curl-6 on 09 March 2016
| nuckles87 said: Prime has a plot and atmosphere, but its story is barebones. Hearing about soldiers getting massacred by local packs of alien predators and powerful tyrants can evoke its own bit of "dread" (though not on the level of the few moments you've referenced in Prime) but nevertheless I wouldn't equate that to "grim darkness". And I think it's also telling that a lot of the stuff your mentioning is mostly only seen in the opening area of the game. Most of Prime isn't even this dark. Prime can have tonal consistency because it has very little story with no characterization. You play a blank slate in a world empty of characters. You'll be hard pressed to find a quality RPG that doesn't have some comic relief in it. In any case, as far as tonal consistency and a dark atmosphere, what you highlight in Prime isn't just something that modern Nintendo doesn't do. Nintendo in general has rarely ever gone in this direction, and the few times it has has been in games that are hardly "consistently dark". There is nothing about Metroid Prime that modern Nintendo wouldn't have the "guts" to do. Dark games in general have always been a rarity for Nintendo. I do agree with you on one thing: I do think it would be good for Nintendo to diversify it's library with more "mature" games. Bayonetta 2 and Xenoblade Chonicles X are a nice start, but these types of games should be more than just an occasional occurrence as they long have been with Nintendo. |
Modern Nintendo seems happy to let other developers make darker games for their systems, (Bayonetta 2, Fatal Frame) but stops short of making them themselves, with the exception of the Xenoblade games, which I think they still view as "external" cos even though Monolith is now a first party studio, they only became so relatively recently.
Nintendo these days seems too afraid of taking risks with their software to go all-out on a modern Metroid they way they did with Prime.
