Why the narrative based platformer died (and should stay dead) , a “retrospective”
Growing up I never had a Nintendo, I grew up with a PS1 and a PS2, as such that meant my options in children’s platformers were Spyro, Crash, Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, and Sly Cooper. My friends with DS’s had shown me Mario64, but the game never seemed to be as fun to me as the other platformers I had experienced.
As I grew older, I grew attached to the games personalities, the games stories and worlds were chat captured me as a child. Gameplay was always fun too, Jak and Daxter had plenty of vehicles to use, and Ratchet and Clank had the weapons. To the point where I had become a very vocal person wanting a new Jak game.
Fast forward 15 years later, I have been fighting with myself regarding should I pull the trigger on the Digital version of the 3D All Stars Collection for switch. I ended up buying the collection on the last day it was available, as I had extra funds. I am aware I could have emulated the collections for “free” as a lot of “gamers” do, but I felt it was a symbolic gesture to Nintendo actually buying the games, as I had never owned the games myself, and purchasing the games gave me an extra incentive to actually play them to get my moneys worth.
Instantly I was bored with Mario64. It had the same Janky camera I remembered, and hated. Later that night I moved onto Super Mario Galaxy. The silly premise of the story had me rolling my eyes, but the gameplay was super new and fun to me for the first 30 minutes of gameplay. I still had not tried out Super Mario sunshine, so I went back to the title screen, and selected it from the menu.
Super Mario Sunshine had the same silly story setup. Playing the game, I started to get really annoyed with aiming the water sprout with the left stick, but I pushed through. After I had collected 5 stars, the game really started clicking. The surfing racing level was fun. My brain started chewing…. I felt like I had played this game before.
The next morning is when it clicked…. I was playing ratchet and clank. For all intents and purposes, I was playing a platformer that was the same as ratchet and clank, but with none of the distractions like guns, or a story that takes itself to seriously. This is when I realized why people always keep coming back to the Super Mario Bros franchise. Its just plain fun, and as far as platformers come, is probably the best gameplay wise.
Sonys con back in the day was they had better graphics, and due to that could tell way more complex narrative stories, and have slightly more complex gameplay, and a few other things, like bigger open worlds etc. This obviously is not a good formula for timeless games. Sure, people have fond memories of playing those games when they were children, but there are not that many people that go back to playing them. I was one of those people who went back to playing them. I kept playing them because didn’t know any better, and now I feel like a fool for standing by Sonys 3D platformers.
Ratchet and Clank in particular, was guilty of throwing in the entire kitchen sink, trying to do everything, perhaps not doing it well, but it was a good enough game to be super enjoyable to someone who had played nothing else. Super Mario Sunshine, on the other hand, does not have a fuck ton of gimmicks, but the few gimmicks it had, they were exploited in such creative ways that gives the game so many dimensions of creative gameplay it isn’t even funny. I remember when I was younger, playing Ratchet and Clank, having an idea for a clever way to solve a puzzle, and being disappointed that I couldn’t solve it that way, even though you would have thought you could. In ratchet and clank, there were plenty of out of bounds, areas with invisible walls or forcefields, just limits to your creativity.
In Super Mario Sunshine, so far it seems the only limits are my own imagination. The water gun gives you options I could have only imagined having in ratchet and clank. Its just so much more fun, and I really am not in the mood to rant about it for paragraphs haha.
Narrative based platformers are only fun if you like the story, and accept their shortcomings as a platformer. Case in point, the game Skylar and Plux. I got that game when it came out, and was super disappointed with it. It just wasn’t fun for whatever reason. It felt like the story created walls, and got in the way of the gameplay, which was enjoyable, but not enjoyable enough for me to want to play more then once. Same with the Ratchet and Clank 2016 remake. I didn’t even finish the Ratchet and Clank remake, I got bored half way through, the original Ratchet and Clank plays so much better, and I would rather play it on pcsx2 at 4k.
If you want to make a 3D platformer, push the limits of the gameplay. Don’t make another basic platformer, create a narrative, and expect the player to fall in love with the characters. Don’t fall into stupid traps with gimmicks like slowing down time either, because if you don’t let us use it all the time, on every level, without also giving us an option to complete the game without said gimmick, then what’s the point of including it in the first place? Its just another bandaid, a distraction from, what would be an objectively terrible game if you stripped all that away…
With this being said, I am selling my Jak and Daxter collectors editions. That nostalgic charm I had for them has been lost. I feel like I was conned into loving a brand. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is still fun and will always be one of my favorite games, but the Precursor Legacy didn’t really rely on narrative as much as the other games did it?
Peace
