| TruckOSaurus said:
The feeling of threat and urgency doesn't need to be portrayed by Mario (but it is to a certain extent since you can see him struggling when he reaches 1 life). As the player, you're the one feels the sense of threat when you dodge bullet bills, jump over electric current, barely make a jump in time, get knocked down by a cosmic clone, etc... then when you finally get the star you can rejoice with Mario because the hardship you've just faced has paid off. |
See, I disagree. I agree with what you put in parentheses and that's important.
In my view, the main videogame character should be the link the player has to the virtual world, and should help the player get immersed into the world he's connecting to. As such, if Mario is getting blown by a gust of wind, he should be holding his hat, or clinging to his body and push forward, or if there's lava below him he should appear to struggle.
To add insult to injury, if you see a character that on the contrary only portrays always the same emotion on screen, then it is totally anti-climactic, it totally breaks the mood and the scene. So for one same emotion portrayed over very different obstacles is a glaring desing mistake.
And so thought the expectation is high, I expect Nintendo to design different emotions in the character throughout different challenges. Wind Waker was an interesting take on this, but the problem is that link is in 3rd person view from the back in most cases, and they only used simplistic facial expressions. There is much that can be said by the body.
In 2D Mario, it becomes even more important to have both facial and body language to reflect what is happening in the game, since the character is that much more visible in his entirety. 3D Mario in 64 and Sunshine gave us a bit more of Mario's face I think since we had full control on the camera back then, but still in galaxy there are a few cases where we can see all of mario and as such they should work on these things. After all, it's the character we see through nearly every moment of the game, so it's not that much to ask, especially seeing that these games are multi-million$ sellers.
I'm trying to find some graphics on Super Metroid on the net, but if I remember correctly, when Samus was low health her body said so. I think mario does in the 3D incarnations I'm not sure. But here are some vids for super metroid that show some interesting character design (it's all awesome, but the most interesting part would be at 8:00):
And I know this is a trick, but look at the art. I think we see a glimpse of this on power bomb use:
