Dueling Design Choices

I’ve been equally unimpressed by Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, honestly. I dislike the concepts, the graphics, the controls, and the gameplay of Phantom Hourglass. I know 2/3 of those are going to be the same in Spirit Tracks, so I stopped caring the second I heard about it.

This will be the second non-CDI Zelda game that I’ve never bothered to beat.

Those Mario & Luigi titles are fucking incredible.

I thought there were some really cool things about the Phantom Hourglass but I got turned off by the tedious temple you had to constantly go back to. It was a little too repetitive. I never finished that game. Still, I’ll definitely get Spirit Tracks. Maybe I’ll have the attention span to finish it at least.

Your argument really doesn’t make much sense to me. Just say you prefer one game design over the other. Not one design choice is better than the other. And what, you expect them to release two different games with two similar design choices?

About the puzzles/areas requiring the use of the Phantom Guards, aren’t most of these areas made intentionally so that no one but the Phantoms can dwell within them? To me it makes perfect sense that Link would need to control them to get around since he obviously isnt a Phantom Guard. The way you word it makes it sound so much less thoughtful.

I personally enjoyed Phantom Hourglass (with exception of the Water Temple) and I hope to enjoy Spirit Tracks just as much where I hope they’ve fixed most of its predecessor’s faults.

I’m also a bit baffled. I don’t see the profound difference in those two designs, really. Both involve designed scenarios involving ‘gimmicks’. What makes the M&L scenario so much better?
(P.s., when you think about it, a ‘gimmick’ is simply an original gameplay mechanic that isn’t fully integrated into the entire game. I don’t know why this is often viewed as such a bad thing.)

‘Adventuring through the inside of Bowser, Mario and Luigi’s path is blocked by a pile of bones, so the player must make Bowser drink enough water to cause a flood that washes the bones away and clears the path.’

Wow, thats pretty cool. Are the other M&L games like this? Theyre games which have never spurned an interest in me as im not much of a mario fan.

Well, I guess I’d argue that since I unfortunately don’t issue the voice of God, if I prefer one route over the other that makes it better in my small dark world. Or maybe a bold statement is just a good way to get us debating about it here.

But let me drop the world gimmick for a second then and say that they’ll be lots of Bowser’s Inside Story that is familiar to all of us that have played previous titles in the series, but that the direct cause and effect is that mix of simplicity and marvel that made so many Nintendo games the charm of my life growing up. Where as with Spirit Tracks, things feel doubled up and tediously trying to rehash something with a very lame mechanic. Why would two switches to open a door be necessary just because Phantom’s inhabit a place? Because we are dragging this Phantom around and need a reason to drag his butt over to the door to make the situation a few minutes longer to fill out game time. I’d never give anyone an absolute about what they should or shouldn’t play, but so far what I’ve experienced with the game is a whole lot of “here we go again” with a very thin guise of “no honestly, it’s a new way to play”.

what I see is that these two games designed so that you need to do something based on the story/theme,

just like in every mario & luigi games, suddenly the whole world have a door that have two switches that have to be pressed at the same time. If you said spirit tracks is gimmicky in this way, wouldn’t that make M&L.. and every other game gimmicky as well?

sigh

thanks to the internet to rewrite a perfectly good word to a bad one

i wouldn’t write spirit tracks off until we know more about it. All we know right now is basically what has been shown on the trailers.

Zelda games are the type of game where if you look at it from the outside, honestly, they don’t look that great. But once you pick up the controller (or in this case, stylus) and start playing, all the doubts go away.

I haven’t played a single (Nintendo or Capcom developed) Zelda game that I haven’t absolutely loved, and I don’t think Spirit Tracks is going to be any different.

But Jody, I did play it, lots

@Catz – also sure, every game can be broken down into a series of gimmicks. But can we really not suggest that there are somethings that feel innately more gimmicky than others?

@jamie love: agreed, it just that the meaning of word it’s already degrade too something that’s less than a pile of poo

I would say the problem is never with the mechanics, but how the mechanics is handled, I always hate a game with a mechanic that is so awesome, yet only used a couple of times throughout the game (can pinpoint the title :P)

@Catz – For sure. What really bit me at first was that at E3 the game was broken into three segments, dungeon, boss battle, train, with the goal of making it easier for people to sample the three major aspects of the game. And something about seeing the game broken down into these three core elements really bothered the hell out of me. And of course that’s not to say that nearly every game series is composed of elements like that, but for me it highlighted a formulaic process with that particular title that I think is holding the series back from accomplishing more.

To be honest, there have always been puzzles in the Zelda games where one would have to press two buttons at once to open a door or make a chest appear. Sometimes it’s done with a box; sometimes with an AI partner, like in the Wind Waker. I really believe your worries come from simply playing a demo of Spirit Tracks while playing the full game of M&L. Wait until you see what else the team does with the Phantom before you call foul.

it is not hard to believe when you take into account that two different design teams worked on each game. ;p

i would argue that the use of such mechanics in a game boil down to how well the gimmicks are integrated into the game as a whole, and how clever they are. if handled improperly, moving a puppet around to accomplish certain things that only he can accomplish seems more of a mini-game in terms of it’s integration into the larger scheme of things – primarily because the player must interrupt ‘normal’ gameplay (controlling link) in order to accomplish these things, which results in the player constantly feeling like they are being forced to play a lot of mini-games to get things done.

remember the part in windwaker where you had to conduct the control melody and then you stood still while you weedled a statue across a room, or in twilight princess when you used that rod to accomplish the same ends? i really disliked the former because the mechanic was an intrusion into normal gameplay. in twilight princess, unless my memory fails me, you did not lose control of link to move the statues – they followed you around and you maneuvered them into place once they were near the right area. this is a superior mechanic because your character is still the primary actor in the actions being taken in the game.

also of issue is how clever the puzzles are at their heart. both examples were ‘there is an impasse and you must do something to pass it.’ the mario & luigi example is extremely, well, unusual, particular to the setting and conceits of the game in question. the solution to the puzzle is therefore both new and feels fresh. the zelda game’s answer is a rehash of the ‘maneuver your buddy/object onto the switch and then push the switch near you’, a mechanic that has been used probably to the point where such mechanics have lost their feeling of originality.

don’t get me wrong, i love zelda games to death, and i try to play any one that comes down the pipes – but i can kind of understand why there was a reluctance to produce a new big zelda game for the wii. it may well be that the gameplay of the zelda franchise has become too static, too expected, and too constrained to really be innovative within the parameters of itself. my hope is that there will be a move to extend the gameplay beyond the edges of what has defined zelda games for the last fifteen years or so, without completely dispensing with what made zelda games fun in the first place.

i wouldn’t mind some more clever puzzles than ‘find the floor switch’, for instance. there was some pretty crafty things in twilight princess – chopping ropes that held things up comes to mind. things that utilize the environment itself more than using switching to affect the environment remotely. hopefully we’ll see more of that and less remote-control robots. ;p

Huh. That’s funny, because I had the exact opposite reaction: that is, that M&L 3 looked far more derivative than Zelda.

I mean, if your argument is ‘man, they invented a Zelda game with a new gimmick which you have to use to get through the game and the entire game is based around that gimmick’….well, then you’ve just listed MOST of the Zelda games. Every Zelda game has the trope of a dungeon that provides a new item…that you can’t complete the dungeon without and usually need to unlock some new area. Ocarina of Time uses the music/time gimmick. Ages and Seasons uses time-travel elements/season changes. Wind Waker has the boat. Minish Cap has size change. Link to the Past has the Golden World. Twilight Princess uses the wolf/otherworld gimmick.

I mean, don’t get me wrong…if you don’t like it, that’s fine. But honestly, complaining that the game seems to create a new gimmick (the Phantom and the train) and then forces you to use it…well, that aspect DEFINES THE ZELDA SERIES. I suspect it just may not be your cup of tea. I like the M&L series, but only as a weak tea version of the Super Paper Mario, for example. I think that generally M&L comes across as too linear and far more ‘been there, done that’ derivative than Zelda. YMMV…and obviously does.

@WizarDru fair enough

@overtninja – thank-you for that comment. I might not have handle it as aptly as I’d hoped, but I think there’s a lot to talk about here.