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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."
You can easily say that Disney have consistantly put out high quality movies - Lion King, Aladdin, Toy Story, etc.
However, they have also put out some rubbish films.
Nintendo have certainly dissapointed me in the last few years. Mario Kart 64 had a shockingly cheap single player mode, Yoshis Story was a let down, and I found Mario Sunshine and Zelda WW to be quite mundane.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Toy Story is Pixar, IMO, not Disney. Lion King and Aladdin are overrated. (But still good, just not great).
Mario Sunshine was great, just never really found its audience. (I think the game may have been too tricky compared to 64). Zelda WW is much better than the N64 games. Better camera and controls.
Yoshis Story was weird. It was an artistic gamble, which they mostly lost with IMO. Very similar to Wario Ware Inc, They tried to change/create a genre. What was there was good, but not up to standards of Yoshi's Island (which is freekin amazing)
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
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.
FF8 is the best in the series. The only reason people don't like it is because it is so different from the other FF games, and it wasn't what they were expecting. FF8 has the best gameplay (no leveling up required), and the best characters (which I define as most realistic, but some players just want "heroic" characters so they may think FF8 has the worst characters).
FFVII had a better story, and FFX has better graphics, but overall FFVIII is best.
Even the 3DO article was pretty harsh, even for it. I admit I hate the Army Men series as much as the next guy, but HOMM (up until they went astray with IV) was a good series. Sure it wasn't the be-all-end-all turn-based fantasy wargame franchise, but it was still fun. Might and Magic (with the notable exception of IX) was not THAT terrible either, and it had its moments as a series.
...but then again, I'm just an old fart who would rather play River Raid than Halo. :)
Square is for the most part like all all the companies on this list. Get a good idea and beat it into the ground until the planet would rather jettison their brains into space than play ANOTHER of the SAME garbage. Capcom has "SNK syndrome" in which it has, consciously or unconsciously, the innate deep-seated desire to put out fighting games until their colon comes out their nose.
I do agree that Nintendo's critical flogging was a bit over-zealous, because Nintendo is the only company thus far that hasn't jumped on the "entertainment hub" bandwagon. I want my console to play games. Period. Sony and Microsoft don't get that. Why? Because they figure if they yell it loud enough and long enough, people will just buy the stuff to shut them up.
I bet we're going to have a meltdown in the future, not as bad as '83, but one in which the "all-in-one" wonderboxes come crashing down under the weight of their mediocrity. They'll fall into the "jack of all trades, master of none" category and fall by the wayside. Sony and MS are big enough to revamp and correct the mistake, but they'll leave a trail of bloody small-development houses in their wakes.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I think the problem with FF8, is that most people got tired of it early on. It was pretty bad early on. You did not have enough powers or item manipulation. Even the story was a bit vapid.
*SPOILER WARNING*
About mid-way during the second disk, you start to get Item manipulation abilities for your GFs, and you start hunting for items to make other items to get magic and make weapons, it gets addictive.
Add on to that what is a great story. (In a nutshell, it's the most coherent FF story IMO, with the exception of IV. The revalation about Edea makes the story. The ending is the best I've seen *EVER* wrapping everything up wonderfully.)
FFVIII is better than the negative hype
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
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.