1269: In Sickness and In Health

So, now I’ve written my review for USgamer, I can talk a little about Time and Eternity, the game I’ve been playing recently.

For those too lazy to click through and read my review, the gist: Time and Eternity is an anime-inspired JRPG that makes use of hand-drawn, hand-animated anime cels instead of polygonal characters. Its story is based around two people — one of whom is actually two different people in a single body, so it’s actually three people, I guess — who are trying to get married but find their wedding interrupted by assassins. Naturally, the thing to do when this happens is to travel back in time and get to the bottom of what is going on.

I won’t go on too much about the game itself, because my review covers that territory in more detail. What I did want to talk about is how much I appreciate the fact this game exists, and how it highlights some issues with conventional criticism.

Time and Eternity has been mostly panned since its release, leading to severely negative preconceptions about it, even among the hardcore JRPG-lovin’ community. I personally enjoyed it a lot — I’ve finished it once, and am contemplating going back for a New Game Plus run to get the “special ending” — but at the same time acknowledge the fact that it most certainly isn’t a game that has universal appeal.

However, just because it doesn’t have universal appeal is not to say that it doesn’t have any appeal whatsoever. This is the thing that a lot of reviews I’ve seen seem to be missing to a certain extent; this is a game aimed at a specific, niche audience, which means by definition that it won’t appeal to everyone. Should it be punished for this fact? Absolutely not; in fact, it should be celebrated.

To qualify that statement, let me explain. One of the most common criticisms of modern gaming — modern mainstream gaming, I should say — is the dumbing down of popular franchises to appeal to a mass market. The idea that a new entry in a popular series needs to sell literally millions of copies to have been worth making in the first place. All too many times recently, we’ve seen high-quality games fail to reach the overambitious expectations set by their publishers and be declared a failure, despite the fact that something like Time and Eternity would kill for those numbers.

Meanwhile, however, titles like Time and Eternity from niche-focused publishers like NIS America bob along under the radar, only to be occasionally noticed by reviewers who aren’t really into the niche they’re aiming for, and thus get woefully, woefully misunderstood. Consequently, they get treated unnecessarily harshly.

This isn’t me being defensive about a game I enjoyed that everyone else didn’t; this is something that I feel is going to become a bigger issue as time goes on. Not every critic bears in mind the potential target audience for something; very few outlets have the “specialists” on staff to be able to handle all titles in an appropriate manner, and I’ve mentioned before how frustrating it is to read a criticism of something from someone who obviously hasn’t given it the amount of time it deserves, or who isn’t “well-read” enough in the genre to be able to make informed comments. I am under no illusions that I am able to handle every type of game out there, but I know what I’m interested in, and I know the things that I know well. I wouldn’t take on a review project for a genre I didn’t know well or didn’t have experience of; it wouldn’t happen in any other medium.

So anyway. If you’ve read my Time and Eternity review you’ll know that I quite liked it, but wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. There are only a select few people in my circle of friends that I would specifically recommend it to, in fact, but I have a feeling those people would enjoy it. Everyone else will probably not. And that’s fine. Not every game is for everyone, and the sooner we figure that out the better.