To me, the juxtaposition of the two biggest Wii launch titles served as perfect illustration of the remainder of this decade in gaming, and what I disliked about it: Wii Sports on the one hand and Twilight Princess on the other. They represent both the tonal and substantive polarity I'm speaking of, yet felt oddly united in their superficiality.
Wii Sports obviously represented the crux of Nintendo's new direction, focused on reaching out to new gamers, mostly out of commercial necessity. Each successive Nintendo home console had fared worse in sales terms than its predecessor up to this point, with the GameCube drawing only about one-third as many total purchases as the NES had. They'd always had a reputation for being the family-friendly one, but by this point it was clear they weren't reaching the whole family, and so with the Wii Nintendo would focus on doing so. The result? ...Eh. Wii Sports to me was mildly fun in a party setting (which were few and far-between for me) for the contemporaneous novelty of its reliance on motion controls, but not the kind of title I've revisited often over the years. Intended to introduce people too the Wiimote, as it was called, it spawned an entire industry of like titles that dominated the platform for years, successfully inspiring many people to try gaming for the first time while at the same time proving off-putting to many more seasoned gamers who craved deeper adventures (myself included). It also resulted in the popular pigeonholing that I still occasionally experience that says my interests must skew heavily casual and shallow because I am, after all, female, which I have not appreciated.
On the other end of the spectrum, in one of their comparatively small number of efforts to appease their pre-existing and experienced fan base of brand loyalists, the big N also released their new system with a Legend of Zelda title in its launch window. Ever since Ocarina of Time, franchise fans had complained of being forced to play as a younger Link, yearning for the return of his adult form. At first, I too thought that that was exactly what I wanted. To summarize the result of these demands though...you know how Final Fantasy has recently decided that it's Game of Thrones? Well with Twilight Princess, Nintendo made a comparable move in deciding that The Legend of Zelda was actually The Lord of the Rings, sending the franchise into full goth mode with all of the attendant moodiness and melodrama aligning with the prevailing demands of the era. Unsurprisingly, it was a commercial success. More surprisingly though, I found the whole experience somehow empty in feel; too tonally heavy-handed to match the nature of the franchise. The drama of it all often felt forced and insincere, and as a result kind of a drudgery, to me. And that's coming from someone who considers myself about half-goth.
I understand many people had a very different experience. I've heard innumerable people tell me they'd quit gaming a generation or two prior only to be drawn back in by the change of direction that the Wii represented. All I can say is that my experience with it was different.
Anyway, this is the sort of dynamic that would characterize gaming overall throughout the rest of the noughties to me; a polar range of casual and wholly light-hearted to the point of emptiness type of experiences on the one hand, a complete return to the older concept of games as simple entertainment and nothing more, and on the other hand, a rival tendency to rely on increasingly arbitrary (and often downright misogynistic) shock value as a marketing strategy for player base building. The Wii was clearly not the epicenter of the latter trend and Twilight Princess was hardly a pronounced example of it either, but I found the juxtaposition of these two Wii launch titles a convenient springboard to that feelings inventory. What I found I actually wanted was more earnestness. Speaking of which, let's (finally) get into some of my favorite 2006 titles:
Let's start with Okami. Built by a semi-autonomous production company called Clover Studio that Capcom had created out of Viewtiful Joe 2's development team, Okami feels very much like an indie Ocarina of Time where you play as a goddess instead of a mere mortal. It follows the same underlying design philosophy, yet diverges from it in ways that lend to the experience a more organic, holistic, and, in keeping with its themes, healing feel. Featuring a very distinctive art style that draws heavily on traditional Japanese paintings and sweepingly moving musical score that similarly draws on feudal Japanese influences, Okami's divine feel is cemented really by its central hook: the celestial brush, which you use to paint everything from bridges and platforms to use to a sun in the sky to change the time of day to bombs to employ to open blocked pathways to attacks you can use in battle to great effect. The ambience thereof is enhanced by the use of (modern) motion controls for me in newer versions of the game. But it's more than those particulars that set it apart. Unlike in the Legend of Zelda games where dungeon areas are clearly distinct from the overworld one traverses and tend to halt narrative progression until they're completed, Okami uses testing areas more organically, weaving them more seamlessly into its larger landscape and using them to advance the game's storyline, which ranks among its best qualities for my taste. Even just traversing the landscape, watching flowers bloom in your wake, feels legitimately magical and uplifting and it helps advance the title's themes that protagonist Amaterasu gains the experience she needs to level up and increase in battle prowess not by battling foes but by completing side quests; by helping other characters.
The underlying message of Okami crystallizes at the end of your adventure. I won't spoil the details of that for you, but the purpose of the game is to convey the importance of faith in our world and the power of art to preserve and convey it to new generations. I'm not a very religious person or much of a believer, but there was something about this game's heart that made me kind of want to join the ranks thereof, and for being that powerful a work of art, I have to credit Okami as my favorite game from this year.
The runner-up choice here for me is Chibi-Robo!, which was a quirky GameCube game created by a team of just 12 people wherein you play as a tiny robot tasked with helping clean up an average suburban house. The smallness of the player character and his dependence on electric charging has the effect of turning what would otherwise be a small-ish setting you'd get tired of exploring quickly with dull tasks to accomplish you'd quickly tire of doing into instead a large-feeling open-ended landscape worthy of traversing and just challenging enough to fully discover. The real specialness of the game though stems from the lives of the family you're tasked with helping out in the small ways you can. As you progress through your tasks, you'll find the story of a brewing divorce unfolding that's roots can be traced to denial and neglect. While the particulars are distinct and quirky, the crux of of this story reminded me a great deal of my own parents and what their relationship had often been like and of the certain feeling of helplessness toward the devolution of their relationship that I'd felt growing up. Some of this story is told through cinema scenes, but much of it is also told through brilliantly-devised environmental storytelling that rewards your exploration and active attention to detail. It's my second-favorite GameCube title after Metroid Prime. (EDIT: I just looked this up and noticed that Chibi-Robo! actually came out in 2005 in Japan. Oh well, I'm still leaving this commentary here since it came out in '06 here in the U.S.)
Some of the other 2006 titles I enjoyed a lot included Drill Dozer, Guitar Hero 2, Persona 3 (my first game in the series, marked by a welcome changing up of the standard JRPG formula that combined dungeon-crawling adventure with social simulation in a brilliantly organic way), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (through which I had the good fortune of meeting a girlfriend, which was a first for me up to that point in my online gamine escapades), and one of the rarest games ever made: Rule of Rose. To single out the latter for a moment because I'm kind of proud to own such a rare game, the reason Rule of Rose has been so difficult to come by is because it was the subject of the absolute dumbest controversy in the history of entire this medium: it was banned outright in the UK and subject to a larger inquiry by the European parliament over content that didn't exist. (Supposedly it was a game that you win by murdering as many children as possible. Actually it was a psychological horror game about being manipulated and abused by children and kind of an interesting commentary (mostly) on how the female social hierarchy works and how girls bully each other. Narratively it's basically Lord of the Flies but with girls instead of boys.) Even though it had originally been their concept, Sony eventually opted against publishing the game in response to the fabricated controversy that was literally just made up by a writer for an Italian magazine who never played the game.
The insane reaction to Rule of Rose was another symptom of this particular period. This was also the infamous Jack Thompson era, which began mostly in response to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and spiraled from there into an endless stream of idiotic litigation that persisted until the Supreme Court finally intervened. On the other end of this spectrum was another 2006 title called Rape Lay that's exactly what it sounds like, which quickly got banned outright even its native Japan. It all surmises much of the aura of the 2000s, especially as you got into the second half of the decade. Like the larger culture, there was a trend in games development toward favoring edgier, darker content that yielded an uptick in demand for censorship in the case of this comparatively new and undiscovered medium. It can be safely said that I'm happier now that both of those trends have receded a good deal. I found it all-around annoying.
A more positive development you were seeing by 2006 though was the emergence of the Xbox 360 as a major competitor. This was the last time that a player other than either Sony or Nintendo would ascend even to the second-place position in the console wars. It was really an accident owed to the poor launch of the PlayStation 3 ($600 price tag, mixed-reception controller lacking now-standard features like force feedback, practically no launch line-up) that got remedied a few years later once Sony trimmed the price with a slimmed-down model, but that accident of history provided Microsoft a brief moment in the sun in console gaming that hasn't been repeated and it was kinda neat to see.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 11 November 2023
