That’s what I feel about this Nintendo direct, Why? Why even hold these if your not going to deliver the goods and do it like a poorly directed youtube video? Build some excitement outside the internet!
(skip to 14:00 seconds, everyone loves mario!)
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Half a decade ago, I was publicly wondering why something like Mario remains fun and cool. One of my answers was that Mushroom Land was like Alice in Wonderland. Alice is timeless so Mario is timeless. Bizarrely, Miyamoto then publicly started to say that Alice had no way, shape or sound, influence over Mario. Some sites (like GoNintendo) quoted Miyamoto as if he was the Oracle of Truth itself. But Miyamoto, himself, only a year or few years prior cited Alice on multiple occasions. I wasn’t just coming up with this stuff out of thin air. I read what they said in the past. you can also look at Mario and see the influences. My favorite is the checkered tiled floors of the SMB 3 castles. I always assumed the reaction to when someone says something influenced it was due to the Japanese desire to always be ‘creative’.
My gut instinct is telling me that Nintendo is more interested in Japanese expressions or oriental expressions or culture exchange than in creating engineering masterpieces that their earlier games represent. I recall Iwata years ago saying that they wanted to spread Japanese ‘culture’ like how it was done in the 80s or with anime.
There’s problems with Iwata saying that. The first is that anime has never been mainstream outside Japan. Sure, there might have been a few socially marginalized people who got into anime in the West, but hipsters also exist in the West. No one would dare say hipster is the mainstream.
The second is that Japanese video games that expressed Japanese culture stayed in Japan. Every gamer paying attention in the 80s and early 90s is cognizant of just how many Japanese games stayed in Japan. What was Japanese about Donkey Kong? Nothing really. What about Mario Brothers or Super Mario Brothers? What about Metroid? Or Zelda? And with some like Kid Icarus, that is an angel which only exist in Western literature.
People who are saying, “Japan should stay Japan and only make games that express Japanese culture,” have no idea about the history of Japanese games that sold internationally. Many games had to be completely redone in order to sell internationally. One of them was Double Dragon. So where is this evidence that Japanese styled games ever sold worldwide? I don’t see it.
In the Classic Nintendo days, the game developers were engineers who obtained content from pop culture or mythological references. With Modern Nintendo, the game developers remind me of hipsters who aren’t that interested in the engineering side of gaming but only about ‘creating culture’… whatever the hell that means. Apparently, it means Yoshi has to have clothed texture even though Yoshi doesn’t wear clothes.
One thing I can say for sure is that creating a blog telling Nintendo not to do these things doesn’t help. I’ve tried it for many years. I believe I would have been more successful by demanding Nintendo make 3d Marios, yarn drawn Kirbies, and more Donkey Kong bongos because then Nintendo’s arrogance would be turned inside out. “What!? He wants us to make more 3d Marios and bongos? SCREW HIM! We’ll only make 2d Marios and no more idiotic bongos!”
It’s all very simple for us to see what must be done. The question is why is Nintendo so obstinate? I’m at the point where I don’t care anymore.
In the past, I remember buying a Nintendo console and being excited because it gave me access to kickass games. Today, buying a Nintendo console makes me feel like I am subscribing to an ideology. For example, buying a N64 or Gamecube was buying into Nintendo’s philosophy of “the future of gaming is 3d”. Since I did not believe in that future, I did not buy the console. 3DS has the same ideology. The 3DS isn’t just a machine, it is saying, “gaming should be in stereoscopic 3d.” The Wii U has an ideology that games should be separate from the TV on a home console (which I very much disagree with as done everyone else if Wii U sales numbers remain low).
I want an ideology free console from Nintendo. Aside from the early systems, the only Nintendo consoles I’ve seen that with is the Wii. With the Wii, you could play it like a Gamecube if you wished. You could even just play SNES games on your Wii. You didn’t have to play a certain way. But with the Wii U, you have to play the Gamecube way.
Culture is an element people say they have when they know they lack value. It is why hipsters believe they are the greatest cultured beings on the planet. I think Nintendo knows their products lack so much value these days which is why you see so much ‘culture’ push lately.