Gentlemen, do pardon me for stepping in. I hope you don't mind.
Erik Aston said:
Wii Fit is of course a pivotal game (bar raiser, game changer, whatever). It is not a content-oriented game. The reason someone plays Zelda is to experience the "Legend" -- the content. The reason someone plays Wii Fit is to motivate them to work out (practical purpose). The reason someone plays Wii Sports is that it fosters a fun, social atmosphere.
I think this is wrong - at the very least, it crreates a false dichotomy between "experience" and "utility", when there isn't actually a different between them. All games are played forr their content, or, better, for the experiences which they confer. Wii Fit is no less content-oriented than any other game in the industry, up to and including the venerable Zelda. We cannot allow ourselves to confuse "different content" with "not content-oriented" because that menas we are misinterpreting the intent of the audience.
Wii Fit is probably the strongest argument one could make tha these games aren't content-oriented, I suppose, because you could argue that people don't actually play the game - but that's not true either, because Wii Fit is actually fun, and as a motivator is undoubtdly content-oriented.
Wii Sports is worse in that it is nothign but a game and there is no way in which it ould be rationalized as being anything but content-oriented. People play it in order to have a good time with their friends or even by themselves.
Erik, I think I know what you mean, but "content-oriented" is not it. I think what you mean is something along the lines of "content that appeals to people in the same way Ocarina of Time did" - which isn't the same way that Link to the Past did, natch. Ocarina of Time was something of a bridge game for the Zelda series, too, because it brought in so many new players at the time - myself included.
The point is that most of the laundry list of pivotal games from Nintendo this gen are NOT content-oriented games. And some of the previous content-oriented games -- most notably Animal Crossing Wii -- Nintendo somehow forgot about new content for, instead focusing on a social aspect with the microphone and "city." With Zelda, they've just failed to create the awe that past iterations like LttP and OoT created. They may have great puzzles and stories and new mechanics, but they lack in terms of the lore of the series.
Now we're getting somewhere. I'll focus more particularly on the Zelda comment, here, because that's what I'm good at and you mention it again at the bottom of yourp ost as exhibiting the same problem as Animal Crossing.
I don't think that it's an entirely fair assessment to make, because there's no objective way to measure "awe" for a series. More, whose awe are we measuring? Old fans who've been with the series for at least eight or ten years? They are not good barometers - old-time fans were not the ones who were most in awe with Ocarina of Time (many of them didn't like it because it was a game-changer), new players were, and in cases where old players were in aw it was because it totally chcanged the way that we approached the series and everything about it. It had nothing to do with the lore of the series. If it did, Twilight Princess would be hailed as the greatest game of all time. The content that mattered in Ocarina of Time was new content, new ways to interact with the world, and the way in which it was able to bring in a portion of old and new players alike by radically changing the way the game was played.
I hope I am making sense.
So long-time gamers who primarily play games to experience content feel somewhat high and dry this gen, and Nintendo is honestly fumbling around with how to handle their older content-oriented series right now.
This is only true insofar in tthat we are not getting as much as we would like - Super Mario Galaxy is considered something like an absolute good, so I think it fits fine into the canon of the Mario series, and even goes so far as to change the game in terms of level design and approach to the series (it will be the first Mario game for many people, I'm sure). There is a problem here with Twilight Princess, though, in that the Wii experience has been almost entirely about changing the game, and the game has not been changed for Zelda sinc Ocarina of Time.
The problem isn't that Nintendo is giving us products that are lacking content - th problem is that the content they are giving us in many cases (Animal Crossing, Twilight Princess) is a refinement of content we've already experienced. Majora's Mask and Wind Waker managed to avoid this pitfall by changing the experience of the games in their own ways, but Twilight Princess tripped over its own feet in its retreading of series lore and tropes and failing to do anything new, in spite of the fact that it's technically the most competent game in the series.
We are not high and dry in terms of absolute content experienced. Rather we, the players who have been with Nintendo for tne years or twenty years, are simply craving new content.
Maybe a good term is "surprising new experience." PH, TP, and AC Wii were not "surprising new experiences."
This is a very good way to put it, and I would be for the adoption of it as a more widely utilized term if there were a way to make it more distinctive. Twilight Princess and Animal Crossing one hundred percent suffer from this, I agree.
Phantom Hourglass, though, does not. That game is a game changer in how it chanegs the way we interact with the world. There's a reason it's so damn big in terms of handheld Zeldas (excluding repeat buyers I'm willing to bet it's bigger than Link's Awakening, or at least as big, and it will soon be bigger than Link to the Past), nd that's because it provides us with new content to experience. Anybdy who's dissatisfied with Phantom Hourglass isn't dissatisfied with it because it fails to present a surprising new experience - most times, complaints are there exactly because it provides a surprising new experience.
