Obviously, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Mainly movies for me because I haven’t read them. Extended editions, obviously.
But also, I adore the mass effect trilogy. Yeah, the rpg elements get gradually watered down, and the third ones ending isn’t the best, but it’s still an absolutely amazing Trilogy that I replay yearly. And it all came out in 5 years! Nowadays, single games have 5 years of dev time, at least. In my eyes, it’s as perfect as it can be…Once it’s been modded a bit.
Do yourself a favor and read the books
The movies are fine, they are top notch, but the books are from another fuckin world
I don’t know.
So, I read the books. And they are very good. There is a reason that the series is so influential.
And there are definitely some things that I do not like about the movies. The shield-surfing, for example.
But as movie adaptations go, it is pretty darn faithful to the original. Like, I’ve seen a lot of movie adaptations where you’re going to miss a lot of material if you don’t do the books, but they kept all the significant stuff in. They streamlined it a little, and no Tom Bombadill, but I seriously think that it does a solid job of capturing the original.
Like, if there’s any book or series where I think that watching the movie would get you a pretty good approximation of the material and still be a really good movie, Lord of the Rings has to be near the top.
I almost brought up the shield surfing 🙂. I decided not to. There were some little warts like that, and “I am no man” and etc, but overall the movies are awesome + about as faithful as you can get without making it into a miniseries that spans decades of production or something.
After watching the movies, I can’t read the books any more. Tolkien was many things, he’s great at world building and mythology, but storytelling is not among his greatest qualities.
You’ve got be joking right? The most influential, most loved, most well regarded fantasy trilogy of all time is not a good story actually? I get that it wasn’t your style for whatever reason but to call it bad storytelling is just asinine.
Literally my first thought was “obviously, lord of the rings”. Opening the comments and seeing those exact words was strangely satisfying.
There’s a podcast somewhere where a guy narrates uses amazing voice acting and music to deliver the story and it’s an absolute banger of a trilogy. One of the most magical experiences I’ve had. It’s like watching the movies but longer, better paced and way more emotional connection to the characters.
The movies don’t say what the people are thinking and the actors did a phenomenal job to convey it, but the book explicitly saying it is better.
Half Life.
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…aaaaaaaany day now.
You could say Portal Revolution is the third game (it’s free direct from Steam, and while not wildly unique it will still have you scratch your noodle until you realize how obvious it is).
So I vote Portal in that case.
See also portal reloaded for new portal concept in time (like that one level from titanfall 2)
The Dollars Trilogy as it’s sometimes called. Italian westerns Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and the Ugly
Hitchhiker’s Trilogy
If you mean The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, man, I have a completely different take.
I use that as one of two prime examples of a series that I love the first book of but steadily like less-and-less as the series goes on. The other example is Dune.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy starts out funny. Okay, yes, black humor, but it’s funny. And it gets steadily less-pleasant and grimmer over the course of the series. I’m not really enjoying it towards the last book or so any more.
Maybe a third series would be the Calvin and Hobbes comics, though I don’t know if you can call that a series. Late Calvin and Hobbes, if you’ve ever read through a complete compendium, is very rarely funny, just kind of unhappy and cynical. The early and mid stuff, by contrast, is my favorite comic.
EDIT: Well, at least Watterson did leave it on a positive note with the final comic:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/c45362c0-e85d-40b2-a54e-f94bd3308768.webp
How to Train Your Dragon Trilogy.
I watched the first one on a ferry, and just hearing the title made me think it was going to be some nonsense. And then it was amazing.
Then they announced a second, and I was thinking what do they expect to do with this and then they gave something intensely heartwarming and heart wrenching. I found it better and deeper than the first.
And then the third. I don’t think it was as clean as the other two, but it closed it off so beautifully I was bawling at the end. Absolutely perfect.