A sort of love letter to another love letter - Jade Empire is fantastic.
As an Asian-American who grew up without seeing a lot of people like me in the media I consumed, who grew up during Jackie Chan's A-list period, martial arts movies have a special place in my heart. So, when I say BioWare crafted one of the sweetest love letters to the genre with Jade Empire, I'm coming from a place of love and appreciation myself. Going over the various influences on the game, tracing characters, settings, and themes to their roots in Chinese mythology, history, and cinema, I found that Jade Empire is not only a fantastic game, but extremely respectful of its source material. There are certain flaws and questionable elements to it, but it's still one of the best and most original role-playing games I've played. Featured Clips: The Five Venoms (1978) Community "Spanish 101" (2009) King of the Hill "Westie Side Story" (1997) Rush Hour 2 (2001) The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) Return of the Jedi (1983) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) The Water Margin (1972) The Drunken Master (1978) Shaolin vs. Evil Dead (2004) Hero (2002) Come Drink With Me (1966) Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002)
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Over the June 27th weekend, Netflix and Hulu removed the “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” episode from their streaming services for its use of Blackface. This move is understandably controversial, as some would say it allows these companies to paint themselves as advocates to the Black community without devoting any actual resources to combat racism.
This may be true. Pulling this episode out costs them nothing. They didn’t devote any of their time or their money or effort to show support for Black lives. At best this is a misguided attempt to do the right thing, and at worst this is a publicity stunt with no real impact. Either way, this is censorship and erasure – one of the worst forms of content control. But let’s focus on what Community actually did. I love this episode. It’s one of the best in television, let alone the series. And the episode in question is ultimately not about race. It is about bullying, depression, suicide, and mental health. It’s about a group of people who see someone in need and their efforts to support him. The argument for why this is “acceptable” Blackface is that it is actually drow-face – that it’s not a portrayal of Black people but of a fictional race of elves from a game. Whether or not you agree with this argument for its acceptability – and, spoiler alert, I don’t – this gives us an opportunity to talk about dark elves in fantasy games. Dark elves were originally created with the Dungeons & Dragons by TSR in the 1970s. They were created as a separate type of elf with dark skin and silver hair, just as Chang portrays them in the episode of Community. In their descriptions within the game of D&D, this is an entire race of people with dark skin who are evil and meant to be feared. The original artwork of dark elves shows them with short, curly hair, further separating them from “normal,” and “good” light-skinned elves who have long, straight hair. Later depictions of the dark elves, which focused more heavily on their women, show them with longer, more voluminous curly hair that evokes the kind of hairstyles Black women wore in the 70s and 80s. In addition, their more revealing outfits and hypersexualized bodies and poses are in line with the racist fetishization of Black women (otherwise known as “jungle fever”) prevalent in that era, certainly indicating the influence of racist stereotypes on dark elf design. We need to acknowledge that racial biases have informed the creation of the drow in fantasy games, that there are problematic racial overtones in portraying an entire community of dark-skinned people as being evil while light-skinned people are not. To say otherwise is to be willfully ignorant. And this is a problem that permeates through so much of fantasy role-playing since its beginnings. The literature that inspired Dungeons & Dragons was deeply rooted in racism, from the works of Robert E. Howard and his Conan The Barbarian series to those of H.P. Lovecraft. These sci-fi and fantasy and horror serials often drew from their contemporary mainstream concepts of eugenics and white supremacy. There was a certain fascination with “otherness” as this looming threat. This kind of ideology was imparted to the fantasy role-playing game. Fantasy races in games are designed with inherent moral alignments and race-based advantages and disadvantages. A fantasy race is, arguably, a racist fantasy – where the circumstances of your birth determine your ability, personality, intelligence, and whether you are good or evil. I understand that, in fantasy, this is more than a division of skin color between races and more closely resembles a difference in species; a hobbit or dwarf would be differently abled than taller characters. But where fantasy races become problematic is the suggestion that these different races could be monolithically good or evil, intelligent or primitive, cultured or animalistic, based purely on their genetic background. No, these fantasy races are not meant to represent real-life minorities, but their descriptions were influenced by the historic denigration of other cultures. I’m not saying that D&D creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were hateful racists, but they had racist and sexist values taught to them through the media and entertainment they consumed – pulp fiction magazines and literature made by white men for white men rife with racist and sexist ideologies. It’s an example of what people can call “white allergies.” White allergies are the ways white people are unaware of their racist words or actions because their upbringing or their environment makes that kind of racism invisible to them. People with white allergies are the kind you would describe as a “product of their time” or that they “just grew up differently.” It’s not an excuse for them, but it helps us understand why they have difficulty acknowledging their wrongdoings. D&D is a product of white allergies – it’s a product of invisible systemic racism. That doesn’t mean that it’s a racist product, but by taking inspiration from racist work, it has a hand in perpetuating a culture of anti-Blackness and cultural exploitation. Which brings us back to Community and its use of Blackface. Some fans of the show have argued that it isn’t a joke on Blackface, but a joke on cosplay and the accepted silliness of fantasy role-playing. Chang wasn’t pretending to be Black! He was pretending to be a drow! It’s not offensive! It’s silly! Even if Chang was not portraying Black people but a fictional race of elves, this is still a portrayal of something with connotations to anti-Black sentiments. And the fact of the matter is that the writers of Community chose Blackface for a reason. This joke would not have had the same impact if Chang was in whiteface. And he’s pretended to be white before, acting as Jeff’s understudy for a Greendale commercial. This isn’t addressed with any sort of disgust or discomfort. Incredulousness, maybe? But it’s never shown to be offensive – just silly and weird. Blackface was picked because it’s offensive. Because it has shock value. Community took something ugly and demeaning and exploited it for a cheap gag. And then it tries to justify the joke by painting it as satire by demonstrating the discomfort of other characters around this portrayal and then by removing Chang from the game first by “killing” him. He’s being punished and ousted for wearing Blackface. Yes, this is deserved. This is the appropriate response to those who think it’s okay to wear Blackface – to humiliate and exclude them. But we wouldn’t even be seeing this, we wouldn’t be discomforted by this, if the writers had elected to not use Blackface in the first place. We cannot condone the exploitation of Blackface, however satirical the intent. We can’t make the people who wear Blackface look like harmless idiots like this. We need to acknowledge that Blackface is unacceptable and then just not do Blackface. Leave it buried in the past where it belongs so that we can see that it’s wrong and then never have to see it again. But I also think that erasing this content, censoring it, is not the same as taking responsibility for it. Community producer and distributor Sony Pictures Television only had this to say, “We support the decision to remove the episode," which is devoid of any admissions of the potential harm perpetuated by Blackface, or any support for the Black community. It makes me think that this censorship was an attempt on their part to stay ahead of what we call “cancel culture,” or “call-out culture.” And I think that this kind of pre-emptive action removes the responsibility from the creators to acknowledge their wrong-doings and demonstrate their growth from it. And I think that the removal of this episode harms the audience members that need support for their mental health, that are dealing with bullying and depression, that need to hear what this episode had to say. This is a good episode with a positive message about surviving depression that attempted satire and fumbled. And, yes, the show writers need to take responsibility for that. The closest official response from people directly involved in the show came from Ken Jeong, who plays Chang, making this apology on his Darkest Timeline Podcast, “I’m truly sorry if this portrayal caused anyone harm as that was not intended.” Rather than fearing being “called-out,” we need to be brave enough to call ourselves in. We need to make ourselves aware of our past mistakes and acknowledge them and take ownership of them. We need to be able to have a conversation about it, make a teachable moment about why this was wrong and unacceptable, and bring closure to the affected parties. This is not a new concept in media – Warner Bros. wrote a content warning for their racist Tom & Jerry cartoons. Hangar 13 wrote a content warning for Mafia 3 and its attempt to portray the racism that affected Black people in the 1960s. They admitted that the content they created could be harmful, and leave the decision to experience that, to have a dialogue about that, up to the audience. Dan Harmon, creator of Community, has done this in the past on a different issue by making a public and specific apology for sexually harassing and invalidating a female writer on the show. Not by being called out by his victim but being called in by her. She pushed him to do the right thing instead of letting him make himself a coward. She later wrote regarding his apology and her forgiveness, “People should see the good that can happen when you aren’t afraid to accept responsibility for your mistakes. He gave me relief, and I hope I was able to give him some in return.” Bringing it back to D&D, in the past few weeks owner company Wizards of the Coast made a commitment to update the racially connotative descriptions and moral alignments of orcs, drows, and other fantasy races in order to better reflect the inclusive space that role-playing is meant to be. “Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game — orcs and drow (dark elves) being two of the prime examples — have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated,” Wizards said in a statement. “That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.” This is the kind of action that I think responsible content providers should be taking. To make a statement of ownership for the harm that they’ve caused – to preface their content with the acknowledgement that what they once thought was right, they now realize is wrong. They need to promise to do better moving forward, and then actually do better. And, you know, if they refuse to do that, then fucking cancel them. Do you want to support racial justice but don’t know how? The first step is always to be educated! Take the time to understand the issues at hand and figure out what is in your capacity to help. Read up on articles on the Black Lives Matter movement, have difficult conversations, and, of course, donate. Sources: "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux" | Community © Sony Pictures Television "Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man - Episode 2 with Matthew McConaughey" | Emmanuel Acho | https://youtu.be/CwiY4i8xWIc "Tom and Jerry - Bonus - Introduction by Whoopi Goldberg" | benjamin cotan | https://youtu.be/k_oEOdIBOpU "Dan's Admission" | Super Junker | https://youtu.be/WfqoLeDsET0 "Episode 19 - Virtual Reality" | The Darkest Timeline with Ken Jeong & Joel McHale | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsk8... | https://open.spotify.com/episode/55s7... "'The Office' Blackface Scene Edited Out, Netflix Pulls 'Community' Blackface Episode" | Variety | https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/the-... "Megan Ganz on Dan Harmon's Apology: 'I Felt Vindicated'" | The New York Times | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/ar... "Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons" | Wizards of the Coast | https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/feat... Skyward Sword succeeds among adventure games as an example of structure. This is a game about growth, and every aspect of its design is based around that. As you play, you gain more tools, more skills that make you a better hero. As you grow, the world around you changes and evolves to challenge you. Analyzing these aspects under the lens of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, it becomes clear that Skyward Sword is committed to putting you on a journey unlike any Zelda game before it. If you’re not already familiar with the monomyth, Campbell conceived this theory in his comparative mythology book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In comparing myths and religions across cultures and ages, Campbell found that they are all structured the same way; a person leaves home, faces various trials, transforms, and returns as a hero. This is otherwise known as the hero’s journey. There are 17 stages to Campbell’s monomyth, but we can really simplify them down to 8 key moments. This is exactly what creator of TV shows Community and Rick & Morty Dan Harmon has done throughout his career. Harmon calls this the embryo, or story circle. Each half of the circle reflects the theme of its opposite side. From top to bottom, we see the hero’s two worlds – known and unknown, normal and special, life and death. From right to left, we see the hero’s two states - stasis and growth, passive and active, mortal and god. The Typical Zelda Story CircleHere’s how a typical Zelda game can be broken down in this framework. You – The Protagonist
It’s very simple, but it gets the job done. And this structure isn’t limited to Zelda games. You can probably make a same step-by-step breakdown of any video game you’ve ever played. But if all Zelda games can be structured this way, what makes Skyward Sword so special? If you consider each dungeon its own story circle, then Hyrule is the common ground that connects them together. You leave Hyrule behind, enter the dungeon, have your adventure, come back to Hyrule, and then look for the next dungeon. Hyrule is the space between adventures, and what happens in between adventures isn’t as impactful as what happens within them. Hyrule is static. Once you’ve taken everything a location has to offer, you’re quick to throw that old spot away so that the adventure can continue. Returning is never very fun because there’s very little for you to do when you go back. For example, in Twilight Princess you are asked to go back to your home village Ordon to pick up the iron boots you need to climb Death Mountain. Besides talking to a few villagers, there’s nothing else to do besides pick up the boots and leave. Revisiting old areas in a Zelda game means you’re on some kind of fetch-quest, where your overall progress is blocked until you pick up some key item. You know the old saying, “It’s about the journey, not the destination?” This is a prime example of what that isn’t. When a Zelda game sends you on a fetch-quest that has you backtrack to a familiar area, it’s all destination and no journey. What makes Skyward Sword different is that you are constantly returning to old locations rather than discovering new ones. But every time you go back to these places, every time you’ve grown as a hero, you have the chance to discover something new about it. These areas, and the way you explore them, evolve as you progress through the game. Return becomes rediscovery, as a place you thought you knew suddenly becomes unfamiliar. The circle rotates, and the adventure continues almost seamlessly. The Faron Woods Sequence Faron Woods is a great example of what I’m talking about with these rotating, linked circles. For most of Act 1, Skyward Sword is standard Zelda – you go from Sky, to Province, to Dungeon, back to Sky, and then to the next Province. Compared to Wind Waker, where you go from Great Sea, to Island, to Dungeon, back to Great Sea, and then to the next Island, these structures are identical. But by Act 2 of Skyward Sword, you’ve unlocked all surface provinces. You’re meant to return to Faron Woods and find a Trial Gate. The game sets this up narratively by telling Link that he needs to power up his Goddess Sword. It’s basically a fetch-quest – go back to this spot, get a powerup, then continue with the story. Faron Woods is already part of your known world, so there’s nothing presented here that’s as challenging or interesting as your first time exploring the area. But then you find the Trial Gate and cross over to the Silent Realm. From here, you’ve crosses the threshold into the special world. The Silent Realm is still Faron Woods, but completely changed. It’s gone from familiar to unfamiliar. You adapt, complete the trial, and are rewarded with a literal Gift of the Goddess – the Water Dragon’s Scale. Now you can return to the ordinary realm of Faron Woods, changed. When you return, however, that’s when the circle shifts again. Your new ability allows you to explore more of the woods than before, making for a renewed sense of exploration and adventure. The new underwater sections have made the known world of Faron Woods into a special, unknown one. Explore all of that and you meet the Water Dragon, a god-like being. She tasks you with going back to Skyview Temple, the very first dungeon of the game, and retrieving some magic healing water. But when you go back to Skyview Temple, lo and behold, it’s changed too. Now full of new enemies and puzzles, making it special and dangerous once again. You beat the miniboss, retrieve the healing water, and go back to Faron Woods. Once you get back, surprise, surprise, Faron Woods is changed. Like the temple, it has been repopulated with new, more powerful enemies. Again, it is unknown and dangerous, and you must approach it with the same caution as you did when you first arrived. The neat thing about this shift is that it brings us back to our original reason for coming to the woods – upgrading the Goddess Sword. If the enemies have powered up, the hero needs to power up. The upgrade is no longer a narrative Need, but a gameplay one. You return to the Water Dragon and she points you to the Ancient Cistern, the dungeon that houses the special flames that will upgrade your sword, and thus the end of this sequence. It’s still one location but shifting and evolving into the unknown four times. This sequence is made of five story circles chained together, keeping the revisit a fresh part of the adventure and not a stale list of tasks. You’re still backtracking, technically, but you’re discovering something new. That makes it fun; it’s about the journey, not the destination. But this is a great example of how Skyward Sword is built on linked story circles, not an example of Skyward Sword being great. If getting the magic water felt like a padded fetch-quest to you, there’s a very simple reason for that. Take our five circles and consider what we learn about the game from each one. The darkened parts of this chain are redundant and can basically be removed from the sequence without changing the game. Here’s the padding. If we remove these parts, the Faron Woods revisit would still be the same, but with better pacing. If the game repopulated the area with stronger enemies immediately after completing the trial gate, then you can skip the fetch-quest while still demonstrating how areas will evolve with the Water Dragon Scale and reminding players to upgrade their weapon through introducing tougher enemies. But the main idea communicated throughout this sequence is that, when you return, things will change. That’s the DNA of this game. The Return Home This is further emphasized through Skyward Sword’s sidequests in Skyloft, Link’s home. Going back to our circle diagram, our known and unknown worlds are the Sky and the Surface, respectively. Every time you need to continue the adventure, you go to the surface. Every time the adventure is complete, you return to the sky. When you return home, that’s when the hero’s journey is given meaning. The hero’s growth, or change, is only meaningful in how they are uniquely able to help the people around them once they go back home. According to Campbell, “a hero, properly, is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.” In most Zelda games, sidequests exist mainly to help yourself. Collect pieces of heart, get more rupees, unlock more abilities – the express purpose is to make your situation better. In Skyward Sword, sidequests are about helping others. Characters will tell you when something is troubling them and ask for your help in a way that only you, the hero who has grown from your adventures, can. Even your reward for helping others isn’t meant to help you – the gratitude crystals exist for the sake of the kind monster Batreaux, who needs those crystals to become human. Every time you come back to Skyloft with new tools or abilities, you come back to the opportunity to change things for other people. The more people you help, the more heroic you become. Mastering Your Sword Moving on, because this is Skyward Sword, we naturally must talk about the combat system – one of the major complaints against this game. With a heavy emphasis on 1-to-1 sword tracking, combat is much more about when and where you swing rather than how much and how quickly. Skyward Sword treats combat like its own puzzles, where you solve it with your skill and understanding on how each enemy operates in each environment. In terms of the 8 stages of the story-circle, we can break down combat encounters this way –
But learning new tactics doesn’t completely translate to the feeling of heroic progression, so you need powerups of your own throughout the game to meet these tougher challenges. When your growth is visible or tangible, that has real impact. Skyward Sword rewards players for their understanding and mastery of the game by upgrading the Goddess Sword at different points of the story. And thus, as the Nintendo story always follows the Nintendo gameplay, a game about mastering your sword literally becomes a game about the Master Sword. Which brings us to the narrative. The Narrative and Story Circle Compared to previous Zelda titles, this game spends the most amount of time developing its characters over the course of the story. Even extremely minor characters such as Fledge and Batreaux exhibit transformation, however shallow. But the real metamorphosis is witnessed in the characters who journey to the surface. Groose, Fi, Link, and Zelda each follow their own heroic journey, and can have their respective arcs represented by the story circle.
Groose’s Circle
In most Zelda games, she’s the princess waiting to be rescued. There are a few exceptions, like in Ocarina of Time, where she guides Link as the ninja Sheik, or Wind Waker, where she lives freely as the pirate Tetra, but these characters are static. There might be some minor changes over the story, but both Sheik and Tetra are comfortable enough with who they are and what they need to do. So, for the first time in the series, Zelda herself embarks on her own journey.
While this might not be your favorite game in the series, I hope you recognize that Skyward Sword is entirely committed to the heroic structure. Every aspect of the game, from the exploration of its world, to the dungeons, combat, puzzles, and epic narrative, exhibits a kind of growth alongside you. They’re all built around the experience of the player journeying into a new situation, learning from it, gaining from it, and returning with change. Skyward Sword is the monomyth in action. Was this intentional on Nintendo’s part? Probably not. In fact, I hope not. The coolest part of the monomyth is that it’s not actually a guideline for telling stories, but some universally recognizable set of elements that make a story meaningful to us across disparate cultures, ages, and media. I like to think that Nintendo genuinely wanted to make a game about growth and mastery, and their designers, through some distinctly human understanding of the nature of meaningful change, serendipitously stumbled into this structure of going on a journey and coming back home. But whatever the case, they made an excellent game that should serve as an example to many on how to structure an adventure. Skyward Sword released in 2011 for the Nintendo Wii – the first new console title in the epic adventure series Zelda by Nintendo in 5 years. While initially met with near universal acclaim, the years since have painted it as the unwanted outsider of the franchise. The internet is permeated with complaints of unresponsive and annoying motion controls, repetitive and frustrating combat, extreme linearity, and depressingly empty overworld. While these feelings can arise from an honest play experience, they indicate a failure to see this game as both a natural progression for the series and a radical evolution of it. Skyward Sword has done more for the gameplay of 3D Zelda games since Majora’s Mask in 2000, and if you don’t agree then you’re playing the game wrong.
This is the first true Wii Zelda title, taking full advantage of the central gimmick of the console – motion control. 1:1 tracking of the Wii remote motions translates on screen into Link waving his sword around. Swing left, right, diagonally, up, or down, and Link will cut through enemies as you expect he would – most of the time. The technology isn’t exactly perfect, so swinging quickly and wildly can lead to some translation errors, lending to the sense of “unresponsiveness” people cry about. But the game doesn’t want you to swing like a maniac and will rightfully punish you for doing so. Unlike previous Zelda games, where players can reliably tap the B button furiously, Skyward Sword asks players to be more deliberate and decisive in how they fight, taking things slowly and strategically. Skyward Sword demands mastery, and enemies will block and stun most attacks if you aren’t careful. The game balances this by having enemies widely telegraph their attacks, having players memorize attack patterns and look for that opportunity to strike. You could parry riposte with a shield bash, trick the enemy into creating an opening, or strike just before their attack as they leave themselves vulnerable. Combat becomes more puzzle-like as you use your tools to adapt to situations, and the game does a fantastic job at communicating this. When you revisit Skyview Temple, a bomb flower is placed just outside the boss chamber, highlighting the key to crowd fights – using the bomb to stun and separate enemies to give you a chance to attack. And the game doesn’t abandon the sense of satisfaction in chaining together quick combination strikes; rather, Skyward Sword rewards players who think strategically by giving them the chance to cathartically swing the sword as fast as possible for a short window of time. Every time you parry or dodge an enemy attack, you have a few precious seconds to counterattack and deal out as much damage as possible. Combat isn’t frustrating at all when you play along to the rhythm and actively participate in its low and high tempo changes. This core mechanic is brilliantly supported and explored by the game’s narrative – forging the iconic Master Sword. According to Nintendo’s late president Satoru Iwata, “the storyline of Zelda is created to bring out the best of the fun and interesting gameplay elements in such a way that the consistency of the story is maintained.” Is it any surprise, then, that a game about mastering the sword evolves into creating the Master Sword? As you learn the ins-and-outs of combat and become more skilled, facing tougher enemies and challenges, your blade naturally grows with you. This is how you build the game around its mechanic, and until Breath of the Wild in 2017, Skyward Sword was the only 3D game in the series to take it to such a high degree. In many ways, Skyward Sword was the foundation for many of the elements of Breath of the Wild – from breakable shields, to limited inventory, to stamina management, and treating combat as a puzzle. Breath of the Wild has improved and expanded upon these ideas, but it’s easy to see where its roots lie. The other common complaint against Skyward Sword is how it handles progression and exploration compared to other Zelda titles. Players cite linearity and a lack of large open spaces compared to the games since Ocarina of Time in 1998. Indeed, the game is often structured so that Link zips from point to point of the overall narrative with little opportunity for the players to decide the course of their adventure for themselves. Of course, I must ask, how is this different than the 3D Zelda titles that came before it? Every 3D Zelda game before this tells you where and when to go somewhere to push the adventure forward. Skyward Sword is a natural iteration on the standard formula with its own changes to make things fresh and set it apart from the older games. In terms of linearity, every Zelda game from Ocarina of Time to Skyward Sword has followed a set order of progression, with few opportunities for sequence breaks. Even A Link to the Past in 1991 had a recommended progression order, indicated by the game map. Skyward Sword is not much more linear than the other titles in the series, and in many ways its progression is less rigid than its predecessors. While most Zelda games feature a large, explorable world, its main content is often concentrated in small points of the map, appearing in strict sequence. In contrast, Skyward Sword features a relatively small explorable world, but its main content is spread throughout, allowing the player to explore as they please without breaking the pace of the game. In Skyward Sword, the world is divided between the sky and the ground, with the ground being separated subsections of Lanayru Desert, Eldin Volcano, and Faron Woods. These ground sections would be comparable to the Hyrule Field of Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time. While each ground sections feels considerably smaller than Hyrule Field, these areas concentrate game content into a tighter, interconnected area. Through exploration and light puzzle-solving, players can uncover collectible items or find “Goddess Cubes” that activate special treasures in the sky. Moreover, by splitting into specific subsections rather than as a general overworld, each area feels intimately connected to the dungeons it hosts – filled with its own puzzles and mysteries that foreshadow the trials of the upcoming dungeon. Rather than existing simply as a space between dungeons or towns, the ground itself is part of the world you explore. The sky is analogous to the ocean of Wind Waker – a mostly empty open area where players can pick their next destination. At least, empty is how it appears at first. As you explore the ground and activate Goddess Cubes, the isolated islands of the sky begin to fill with divine treasure chests to aid you on your journey. These treasure chests are like the sunken treasures in Wind Waker, which typically yield rupees or (in part of the main quest) pieces of the Triforce. Aside from the Triforce hunt, these treasures don’t feel so connected to the rest of the adventure. In Skyward Sword, exploring the ground becomes connected to exploring the sky, as you wonder what boon you will receive for each Goddess Cube you activate. It further ties into the main mechanic as activating the Goddess Cubes require the use of Skyward Strike sword beams, rather than buying the treasure chart from a shop or randomly discovering it during your dungeon exploration. Overall this game handles exploration and progression through the overworld similarly to the Metroid series. Each subsection offers as much exploration as each dungeon, with collectible goodies scattered throughout that will aid you on your quest. These collectibles allow you to upgrade your items and gear, such as ingredients to power up your potions or materials to make your beetle drone fly faster. These collectibles help you survive on your adventure, just as collectible upgrades function in Metroid. Moreover, each ground subsection is an intricately interconnected space rather than a gauntlet of challenges that allow you to meander about and uncover its secrets at your own pace. This Metroid comparison only becomes stronger when the game has players revisit old areas with their new gear, which recontextualizes your understanding of the space and allows even more exploration. One retread of the Faron Woods comes to mind as an example of this world design and sense of progression done well. Link must revisit the Skyview Temple – the first dungeon of the game. The player enters this space already possessing an understanding of its layout and challenges, only to see that the enemies are stronger and more numerous, and new puzzles are introduced to twist expectations. This quest was designed to show players that this is a turning point for the game – even the familiar spaces will no longer be safe and will continue to test you again and again. I am reminded of the Joseph Campbell monomyth, in which the hero leaves familiarity into the unknown and eventually returns to familiarity having changed. Skyward Sword leans heavily into this; in the beginning, Link is called to a new area of the ground before always returning to the sky. Each time, Link returns home changed, with new gear or abilities, and he sees himself in the position to do more in Skyloft. In the middle of the overall adventure, Link is called to return to the different areas of the ground, only now they shift from the known into the unknown – new enemies populate Faron Woods, but Link’s new abilities allow the players to explore much more of it. Adding on to that, Link thrusts himself into the supernatural Silent Realm as part of his journey, in which players are stripped of all weapons and equipment to complete a trial, upon which they may return to the natural world with yet another new ability. Skyward Sword is a series of tight story circles chained together into a single large one. Every time Link and the player grow and change, so too does the world and the people around them. The reason retreading old areas so often works so well in this game is because of this constant shift between expected and unexpected, familiar and strange. No, this game certainly does not “feel” as large as the fields of Hyrule or Wind Waker’s Great Sea. That sense of an open grandiose adventure should be credited to the fact that you can see great landmarks of the game as soon as you get to the open world. In Ocarina of Time, Death Mountain is a constant presence in the background. In Wind Waker, its most important islands appear to you as gigantic silhouettes in the horizon. The difference is that the presence of something bigger than yourself always makes itself known in these games. Skyward Sword lacks severely in that sense. But the content of its overworld is much more meaningful and interesting. The player’s actions have a visible effect on the game, whether that’s collecting treasures for upgrades or discovering a new shortcut around the map; Skyward Sword lacks in a sense of scale but more than makes up for it in agency. That being said, Skyward Sword is by no means a perfect game. It is brilliant during the times that you can play and explore, but tedious and inhibiting when it aggressively guides you through certain puzzles. Take, for example, the quest in which Link is captured by enemy monsters at the Eldin Volcano – left without any weapons or tools except for his digging mitts and a map of the area, the player must plan how to reclaim their lost gear while avoiding recapture in enemy territory. It’s a great opportunity to test the player’s knowledge of a familiar but changed area, and each tool they recover would work its way into the gameplay, creating new opportunities to stealthily avoid or distract enemies. It sounds like a fantastic and memorable adventure, right? Sadly, the game frequently stops you before most stealth puzzles, revealing a wider view of how many enemies are patrolling, where their blindspots may be, and which hole you need to burrow under to crawl past the enemy watch and make your way to one of your lost tools. The prospect of making a fatal mistake becomes lost along with any feelings of tension. Gear must also be recovered in a specific order, as each stealth puzzle evolves only to include the latest item you have reclaimed. In a perfect world, this mission would have involved the use of the beetle drone to provide that critical aerial view of the immediate area, helping players plan where to go next. Gear could be reclaimed non-linearly, allowing each player to decide for themselves how to progress – stealthily with the digging mitts, tricky with the whip and clawshots, or more “Rambo-like” with liberal use of bombs and arrows. Of course, the weapon tools such as bombs and arrows would be much more difficult to reach first, and because the game already reveals where each item can be found, difficulty would be another layer to factor into the player’s strategy. Even without a non-linear structure, the game could at least remove the guiding scene before each stealth puzzle and hide the treasures from the map – this would make the experience of finding one of your items feel more surprising and organic, hiding its linear track from the eyes of a first-time player. The design of these stealth puzzles themselves are not bad; rather, they satisfyingly grow in complexity with each reclaimed tool, showcasing how each one supports Link’s adventure outside of the dungeon-space. The game designers just gave away too much of the solution before players get the chance to figure it out on their own. Similarly, Skyward Sword’s companion character Fi (the sidekick – a staple of 3D Zelda games) is aggressively helpful to the point of redundancy. Any time new information is presented to the player through dialogue with NPCs or new item description boxes, Fi would pop up and repeat the new information a second time. Even without dialogue, Fi would verbalize information presented through the guiding scene. Entering an area could trigger a guiding scene to an exit, telling players where they need to go. Fi would then appear and tell Link, “There is a high probability that going over there will bring us closer to our goal.” Furthermore, Fi would appear and describe information that a player could easily gather for themselves. Discovering the large and obvious Boss Door of a dungeon would prompt Fi to interrupt gameplay to state, “This door is larger and more important than the ones we have encountered so far – there is a strong probability that we will need to open this door somehow.” Fi, please. I understand that players are meant to build a relationship with Fi, as she is literally the personification of the sword you wield (again, an example of the core mechanic influencing the story), but the number of redundant interrupts leaves the player less willing to value what she has to say. If the information could be presented primarily through Fi rather than alongside Fi, this would cut the redundancy and place her input as higher priority for players. Don’t give a description blurb for a new item and then have Fi repeat that blurb. Just have Fi solely provide the information in the first place. In fact, any time you need more details on items in your inventory use Fi’s sound effect and dialogue box style instead of the non-personified description box. Fi’s input suddenly becomes valuable, essential, and, most importantly, non-intrusive. Overall, I enjoyed this game a lot. It has a nice balance of honoring its legacy as the 25th anniversary title of the series by including many callbacks and core features of Zelda while also radically forging its own identity by twisting those core features and introducing new ones. This is the first adventure of the Zelda timeline, in which the titular Zelda is more than just a princess needing to be rescued but a literal goddess who reclaims her lost powers and seals away a great evil. This is the first game that accurately presents itself as The Legend of Zelda, where Link is just the vehicle of her machinations. The world is of smaller scale but develops a growing relationship with the player as they uncover its mysteries. The motion controls weren’t always perfect, but neither was I. And with the immersion it affords players, I have never felt so good dueling against bosses in a Zelda game as I did in Skyward Sword. This game is skillfully stitched together with the themes of growth and mastery, in both its story and its gameplay, and it is a wonderful anniversary gift to the games you’ve grown up with – knowing where its been and bravely taking the series to new heights. “Queerness and games are fundamentally and intimately linked – through play, through their invitation to inhabit new worlds, through their non-normative pleasures, and more.” – Bonnie Ruberg To begin, I am a heterosexual, cis-gendered man writing from my own perspective on the relationships between queerness and video games. For a large part of this essay, I am using queerness in the broad sense as something beyond the sphere of socially constructed normalcy and not specifically as a sexual or gender identifier. Queer representation in games is typically seen under the lens of narrative – that is, the inclusion of a queer-centric story or queer characters. Narrative representation is present in many story-driven games, such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Life is Strange, The Last of Us, and Undertale, among others. In these games, queerness is part of a character’s arc, such as a quest in which the player helps this queer character resolve an internal struggle with their sexual or romantic identity. In The Outer Worlds, players can assist their ship engineer Parvati in meeting the engineer and captain of a space colony, Junlei. Narrative representation is also seen in action-driven games such as Overwatch and Apex Legends, or even Mortal Kombat, where the character’s queerness may not be observed in the gameplay but rather in supplemental materials. This kind of representation is made specifically with the LGBTQ community in mind, analogous to the inclusion of queer characters in other forms of media like novels, film, television, or drama. It is a step in the right direction for games as a cultural phenomenon. Queer representation in games can also be seen under the lens of visual expression, which is as simple as customizing your player avatar and the spaces the avatar lives in. This is seen in games such as Animal Crossing, The Sims, and the Saints Row series, among many more. As the avatar is meant to represent the player as much as possible, these games create opportunities for queer people to express as much of themselves as possible in the avatar. Players can choose how they will physically look, how they will sound, whether they walk with confidence or reservation, how they dress, what car they drive, what space they live in, and what people they associate with. In games such as Mass Effect, narrative and visual expression can intersect so that the player may involve their customized avatar in a romantic relationship with another queer character, further personalizing the game. This customizable experience was not necessarily made with queer people in mind, but this experience allows queer people to see themselves represented in the game in a way that other forms of media lack. To immerse yourself in the fictional space as deeply as possible is the pièce de résistance that sets interactive media apart from passive media, and so this is the next natural step for queer representation beyond the narrative. But inclusivity does not halt itself there. In 2017, I attended a guest lecture at my university led by Bonnie Ruberg – a queer games studies assistant professor. They posited the idea that the relationship between queer representation in games extends beyond the issues of narrative representation and visual expression. Rather, they argue that there is a connotative link between gameplay and queer thought processes. Ruberg begins their argument using the same clarification I am using in my first paragraph – queerness is anything that strays from social constructs of “normal,” and there exist many examples in how this type of queerness manifests in play. This lecture used the mechanical experiences of both speedruns (playing a game to completion as fast as possible, often searching for and exploiting glitches to do so) and walking simulators (a slow, explorative jaunt through a limited space) as examples of how queer modes-of-thought influence the gameplay. “Video games,” Ruberg states, “appear to offer players infinite possibilities for interaction, but they are in fact highly structured. To play a video game the ‘right’ way, the way that the game intends, is also to play along.” Indeed, there is a chrononormative experience designed for a game, where progress happens under the satisfaction of certain conditions, where players are meant to play per a designed timeline just as non-queer people live per a designed timeline – get married by a certain age, have kids, own property, etc. Speedrunners, however, play the game according to a new set of rules and outside of the intentions of the designer. Speedruns surpass the chrononomative sphere of gameplay, just as queerness surpasses the chrononormative sphere of “normal” life. The gameplay of the speedrunner may be queer to the designer, but their progress is just as valid within the world of the game itself. Similarly, walking simulators – games such as Gone Home, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, and The Stanley Parable – exist outside of the sphere of what many consider to be a game. They often de-emphasize external conflicts and instead present the player with internal ones. Walking simulators build upon the players curiosity within a space, as players discover the story through slow exploration and determine their own role within it. Rather than adopting gameplay that is queer to designers, walking simulators adopt design that is queer to cultural expectations of gameplay. Players are rewarded not for traditional feats of skill, such as fighting off enemies or traversing deadly gauntlets, but for a careful and thoughtful understanding of how they fit into the world around them. It is in this way that the experience of a walking simulator follows the thought-processes of queer people. With the queerness of both speedrunning and walking simulators in mind, queer modes-of-thought can be argued to have a strong relationship to the fundamental language of play. Play, as Ruberg states, is “playfulness: a kind of free-form expression that allows game players to explore new ways of being in the world and by extension themselves…Players roam in-game terrains and try on the lives, bodies, and desires of others.” Queerness is the refusal to listen to instruction and the satisfaction of exploring pleasure. Queerness is emergent and personal desires combined with the opportunity to see that desire fulfilled. To navigate queerness – to try to understand and seek out your pleasures – is to play, and Super Mario Odyssey is one of the queerest games of all time. Odyssey starts with players dropped into a very “normal” Mario experience – Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach with plans to marry her and Mario must chase after them to rescue the princess yet again. Not only is this a typical Mario formula, it reinforces certain heteronormative expectations as the male hero pursues a female princess. There are some key elements that separate this from the typical Mario game. Princess Peach rejects Mario and Bowser fighting over her to instead travel the world for her own pleasure, defying the heteronormative premise. Players can customize Mario’s outfit to their liking. Whether Mario fights Bowser’s army in the classic red-and-blue getup or a wedding dress, it’s completely up to the you. Mario’s ship can be decorated with souvenirs and stickers, allowing players to transform it from a shabby aircraft into a personal living space. These elements line up with the issues of narrative representation and visual expression, but where Odyssey’s inherent queerness truly expresses itself is through play. In true Nintendo fashion, Odyssey is all about play. Consider Cappy, Mario’s partner in this journey, as the linchpin of play in Odyssey. Through Cappy’s mechanics, players discover different ways to interact with the world – hitting blocks, fighting enemies and bosses, extending Mario’s jump to cross gaps, and other dynamics. Cappy’s standout mechanic, however, is the body capture gimmick; by throwing Cappy onto certain enemies or objects, Mario inhabits these foreign bodies and uses them to navigate the environment in a new and unique way. This isn’t a game about playing as Mario – this is a game playing as whatever you want to be and figuring out how whatever it is you are fits within the world around it. Each capture invites the player to recontextualize themselves and their surroundings, encouraging and rewarding a careful understanding of both through hidden coins, extra power moons, or newly discovered shortcuts to the goal. Battle in Odyssey is deemphasized, with a newfound appreciation instead for intimacy. Players are no longer meant to think of enemies with contempt, but with welcoming and excitement. There are no enemies in Odyssey – only possibilities. Odyssey’s latent queerness is most present in one of the most play-centric maps of the game – New Donk City. The moment you touch down on the New Donk skyscrapers, Mario himself becomes queerer to his surroundings than in any other world in Mario history. Players know immediately that this world is different. Within the scale of the Metro Kingdom, Mario exists outside the realm of what a normal person looks and acts like. Within the scale of all of Mario, the culture and people of New Donk City exist outside of the realm of normal. But the game never dwells on it, and the characters never comment on it, because all that matters is that everyone gets to play. There has never been a Mario world that knows the player’s every little quirk and habit the way that New Donk City does. Once you get past the first boss and the world opens itself up to you, New Donk suddenly becomes the ultimate playground. You can jump on cars, spin on light posts, run across rooftops, discover secret doors, drive a scooter, capture a taxi, be a tank, go to a concert, find your way on a billboard, hop over peoples heads, kick cans into garbage piles – there is something to do around every corner, and everything you do can be fun. Whatever you can possibly think of doing, this place doesn’t tell you “no.” It asks you, “how are you going to do it?” and it is more than happy to reward you for answering that question. New Donk City combines the creative and experimental gameplay of speedrunners and the personal, slow, and explorative nature of walking simulators. This world is packed with opportunities for players to have fun on their own terms, whether that’s taking on all the platforming challenges or talking to the citizens and figuring out how to help them. Neither side is wrong, and everything you do all helps you progress somehow. How many games reward you for going to the park and jumping ropes? For gardening? For capturing another human and playing with their RC car? Or for just taking a minute to cheer up a lonely guy sitting on a bench? New Donk City presents you with a million things to do and then tells you do whatever you want for as long as you’re still having fun. You can relax because there is no “wrong” way to be in New Donk. Super Mario Odyssey is 3D Mario gameplay at its best, with opportunities for any player of any skill level to do whatever they want. Everything you do is rewarded and every reward has meaning. Every 10 coins is an extra life, every purple coin is another means of buying a new outfit or decoration, and every power moon can be hidden around the corner in the most surprising and unexpected way. The game might test your skill, but only after it asks you to be respectful and knowledgeable about the world around you and the people that live in it. Nothing that you do is bad or wrong, and everything you do feeds into a sense of pleasure and reward. Your path, whatever that path might be, is the right one. That is the relationship between queerness and play, and that relationship makes Odyssey a perfect example of what it means to be inclusive by design. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2017. “Speedruns and Slow Strolls: Queer Movements through Space and Time in Video Games.” Dean’s Arts Lectures. FILM80V at UCSC.
Ruberg, Bonnie. 2018. “Queerness and Video Games: Queer Game Studies and New Perspectives through Play.“ GLQ 24:4. 543-555. Duke University Press. Sonic Adventure is one of my favorite games of all time; it's one of the first games that I ever played, it has a really cool setting and characters, and it has a lot of neat mechanics that feel good to play. On my Tumblr page, I wrote a retrospective essay series on the game, citing its successes and flaws in game design. For my website, this will be a more concise, focused version of the retrospective that closely follows the YouTube version.
Sonic Adventure introduces players to the new, stylish, and rebellious Sonic, selling itself on rock-and-roll, 3D graphics, and high-speed action. The game was quickly solidified as a fan-favorite and kickstarted the modern era of both Sonic and its fandom. In fact, this game was so popular that for years, Sonic fans asked when another game would come out just like it. When I wrote the original retrospective, I asked myself whether the franchise really needs a game just like it. To make thousands of words short, Sonic Adventure is a bad game. Poor level design, lazily padded game sections, and a cavalcade of glitches all serve to harm a smooth and rewarding game experience. But, in a strange way, that is exactly why this game matters to Sonic fans. There is as much potential as there are flaws, and so many fans ask about a return to this Sonic Adventure-style of game because they want to see that potential fulfilled. The game features multiple playable characters, and they mostly have great mechanics. Each of them play the way you expect them to, with unique abilities that distinguish them from each other as they navigate the game world. Almost every aspect of their movement, from the jump height and distance, to acceleration, turning, and deceleration, is both reliable and satisfying. There's a great sense of momentum as Sonic carries his speed into a jump, or transitions from a jump into a run. Controlling Sonic and his friends has never been as good as Sonic Adventure. These mechanics lend themselves to great gameplay dynamics. With Sonic, you can use a spin dash on a slope and carry that velocity and direction into your jump, and then finish that jump with a homing attack to get that little bit of extra distance to clear a gap. Players can keep that in mind as they traverse the level, looking for opportunities to use this knowledge and skill to discover something new. Unfortunately, these dynamics are rarely played with in the intended designs of the level. As these action stages are mostly designed as single-track gauntlets, the intentional design and the speedrunner exploit become easy to distinguish. Sonic's levels feature so many narrow tracks, loops, and dash panels that serve to show off how fast Sonic moves. Speed is a spectacle, and that spectacle makes a level memorable, but takes away from an active player experience. Sonic Adventure treats speed like an expectation, when Sonic games should be treating speed like a reward. Maybe the player completed a really tricky gauntlet and they need that shot of adrenaline to keep them excited until the end of the level, or maybe they saw a secret path in the stage that requires them to build up the momentum to reach it. Speed should be fueling the excitement and exploration, and players seeking that speed should be challenged and rewarded for it. Tails races against Sonic in linear sections of Sonic's levels. He can't move as fast, but his key mechanic is his ability to fly. The developers make an attempt at using this mechanic by placing aerial speed-boosting rings throughout the stage, which allow Tails to skip over sections of the level and gain the advantage. What ended up happening is that Tails' stages became incredibly too easy and left players seeking challenge feeling unsatisfied. Not only does this come off as obvious game padding and lazy level design, but it also presented a ludonarrative dissonance in Tails' character arc - a disharmony between gameplay and story. Tails struggles with his insecurities as a sidekick and wants to believe in himself as Sonic's equal, but it's hard for players to believe this struggle when gameplay usually has Tails leaving Sonic behind in the dust. Gamma's levels operate as 3D shooting galleries; players move from Point A to Point B within a time limit and shoot down everything in between to buff up their remaining time. Time becomes an economy, where players must know where enemies are and when to shoot them down in order to complete the stage in time. The biggest issue here is that these levels pass by without needing those extra seconds; the average Gamma stage could be as short as 30 seconds. Treating time like an economy doesn't feel like an important mechanic because the starting time is more than enough to get through each stage, and this makes every stage feel too easy and unfulfilling. Amy spends her levels on the run from Eggman's hunter robot, Zero. This robot supposedly ruthlessly pursues the player through sections of the stage, but it never feels like a real threat. There are a few jump-scare moments and chases that are enhanced by tricky level mechanics, like the mirrored sections of Twinkle Park or the rolling levers and ladders in Hot Shelter, but any tension is either broken by the scripted nature of the encounters or the fact that hitting Zero with Amy's hammer will stun it long enough to get away. There is a great moment in Hot Shelter where the player needs to push a ladder towards an escape vent as Zero closes in on them, but it's quickly ruined by the game script. As soon as you stand next to the pushing mechanism, Zero flies away. If playing as Amy is supposed to make players feel more vulnerable and desperate, the game did a poor job of communicating that with their main mechanic. & Knuckles' levels are themed around exploration and treasure hunting, which work well with his gliding, wall-climbing, and digging abilities. Players are dropped in an open area to explore and uncover shards of the broken Master Emerald. Because the emerald radar tracks all pieces simultaneously, it often attention is taken away from the stage itself as the eyes are drawn squarely to the interface. Additionally, random placement means that the treasures could be found in less than a minute more often by luck than skill. And Big just should not have been in the game. The second biggest point of the game is its adventure field - a central hub between action stages. Sonic Adventure succeeds at crafting an interesting world with strong visual and narrative themes - the Mystic Ruins hints at a deeper and mysterious past that's further explored in the Tikal flashbacks, Station Square features many NPCs with their own stories and arcs that indicate a changing present, and the Egg Carrier gives a rare look into the stylish, but cold and robotic lifestyle of Eggman, and foreshadows the kind of future he wants to build. World-building is meant to make people think about how they would live in the fictional world presented to them, and Sonic Adventure's success in this is proven by the years of fanart and fanfiction that proliferate throughout the internet over the past twenty years. This game presented people with a colorful, changing world with a rich and interesting history that people wanted to learn more about. In terms of gameplay, however, the adventure field is inconsistent and confusing. Adventures need three things to drive player action - an objective, a motivation, and a direction. The adventure field, as the means of taking players between action stages, often fails to provide all three, and sometimes fails in giving just one. Sometimes levels become available through a key-and-lock system, sometimes they require a new ability to access, and sometimes they need you to walk around the area until a cutscene triggers. Some of these sections provide an objective and direction without motivation, which leaves players asking "Why do I have to do this? What does this have to do with my character's goals?" Sometimes these sections provide an objective and motivation without direction, leaving players asking "Where do I have to go?" And if the game gives you nothing, you just walk around until it does. The way this adventure field is set up constantly breaks the flow of the game, confuses players, and mostly relies on you knowing what to do because this section crossed over with another character's story. Sometimes an NPC would point you to where you need to go, and other times they say nothing important at all. Most players might not even talk to NPCs because the game never presents them as being valuable to the play experience. Lastly, the adventure field is devoid of any reason to explore it after the story. There are a few optional ability upgrades (that have no real use to gameplay), some hidden emblems, and the Chao Garden minigame, but it's otherwise empty. Each of these characters have unique ways of interacting with and exploring the environment, like Sonic's light speed dash, Tails' flight, Gamma's laser, Amy's hammer, & Knuckles, but they only use their abilities to find something new just a handful of times. There are no meaningful collectibles or secrets to discover. With no incentive to keep the adventure going when the game is over, the adventure field wastes any potential that these characters had to explore it. This game had so much going on for it when it came out - brand recognition, great presentation, good mechanics with interesting dynamics, and characters that weren't just avatars for gameplay. Sonic, Tails, Amy, Gamma, & Knuckles all had their own stories with their own character development. They had goals, motivations, fears, anxieties, strengths, weaknesses - for cartoony animal video game characters , they had depth that no other platformer games were offering. The world wasn't just some playground, but somewhere these characters lived; it had a history, a future, and even though it borrowed elements of the real world, it was still just fantastical enough that you could believe Sonic spent his time there. The game inspired imagination for possible stories to explore, characters to meet, and adventures to be had. And even if the gameplay had flaws, I still remember each of the levels fondly for their great visual themes and music. The game relied so much on spectacle, but they did it so well that my first impression lingers to this day. Despite its overall flaws, there are still some brilliant examples of good game design that really got me thinking on my feet as a player, like some parts of Lost World (the stage, not the game), and nearly all of Red Mountain. Most players might not think much of Red Mountain because it lacks the spectacle of other stages, but it offered the most freedom in tackling each platforming challenge while keeping your momentum going. There's a small detail that I love where the level begins and ends with launching Sonic on a rocket. Skilled players can get off the first rocket and land Sonic on a shortcut at the start of the level, and skilled players can get off the last rocket and land Sonic on the goal capsule to finish in style. It's a satisfying mirror that offers a nice punctuation to the stage. Not every level is made like this, but each of them are just as memorable. There is not a single forgettable level in Sonic Adventure, and that is something even the best games struggle to achieve. The biggest problem with this game is that there is something special there buried under laziness. The ideas are all there, with an imaginative setting and great balance of serious story-telling and cartoony anime aesthetics; the foundation is there, with solid gameplay mechanics that have interesting ways of working together; but the execution is lazy and wrong. I like to compare this game to Mass Effect - not in scale, scope, or quality, but in the fact that the first game has a lot of great things going on and a few not-so-great things. In Mass Effect 2, BioWare cut out anything that didn’t work and iterated on the things that did, streamlining the experience. But it was missing some of that charm or aesthetic from the original. In Mass Effect 3, BioWare iterated again on the best of Mass Effect 2 and found a way to merge them with the cut elements of Mass Effect to see the potential, the ideas of the first game fully realized. Sonic Adventure 2 similarly cut out the poorly received sections of Sonic Adventure and worked on streamlining what they considered their strongest game mechanics. And while Sonic Adventure 2 is a lot of fun and overall feels good to play, I always missed the charm of Sonic Adventure, for all its flaws. I think a lot of the fanbase agrees – Sonic Adventure had a lot of potential that never went fulfilled. I think that the reason why fans of these games want Sonic Adventure 3 is because they want Sonic Adventure to be given the same chance Mass Effect had – to improve its best ideas and evolve its weaker ones – to see the game it was always meant to be. |
AuthorGreg Anthony is a game designer and writer who turns his long essays into videos for YouTube. ArchivesCategories |