Every day I think about Wind Waker

[rynling]

Yesterday afternoon I gave a short lecture at SUNY Buffalo on Nintendo's "Blue Ocean Strategy" and how industry trends and the constraints of console technology shaped the art direction of the Legend of Zelda series. Trying to summarize the stories of the games in a sentence was difficult.

For example, I couldn't say...

Tears of the Kingdom is about how rational and civilized white(/Japanese) people and their furry companions band together to combat the threat presented by a half-naked savage from the desert who won't listen to reason and only understands violence. (Ganon's green skin is the result of "natural lighting" of course.)

I also couldn't say: In Tears of the Kingdom, Link sacrifices his arm and Zelda turns into a dragon, but special time magic reverses both of these changes at the end of the game, as being able-bodied and "fully human" is the reward the characters receive for their hard work and moral choices.

I don't dislike Tears of the Kingdom, honestly! I've done completion runs on two separate game files, and I don't regret any of the 350+ hours I spent in the world of the game. I love exploring the natural environments, and I love building machines to help reunite Koroks with their friends.

Still... I try not to think about the story too hard.

And when I do think about the story, I think about how much it amuses me that Ganon disguises himself as a pretty princess in order to perform minor acts of mischief, and also I enjoy imagining the intrigue Zelda no doubt got herself involved with during the time she spent embedded in Rauru's court. That's not the sort of thing you can say out loud to an academic audience, though.

Anyway, here's one of my slides.



That "from" dangling off the end of the first bullet point is a worse design crime than anything Nintendo did with Ganondorf; but, at this stage of enshittification, PowerPoint is the least of all evils when it comes to slideshow creation software. What can you do.

ETA: When I say "studying fan reception," I personally mean looking at message boards from 15-20 years ago. Somebody else is going to have to study what people say on Twitter. That sort of work is not for me.

Comments

[lassarina]

I've long since stopped actually playing Zelda games (there's half a dreamwidth post in that, but not one I'm writing today) but even though I haven't played ToTK, I winced because I could immediately extrapolate from what I have played, why it looks like that. Game designers in general, please, do better. (I just finished a 110-hour run of Dragon Age: Inquisition and have a lot of fucking thoughts about doing better there, too.)

[rynling]

Dragon Age Inquisition is an interesting comparison. I've only experienced Inquisition through the novels' worth of fic I've read, as well as a handful of meta essays and podcast discussions. But, to me at least, it seems as though the writers who worked on that game were trying to create something meaningful that partially succeeded, even if it didn't quite work in every aspect.

Tears of the Kingdom, though? Nintendo unapologetically outsourced the writing.

Although it's not like they haven't done that before with the Zelda series. I think the last game you played was one of the twin Oracle titles that Nintendo outsourced to Capcom, and those famously weren't great.

I don't mean to be like "capitalism ruins everything," because I'm always happy to see large corporations get a little loose with their prestige IPs. It's good to mix things up and take a few chances with outside talent, you know? After all, the guy who directed the two shitty Oracle games went on to create Breath of the Wild. And who am I to turn up my nose at Nintendo for making easy money from a breakout success?

Still, I sometimes think about how incredible it was that Square Enix responded to the success of Final Fantasy VII by following it up with the bizarre masterpiece that is Final Fantasy VIII. What absolute legends.

[lassarina]

Honestly, one thing that's fascinating about the FF series in general is just the array of "fuck it, we ball" decisions that Square has made at various points in its history. The wildly different takes that are the four Playstation era games (I'm including Tactics), the variety of choices from 10 onward, the move to direct sequels which has been full of variety in terms of execution and everything else....) I feel like one could do several dissertations in multiple areas of study on it.