Nintendo Land has several problems with it. The first is the lack of any online multiplayer with the game. This means gamers who are independent adults and don’t live at home will rarely be able to play Nintendo Land in multiplayer. The second is that some of the games are incredibly boring. The way how I know this is because I’ve already played these games. Is anyone excited about Balloon Trip with a stylus to direct the way the wind hits? When the copy of Balloon Trip from 1986, over twenty six years ago, presents a more enjoyable and wholesome experience, you know there is something wrong with the game.
One of the cancers that has been eating Nintendo alive has been their obsession with 3d (Virtual Boy, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, 3DS). It was with the 3DS that the company began to operate at a loss because Nintendo was struggling to sell the 3DS even at a loss. The sick, sick, 3d obsession is not the only cancer ripping its core market to shreds (Nintendo’s Core Market is not the kids who grew up with the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube, it is the people who made the NES and arcade Donkey Kong a success).
This Second Cancer is Nintendo is refusing to adopt an international art style and stubbornly clinging to a Japanese aesthetic. The reason why the NES looks so different from the Famicom is because native Japanese products cannot sell internationally unless intentionally designed that way. In the 80s, Japanese game makers were asked by publishers to give their games international appeal. International appeal meant minimizing the anime flavors while retaining the cartoony look. The great classics from Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man, Double Dragon, Contra, and all were designed to be appealing outside Japan.
For whatever reason, Japanese Game Companies have decided they do not like this. Perhaps they think it conflicts with their blessed creativity. One of the major contributions to the collapse of the worldwide appeal of the JRPG is that JRPG’s art, character design, and story are no longer interested to be appealing to people outside Japan. And since Japan is an aging and shrinking population, this approach is Kamikaze Game Design.
Nintendo has illustrated behavior that shows they are not unlike their sibling companies. When a massive backlash occurred against the appalling art design of Zelda Wind Waker, Nintendo put it back in for the handheld games and pushed as much as it could in Skyward Sword. If anyone thinks the Wii U Zelda will look anything like the Zelda Wii U trailer (which was also made by Nintendo), I have a bridge I would like to sell to you.
Nintendo Land is fatally flawed with a graphical style that makes Western markets hostile to it. While there will be much ‘anger’ about Nintendo Land from the usual suspect gamers with many correct complaints such as ‘no online multiplayer’ or ‘bad mini-game’, would this tempest of complaints exist if the game had art that appealed to the Western Market?
I still cannot believe this is the actual logo for Nintendo Land. Imagine the year is not 2012 but 1985 or 1995. Would a game with that type of logo fly in the West? No way.
Nintendo somehow managed to create an art style worse than Wind Waker.
Takamaru’s Castle also looks atrocious.
This Animal Crossing art looks like it is from a game that stayed in Japan. It does not look like an international game.
The Donkey Kong mini-game looks more appealing and neutral because Donkey Kong already proved itself as an international game.
While F-Zero looks neutral, it looks like F-Zero X from the N64 upscaled. Isn’t the Wii U a HD console? Shouldn’t F-Zero look better than what we saw on F-Zero GX?
This is Metroid? It looks like a laser tag game in a kiddie theme park.
The reason why everyone was repulsed by the E3 trailer of Nintendo Land was because… it was repulsive.
Nintendo is aware of their art style problem. Why wasn’t this a problem then but a problem today? One of my hypothesis was that art demands for 8-bit and 16-bit games were much lower than today. An artist’s eccentricity or geographical influence becomes more pronounced as art demands increase. But I do not think this is accurate because there are Japanese game companies selling games in the West with no problem.
Let’s look at these early Nintendo games. Donkey Kong was influenced by King Kong… a Western movie. Many Western movies had an influence on the aesthetics of video games. Contra had the box cover be Schwarzenegger and Stallone clones. Metroid was influenced from the movie Alien. Super Mario Brothers had an influence from Alice in Wonderland which is a classic in the West. Legend of Zelda was the combination of arcade gameplay and the western role playing game (what Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter said). Kid Icarus is about an angel which doesn’t appear at all in Asian culture.
I do recall Iwata once saying that Nintendo wanted to reinvigorate “Japanese Culture” because Japan used to export anime and video games so much in the mid to late 1980s and 1990s. But not only did these ‘Japanese video games’ centralize on Western themes (Donkey Kong, Mario, Dragon Quest, Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, etc.), so did the anime. Anime was introduced in the United States with Robotech which was a complete Western re-writing and splitting and splicing three Japanese shows because, as Carl Macek said, “the Japanese weren’t that great of story tellers.” And from Robotech’s popularity that other anime came in but it always remained a niche and heavily stigmatized. People who watched anime in the West were mocked and made fun of. Anime was seen as something to ‘grow out of’.
If Iwata wishes to revive Japanese cultured video games and anime exports, he should consider how he can revive something that never existed in the first place. No one (aside from a crazed niche) consumed Japanese cultured video games and anime. To the contrary, it was the consumption of Western cultured video games and anime done through Japanese craftsmanship. Space Invaders wasn’t popular because it was Japanese. It was popular because it reminded people of a Western movie called Star Wars.
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