This is an IGN opinion piece from Charlie Lopresto, who has been writing online about Nintendo since building his first Pokemon fansite in 1999. He rates the DS Lite as his favorite Nintendo system and will not rest until the Koopalings are once more recognized as Bowser’s rightful heirs.
Nintendo hired that man!
Not literally. There is no man, or woman, or anyone for that matter. Most cries of “hire this man” are sarcastic, even scornful. The notion of an Unreal Engine Mario with spotty framepacing and shader compilation screens runs contrary to everything we know about the company that consistently bucks modernity and blazes its own trail. Nintendo would never chase such stale industry standards. You might as well have Peach on the tactical comms.
The jokes have been landing a little differently lately. Star Fox on Switch 2 is a stellar remake of a game that’s been remade several times since 1993, full of lens flare and lush skyboxes and physically-based feathers rendered with the full triple-A toolkit. Meanwhile, Ocarina of Time’s second remake appears to chase a similarly contemporary sheen. Nintendo is still no stranger to charming, bespoke bangers, but the remake slate, the Switch 2’s less-than-inspired existence, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s public embrace of the Mario Galaxy Movie’s mid-ness all raise a question that a lot of Nintendo fans would rather not sit with too long. Has Nintendo lost its soul?
What is Nintendo’s soul? Its sauce, its rizz, the secret ingredient that let it run circles around competitors with triple the teraflops? Soul, for Nintendo, has always meant the same thing: making a decision that could only have come from them. So why does it feel, maybe for the first time, that Nintendo is going with the flow?
This is not a new argument. Nintendo already had it – with itself – twenty-six years ago.
“Where Is My Mature Zelda?”
August 24th, 2000, Chiba, Japan: Nintendo opens the doors of its annual “Spaceworld” exhibition, the company’s own version of E3 where it’s set to debut the next generation of hardware after the commercially disappointing N64.
The reveal of the Gamecube, a teeny purple box with a handle, and its accompanying controller with bean-shaped buttons, oozed with the kind of quirky character we’d come to expect from the big N, but the software on display was a very different beast. The now-legendary Spaceworld 2000 demo reel consists of clips designed to dazzle turn-of-the-millenium game journalists with the pure graphical power many felt had been lacking in the prior generation. Amidst a litter of dancing Meowths and myriad Marios, sandwiched between a squashed and stretched Luigi and Samus Aran sprinting down an exploding hallway, was 12 seconds that would spark one of the biggest fan outcries in gaming history.
Finally, Nintendo would have a cool, realistic Zelda to silence the lunchroom slander and BBS bullies. At long last, Nintendo could compete graphically with contemporaries like Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s recently unveiled Xbox. The company would be safe from irrelevancy, spared the sad fate of Sega’s Dreamcast that just couldn’t keep up with the Final Fantasies and Metal Gear Solids out there. This was considered an unusual move for Nintendo even at the time. Covering the event, IGN’s own Fran Mirabella remarked:
“In a very un-Nintendo style it showed how great the games could graphically be, not how well they might play… In fact, the whole presentation was almost totally devoid of Nintendo’s true vision. The innovative company has said time and time again that great graphics mean nothing, and it can only succeed if it offers the world a new way of looking at games.”
Those fears would prove unfounded just a year later. The graphical demo was just that, a quick hit of hype never intended to be a real game, though that didn’t stop console warriors from salivating at the thought of bump-mapped Biggorons and Bongo Bongos.
When the actual GameCube Zelda was revealed at Spaceworld 2001, the reception to the cartoonish, child Link and his brightly colored, highly saturated world was nothing short of volcanic, an embarrassing epidemic of pants-wetting and puerile anger towards “Celda.” Message boards across the web raged: “Where is my mature Zelda?” “They made Zelda look like a puppet show for 5 year olds!” “I want a deep plot and REALISTIC graphics!” “I thought this game would look so good my eyes would bleed!”
Hindsight has been kind to Celda, now known and beloved as Wind Waker. The art style that sent forums into fits has endured as a shining example of Nintendo’s bold, visionary, trend-bucking spirit, while the Spaceworld demo that was so breathtaking in 2000, with its plasticky character models and sludgy brown aesthetic, has aged like Lon Lon Milk. Even when Nintendo gave the “hire this man” crowd exactly what they wanted with Twilight Princess, the solidly mid sequel remains lower on the tier list than the Zelda games the company made on its own terms.
It’s almost like Nintendo knows what it’s doing. After all, it’s been doing it for a long time, and the philosophy is no accident. It was, in fact, a deliberate, named decision that allowed Nintendo’s soul to emerge.
Lateral Thinking
Neither Wind Waker nor the rest of the GameCube’s very admirable library could save the quirky little console. It was already falling behind competitors when Satoru Iwata became president of Nintendo in May of 2002. A master programmer who knew his way around hardware, Iwata could see which way the industry was headed and wanted none of it. The GameCube generation would be the last in which Nintendo tried to hang with the big dogs in the race for graphical fidelity. Competing was expensive, bloating development costs and eating into margins– and unlike Sony and Microsoft that sell cutting-edge hardware at a loss, Nintendo turns a profit on every console it ships.
The result was the Wii, a paradigm-shifting revolution in gaming that couldn’t even dream of cracking 720p while games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto ignited an triple-A explosion that severely graphicsmogged Nintendo’s seventh-generation console. The games that made the Wii worth owning were bespoke, designed from the ground up around the capabilities of the cost-efficient hardware in that clean, tiny white box. They didn’t look like the other games on the shelf because they couldn’t, outside of rough-looking compromised ports with little to offer beyond gratuitous waggle.
The Wii, and the equally humble-under-the hood DS, looked and played like toys, but their astronomical success proved Iwata’s strategy beyond any reasonable argument. He was running a playbook established 15 years before by Gunpei Yokoi, the brilliant inventor who saw salarymen goofing off with calculators on the train and used the same components to invent the concept of handheld gaming.
Yokoi called his philosophy “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology,” making the most of cheap, well-explored, underpowered components through innovation in design and experience rather than raw performance. It’s evident in the deliberate simplicity of Yokoi’s Game and Watch and Game Boy, whose monochromatic screen traded color for a lower price tag and 30 hours of double-A battery life. Iwata decided to scale Yokoi’s doctrine to home consoles, creating a lane for Nintendo to occupy all its own.
Hardware limits heavily informed the design of Nintendo’s software, and rather than sheepishly hiding behind its modest specs, the company used them as permission to dazzle with wit and craftsmanship and soul. You already know what it looks like.
Soul is responding to the pre-rendered muscle of Donkey Kong Country with the crayon scribbles of Yoshi’s Island. Soul is turning to cardboard cutouts to compete with the operatic excesses of Cloud Strife and Squall, or forgoing the crowd-pleasing path of a hyper-realistic Hero of Time and delighting us with Toon Link instead. Soul isn’t always enough, but Nintendo’s long history of flops from the Satellaview to the Wii U are still imbued with the undeniable spirit of a company that’s willing to put itself out there and try something different.
Even the company’s more frustrating business decisions have a handmade, idiosyncratic quality that distinguishes them from generic corporate extraction. Moves like sticking with cartridges way past the point of reason, charging $40 for DLC in the form of a plastic figurine, and locking voice chat and game soundtracks behind a standalone app were all kind of insane, but recognizably, soulfully, Nintendo insane. Frankly, we wouldn’t have it any other way, even if our wallets say otherwise. Nintendo is gonna Nintendo, and that’s worked out really well for more than a century. Lately, however, Nintendo’s been doing a little too much of what Nintendon’t.
Nintendon’t
Nintendo has been so successful for so long that it’s almost hard to remember its last flop era, even if it was only about 13 years ago. The Wii U, a funky, dual screen concept that confused retailers and alienated the casual audience cultivated by the Wii, was an unmitigated disaster, and Nintendo, true to form, didn’t waste any time on a new pivot. The withered technology ethos wasn’t the problem, as the Switch would prove with extreme prejudice, but it was clearly time to find more mainstream ways to make money. The tightly-controlled walled garden that had generated so much of the company’s mystique and aura would be opened wide to licensors, theme parks, toys, and movies, and things wouldn’t really be the same afterwards.
This isn’t entirely a bad thing. Super Nintendo World is fantastic, we’ll never say no to cool Lego sets, and it was nice to have a Mario Bros. movie that didn’t traumatize the people making or viewing it. Still, the first cracks appeared almost immediately: the film that Nintendo, with all its creative capital and institutional weirdness, chose to sign off on was a shallow, by-the-numbers exercise in focus-grouped IP exploitation from the folks who made Minions. You’d think the company behind utterly unique, out-of-left-field ideas like Pikmin and WarioWare could be a little more creative than Chris Pratt.
But that’s movies. Surely the games would be different. Surely Nintendo would follow up the runaway success of the Switch with another seismic piece of hardware to fly in the face of the futile quest for graphical perfection. Its answer was the Switch 2: the Switch, with more graphics. While not unappreciated given the dismal resolution and framerates of the original console, running the same playbook with some extra juice under the hood was a perfectly whelming decision from a company we’re used to seeing dazzle us. It’s exactly what everyone else does.
The software slate tells a similarly milquetoast tale. Switch 2 launched with Mario Kart World as the flagship title, a cromulent enough entry in the stalwart racing series that nonetheless left much of the fanbase wanting more– especially given its historic $80 price tag, well before GTA 6 came under fire for doing the same. The audacity of charging so much for more Mario Kart is a testament to how much grace fans are willing to give Nintendo as long as the company holds up its end of the bargain and delivers the good stuff. But is it doing that?
The Switch 2 is, by all commercial metrics, a massive success, and Nintendo is still delivering great games on the regular. Surprise hits like Tomodachi Life and Donkey Kong Bananza are still bursting with the company’s trademark magic, but it seems like for every soulful smash there’s either a misfire like Metroid Prime 4, or, well, not a whole lot. GBA Pokemon roms sold at full price and paid upgrades for the back catalog. It’s the sound of a satiated company happy to tread water.
And Nintendo is right to be happy. The folks working there certainly are, with an impossibly low turnover rate in an industry that’s infamous for mass layoffs. The people are what make Nintendo Nintendo, and the accumulated wisdom and expertise from decades in the development trenches is impossible to recreate elsewhere. But those people are getting older, and many of the icons of Nintendo’s golden age are entering into a well-earned retirement. Some, like Iwata, are tragically no longer with us, and the ones who stayed might be growing a little checked-out.
Even Shigeru Miyamoto himself, the visionary genius behind some of the most joyful, inventive games ever made has settled into a sort of a ceremonial emeritus role. And let’s be clear, the man who has given us so much owes us nothing and deserves to ride off into the sunset. That said, it was a little weird to see him caping so hard for the Mario Galaxy movie. He almost seemed defensive, taking shots at film critics for being so negative on the utterly routine sequel. If Miyamoto-san is willing to go to bat for mediocrity, what does that say about Nintendo?
There’s still plenty of talent willing to take risks, from a rising new generation of developers cutting their teeth on fun new series like Splatoon to legends like Masahiro Sakurai pouring his considerable creative energy into an awesome and entirely unasked-for Kirby Air Riders sequel before being sent back to the Smash Bros. mines.
What happens when the people at Nintendo who know how to make something weird and mean it are retired, uninterested, or otherwise occupied? The traditional move in gaming is to fall back on tried and tested IP. And what do you do when you’ve got some of the most valuable IP in human history and no particular vision for what to do with it?
You remake it.
Sorry to Jet
Star Fox on Switch 2 is an awesome game. It’s gorgeous, runs flawlessly on the still-somewhat underpowered hardware, and feels more or less exactly like playing the original, just with some extra cutscenes that all take place with immaculate anthropomorphic character models loafing about in one grey room. It’s an excellent introduction to the franchise, largely because it was the introduction to the franchise. Behind the bells and whistles, Star Fox 2026 is largely the same game as the 1993 Super FX shooter and exactly the same game as the 1997 Nintendo 64 classic that brought force feedback to the masses. The only difference is that now it looks and sounds like every other game out there.
Gone are the unhinged line-readings in bizarre regional accents delivered via the distorted urgency of the N64’s audio compression that became vocal stims for an entire generation, replaced with serviceable modern actors reciting sanded-down dialogue like they don’t want to wake up their parents in the next room. The radio squeal and static have been swapped for sterile HD competency. The visuals are stunning but lack readable clarity, and the bosses have lost the crispy hit feedback that let you know your shots were landing. For all the world, Star Fox feels like Nintendo hired that man, but that man was missing that extra spark that made Star Fox 64 hit different.
It’s good. Great, even. But is it special? Is it soulful? Does it have the juice? Compare it to the handmade models used in the original promotional materials, these fuzzy, ghastly marionettes inspired by low-budget British children’s programmes. Or, if you want something a little less nightmare inducing, the team’s dynamic anime makeover from the Mario Galaxy movie could have been an interesting jumping-off point. There were a lot of ways the abstract polygons of Andross’s armada could have been interpreted, but Nintendo went for the safest one. Maybe it was intentional, a way to get newcomer Velan Studios up to speed on Star Fox before letting them loose to carve their own more interesting path. There’s a time and a place for training wheels, and Star Fox is a fine franchise to earn your sea legs on. Zelda is another matter entirely.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time is arguably the most celebrated game in the most celebrated franchise ever, and it looks to be headed somewhere similar. It’s too early to render a full verdict, but the visual direction reads like a company more interested in validating the Spaceworld 2000 crowd than telling them to pound sand and giving them greatness they didn’t even know they wanted.
Nintendo has gone back to this well before. The 3DS version of Ocarina was more of an HD port than a full remake, and even that lost some of the immaculate original art style in the translation, especially when it came to Majora’s Mask. But this is something else entirely. Nintendo redoing Ocarina of Time with the “mature,” “realistic” graphics gamers pine for is like Hayao Miyazaki remaking Princess Mononoke in live action on a greenscreen. It’s not wrong, exactly, it’s just the most commercially legible version of the thing with the highest profit upside, a path Nintendo normally refuses to take.
Ocarina isn’t alone in the pipeline. Nintendo’s near-future slate is notably light on original titles, and more sacred cows are undoubtedly queued up for the same modern makeover. At what point do you stop celebrating your back catalog and start fracking it for guaranteed returns? It’s a fine line, and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Remakes are not your enemy. Remakes can absolutely have soul, they just need something to say. Capcom is running back the entire Resident Evil series with expanded games rebuilt from the ground up in ways that enhance the source material without xeroxing it, earning them a ton of money and an impeccable reputation among fans and critics alike. Atlus is revitalizing past Persona games with the confident visual flourish it developed after the phenomenon that was P5, using its newfound swagger to embellish the classic RPGs with modern, unmistakable style. Both approaches require a genuine point of view about what the thing is and what it could be. The best remakes come with an opinion about the original, they have someone in the room who cares enough to have an argument about it. Nintendo used to be that company. We’ll know soon enough if it still is.
