Miyamoto Scrutinizes Mario, Zelda, Hails Portal

eldavojohn writes "Nintendo icon Shigeru Miyamoto stated in an interview that 'What I've been saying to our development teams recently is that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was not a bad game, by any means. But, still, it felt like there was something missing. And while, personally, I feel like Super Mario Galaxy was able to do some things that were very unique, at the same time, from another perspective, certain elements of it do feel somewhat conservative. This is something I've been talking to both of those teams about ... hopefully [the next Mario and Zelda] will feel newer and fresher than their most recent versions.' MTV Multiplayer also commented on Portal's mechanics and gameplay, to which Miyamoto responded, 'I think Portal was an amazing game, too.' GameSetWatch has a related article criticizing Nintendo for relying on the Wii's input devices to develop game franchises rather than improving actual gameplay."

Comments

Un peu de poids.

[Sulix]

Miyamoto is someone who has a lot of weight behind what he says. You can bet that Valve are grinning like idiots and that the teams working on the next Zelda and Mario are breaking a sweat.

Re:Un peu de poids.

[binarylarry]

This guy practically invented video games as we know them.

I'm sure the people at Valve jumped in the air, simultaneously high five-ing each other after they read that.

Re:Un peu de poids.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Eh. I don't know. I'm sure Valve appreciates the compliment, but I doubt they'll be gushing over it.

Oh please. There probably wasn't a dry pair of underwear in the whole building.

Re:Un peu de poids.

[Translation Error]

And then fell to the ground and started cursing up a storm after smashing their heads into invisible blocks.

Re:Un peu de poids.

[xenocide2]

Amusingly, the actual team behind Portal were at DigiPen, a training institute that Nintendo of America is deeply intertwined with. I dare say part of the reason that Portal is that Nintendo is very Japan centric, and unable to fully embrace American innovators, even ones they grew. Valve happily snatched the group up and paired them with talent from everywhere. If you look at their one endeavor to actually capitalize on the eager people ready to work for Nintendo, NST, they're a damn near failure. Every game they make is a derivative or sequel, it's like a list of "all the games you fuckers should have played, damnit!" It's clearly not a matter of talent, so I'm willing to blame management.

Clearly many people involved with Portal are enamored with Miyamato's games. Seanbaby brings a culture of gaming steeped in the history of gaming, all the way back to the NES. And yet it seems like NoA would have made sure nobody with his edgy cult celebrity status would participate.

Re:Un peu de poids.

[Drinking Bleach]

I've seen so many people actually believe Miyamoto is in control of the franchises he created, I really believe your post to be sincere.

In reality, Nintendo executives are after profit no matter the cost -- well, actually, not that drastic, it seems that the Nintendo 64 blunder and the lack-luster GameCube popularity changed their minds, somewhat. The Wii was a gimmick with little benefit than a then-unique input method (well, actually, the whole motion sensing thing is nothing new, but it rarely appeared on consoles except for one or two Dreamcast games). They make games based around the input, and out comes Zelda Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy. Not bad games by any standard, but they aren't exceptional. Miyamoto has every right to complain about lack of originality at Nintendo.

Re:Un peu de poids.

[Spacelem]

The N64 wasn't really a blunder. It had Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which were both considered masters of the genre, and OoT is still considered one of the best games in the world. This was before people started commenting that the series were getting a little stale. Oh, and GoldenEye, and a whole pile of games done by Rare who were so good that Microsoft bought them after Nintendo were found guilty of price fixing and had to sell them off.

In fact I'd say that there were a lot of really awesome games on the N64, just none of them were Final Fantasy. Meanwhile, the N64 had a control stick, and managed to pack an awful lot into those cartridges. It was done to prevent long load times, which it managed. I still love my N64. The worst thing I can say about it is that my control stick got a bit crusty after all these years, and some of games had too low framerates, and it didn't help being in the UK with PAL's higher resolution (although that became less of an issue towards the end of the N64's lifecycle).

The GameCube had the world's most comfortable controller, and I still prefer it to the Wii Remote. It had graphics which were perfectly functional, maybe not as flashy as the other consoles, but I hold that graphics are only a very small part of what makes a game good (proof: if graphics were important, then all older games would suck, and they don't). Nintendo experimented with gameplay, and they came up with some fantastic ideas. They used a very easy SDK, so it was much easier to produce games for the NGC than the PS2, and the X-Box made it too easy to just port PC games.

The N64 and NGC were successful and good consoles, and Nintendo is still in the videogame business despite the heavy competition they faced, and growing stronger than ever. They'd have never made the Wii otherwise.

Fair comments

[sleeponthemic]

He's right on both counts and it doesn't take anything away from either game to point out they could have been better/more adventurous. I doubt that guy got to where he is "settling" for the level of his games. There is always a new level to reach. I own both and from an end user point of view, they were awesome. No complaints.

I hope this means there will be another Mario game for Wii. It has been a disappointing feature of the latest Nintendo consoles, that only one Mario is released per generation. With the absolute crap that is mostly coming out for the Wii, they really need to step up and rely on the strong franchises to maintain interest.

Re:Fair comments

[enderjsv]

"I hope this means there will be another Mario game for Wii. It has been a disappointing feature of the latest Nintendo consoles, that only one Mario is released per generation."

You know what, I actually kind of have to disagree with that sentiment. I mean, I guess I really wouldn't have anything against a new Mario, but in truth, I really just want to see something new from Nintendo. Looking at the games they've released for the Wii, you have a lot of sequels: Metroid, Smash Bros., Mario Kart, Zelda. I don't have anything against sequels, as long as they're good (and they are), but also I'd really like to see them expand into new IPs.

I'm aware that they have some new IPs, like Wii Fit, Wii Music and Wii Sports, but these are really just novelty IPs, not quite the kind of games I'm into.

I love Mario. Always will. But sometimes, Mario should sit it out.

Re:Fair comments

[sleeponthemic]

That is the problem though - Desires aside, there are not enough actual, proven decent titles coming from the wii catalogue. In a previous post I'd mentioned the realisation that there are very few Wii games reviewed with 85% or higher (compared to other consoles). Something that became increasingly obvious as I checked in bi-monthly to see if there is anything worth playing.

Someone (some awesome individual) then did a bit of stats and posted a very good summation of the situation (deserved to be modded up but too late, I guess). Read these stats and think about how many of the actually good games are franchises.. I will repost it here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1009873& cid=25545311

Ok, let's use Metacritic...

Wii First available: November 19, 2006
Scores 80 and above: 36 games
Scores 85 and above: 13 games
Source: http://www.metacritic.com/games/wii/scores/

Xbox 360 First available: November 22, 2005
Scores 80 and above: 122 games
Scores 85 and above: 47 games
Source: http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbox360/scores/

PS3 First available: November 11, 2006
Scores 80 and above: 79 games
Scores 85 and above: 34 games
Source: http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps3/scores/

PS2 First available: October-November, 2000
Scores 80 and above: 319 games
Scores 85 and above: 149 games
Source: http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps2/scores/

Nintendo DS First available: November, 2004
Scores 80 and above: 64 games
Scores 85 and above: 25 games
Source: http://www.metacritic.com/games/ds/scores/

"Good" Game per Month (GGPM) Ratio Since most consoles were released in November, lets round up their ages by year. And assuming the score of 80 qualifies as a "good" game: - Wii: 36/24 = 1.5 GGPM
- 360: 122/36 = 3.39 GGPM
- PS3: 79/24 = 3.29 GGPM
- PS2: 319/96 = 3.32 GGPM (*)
- NDS: 64/48 = 1.33 GGPM

*) The PS2 probably doesn't have many new games anymore in the past few years.

It seems the NDS and Wii are filled with a lot more family and kids-friendly games, and these games tend to not favor the critics, and possibly most hardcore gamers.

I think, given the quality and innovation of SMG, there is enough room for further elaboration on the Wii.

And if you truly actually want decent titles on the Wii rather than noveltyware, right now, you're worried about the future of this console. Very little quality stuff is coming out. It's a complete contradiction to the perpetually sold out status of the console. I'm surprised more people are not complaining about how poor the catalogue is. As it stands, more often than not if I go browse the Wii shelves, I'm standing next to a family who are buying a game on cover alone (and promised novelty mechanics that rarely work). If that is the majority market, I can see why publishers don't give a shit, just turn out turds and watch the dollars roll in :-)

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a "gamer". I just make informed decisions on whether to buy something. Strangely, whenever I check whether I should, I'm confronted with a fairly resounding "nothing to see here" regarding new stuff coming for the Wii.

Re:Fair comments

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

It's striking that DS has a similar GGPM rate to Wii, and that both are lower than the other consoles. I think the explanation for the discrepancy is Nintendo's target audience. First, a lot of people who buy Nintendo consoles buy them specifically for Nintendo games: Mario, Zelda, etc. Compare the top selling games for the different consoles: almost all of Wii's are first-party, whereas Xbox 360 and PS3 have more variety in their publishers. So the target market for Nintendo is mostly interested in first party titles.

The other thing is that Nintendo's target market probably buys fewer games per console. How many games does the average Nintendo customer buy a month? I'm not talking about "hardcore" gamers, I'm talking about the average person with a Nintendo console. I would be hard-pressed to say its more than 1 a month.

For the other consoles, you've got more "hardcore" gamers that buy games more frequently, but that can't be expected to buy the same games as each other. As a rough example, 9.53 million Mario Kart Wii sales per 30.55 million Wiis, vs. 3 million MGS4 sales per 16.84 million PS3 sales. Put another way, about 1 in 3 Wii owners bought Mario Kart, but less than 1 in 5 PS3 owners bought MGS4. (I realize there are some important differences, but this is just to give a rough idea.)

This would explain why Nintendo puts out fewer quality games. Their target audience only wants so many games per month, and they can be expected to buy the same quality games as each other. By comparison, the other consoles have to put out more diverse quality games because of the more diverse and frenzied appetites of their target market.

Re:I love Miyamoto's insight

[FornaxChemica]

At least he's no Nintendo fanboy, he still has some critical sense left. And it's indeed interesting he's criticizing a little Twilight Princess and Mario Galaxy, both of which have been hugely successful in the press, especially Mario (highest-scored Wii game in most websites).

I just hope I'm understanding his remark correctly... that he's not actually thinking those two games should have been more similar in spirit to Wii Sports/Fit/Music. Because when you come to think of it, he's quite enthusiastic about those shallow titles.

Re:I love Miyamoto's insight

[Toonol]

Shallow isn't bad. I spent countless hours of my childhood tossing and catching a rubber ball with my friends; I did it for five minutes with my son yesterday. Simple, shallow, but perpetually awesome.

Or, to illustrate it with videogames; Asteroids is shallow as hell, but playing it is a much purer state of videogame zen than gears of war will ever be.

Re:Question-

[Chris Burke]

Meh. As long as they keep making games in the same genre, I see no reason not to keep making games for that genre be part of the same franchise. I still love the Action/Adventure genre as much now as I did in the 80s when The Legend of Zelda basically invented it, so what purpose does it serve for Nintendo to make a new action-adventure game that doesn't use the Zelda brand?

Beyond Good and Evil is an action/adventure that I recommend to friends by calling it "a better Zelda that Zelda", but that wasn't because it didn't feature Zelda characters. It was because it had excellent gameplay in exploration, combat, and sneaking sequences, tightly integrated dungeons, and a lack of time-killing hunt-and-find quests. Okay, the story was also significantly better than your average action-adventure too, but there's nothing that says a Zelda can't have a good story either (and some do).

If StarFox Adventures had been whatever it was before being getting slapped with the license, would it still have been a piece of crap? Most likely, though getting to play as the female character for more than an intro sequence as originally planned might have taken the edge off the suck.

Mario Kart would be an ever better example for a genre where having it be the same franchise makes little to no difference to me.

So, I guess my point is... As long as I like the genre, I don't mind a franchise in that genre. Of course it's very nice when they inject originality into the franchise... But honestly, did Twilight Princess disappoint Miyamoto because the Zelda franchise locks the developers into certain cliches of gameplay (which are equally well cliches in nearly all other games in the genre), or because coming up with completely original gameplay is hard regardless of whether or not you call your game "Zelda", and the dev team just failed to be creative enough?

Re:Question-

[Tjebbe]

While I do agree with you, I must say I think that the Zelda and Mario franchises are bad examples, at least in the earlier iterations. Mario 1, 2, 3, and 64 were completely different games, as were the Zelda's up to and including Ocarina of Time.

IMHO staying within the setting but building a completely new game around it is no problem at all.

Repeating the same game but with fancier graphics or two added gimmicks is a whole different thing. And that is where the newer versions probably went wrong. Although I still liked them :p

Re:Question-

[enderjsv]

The gameplay is radically different? Which game are you referring to?

Mario Galaxy radically different than Super Mario Sunshine?
Mario Kart Wii radically different than Mario Kart DS?
Metroid?
Zelda?
Smash Bros?

I guess it's a matter of opinion, but to me, the radical changes to Nintendo IPs mostly happened during the N64 era, and to a lesser extent, the Gamecube era, when games were making the switch from 2d to 3d. All of the games I've mentioned above share quite a bit in common with their N64 and Gamecube counterparts.

Finally, I ask, what's so wrong with wanting original IP's? Why do some people get so defensive when this is asked for?

Weird, I disagree with him (sort of)

[7Prime]

While I applaud his candid response, I wouldn't have had anything against him saying, "well folks, we've put out the two best games in their respective series"... because I feel both were. Twilight Princess combind the timeless epic quality of Ocarina of Time, but gave it the drama and heart that I feel that the series has lacked. Mario Galaxy may not quite beat out Mario 3 in my book, but both felt eerily similar in their inspired quality, and I think that Mario Galaxy is the best game since Mario 3. Now, all I feel they need to do with Zelda is do to TP, what Majora's Mask did to OoT, ie: fuck with it, do something out of left field that's not "normal" for Zelda. MM was my favorite game in the series until TP came along. TP is now probably my favorite game... period.

Portal was wonderful, don't get me wrong. However, it didn't present me with a full emotional and gameplay spectrum the way that Zelda or Mario do... it was a short vignette of a game, a very perfect one, for that matter. Don't know why I can put ICO at the top of my list but not Portal (similarly short), but something keeps Portal from reaching that high eschellon for me.

Re:Weird, I disagree with him (sort of)

[Cocoa Radix]

You forget that Miyamoto is VERY into innovation. Pikmin, Nintendogs, Wii Fit (among others): those are all his, and all are/were pretty innovative ideas. Portal was innovative, too, and it's obvious why he really likes it.

I thought that Twilight Princess was an excellent game, as well, but while I played Mario Galaxy from start to finish -- and enjoyed it thoroughly -- its linearity kept it from being either challenging or exciting.

Remember Mario 64? How you pretty much had free reign over fifteen large worlds? In Mario Galaxy, there are some large worlds, sure, but depending on which objective you're on, you're really only allowed to visit certain parts of each world, and to progress from celestial body to celestial body, you just walk from point A to an obvious point B -- there's never any guesswork or exploration involved. For me, that's what made Mario Galaxy way too easy and predictable.

Re:Question-

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Mario Galaxy radically different than Super Mario Sunshine?

Yes, absolutely. Although I see your point with the others. (I say this despite personally having a lot of affection for Twilight Princess.)

Finally, I ask, what's so wrong with wanting original IP's? Why do some people get so defensive when this is asked for?

It was this line: "Why do gaming companies have to make 100 versions of the same franchise?"

Nintendo in particular is pretty darned good at making a compelling sequel. In a world where the vast majority of sequels are, at best, expansion packs of the original game, Nintendo still finds ways to keep them compelling. I never would have thought I'd prefer a Tetris game over the original Game Boy version. But Tetris DS came along and blew me away. Multiplayer Tetris, over the internet, on a portable system. Suh-weeet. Mario Kart DS? Same deal. Zelda? Do a search for GameTrailers Zelda Retrospective. The epic scale of that franchise is mind-boggling. Compare all that to say Grand Theft Auto. Now, I love Grand Theft Auto. I've played the heck out of all the non-portable versions, even before it went 3D. But when I look back, yeah the sequels were fun, but honestly I don't see that big of difference between them. The stories are different, that's what keeps me coming back, but fundamentally we were given a few trivial upgrades to the original premise. I won't be waiting in line for the next GTA game anymore. Even Bully could be considered an unofficial GTA sequel. It's just so... tried and true. It's hard to look at a series like that then criticize Nintendo for their sequels.

Even then, I really don't have a problem with criticism of Nintendo's games. Not every game works with everybody. But you wouldn't seriously say that Nintendo doesn't try new things, would you? Wii Fit? Wii Sports? (The best selling game of 2007 and it's.. bowling?!) Brain Age? Strikers? Seriously man, when you say things like you did, it sounds like somebody who read the title and jumped to conclusions about what the game is. You're going to receive criticism for that by people who know better. It's like saying: "I don't like vegetables because I hate spinach, give me something original." I'm not sure what else you'd expect, honestly.

Re:I love Miyamoto's insight

[Anonymous Coward]

Asteroids needs achievements. And unlockables.

Re:Question-

[jonaskoelker]

but there's nothing that says a Zelda can't have a good story either (and some do).

They all do! For one,

SPOILER WARNING
In Twilight Princess, Ganondorf kidnaps princess Zelda.
SPOILER OVER

See?