The Nintendo "Off My Chest" thread (BE CIVIL)

[Jotari]

The simple reason we get less of those IPs is that Nintendo **** down their own development wing in the mid 2,000s and merged them. Most Nintendo first party games released now a days are made by some other company with only some noticable big releases being developed in house (and usually even then in conjunction with another studio). A lot of the titles people are listing were also just never developed first party and are projects the subsidiary companies have always handled.

Another Code, Advance Wars, Big Brain Academy and Famicom Detective Club be like "What are we, chopped liver?"

Another Code is a really weird one to include here. Because Nintendo did give it a remake recently. Which is extremely surprising and kind to the IP. The reason we see nothing from that series can be pretty directly linked to the fact that Cing, the company that made it, went bankrupt in 2010. They made some alright games but none of them were money makers in the half dozen years that the company was making games.

 

[fogbadge]

Another Code is a really weird one to include here. Because Nintendo did give it a remake recently. Which is extremely surprising and kind to the IP. The reason we see nothing from that series can be pretty directly linked to the fact that Cing, the company that made it, went bankrupt in 2010. They made some alright games but none of them were money makers in the half dozen years that the company was making games.

i'm well aware of that. but a revival is a revival

 

[Jotari]

i'm well aware of that. but a revival is a revival

Well sure, but it's entirely rationale for a series that failed so hard the company went bankrupt to be quietly ignored. That they've given it another opportunity to succeed via a remake is incredible generous of Nintendo to its lesser IPs in this case.

 

[fogbadge]

Well sure, but it's entirely rationale for a series that failed so hard the company went bankrupt to be quietly ignored. That they've given it another opportunity to succeed via a remake is incredible generous of Nintendo to its lesser IPs in this case.

ok that is not true. the games limited success did not cause the company to go bankrupt there were multiple problems and there were games released after it

 

[Jotari]

ok that is not true. the games limited success did not cause the company to go bankrupt there were multiple problems and there were games released after it

I know, I was being a tad factious to demonstrate my point. Which is that, much like many of the lesser IPs, it wasn't a money maker. The word you used, limited, is pretty apt.

 

[fogbadge]

I know, I was being a tad factious to demonstrate my point. Which is that, much like many of the lesser IPs, it wasn't a money maker. The word you used, limited, is pretty apt.

yes but you needn’t word it so harshly

 

[Jotari]

yes but you needn’t word it so harshly

I thought it best to demonstrate my point. I hope you didn't take it like a personal attack or something.

 

[RealLuigisWearPink]

Me when one of my favorite games of all time has less than zero chance of getting a remake or sequel

“yep, poor Star Fox!”

 

[Quillion]

Me when one of my favorite games of all time has less than zero chance of getting a remake or sequel

“yep, poor Star Fox!”

At least in its most well-known "flight shooter" state, Star Fox just isn't cut out for being a big release these days by its very nature. As much as there is a place for linear games, actual devs have admitted that they aren't very economical if you're just zooming by scenery that takes thousands of $$$ to build.

On that note, that's why I think the Assault model is worth revisiting, since you're making just a few very explorable maps. Just do a better job of integrating the other vehicles and incorporate the polished motion+stick controls that the Splatoon team has mastered, and it's golden.

 

[Quillion]

On that note, that's why I think the Assault model is worth revisiting, since you're making just a few very explorable maps. Just do a better job of integrating the other vehicles and incorporate the polished motion+stick controls that the Splatoon team has mastered, and it's golden.

On THIS note, I think the Splatoon team is actually best-equipped to make a Star Fox game better than anyone else, at least within Nintendo and their usual partners.

 

[SpecterFlower]

Star fox simply doesn’t work in modern tiems, even if they made the best 3 hour rail shooter with branching paths with a total of 5 hours of unqiue rail shooting no one will care, unless that’s a 20 dollar game which I doubt Nintendo would do.

it needs more on the ground sections and free flight with rail shooting segments

 

[Jotari]

Star fox simply doesn’t work in modern tiems, even if they made the best 3 hour rail shooter with branching paths with a total of 5 hours of unqiue rail shooting no one will care, unless that’s a 20 dollar game which I doubt Nintendo would do.

it needs more on the ground sections and free flight with rail shooting segments

I do wish bigger developers with long-standing ips were more willing to make lower cost, lower price games with quicker turnover that can still be of high quality. I would buy another game using the GBA Zelda or Fire Emblem game in a heartbeat, and I think many would too if it were a genuinely great game that cost 20 bucks. That might sound like a lot to ask with how many adjectives I used, but the truth is that indie creators can make great games with shoestring budgets, it shouldn't really be difficult for a big company to do the same by having small dedicated teams work on projects that don't require cutting edge hardware and can reuse the mountain of assets they've built up already over the years.

 

[fogbadge]

I think bowser looks better in Wreck It Ralph than in the Super Mario Bros movie

 

[StrangeKitten]

Time to be a Pokemon fan dramatic thunder

Kanto games are good, actually. I know there's been a huge backlash against the infamous Genwunner crowd, but it feels like somewhere along the way people decided it's a bad region when it isn't. Is it outdated and basic? Yes, but not any more than any of the other franchise-starting games in Nintendo's catalog. Besides, Fire Red and Leaf Green fix all the problems and are easy A+ tier Pokemon games.

On the flipside, Unova went from being the most overhated region to being overrated, but that's just the cycle of Pokemon games lol. Good games, but I still think Hoenn and Sinnoh were the peak of the franchise.

Late replying to this, but I wholeheartedly agree. Kanto has all these little things that I just love, that add up to make it feel very unique as a region. It feels much more mysterious and intense, which the OST helps with. I love how there's a lot of openness to it, and how you have a lot of options for strong Pokemon kinda constantly coming your way. Raticate is immediately fast and powerful, unlike most of the early-game Normals of later regions. Nidoking, Gyarados, the trade evolutions if you're able to get them, Dugtrio, Snorlax, the Eeveelutions, Lapras, it just feels like Kanto hits a high-octane pace pretty consistently throughout. I also really like that you have the ability to go obtain Articuno and Zapdos at a reasonably early point for them to feel like proper members of your team once you know where to go find them, compared to most other legendaries not being available until after badge 7 or later. Definitely a replay thing, since you likely won't know where they are on a first playthrough, but any version of Kanto lends itself well to repeat playthroughs thanks to the diversity of Pokemon you're able to use. There's something that also just feels a lot more thought-out and deliberate about the original 151 to me compared to all the generations that would follow, probably because GameFreak spent such a long time developing the region. All the stone evolutions and having the stones available at Celadon, too. Later regions cut down on the amount of stone evolutions and you'll often find the stones much later than you'd like, but Kanto gives you 2 or 3 Moon Stones well before Celadon, and the rest you can buy. It really feels like Kanto strikes a good balance of giving you a ton of immediately-powerful Pokemon to use, without them feeling overpowered (with the exception of Articuno and Zapdos and perhaps Alakazam). Every team I've used has felt strong, but also like the mid- and late-game caught up just the right amount with it. That's not something I can say of every region.

I wouldn't call Kanto the best region. I absolutely agree it's a bit too plain, and I definitely have issues with the original 151 too. Namely, how there's only one line of Ghost-types, only one line of Dragon-types and level 55 is too late for an evolution imo, how some types sorely lack in strong STAB options especially in gen 1 but the problem still persists to an extent in gen 3. And that wouldn't be as big of an issue if Game Freak would make a Kanto game with an expanded dex, but I'm sure we all know how they've been too stingy in that regard. But I'd say the highs far outweigh the lows and Kanto remains a standout region.

 

[Quillion]

I do wish bigger developers with long-standing ips were more willing to make lower cost, lower price games with quicker turnover that can still be of high quality. I would buy another game using the GBA Zelda or Fire Emblem game in a heartbeat, and I think many would too if it were a genuinely great game that cost 20 bucks. That might sound like a lot to ask with how many adjectives I used, but the truth is that indie creators can make great games with shoestring budgets, it shouldn't really be difficult for a big company to do the same by having small dedicated teams work on projects that don't require cutting edge hardware and can reuse the mountain of assets they've built up already over the years.

They already have a team that works on small, experimental ideas tbf.

Also, Nintendo's been floundering with the Mario spin-offs lately, and those are lower-cost, lower-price games with quick turnover, but at the cost of being anemic with content. That said, hopefully Peach Showtime can turn things around.

 

[Wario Wario Wario]

I guess this dormant-IP talk kinda fits in to a recent hyperfixation I've had lately, but the problem isn't "Nintendo owns these IPs but does nothing with them", the problem is "Nintendo does nothing with these IPs but owns them". Copyright has been ****ed since the 70s, there is absolutely nothing in place to prevent companies from hoarding characters they do nothing with and content they don't want to - or can't - distribute, even though such a thing DID exist in the past through manual renewals, and such a thing DOES still exist for trademarks. I'm not sure if this applies to Star Fox, that had a new instalment relatively recently and has never gone a decade without 2 (counting Star Fox 2 as a 2017 release), but it absolutely applies to something like say, Eternal Darkness or Kuru Kuru Kururin.

If the US were still running off of the pre-80s system, where works had to be manually renewed after 28 years (1996 currently), we probably would've seen a good few lesser-known Nintendo games from the 70s, 80s, and 90s enter PD by now in the states, and that would probably include a small sampling of Mario spin-offs and any characters introduced in them, and wouldn't be too far off from the meaty, highly protected stuff like Donkey Kong, Zelda 1, Duck Hunt, e.t.c. given that we'd currently be on '68 expirations for extended works, less than 2 decades before the 80s. Unrenewed extensions absolutely wouldn't give us F-Zero or Punch-Out, buuuut Stunt Race FX and Teleroboxer is something, right?

 

[LiveStudioAudience]

I've been thinking back to the 2005-2016 period of Nintendo and when reflecting on it and my own sense of small disconnect from the company, I think I finally realized that the source of that wasn't the emphasis on stuff like the touch screen or motion controls, per say. I think that sort of control experimentation was novel and critical to the company's overall creativity, but it was paired with Nintendo's stubbornness towards player choice that ended up rendering many gameplay experiences more frustrating than they should have been.

There were just so many DS/Wii/Wii U/3DS (much less with the latter in some ways) titles that had real value in how they used their unique controls... that also tended to make such aspects mandatory with no option to change them. The DS Zelda duology, Skyward Sword, Star Fox Command, DKC Returns, and so many various others that were genuinely solid titles at their worst that nonetheless were personally defined by a disappointment that they had to be played in a certain way. While stylus or motion controls (and the streamlined modern use of the latter in gyro aiming) could be incredibly effective, constantly having alternatives be taken away due to a Nintendo insistence on their preferred method became more and more alienating over time. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks specifically feel like such wasted opportunities to give fans the ideal way of play that I can't realistically see myself playing them again without either QoL features or an emulation with a patch that allows d-pad controls.

This growing frustration I think explains that while I was disappointed by the Wii U's market failure and a lament that its quality games weren't being appreciated, there was some small satisfaction to be had in seeing the general public finally indirectly reject Nintendo's obstinance in experiencing their titles based on their preferences and not the players'. Among other qualities, one of the reasons I've enjoyed the Switch is that it feels like an embrace of options again, with the method (portable or home) being entirely up to you, gyro aiming being offered but not required in many cases, and even seeing older games like Skyward Sword get re-released with the ability to fit it to your own preferred style. Its Nintendo creativity married to an acknowledgement of player choice which makes for much stronger output as a result.

 

[Quillion]

I've been thinking back to the 2005-2016 period of Nintendo and when reflecting on it and my own sense of small disconnect from the company, I think I finally realized that the source of that wasn't the emphasis on stuff like the touch screen or motion controls, per say. I think that sort of control experimentation was novel and critical to the company's overall creativity, but it was paired with Nintendo's stubbornness towards player choice that ended up rendering many gameplay experiences more frustrating than they should have been.

There were just so many DS/Wii/Wii U/3DS (much less with the latter in some ways) titles that had real value in how they used their unique controls... that also tended to make such aspects mandatory with no option to change them. The DS Zelda duology, Skyward Sword, Star Fox Command, DKC Returns, and so many various others that were genuinely solid titles at their worst that nonetheless were personally defined by a disappointment that they had to be played in a certain way. While stylus or motion controls (and the streamlined modern use of the latter in gyro aiming) could be incredibly effective, constantly having alternatives be taken away due to a Nintendo insistence on their preferred method became more and more alienating over time. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks specifically feel like such wasted opportunities to give fans the ideal way of play that I can't realistically see myself playing them again without either QoL features or an emulation with a patch that allows d-pad controls.

This growing frustration I think explains that while I was disappointed by the Wii U's market failure and a lament that its quality games weren't being appreciated, there was some small satisfaction to be had in seeing the general public finally indirectly reject Nintendo's obstinance in experiencing their titles based on their preferences and not players. Among other reasons, one of the reasons I've enjoyed the Switch is that it feels like an embrace of options again, with the method (portable or home) being entirely up to you, gyro aiming being offered but not required in many cases, and even seeing older games like Skyward Sword get re-released with the ability to fit it to your own preferred style. Its Nintendo creativity married to an acknowledgement of player choice which makes for much stronger output as a result.

TBF, player choice as a whole wasn't a really big focus in the industry as a whole in about the period between 2005-2011. You need to remember that the Seventh Generation for most of its run was filled with linear games partly due to HD budgets and partly due to design attitudes from devs and players alike shifting to that focus.

And sure, it was the Wii U's severe underperformance that signaled Nintendo had to acknowledge player choice, but what the Switch needed more than anything was developer friendliness rather than the bespoke, proprietary architectures that the company had relied on to that point.

Really, I'm sure the Wii U would've stood a better chance if Nintendo emphasized dev friendliness when making it. The success of the PlayStation Portal controller for the PS5 seems to say so.