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Soundwave on 04 November 2015
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spemanig said:
Soundwave said:

Sometimes maybe you just need to listen to your audience. Batman once upon a time was this:

Which then became even campier/sillier

But the audience has overwhelmingly decreed that this is the Batman they prefer for the last several decades ... dark and serious

And when they went too silly with Batman again like the George Clooney version, the audience overwhelmingly rejected it

 

If DC/Warner kept trying to force feed a silly/campy Batman down the throats of audiences, the character would basically be a niche character that appeals to  small group of purists. Sometimes it's OK to listen to what the market is telling you, in fact it's vital if you want franchises to endure. For every Mickey Mouse there's a Popeye that has basically zero relevance to kids today because the character did not adapt to the times. 

And lets face it, Nintendo doesn't frankly have the gumption to make a dark/serious IP and invest real huge marketing dollars into it. Too risky for them and it would likely fail because they would have one "dark franchise" in a sea of cartoony fare. They needed to make more IP like that in N64/GCN/Wii days (or not lose them via selling Rare) when it was far less risky to make a new IP. With today's development costs, big time new IP like Destiny require a monstrous investment to get on the map. 


Batman wasn't originally an elfen boy in green tights being helped by fairies and saving princesses and inspired by characters such as Peter Pan, Taran, and other Disney influencers. He was a rich, grown, muscular man clad in black, whos mascot was a nocturnal animal commonly associated with fear and darkness. That's why you haven't seen Pan slicing heads off with a beard telling kids "Yes, you do want to grow up." Zelda is not the franchise that needs to listen to an subset of audience that frankly shouldn't be playing these games if that's the kind of stuff they expect from the series.

I can't even say it's not their fault for getting into a series they would have never liked. It's entirely their fault. People say Ocarina of Time is some dark, gritty game when it is literally cartoon violence. Nothing happens that is grittier or has more scary imagery than the most violent scenes in Disney movies like The Little Mermaid or Snow White. Ganon was a cartoon villian with cartoon motivations, and that's fine. All the art for the game was blatantly cartoon art, and that's fine. The game was Rated E and that's fine. If you played OoT and expected the future to be some dark fantasy franchise for older audiences, you were horribly fooling yourself, and I frankly have no clue what you were playing. My advice is to play something else and get over it. Play the Witcher III. People loved that. Play Dark Souls. I personally love that. Play Shadow of Morridor. It won plenty of game of the year awards. There's plenty of high quality dark fantasy games about adult heroes with swords. Zelda has never been for you, and clearly never will.

TP was a misstep in direction. Aonuma has expressed this in literally every interview on the subject. He has literally never gleefully praised the artstyle of TP since release, and always talks back to that time as though he had been coerced into making the game look like that, which he basically was. Literally every single Zelda game since has been a fervant rejection of this direction, and for good reason - it doesn't belong and it never belonged. If Nintendo wants a Batman, they need to make a Batman and not try to make Peter Pan Batman. They learned over a year ago that trying to turn Peter Pan into Batman makes for a lower quality product, which is why SS was so opposite of that despite all its rampant failings, and why Zelda U is going even farther way from that. Which is absolutely as it should be.

Nintendo is the Disney of the gaming industry for a reason. If the idea of that makes you squirm, you shouldn't be here. If Zelda being E Rated puts a frown on your face, you shouldn't be here. If bright primary colors and a young, soft faced, "kiddy" boy clad in a bright colored tunic makes you blush in embarrasment, you shouldn't be here. You don't get it. These games were never made for you, and that's okay. But they never will be either, and that's okay too. Continue playing something else. Continue absolutely love those other games made specifically for you. Or get mad and rant about it. I don't care. These games are being made for me so I'm peachy, and that's as it should be, because I do get it.

It would make me happy if Zelda U was Rated E/E10. It puts a giant smile on my face that Link is visably younger than he's been in a very long time and wrapped in a world filled with lime greens, baby blues, and juicy oranges once again. It makes me dance that Nintendo is treating Zelda like the Disney-esque darling it always has been. That's as it should be. The word grit doesn't belong in any sentence describing The Legend of Zelda other than "This most recent entry in the franchise is totally lacking in any true grit. Why does that matter again? Oh right: Twilight Princess happened like 10 years ago and people still haven't gotten over that. Oh well. Anyway, yeah. The game's good."

 

Disney is darker/grittier than most Nintendo fare anyway. Nintendo veers more into almost pre-school design categories with things like Animal Crossing, even the humor/"romance/sex" (ie: kissing) in Disney movies would be too intense for a lot of Nintendo franchises. 

I've owned every Nintendo consolefrom the 1980s onwards outside of the Virtual Boy (which I regret not picking up when it was on clearance at Blockbuster Video) and probably have one of the largest Nintendo collections on this board. 

And the 60s Batman was sillier than any version of Link, it's just up to the audience I think the dictate what they prefer. 

Zelda hardcore fans really aren't the big issue, they will buy the Zelda game no matter what the art style is. 

What Zelda used to represent (probably doesn't anymore) was it was still a mass market IP to the wider crowd of gaming, as in you would get Zelda fans to buy it, but MORE than just the usual Nintendo fans bought Ocarina of Time for example, I know even Playstation fanatics that bought an N64 basically for OoT and GoldenEye, but they had to have it. None of those people bought a GameCube for Wind Waker.

That's the difference between a Zelda game selling 5-8 million copies or the ho-hum 3-4 million that the cartoony ones top off at. When you have a cartoony version of it, it's just a turn off to that second portion of the market and they quickly go elsewhere. That's why it's not really smart business, Zelda fanatics will buy any kind of Zelda game in any art style, but Nintendo is otherwise cutting the legs off the wider mass appeal the franchise could have by force feeding a cartoony style that a very niche audience is asking for. 

Nintendo can push that "we're the sugary sweet company of the game industry" and that's fine. They just won't have a large slice of the home console market ever again I doubt. People don't buy consoles to play on 50-inch HDTVs (soon to be 4KTVs) to play cartoony games anymore, the home console is now for big screen experiences. They will do well with smartphone games though with that aesthic, which will more than pay for the bills, so at least there's that.