now, before you zelda fans get your panties in a bunch, i'm not talking about which is cooler or a better game by itself, but which game best demonstrates the philosophies inherent to the Wii console.

The most important point that Nintendo is trying to capture in he Wii console is that of inclusion of everyone. all races,gender, age, left or right handedness, casual or hardcore player alike. The most difficult issue for their games to address is the ability to appeal to BOTH casual AND hardcore gamers. In general, what a casual gamer looks for in a game and what a hardcore gamer looks for are completely opposite of each other.

Now in this instance, I am not defining Hardcore players as those who are the graphics whore mature shooter/racing games only stereotype, but rather those who devote a large portion of their time to gaming, and also expect the games they play to provide challenges that will remain challenging even as their skill with the game increases. 

When I looked at Mario Galaxy, I noticed a wide diversity of level difficulty. Some stars were mind numbingly easy to get, while others have been frustratingly impossible. What I also noticed was that the number of stars that I found easy to obtain fell very close to the number that was required to gain access to the final boss battle against bowser to "beat the game"

What I am beginning to realize, or at the very least suspect, is that with Mario Galaxy, Nintendo has recognized the different mindset between the casual and Hardcore gamer. Where the casual gamer plays with the basic goal of "winning" the hardcore gamer wants to be challenged, which to this point had usually coincided with beating the game.

When the casual gamer plays SMG, they can work through the less challenging stars and are still capable of beating the game without having to trial their way through frustrating obstacles. Hardcore gamers can beat the game with little difficulty, but are then challenged to overcome ALL of the stars, which by this point will be whittled down to only the most challenging stars remaining. By overcoming this challenge they are then rewarded with a feature that further extends their gameplay. (At least if I've heard properly, i haven't gotten that far myself) 

As a result, Mario galaxy is capable of appealing to the Casual and Hardcore gamer at the same time. This is something, I feel, cannot be said about Twilight Princess.

While an excellent game, I found Twilight Princess to be challenging my first time playing it, but then not really challenging at all after that. I consider myself an intermediary between casual and hardcore, so with this in mind, it seems to me that the Hardcore player would have found little challenge to the game and grown bored, and the casual player would have found far too much challenge and grown frustrated.

There is no difficulty setting in which I can make the game more or less challenging, and there are only a few minor collection tasks that are secondary to the game to provide further challenge for the hardcore player. On top of this, one of the more significant collection tasks is that of killing poes. Upon finding and beating all said poes in the game, you are rewarded with an infinite rupee, which enables you to buy any item you want without worry, and also to used to endlessly power the armor of invulnerability.

Rather than this enhancing the gameplay for the hardcore player, this reward is actually a curse. Where battles will already be easy for the hardcore gamer, they now become absolutely worthless. Items can be bought and wasted with no regard for it and all challenges in every aspect of the game are basically thrown out of the window. This reward would only truly be such for the casual gamer, but the casual gamer is almost certainly not going to want to go through the effort of finding and beating every poe in the game, and therefor will likely never see this reward.

Because of this, I feel that Zelda attempted to appeal to both audiences by straddling the line between them. While it accomplished the task of straddling the line between them, rather than this satisfying both sides, it instead resulted in satisfying neither side.

In conclusion, I feel that Mario Galaxy is Nintendo's first step in showing that they are capable of providing for the new casual gamer market without having to ignore the hardcore gamer market.

Discuss.

I'm a hardcore wii fan and i hated SMG and loved Zelda so i disagree with you, but your theory seems to have some basis.

Very insightful, I too noticed that the structure of SMG seemed very casual friendly, with many of the levels being short and easy

@Auron you hated SMG? wow, and why? i really loved both but i thought, like you, that SMG was better going by the "wii philosphy". Remember, though that TP was made for gamecube and ported. i think nintendo has a wide range of possibilites in ideas for the Wii zelda and i think a wii zelda built from the ground up for the wii will be a lot more ideal then TP was for the wii

Great post.

You're exactly right about Mario Galaxy, with the breakdown of hard and easy stars so "anyone" could play the game through beating Bowser. Read the Iwata Asks interviews about it, if you haven't.

Well, being that Zelda:TP was made for the Gamecube and SMG was made for the Wii that kinda just makes sense...other than that, great post. Very well though out.

:) sorry, I mean this as sarcastic not mean. I have a smile on my face as I type..a sarcastic smile.

Poser!

I'm pretty sure that Zelda was never meant to appeal to all types. It's a gamer's game, if you will. SMG you can sit down and play for 5 or 10 minutes, get a star, and be satisfied. No real need to invest more time than that to get something out of it (though you certainly can if you want). You try playing Twilight Princess in 5- to 10-minute intervals, however, and you'll be lost and confused in no time (and never get past the first dungeon, I'd wager). Zelda 1 was slightly more play-a-bit-then-quit (but not by much), but the series has evolved to the point now that it's essentially on the same level of expected time dedication as an RPG expects of a player.

I'm huge fan of The Zelda franchise and I Totally agree with you !! but Nintendo didn't provide us the real Zelda for the Wii Twilight Princess isn't the game from Zelda to compare with SMG you can take Phantom Hourglass and you'll see that The Next Zelda for the Wii will be The Best Zelda ever!!!

It's an interesting theory, and that may have even been the thought process at Nintendo when making each game - Zelda may have been an attempt at appealing to both audiences by averaging the difficulty while Mario had extra levels for players wanting more of a challenge.

However, I don't think they at all succeeded - with very, very few exceptions, every necessary part of Zelda TP is easier for casual gamers than much of what is required of anyone playing Mario Galaxy.

Your description of the difficulty of each is from the perspective of a regular gamer. Imagine how your girlfriend, or father, or even grandmother would approach each game. The difference is that games are difficult for casual gamers for two reasons, while regular gamers only see one dimension of difficulty.

When we play games, we recognize a difficult task as one that requires timing, quick reflexes, or a lot of practice/observation.

When casual gamers play many games, they don't even get to this sort of difficulty. Give your sister a 360 controller and start her on Halo 3's first mission - see whether she dies because she doesn't have the timing down or can't react quickly enough to seeing an enemy or doesn't figure out which guns are good in which situations. None of this will be a problem for her. Instead, she'll die because she can't figure out which buttons do what. Even after some practice, she won't be able to do more than one thing at a time - maybe she can shoot when she wants to, but, when she's shooting, she can't aim or move.

Casuals have a hard time with what we think of as very easy games, but this isn't because they can't do any of the things that a good gamer might pride himself on. They aren't as good at most games simply because they have a hard time dealing with the way games are controlled.

This is why Zelda tends to be easier for casual gamers. Most enemies in Zelda can be beaten with just a few buttons. Z-targeting can even be set to toggle instead of hold, though I've found that most people have no difficulty holding the button - they encounter problems only when they have to be moving their fingers. Anyway, most enemies can be beaten by repeatedly stabbing while the status of all other buttons remains the same. The entire game is like this. Bosses always give you enough time to stand still for a bit in order to first aim, and then fire, the hookshot or whatever at a stationary target.

Mario, on the other hand, typically requires the player to be jumping, while changing direction, and sometimes while spinning occasionally. This is a much more complicated set of activities.

All I've got to offer as backing is some anecdotal evidence, but how's this: of the three casual gamers I know of who have played Zelda (two of them female, for what it's worth), all beat it, and they only rarely died (call it three times or so throughout the game, on average, generally around the first shadow beasts and the ice dungeon miniboss). While they haven't played Mario Galaxy, I know that at least one found Sunshine all but impossible while another thought it was too difficult to be worth playing. None of them have any ability to play Smash Bros, mostly because the most sophisticated strategy available to them is smash attacking while standing still. Only one of them is capable of recovering with any regularity - it requires jumping and then using the characters up-B, in that order, all while holding the direction of the stage. I've yet to see a casual player who was any good at Smash Bros at all, and mostly for these reasons. You can explain to them exactly what needs to be done, and they can understand that, but they can't figure out how to make the character do what they want him to do in the short amount of time they have.

Zelda is much slower paced, and can be played and beaten by seeing it as a progression of one-button tasks. Mario is faster and requires multi-tasking on the controller. That alone makes Mario a much harder game for many casuals.

Edit: To address the obvious objection - that Nintendo already fixed this with the Wii controller - I'd argue that we're not even close to fully intuitive control. From my limited observations, I think that Nintendo's done wonders for casual shooters - aiming and shooting is now achievable for even the least practiced person - but Mario Galaxy can hardly be said to use the motion controls intuitively. It's 'shake to spin'. They would have been better off letting you spin in the air by pressing the jump button again. And the star bits make the whole thing even more complicated.

Edit2: To perhaps clarify the sort of skill I'm talking about, I think that regular gamers eventually instinctualize controller functions to the point that they don't consciously think about which button they have to hit to perform a task. When we play Mario Galaxy, we don't have to go through this process: "An enemy! I want to jump on his head. Which button is jump? A! I'll press A." We think "An enemy! I'll jump on his head." Now what if you have to long-jump, turn 90 degrees, jump, wall-jump, and deal with an enemy? And what if you're rushed because you're on a moving platform or there's a wave of lava approaching or similar. This isn't that dissimilar to a lot of situations in Mario Galaxy, even the bits that you'd expect everyone to see.

Edit3: I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who knows a casual gamer who found Zelda too difficult while having no real problems with Mario.

Edit4: First, sorry for all the addendums. Reading the above posts, I'd like to distinguish between casual gamers as gamers who only play for brief periods of time and casual gamers as people who almost never play games. I'm talking about the second sort in the above.

As to which one was better, I found Zelda more rewarding.  Mario was fun, and a good way to pass time, but I found it ridiculously easy with the exception of one or two levels.