Video game ramblings: prices, princesses, and the casual/hardcore divide

 No, there's no typo in the title. Today I want to discuss a sustainable video game industry, appeasing two very different subtypes of gamer, and my thoughts on Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Read on after the jump!

First off, Switch 2 console and game prices are downright appalling. I could barely afford a Switch, and that was just because I got a Switch Lite when they first came out (conveniently in time for the release of Pokémon Sword and Shield), and I've always struggled to afford the games. Even bought used, you have to wait a good few years for the used price of a first-party Nintendo title to drop enough that it won't eat into your grocery budget. And now the Switch 2 looks even more out of my reach economically.

This frustrates me, because I remember the days when N64 games cost $40. Even accounting for inflation, Switch 2 prices are just out of control. What's next, the Switch 3 for $2000 with games that cost $150? If this pricing trend continues, video games are going to enter the realm of the sorts of hobbies that only the affluent can enjoy, much like space tourism and pizza topped with caviar and gold flakes.

In my opinion, Nintendo, and game developers everywhere, need to stop and reevaluate what they're doing and why. Because the cause of these rampant price hikes is game companies' eagerness to utilize the newest and shiniest technologies--no matter the end cost for the consumer. And I'm thinking, do video games even need that?

Perhaps it's a controversial thing to say, but do video games really need to be as fancy (and expensive to produce) as they are nowadays? And do they need to keep getting fancier? 

The bottom line with video games is that they're supposed to be a fun experience. You can definitely make a video game that's thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing without photorealistic graphics, a superadvanced physics engine, or online multiplayer bells and whistles. Case in point: Pokémon Red and Blue. An RPG crammed onto a Game Boy cartridge that takes the player through a pixely monochrome world of bleeps and bloops. A game that cost all of $30 in 1998 money and is riddled with glitches and programming oddities. And yet it was unarguably one of the best games of its era, gaining a loyal worldwide fanbase and launching one of the most commercially successful franchises in human history. It didn't need top-of-the-line hardware to succeed because it just focused on being a phenomenally well-designed game.

So my question is, when are developers going to stop trying to push hardware limits and just focus on making games fun? Graphics are already really good. Physics engines are already really good. I have no idea how they managed to fit Breath of the Wild onto a tiny Switch game card. Can't this be enough, at least until cutting-edge technologies become commonplace enough that they don't drive up production costs? Because as awesome and breathtaking and mindblowing as your shiny new AAA game is... nobody can afford to play it. So you're succeeding as a game developer but failing as a business, and with no money coming in, that's probably the last game you're ever going to make.

Maybe part of the reason game developers are so obsessed with the race for technical perfection - no matter the cost - is due to some attitudes I've noticed in the gaming community. Namely, I feel like a startling number of gamers place undue emphasis on a game's technical performance and graphics, when, again, I think that isn't really part of what ultimately makes a game fun. Just take, for example, the Animal Crossing series, which is all about big-headed cartoon animals wobbling around a stylized landscape and speaking a gibberish language, and is an absolutely charming world that you've spent three hours in before you even know it.

I've seen countless game reviews that go on and on nitpicking technical details in the graphics and programming, and then devote one or two paragraphs to saying something like "oh yeah, the story was decent and the gameplay was fine, 6.5/10" as if the game wasn't much more to them than a glorified tech demo. But these are things I never notice or care about when I'm playing a video game. I'm too busy getting emotionally invested in the storyline, feeling the satisfaction of a well-executed strategy paying off, and just letting go of my cares for a while and getting lost in a compelling world, to pay attention to frills like draw distances, animation complexity, and model texturing.

When Pokémon Scarlet and Violet came out, a prominent gaming website posted an unfavorable review of the games, but the reasons the reviewer gave them a low score were a) the games' tendency to crash due to a memory leak if the player stays in the overworld for too long at a time and b) allegedly drab and boring landscapes.

I found myself disagreeing with this review--not because I thought the games deserved a better score, but because I disliked them for completely different reasons. I've ranted about this in several posts, but I'll summarize by saying that I felt the character development was weak and unsatisfying, the map was too empty for its size (especially compared with prior Pokémon games), and it just didn't work to pair vast open-world exploration with a really sparse set of main story quests (and no side quests, for shame). The memory leak and the landscape design were total non-issues for me (the memory leak thing can be easily fixed by loading a different environment such as Mesagoza, or even just turning the Switch off and on, and the game autosaves regularly anyway, so it's not like you'd lose much progress even if it did crash).

I just can't help but feel like gamers have been constantly pressuring developers to improve consoles' and games' technical performance, neglecting to account for the fact that such things inevitably cost money--and it's going to come out of the gamers' wallets. But, again, you don't need jaw-dropping graphics to make a game fun. Honestly, if all people want is jaw-dropping graphics, they should just go watch an overly CGI'd movie. That's not really what games are supposed to be about at the end of the day.

Perhaps another factor might be developers getting excited about new technology and immediately wanting to implement it into their next console/game. I totally get that. But is playing with new tech really worth the cost to the consumer? Like I mentioned before, you can make the fanciest, most expensively produced game ever, but if it's costly on the shelves, nobody can even buy it and you're not doing part of your job right.

The president of Nintendo has recently addressed rising game development costs, and he says Nintendo is considering shortening development time on its smaller titles, but I'm concerned about this because we may then end up with a glut of cheap, throwaway Switch 2 games that satisfy gamers about as much as the Taco Bell value menu. And then we'd be right back in the days of the Video Game Crash of 1983, where game developers were just out to make a quick buck with cobbled-together titles that weren't much more than a technological curiosity.

So maybe it's okay for graphics and performance to hit a plateau for a while. Because I'd rather live in a world with games I can actually afford, than a world full of games with ultrarealistic graphics, flawless performance, and unobtainable prices.

Moving on--I beat Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom the other day, and to be totally honest I have mixed feelings about it. Was it a fun game? Yes. Was it a cute game? Yes. Do I wish I had the cat suit in real life so I could just go around talking to cats all day? Absolutely yes. But was it what I want out of a Zelda game? Not... really.

First off, it was short. The world and storyline seemed as tiny as the little chibi characters waddling around it. The eight dungeons felt like they took less time and thought than an average Zelda dungeon, and some of the fifty side quests were pretty effortless, like "hey I need 3 of this thing you already have 20 of in your inventory". It's ironic that EoW is so visually similar to the Link's Awakening Switch remake, because I feel like EoW looks and plays like a remake of a Game Boy game that never actually happened.

And the plotline had some interesting bits (like some tantalizing lore about the Golden Goddesses and the creation of Hyrule), but after the incredible sophistication and character development of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, EoW's characters just felt a little unfinished. Throughout Zelda's journey, she (and I) encountered characters who felt like they had the potential to be memorable, but their conflicts just got resolved way too quickly and cleanly to be compelling. It was a far cry from the complex, multilayered personalities of characters like the Champions, the Sages, and BotW Zelda and the satisfaction of watching them triumph over their struggles and weaknesses. The plotline and character development felt more scaled to mid-90's handheld gaming, but I really expect more in 2024 from something that cost $60.

Also, this is just me, but I've always had a much harder time getting into the 2D, top-down Zelda titles than the 3D ones. The 3D games just feel so much more immersive and substantial in their worldbuilding. I remember going over to my cousin's house as a kid, watching him play A Link to the Past and not understanding why he enjoyed the game so much, since it just seemed to be about a pink-haired pixel guy running around swinging his sword at monsters for no reason. Even when I sat down and played LttP myself, I just couldn't get into it and to this day it remains not one of my favorite Zelda games (even though I'm pretty sure disliking LttP is actual blasphemy).

I also borrowed Link's Awakening for Switch from my niece a while back, but I couldn't even get to the first dungeon before I lost interest. (A big part of this, though, was because it was just too similar to the original Game Boy release, which I played through years earlier, and I could go on a whole other rant about disliking the recent trend of making "remakes" of older games which are essentially the exact same game, but with higher-res graphics and a few minor tweaks.)

But when I played Ocarina of Time back in the day, I was hooked from the word go (or the words "Hey! Listen!", I guess). I sunk so many hours into that game even after I beat it because the world was just so ridiculously fun to be in. There were days when, needing to unwind after a crazy day of junior high, I grabbed my CD player, plopped in front of the TV, and simply cruised through Hyrule Field on Epona, pretending like I could feel the wind in my hair and utterly failing to catch any Big Poes. That game left such a big impression on me, and still does to this day. That level of immersion is what I like to see in a Zelda game.

(That said, the Deku Scrubs in EoW are absolutely hilarious and I need more of them in Zelda moving forward. I really like this characterization for the Deku. Keep that.)

While playing EoW, though, I kept getting the distinct impression that it felt suspiciously like a game trying to cater to the tastes of people who aren't as interested in 3D Zelda games. I don't know if this is the case, but I feel like EoW sort of highlights how the Zelda franchise, and video games in general, are caught in the middle of a business tug-of-war between two distinct subtypes of gamer: casual and hardcore.

I know there can be some friction between the casual and hardcore gaming communities, but I think we can all agree that everybody enjoys video games differently, and just because you like a certain genre of game, doesn't meant that's the only genre that should exist. There will always be people (like me) who like video games that are an intellectually and creatively engrossing experience with rich worldbuilding and storytelling, and there will always be people who want games that don't offer much more than a fun diversion. And that's okay. Different gaming strokes for different gaming folks.

However, it distresses me to see development teams lose direction over trying to figure out which group to appeal to. After the really satisfying RPG that was Pokémon Legends: Arceus, I felt like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet did an about-face and placed more emphasis on battling and the multiplayer experience--but did so to the detriment of its story, world, and characters. This concerns me because the main series Pokémon games have always been really good at balancing the battling metagame with the joys of just exploring the world, and I don't want to see the latter sacrificed for the sake of the former.

But I also don't like when hardcore gamers complain because a game looks too casual, such as what happened with Zelda: The Wind Waker (even though the terms "casual" and "hardcore" weren't even around then). I also strongly suspect that Kingdom Hearts: Missing-Link got cancelled partly because of complaints from Western gamers, who don't like mobile games as much as Asian gamers (because most mobile games are perceived as "casual" and thus anathema to everything hardcore gaming stands for). (This isn't entirely true, in my opinion; there are some great mobile games out there that actually pay attention to things like plotline, character development, and fan investment.)

And, I think games developed with an eye for the casual demographic can still be fun for hardcore gamers. I really enjoyed Zelda: Skyward Sword, and I feel like the items that a lot of hardcore gamers complained about (like the overdesigned UI, the replacement of a main overworld with smaller - but still really substantial - sub-areas, and Fi being overly helpful) are non-issues in light of things like the beautiful aesthetic, the quirky and loveable characters (Groose had the best character arc and Impa was just plain awesome), the plentitude of things to do outside the main quest objectives, and some of the best lore in the series (origin story!!!!). 

The dungeons in that game are also among my favorites in the entire series; they had clear layouts and intuitive designs, and traversing them felt more like progressing through a well-defined narrative within a structure than wandering around half-lost, trying to find that last small key or room I hadn't been in yet, like in some Zelda games, which is not really my favorite way to experience the world. Most of them also had refreshingly bright interiors, which was a really nice change of pace from most of the dungeons in, say, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask which had pretty dingy color schemes and could just be plain difficult to see your way around sometimes. Maybe gamers just need to be a little more open-minded and understand that a game can still be fun, even if it's not what one has come to expect from a franchise.

I'm not really sure I can offer much in the way of advice to developers trying to juggle audiences, except for this: if you make games you personally like and are invested in, the kind of games you yourself would play, you likely can't go wrong. Part of why I think Pokémon Scarlet and Violet suffered was because they were trying too hard to intentionally be everything for everyone, and ended up not being much of anything for anyone. Past Pokémon games felt much less forced in their creative direction, and as a result were truly vibrant and mesmerizing. And I really think the reason Ocarina of Time was such a success had less to do with it being the kind of "mature" fantasy action RPG that Western teens wanted in the 90's, and more to do with the dedication and care put into its development that shows in every detail.

It's not really wise, creatively speaking, to find you've gained an audience and then shift your focus to producing more of what you think will appeal to that audience. Your work will stagnate, and while it may seem like a good idea at first, once people realize what you're doing and that all of what you produce is starting to look the same, they'll drift away. You're much better off investing that time and effort into something you truly loved creating. Those are the titles that will stick with people for generations to come. And you absolutely don't need fancy graphics or quantum computing to pull that off.