I noticed in your last post you said “Imagine Zelda Galaxy”.
Imagine you are watching M*A*S*H and when the doctors are performing surgery, all of a sudden Batman bursts into the room. The cohesion is broken.
However, if you observe people’s faces when they see the above, they will still smile and be surprised. They will think, “That was crazy!” But when it is over, what they saw won’t resonate because it doesn’t make any sense. And would they wish to watch Batman burst onto the doctors again? No. Its an example of a bad form of entertainment surprise that isn’t detected if you just look at people’s immediate reactions.
Now I will probably piss off many people by saying the following, but a good example of a show doing the ‘no cohesion’ and ‘surprises’ that ended up into nothing was the recent Battlestar Galactica. The ratings for the show were horrible especially after the first season. It got so bad that new episodes were being beaten by reruns of Enterprise. But the cylons had no ‘plan’ as the teaser teased, Ron Moore was just making it up all along. Strange things would happen like all of a sudden a character would end up being a cylon. Or a character would come back from the dead. Or there would be plot twists for no apparent reason. The further the show went on, the less and less it made sense. The finale was the strangest ending I had ever seen in a sci-fi show. I was laughing at how ridiculous the show had become. “Daniel!”
In fiction writing, especially fantasy and sci-fi writing, much, much, much is done about building a world and having the characters and plot follow the set of rules the world set up. Tolkien doesn’t change Frodo into a strong warrior in the middle of the story, even though it would be convenient and would make some more action packed scenes, but he would be breaking the rules he established for the hobbits (hobbits aren’t warriors of strength).
Breaking the rules of your fictional universe is cheating the reader/viewer. They will get frustrated and conclude you do not know how to tell a story.
Of course, games are not stories. At least, not in the traditional sense. In a fictional game (Mario, Zelda) as opposed to a non-fictional game (Wii Fit, Wii Sports), the gamer expects things to operate according to the game’s universe. If Link pulled out a laser gun, this would not make sense. If Samus used a bow and arrow to kill a Metroid, this also would not make sense.
Better entertainment comes when the rules of the universe are very strong. This is one reason why entertainment is very fun when it is about the real world and resonates so well. Entertainment about modern war will not have a space ship come from no where and fire laser beams. World War 2 games all followed the rules of the universe that was World War 2.
If 3d Mario followed the rules of the universe that is the Mushroom Kingdom and was a further exploration of that universe, I might be interested in checking out 3d Mario. But it is clear, especially with the Galaxy games, there is no universe at all. It is as if the game universe went through a blender.
Zelda is a good example of this as you said with the trains. In Twilight Princess, there was a scene where you were like in a western. Why is a Western in Hyrule? It is like in the middle of the Lord of the Rings, Frodo begins going at the orcs like a cowboy. I felt that the worst parts of Twilight Princess were those ‘odd’ moments but also moments we had all seen such as the early dungeons. Why is the first Zelda dungeon always the Forest Temple? Oh, and look. There is a lava dungeon. And a water dungeon. And a ‘maze’ to get the Master Sword. Yawn. I felt like the best moments of Twilight Princess was when the game explored its own universe in a surprising way such as the City of the Sky or the Temple of Time (a temple stuck inside time itself).
When a game universe loses cohesion, it loses much of the fun. The immersion is broken. The game is nothing more than a series of mechanics. And that is what Galaxy feels like to me.
I don’t think accessibility is a problem with 3d Mario, at least it is not the biggest problem. It is a completely different game than Super Mario Brothers. But the breakdown in cohesion of the game universe, something we are seeing in all Nintendo franchises (Mario, Metroid, Zelda) and game mechanics trumping content is a rot that makes those old oak trees look increasingly hollow.
When you buy a sequel to a game, you are eager to see how they have carved out the game universe some more and how the game world has changed. For example, with Starcraft 2 people will be eagerly seeing how that universe is carved out more and what is now going on with the races.
Many people confuse this with “story”. This is not “story”. Think from the perspective of a writer. A “story” is Frodo having to take the ring to the fire and dealing with the pain and chaos the ring attracts. But that is not the universe. The universe was established well before the “story” was written. It only takes a writer a few months to actually write a story. But the universe for that story can take years if not decades to slowly assemble.
Let’s use Star Trek for an example. A big attraction to people watching Star Trek was to see how the new episodes would carve out the fun universe some more. This is a big reason why Enterprise was so disappointing because as it was set in the past, there wasn’t much to look forward to. And Voyager might as well be set in the void as there were no repercussions from any of its episodes. It is not like when Picard first encountered the Borg (which shocked people). Or when the Dominion blew up a Galaxy Class starship in its first appearance. The universe was expanding and new things were entering.
The Star Trek universe, not its narratives or ‘stories’, was what was so incredibly valuable. In the Star Trek universe, of course you had the movies and TV shows, but you could have novels, you could have video games, you could have incredibly tons of things set in that universe. When the universe began to lose cohesion, when things began to not make sense, that really avalanched with Voyager and especially Enterprise, the massive franchise was finished. When the universe lost cohesion, everything lost cohesion.
The universe is the platform in which a movie or a story or a novel or a TV show or a video game sits on. If the universe loses cohesion, it unravels everything. This is why there is a growing anger toward the Warcraft universe because World of Warcraft is ruining the cohesion of that universe. It doesn’t make sense anymore.
Mario and Zelda were far more fun when the universes were intact. The constant timeline theories going about Zelda depends entirely on the customers’ faith of cohesion. Galaxy wasn’t the first time Mario lost cohesion. It was back during Yoshi’s Island that Mario plummeted in popularity and became ‘lame’. Mario was retconned to being a ‘citizen’ of Mushroom World instead of a plumber from Earth who was a stranger in a strange land.
With Super Mario Brothers 2 aside as a ‘dream sequence’, there used to be a cohesion in the Mushroom Kingdom. Super Mario Brothers is the first encounter with Mushroom Land. Super Mario Brothers 3 is a further exploration of it with Bowser having Koopa Kids and doomships. Super Mario World got a little off track being in Dinosaur Land but the doomship was the ghost ship and the Koopa Kids were all there. It is as if they retreated to Dinosaur Land after their defeat in Super Mario Brothers 3. Super Mario 64 fully explored Peach’s Castle and added that to the growing Mushroom Land universe. All of this was part of the fun. People wanted to see what new things were added to Mushroom Land.
Decades later, that same exact game universe is used for countless sports games, racing games, and RPG games. The Mario universe is very valuable. Galaxy isn’t adding to the Mario universe in any meaningful way. While Mario 5 is awesome, it relied on the older universe and added very little if nothing.
Playing Nintendo games used to be going through the Looking Glass. I do not get that feeling anymore. And it is not because of age, I assure you. I still get that sense from some other games such as Blizzard’s games. but remember the first time you played Link to the Past? Or the first time you played Ocarina of Time? The game felt as if everything belonged. You didn’t have the immersion broken when you thought, “OK, they are doing game mechanic X here.”
While it is important for game developers to think mechanics, the consumers never should. Instead of thinking, “If I raise shield at five seconds in and run in a circle to confuse its AI…” the consumer should think, “I cannot wait to try again to slay the dragon!” They don’t want to see mechanics. They just want to see the dragon.
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