Nintendo thoughts, Part 2

I know it's been a long time, and no, I didn't forget.  As promised, part 2 of my Nintendo rant from previously...

Last post, I focused on Nintendo's hardware and the Wii.  This time around, my focus is going to be on their games and software.  NOTE: to keep things simple, I'm just going to be talking about NINTENDO titles, not merely games that were available on Nintendo consoles.  Thus, while MegaMan is arguably as influential as Zelda, it's technically a Capcom series and thus falls outside the scope of this discussion.

To try and talk about the history of Nintendo games seems redundant and unecessary.  I mean, everybody knows the story; in the 8-bit era, games like Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid (the "big 3", so to speak), not to mention the instant super-stardom of Super Mario Bros. 3 (thank you Fred Savage), delivered instant notoriety for the NES, making Nintendo a household name.  The SNES carried the trend forward, with Super Mario World, Link to the Past, and Super Metroid effortlessly bringing Nintendo's AAA titles into the 16-bit world in a way that made the games new and fresh while simultaneously preserved the sense of familiarity that made them such beloved games previously.  The gravy train kept rolling for Nintendo with the N-64, a system which was hugely competetive despite the fact that at the time of its launch, the PlayStation had a library almost 10 times that of Nintendo's, and Sony's games ran on 700 mb discs rather than 8 mb cartridges.  How was this possible?  Mario 64.  Ocarina of Time.  Super Smash Bros.  Arguably some of the greatest games "of all time."  Games that took everything we thought we knew about our favorites and blew us out of the water by introducing brand new innovations we could never have thought of.


These games have enamored us for so long that Nintendo has decided to keep making them. Exactly. Sure, some story elements may have changed, or a new game mechanic or two may get introduced, but for the most part, Nintendo's AAA titles seem to be just reskins of these original greats. Some people may not think this is a terrible thing since, after all, they were great games. But what people fail to see is the reason they were so great is because they were new and fresh and totally shattered our expectations; to keep this formula unchanged for a decade and a half (Mario 64 was released in 1996) is to adopt the very same stagnation that Nintendo strove to break free from in their earlier days. Maybe the novelty really hasn't worn off yet, but I think it's more likely that Nintendo is allowing itself to get fat and lazy on its throne, and they're afraid of rocking the boat too much under the thought process that "if it aint broke, don't fix it. Ever."

I may represent a minority of gamers out there, but frankly I'm ready for something new. As far as I'm concerned, if I can predict the story progression of the latest Zelda title before it even played out, that's a BAD THING. There's a fine line between comfortable self-referential humor and endearing familiarity on the one side, and sedentary complacency and unoriginal game design on the other, and from what I've seen, Nintendo is crossing over to the latter.

Take Zelda for example. Ocarina of Time could be seen as the peak (although I know some who would argue this). They tried something new with Majora's Mask and it was a technically brilliant game. But for some reason, they shied away from things different and with Wind Waker returned to the original 3D Zelda formula with the addition of a new game mechanic (the sailing). Twilight Princess, the first current-gen Zelda title, was actually a port of a game originally made for GameCube...nothing more need be said about that. Hope was on the horizon, as Miamoto (Mr. Nintendo himself) went on record saying that the next Zelda title would incorporate "big new unique ideas". What this worked out to was the incorporation of Wii motion plus into a Zelda formula that seems otherwise unchanged.  Now maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but designing a major AAA title around a game mechanic that isn't even 100% actualized (refer to my previous Nintendo post for this) seems like a bad idea.  I just think that it takes more than a new hardware feature that doesn't even really work the way it was conceptualized (just watch videos of the E3 demo to see what I'm talking about) to revive a franchise that's been singing the same old song for years now.

Mario is another title that seems to have peaked in the 64-bit era and has since been riding the same gravy train.  Mario 64 was, by all accounts, THE game that brought us into the 3D world and, just like with Zelda, Nintendo seems reluctant to deviate from that path.  Don't get me wrong - I understand that change for the sake of change isn't necessarily a good thing, but we're talking about recycling a formula that was new in 1996.  Sunshine tried to add a few new game mechanics and was pretty much universally panned for it.  Galaxy was visually novel with truly 3D worlds and new gravity mechanics, but was on the whole not a huge step forward, which is fine since, after all, it's a Mario game.  But I think the most insulting offering was Mario Galaxy 2 - a game which actually began life as an expansion for Galaxy.  The game featured the same level design, the same mechanics, and even recycled many of the same boss fights (blatantly, at that) and yet still was packaged as a separate, full-price game.  Congratulations Nintendo fans - you just paid $50 for Yoshi.

Interestingly enough, Metroid is the only one of the "Big 3" that doesn't seem to follow this trend.  This may be because the Metroid series did not have a 64-bit offering.  Instead, the series experienced its peak on the SNES with Super Metroid.  My guess (and this is purely speculation) is that Nintendo were reluctant to let slip away one of their most popular titles, but they hadn't released a new game since 1994 and they didn't know themselves how to up the ante with a new game.  Their solution?  Hand the series off to another developer.  The result, oddly enough, was a resounding success.  Retro did with the Metroid Prime games what Nintendo could never have done.  In approaching the 20-year old series with a fresh set of eyes, they refused to be bound by the convention of Nintendo's "house style".  Their's is the approach of those who had instead grown up playing the games, and then gone into the development process with ideas that they as players would want to see. The end result was, of course, one of the greatest Game Cube titles ever in Metroid Prime, (and Echoes), and an astoundingly well-made Wii title as well. Corruption doesn't play like a game that flaunts the Wii hardware around as a Gimmick (I'm looking at you, Zelda). Rather, it is a solid game in its own right that uses the unique strengths of the Wii hardware to make it even better.  My question is why doesn't Nintendo do this with more of their franchises?  Imagine what a Zelda game developed by a third party studio with a fresh set of eyes could be.  This new, invigorated game design is, in my opinion just the sort of thing Nintendo could use to keep their titles legitimately at the forefront of the gaming world.

I've thought quite a bit about this lately, and I wondered if maybe I've just outgrown games like Mario and Zelda.  Maybe the incredibly fond memories I have of Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and the others are more reflective of the nostalgia for my childhood gaming days than actually being indicative of their staying power.  However, the more I think about it, the more I think it's not quite that simple.  We're far from the end of the road for any of these games.  The difference is that maybe Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were more significant because they allowed us to get to the point in gaming where we are now, similar to how we wouldn't have hybrid cars if there never was a Model T.  Maybe instead of trying to recreate these games time after time, we should just just recognize them as the important first step into the larger world of possibilities that they were, pay them due respect, and then build from that rather trying to simply build on that.

Unfortunately, Nintendo does not seem to want (or need) to change anything.  In spite of everything I've been complaining about, the Wii still sells like hotcakes, and I have no doubt that we will continue to see Mario and Zelda rehashes, with the occasional Mario Party of Link's Crossbow Training thrown in, for years to come.