The Patreon Letter - 14th February, 2019

Happy Valentine's day! I know this letter is late, but as Jackson explained last week please expect the letters to just be late until Discovery is over. We're literally drowning in work right now, and I haven't had an actual day off since Christmas. It's been a rough go, so thank you for bearing with us as we do all the podcasts as our main priority. 

There was a Nintendo direct today and they announced a remake of one of the greatest games of all time, and absolutely the best Zelda game, Link's Awakening. If you don't know, it's the original game boy one from 1993 that got a colorized remake on the GBC and you can pick up for like $6??? dollars on the 3DS eshop. Also it's apparently coming on switch later this year with a premium $60 price tag and a cute, capsule toy kind of style to it. 

The look is divisive. I don't think I hate it, but it's hard to divorce the general artistic decisions from the ones that feel driven by Nintendo's house engine style now, with lots of tilt shift and the same transparent borders and bland fonts that show up in literally Every. Single. One. of their first party releases. That stuff I do think shaves off the edges of what was a very singularly weird game, a Zelda game where Link could hop on a goomba and get murdered by a shopkeeper for stealing. 

I also think the aesthetic choices kind of undercut some of the tone of the original game. Perhaps I'll feel differently when I play the final game, but Link's Awakening is a game about the wistful downfalls of adventure, where secrets get uncovered and voyages end and goodbyes are inevitable. There's a vague sense of existential ambivalence and unease that permeates parts of the game, something that only Majora's Mask ever really succeeded at after Link's Awakening. By reducing everything to a sort of vaguely skeuomorphic toybox it reminds me of the literal years I spent playing handheld games that nobody I knew would touch because they weren't the real game platforms.

For better or worse, Nintendo has killed this idea for good by smashing the handheld and the console into one object. But by doing that I think it's made them far less willing to be weird, and instead the strange sad Zelda gets a makeover befitting its 'lesser' status to people who haven't played it before. 

Maybe I'm just bitter they opened the announcement with a fully animated colored pencil-looking opening that was more in line with the official manual art of the time, an aesthetic I continue to wish Zelda would just go and live in please I'm dying here. 

But also this makeover and the burial of the fact you can just play this game for under $10 on your 3DS comes with a unhappier surprise: this game is going to cost you $60. Which ... I don't want to speak out of turn, but that's unreasonable. I know games are expensive to make in 2019, but a) Nintendo games never go on sale and b) it's a game from 1993 that seems to be a tile for tile remake, which means it not only isn't very long but will be even faster for anyone who has played it before. 

We moan about capitalism a lot on here, but I really do think this is an unreasonable ask when I know Nintendo absolutely won't put the original on the Switch even though I think we can safely assume it would be trivial. So we get a version that is potentially not an improvement, for roughly ten times the cost of the original game which is what people fell in love with in the first place. I know everyone has accepted Nintendo pricing, NSMBUD was a FULL PRICED GAME beyond all reason, but I still think these are bad decisions made to maximize returns at the cost of Nintendo's actual legacy. 

I'm sure I'll play this damn thing and probably have a great time. I love Link's Awakening. But I continue to look at the Switch and see the slow bleeding out of the type of game that I really wanted from Nintendo as they over-polish everything into the same inoffensive brand ambassador for this quarter and the weirder, smaller games disappear unless they get remade into big price tags. The Switch is very popular and the games sell, so perhaps I'm just offering up my sour grapes from the sidelines, but I think it's real enough to talk about, and I worry about a world where all the handheld games are gone more and more each day.