I liked Odyssey as a playground where you just happen to find some loose change everywhere but the platforming challenges just didn’t feel that focused. The side areas that loaded as their own levels that have you focus on certain tasks just felt to short. The mechanic or tool that they get you to master there is rarely applicable else where. The strongest example I have right now is how you get Yoshi in the end game and has a wall jump with his tongue but you can only chain it one specific challenge area and the other level geometry where you have access to yoshi does not allow for this.
Enemy Jacking was a fun way to expand your verb set but alot of them kinda end up as lock and keys.
Nintendo loves lock and keys though, they will agonize for years trying to make lock and keys enjoyable in themselves rather than design their games differently
This is why I hate it. I didn’t put my finger on it until this Joseph Anderson video where he demonstrates that it is at best Ubisoftian open world stamp tool and at worst Bethesda RPG kleptomania.
Sunshine is good. FLUUD is an invitation to feel the Gs as you fight momentum constantly.
I hate Cappy so god damn much. It’s design by social media marketing.
re that video, is there a new retroarch purist practice where when you’re emulating the N64 you’re not allowed to change the colour levels so they just look like shit
At the very least, it would be at least 25% better if the 5-15 second cutscenes for the higher denominations of change would be skippable. They’re the opposite of rewarding
BotW is kleptomanic as well but I had much less objection to it, personally.
anyway I do agree that this is easily the most obvious critique of the game and it was apparent even before release, but (not having played it still) it seemed to overwhelm that response with sheer goofy inventiveness even for many people who I’d normally trust to be critical
there is a lot of “it’s not building on anything, it’s not naturally integrated with your moveset, you’re just doing it because it’s there” but … 64 was like that too, and that they’ve managed to make something that succeeds on that level to an even remotely comparable extent to a 3D game from 1996 is still impressive
I am also one of the heritics that loves Sunshine. I love having air control. Give me hovers, air dashes, descent management etc. I loved how fludd gives options without just being a double jump device. Slide on water is still my favorite method of rapid acceleration in a game. Odyssey’s rolling needed a higher top speed and a slower deceleration to feel better when moving through large empty spaces. Sunshine sliding was just so great to find a cycle. Spray>Slide>Jump>Spray>Dive to keep your speed up. There wasn’t much like that in Odyssey.
The micro-challenges are there, just as they are in Breath of the Wild, to make the game work as a 5-minute-long mobile game. Understanding how to make a game work in 5-minute, 15-minute, 2-hour sessions is a skill Nintendo has more than anyone else right now. It’s fair to criticize how it affected long open-world-like slack-jawed marathon play sessions but it should be done with understanding that it’s not fulfilling the same purpose as Ubisoft cruft.
yeah and that the doing-it-ness is presented so lackadaisically is actually a huge saving grace; part of the reason I couldn’t stand either of the galaxies for more than half an hour was because the presentation of the levels as these impressive things I had to clear was immensely tedious given the reality of nintendo’s then-current design philosophy. that odyssey just lets you wander off and get more moons and doesn’t punt you back to the menu every time YOU CLEARED OBJECTIVE is absolutely the difference between a tedious whizbang carnival ride and a fun 3D mario game
Yeah, the deliberately-confused completion number of moons is very important to communicating anti-completionism; along with moons spread over multiple worlds, like the taxi cabs and picture clues, my read is that even in endgame they want you dipping in between worlds, not trying to excavate them entirely one-by-one.
I still can’t believe anyone liked galaxy, whose design philosophy appeared to be “make an eight year old’s idea of a kaizo platformer”
odyssey is good though it absolutely strives to be a trivial game from which you can’t really take anything away other than at a meta level about flow &c.
64 just feels great, its got snap to it and I never had trouble with the camera. like its just not hard to just pop it around where I want it but I realize thats not the normal take. Shell surfing was my jam I spent hours doing it as a kid and I dont know why it never came back. All the levels with their fun names and weird themes. Rainbows and flying carpets? Sure! Grimy industrial tunnels with falling rocks and a dinosaur in a tiny lake? Hell yeah. Whats down this mesh tube in the corner? a little flooded town! Like every element is a little wacky brain party.
Sunshine is really snappy to control and has some great stuff in it, some great movement options and so on. I play it again every now and then. It doesn’t feel as free or as mysterious as 64 however it does have plenty of vaguely threatening whimsy, my favorite kind of whimsy. It feels like nintendo has started shutting down ideas for being “too weird”.
Every design element of Galaxy grated on my so I never gave it that fair of a shake but I feel like that was enough. I jumped around the curvature of a planetoid and loved it, then I did it again and didnt. It felt like being in some sort of condescending nursery world. Mario Galaxy smells like clean diapers and disinfectant.
I beat Odessy on a vacation trip and feel no great desire to return to it. It doesn’t feel joyful, the restraints never really come off until you are used to them and then you just get phantom restraint syndrome. I played it in handheld mode and it felt kinda laggy, kinda… rubbery. Was that in my mind? Like I never died because of it. I also just dont like cappy in any way, especially as a movement mechanic. The levels feel like they have a strict formula and were made by separate teams who communicated with home office exclusively via email.
Its like the mcdonalds play place of mario games. Like I guess this is technically fun but you gotta stay in these tubes.
The impossible number of things to collect in Odyssey discouraged me from ever starting a new game, but I’m absolutely OK remembering it as a really joyful dozen or so hours of videogame.
I know video games are a bunch of systems stacked on systems that are a hairs breadth of falling apart if you use them the wrong way but just want to take my toys and play with them in ways that may void warranties. Sure, playing with them in water might rust the hinges or cause some paint to fade but damn if it didn’t feel good to make my TMNT toys look like they were swimming.
Actually it’s probably more popular now, post-Minecraft and especially with micro-MMOs (DayZ, Rust, Ark (oh god Ark’s direction) and the physics/simulation subgenre, like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
I think it’s most common in engineer-driven games. Someone’s coding and comes up with a funny or cool result and says, why isn’t this a game? If it gets bigger and you put a designer on it that says, but what does this mean? then you start squashing this sort of unstructured play.
The best for this are engineers with a graphic design sense (and here, I’m using ‘engineer’ as a personality and predilection; the type of person who prefers to code over talking or arting)
I’m more of an action game centered person so I need some level of polish to ensure adequate game feel but the times I have felt this most strongest are the LDK mode for DMC4 and the No Mercy mode for Mercenaries in Resident Evil 6. Just upping the enemy count just feels like the most raw design exercise to see what the game and the player can handle.
