) introduce them smoothly by having a cutscene establishing that, yes, this Spanish villager has a parasite who has eaten his brain and now is erupting from his spine.

Also, make sure that the nature of your combat matches your protagonist and the setting. It makes sense for Leon to be going up against waves of enemies because Leon is Secret Service and Saddler can just make a ton of ganados via coercion.

This one kinda does require an example to explain what I mean.

For comparison, I think the new Tomb Raider is a pretty good game, but it got these dead wrong. There are two ZEROES too many Solarii. The number of humans and corpses on the island must be quite limited because they're all survivors of something. Lara has training, but she's fundamentally set up as a weak, but growing protagonist.

A body count in the hundreds does not match your world-building or your protagonist. What would match is a dozen or so recurring enemies who stick to cover, are loathe to waste ammo, and retreat when you're in an advantageous position. They are humans with survival instincts and limited resources.

Because of this, the supernatural enemies should have been introduced much earlier; none of these rules apply to them. They can take as much damage or have as little sense of self preservation as you want.

In retrospect I really wish they had set up a Witcher-like setup, where you use your bow on animals and humans to conserve ammo, and you use guns on everything else because they soak up nightmarish amounts of damage.

I'm not missing the point at all.  I've played both of the other you've mentioned in this post, but my examples are games that are somewhat similar in style as the enjoyment of both games comes from the boss battles without the need to grind for weapon upgrades.     

Your whole spiel about weapon and armor crafting being the main focus in Monster Hunter then listing that they're not in Ragnarok Odyssey or Soul Sacrifice because you get no reward for killing a monster is way off.  They're there, they're just a little different.  On Monster Hunter you harvest them from the monsters you kill or harvest points.  In Ragnarok Odyssey they immediately drop to the ground after you kill the monsters, cards and crafting items.  On Soul Sacrifice you get spells as a reward for how well you do, up to three different ones, you get spells for breaking a cursed part, and you get spells if you sacrifice part of your body or are used as a sacrifice, each spell being able to be upgraded for more uses or a more powerful version of a spell. 

The difference with the games are the gameplay and that's what makes it better, not the grinding for parts.  I'd actually like Monster Hunter more if it was less repeated grinding for parts to make your weapons more powerful because I actually thought that fighting the bosses was the best part of the game.

At a certain point one has to realize that developers are people with creative ideas and interests to keep their work (and sequels) fresh moving forward. Also, the gamers themselves have to keep an open mind, stop being so entitled, and appreciate the old games for what they were, while embracing the changes in the new one.

Now if the sequel bombs on metacritic, thats another story.

Vomit at your MH example. I never played MonHun for weapon crafting, I played it for gameplay and 4 player boss fights. Every other hunting game has better gameplay (and some of them actually have plot too), so I no longer want to play MH. Series would be better if it wasn't so stale and didn't have so awful game mechanics.

You're so right in your OP and so right about this. I wasn't sure why I liked MH. And as you wrote it, I was thinking - is it so? Does armor and weapon-crafting hold the key to making this series so unique? And then I looked at a piece of paper on my desk, that I made playing MH. I noted which parts I need to craft the next thing I wanted. And that's the point I think. You see what you can craft and you can see specifically what you need. You know after some time which monster drops it, and probably have to learn which body part you have to break to increase the probability of dropping the specific part. I think MOnster HUnter wouldn't work, if you only see new weapons or armor, if you have enough materials to craft them. As you can look forward you can plan which monsters to fight next, and that makes a big part of the excitement.