Huh? Undertale has an extremely original art direction and game design. It has influenced sure, but so does everything. The combat system alone would set it apart from any other RPG I can think of, and it’s approach to branching narrative is pretty singular.
Stardew Valley is a lot closer to harvest moon than Undertale is to it’s influences, but it’s maximalist approach and art style make it stand out as it’s own thing even then?
Every game borrows from other games, it’s how creative stuff works.
Yeah, Undertale strikes me as a normal homage, with original art, themes, and mechanics, working off an emotional tone inspired by a beloved work. This is what I’d typically describe as healthy.
Stardew Valley I’d put on the unhealthy side. It’s very good as a syncresis of all the almost-complete Harvest Moon games, but it has no desire to add or even aesthetically differentiate aside from a challenge leaderboard, an effective but not necessarily healthy innovation of modern games. I put a good week into it but it was such a naked nostalgia play it made me uneasy the whole time.
Felix that analysis frame is so depressing I don’t even know what to do with it. You’ve pushed it before and you probably see a lot more student-age folks than I do, but that’s truly bleak
Honestly, as suspect as I was that Gamer Girl was anything interesting or worthwhile or taseteful, them falling on the defenses that it was supposed to “raise awareness” and their “cowriter” (I’m assuming primarily/entirely because they made her come up with all the specific dialogue herself) really made the whole thing feel extra gross.
A lot of people thought it looked cheap and exploitative of people’s experience of harassment and thought the power dynamics looked gross and misogynistic.
I think some of the backlash was likely overblown in the way that people look at something at a glance, assume they know everything about it, and read it in the absolute worst faith.
alls i know is that they were never gonna port JSRF and someone else had to take it into their own hands
between this, Sonic Mania, Streets of Rage 4, and the dozens of Outrun/Virtual Racing homages, i think maybe we should just dissolve the non-Yakuza parts of Sega and give it to everyone
you say that but JSRF was literally bundled with the console for a while and the JSRF/Sega GT 2002 doublepack littered Funcolands and Gamestops for years
I think the lack of Sims-likes is due to a narrow-minded approach to what the core appeal of games is. Sims falls into a market which happens to have a proportionally large female playerbase which The Sims is totally comfortable with because it has broad appeal. Many developers coming into the space just don’t see the value in appealing to a market broader than pop-culture-obsessed manchild power fantasy. It boggles my mind that dress-up games aren’t a more established genre despite there clearly being a huge market that want to do nothing more than express themselves through customisation with low degrees of challenging game loops surrounding the activity. I mean fashion is a huge draw in games which aren’t even about fashion (Dark Souls, Nioh, Grand Theft Auto, Splatoon etc).
I guess life sims like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing kinda fall into this space but it’s crazy given that the market would likely be potentially much bigger than something like Doom Eternal or Ghost of Tsushima.
