With the somewhat recent bomb of “Starfox Zero,” I couldn’t help but wonder if Nintendo is going in the right direction.
Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo has had some bad apples in the past, even producing a system that was a universal flop (the Virtual Boy), but what I’m talking about goes beyond a few wrong turns; I think that the core road map that Nintendo has put itself on is flawed.
This dates back to the days of the Gamecube, when Nintendo had a third place console.
Their age-old nemesis, Sega had just went under in the console scene, pushed out by industry newcomers Sony and Microsoft.
Nintendo needed to rethink how they approached video games. The Gamecube had a fantastic lineup of games, but the console just didn’t sell.
If they wanted to compete with Microsoft and Sony, they needed to capture a broad, general audience, much like the mascot platformers and first person shooters did on the Xbox and PS2.
Their solution; Project Revolution, later known as the Wii.
The Wii’s goal was to transform how the public interacted with video games in order to widen the demographic, and boy did it work. The Wii is the fifth highest selling console of all time, behind the original Playstation, Game Boy/Game Boy Color, Nintendo DS and PS2.
However, while the Wii managed to capture a broad, general audience, it didn’t have that many great games. As a result, it became a console people played for a few months and then allowed to collect dust.
Why was this? The Wii’s software was a nightmare to program for 3 party developers, and Nintendo offered little assistance. It’s why you have so many ports that simply look and play better on the 360 and PS3. It became a console that only Nintendo knew how to program for, and barely so.
What was Nintendo’s solution to this? Let’s try to change how people interact with games again, except this time, it failed. The Wii U has a tons of great games on it, and the upcoming “Legend of Zelda” for the NX looks fantastic, but the Wii U is a monstrous, unwieldly piece of hardware. It’s big, it’s bulky, and it somehow controls worse than the Wii mote. For what is was supposed to be, a second “revolution” in gaming, it fell flat on its face.
Now, it’s important to note that despite the fact that the Wii U did not live up to Nintendo’s expectations, the system did make money. So many people like to compare this to the Virtual Boy or Sega’s track record of failed systems, but this isn’t a fair comparison to make. Nintendo started making money on the system around the time Super Smash Bros. 4 came out. They are nowhere near getting booted out of the console business; they have more than enough capital to stay in the game, for now.
That being said, Nintendo’s goal, to revolutionize how we interact with games, failed. Their exploits in motion controls and extra screens never provided a superior option to buttons. Instead of revolutionizing gaming, the company made a few gimmicks here and there that drew in the casual crowd, while those gimmicks themselves alienated their core fanbase.
I’d go so far as to say that even the Nintendo DS’s touch screen didn’t add a whole lot to its games, aside from a few drawing mechanics and some convenient alternatives to… buttons.
All this has been good and fine up to this point. Sure, the third party game developers have left, but Nintendo has enough strong franchises to keep the machine going. It helps that, for the most part, they have been the only company that knows how to develop games for their own hardware. Sure, some of their games have had stupid little gimmicks plastered onto them (“The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword” and “Phantom Hourglass”), but they didn’t break the games themselves, or present such a ginormous learning curve that only the absolute best players in their audience could enjoy their games.
Until “Starfox Zero.” From those who have been able to adapt to the atrocious controls, I hear it’s a great game. However, most people can’t do that. This is a major re-imagining of a beloved first person IP, that was supposed to give the Wii U one last fiscal push, but instead made it the laughing stock of this generation.
Nintendo needs to stop trying to re-imagine how people play video game systems, because all of their solutions have been very poor alternatives to buttons. Some of their ideas have even hurt the strong first party properties that their consoles survive off of.
Nintendo needs to focus on games, not gimmicks. If they want to succeed with the NX, they will have to craft a good ol’ button controller that you can fit in your hands, on a system that has graphics that can pass for the next generation. Nintendo used to be an industry leader in 3D graphics (ala the Nintendo 64), it’s not too farfetched to think that the NX could be a beefcake. I can only hope that the recent news about “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” is indicative of a change in attitude inside the company.