hey dan! Yeah, we're definitely trying to explore that with Angeline Era.. lots of ways that kind of push the ways an adventure game should be expressing things based on the base action interactions.
I just played the Angeline Era demo now, and I really liked the mini game that the player has to play when discover a new area on the map! Very memorable!
Really loved this post. As you can tell from my avatar, I think a lot about Pokemon :-) I think you're right here that there's a lot of *weird* elements in those earlier games that make them memorable... and it's sort of interesting that subsequent remakes of those games remove a lot of those weird things. Like, the gambling minigames just... stopped being a thing (mostly to appease the ESRB, I'm pretty sure). The weird thing is that no one really liked these elements - the Safari Zone minigame stuck around even though everyone hated their dumb mechanics that made it artificially difficult to catch a frickin' Tauros! - and yet removing them makes the games feel kind of bland!
> Rather than a game trying to create vignettes with its design language, there’s an overadjustment toward using cinematic methods of communicating meaning about the game’s world.
This bit really stood out to me in the context of the franchise. IMO the last really memorable or interesting Pokemon game is Black/White, in part because it's really embracing cinematography in a way that feels very deliberate - like, the setpiece that really stands out to me is when you're walking on the big bridge, and the heretofore-static camera starts wilding out, doing these really extreme zooms out that emphasize how small you are relative to the big city you're about to enter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE16BT9RFEc
The standard complaint is that the later Pokemon games are overloaded with cutscenes, which is objectively true lol, but when B/W does it it feels... deliberate! Like, the game is explicitly wresting control from you to emphasize how powerless you are during these big moments. (It helps that these are the games that are canonically set in a Pokemon version of America, so it feels like they're explicitly channeling Hollywood films - e.g. a plot twist concerning the game's villain takes place on a Ferris wheel in a scene I'm 100% sure was a deliberate homage to "The Third Man.") Whereas once the series goes truly 3D in X/Y, the cutscenes are used to stage conversations between groups of totally forgettable characters. (X/Y is also just a weirdly conservative/nostalgic game in a way that makes me suspect Nintendo was walking back the deliberately alienating aspects of its predecessor - sort of a Rise of Skywalker situation)
The snipers in the Angeline Era demo felt memorable to me and I think align with in your thesis as a visit to a design space boundary.
hey dan! Yeah, we're definitely trying to explore that with Angeline Era.. lots of ways that kind of push the ways an adventure game should be expressing things based on the base action interactions.
I just played the Angeline Era demo now, and I really liked the mini game that the player has to play when discover a new area on the map! Very memorable!
Really loved this post. As you can tell from my avatar, I think a lot about Pokemon :-) I think you're right here that there's a lot of *weird* elements in those earlier games that make them memorable... and it's sort of interesting that subsequent remakes of those games remove a lot of those weird things. Like, the gambling minigames just... stopped being a thing (mostly to appease the ESRB, I'm pretty sure). The weird thing is that no one really liked these elements - the Safari Zone minigame stuck around even though everyone hated their dumb mechanics that made it artificially difficult to catch a frickin' Tauros! - and yet removing them makes the games feel kind of bland!
> Rather than a game trying to create vignettes with its design language, there’s an overadjustment toward using cinematic methods of communicating meaning about the game’s world.
This bit really stood out to me in the context of the franchise. IMO the last really memorable or interesting Pokemon game is Black/White, in part because it's really embracing cinematography in a way that feels very deliberate - like, the setpiece that really stands out to me is when you're walking on the big bridge, and the heretofore-static camera starts wilding out, doing these really extreme zooms out that emphasize how small you are relative to the big city you're about to enter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE16BT9RFEc
The standard complaint is that the later Pokemon games are overloaded with cutscenes, which is objectively true lol, but when B/W does it it feels... deliberate! Like, the game is explicitly wresting control from you to emphasize how powerless you are during these big moments. (It helps that these are the games that are canonically set in a Pokemon version of America, so it feels like they're explicitly channeling Hollywood films - e.g. a plot twist concerning the game's villain takes place on a Ferris wheel in a scene I'm 100% sure was a deliberate homage to "The Third Man.") Whereas once the series goes truly 3D in X/Y, the cutscenes are used to stage conversations between groups of totally forgettable characters. (X/Y is also just a weirdly conservative/nostalgic game in a way that makes me suspect Nintendo was walking back the deliberately alienating aspects of its predecessor - sort of a Rise of Skywalker situation)