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Back in June, I flew to North America to see my partner (who lives on the other side of the world), and when I was there I had the opportunity to try out some Nintendo games on his Switch. My opinion was fairly lukewarm, and I came away with the impression that the high esteem in which many of their games are held seems to be driven primarily by legacy clout. Breath of the Wild was hands-down the Nintendo game that I enjoyed the most (I put a good few hours into exploring the world and experiencing the main story), and it's a game that has been hailed as a shining example of open-world done right and has been placed on many peoples' lists of best video games of all time. I thought it was good, but don't believe it's nearly good enough so as to warrant inclusion as one of my favourite video games.
The game is fun, and the fact that you can climb and scale basically everything in game and explore the world in a variety of different ways imparts a feeling of freedom that's quite addicting, an aspect in which the game excels - but in practice that all amounts to getting from A to B in a subtly different way. The game doesn't really justify its (extremely large) open world, and in order to progress the main story you're mostly going from one very clearly spelled-out quest marker to another. Now, these quest markers are necessary because of how sprawling the world is - the player would easily get lost without some form of guidance - but the game explicitly tells you where you are supposed to go, and doesn't really give you incentive to explore out of bounds. If you are making an open world game you need to capitalise on the open world part as a core aspect of the game.
Technically, you don't need to progress through the game using the path set out for you, and you can take it as fast or as slow as you want, you can even skip straight to Ganon after the tutorial. One of the most exhilarating parts in my playthrough was sneaking past a bevy of guardians on the way to Hyrule Castle, a place where I was certainly too underpowered and under-skilled to be at that point. From a game design standpoint, this was certainly meant to dissuade beginner players from trying to go straight for Hyrule Castle immediately and trying to skip past the main game's content, and it felt like I was exploring outside of the manicured, well-trodden path the game had laid for me. This felt great, and I did make it past all of the guardians, but eventually turned back since I was essentially forfeiting main game content by trying to cut straight to Hyrule Castle without much reason to try and do so.
Trying to explore for additional, optional content isn't particularly enticing either, since the world is kind of a content desert with large areas of dead air in between points of interest, and there are only so many shrines and Bokoblin outposts you can explore before the cost/benefit of exploration starts looking very unfavourable. As a result, I never really felt the urge to explore outside of the bounds of the game, and was pretty much always shoehorned into doing everything the game set out for me. It's effectively an open world game that doesn't actually really make use of its (all too large) open world.
To be fair to BoTW, this criticism can also be levelled against most open-world games - the idea of an open world is generally much more enticing than how it actually plays in practice. So far, the only game I've seen do it right is A Short Hike, which succeeds primarily because of the fact that it has a fairly small, condensed "open world" packed full of content relative to its size and an extremely simple objective which you can easily complete and that doesn't require a huge amount of trekking through empty terrain. Once you start trying to expand the game's scope, when you're trying to make a 10-15 hour game with a coherent throughline set in a large, sprawling open world, making your way through the world starts to feel very tiring, and content deserts are all but guaranteed unless you want development time to inflate hugely.
It should be noted that I am someone who does value plot fairly heavily in games, something that's generally not a focus of Nintendo's. BoTW appealed to me more than, say, any mainline Mario game because of its relatively consistent worldbuilding and the fact that it had a story that wasn't an extremely marginal part of the game. The seamless incorporation of compelling narratives into a game format is an important part of the medium for me. But even excluding the general weakness and inoffensiveness of Nintendo's stories and worlds, and just focusing on gameplay, their games have some issues that I find quite difficult to brush past, and I don't agree with how highly their games are generally ranked.
Change my mind.
Nintendo is overrated in the way Disney is overrated — brand power and nostalgia do a lot to sell and market their games. That said, look at the AAA gaming scene over the last 5 and what developers are left that haven't devolved into slop mills pushing out incomplete, buggy, soulless games? Nintendo, From Soft, maybe CD Projekt depending on how charitable you want to be towards Cyberpunk. Nintendo holding onto their reputation for this long speaks to something beyond nostalgia.
I share a lot of your criticisms of Breath of the Wild though. They spent so much time on the (admittedly amazing) world design and physics engine that dungeons, loot, enemy variety are all undercooked. Something I've noticed about it is that the non-gamers I know absolutely adore the game. They love the freedom and playing around with the cool physics system to see what you can do. More traditional gamers I know get tired of the copy-paste content after trying to play the game like a traditional Zelda and wind up much more negative on the game.
This is certainly true and it is why I unironically Only Play Indie Games. I grew up in a time where Newgrounds games were becoming increasingly popular, and as a result have always had a bent towards the more idiosyncratic styles of small teams and individual creators. And as high-quality tools to create games have slowly become more democratised and readily available over the years, there has been less and less reason for me to turn towards AAA studios for... anything, really. You can now find really well refined games coming out of independent studios now without any of the soulless, manicured, decision-by-committee feel that AAA titles tend to have. Indie games have always been able to pursue more distilled and targeted visions as they are usually geared towards smaller consumer niches, instead of aiming for wide appeal, and in addition the small size of their operations allow for less compromise.
Does Nintendo stack up favourably to many other AAA studios? Yeah, but considering the absolute disappointment that is the AAA gaming scene in general I'd argue that's not saying much.
Can you tell me some of your favorite games from the last few years?
I usually enjoy indie games I have played, but I don't go to the online places where I would hear about them. Really, I've been hosed on discovering new games since Tips and Tricks magazine went out of business.
You didn't ask me but I have some recs too.
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Yeah, sure thing. I don't know which genres you're most partial to, but here are some games I think are particularly well done, along with a short description of what they're about.
1: SOMA (2015)
SOMA is a horror game by Frictional Games, a studio best known for pioneering a game mechanic where you can essentially only run and hide from enemies. They primarily broke out with the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent which blew up on Youtube everywhere in the heyday of Let's Plays. Ever since then, they've mostly tried to recapture the pure horror vibes of Amnesia, but there was a brief moment where they decided to make a horror title with more existential sci-fi leanings.
Frictional's game designer, Thomas Grip, has stated that SOMA was hugely inspired by hard sci-fi authors such as Peter Watts and Greg Egan, and it really shows. It's by far my favourite game of theirs, and if you're playing one game on this list, make it this one. Go in completely blind. You won't find a better game narrative anywhere.
2: Baba Is You (2019)
I feel like Baba Is You is one of these indie titles I don't have to say too much about because of its ubiquity, but Baba Is You is a sokoban puzzle game where you push statements around an endlessly manipulable game world in order to satisfy a win condition. The game allows for constructing statements that allow the player to change the very characteristics of the level, to the point that you can yourself define the win condition of many levels.
It is not easy, and is one of these sadistically difficult puzzle games which you'll find yourself banging your head against for hours. According to Steam I've wasted 47.5 hours of my life on this game's puzzles alone.
3: Growing My Grandpa! (2022)
Now this is a weird one. Growing My Grandpa! is a short game by up-and-coming indie creator Yames that exhibits a strange hybrid of influences coming from Virtual Pet games, 90s adventure/edutainment games and Cronenbergian body horror alike, and the result is an extremely surreal and unique game that has absolutely no parallel elsewhere. The gameplay is fairly sparse, innocuous and repetitive, as is par for the course for a game based around a virtual pet-like mechanic - but it gets contrasted against an increasingly eerie, grotesque and uncanny plot, a dichotomy that's exploited as both a source of humour and horror in the game.
This game is very esoteric. It's not for everyone, and I can imagine people being really put off by any combination of the mechanics, the visual style, or the writing. In my case, I think his work is enticing enough to want to donate to his Patreon, which is fairly unusual for me.
4: INSIDE (2016)
INSIDE is a dark, cryptic platformer from developer Playdead. It draws many elements from their breakout hit Limbo - child protagonist, bleak atmosphere, abstract plot, many ways to die in bloody fashion - except it's executed better in virtually every way. As is usual from this developer, there's not a single line of dialogue and there isn't too much explanation provided to contextualise the events of the game, and much of the story is told through the environment.
A major draw of INSIDE is the art direction and music, which is executed beautifully throughout - it's a very atmospheric and potent game, and despite the lack of a clear through-line for the situations the game throws at you there is always a sense of intentionality behind every design decision that keeps it coherent.
5: Inscryption (2021)
This is a roguelike deck-building card game from Pony Island creator Daniel Mullins, and it's yet another title
where it's best to know as little as possible about the game gong in, because suffice to say, it does not stay in that genre for very long. Despite appearances in the beginning, it is a plot heavy game - while the story is certainly a (I'd say intentionally) campy one, it provides the framework for a lot of very interesting genre-bending that gets executed quite smoothly and cleverly.The element of surprise is crucial in this game, and the only reason I'm giving this much away about it is that I am aware of people who completely didn't anticipate the later shifts in the game, and were fairly disappointed by it since they went in expecting one thing and got another.Forget everything you just read. This is a perfectly normal game.
There are many more quality games that have been released over the past few years, but these are the ones that currently come to mind which I actually think try to do something really interesting and intriguing with their setup, even if sometimes they are a little rough around the edges. Note I have a bit of a bias towards plot-focused, generally bleak games (with the exception of Baba Is You), these are my own genre preferences showing through and they might not align with yours.
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