I’ve decided that what’s really significant about this review is how it can be used to explain the emergence of art. A person who doesn’t play many video games might find God Hand and God of War II to be indistinguishable – indistinguishable in their stupidity. Yet, there is a gulf between them.

Also, I watched vids 1-5 and they were all amazing.

Recently, I stumbled across an Iwata asks interview with Yuji Horii and one of his understudies about Dragon Quest IX. Interestingly enough, the understudy dude was explaining how Horri constantly focused on little things that wouldn’t feel right — like when timing between menus was off — and that the understudy learned so much from this. And then Iwata and Horri both agreed right then and there that that approach was common element between Horri’s approach to making DQ games and Nintendo’s approach to making games — and that this even accounted for their games’ success. I swear that they were making the exact point that Tim Rogers has been making on this site (and elsewhere) about friction in gamesn (and anybody who’s interested in seeing the video just has to go to the DQIX website and click on video # 5 of the Iwata Asks interview (which was titled something like “on the sameness of Dragon Quest and Mario”)).

What does this have to do with my previous comment? Well, if the time between various menus can massively impact the enjoyment of an rpg according to the creator of Dragon Quest (like has been said here on this site), then I’m pretty sure that the timing between player action and sword swing can vastly impact player-enjoyment of TWP over the course of 40 hours.

And so, I guess what I’m saying is not that TWP doesn’t have the problems that this reviewer says it has. No, I’m just saying that some (but certainly not all) of those problems are masked-over in the GCN version, simply because it’s a better overall game.

I roughly agree with the TWP-is-assigning-you-homework point that was made in this article. However, I can think of three reasons why this didn’t inhibit my enjoyment of the game too much at a personal level. And I’m posting them merely in case anybody finds them remotely interesting — not to argue any point against this article. These are just merely reflections.

Here they are:

1) One of my favorite parts of the game was the feeling that Midna was messing with my mind. Not that I like my mind being messed with. No, it’s just that when Midna is constantly telling me how I have to continue on in an “It sucks to be you,” type of tone, it made me feel like I was dealing with a character far more real than most characters I’ve encountered in games. She was messing with me. Most video game characters don’t mess with you.

2) Also, I was the “chosen hero,” and this caused me to reflect personally on several philosophical questions surrounding free-will.

I think #’s 1 and 2 both helped to keep me from getting too hung up on the homework-assigning part of the game — after all, that part of the game isn’t too discordant with the stuff Midna was pulling on me and the position the game thrust me into. Since I was cool with my position in the game world and with Midna’s mind-games, I didn’t even really get to a point where I could complain about the homework. I was already well into my assignments before they could have even begun to trouble me.

3) TWP’s obtuseness in its dungeon design exacerbates the potential for feeling like you are assigned homework in a way that a game with more elegance and compactness wouldn’t. However, I played the GCN version first — and this changes one’s perspective on the obtuseness. But I have to digress for a second to first cover something Aonuma said and then cover some feelings you get controlling the cube version — and I need to cover those points before I can explain how the cube version impacts one’s feelings regarding the obtuseness of the adventure.

Basically, Aonuma is on record saying that TWP’s world size and location size were unintentionally made large. According to him, the big-ness of the word was a mere product of Epona-being-so-huge and Epona and Link were made before the rest of the game (and one can see how with everything else bigger, the design team would feel a need to up the spaciousness of the dungeons for purposes of keeping the dungeons in their traditional role as the-crucial-points in the game’s narrative). And of course, Aonuma wanted to keep Epona large, because they started making TWP with the goal of making horse-combat awesome.

Funny thing is, when you play the cube version, the horse combat is awesome. There’s no waggling of the wii remote. Instead, you press the b button if you’re not using a. And your hands are wrapped around one single controller (rather than mote and nunchuck) as you race along on horseback. This is a far better way to enjoy the experience. And although TWP is far from an action game, the cube version maintains a slightly more combat-focused attitude when Link steps off the horse. Again, you get to use the b button rather than waggles.

But that’s not all: Link in the GCN version feels heavier, and his b button sword swings are heavier too. But they are quicker at the same time.

As such, whether you’re racing around as a wolf, galloping around as Epona, or hacking away at a baddie on foot, the whole experience feels slightly quicker and slightly more intense — and the greater speed and intensity (and better friction) throughout (from wolf to horse to combat-in-the-dungeon) cause the experience to feel more unified.

Going back to what I said at the start of this point (point number 3): TWP is too obtuse. With a game that is too obtuse, the best thing is to keep the experience as unified and cohesive as possible. The Wii-remote-waggle system ruins the cohesiveness (not only by having you use two controllers like all wii games but also) by slowing up combat and making it less weighty and friction-y — all at the same time. A potentially-too-slow-game is slowed down even more over the course of 40 hours when every enemy encounter is slightly slowed (and hampered overall) by worse controls. But when everything is a little sped up and a little more weighty (even if only a little) this adds up over the course of a long play-through. As such, the GCN version just ends up feeling quicker and more cohesive than the Wii version.

And this has a broader impact. If our overall impression of a game is good, it’s easier to overlook the lows and focus on the highs — even when we’re trying not to. Since my overall impression of the game was one of a slightly more streamlined Zelda experience, interesting streamlining elements such as the designers’ decision to make the players explore-without-knowing-it during the wolf-collect-a-thon sections — experiences like those stood out more to me. Obtuse dungeouns (and therefore, feelings of being assigned homework) stood out less do to my differing overall impression (also worthy of note is the fact that just laying into a baddie with “b” and then just randomly hopping around and using “a” attacks after the initial attacking with b — this all feels good and flexible — and to have fun attacking an enemy (when you actually find one) in a slightly-too-big dungeon — well, this also takes your mind off of the obtuseness —- but this whole more-fluid combat experience is denied to the player in the wii version).

So yeah, Midna’s determination to mess with me combined with a more streamlined GCN experience probably helped me feel less like “omg I have homework” and more like “this is epic dude!!!” while I was playing. The GCN version isn’t a totally different game — but overall, I think some little things in it can help to trigger different emotional reactions for certain players — especially if said players like the story/scenario.

But this review still seems pretty accurate to me.

As someone who has never played Earthbound, should I take this as a recommendation to play Mother 3 without waiting to play Earthbound beforehand? I mean, that’s what I’m pretty sure you’re saying (you said you’d envy anyone in the position of an outsider to the series who witnesses all of this crazy-awesomeness)… but yeah… I guess I just wanted to make sure that you’d still hold to that line when you’re confronted with the actual possibility of someone attempting to play Mother 3 first.

If you’ll stick by what you said (with no qualifications), then I’ll go and play Mother 3, asap.

also, nailed to the ground in its relentless lowness and weirdly spider-like on hills.

uit after a month without feeling ripped off is a goddamned miracle. The only thing that kept it from getting a *higher* score was that shitty samey-same MMOness and lack of basic logic in the elements like the horse-speeders and griffon-speeders and boat-elevator-shuttles.