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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.