2338: Link’s a Boy, Deal With It. Or Spend Some Time With These Awesome Female Protagonists Instead of Moaning

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Nintendo revealed its new Zelda game today, or, more accurately, showed off a decent amount of gameplay. It looks lovely, both from an aesthetic and gameplay standpoint, though it remains to be seen if they can provide a Zelda narrative that keeps me interested more than most of the previous incarnations.

Naturally, this being the ever-offended Internet, most of the discussion surrounding Zelda was about the fact that, shock horror, Link is still a boy. You know, like he’s been for the last 30 years, as an established character — indeed, one of the most recognisable characters in gaming after his Nintendo stablemates Mario and Luigi.

A bunch of people seemed to have got the idea in their head that Link “should” be female in this new Zelda. Nintendo had fueled the fire a little with some concept art and, later, a character called Linkle (seriously?) in 3DS title Hyrule Warriors Legends, but nope; the new Zelda game will feature a male protagonist, just like its predecessors, and — spoiler — will probably also feature a princess called Zelda.

Don’t get me wrong, a female Link could be cool, but that’s about all. If Nintendo were to change Link to a female character now, it would look like change for change’s sake, and Nintendo isn’t really about that… to a fault, some might say. There’s also an argument that people want to see a representation of themselves on the screen, but no; despite the fact that Link has never spoken in any of the Zelda games, he’s still an established character. You are playing as Link; you are not playing as you.

But let’s not get bogged down in this; there’s a whole argument to be had over Zelda lore and Link actually being lots of different incarnations of one heroic spirit, but that’s for another day. Instead, I want to talk about something more general on this topic.

This exchange on Twitter bothered me:

https://twitter.com/IvoryOasis/status/742786606466142208

“They” presumably being either Nintendo, or Japanese developers in general. Either way, it’s just plain wrong. Here are some excellent female protagonists from Japanese developers, including Nintendo:

Samus Fucking Aran

If Nintendo consider women “2nd class”, how is it one of their most beloved characters is a woman? The fact that Samus is a woman is widely known now, of course, but back when the original Metroid came out it was a genuine surprise to see her take off the helmet of her power armour and reveal that yes, indeed, she was a woman.

This was in 1986. 30 years ago. To my knowledge, not one person has argued that Samus should be rebooted as a man.

Arnice

The protagonist of Nights of Azure by Gust is a thoroughly capable young woman who doesn’t take any shit from anyone. Not only that, she’s also gay, so double diversity points there.

Pretty much every protagonist in the Atelier series

With the exception of the three Atelier Iris games and half of Atelier Escha and Logy, all the protagonists of the Atelier games have been female. There are 16 Atelier games, plus spinoffs and reboots, and the series has been running since 1997.

Everyone in the Senran Kagura series

The Senran Kagura series has a cast that expands with each new installment, and there are very few male characters. The focus is squarely on the female characters, each of whom get a decent amount of time in the limelight and, in the Versus games on PlayStation platforms, their own side stories to further flesh out their characters. Estival Versus has 25 playable female characters, plus several additional DLC characters.

Everyone in the Neptunia series

The entire main cast of the Neptunia series (with the exception of important character Umio in the latest installment) is female. In fact, there seem to be very few men in these games at all, and when they do show up, they are usually shown to be incompetent or evil. The Neptunia cast has become so strong and recognisable now that it’s transcended its original role-playing game genre into visual novels, strategy games and beat ’em ups, with more doubtless to come in the future.

Estelle Bright

Estelle from Trails in the Sky was easily my favourite thing about that game. She was a great protagonist for a traditional RPG: optimistic, enthusiastic and courageous. She also had a dry wit and a good line in putdowns for those who thought she was too tomboyish in her behaviour, and acted as an excellent, well-crafted centrepiece for an interesting, memorable ensemble cast.

Yunica Tovah

One of the three protagonists in Ys Origin, Yunica overcomes a considerable amount of adversity in her world: she can’t use magic like many of her peers, but instead of getting mopey and depressed about it, this just makes her throw herself into bettering herself in other ways. She strikes an interesting balance between traditional femininity in her behaviour and being a total badass when it comes to combat, swinging around battleaxes and two-handed swords like they weigh nothing at all.

2B

Not much is known about Nier Automata yet, but if the first game’s ambitious, emotional story is anything to go by, there’s going to be a very interesting story surrounding the female android protagonist of this sequel.

Bayonetta

Two of the best character action games in the last few years have a woman in the leading role. Bayonetta is designed in the exaggerated superhero mould, and her portrayal in the games deliberately emphasises her sexuality, which she takes total ownership of throughout. Also she rides a motorbike up a rocket into space before punching God in the face.

Milla Maxwell

My love for Tales of Xillia protagonist Milla is well documented, but she bears mentioning again, because she’s awesome. An incredibly interesting character with some fascinating development over the course of the two games in which she appears, Milla subverts a ton of tropes and ended up being one of the most memorable characters I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with in the last few years.

I could go on, but that’s probably enough for now.

Needless to say, my point is probably clear: Japanese devs (including Nintendo) emphatically don’t think of women or female characters as “second class”. In fact, I can name considerably more Japanese games with female protagonists than Western ones. And they’re cool, interesting, well-written characters, too — even in the more fanservicey games like Senran Kagura, which many people find to have an extraordinary amount of character development if they go in on the assumption it’s about tits.

But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good bit of stupid, pointless outrage, shall we?

In other words: stop getting upset that a character who has been male for 30 years is still male when there are a huge number of awesome female-led games from Japanese devs. And stop lying, while you’re on. kthxbai

2141: #NotAllZeldas

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I’ve been continuing my leisurely jaunt through Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series for the last few days, and have finished A Link to the Past and started on Link’s Awakening. The degree to which I’m enjoying these games suggests to me that this is something I should have probably done quite some time ago, but no matter; the nice thing about the Zelda games, I’m discovering, is that despite their technical limitations in their older incarnations, they are mostly pretty timeless experiences that stand up very well today.

The other thing I’ve discovered is that the oft-mentioned criticism that “every Zelda game is the same”, at least with regards to plot — a criticism that I have myself leveled at the series in the past — is actually complete bollocks. Don’t believe me? Let’s take stock.

The Legend of Zelda: Ganon kidnaps Zelda. Link has to save her and defeat Ganon. This is the wafer-thin plot that everyone assumes is the same in every subsequent Zelda.

The Adventure of Link: The Link from the first game seeks to awaken a Zelda who is not the Zelda from the first game by taking magic crystals to palaces. Meanwhile, Ganon’s followers seek to resurrect their pig-faced twat of a master by sprinkling Link’s blood on Ganon’s ashes.

A Link to the Past: A Link from several eras prior to the first two Zelda games follows his uncle into battle having received a telepathic message from yet another Zelda, who is a descendant of seven wise men who sealed away the Demon King Ganon. Ganon is trapped in the Dark World, which was once the Golden Land, where the Triforce lay. Link takes up the Master Sword to strike down Ganon and return the Dark World to its former status as the Golden Land, and to undo the damage Ganon’s machinations have done to the Light World.

Link’s Awakening: The Link from A Link to the Past washes up on a mysterious island and is not immediately beset by requests for help from anyone called Zelda, instead finding himself meeting a cast of weird and wonderful characters and given the inevitable quest to clear out a bunch of dungeons, this time to “wake the Wind Fish” and escape the island.

Ocarina of Time: A Link from several eras before A Link to the Past and even more eras prior to The Legend of Zelda becomes aware that there is something special about him after a somewhat humble beginning in his forest village. He witnesses how Ganondorf, leader of thieves, becomes Ganon the Demon King, and through somewhat convoluted means involving time-travel, gives Ganon a right good kicking. Possibly. If he doesn’t, A Link to the Past happens. If he does, Majora’s Mask might happen, or Wind Waker might happen. It all gets a bit complicated here.

Majora’s Mask: The young Link from Ocarina of Time finds himself drawn into a strange other land called Termina, which is set to be destroyed in a horrible cataclysm in three days’ time thanks to the machinations of the peculiar Skull Kid, who has decided it would be a really good idea to call the moon down from the sky to blow everything up. Link, being a pro at this time-travel thing by now, repeatedly cheats death for everyone in Termina by rewinding time to the beginning of this three-day period until he can finally prevent the disaster from occurring. (It’s a tad more complicated than this.)

I could go on, since there are a lot more Zelda games than these six, but I won’t for now. Suffice to say, the assumption that “all Zelda games are about rescuing Zelda and killing Ganon” is completely mistaken, with the series actually having a rather complex and fascinating timeline if you care to explore it in detail. The nice thing about it, though, is that if you don’t care to explore it in detail, each game stands perfectly well by itself without requiring any prior knowledge of its prequels, sequels or parallel timeline tales that the series has exploded into over the years.

Whether this complexity was entirely intentional or more of an “oh shit!” response to the folks at Nintendo realising they’d fucked up their own canon repeatedly isn’t entirely clear. But it works for me, and the more I explore the Zelda series this time around, the more I’m glad I’m coming to it when its hype is at a somewhat more temperate level. It means I can explore — or revisit, in some cases — these games with relative “beginner’s mind”, and make up my own mind up about what I’m playing.

So far, I’m enjoying the experience a lot. Whether I’ll make it through all of the Zelda games released to date — all of the good ones, anyway; I doubt I’ll touch those CD-i monstrosities — remains to be seen, but I’m hopeful about my progress so far.

Now, back to Link’s Awakening…

2137: Nintendoes

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I’ve been playing almost exclusively Nintendo games for the past week or two. This wasn’t entirely deliberate, but it’s just sort of happened. And it’s allowing me to rediscover my appreciation of what Nintendo does well.

Nintendo, more than pretty much any other company out there, puts out games that feel satisfyingly complete. They don’t come out of the door half-baked, lacking in content or riddled with bugs; they’re ready to play, bursting with things to do and full of enjoyment waiting to be discovered. And this is how they’ve always been, even since the days of the NES.

The other thing I rather like about Nintendo is that their work has a very distinctive “voice”. This is partly the job of the localisation teams who work on the various properties, but the overall “tone” of most Nintendo works is so very consistent — and has been for many years — that I find it difficult to believe that this is purely a regional thing. Rather, I feel that Nintendo almost certainly makes very careful decisions about how it’s going to localise things and make them accessible and tonally appropriate in territories around the world. This even goes as far as making the British/European English and American English versions of games different to quite a considerable degree in some cases, which always feels like a pleasantly “personal” touch.

Now, Nintendo have attracted the ire of a number of people over the last few years thanks to what these folks see as unnecessarily “butchered” translations of games such as Fire Emblem Awakening and Xenoblade Chronicles X. And, for sure, some notable changes have been made from the original scripts — and, in a number of cases, content has been edited or even cut to be in keeping with the perceived values of a particular territory. Memorable examples in recent memory include the shot of Tharja’s panties-clad bum in Fire Emblem Awakening (which featured a curtain being pulled across it in the English version, inadvertently making it look more lewd by hiding her panties altogether) and the inexplicable removal of the breast size slider from Xenoblade Chronicles X‘s character creation tool.

These sorts of edits are nothing new, however. The Legend of Zelda series, for example, has a somewhat different tone in Japan to in the West, particularly in installments such as A Link to the Past on Super NES. In the Japanese original A Link to the Past, for example, the story touched on religious themes, with one of the main villains being a priest. In the English versions, however, religious references were removed, and the “priest” became a “wizard”.

Why does Nintendo do this? For an attempt at inclusivity, I guess; the company has a carefully curated “family-friendly” image to uphold, after all, and “family-friendly” means different things in different territories. From its localisation decisions, we can interpret that Nintendo believes here in the West that “family-friendly” means something that the whole family can sit down and enjoy together without any material provoking arguments or awkwardness between one another. We’ve seen on all too many occasions that discussions and material relating to both religion and sexuality are very much capable of inducing arguments and awkwardness, so out the window they go. It’s kind of a shame for those who prefer their translations to be more literal and true to the original Japanese texts, but it is, after all, what Nintendo has always done — and, I have to admit, that warm, friendly tone most of their localisations tend to have is rather comforting, and quite unlike anything from other localised Japanese works.

This is even apparent in games such as New Style Boutique 2 and Animal Crossing, where there was unlikely to be any real “offensive” content in the first place; both have been localised in such a way as to be as inclusive and welcoming as possible to a broad audience; they’re games that invite you in to enjoy the experience rather than insist you must be this skilled to ride, or whatever. And that’s rather nice, really. Not something that every game needs, of course — some games are all the better for their laser-sharp focus on a very specific, niche-interest audience — but, to be honest, I find it hard to get too riled up about censorship talk when it comes to Nintendo games, simply because I’ve grown up with that warm, friendly, familiar tone of their localisations, and it would feel kind of strange for that to change now.

Anyway. I’m enjoying my Nintendo period right now: currently playing Zelda 3, Hyrule Warriors and New Style Boutique 2. All are very different games from one another. All are simply marvellous. All are proof that Nintendo doesn’t give a shit what its competitors are doing, because they’re quite happy doing their own thing, even if it ends up causing their sales figures to look dismal in comparison to those of Sony and Microsoft.

I hope this Nintendo never goes away. They’re an important part of gaming, and it would be sad to see them go the way of Sega, becoming just another third-party publisher.

1660: Stop Wasting Cool Licenses on Monopoly

Hey! Listen! There’s a Legend of Zelda board game coming! Awesome! Take a look!

…Oh. Monopoly. Again. Great.

Yes, indeed: the latest in a long-line of quick-and-easy cash grab Monopoly sets is one based on Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series, a franchise that has been running almost since the dawn of gaming, and one which has consistently provided gamers with some of the most enchanting interactive adventures of all time, blending childlike wonderment with epic heroic fantasy.

The Legend of Zelda, meanwhile, has not been particularly known over the years for its protagonist Link’s desire to build up a sizeable portfolio of property, nor has Hyrule society ever been particularly dependent on capitalism. Link, more often than not, does good deeds out of a sense of altruism, or occasionally for the promise of “something good” (inevitably in bold print) — said “something good” is rarely financial reward, with questgivers instead tending to give him something of much more practical use.

I’m a bit annoyed about this. I’m not a particularly huge Zelda fan myself, but this is, without a doubt, a colossal waste of an awesome license. Monopoly is a terrible board game to shoehorn the Zelda license into. It’s a terrible game in its own right, too, but I’m aware some people still like it, so I’m not going to push that angle too far — besides, my own personal dislike of Monopoly isn’t why I’m frustrated to see Zelda squandered like this.

No, instead I find myself wishing for a more appropriate use of the license. It doesn’t have to be an original board game in its own right — though that would be cool: spectacular Polish RPG series The Witcher is soon to get its own cool-looking original board game, so it’s not without precedent either — but surely, surely there are better ways that Zelda could be adapted for tabletop play?

Here’s just a few suggestions:

The Legend of Zelda: Carcassonne — Standard Carcassonne, except the tiles are all made up of actual tilesets from past Zelda games — A Link to the Past’s 16-bit top-down graphics would be ideal for this. Meeples could be replaced by the different, distinctive races of creatures you come across in a typical Zelda game — one player could have a set of Gorons, while another could have Zoras, another still could have the Kokiri, and so on.
The Legend of Zelda: Catan — Much like Carcassonne, the bare minimum you need to do to make a convincing Zelda Catan set would be to redo the tile artwork in an authentically Zelda-esque fashion. You could incorporate some of the new rules and tweaks from things like Star Trek Catan — variable player powers is neat, for example — and Catan’s numerous expansions for different scenarios.
The Legend of Zelda: Talisman — Talisman is, while flawed as a game, a decent depiction of an epic quest to achieve something. Reskinning this would be a more appropriate use of the license than Monopoly.
D&D Adventures: The Legend of Zelda — The dungeon-crawling co-op adventure games carrying the D&D brand are ripe for adaptation with Zelda artwork, enemies and items. You could even do a “Four Swords” thing, with each player having a differently coloured Link to control.
Arkham/Eldritch Horror: The Legend of Zelda — Okay, stretching things a bit here in terms of theme, but the mechanics of Arkham and Eldritch Horror are ripe for adaptation into a Zelda-style epic quest. There’s exploration, treasures, character progression, battles, boss fights… everything a good Zelda game would need.

And this is just off the top of my head. All of the above would need very little adaptation in order to create a more convincing tabletop Zelda experience than Monopoly ever will. Come, on, Zelda Monopoly even still has “salaries”, “Go To Jail” and “Free Parking”, the latter of which in particular is completely incongruous with the setting.

So, this is pissing in the wind, I know, but please, please, license holders: when considering whether or not to license your awesome property for tabletop adaptation, please look a little further than Monopoly. It may be one of the most well-known games in the world, but there are hundreds, thousands of other, far better board and card games out there, most of which would be much better-suited for adaptations of this kind.

#oneaday Day 570: Nintendon’t

So apparently Nintendo are under pressure from their investors to say sod the 3DS and start developing for smartphones. I can’t help but think that this is a really good idea. The 3DS was a bold experiment for the company, but it’s not going particularly well for them right now — hence the massive price cut. Said price cut still isn’t enough for me to want to purchase one, however, which I think is part of the problem. Nintendo doesn’t seem to know who the 3DS is for. Is it for the casual market, a la Wii? Is it for core gamers? Is it for people who played their DSes religiously?

The answer to all of those questions is a shrug of the shoulders and a non-committal “Idunno”.

The trouble is, of course, iOS and to a lesser extent Android. Why should people purchase a dedicated game system featuring an initially impressive but ultimately useless gimmick when they can have equivalent gaming experiences (albeit without the 3D) on their phones? The only real advantage I see of the 3DS (and, by extension, the Vita) over the smartphone platforms is the addition of physical controls — a relatively big deal, sure, but a lot of developers are getting wise to the best ways to work controls around a touchscreen now.

iOS and Android have a bigger ace up their sleeve than physical controls, though: pricing. This occurred to me today when considering the disgruntlement people expressed over Final Fantasy Tactics releasing at £10.99/$15.99 on iOS. Final Fantasy Tactics is about 14 years old, and was a full price title on its original release. It was then a full price title on its more recent PSP release before dropping down to around the $10 mark on PSN. The iOS port is more expensive than the PSP version, sure, but it has been revamped for the touchscreen — and rather well, I might add.

Still think it’s expensive? Let’s take a look at the one game people consider to be an “essential purchase” for the 3DS: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. A game of an equivalent age to Final Fantasy Tactics. Given a slight makeover with some new textures, 3D graphics and an interface revamp, sure — along with the addition of the Master Quest variant that I’m pretty sure no-one ever plays — but still, in essence, the same Ocarina of Time we were playing on the N64. The price? $40.

Now hold on a minute. Suddenly Final Fantasy Tactics doesn’t seem like such a bad deal after all. If Nintendo are going to charge that much more for the privilege of having the game on physical media rather than a digital download, then I say bring on the digital future. If Nintendo are so stubborn as to remain dedicated to their own proprietary hardware, then they need to think about how they can be competitive. Because at the moment, they’re not — and the sales figures are showing that. Perhaps the 3DS will show a sharp upswing in popularity when the price drop comes into effect tomorrow, but said price drop still isn’t going to solve the system’s most critical problem — a lack of good games, and those games that are good released at a price way higher than you’d find similar experiences on the App Store — even the most expensive ones like Final Fantasy Tactics.

It’d be sad to see Nintendo crushed after they dominated the handheld market for so many years. But I have a feeling it’s going to happen — and the sooner they accept it, the better. I for one would certainly be very happy to see a Virtual Console app appear on the App Store, and I’d be delighted to play titles like Super Mario Bros., Castlevania and numerous others on the go. But I’m not buying a 3DS for the privilege — if Nintendo can’t accept the common knowledge that people of 2011 want fewer devices in their pocket, not more, then frankly they deserve everything they get.