I’m mostly thinking about 8 bit games, and NES in particular, but it was a thing that continued at least into the 16-bit consoles. There were a lot of games that come to mind that did the perspective shift, sometimes blending genres in the process. Stuff like:
- Guardian Legend (sh’mup with 3rd person action)
- Blaster Master (mix of side scrolling and top down)
- Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link (top down, but sidescrolling battles and dungeons)
- Contra and Super C (change in perspective from side scrolling to top-down / 3rd person)
- Actraiser (sidescroller + god game)
- Battle Golfer Yui (adventure/golf game mashup)
I’m sure there’s plenty of others I’m not thinking of. It just feels creative, like even if in some cases a title might not be a “good” game, stuff like this just feels interesting, and there was a lot of experimentation with genre mashups and perspective changes like this in the 8 and 16-bit era.
The Nier games are really good for this, I love when it goes from over the shoulder character action game to isometric dungeon crawler and then to bullet hell shooter. I love the Nier games so much. ❤️
In one of the latest Mario game for Switch (Odyssey?) Mario switches from 3D world to 2D platformer puzzles quite often.
Battle Toads had that one fight that was in 2nd person. I can’t think of many games at all that used 2nd person.
The Adventures of Bayou Billy went from beat-em-up, to shooter with the zapper, and then to driving. Wild game.
I remember the first time i saw the Contra switch from side-scrolling to “first person” and being totally blown away by it.
