Third Is 3D

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For a period in The '80s, it was not uncommon for the third film in a series to be released in 3D. The practice saw a revival in The New '10s flood of 3D film releases. It may or may not also be set in a foreign country.

Also, a common trend in the times of the first Video Game 3D Leaps, was to have two 2D games, and make the third a 3D one, with titles such as:

• Ultra Super Death Gorefest Chainsawer
• Ultra Super Death Gorefest Chainsawer 2: Chainsaw Good!
• Ultra Super Death Gorefest Chainsawer 3-D

Compare Super Title 64 Advance.

Examples:

Films — Animation

• Happy Heroes does this animation-wise; its third movie, Happy Heroes: The Stones, is all-CGI whereas its predecessors were 2D. They shifted back into 2D to some extent from the fourth film (Happy Heroes Multiverse Rescue) onward, having the characters animated in 2D like the Happy Friends show the films are based on, while the locations are in 3D.
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
• Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
• Toy Story 3

Films — Live-Action

• Amityville 3-D
• Deadpool & Wolverine
• Friday the 13th Part III
• Iron Man 3
• Jaws 3-D
• jackass 3-D
• Krrish
• Men in Black 3
• Piranha 3D
• The Ring
• Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Taken even further with the fourth Spy Kids movie, All The Time In The World which was released in 4D (scratch and sniff).
• Step Up 3D
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon
• A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas
• Zombi 3D

Live-Action TV

• The third season of Holey Moley is called Holey Moley 3D in 2D.
• The third installment of the VH1 miniseries I Love the '80s is in 3D. It uses a a process called ChromaDepth that appears in 3D when using a special pair of ChromaDepth glasses, but the process allows the show to be viewable in normal 2D (unlike the anaglyphic 3D process). These glasses for the show were available free at Best Buy stores across the United States.
• Parodied by Psych, which titled its third Yin/Yang episode "Yang 3 in 2D".

Music

• The third album of Psychostick is named Space Vampires VS Zombie Dinosaurs in 3D.
• The third track on Tito Puente's Dance Mania, Vol. 1 is called "3-D Mambo".
• "Weird Al" Yankovic subverts this, as it's his second album that's titled In 3-D.

Theme Parks

• Universal Studios' Terminator 2 3-D: Battle Across Time, if you count it as the third installment of the franchise.

Visual Novel

• Pizza Game parodies this. In Chris's RPG-themed route, his third experience level is called Chris 3D.

Video Games

• For consoles specifically:
  • Nintendo 64: While not stereoscopic 3D and not having "3D" present in its name, it was Nintendo's third home console and the first to render Polygonal Graphics natively (the Super Nintendo Entertainment System could only do so via the Super FX chip used by certain games).
  • PlayStation 3: Not at first, but eventually gained 3DTV support via a firmware update.
• The first two Age of Empires games were barely isometric, while the third blew away its competition in the 3D graphics department.
• Bubble Hero: The third game, though not specifically mentioned in its title, is in 3D. Subsequent releases like 4 and BoBo.Dragon.Richer (a crossover with Richman) used the same 3D graphics.
• Subverted with Bubsy 3D. It is sometimes viewed as the third game in the series, but it is actually the fourth game. The lesser-known Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales was released exclusively for the Atari Jaguar following the first two Bubsy games on 16-bit consoles.
• The Catacomb series: Catacomb, Catacomb II... Catacomb 3-D.
• The 2D RPG Chrono Trigger was followed by the visual novel Radical Dreamers, which was in turn followed by Chrono Cross, which used 3D models for its characters. The backgrounds were still 2D, though.
• Command & Conquer: The third games in both the Tiberium series and the Red Alert series used a 3D engine. There's also a more meta example involving Generals, the first fully 3D RTS in the series which started a third continuity to Command & Conquer. Also, if you consider Dune 2000 as a separate game instead of a remake of Dune II (which was technically the first game, being entirely unrelated to the other Dune game from 1992), then Emperor: Battle for Dune counts as well.
• After using sprite graphics for the first two Corpse Party titles, the third game in the series, Corpse Party: Blood Drive, switched to the Unity Engine to render the previous games' environments in 3D.
• Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective...in 3D!, though that one changed mediums from webtoon to graphical adventure game.
• The third DJ Hero game would have been a Nintendo 3DS spin-off entitled DJ Hero 3D. The game appears to have been cancelled, however. You have Warriors of Rock to blame for it (although Activision acknowledged that had DJ Hero not existed to begin with, Guitar Hero may still be up and running).
• The 3 in the title of Doom³ is stylized so as to make the title essentially "Doom cubed", which is interpreted by some as meaning "3D". This one is interesting, as it announced a switch from "fake" 3D using sprite scaling to "true" polygon-based 3D. Depending on how you count them. it's actually the fourth or even fifth mainline Doom game, following the two classic PC games, Final Doom, and Doom 64, but being a reboot instead of being in continuity with them.
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Earthworm Jim 3D
• Excitebike 64 is the third game in the Excite series and the first with full 3D graphics and gameplay (the second game was a Japan-only Mission-Pack Sequel of the first).
• Fallout 1 and 2 were isometric... and you can guess where this is going... Like Duke Nukem, however, there were a few Gaiden Games between 2 and 3. Black Isle Studios' cancelled Fallout 3 also would have been in 3D, but would have kept the isometric camera of the first two games.
• The third Gabriel Knight game, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, was in 3D. In hindsight, its creators call jumping on the 3D bandwagon a wrong decision. They regarded making the second game an Interactive Movie the same way.
• If you consider the Light Gun Game Ghoul Panic as a Point Blank (1994) sequel, then it marks the spot where the games switched from 2D to full 3D characters and environments.
• Grand Theft Auto III, while not the first three-dimensional game in the Grand Theft Auto series (as the first two also had a height dimension), was the first to feature three-dimensional camera angles, in contrast to its forerunners' top-down views.
• Guilty Gear Xrd, kinda. It uses 3D models to imitate 2D sprites and is the third "X" game in the Guilty Gear series after Guilty Gear X and Guilty Gear XX. Sequel Number Snarl complicates matters, however — it's technically the fourth fighting game since the original Guilty Gear didn't use an X in the title, and sixth if you count Accent Core Plus (one of the many revisions of XX, which included a new story following the events depicted in the original release) and Overture. The count bumps up to 7 if Isuka is also included, though that game isn't part of the main canon. That said, Xrd is the first non-spinoff in the series after Overture'', which was explicitly numbered 2.
• A third Jazz Jackrabbit game was planned to be a 3D platformer, but was cancelled.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has 3D visuals (though the gameplay mechanics and hitboxes remained 2D).
• Metal Gear:
  • The "Solid" in the original Metal Gear Solid comes from not just Solid Snake's codename, but also from solid geometry (since it was the first game in the series to be made in 3D), while also being a subtle way of indicating that it was a sequel to the first two Metal Gear games on the MSX2 (the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake). The choice of "solid" was also a slight jab at SquareSoft, a company which Konami viewed as a rival, since a "solid" is a square with an extra dimension.
  • When Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was ported to the Nintendo 3DS, the title was changed slightly to Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D.
• Micro Machines V3 is an aversion, as it wasn't actually the third game in the series.
• New Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually the third entry in the New Super Mario Bros. series (the actual second game being New Super Mario Bros. Wii), instead owing its name to being the second handheld installment. And it's on the Nintendo 3DS, which supports stereoscopic 3D.
• Paper Mario:
  • Super Paper Mario might be an inversion, as normal gameplay is in 2D, and 3D is instead an optional feature only Mario can use.
  • If one considers Paper Mario: Sticker Star to be the start of a trilogy that focuses more on the Paper aspect of Paper Mario, then Paper Mario: The Origami King qualifies for this trope in a sense, due to the emphasis on paper's most three-dimensional form, origami.
• Prince of Persia 3D
• Puzzle Bobble 3 was titled Bust-a-Move 3DX in some countries.
• Subverted by R-Type Delta, which is the series' fourth mainline installment.
• Subverted with Rayman, which has a game called Rayman 3D, a 3DS Updated Re-release of Rayman 2: The Great Escape, the last one you'd expect from that title.
• The third RoboCop Licensed Game for Atari ST, Amiga and DOS was in 3D, though it was simply titled RoboCop 3, and Ocean also made 2D games with the same title for other systems.
• RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 was in full polygonal graphics, unlike the first two games. It even allowed to ride a coaster in first-person view.
• In terms of mainline Shin Megami Tensei games, Shin Megami Tensei and Shin Megami Tensei II were in 2D, while Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne was in 3D, including during all battles, the latter quality not seen again in the mainline series before or since until Shin Megami Tensei V 18 years later.
• Data East's Side Pocket series became a "3D Polygonal Billiard Game" for its third and last installment.
• Simon the Sorcerer 3D
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves parodied this by giving the game 3D sections to be used with the glasses included in the case, effectively making it a game that followed the movie method.
• Sniper Elite III: The series was in 3D from the start, but the third game can be played in stereoscopic 3D if you have the right sort of TV.
• Sonic 3D Blast is an aversion, as it wasn't the third game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series.
  • Played straight with Sonic 3. While it wasn't a 3D game, the title screen actually used pre-rendered 3D as opposed to the pixel art tile screens in the first 2.
• Averted by Space Harrier 3D, which is actually the second game in the series.
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, much like Metal Gear Solid 3, was ported to the 3DS under the title Splinter Cell 3D.
• The first two Trine games used polygonal graphics for its backgrounds and characters, but gameplay was strictly on a two-dimensional plane. Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power brought the game into full 3D.
• Warcraft III was fully 3D, after the first two and their expansions were isometric.
• Wolfenstein. First there were the two Apple games, and then id Software bought the rights to the title and released Wolfenstein 3-D (even though the Apple games don't really belong to the Wolfenstein series.)
• Even though Worms 3D is technically the sixth entry, the other ones were considered expansions to both Worms (1995) and Worms 2.