Seems like time and time again, Nintendo is always trying to sell games to an audience of people who do not wish to play video games. For a sequel, I figured Nintendo should focus on their core audience of Pikmin fans but it seems like they’re always changing things to appeal to people who don’t play games while in return alienating the people who want more sophisticated gameplay and challenges.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn’t just about story/aesthetics, it’s also about difficulty. Most young kids don’t have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.
I could split Nintendo games (I’ve played) into three groups based on target audience:
Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi
All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there’s more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.
Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)
I’d consider frankly pretty much all Zelda games more mature. I haven’t played them all, but the pattern I’ve noticed is that the more recent games feel easier (though the open world makes them more time consuming). The bigger puzzle dungeons of older games could get quite difficult sometimes. Easy to get lost and confused. The 2D games often were extra cryptic and combat was more punishing.
As a kid, I bought oracle of ages as my first ever Zelda game and couldn’t figure out where to go after the first dungeon, so had to sell it. As an adult, I beat it and the seasons equivalent just to see what I missed out on. I had to use a lot of save states and recall some bizarre minigame that was just horrible, horrible, horrible (90% of my save states would have been that one minigame). I had to Google multiple times where to go. I dunno how kids could do it. Sometimes I wondered if it was all a ploy to make kids call that pay number for video game tips that predated the internet answering all these questions. Also, I seriously question why I even put myself through that. It wasn’t that fun.