BAD

like i remember starting to notice in ds era that their games started having less to do? like noticeably less content? you could say "well it's a portable system" but that doesn't explain it transferring over to wii. most of their wii games felt more like ds games on the big screen.

a far cry from all their n64 and gcn and even snes games, that seemed to always be trying to like? evolve the hobby. trying to jam as much interesting and unique content into a game that they could. making games bigger and better. they'd see "rules" and take it as a challenge to break them.

that all went away by the time wii era hit. like they seemed to have "guidelines" for putting as little effort or content into a game as possible. it wasn't EVERY series that suffered, but it was certainly a change for some. this kinda continued into the wii u era, where they started to push things a bit again? maybe bc they weren't doing so hot.

by the time switch era really hit, it had come back a bit. a lot of their games stopped feeling like overblown mobile games. but it didn't come back all the way. it still felt like they had some bizarre "guidelines" set up for the amount of content and features. like as if they were trying to set a standard for "this is the max content our players will get for 60 dollars".

but then a new issue arose. zelda botw had come out, and was wildly successful. i don't care what botw fans say, it obviously was designed to copy skyrim and minecraft. it split up content, such as dungeons, very artificially into "shrines" that all looked the same and with nothing that tied them together. even for an open world game, it felt "dead". and they used "oh it's a dying world haha" as an excuse. it felt dead bc it didn't have content to fill in all the blanks.

still, it was wildly successful. all of the old zelda fans bought it, whether they felt disappointed after or not was irrelevant because they'd still bought it. and all the very mainstream players who didn't normally like zelda and only played gta and madden (a much bigger market) also bought it. this told them "yes this is how to make money, follow THIS formula". compare this to mario odyssey, which had a ton of very complete and polished content? which while successful, was maybe only half as successful as botw. nintendo had a new proven strategy for design.

they had also started to develop the "updated port", smash ultimate was definitely the exception, because the majority of the games had only minor additional content. but people ate them up. and they could support these games with dlc. they were double and triple dipping, very successfully.

covid hit, and someone at nintendo pushed them to release their new animal crossing early. this was wildly successful even though the game was so OBVIOUSLY unfinished. nintendo isn't gonna be like "oh it was because of covid, otherwise this game wouldn't have done well in this state". no, they saw it as more proof that they could hold back on purpose and it'd make them more money. and by slowly releasing content updates (some free some paid), which dripfed all the content that was originally supposed to be in the game at launch, they got both free advertising and more money.

this is why totk happened like it did. they knew. they fucking knew. that they didn't have to make a new game or a finished game. even though, honestly, the mainstream gamers who'd bought botw didn't care because they were never going to be loyal anyhow. and the oldschool fans had already been burned by botw. it didn't do nearly as well, but it still sold a shit ton of copies. it felt more like a finished game, sure. but only because it reused most of the content from botw. they'd double dipped again, successfully. they probably didn't care that they'd lost a third of their fans because 2/3 is still twenty million sales lol.

they had successfully duped people into giving them over 50million sales for a single game, not including dlc etc. oh and lets not forget the fucking price increase totk brought.

mario kart world releases. and nintendo again tries to push things. it's a feature incomplete game compared to older titles. content is spread out weirdly. it's obviously unfinished. and yet they charge EIGHTY TO NINETY DOLLARS FOR IT. nintendo themselves say "oh well our game has soooo much content that it SHOULD cost this much". can you blame them? they've been told by their customers for years now "SCAM US SCAM US WE LOVE IT".

but people don't love it this time. mkw is actually selling WORSE than mk8. their strategy failed this time. but, considering the overall picture? they look at it less as "we flew too close to the sun" and more "these greedy gamers hate games with content, they don't understand the VALUE of our games". and i'm sure this will ironically mean future games with less content. the games will probably mostly go back "down" to seventy dollars (still a big increase in a short amount of time), but they'll be lacking even more content.

which brings me to tomodachi life ltd. a game i love. a very successful release. that is totally unfinished and obviously lacking a ton of content. go back and play tdl 3ds and see how many little unique minigames and encounters and unique little bits of content that game had compared to ltd. and they "compensate" for it by allowing the player to "create their own fun". i'm sorry, but me creating a mii that says fuck and living in a trashcan is not the same as a designer creating tomodachi quest. yes i like the former, but it came at too high a cost.

i'm sorry, i've been comparing 3ds to ltd for months now, and 3ds so obviously comes out on top in almost every category. and that was, really, just an enhanced port of a ds game. why does their big console sequel have way less content than a ds game? when that era was known for it's games lacking content??? and before i forget, has anyone else noticed that a good chunk of the clothing and other assets has just been straight up lifted from animal crossing?? i already know a bunch of the "upcoming new content" that will undoubtedly be free and/or paid updated into the game because i've already been seeing it for well over five years in ac.

and tomo ltd was wildly successful. not because it was actually better, but because content creators are so much bigger now. a cc can make a character called shithead and make them say "ass" to an ugly trump mii. they focused development on making a game where the players brought in all the creativity. which lines up with everything they see to do nowadays. which is pushing out unfinished games that are lacking content. overcharging for them. double and triple dipping with updates and dlc. and chasing trends.

we are living in an era with a nintendo that cares more about profit than ever, with leadership formed from old devs transformed into businessmen who "still think they know best" even though they lack any of the passion they'd brought to the table initially. why is miyamoto the head of a gaming company when all he really wants to do is make a new disney world and get into the movie business? and he still tampers with the games, when he isn't actually really concerned about them at all.

or the higher level creatives like aonuma, who so obviously doesn't want to make zelda anymore and so he makes completely different games that still get called "zelda" for some reason. seriously, try and argue botw or eow are anything like zelda games. try. and don't bother with the "botw is like z1" bc no it fucking is not. you want z1? go play lttp or la. botw has more in common w z2, which is still almost nothing.

all that combined with their scammy or at least stingy business practices results in... a company that i spend more time complaining about than i do enjoying the games. i love tomo ltd, but i understand good and well it's only because my standards are so fucking low. remember ac city folk? that's what tomo ltd feels like. yeah it's cool, it's a nice callback to an older portable game. but something important is missing. the company doesn't have what it used to have back when i fell in love with it's games.

now i settle. for a subpar tomo sequel because at least we get more TOMO at all. i say donkey kong is good even though i barely got through half of it before getting bored. the games i'm looking forward to the most are a star fox remake that seems mostly graphical. and a zelda oot remake that will, let's be real, be AT BEST using the botw engine to make ANOTHER botw clone, just reusing the set pieces from oot. and at worst it'll be like star fox. and i'm STILL EXCITED, that's the crazy part. excited for a remake of a game i love using an engine from a bad game and being designed by a creator who doesn't want to make zelda and who famously has said he "doesn't understand why old zelda fans want old zelda back".

i think i've made my point. and driven it into the ground. i don't really care for nintendo anymore. if this nintendo tried to compete with old nintendo or sega or ps1 era sony, it wouldn't stand a chance. i honestly think i'd rather the company be run by a cutthroat businessman looking for the next big thing to grow the company rather than an out of touch, understandably arrogant creative who wants to play things safe to fund his real passion which is making a theme park and movie biz to leave to his family. everyone who made the company what it was either died or retired or became executives or lost interest. so i guess i've lost interest as well. mostly dead company, only better than sony and ms by default bc those companies are somehow significantly worse.

why did i just have to pay almost 30% on top of already insane shipping that cost more than the purchase

somehow a 70 dollar charge became 140 like no no no never again