vezouta asked:

Well its dumb because the Ocarina of Time remake for 3DS kept the Bulldog moblins. Spirit tracks for DS featured Bulldog moblins as well. Also outside of color, the only difference between moblins and Pig warriors in the switch version now is their ears, lame! Also it comes off as a retcon.

(In regards to this post.)

Ah, I didn’t realize there was more recent precedent for bulldog moblins. That’s what I get for basing my answer off a quick scan of the wiki, I guess :) I have to admit I haven’t played a mainline Zelda game since the original Link’s Awakening, so I’m very fuzzy on the details.

Given that, I agree this is a bizarre and frustrating decision on Nintendo’s part, inconsistent with their own precedent and with the attention to detail the remake otherwise seems to be receiving. Now it bugs me too. :)

vezouta asked:

What also bugs me about the Link’s Awakening switch graphics is the original game had Bulldog Moblins AND Pig Moblins, the remake removed the bulldog moblins so now we just have Pig Moblins, lame Nintendo.

(In regards to this post.)

I didn’t know about that - that is disappointing!

I was ready to get all huffy about how rising costs of graphical fidelity often mean we lose artistic variety along the way, but after looking into this it seems like a much more interesting problem. Maybe you knew all this, but it was news to me - apparently moblins were originally bulldog-like but after a few games became more pig-like. The original Link’s Awakening is one of the few games on the cusp of the transition and so features both the bulldog moblins and pig moblins.

I’d assumed the remake dropped the bulldog moblins to save costs, but it looks like they still get their own model, it just also looks pig-like. You can see on the Zelda wiki - the formerly-bulldog moblins are the current default page image for the Moblin article, while the pig ones are the page image for Pig Warrior.

So this isn’t about costs or laziness - it’s about artistic direction. When Link’s Awakening was first made, moblins could look like either bulldogs or pigs - but for a long time now, they’ve only looked like pigs. I can understand why Nintendo would decide to update the design to bring it in line with what most people today know moblins to be, but I get why it bugs you and I do find myself wishing they’d taken a different approach.

I don’t understand the appeal of the toy/diorama/tilt-shift aesthetic for the Link’s Awakening remake. To me it’s an incorrect nesting of metaphor, similar to adding lens flares and related effects to video games.

Like, when you’re playing a game and it’s raining and some water droplets get rendered on the screen like it’s being filmed with a camera with a wet lens - unless you’re playing a game where the conceit actually is that you’re looking through a camera, this is immersion-breaking, not immersion-reinforcing. Like, I was driving around the city rocking out to the radio and looking for trouble, now I’m apparently… watching a video feed of that happening instead? I’m trying to pretend I’m actually in the world of the game - why shove this additional camera metaphor in the middle and distance me from that world?

With the toys - it’s been a couple of decades since I played with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, but the way I remember it, the fantasy wasn’t “Oh man, what if this molded plastic could move by itself?" It was “Oh man, what if the turtles had these crazy adventures I am making up?” The toys were a gateway, a jumping-off point for the imagination. They stood in for the turtles the way they looked and sounded in the cartoon.

When I played the original Link’s Awakening, it was the same thing. In my head, I was on an adventure on Koholint Island. I was getting to know its inhabitants, bravely exploring dangerous dungeons, and prevailing against monsters in combat. The low resolution monochrome graphics, the tinny chiptune music, it was all a gateway.

Updating the graphics to look like plastic toys makes no sense to me. (I didn’t much care for this approach in Disney Infinity either, though there they at least had the excuse of trying to make it look like your actual figures had come to life in a stylistically-consistent world.) Now the fantasy isn’t being on an adventure, it’s… playing with toys and imagining an adventure? It’s pretending to pretend? Again, why shove this additional metaphor in the middle and distance the player from the world?

In Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Clank receives an artifact called the Chronoscepter. It does several things, but to me the most interesting is that when it hits objects like broken pipes and shattered viewscreens, it reverses their timeline and repairs them. Throughout the entire Ratchet & Clank series I’d been smashing up the scenery; I found it surprisingly satisfying to suddenly have a chance to restore it instead.

Since then, I’ve played a few of what I think of as “restoration games” based around this sort of mechanic. Rather than running around causing destruction, Flower, Refunct, and Dawn all have you exploring landscapes to restore life and color. I found them all to be uplifting experiences and I’ve been thinking about why I enjoy this kind of gameplay so much.

Thematically, it’s adjacent to what you might call “rebuilding games” that give you ruined farms (Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, etc.) or towns (Dragon Quest Builders, etc.) and task you with building them back up. I like that a lot too, but I think it’s a different niche - those games are about imposing your own will and design on nature, same as normal “building games” like Minecraft and Terraria. The ruination is just there to provide an excuse for why you have to start the farm (or town) over and build it the way you want to - your first task is to clear it out, not restore it.

Restoration games aren’t about your will and design. They aren’t about construction - they’re about undoing destruction. In a sense they are still power fantasies, but ones where you have the power to reverse entropy. You can wipe away the ravages of time and prevent inevitable loss and decay. You can give death the middle finger.

That’s real power.

It’s an appealing fantasy. I’d like to see more such games.

It’s being reported that the upcoming Animal Crossing: New Horizons will not support cloud backups for its save files “to avoid manipulating time, which remains one of the founding concepts of the series.” (Source, translation.)

It’s bad enough that Nintendo doesn’t allow you to back up your own save files manually and makes a paid subscription the only way to protect your data from hardware failures, damage, loss, or theft. That’s already anti-consumer.

But if they’re going to do that, then once you’re paying money for the privilege of backing up your data from playing your game on your console, no game should be able to opt out. It’s ludicrous to charge you for a service and then tell you “Nope, this particular developer didn’t feel like you should get to use the service you’re paying for on the product they sold you.”

Supposedly, developers need “a good reason” to opt out of cloud backups, but in practice the reasons we’ve seen so far usually aren’t good at all. But what I find interesting about this one is how paternalistic it is.

It feels similar to the argument you sometimes hear against the inclusion of easy modes, that somewhere a player might play on easy even though they’d enjoy the game more on hard, and preventing this possibility is somehow worth blocking other people from enjoying the game at all. I don’t care if some player out there uses save backups to finish their insect collection faster or whatever - why on earth is preventing that worth blocking all players from backing up their save in a game that’s intended to be played for months or years?