Post by Shrikeswind on Jul 11, 2018 3:54:55 GMT -5
Sorry I've been so ranty lately. I don't know what's going on. Perhaps I need to cut back on my coffee intake (lies, my coffee intake is perfectly healthy and I totally don't need an intervention. *hiss*)
So I recently mentioned in the "What you want to see in a future Zelda" thread that I would like to see the old characters from OoT and MM come back for another 3D Zelda title (or really any Zelda title, but the post was mostly about following up on Ocarina's success), and it got me thinking about Smash Bros. again. Smash Ultimate is doing a lot of cool things, I can't deny, but something that's kinda bugging me is how the Zelda franchise - and for that matter quite a few of Nintendo's big-name franchises, but it's especially prominent for LoZ - tends to focus on a very limited number of characters to represent it as fighters. Specifically, Zelda has 3 characters.
"Uh, Shrikes? I don't know where you learned to count, but..." No, I know, Link, Zelda, Sheik, Ganondorf, Young Link, and Toon Link makes six, but you might notice that I had to type out the word "Link" three times just there, and spoiler alert, Sheik killed Dumbledore, Snape's the name of the sled, Rosebud is Luke's father, Darth Vader is actually Zelda in disguise. "Again, Shrikes, I'm pretty sure you missed something about the timeline, but..." Again, I'm aware that these are technically separate characters according to their designs - Ultimate is using the Links from BotW, OoT, and TWW and the Zeldas from LttP and OoT, and these characters are separated by centuries. I know my Zelda lore. "...I was going to say Darth Vader was actually Zelda's grandfather, and that Zelda is Kylo Ren." Okay, shut up, hypothetical post critic.
Anyways, this isn't exclusively a problem with Legend of Zelda (Dr. Mario, Zero Suit Samus, you could make a solid case for Pichu and Dark Pit...), though like I said, Zelda gets the brunt of it, in no small part because there's only 3 characters in the Legend of Zelda who have a consistent presence throughout the series. ...Hang on, I'm getting something in my ear. What? Impa's been around since LoZ1? Alright, fine, I'll say four... I'm sorry? Sages in LttP? ...Named in AoL? ...What's this about kings of Hyrule? Hyrule Warriors? Okay, hang on. My pretend writer just informed me that I'm off by at least 8. Impa is specifically recurring, a king of Hyrule has had direct impact on the story in some capacity in several games including being the Big Good of Wind Waker and a playable appearance in Hyrule Warriors, the other 5 Sages of OoT have had lasting lore impact with Darunia and Ruto also having playable appearances in Hyrule Warriors. ...That was 7. ...What's that? Absolutely not. No, I'm not saying Tingle. No. I have a code of ethics and I must draw the line somewhere. You could also make the case for Midna ahgoddamnitfinestopyellinginmyear and I can't possibly forget about Tingle ...hear from my fake lawyer about this..., so Zelda's definitely got a pool of characters Nintendo could pull from. But instead, they seem adamant that there's only the three. What's strange about this, though, is that Legend of Zelda is one of the four franchises in Smash that's incredibly well-suited to adding unique characters (the other three being Super Mario, Pokemon, and Fire Emblem, each for their own reasons.)
This brings me to my second point. Smash has had some problems with coming up with new franchises to introduce (well, okay, new Nintendo-owned franchises, third party content is building up,) and many of these franchises - in fact, with the exceptions of Fire Emblem and Kid Icarus, all of these franchises - have very little else that could represent them. And with so few new franchises actually being produced, this problem is only going to get worse. When it comes to producing unique fighters, Nintendo is needing to rely more and more on franchises that haven't had much relevance in years, if not decades, because they don't have a lot of newer franchises that have more than one character to offer, and fewer still where they aren't really squeaking out a moveset.
Here's what I mean by that. Brawl gave us four franchises, Wario, Kid Icarus, Pikmin, and ROB, while Smash 4 gave us six, Wii Fit, Mii, Duck Hunt, Xenoblade, Punch-Out, and Animal Crossing. Of these 10 franchises, 2 to maybe 4 have enough content to produce more than one unique character (I don't know enough about Xenoblade to say and Punch-Out is lucky it's cartoony or it'd be screwed by being a boxing game.) Smash Ultimate is adding an 11th with Splatoon, which as far as I can tell has the same problem - only enough content to give us Inkling. The part that makes this so frustrating though is that Nintendo has plenty of franchises they could tap with a flood of content to play with. There's Balloon Fight, Drill Dozer, Golden Sun, Joy Mech Fight, Sin & Punishment, Stafy, Murasame Castle, Mach Rider, Famicom Folktales, Wave Race, Urban Champion...and these are just the ones that Nintendo has acknowledged in Smash Bros. already! And okay, some of these don't offer nearly as much as others - you could get more out of Golden Sun than Murasame right now - but including Fire Emblem gave the franchise enough attention to make the international market seem not only reasonable but outright unignorable. Kid Icarus and Punch-Out both got new games basically on Smash, with Little Mac getting promoted to playable on the exposure.
Now let's tie these two points together: The Smash Bros. dev team has been having obvious trouble finding contemporary franchises to make fighters for the game with due to a lack of newer franchises that they can do much with, while at the same time knowing that there are options available from older franchises but willfully ignoring those options despite acknowledging their existance. They have franchises that are long-standing in Smash Bros. which have plenty of options available that people would be incredibly excited to see, options that have been acknowledged in other ways by Nintendo at large and by the dev team specifically, but again ignored. I recognize that I'm not the guy who comes up with the ideas, but it seems like this shouldn't be a complicated issue.
Here, then, is what I propose, not just for Smash Bros., but for Nintendo at large: A concerted effort needs to be made by the fans to get Nintendo to remember both older games and to remember content from those older games. Smash Bros. is a good vehicle for it, of course, because non-fans see these things and are like "Hang on, what's that now?" (ProtoMario recently did a video talking about Joy Mech Fight, for example, entirely because of Smash Bros. including Sukapon - he's a Nintendo fan, of course, but that doesn't necessarily apply to all of his followers.) If there's enough attention given to, say, Impa or King K. Rool or Samurai Goroh or to Golden Sun or Murasame Castle or Mach Rider, Nintendo will see it. We also need to make sure to give not only Nintendo but video game companies in general reason to make more character-driven games - custom options are nice but they aren't always ideal, and the more developers fall into the custom-player trap, the fewer unique characters their franchises will have.
So I recently mentioned in the "What you want to see in a future Zelda" thread that I would like to see the old characters from OoT and MM come back for another 3D Zelda title (or really any Zelda title, but the post was mostly about following up on Ocarina's success), and it got me thinking about Smash Bros. again. Smash Ultimate is doing a lot of cool things, I can't deny, but something that's kinda bugging me is how the Zelda franchise - and for that matter quite a few of Nintendo's big-name franchises, but it's especially prominent for LoZ - tends to focus on a very limited number of characters to represent it as fighters. Specifically, Zelda has 3 characters.
"Uh, Shrikes? I don't know where you learned to count, but..." No, I know, Link, Zelda, Sheik, Ganondorf, Young Link, and Toon Link makes six, but you might notice that I had to type out the word "Link" three times just there, and spoiler alert, Sheik killed Dumbledore, Snape's the name of the sled, Rosebud is Luke's father, Darth Vader is actually Zelda in disguise. "Again, Shrikes, I'm pretty sure you missed something about the timeline, but..." Again, I'm aware that these are technically separate characters according to their designs - Ultimate is using the Links from BotW, OoT, and TWW and the Zeldas from LttP and OoT, and these characters are separated by centuries. I know my Zelda lore. "...I was going to say Darth Vader was actually Zelda's grandfather, and that Zelda is Kylo Ren." Okay, shut up, hypothetical post critic.
Anyways, this isn't exclusively a problem with Legend of Zelda (Dr. Mario, Zero Suit Samus, you could make a solid case for Pichu and Dark Pit...), though like I said, Zelda gets the brunt of it, in no small part because there's only 3 characters in the Legend of Zelda who have a consistent presence throughout the series. ...Hang on, I'm getting something in my ear. What? Impa's been around since LoZ1? Alright, fine, I'll say four... I'm sorry? Sages in LttP? ...Named in AoL? ...What's this about kings of Hyrule? Hyrule Warriors? Okay, hang on. My pretend writer just informed me that I'm off by at least 8. Impa is specifically recurring, a king of Hyrule has had direct impact on the story in some capacity in several games including being the Big Good of Wind Waker and a playable appearance in Hyrule Warriors, the other 5 Sages of OoT have had lasting lore impact with Darunia and Ruto also having playable appearances in Hyrule Warriors. ...That was 7. ...What's that? Absolutely not. No, I'm not saying Tingle. No. I have a code of ethics and I must draw the line somewhere. You could also make the case for Midna ahgoddamnitfinestopyellinginmyear and I can't possibly forget about Tingle ...hear from my fake lawyer about this..., so Zelda's definitely got a pool of characters Nintendo could pull from. But instead, they seem adamant that there's only the three. What's strange about this, though, is that Legend of Zelda is one of the four franchises in Smash that's incredibly well-suited to adding unique characters (the other three being Super Mario, Pokemon, and Fire Emblem, each for their own reasons.)
This brings me to my second point. Smash has had some problems with coming up with new franchises to introduce (well, okay, new Nintendo-owned franchises, third party content is building up,) and many of these franchises - in fact, with the exceptions of Fire Emblem and Kid Icarus, all of these franchises - have very little else that could represent them. And with so few new franchises actually being produced, this problem is only going to get worse. When it comes to producing unique fighters, Nintendo is needing to rely more and more on franchises that haven't had much relevance in years, if not decades, because they don't have a lot of newer franchises that have more than one character to offer, and fewer still where they aren't really squeaking out a moveset.
Here's what I mean by that. Brawl gave us four franchises, Wario, Kid Icarus, Pikmin, and ROB, while Smash 4 gave us six, Wii Fit, Mii, Duck Hunt, Xenoblade, Punch-Out, and Animal Crossing. Of these 10 franchises, 2 to maybe 4 have enough content to produce more than one unique character (I don't know enough about Xenoblade to say and Punch-Out is lucky it's cartoony or it'd be screwed by being a boxing game.) Smash Ultimate is adding an 11th with Splatoon, which as far as I can tell has the same problem - only enough content to give us Inkling. The part that makes this so frustrating though is that Nintendo has plenty of franchises they could tap with a flood of content to play with. There's Balloon Fight, Drill Dozer, Golden Sun, Joy Mech Fight, Sin & Punishment, Stafy, Murasame Castle, Mach Rider, Famicom Folktales, Wave Race, Urban Champion...and these are just the ones that Nintendo has acknowledged in Smash Bros. already! And okay, some of these don't offer nearly as much as others - you could get more out of Golden Sun than Murasame right now - but including Fire Emblem gave the franchise enough attention to make the international market seem not only reasonable but outright unignorable. Kid Icarus and Punch-Out both got new games basically on Smash, with Little Mac getting promoted to playable on the exposure.
Now let's tie these two points together: The Smash Bros. dev team has been having obvious trouble finding contemporary franchises to make fighters for the game with due to a lack of newer franchises that they can do much with, while at the same time knowing that there are options available from older franchises but willfully ignoring those options despite acknowledging their existance. They have franchises that are long-standing in Smash Bros. which have plenty of options available that people would be incredibly excited to see, options that have been acknowledged in other ways by Nintendo at large and by the dev team specifically, but again ignored. I recognize that I'm not the guy who comes up with the ideas, but it seems like this shouldn't be a complicated issue.
Here, then, is what I propose, not just for Smash Bros., but for Nintendo at large: A concerted effort needs to be made by the fans to get Nintendo to remember both older games and to remember content from those older games. Smash Bros. is a good vehicle for it, of course, because non-fans see these things and are like "Hang on, what's that now?" (ProtoMario recently did a video talking about Joy Mech Fight, for example, entirely because of Smash Bros. including Sukapon - he's a Nintendo fan, of course, but that doesn't necessarily apply to all of his followers.) If there's enough attention given to, say, Impa or King K. Rool or Samurai Goroh or to Golden Sun or Murasame Castle or Mach Rider, Nintendo will see it. We also need to make sure to give not only Nintendo but video game companies in general reason to make more character-driven games - custom options are nice but they aren't always ideal, and the more developers fall into the custom-player trap, the fewer unique characters their franchises will have.