Things a Game/Series Does Too Much of?

[Moonface]

Got this thread idea from thinking about the Tomb Raider series recently and how starting from Legend onwards the games have constantly been bringing up Lara's parents as either a plot point and/or a character development tool. If you don't know how many games that actually spans, it's a total of six games. Worse still, Legend was the start of the first reboot trilogy, and had the parent stuff stayed there it may not be too bad but then the second reboot trilogy came along starting with TR2013 and it not only puts as much focus on Lara's parents as the trilogy before it but even retreads some parts of it too. For me it's the equivalent to doing the Uncle Ben story in Spider-Man now; we've seen everything there is to be explored with that aspect of the main character and it does nothing to cover that ground again.

[ShiraNoMai]

Nintendo being way too strict on their IP boundaries. I feel like Aonuma (Legend of Zelda series producer) has been the only one allowed to stray from the pack when it comes to Nintendo's mainline series of IP; everything else has to checkmark all these boxes that they believe make their experiences core to their series, and it genuinely makes me think it holds them back from SO much.

A hot example is what they've cemented the Yoshi series into: if it's not adorably childish at every twist and turn, FIRST AND FOREMOST, it's not happening. Yoshi, to them, caters to a very passive, young crowd--make it artistically strong, make a mechanic around that artistic merit, and make it as accessible as possible to the lowest common denominator. Now, I feel like a couple of those qualifiers also applies to other Nintendo franchises (AKA anything they can attribute the "next generation console's gimmick!"), but for Yoshi in particular, it feels like such a disservice to admonish the level design and gameplay of the very first entry in the series over the art style that, in all honestly, is timeless purely because of it's particular time and place of use (the advent of the looming 3D game left sprite-based games as a lesser kind, so to be able to bring a compelling argument to the table of "hey 2D can still look really good", that was Nintendo's response)--but I feel like Nintendo has just completely closed their minds off of every other aspect of the game aside from that aesthetic factor.

[Moonface]

A hot example is what they've cemented the Yoshi series into: if it's not adorably childish at every twist and turn, FIRST AND FOREMOST, it's not happening. Yoshi, to them, caters to a very passive, young crowd--make it artistically strong, make a mechanic around that artistic merit, and make it as accessible as possible to the lowest common denominator. Now, I feel like a couple of those qualifiers also applies to other Nintendo franchises (AKA anything they can attribute the "next generation console's gimmick!"), but for Yoshi in particular, it feels like such a disservice to admonish the level design and gameplay of the very first entry in the series over the art style that, in all honestly, is timeless purely because of it's particular time and place of use (the advent of the looming 3D game left sprite-based games as a lesser kind, so to be able to bring a compelling argument to the table of "hey 2D can still look really good", that was Nintendo's response)--but I feel like Nintendo has just completely closed their minds off of every other aspect of the game aside from that aesthetic factor.

It makes me curious how different Nintendo IP's that use a similar gimmick/art style to each other all suffer from similar problems when it comes to the gameplay and difficulty when they're compared to other entries for that same IP that don't use that gimmick/art style. For example, does Kirby's Epic Yarn see a huge difficulty nerf like Yoshi's Woolly World did, or does everything outside the art style retain what Kirby games before it were like in terms of accessibility and difficulty?


A really funny one I thought of that a game does too much of is Uncharted 3 giving Nate this insatiable need to reach out and touch everything near him in the environment. You walk near any wall or environmental obstacle and without fail that mans hand will reach out towards it, even if you're not close enough for him to actually touch it. Once you notice he does this, you can't stop seeing it happens constantly unless you're standing in the middle of an open area.