Video games are getting too big. It’s a familiar refrain I keep hearing from friends of mine, regardless of what else they’ve got going on in their lives. Some of those who say this are people like myself – parents who might play a game for 30-60 minutes at the end of a long day. Others are simply people who have more than one hobby, and have found that keeping up with the year’s slate of major video game releases leaves time for little else. And then there are people who have gaming as exclusive hobby, and still, even they don’t even have time to play all of the things they’d like to.
I love adventure games and RPGs, but looking over the year’s calendar of releases, it’s easy to see the problem. It would just be impossible to play everything that I’d want to, despite how poorly-regulated as my gaming habit tends to be. After all, almost every game has 100 hours of content, and next year there will be even more games out competing for my attention.
It’s hard to believe that, once upon a time, games weren’t so focused on being so addictive. Take Link’s Awakening, which I just finished on my Analogue Pocket: 8 main Dungeons, which probably take an experienced player 30-40 minutes to complete, and a few side quests. Overall, I finished the game in less than 14 hours, and mostly played it in 20-30 minute bursts that easily fit into my schedule.
That’s one of the things I miss the most about retro games, and why I still like playing them so much. Games like Link’s Awakening and Final Fantasy Adventure, which I played earlier in the year, feel more like creative projects – endeavors to craft a memorable but finite experience for players who craved innovation and novelty. Far from being like today’s massive life-replacement experiences, I found something touching and true in Link’s Awakening allegory-like narrative.
“This is all a dream,” Link’s Awakening tells the player. “We’ve poured our best ideas into it, and hope you love it.
“But really, player, it’s a dream. And out there is your life. And you should want to wake up”.
Although Kiwami presumably comes with a slathering of new features and story content not present in the original Playstation 2 game, it still feels like a more focused effort than its predecessor, Yakuza 0, which, in retrospect, it starting to look like the triple-disc “Greatest Hits” entry of the series. Initially, I felt somewhat let down by what seemed like a parsed-back Y0 “DLC”, but by the end, I found that I actually preferred Kiwami for its narrower scope and more limited range of features. Still, nothing less than a full game, with RPG-style cinematic storytelling quasi-RPG systems worth investing in.
Bright and cheerful Christmas decor traded for this soupy green maze of horrors.
It stressed me out. But weirdly, I found it inviting. Lots of secrets here. Don’t let the samey textures fool you – there are new surprises to haunt you at every new level of this labyrinth.
OK, maybe “dies” is a strong word. Geno, a wooden puppet who becomes animated and joins the party at an early stage, only ever gains sentience because a “higher power” sends him to aide the Mushroom Kingdom in its quest to retrieve the Seven Stars and save Star Road. When the game’s titular quest is fulfilled by the heroes, Geno’s soul simply rises up from his body and returns to the cosmos, reverting “Geno” back to his original form of a puppet.
There’s not a ton of dialogue in Super Mario RPG fleshing out Geno’s self-sacrifice. We are never treated to much melodrama exploring how anyone else from party feels about it. We can assume Mario and the crew liked having Geno around, just as we can assume that Geno enjoyed the time he spent in his corpeal form. When, in the game’s final moments, Geno’s “soul” is seen rising from his body and ascending up over the top border of the frame, we haven’t been told how we’re supposed to feel about it. Mallow – Mario’s cloud sidekick – simply says something like “when we do this, you’ll -“, and Geno and the rest nod along in understanding.
Since the 90s, most role playing games feature what is often described as “way too much talking”. But during the SNES-era and prior, it wasn’t like this. Prior to, perhaps, Final Fantasy IV, video game narratives were not always so hand-delivered to the player, and the RPG faithful had to sometimes use their own imaginations if they wanted more detail around the characters they were controlling and the story in which they were taking part. That is one reason why fan-fiction and video game novelizations became popular online during the 90s. The games sparked the imaginations of the players, who in turn felt compelled to answer questions from their own minds to their own satisfaction.
Games today, with their full voice acting and 100s of hours of content, rarely are willing to leave so much to the player’s imagination. Take Octopath Traveller II, which came out this year, as an example. While I loved the game and the absorbent amount of time I spent with it, I was taken aback by the sheer volume of writing contained in a game that was stylized as a retro JRPG. At no point in Octopath Traveller II is the player spared any detail about what a main protagonist could be thinking or feeling, and I’ll fully admit that, somewhere around 30-40s hours in, I was sick enough of reading what some characters had to say that I’d simply starting skipping a lot of it.
Or take another game I loved, Horizon Forbidden West, as an example: that game features both fantastic writing and world building, to be sure. But the amount of talking that Aloy does is often cited as a criticism, and for good reason. When I am made subject to Aloy’s every passing thought, how I am then expected to ever feel like Aloy’s thoughts are really my own thoughts, or that her struggle is my struggle?
One might say that we’ve got it too good these days, and as a result, the relationship between player and game has changed to something that is undeniably more passive, even as game developers strive to make gaming more immersive.
I probably won’t remember what Super Mario RPG was about, but I’ll always remember how it made me feel.
Specifically, I’ll remember how it made me feel because of stuff near the end involving Geno. Sitting from the sofa, I can’t really say I know how Geno felt about leaving Mario and his friends. I don’t know what it was like for Geno to be alive, for however short of a time that it was.
As the credits rolled, we’re shown an image of Geno reverted back to his puppet form, once again being played with by a child in their room. Over the collage of bright graphics and catchy music, I catch my thoughts drifting to the meaning of life itself: in particular, what it means to be alive, and to have relationships, no matter how transient both may ultimately be. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a modern production with a large budget giving me so much space to grapple with my own thoughts and feelings. I imagine that giving a player space to sort out their own thoughts carries a certain risk.
What I do know is that I was grateful to get to know Geno just as I was delighted to spend a dozen or so hours with the Mario gang. The credits are rolling now, and the Yoko Shimomura soundtrack is starting to hit. I feel like I’m back on the school bus, looking out the window at my imaginary friend, Mario. And dang it – I’m welling up.
The Tingle Review 