Hand of Fate Shines because of Aesthetic

Hand of Fate is the first, and currently sole, game developed by Defiant Development. A mishmash of action, roguelike, and choose-your-own-adventure, I've been playing the game a bit recently and have really been loving it. But the more I played of the game, the more I began to wonder, why did I enjoy it so much?

The combat is nothing to write home about. If you've played any of the Batman: Arkham titles, you've seen it before. Enemies crowd around. You wait for an attack. Counter with proper timing. Go in for the combo. Rinse and repeat. Some twists, like uncounterable attacks and ranged attacks, force slight change but ultimately don't amount to a huge difference. It's fine, but also lacks the polish the combat had in the Arkham titles. There isn't the nice flow between animations you saw in those game. In the Batman games, a lot of care was done to make sure the different actions transitioned without being jarring. It looks like how a fight would go, with punches going to counters going to rolls smoothly. Hand of Fate, however, snaps from one animation to the next. You punch, and then you're rolling in a jarring change.

The other main portion of the gameplay, the non-action events, tend to get repetitive after a while. Your first encounter with the disguised goblin Mr. Lionel, or finding a weapon at the bottom of a ravine, or receiving aid from an elven maiden, are all intriguing given the ways they can go right, or wrong, and how you can handle them. Your second encounter? Third? Fifth? Eighth? Sixteenth? Less so.

What I think really works about Hand of Fate is the presentation. A man sits before you, with wide arm gestures and passionate exposition, extolling the difficulties and impossibility of the task you've chosen. It's bombastic, it's creative, it's expressive. It's a lot of the qualities fans of tabletop role-playing games would say is essential to be a good game master! And beyond the qualities of the man himself, there are the cards floating in front of him, dramatically swirling, there's an ornate case he has besides, there's subtle music providing ambiance for your next game...everything comes together to feel like if a game of Dungeons and Dragons could be taken that one step further.

Would Hand of Fate be anywhere near as good were it's presentation more drab? If the man merely laid the cards in front of you, and directed the action, would the game be nearly as good? Absolutely not, but this much is obvious. No game can survive without that bit of panache. Just this year, these sorts of flairs can be seen in Persona 5, Gravity Rush 2, Yakuza 0, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, all leverage their aesthetic to go from good to great. But Hand of Fate makes it abundantly clear that your ability to pull off the look and feel of what you're trying to evoke can make or break your game, determining whether it's an enjoyable game or a forgettable mess. Aesthetic can make all the difference, and in the case of Hand of Fate, it absolutely did.

Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Curtain Call is Great Music, Good Gameplay, and a Poor Mix

Final Fantasy Theatrhythm is proof that great music doesn't necessarily make great rhythm gaming.

It's an unfortunate realization I came to recently, while playing the second Theatrhythm game, Curtain Call. I got the game around it's release, way back in 2014, and haven't played it in about 2 years. But while playing Final Fantasy XIV, I was reminded that the music in Final Fantasy games is always so dang good, and decided to dust off the cartridge. And you know what? I was correct. The music in Final Fantasy is, indeed, so dang good. Sweeping orchestral scores, or as close as 8- and 16-bit hardware could manage way back when, serve as a fantastic backdrop to grandiose stories of capital-h Heroes saving the capital-w World. All of the songs are fantastic in their own right, and a few still give me chills to think about.

And Theatrhythm is a very good rhythm game. Hundreds of songs from the series history are represented, from the very first game for the NES all the way to Final Fantasy XIV, the most recent in the series at the time. Even spinoffs like Crystal Chronicles and the obscure Mystic Quest have a couple songs and characters in the game. Beyond the variety of music, the scoring and progression is unique and interesting as well: you create a party of 4 characters chosen from a wide roster, again culled from across the series' history, which all have their own stats. These stats determine how good they are at what kinds of songs: Some characters will make Battle songs easier, while others make Field songs easier, and more still are suited to cutscene or Event songs. These characters will gain experience as you use them in your party, gaining abilities and stats to further help you pass through difficult songs.

Did I mention all of the different kinds of songs have differing mechanics, as well? Battle Music Stages force you to keep tabs on 4 different tracks for notes, while Field Stages have only one that you'll need to manipulate to keep centered on the upcoming notes. Event Stages will actually move the cursors onto notes rather than the opposite. You also have a variety of ways of hitting notes, so whether you're most comfortable using buttons and the circle pad, your stylus, or a mixture of the two, the game allows it and even keeps track. It can occasionally be a little fiddly when the game asks you to flick the stylus or circle pad in a particular direction, but for the most part it's a fun system. And the incredibly slow progression system, of slowly unlocking art and new characters (earned via crystals) as you gather 'Rhythmia' from finishing songs, ensures dedicated players have a reason to play for months. It's great fun.
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Which all goes to show that sometimes, great tastes do not taste great together.

Rhythm games work best with songs that are more designed to be...well, rhythmic, I suppose. Catchy, recognizable beats that are easy to hum along to. I love Final Fantasy and its music with all my heart, but "hummable" describes very few songs in the series. Some songs certainly work better than others: Battle songs tend to work anywhere from decently enough to pretty well. But once the game wants you to play DDR in time to a slow town theme, the whole things feels off.

Not to mention, the note maps are occasionally...silly. There are a lot of ways high-level rhythm game maps mix up the difficulty: They require more buttons, they force you to more closely follow the notes in the song instead of simplifying, things like that. But there's always a sense that goes into those increases in difficulties. Take, for example, this video from Hatsune Miku Project Diva: Future Tone. It's of the song Sadistic Music Factory, on the hardest difficulty level:

Pretty difficult, right? But there's a flow to how the notes are arranged in the song. There are moments with rapid alternation between two notes, which may shift to hitting the notes simultaneously, or holding one note while hitting out a rhythm of other notes. Ultimately, the speed makes it difficult, but any individual section can be looked at on it's own and have a sense to it that congeals well in the end.

For comparisons sake, let's look at the Final Fantasy XIV Titan Theme at the highest difficulty in Theatrhythm:

The notes are much more all over the place in this one. In the same section of the song, the notes you're expected to play shift rapidly without reason, almost like the game is trying to trick you. Note maps can be difficult, but there's usually a sense to them. Some of the maps in Theatrhythm look like those joke note maps for free computer DDR or Elite Beat Agents games. In a song you'd typically hear in a rhythm game, this kind of stuff isn't necessary because following the song itself can lead to enough challenge on its own. But when the music doesn't get as crazy, you have to resort to stuff like this, even when it feels cheap.

I cannot stress enough that I really enjoy Final Fantasy Theatrhythm. I'm at over 40,000 Rhythmia, a metric which has no meaning even to me but basically means I've played this game a bunch. The music is great, and the gameplay is pretty good. It's just a crying shame that they mix like oil and water.

Splatoon 2 Global Testfire Impressions

Stage 1 - Denial

It's the morning of March 24th, approaching noon, and I've gotten my nice new Nintendo Switch out to play some Splatoon. Starting soon, the Global Testfire will start, and as a huge fan of the original Splatoon on the Wii U I'm looking forward to seeing how things have changed. The supers are all brand new, there's a new kind of weapon in the Splat Dualies (which allow for rolling, how fun!), and the maps are all new.

The hour rolls around, and I boot up the game. A tutorial lets me get the hang of the controls, which seem largely unchanged from the original game, and I'm quickly shown the weapon select. I select my old standby, the Splat Roller, and the test starts connecting me to the game. Or, it tries to, at least. After a little bit, a connection error message pops up, and I'm booted back to weapon select. I try again, and the same thing happens. Try again, same thing. I look up information online, certain this must be a widespread issue, but...no, most everyone else has gotten in, enjoying themselves.

I find a few scattered reports of issues, and I try their suggestions. I restart my Switch, no dice. I double- and triple-check my internet connection, and it's green across the board. There is, as far as I can tell, no reason that I should be unable to play the game. Yet, I still get booted out. I post a joke on Twitter, complaining that there's no Squid Jump to distract me like in the original game, all while continuing to try, fruitlessly.

The hour ends, and with it the test, but my hopes remain high. The server tests for the original Splatoon were rough at first as well, but by the next time I was able to connect no problem and start splatting. I look forward to the next test I'll be able to join in on.

Stage 2 - Anger

It's 4 AM, the following morning, March 25th. I got home a few hours ago from a pretty rough shift at work, my feet still hurt, and I'm still a bit annoyed at some stuff I won't go into. But that's all in the past, and now I'm about to jump into the Splatoon 2 Global Testfire, which is about to start another hour of testing. I hop in, pick my weapon, and...the same thing happens. Can't connect.

I go through all the same motions as last time, restart the console, check the internet, everything's good, everything's working, why the fuck can't I play this game? I start trying different weapons to see if somehow my choice of the roller is preventing it from working, no luck. I'm already tired and annoyed, and now I can't even play this goddamn video game. Great. I post into a group chat that I want someone to complain to about this, but it's four in the goddamn morning, nobody's around. I go to sit next to our router, get as good a connection as I can, but nothing works. Around this time, I notice that it's always around 2 measures of music, the same two measures of music, before I get booted around, but it's never the exact same amount of time, always ever so slightly off.

I go back to my computer and am quite surprised that someone has in fact joined voice chat. I take a moment to remember that it's not 4 AM everywhere, then hop in and start my complaints. They lend a compassionate ear at my understandable frustrations. They tell me what they thought of the game, which doesn't annoy me as much as I was afraid it would (though I still make a sarcastic comment). Apparently Rollers have some momentum now where they take a second to roll at full speed? That's weird, and feels super unnecessary, but so did making the Kraken super in the original Splatoon completely useless by the time they stopped updating it, so who knows.

We shoot the shit about the original Splatoon, and our likes and dislikes about it. We both agree that skills shouldn't be tied to equipment anymore, so we can just be stylish, and that Nintendo will likely keep that stuff linked to equipment anyway. The entire time I keep trying to connect to a match, but no luck the entire way through. Eventually, the hour ends, and I've still put absolutely no time into Splatoon 2. I thank my friend for lending me their ear, and go to bed, setting my alarm for before the next test starts. I end up sleeping through it anyway.

Stage 3 - Still Anger

It's 8 PM that night, and guess what, the same shit happens. Can't connect. Earlier today a friend of mine who lives on a rock with bad internet and doesn't own a Switch tweeted about how they were playing Splatoon 2, which definitely wasn't rubbing it in my face but also definitely felt like it a little bit.

I spoke to the same friend earlier and apparently Bill Trinen, Senior Product Marketing Manager and notable public face of Nintendo of America, noted issues related to Comcast, the same ISP which I am unfortunately bound to. I check, and he is able to connect just fine to the current one. He is now tweeting about college basketball, and I guess I hope the team he was rooting for did well.

My thoughts wander to the worst case scenario. What if this is just how the game is gonna be? I feel like I'm one of like 7 people on the planet who can't get in, what if I'm considered an acceptable loss and Nintendo just doesn't do anything because hey, most people aren't having an issue? Splatoon 2 was one of the reasons I spent 300 dollars on this, what if that's just not feasible? I tweet to the official Nintendo of America account asking what work is being done between sessions, but I might as well scream into the void. The void does not scream back.

Stage 4 - Acceptance, And Definitely Not Anger Or A Different Kind Of Denial

It's 4 AM on Sunday, March 26th, and there's another hour of testing, the last hour of this group, but who cares honestly. Splatoon wasn't that great anyway, I guess on a floundering system like the Wii U it was alright, but it was overrated in retrospect. Who cares about the sequel to it? Even if you did, it all looks the same, they haven't changed anything, so you might as well just play the one that actually fucking works instead of this new piece of garbage.

You know what game is better than Splatoon 2, probably? Nier: Automata. This game is rad, and I'm starting my second playthrough, and it's already pretty crazy. I'm still trying to connect to the Splatoon 2 servers, but not because I wanna play it, I just feel like I have to, if I want to be able to speak with any sort of authority on video games I should play all the games I can, even if I don't care about them even a little bit. 

You know what else is definitely better than Splatoon 2, which I know because Splatoon 2 is dumb? Persona 5. That's coming out in like, a week or something crazy like that, and I still need to beat Nier: Automata like 4 more times or something before it comes out so I can see all the endings, which are apparently all pretty amazing. Who has time to play some dumb multiplayer paint game, that I just checked again and nope still no connection shit, when I have to beat a game that many more times in a week? Not me.

Definitely not me.

Pillars of Eternity, and the Possibility of Crowdsourced Lore

I've been spending a little bit of time lately playing 2015's Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian Entertainment's old-style RPG in the mold of Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights. I kind of suck at the genre, but I've been enjoying it a great deal. The gameplay does "classic" without feeling outdated, and the story of trying to discover the reason behind a slew of soulless childbirths and your own newly-activated ability to converse with souls both living and dead keeps me going even as the opening stays fairly vague and mysterious.

Your ability to converse with souls most commonly comes to the fore via "soul stories," stories you can read from certain non-player characters depicting events from their lives or past lives. I was a bit surprised to learn, after doing some research, that all of the soul stories and the NPC's they're connected to were by backers of the games Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, which raised nearly 4 million dollars in 2012. Anyone who donated a whopping $1000 or more was able to design an NPC who would appear in the game, with a soul story written by the backer. These small pieces of backstory on their characters (and, despite the game making it clear the souls held stories from past lives as well, every backer seems to have written stories from their NPC's point of view) led me to thinking: Could a game have NPC's written by their fans? Could you take those small, personal pieces of lore, and put their creation in the hands of the crowd?

The Familiar Feeling of Thumper

Before finally getting a chance to play it this week, I'd been hearing things about Thumper for a good long while. It's freaky, it's fast, it's "Rhythm Violence". It's barely even a rhythm game, it's all about getting into the flow of things. It'll stress you out. It'll make you sweat. It's not like other rhythm games.

Having played it, I'm inclined to disagree. Not to say the game isn't an odd duck, it definitely has its own idiosyncrasies. For instance, in a genre which typically maintains a shorter playtime on songs, around 2-4 minutes, to avoid overwhelming the player, Thumper gleefully has levels which reach over 30 minutes in length. In relation, the game doesn't really seem to expect you to memorize the levels the way you would memorize note charts in other rhythm games, given how it'll give additional sound cues ahead of time for the notes and also how 30 minutes is a ludicrous amount of time to memorize. Most importantly, in my opinion, the game’s soundtrack isn't catchy, or listenable, or even rhythmic: I often found myself completely incapable of finding a beat, only hitting notes by listening for the sound cues or looking carefully ahead. The soundtrack is more like a horror movie soundtrack, like John Carpenter's The Thing: The point isn't to be melodic or catchy, it's to set an unnerving and eerie mood.

But, ultimately, it's still a rhythm game. Let's compare it to a more recent release: Hatsune Miku Project Diva: Future Tone! There are the obvious similarities: You're still hitting buttons and directions in time with a rhythm. The music is a focus, though for different reasons. And, interestingly, there's a lot of visual noise behind the important, gameplay-focused notes and paths: Thumper has writhing limbs and flashing backgrounds, while Hatsune Miku has its music videos, which vary from unassuming fake concert footage to 3D animated music videos.

For me personally, the biggest similarity is what many people seem to think separates Thumper from the rest of the genre: stress.

Thumper revels in the stress it causes players: The long levels mean you can't feel "finished" with a song in the same short period of time as a typical rhythm game, and of course the Lovecraftian look of the game is incredibly unsettling. But the sweaty palms, the tense shoulders, the cursing at mistakes...that's not a new feeling for me when I play rhythm games. When I play, I want to get a perfect score. Any difficult part of a song, any tricky pathing...my shoulders tense up. My toes involuntarily flex. Every part of my body acts as if a moment of great exertion is happening.

That's what rhythm games are to me: stressful. A fun stress, not unlike what horror fans get out of their chosen genre. I don't dislike the Hatsune Miku games for that reason: Project Diva f 2nd is still a mainstay in my Vita, which I come back to periodically to try and do a bit better on songs that are always frustrating me. Ultimately the thing I'm there to do is overcome that tension and do my best. Thumper revels in it like few others do, sure, but it's not particularly novel in that respect. Thumper extends that stress out over 30 minutes, but the spikes I've felt playing through, say, Close and Open Demons and the Dead on Extreme difficulty easily match that stress, if not exceed it (though to be fair, I'm only about halfway through Thumper.)

My palms may be sweaty, my shoulders may be tense, my tongue may be sticking out to focus, I may be cussing a lot. But that's rhythm games for me. Thumper isn't an outlier; it fits comfortably, if oddly, among the rest.

Violence and Legacy in Hyper Light Drifter

The following piece contains spoilers for Hyper Light Drifter

Also, the story in Hyper Light Drifter is told entirely without text, so all names and proper nouns are derived from the Hyper Light Drifter wiki. In addition, while the player character is typically known as the Drifter, this would create three things in this article which I refer to as “Drifter,” alongside the game’s name and the general concept of a “drifter.” For the sake of clarity I have chosen to refer to the character as The Magician, an alternate name derived from the Steam trading card the character appears on.

Hyper Light Drifter was a game I almost entirely missed out on last year, playing it for about an hour before putting it away and not touching it until the very first day of this year. Over the course of two sessions and 6 hours, I plugged away at the game (finishing it that day) and came back very impressed. The controls were tight even as I used the non-ideal mouse and keyboard setup, combat was fast and fun with enemies that forced me to mix up my tactics, and the visuals were stunning. For a game that could easily be dismissed as “another pixel game,”the places and vistas were amazing, and let you know what the world of Hyper Light Drifter was like, just by their appearance.

For the uninitiated, Hyper Light Drifter tells the story of The Magician, one of many Drifters drawn to Central Town. Each drifter is afflicted by a mysterious illness which threatens their lives, and leads them to follow a mysterious dog known as the Jackal in their search for a cure, periodically assailed by visions: a sea of bodies after a catastrophe; a shadow assailing them; hellish titans too large to comprehend; a massive tower which bursts from the ground; a strange crystal, corrupted by a malevolent force.

The Magician fights through four different areas surrounding Central Town, defeating bosses and raising pillars, eventually leading them to a final confrontation. As you play, the Magician periodically encountering other non-player characters such as a fellow drifter known as The Guardian, who points you in the direction of important collectibles called Modules in each area. The areas are diverse and fun to navigate through, but there was one thing which seemed to link them all: evidence of war and destruction.

Hyper Light Drifter’s world is filled with legacy and history. The corpses of giants cling to mountains, vehicles are overgrown with vines and ivy, ruins lie at the bottom of lakes long forgotten, all of which points to a huge past of prior events. But it is a history of violence and war, of destruction and weaponry. The giants have been killed in the midst of attacks, and the vehicles are armored and fitted with heavy armament. All the Magician can do, all you can do, with that legacy is contribute to it. You cannot read books littered around a library, you can only destroy their stories and words. You cannot broker peace with other beings, only kill them before they kill you. For all you contribute to the legacy of death, you cannot even respect it; coffins and remains are set dressing, and the bones of those who came before, which you find littered about, are as easily crumbled as what those people left behind. You’re even actively encouraged to destroy anything and everything you can as you go through areas; attacking enemies and objects refills the ammunition bar on your gun, an important tool in combat.

When you defeat enemies in the world, their bodies are left behind. But they don’t disappear quickly after you leave them behind, they stick around for quite a while. That was something I definitely noticed when I first backtracked through an area: every enemy, every body, was still there. Dead. Exactly where I killed them. Eventually they *do* despawn, if you leave an area entirely, but I almost wish they didn’t. It felt big, when I saw them still lying there. Another part of the legacy, left behind to be found by someone else.

Even as your adventure comes to a close, you cannot avoid violence. The game leads up to a climactic finale against the shadowy being known as Judgement, who attacked you at the beginning of the game and who you’ve potentially seen several times since if you’ve been collecting enough of the Modules. In the visions which you receive after finding the fourth Module in an area, Judgement appears and, in the tradition of the game, violently attacks you. In one, he summons small crystals which whip and slice through the Magician’s skin. In another, he comes down upon the Magician with his full mass, crushing them into a pile of blood. In the most violent I can recall, Judgement turns his tendrils inwards before stabbing them out, impaling the Magician. He effortlessly lifts the Magician up, watching as they writhe in pain and eventually die.

The fight against Judgement is grueling, with large area attacks forcing you to unfavorable positions, and a single misaimed dash being the difference between survival and getting a massive evil laser to the face and dying. As you strike the final blow, the Magician goes in for the kill, unleashing a flurry of blows before finally plunging their blade deep into…

The crystal you’ve been going after the entire game; the Immortal Cell. The story is vaguely told, but it certainly seems like you’ve been chasing it the entire game, hoping it would be the key to your survival. And now it’s destroyed.

It’s hard to tell if it’s intentional or Judgement tricking you in a final moment. But throughout the game it seems like the core itself was not evil, merely corrupted. Perhaps there was a way to save it, to bring it back to a purer state. But that’s not how the Magician solves problems. Not now, nor anytime prior. The Magician destroys. They destroy monsters, they destroy remains, they destroy harmless objects, and now they’ve destroyed the Immortal Cell.

Despite this, it is generally considered by fans that the Magician has done the right thing. The structure of light which hung above the world disappears, and the Jackal which has appeared throughout the game certainly seems pleased with the outcome, entering a massive structure in one final vision, after which the Magician, apparently, dies. Their hard work is given no reward, their hope in a cure for the disease which has plagued them for the entire game dashed. Their fate is the same as The Guardian, who you see perish earlier in the game, and the same as all others who chose this over peace.

And yet...it seems as though someone had to choose this path. If destroying Judgement and the Immortal Cell is what it took to save the world, then someone had to pick violence. The people who stayed in town, who didn’t fight, are happy. They have their homes and their shops. They peddle their wares and play soccer in the local field. In your journey, you meet a fellow warrior, potentially a drifter, who chooses to return to town, to give up violence, and they turn out okay. But if everyone chose peace, chose to not fight, then Judgement keeps their power and the Immortal Cell stays corrupted. Fan theory claims that Judgement’s goal was to bring back the titans you see in your vision, and destroy the world. If no one stopped him, the world would quite literally end.

Everyone who fights dies.

But somebody has to fight.

Someone has to kill, to save everyone else. It’s a difficult path to choose, and one that carries severe repercussions. But someone has to do it, for everyone’s sake.

One final note I’d like to make: Throughout the game, especially before the violent visions I mentioned earlier, you see further evidence of the Magician’s illness. He hunches over, his vision blurs, and he coughs up a lot of blood. But, the puddles of blood disappear almost immediately, as do the ones created to help show you that your health is low. Your fights stay behind; evidence that you fought and killed remains. But the evidence of your struggles, of your illness, of the times that you were almost the one killed, of the times you bled, that doesn’t stick around. That isn’t what you’ll be remembered for.

Hyper Light Drifter is available via Steam, Humble Store, and GOG on PC, Mac, and Linux; via Playstation Store for Playstation 4; and via Xbox Marketplace for Xbox One

On Pokemon's Future, Past, and Nostalgia

This piece includes minor spoilers for Pokemon Sun & Moon

To say nostalgia influences pop culture would be an understatement. There is, of course, the natural inspiration a creator may get from remembering or revisiting a beloved property, but we see it in much more overt ways as well; the recent years have introduced hugely successful films based on Transformers and G.I. Joe, children's cartoons from the 80s, and J.K. Rowling is still writing stories based on her Harry Potter series. Games, ultimately, are no different, with companies like Nintendo using their established properties and the strong feelings people have towards them to sell products. Just because a game uses nostalgia doesn’t mean it’s just empty reminders of the past, however. Good nostalgic games, like good nostalgic movies or books, will go “Okay. What here is essential? What needs to be the same to invoke what we’re trying to evoke? What needs to be different for this to work in the modern day? What should be changed, but can’t be altered for fear of backlash? What’s disliked, but essential for what this game was about?”

Take, for instance, the Pokemon series. For over twenty years, the games have delighted children the world over, and with a twenty year legacy comes a swath of fans now in their early to mid-adulthood. I myself, very young at the release of the first generation, grew up with the games, and consider them a very dear part of both my childhood and my adolescence. To this day I love the series and eagerly await this Friday, when the latest generation of Pokemon, the seventh generation, Sun & Moon, will be released and (with a convenient day off of work that I swear I didn’t ask for) I’ll be spending the whole day exploring the new Alola region, and discovering all the new Pokemon and people to challenge and befriend. As the day fast approaches, I look back and consider the best and worst of the series, at least in my opinion; the worst being the most recent installments, X & Y; the best, their predecessors, Black & White. Why? It all comes down to nostalgia, or to be exact, how those twenty long years of nostalgia are used.

X & Y tried to make you remember the past in the same way a parent might reprimand you; harshly and unsubtly. The third Pokemon you see in the games, after the local professors Gogoat and your mothers Fletchling, is a Rhyhorn; not only one of the original 151 Pokemon from Red & Blue, the first games in the series, but the pre-evolution (a prior form) of Rhydon, the very first Pokemon ever designed! A nice deep-cut for the real, old school fans. Later, when you enter the tall grass where wild creatures roam, what’s the first Pokemon you’d find, guaranteed, with 100% programmed certainty? Why, it’s a Pidgey! The bird you find in the grass in the original Red & Blue, right at the start! It’s like you’re playing those great old games from your childhood again! In the following area, a forest (and oh boy, a forest as the first dungeon! Just like Red & Blue!), you may encounter a Pikachu, the mascot of the series. What’s this? Replacing the electronic noise of a typical Pokemon call is a voice clip of “Pikachu!”, pulled straight from the cartoon you surely remember from when you were a kid.

It feels like the games are trying to distract you from the new, as if they’re afraid you won’t like what they bring to the series, so better to bury it amongst trite reminders of games and experiences long past. Indeed, the game seems reluctant to allow you to see any of it’s new Pokemon. On the first route you can find Pokemon on in the game, barely over half of the encounters (statistically speaking) will be with new Pokemon. In the following area, the aforementioned forest, there’s a measly 30% chance of encountering a Pokemon original to the sixth generation. X & Y lean on the old, and it works at first glance, but once you notice their crutch, you can tell how close they are (or feel they are) to falling over.

In sharp contrast, Black & White’s use of nostalgia was finessed. They didn’t hide their new Pokemon behind old; in fact, no old Pokemon appear in the games before you’d beaten the main story. Much like the experience of the original games, you had to traverse the land and meet new Pokemon to befriend and battle with. If you’re looking for references to the anime, then they certainly did work in the game to characterize the gym leaders and make them important characters in the story, doing the work in-game that would normally be kept for the television screen. Compared to the gym leaders in X & Y, who I felt were largely forgettable and only one of whom had lines outside of their gym battle to my recollection, the leaders in Black & White were downright nuanced.

Black & White were willing to step away from the norm in some pretty big ways as well; instead of only occasionally changing which Pokemon you encounter, the aesthetic of certain areas are entirely different depending on which game you get. Pokemon Black looked to be a Tron-esque future and Pokemon White appeared to eschew technology in favor of more natural beauty. There’s even an entire location that was different depending on which game you had, with players being able to battle a rotating cast of trainers in Black City, or capture rare pokemon in White Forest. A geographic difference between the two versions had never been in the games before, and certainly didn’t make a return in X & Y.

In addition, the story of Black & White were a step up from their predecessors as well, with the opposed Team Plasma being dedicated to freeing Pokemon from what they claimed was the tyrannical control of man. Admittedly, the game did little besides pay lip service to this idea; after a quick anti-Pokemon-capturing rally, you next saw Team Plasma grunts kicking a defenseless psychic tapir, presumably to assure children that no, the evil team doesn’t have a point and you don’t have to worry that you’re being cruel to Pokemon. But the fact that it even brought up something so often joked about in a semi-serious way was somewhat startling, and for all the harm his cronies may do, it’s made clear that your primary antagonist, the young idealist called N, sincerely believed that to be a trainer is to oppress Pokemon; capturing and controlling them against their wishes.

Compare and contrast this with the story in X & Y: a bad man wants to destroy the world. Stop him. Also, friendship.

I turn my eye towards the upcoming Pokemon titles and wonder which direction they’ll go in. I have ample reason to be skeptical; the main Interesting Thing™ of Sun & Moon are Alolan forms of existing Pokemon which grant different appearances and skills; dataminers digging through the released demo and copies of the games acquired early show these only exist for Pokemon from Red & Blue. In addition, there has been plenty of fussing and discussion about the inclusion of NPCs from previous Pokemon games, especially the titular protagonist and rival from Red & Blue. Once again, it seems as though the games will be trying to make up for deficiencies with blatant and poorly made appeals to players’ childhood.

And yet, at the same time, so much of what Sun & Moon are doing, or seem to be doing, are off the beaten path. For instance, the standard rhythm of the games, wherein the player goes to defeat eight different gyms, before facing off against the final challenge of the Elite Four and regional Champion, is gone. In fact, it’s an element of the story that the traditional Pokemon League is still in the process of being founded in Alola. Instead, players will go through the Trials of each of the four islands of the region, consisting of various tasks assigned by the island’s Trial Captain, followed by a battle against the island’s Kahuna. There’s also been a focus on the story of the games in trailers, involving mysterious Ultra Beasts and the Aether Foundation which works, in part, to study them (and who have, for their efforts, been treated with much suspicion by the Pokemon fandom at large). In addition, Team Skull is fulfilling the Team Rocket role of the game by stealing other trainers’ Pokemon. How this will all play out, and how all these pieces will play off each other, remains to be seen, but I’m looking forward to finding out for myself.

Pokemon is uniquely nostalgic for a new generation; I think it’s fair to say it may be to my generation what G.I. Joe or Transformers were to the generation before, the beloved childhood series that did no wrong as far as we can see looking back. This legacy gives Pokemon the ability to excite fans in two ways: It can merely show us what came before, content to retread old ground and confident it will suffice. Or, it can show us the best version of that, evolving and growing better with age without losing what made the games so loved in the first place. Game Freak, the developers of Pokemon, have both succeeded and faltered in taking those original games, the first generation, Red & Blue, and improving and modernizing them for the needs of the time. We’ll see soon enough if Sun & Moon can step forward, or if they’re too busy looking behind.