I recently came across this video on Youtube:
and it brought up something that I feel is missing from today's Nintendo games, and that's the notion of melancholy.
If you don't want to watch the video then the basic gist of it is that Mario Galaxy has certain moments where it allows the game to 'take a break' from the constant bombast of its main levels to have a moment of quiet sadness. No better is this more exemplified than in the storybook scenes and that damn music, but there are many more examples throughout the game of sad or simply quietly melancholic moments.
Now look at Mario Odyssey. Odyssey is a great game, and depending on what you want it may even be better than the original Mario Galaxy, but it's also a game that does nothing but celebrate; it celebrates the joys of travel, the diversity of communities, the movement that it bases itself around, and so on. Compared to its contemporaries (3D World, Land, NSMB) it definitely concerns itself a lot more with themes that go beyond the superficial but, even then, I feel that it lost something that made Mario Galaxy so special. To me that points to a more wide-spread concern regarding Nintendo's recent output, which is that they've removed so much of the sadness and melancholy that permeated some of their best previous work.
Another great example would be in comparing Majora's Mask and Wind Waker to Breath of the Wild and its sequel. Yeah I know the latter has literally only got a basic teaser trailer, but I feel that as a 'tone-piece' the trailer does a very good job at showing what that game will be about, so I'm gonna talk about it.
But I digress; Breath of the Wild is a game that has many quiet moments, and it very much bases itself around that. It's named not after an instrument or an event but after a concept, the 'Breath of the Wild' calling Link to adventure, exploration, etc. However, despite that, I feel that it fails to capture the melancholic nature of its world in the way that it really should have done. Despite being set in a very sad world the game rarely, if ever, places focus on that; townspeople are generally happy, the Champions who died aren't 'really' gone, and the ending itself is bombastic as all hell. It's a game where death permeates the entire thing, but loss (don't) plays such a small role in it. Now that we've got a teaser for its sequel it seems that things will be similar; the sequel is definitely dark, and it's clearly gonna talk about death and all that, but I doubt that it's going to be particularly 'melancholic'.
Now compare that to Majora's Mask and Wind Waker, two games that are diametrically opposed in terms of both tone and art style whilst still keeping certain elements of melancholy throughout. It's pretty clear how Majora's Mask shows melancholy, so I won't exactly go into much detail, but I will focus a bit on Wind Waker. Wind Waker is the second Zelda I managed to complete and it's also one of the ones that resonated with me the most. Part of that is because throughout the game's happy-go-lucky adventure you come to points where genuine loss is felt. One of these is when you find Hyrule:
It's dead, and it's never coming back. The game ends with it being completely immersed by the vast ocean around it, with the King of Red Lions and Ganondorf's corpse disappearing into the ocean to never be seen again. It creates melancholy because, unlike Breath of the Wild, it presents something that can't be saved nor given a 'last hurrah' (like with the Champions), something that the player and Link must accept as gone. You still very much 'save the world' but not without a cost, and it's in exactly the same vein as Mario Galaxy's storybook (which is about Rosalina coming to terms with the death of her Mom) and Majora's Mask's entire plot (where you have to allow a town to see death over and over until you finally 'win'). There's also a more subtle moment in the game; if you go back to visit your Grandma you're met with a sick old woman whilst this music plays. Sure you went on an adventure but it deeply affected your old Nan, and even though you can heal her there's genuine sadness there. Despite Breath of the Wild being more explicitly darker than Wind Waker the melancholy that surrounds those moments is, in my eyes, missing to quite a significant extent, and that's really quite disappointing to me.
There are plenty more examples where Nintendo has focused quite heavily on bombast, fun, etc whilst ignoring the darker, more melancholic nature of many of its earlier stories. Splatoon 2, for instance, is a literal post-apocalyptic story but you wouldn't know that unless you find some collectables that, in and of themselves, contain very little in the way of melancholy. Metroid: Samus Returns and Federation Force largely move away from the quieter nature of titles like Metroid Prime and Super Metroid in favour of a more action-orientated experience where with music as a near-constant. Similarly, Link's Awakening does feature a heavily melancholic side to it but that is a literal one-to-one remake of the original game, so to say that it counts as an example of Nintendo's original storytelling would be wrong.
So, yeah, now that I've stopped rambling what do you think? Am I right, wrong, somewhere in between? Or am I just making no sense? Please leave your comments below and don't forget to like, favourite, subscribe, buy my sponsor, and click the plum for notifications when my next shit post is shit-posted.
and it brought up something that I feel is missing from today's Nintendo games, and that's the notion of melancholy.
If you don't want to watch the video then the basic gist of it is that Mario Galaxy has certain moments where it allows the game to 'take a break' from the constant bombast of its main levels to have a moment of quiet sadness. No better is this more exemplified than in the storybook scenes and that damn music, but there are many more examples throughout the game of sad or simply quietly melancholic moments.
Now look at Mario Odyssey. Odyssey is a great game, and depending on what you want it may even be better than the original Mario Galaxy, but it's also a game that does nothing but celebrate; it celebrates the joys of travel, the diversity of communities, the movement that it bases itself around, and so on. Compared to its contemporaries (3D World, Land, NSMB) it definitely concerns itself a lot more with themes that go beyond the superficial but, even then, I feel that it lost something that made Mario Galaxy so special. To me that points to a more wide-spread concern regarding Nintendo's recent output, which is that they've removed so much of the sadness and melancholy that permeated some of their best previous work.
Another great example would be in comparing Majora's Mask and Wind Waker to Breath of the Wild and its sequel. Yeah I know the latter has literally only got a basic teaser trailer, but I feel that as a 'tone-piece' the trailer does a very good job at showing what that game will be about, so I'm gonna talk about it.
But I digress; Breath of the Wild is a game that has many quiet moments, and it very much bases itself around that. It's named not after an instrument or an event but after a concept, the 'Breath of the Wild' calling Link to adventure, exploration, etc. However, despite that, I feel that it fails to capture the melancholic nature of its world in the way that it really should have done. Despite being set in a very sad world the game rarely, if ever, places focus on that; townspeople are generally happy, the Champions who died aren't 'really' gone, and the ending itself is bombastic as all hell. It's a game where death permeates the entire thing, but loss (don't) plays such a small role in it. Now that we've got a teaser for its sequel it seems that things will be similar; the sequel is definitely dark, and it's clearly gonna talk about death and all that, but I doubt that it's going to be particularly 'melancholic'.
Now compare that to Majora's Mask and Wind Waker, two games that are diametrically opposed in terms of both tone and art style whilst still keeping certain elements of melancholy throughout. It's pretty clear how Majora's Mask shows melancholy, so I won't exactly go into much detail, but I will focus a bit on Wind Waker. Wind Waker is the second Zelda I managed to complete and it's also one of the ones that resonated with me the most. Part of that is because throughout the game's happy-go-lucky adventure you come to points where genuine loss is felt. One of these is when you find Hyrule:
It's dead, and it's never coming back. The game ends with it being completely immersed by the vast ocean around it, with the King of Red Lions and Ganondorf's corpse disappearing into the ocean to never be seen again. It creates melancholy because, unlike Breath of the Wild, it presents something that can't be saved nor given a 'last hurrah' (like with the Champions), something that the player and Link must accept as gone. You still very much 'save the world' but not without a cost, and it's in exactly the same vein as Mario Galaxy's storybook (which is about Rosalina coming to terms with the death of her Mom) and Majora's Mask's entire plot (where you have to allow a town to see death over and over until you finally 'win'). There's also a more subtle moment in the game; if you go back to visit your Grandma you're met with a sick old woman whilst this music plays. Sure you went on an adventure but it deeply affected your old Nan, and even though you can heal her there's genuine sadness there. Despite Breath of the Wild being more explicitly darker than Wind Waker the melancholy that surrounds those moments is, in my eyes, missing to quite a significant extent, and that's really quite disappointing to me.
There are plenty more examples where Nintendo has focused quite heavily on bombast, fun, etc whilst ignoring the darker, more melancholic nature of many of its earlier stories. Splatoon 2, for instance, is a literal post-apocalyptic story but you wouldn't know that unless you find some collectables that, in and of themselves, contain very little in the way of melancholy. Metroid: Samus Returns and Federation Force largely move away from the quieter nature of titles like Metroid Prime and Super Metroid in favour of a more action-orientated experience where with music as a near-constant. Similarly, Link's Awakening does feature a heavily melancholic side to it but that is a literal one-to-one remake of the original game, so to say that it counts as an example of Nintendo's original storytelling would be wrong.
So, yeah, now that I've stopped rambling what do you think? Am I right, wrong, somewhere in between? Or am I just making no sense? Please leave your comments below and don't forget to like, favourite, subscribe, buy my sponsor, and click the plum for notifications when my next shit post is shit-posted.
