| (Image property of Nintendo) You see, I enjoyed my time playing it very much, but it left me cold. I never felt all that attached to the world of the game on anything beyond a gameplay level. It's the little details that did it for me. The fact that even though we see Samus's face reflected in her visor quite frequently, she's never particularly well characterised. Equally, I find it a little difficult to feel invested in her wants and struggles when the villain that we're struggling against only appears about three times throughout the entire course of the game and then gets wiped out in a piss-easy boss fight. As I said, I still thought the game was good, but I didn't feel any of that emotional attachment that gets me really rabidly invested in a game. This, however, gave me pause for thought because it isn't the first time that a first-party Nintendo game has left me with this feeling. Breath of the Wild, while notably one of my favourite games of recent years in design terms, also left me feeling a little hollow in the story department. So, I wondered, why do I have this issue with Nintendo games? I gave some thought to it and I've pinned down my reasoning to a few key points.  | | (Image property of Nintendo) |
Intent First of all, I don't think Nintendo really try all that hard to have compelling stories. If Sony is the straight-laced school teacher that demands pupils hang off their every word to ensure maximum attention, Nintendo is more like the PE teacher who sits back and lets the foul-heavy football match continue until either the lesson ends or someone draws blood. When you look at my above examples like Metroid Prime or Breath of the Wild, both are games that contentedly drop the player into an expansive world and then leave them to find their own fun and create their own stories. Ironically, this is probably my favourite thing about a lot of Nintendo's games. They aren't fussy with how you play their games. They simply create a world, a set of compelling rules and then happily send players off the find the emergent gameplay stories as they appear. After playing years of railroading narrative experience games, it makes for a refreshing and rather liberating change of pace.  | | (Image property of Nintendo) |
Characters But, I've always been an awkward child who likes to have his cake and eat it and I can't help but feel like Nintendo's gameplay-centric-at-all-costs model is throwing the baby out with the bathwater somewhat. Look at games like Cyberpunk 2077. That, too, throws you into an expansive world to make your own discoveries and V in that games comes across as being full of life and carrying with them a strong sense of self. Allowing the player to project onto a character and make their own decisions is nice and all but when games like Metroid Prime and Breath of the Wild have only minimal roles of their supporting cast, it does leave something of an emotional void.  | | (Image property of CD Projekt) Perhaps, I'm making an unfair comparison though. After all, so many of Nintendo's beloved protagonists are silent. It is, after all, quite difficult to engrave character onto a silent protagonist. Even then though, you can look to games like Doom (2016) for a case study in making a silent protagonist feel vibrant and emotive while also leaving them as a blank slate for the player to project onto. It would go a long way towards making me feel more of an attachment to characters like Link or Samus if they would actually emote a bit from time to time.  | | (Image property of id Software and Bethesda Softworks) Link, in particular feels strange, as I've written about before, because he approaches most situations with a face like a brick wall no matter how significant. One of the few things he does emote at are the meals that you make him cook, which is almost weirder than if he didn't. It implies to me that he can emote at the plot-relevant stuff and actively chooses not to like some kind of hyper-fixated culinary sociopath.
Hard and soft edges Upon closer examination, perhaps my problem isn't with Nintendo's games lacking personality. After all, even if their characters can be a bit of a wash at times, their worlds are always vibrant and colourful enough to make me feel as though I should be more invested in them than I am. Rather, perhaps my problem is more that these worlds nad their characters lack a certain edginess. Further to this point, I've recently been working my way through Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door because I'd heard it was yet another Gamecube gem now available on the Switch. What Paper Mario does so well is that it isn't afraid to get a little edgy or bizarre with its humour. The game feels like it is happy to entertain a wider emotional spectrum than games like Breath of the Wild.  | | (Image property of Nintendo) I'm going to do a video game analysis cliche now and compare something to Dark Souls. An interesting point that I heard made about not just Dark Souls but all FromSoftware games is that, despite being grim dark fantasy games, they aren't afraid to indulge some silliness. Some bizarre phsyical comedy here, some giant mushroom people that hit like a truck there. Much like Paper Mario, FromSoftware feel happy to entertain a wide spectrum of emotions to keep the player engaged, almost like the intermittent tonal shifts are there to break the player out of any trances they've been lulled into. This is something that I never quite felt with Breath of the Wild. The world has colour and charm, I'll grant you, but it all evokes a fairly flat emotional tone that doesn't really have enough tonal jolts to shake me into investment. For perhaps a more relevant contrast, I'd also point out the Link's Awakening remake, also on Switch. While that game is a pretty standard affair for Zelda, it kept me engaged with the weird dream-world logic that it has and, having suckered me in with that, it was also to sink its emotional hooks into me and make the emotional beats actually land quite hard. By contrast, I never felt the same shock or surprise at Breath of the Wild. To put it straightforwardly, I admired it but never fell in love with it.  | | (Image property of Nintendo) |
Conclusion Overall, I still maintain that Nintendo are still one of the best first-party publishers out there and I genuinely admire their gameplay-centric approach to game design. However, while I will always admire Nintendo's games, there is a clear dividing line between the games of theirs I like and the ones I love and that line in my emotional investment in them. While Metroid Prime and Breath of the Wild are undeniably excellent, I never feel as emotionally attached to them as I do to some of Nintendo's wackier undertakings like Paper Mario or Link's Awakening because they feel just like less emotionally-involving experiences to begin with.  | | (Image property of Nintendo) My only real concern now from discussing this is that Nintendo seem to be increasingly moving in the opposite direction of the anarchic, albeit less profitable, spirit of the Gamecube with their more recent undertakings. That said, you never know, and perhaps the recent re-releases of Paper Mario and Link's Awakening alongside their more straight-laced titles on the Switch might signal a loosening of their collars and an increased willingness to let their wackier side show. Only time will tell. But, emotions are just about the most subjective thing out there so what do you think? Am I an idiot? Yes, probably, but I'm asking specifically about this. Are you someone who feels emotionally invested in Nintendo's first-party offerings or have you feel a little cold on them from time-to-time like me. Do let me know through either my socials on Bluesky, Instagram or, urgh, X. Otherwise, as always, I wish you a good day. Images and property names belong to their respective rights holders and are utilised here for the purpose of criticism and review.
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