1965: Some More Words About Vita

I feel like I’ve written this post a number of times before — indeed, I had to search my own blog just to make sure — but I feel it’s time we talked about the PlayStation Vita. Again, because the issues I described last time really haven’t improved a great deal — at least not so far as the press is concerned.

Sony’s handheld is a wonderful platform. It’s arguably the most distinctive of all the currently available platforms — with the possible exception of Nintendo’s 3DS — thanks to its unique library of titles, and it’s very much carved out its own niche.

By virtue of this, however, the platform is, by definition, not ideal for everyone. Despite originally being marketed as the most powerful handheld on the market — and I don’t have the tech specs to hand, but certainly from casual observation I don’t doubt that claim — Vita is not a platform on which you should expect to play a lot of “triple-A” games. And this is what has led some people to regard it as a “failure”; a seeming lack of the big hitter franchises like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed and Battlefield on the platform coupled with the apparent lack of support from both triple-A studios and, at times, Sony itself doesn’t paint a particularly rosy picture.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. It may not be entirely what Vita was originally positioned as, but Vita’s niche serves a passionate market. Several passionate markets, in fact: specifically, the market that enjoys localised Japanese games (or, indeed, those who like to import, since Vita is region-free, unlike the 3DS) and the market that enjoys interesting, creative and/or experimental independently developed Western games. Between those two niches — which have a certain degree of crossover — Vita has an astonishing library of quality games, even without the heavy hitters of the industry.

And who wants to play visually spectacular triple-A games on a tiny screen, anyway? Triple-A isn’t playing to the platform’s strengths at all, which explains why since an initial few attempts — most notably an Uncharted game that apparently wasn’t all that bad but not as good as the PS3 installments, and an absolutely terrible Call of Duty spinoff — triple-A developers are paying the console little to no mind. (Ubisoft is something of an exception to this, though their smaller titles are very much designed with an “indie” philosophy in keeping with the Vita anyhow.)

Vita’s strength is its portability, and its best games are those that cater both to short play sessions and longer marathons. The many, many quality role-playing games that grace the platform are testament to this: although RPGs are typically regarded as somewhat slow-moving, in most cases those that have been designed specifically for Vita have been put together in such a way that you can fire them up for a few battles and still feel like you’ve had a worthwhile experience. The Neptunia games are a good example; their dungeons are short and their battles super-quick, but if you want to sit down with them for a few hours at a time as opposed to a few minutes, there’s plenty of depth to explore there, too.

So what’s my point? Well, mostly bafflement, as expressed by a number of us Vita enthusiasts on Twitter earlier today when we saw yet another article snippet berating the handheld for no particularly good reason. We found ourselves questioning exactly why it’s treated this way, and why it’s still regarded as a “failure” or “dead”. The misinterpretation of Sony’s recent “legacy platform” comments certainly didn’t help, though one can lay at least part of the blame at the feet of the press for that one for poor reporting.

Another possible perspective is to do with what I’ve just talked about: the niches that Vita serves. A while back, Polygon’s Phil Kollar — a supposed JRPG expert and enthusiast — posted a particularly obnoxious article berating Atlus for localising Dungeon Travelers 2, a dungeon-crawling RPG starring a cast of cute girls that has a lineage which can be slightly indirectly traced back to an eroge called To Heart 2. (Read my response here, if you’re bored.) Kollar lambasted the game while clearly having little to no knowledge of it whatsoever and no desire to explore or investigate it, and he’s not the only one to post such a piece. In other words, it’s little surprise that popular perception of Vita suffers when it’s typically ignored in favour of the big-budget PC and console triple-A flavours of the month — except, of course, when something “problematic” rears its head and gets all the “progressive” types in a tizzy.

It’s probably a gross oversimplification to consider that Vita might be suffering at the hands of the press because many of its games don’t fit neatly in with the “progressive” ideology that most mainstream gaming sites are presently trying to peddle — this viewpoint ignores the numerous successful Western indie games, including the more experimental, arty end of the spectrum, for example — but I can’t help but feel there’s a bit of truth in there. To return to Neptunia, for example, we’re talking about a series of games that has grown from very humble beginnings in 2010 into one of the most popular, recognisable, prolific and varied series in the whole Japanese niche gaming market, but is it ever acknowledged by the big sites? Is it bollocks.

Anyway, fortunately, despite the perpetuation of the “Vita has no games, Vita is dying/dead” narrative, the platform is very much alive, well and beloved by those who have taken the time to understand what it’s doing and engage with it. I have a healthy collection of Vita games in both physical and digital format; a somewhat more dedicated friend on Twitter has over a hundred games for his Vita in both physical and digital format, and the new releases out of Japan don’t look like slowing down any time soon.

One thing that’s become increasingly clear to me as the years have passed is that the press is rapidly losing relevance, and the numerous “social commentary” pieces that regularly rear their ugly heads are an attempt to move with the times and evolve. Fair enough, but that’s not what I want to read in most cases; meanwhile, that which I used to get from games magazines and websites — enthusiastic discussion of games I’ve played, and recommendations of games I might like to play — I now get from social media, via personal interactions with the people who actually matter when it comes to this sort of thing: the people who are actually playing them.

As a former member of the games press, it’s a slightly frustrating and disheartening situation to see. But so long as Vita keeps coming out with great games that I want to play — and two new ones arrived just this week (Moe Chronicle and Operation Abyss), so I don’t think that will be a problem — I’ll keep talking about it, and I’m far from the only one who feels this way, thankfully. It’s just a pity it’s so hard to make people outside our circle of enthusiasts listen.