Nintendo must be stunned at their gigantic decline. I’m still watching to see how they interpret it. After the stunning decline of the N64 and Gamecube, the adults in Nintendo realized they needed to do things differently than before.
Everything successful about the DS and Wii had two things in common.
The first was that the successful games were devoid entirely of “Nintendo Culture”. Brain Age, Tough Generation Games, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, all of these were scrubbed clean of everything Nintendo including the iconic Nintendo logo. There was no Mario in these games or any of the usual Nintendo ‘culture’ stuff.
The second was that the other successful games were spiritual successors to Classic Nintendo games of the 8-bit or 16-bit era. New Super Mario Brothers and New Super Mario Brothers Wii was the market saying, “Yes, return to the direction you did of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.”Donkey Kong Country Returns was another successful example. The most successful examples were Mario Kart DS (intentionally designed to ‘beat’ Super Mario Kart) and Mario Kart Wii to an extent. Both of those Mario Karts focused more on online and the Internet than “Nintendo Culture”.
I think the success of Smash Brothers has totally distorted Nintendo. People buy and play Smash Brothers because it is a fun game. From Nintendo’s perspective, people buy and play Smash Brothers because of Nintendo Culture. From that moment on, Iwata and others believed they could just experiment with new gameplay and combine it with infinite forms of the established Nintendo characters.
The Iwata Asks series of interviews is nothing more than vanity on parade while Iwata marvels over ‘Nintendo Culture’ and how amazing it is. It is so amazing that no one wants to buy their products.
With the Wii U, Nintendo is going full ‘Nintendo Culture’ mode. Nintendo Land is a celebration of “Nintendo Culture”. NSMB U is a celebration of “Mario Culture”. The chosen VC games they have on sale is more ‘celebration of Nintendo culture’.
You can’t move forward by constantly staring at prior works. Yet, that is what “Nintendo Culture” is.
Take something like the Zelda series. Zelda is now just a new gameplay ‘thing’ wrapped in “Nintendo Culture” (or rather ‘Zelda culture’).
If I was in charge of Nintendo, I would forbid the word ‘culture’ to be used again in the company. All this ‘culture’ crap isn’t helping, and no one at Nintendo is ‘generating culture’ (not even Miyamoto as the content of his games are derision of other people’s work). Instead, Nintendo should just focus on making games.
What Pikmin 3 is about is some new gameplay ‘things’ wrapped in “Pikmin Culture” (whatever the hell that is, I’m sure both Pikmin fans know what it is).
What Nintendo values the highest internally is the rot that is destroying their company.
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