Axel from Bare Knuckle/Streets of Rage: he was made to look subtly more like Final Fight's Cody when he, (Axel) reappeared in Streets of Rage 2, and I didn't altogether like that.

I guess being an old school gamer I feel like a lot of themes and characters went in a weird kind of direction, but I'm just older, so that's my perspective of things. It's like if I treasured a novel from childhood and then saw a modern film based on the book: even if the motion picture was above average it would still most likely disagree with how I had imagined the story to be in my head.