Anybody else ever get the sequel first?

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I was just reflecting that I picked up Mass Effect 2 & 3 at Good Will, with no sign of the first game, and that it was far from the first time I got a sequel first. Usually it was because I got a game as a gift.
I'm drawing a blank on which came first, but I know that back when I was a kid, I got Final Fantasy Legend II for the Game Boy as a birthday present which introduced me to cRPGS. I would not track down Final Fantasy Legend I until years later when I spotted it at Funcoland. Ironically after getting Final Fantasy Legend III and Final Fantasy Adventure (Which I mistook for FFL1).
A similar thing happened with Sword of Hope 2, and I never did find a Sword of Hope I game boy cartridge.
Also I recall getting King's Quest III for Christmas after playing King's Quest II at a friend's house and talking about it. I wouldn't play the original King's Quest until several years later, it being the second-to-last Sierra AGI game available for the Apple IIGS that I played (after Space Quest II, which I never found in stores for the Apple II or IIGS and eventually pirated from Asimov around '96).
Also, I recall getting Curse of the Azure Bonds the following Christmas after Final Fantasy Legend II, and did not get Pool of Radiance until the next year. I got Champions of Krynn before that (and those were the only Gold Box games released for the Apple II).

So, how common was this experience for the rest of you of getting sequels as gifts?
In the pre-internet era, tracking down the previous game was not easy, unless you were willing to pay a premium by ordering directly from the manufacturer. However, for instance, the King's Quest games were something like $15-$20 in stores, but Sierra's catalog had them listed for over $30. I only know this because I just helped my mother do some "spring cleaning" of her attic and basement while furloughed and found an old Sierra 1989 catalog and some of my old boxes for Apple II software with price stickers still on them.

Of course, today we can look on ebay, steam, gog, or even Amazon if we want to track down the previous game in the series, and most manufacturers don't gouge on their websites the way they did on their catalogs. Or at least I recall Sierra, Electronic Arts, and Broderbund did as their catalogs tended to be higher than at the stores in Woodfield or Randhurst Malls (RIP Randhurst, they ruined it).

 

Hmm, let's see.

I played BG2 before BG, I played IWD2 before IWD.
I played Saints Row 2 before 1 (have never played one, in fact, though I did play 3 and 4).
I played Serious Sam 2 before the first Serious Sam (though I played the first encounter before the second encounter).
I played Alien Shooter 2 before Alien Shooter.
I played Jagged Alliance 2 before JA1 (though I technically played the demo for JA1 first).

I'm not even sure why I played these games out of sequence, really. Sometimes the second game was just easier to get into (JA1 resolution is pretty hard on the eyes after JA2 at max resolution, for instance).

I did play Fallout 1 before Fallout 2, Doom 1 before Doom 2. Most game series I played in sequence, probably.

 

Come to think of it, I don't think I've gotten to try Doom 1 more than once. It was at somebody else's house and they lost the disks or disc and then had a HD crash.
I did not get very far in Doom 1 as I only had about an hour.
I had Doom 2 on the Mac that somebody passed on to me when they went Windows.

Every time I played a sequel first it was a question of availability.
As for JA1's resolution being hard on the eyes, all I can say is "you poor, spoiled child".
Although I can relate. They never released an Apple IIGS version of Bard's Tale III, only an Apple IIe version. They DID release Apple IIGS versions of Bard's Tale I and II. So after playing BT1 & BT2 which had great graphics for the time (and not too horrible today, although the resolution/screen size is small on modern monitors, it looked decent on the 13" AppleColor RGB monitor but not a 24" widescreen monitor) and awesome sound (which is still good even today), the Apple IIe version looked and sounded horrible in comparison.
Somebody gave it to me for either Christmas or my Birthday (I can't remember), and I was unable to exchange it for the IIGS version for the simple reason that the IIGS version was vaporware.
The graphics were not much worse than Might and Magic I or Magic Candle for the IIe, but compared to the beautiful IIGS version, they sucked.
Although the first Ultima and Wizardry games arguably had worse, they did not seem as bad, or I was just more forgiving because of their age.

 

I didn't mean that the pixels of the low resolution bothered me in JA1, what bothers me is that the isometric camera is so close. There is no overview. I wouldn't be able to play BG2 on 640x480 anymore, either, not after being used to 1024x768, where you need to scroll around the map a lot less, and can actually see more than the circle of vision your characters have.

 

You do know about the big map view that shows everything but is impossible to move your mercs on precisely?
I use the keyboard to switch back and forth all the time.
Also the fog of war was put there on purpose in both JA and BG.

 

It's been a verry long time since I played JA, but the map feature seems like using the map to move around in BG2, which is possible, but not very convenient.

 

Pretty much. That's exactly how I saw it since I played BG2 over ten years before I found JA in a "book sale". (I've been finding a lot of old gems in the "book sales", it's why I go).