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Nintendo, Square - Embarrassing?
Thanks to EvilAvatar for pointing to a recent update at the sadly semi-retired ToastyFrog site, in which Nintendo and Square are added to the list of The 20 Most Embarrassing Game Companies. A gentle roasting is applied to Nintendo for being "..called the gaming equivalent of Walt Disney. Partly because their work is innovative, polished and marketable, but also because a pervasive stench of evil hovers over the company", and a similar treatment is applied to Square, of which ToastyFrog posits: "Which is worse, the company, its fanboys or its ex-fanboys? The world may never know." However, this tongue-in-cheek cynicism produces plenty of good points, most notably Square's Tom Sawyer RPG as a "terrible cultural hiccup."
Nintendo=Walt Disney?
I don't think so.
Nintendo has constant high quality for all of their games. Not only that, there is little that comes across as rushed.
The Walt Disney of game companies? Edios. Enough said.
So, tell us something you like, and we will proceed to rip on you in exactly the same way.
Why are people so..harsh on hard sci-fi? Especially in non-book mediums?
Personally, I like it. Sure the charactures kinds suck. But what do you expect? The characters in hard sci-fi books suck.
-psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
The article referred to Kingdom Hearts as "flawed at best" and implied that it was due to the FF characters that just show up and 'act pretty". It's true, in KH the FF characters don't do *much* but they do point you in the right direction and provide some good opposition in the arena. However, I haven't played any FF games in any depth at all, so I'm not attached to (or familiar with) the characters. I recognized some of the names, but didn't have any emotional connection or sense of how the should be used in the story.
However I do take exception to characterizing Kingdom Hearts as "flawed at best" on every other point. The game looks good, controls well, provides a lot of challenges and side missions. The real star is how well they tie in the Disney properties. The worlds and characters all *work*. I didn't expect that adventuring with Donald and, of all people, Goofy would be cool. But they are. In marvelous level design they squeezed Wonderland into four levels, and kept rotating one room to create different situations and open up different paths. Visiting familiar places and meeting characters was also cool. It all helped drive the urgency of the plotline, since you're charged with protecting all of this familiar territory.
Even without the licensed properties the game would still be worth playing for its enormous bosses and flagrantly beutiful scenery. The Tarzan world has several stunning vistas - go up to the very top of Tarzan's house and you can see for miles, and the fight up the waterfall is just gorgeous. All of the art direction and level design is stellar.
The real-time combat system does an excellent job of combining 3d fighting action (some basic combos to chain up) with platforming intensity and RPG decision making. The sidekicks (Donald, Goofy and/or Tarzan, the Beast, Jack Skellington, Ariel etc) actually help in combat. The game alternates between swarms of small fry, mixed up with smaller numbers of big monsters. Sometimes you have to just button mash and pound your way clear before you're overrun with bad guys, other times you have the opportunity to set up combos and plan your attacks. It keeps the intensity up. And the aerial battle against Captain Hook rocks.
Bosses are big. Sometimes really big. Uggy Wuggy or whatever is name is from Halloweentown turns into a veritable mountain of a monster. You have to climb and jump over him to attack weak points. And he's at least 100 yeards high. Fighting Cerberus in the arena requires jumping on his back to escape the jaws, and fireballs and dark magic and... The human-scaled bosses are still dangerous for all the fact that you can cross blades with them.
KH is also a 3d platformer. Jumping puzzles abound, some of them intricate and requiring precision to pull off. And sometimes you're faced with a jump you just can't make yet and will have to come back to. But they're rarely game killers. I did have to take breaks and come back to execute some sequences, but I felt *good* after the accomplishment. Even the tricky ones rarely felt 'cheap'. At least you never take falling damage, so you usually just have to retrace your steps if you miss a jump (there are a couple of bottomless pits to get lost in though). And you have some chocie in which world to tackle next.
The story is good, deliberately cheesy in places but not overly so. It has lighthearted moments and some very dark ones. The inevitable setup for a sequel is tastefully done. The wholly original world design (the final levels) was very well executed. As a real bonus there iare remarkably few graphical glitches. I found a rendering error under Tarzan's house, and you get slowdowns during big fights in the hold of the pirate ship because there's an environmental fog effect that competes with spell efefcts for rendering time. Other than that, and one or two jumps that we're trickier than they had to be, the game was just about pefect.
"Flawed at beast" my hat. This would have been great without a single licensed property. And they used at least t
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Hardly a niche Player when the GameCube is #2 worldwide, and of top 100 games in Japan, Nintendo published more than anyone else.
... since there are only about 20 major game publishers left. AFA "embarrassing" my top 3 would be:
1. Lucas Arts - No explanation needed
2. EA - Most guilty of trying to take advantage of their customers by rehashing games, selling bogus expansion packs and of course charging on-line fees.
3. Capcom - A tragedy more than embarrassing, they were once one of the greatest, most innovative game companies in the world, but are now reduced to making fanboy wet-dreams. (Viewtiful Joe being the exception)
3DO and Acclaim are guilty of just making lousy games
Those games rock (FF3 and Chronotrigger). I still play them today on my SNES emulator, and loved them when I was a kid. The story lines are well thought out, and the multiple endings for Chronotrigger was a great idea to get people to keep playing. In fact, I think it's about time I fired SNES9x up again :)
Square may have made alot of mistakes, but what company doesn't? Overall, I think they've done a pretty good job over the years.
"1995 The Super NES, revitalized in sales by Donkey Kong Country, realizes its swan song year, offering a huge variety of top-tier games like Chrono Trigger, Earthbound and Yoshi's Island. No one cares, as Sony launches the PlayStation and new mascot Polygon Man wins the hearts of millions."
Talk about biased writing. I wish there was a better mechanism to control the quality of article submissions- unless... the intention was to create controversy.
Actually, I'm playing through Chrono Cross (yes, for the first time), and I'm finding it a much better story line than Chrono Trigger had. Doesn't have all the time hopping, but the alternate worlds is a difference.
Chrono Trigger was good, in its respect. FF6 still rocks, though.
The articles for Ninetendo and Sqare-Enix may be toungue and cheek, but I think its more important to look at the entire section as a whole. Too put Capcom, Nintendo and Square-Enix in the same context as 3DO and Acclaim...now that's just wrong. I find 3DO and Acclaim seriously embarassing as a gameplayer. They put out some real steaming piles, and lets not talk about tombstones. I just think its bad journalism in a way, to put those companies in the same context.
He deffinately has a pair for critcizing Capcom, Nintendo and Spuare-Enix in this way, though. I just think he might have had a blood flow problem at the time.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I am truly amazed at the journalistic integrity in this article :
1943.
An ancient, slumbering Lovecraftian deity is resurrected in a pagan rite by Nazi scientists. He slaughters them and escapes to Japan, where he assumes the name Hiroshi Yamauchi and violently takes over Nintendo. Soon afterward, "Yamauchi" forges a pact with the American Walt Disney Corporation [4] allowing Nintendo to borrow Disney's characters for cards.
Having owned a myriad of consoles from sega,atari,nintendo,microsoft,sony,amstrad etc I can honestly say that Nintendo have always had cornered a very clear niche part of the market.
They have always had the consoles that have many original, approachable, FUN games, by fun I mean that the games aren't complex, they aren't necessarily easy and they generally have bright, fun graphics and are simple to play - especially for novices (there is almost always a novice in a group of 4 players playing at the same time).
Yet another artifact of (perhaps sony's) marketing department, since there seems to be a lot of anti-xbox and gamecube propoganda (particularly sales based propoganda). Doesn't seem like the war with consoles is based now on game quality, machine performance and the likes, all I ever see are sales figures justifying which console one should by.
Mmm, Chrono Cross starts out really well, but I'm not so sure you will feel the same after playing everything through. It's seriously twisted in the end, and it seems like they feel like they had to make some connections to Chrono Trigger, even if the game *really* would be best as a stand-alone.
i haven't seen something that racist in a long time... thanks Square
Actually, I'm playing through Chrono Cross (yes, for the first time), and I'm finding it a much better story line than Chrono Trigger had.
It gets very, very complex. There's quite a bit too much plot, in my opinion. I had to hit GameFAQs for an explanation just to make sense of it all.
Once I'd read the GameFAQs story guide two or three times and got my head round it, it made sense, and actually tied up in quite an elegant way. But it didn't seem that way while I was actually playing the game. For that reason, I found Chrono Trigger more satisfying in terms of storytelling.
Chrono Cross's battle system rules all, though.
FF6 still rocks, though.
Too right. Best characterization of any of the FFs (Celes Chere is my favourite FF character ever), and an elegant story that, while relatively simple compared with the PSX-generation FFs, held the player's attention (pacing issues in the second half notwithstanding), and never completely lost the plot like FFVIII and FFIX did towards the end.
-Stephen
Is great. That's why I bought my PS2.
Actually, I'm not aware of much Sony propaganda towards Nintendo. I'll admit I'm not exactly an industry insider, but I keep my eyes open, and I've not seem them say much about it. The propaganda, I would say, comes from the fanboys themselves, most of whom are teenage boys desperately trying to not seem like babies in front of their friends. It's peer pressure working on a massive scale, and it's also one of the big reasons we have such a sad motion picture industry in the States. That, and many developers (many of whom are only barely out of the teenage-fanboy classification themselves) are antagonistic towards the appearance of Nintendo's products. There was a story in Wired not long ago that presented the viewed of a few notable developers, many of whom basically said, why can't their wonderful games look like they're made for adults?
I have two answers to that. One, the industry's view of "adult" gaming runs towards a shallow, MPAA rating board measure of maturity. If it has gore and naked women and a kick-ass attitude it must by for adults. Maturity misnamed, basically. This approach has given us countless travesties of design, and I would say that it'll all come to an end once the public gets wise to it, except that the motion picture industry has made it abundantly clear that many people are perfectly happy being stupid.
The second answer is that Nintendo's happy, carefree attitude towards gaming is an encouragement for creativity. All games are, at their hearts, abstract exercises that attempt to relate in some way to the player's experience. This communication is absolutely essential. If a game doesn't relate at all it's incomprehensible. However, most games these days go too far in this direction. Most "mature" games attack the same old themes over and over again: the military, alien invasion, vampires, superheroes, that kind of thing. Most developers these days start with the concept and try to build a game around it. It may sound like there's a lot of variety there but there's really not, and anyway they've all been visited so many times that without genius game design, you just aren't going to come up with something new.
Nintendo, on the other hand, always seems to start with the design first, and then tries to build a concept around it. Mario Sunshine is obviously a collection of tasks built around a water gun. Wind Waker is build around the idea of Zelda-style exploration on an ocean instead of a typical overworld. Nintendo's developers (and let's be fair here - Miyamoto may be a genius, but he does very little actual design work these days, he's mostly a supervisor and mentor now, it's time for Nintendo's other directors to take a bow), they're much closer to the abstract soul of gaming. That's why just about everything they produce is incredibly enjoyable for anyone with an open mind. Even their missteps (like the way-too-short Wario World), are about ten times more fun than almost anything for the X-Box. (Well, except for ToeJam & Earl III.)
About Nintendo from this article...
Partly because their work is innovative, polished and marketable, but also because a pervasive stench of evil hovers over the company
Pervasive stench of evil? If anyone has a pervasive stench of evil in the games and software industry, that would be Microsoft.
However, admittedly, releasing a GBA without a light is vicious, just not full-blown evil.
Given their flaws, both Nintendo and Square have both given great contributions to video games. I mean, one could go on forever about the number of games Nintendo has developed (originally) that have gone on to become some of the most memorable games of our time. Just a couple months ago, IGN ranked Super Mario Brothers at the top of the 100 greatest games of all time. I won't even go into how many other Nintendo and *gasp* Square games are on that list. Even though there have been indications of the Gamecube performing poorly on a financial level, that certainly shouldn't be considered an embarassment. Nintendo continues to develop some of the best, most original games to date. One needs look no further than games like Metroid Prime, and Zelda: The Wind Waker. Not everyone likes these games but that doesn't mean that they aren't good, high-quality games.
Using the word "embarassing" to describe Nintendo or Square seems quite out of place, imho. One of the things that has kept me playing video games is the Final Fantasy series. The title, as the article's author points out, is interestingly confusing but, really, is that a valid complaint anymore? I mean does it really, really matter? I certainly didn't play Final Fantasy VII, and X all the way through thinking to myself "gee, these games would be great if they'd just fix the title." Also saying that Square focuses on video and presentation over gameplay should be proved wrong by what I consider to be a great battle engine in Final Fantasy X. They showed a great effort to make the menus easier to navigate, and the players easier to swap out during each battle.
I can't agree with the author's take on Kingdom Hearts either. I actually thought that game to be very original in its approach and was amazed at just the thought of mixing Disney characters with Final Fantasy characters. Not to mention the chance to see Sephiroth and Cloud in action again. And let's not forget about Parasite Eve, which is another Square game I highly enjoyed. I did have a problem with the Bouncer series and there are certainly games that both Nintendo and Square have released that could be considered embarassing. However, I don't think that makes the companies themselves an embarassment. This is true especially in comparison to everything else they have accomplished. Square released a full-fledged, widely circulated movie for crying out loud. Not saying it was great, or that it wasn't great, but that certainly is an accomplishment to take note of. And (based on my experience only) I think Square's FMVs are second only to Blizzard's in the Warcraft series.
The author also mentions that they have a problem with religious conotations in some of the Square video games. That, I think, is something that the video game creator has complete freedom to do. If I were to form a complaint about a game, simply because there were undertones in the plot that I didn't like, I would be branded an enemy of free speech and unconstitutional by some. I'm not going to cast the author of this article in either of those lights. I just do not see the religious conotations of a developer's game to be a valid point of argument.
I understand how the author obviously feels about both companies and do not wish to force him to see any particular point of view. I just felt I would indicate my feelings on the subject.
Someone with mod points mod this article down, -1 troll.