Regarding Spiritual successors:
Shovel Knight
Freedom Planet
Mighty Gunvolt Burst
Gunvolt in general?
The spiritual successors I had in mind when posing that question were those involving a prominent developer of the original series working on the new IP, mainly because developers are more likely to become "free agents" in reality than the properties they've worked on. The Gunvolt series fits into this category due to the number of Mega Man games Inti Creates have developed in the past, while Freedom Planet and Shovel Knight (which I like very much) would not. Apologies for not being more clear about this during the show.
That's cool, Greg. if you want a really neat example, Fallout was a spiritual successor to Wasteland, an old-school CRPG... InExile games of course , are a break-off of staff from interplay that eventually brought Wasteland 2 to Kickstarter, which now stands as the closest thing these days you can get to a 'classic' fallout experience!
Richard Garriott broke off from EA after the company sank Origin and proceeded to make a kickstarter for "Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues", which is a spiritual successor to Garriott's Ultima games. that's sitting at... middling reviews, I suppose.
There's also more popular contemporary examples, such as Bayonetta being a spiritual successor to Kamiya's work with Devil May Cry. Or Ken Levine working with 2K for bioshock as a spiritual successor to System Shock 2. those however, fall under the purview of still being games created under the traditional publishing system rather than crowdfunding.
One more I can think of that's VERY recent is Fighting Layer EX. Arika was formed by Akira Nishitani, AKA the Man who programmed Street Fighter 2. in the late 90's , he got to work on Street Fighter again after doing some work with SNK. the game he made was Street Fighter EX, a weird quasai-3D fighter that introduced a TON of new characters to the franchise that Arika retained the rights to, while Capcom kept their character rights.
cue April 1st, 2017, when a joke trailer for a fighting game featuring Street Fighter EX's Hokuto, Garuda, and Kairi pops up on the internet. fanboys get VERY upset that this is an elaborate April fools joke/PS4 tech demo and not a full on game. Arika sees this reaction around the internet, and thus they decide to take the risk of self-publishing "Fighting EX Layer", a fighting game featuring many of the new characters from the Street Fighter EX games and sporting a very similar 2.5D-ish fighting system. although there are characters from the previous games that weren't copyrighted by capcom, it is a 'spiritual successor' of sorts to Street Fighter EX.