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Nintendo wants mature games & JP 3rd parties slow to react
- Thread starter ggx2ac
- Start date
neurosisxeno
Member
You are drawing so many conclusions it's not even funny. For starters, good scores have always been a huge part of successful games. Civilization IV technically won a god damn Grammy. Earthbound used a ton of songs that were huge in pop culture, and soundtracks for games have always been a huge deal. Eternal Sonata was literally a game based on Chopin.
But that's not what I was questioning about your post.
You're advocating taking a family-friendly classic story, and turning it into fucking Wolfenstein. You don't think that's going to play poorly with the general public? You can't fundamentally change the entire story and still use that name. I don't know about you, but I don't remember the party in The Sound of Music where a character sneaked through a field and then stabbed the hell out of some Nazi's. If you take a beloved family classic and change the entire premise of the story, it is going to absolutely blow up in your face. Also, I'm not sure if Fair Use is the correct term you intended to use, but if you made a game like you proposed you would get sued into oblivion and lose.
It's just incredibly tasteless, and odds are nobody is going to want to play it.
I feel like a majority of the games you're citing were revered/hated for other reasons--FFVI was an all around great game, FFIX was a kind of back to basics FF, FFX-2 was universally reviled and may be the worst game in the series so probably not the example you want to use, and Lightning Returns was only praised for its music because FF XIII-2 was so bad Kotaku likened spending the extra money for the CE with the soundtrack to "paying somebody to shit into your ear".
Fast Forward
Member
Very true, and I'm sure there are some in the Joe movie goer public who does not realize the MCU/Disney connection, but even so, Disney, at least to me, is the prime of how it can be done. How a company, like Disney, can both maintain a "wholesome family image," and yet, touch upon violent action themes under the same ownership.
Certainly with the Vita's failure (not laughing at the the Vita BTW as I purchased a PSTV FFS of all things), there's a opening in the market for the Switch.
Heartskips
Banned
They shouldn't change their core franchises to M rated for no reason. I don't understand how people think Mature = Complex/Deep/Good. Are Disney movies bad because they're for children? I see more depth in them than most action movies.
daTRUballin
Member
I was going to post and say basically the exact same thing! Took the words right out of my mouth.
Nintendo should build a time machine and go back to 2002 and not sell Rare. That would solve all their problems. ¯_(ツ
_/¯I was going to post and say basically the exact same thing! Took the words right out of my mouth.
Nintendo should build a time machine and go back to 2002 and not sell Rare. That would solve all their problems. ¯_(ツ
They never sold Rare, the Stamper brothers had the majority of shares and sold themselves to Microsoft.
Fast Forward
Member
This is very true.
Pixar, which has mostly released PG films, has explored deeper/darker story elements than many films with a R Rating, let alone PG-13.
I can't tell if you're just using sarcasm.
daTRUballin
Member
I am aware Nintendo technically didnt sell them willingly out of nowhere, but the Stampers approached Nintendo with the idea of buying out the company before Microsoft even came into the picture, and Nintendo said no.
My whole point is that Nintendo shouldve bought them/kept them when they couldve. Sadly, a lot of gamers would foolishly argue otherwise.
MAtgS
Member
Well then Nintendo should've just gone ahead and buy the Stamper's share.
Heartskips
Banned
Because they censored third party games like Senran Kagura in the past too, right?
Also, if you need to bring burqas into the discussion, maybe you should discuss this on gamefaqs or something like that.
You seem to be missing the point. This wouldn't just be voice acting. It would be full mocap. Sure its easier to have 2 seperate people, but to build chemistry between everyone on set it would be almost essential to have the Mocap actor doing the voice acting including singing. Maybe not all the Von Trapps but definitely Maria, The Captain and Liesl all of whom would be playable. You couldn't cheap out on this.
You could possibly save money with fresh faces. Lots of people can sing and you can find unknown actors to fill the roles. You don't need names, because unless you get Julie Andrews no one will recognise them anyway. Broadway famous or in the case of The Sound of Music, West End famous. (You would want NoE to do the localization and you want good british accents) isn't famous to the general audience.
This is not something you do on the cheap, its potentially an indusrty redefining paradime shifting project that aims to legitimize video games as an artform that reaches beyond your typical Scifi/fantasy b movie action crowd. That requires real actors, stages, props maybe even mocap costumes for accurate dress physics. I'm not sure about the technical aspects of a production like this.
Nintendo have historically always been willing to take the risk on bold ideas, then executing them with extreme polish. You would have to agree that something like this is extremely bold.
The thing is as an open world third person stealth action game with villainous Nazi's its also about as safe of a bet at being profitible within the gaming space as any risky project can be.
As a game i am certainly not advocating turning The Sound of Music into Wolfenstein. The fact is The Sound of Music has a number of stealth sections naturally built into the film.
1. Maria sneaks back into the abby (How do you solve a problem like Maria) as the 2nd song in the film.
2.Liesl sneaks out to meet Rolph (16 going on 17) and then has to sneak back into the house by climbing up to Maria's room in the rain (My favourite things)
3. Maria sneaks out of the Von Trapps party (So Long Farewell)
4. The children sneak out of the house to go see Maria who has returned to the abbey and then try and sneak back inside before being caught
5. Maria returns to the house and meets The Captain in the garden (something good)
6. Trying to push the car out past the Nazi's
7. Escaping the music festival (sneaking out past the Nazi's)
8. Hiding from the Nazi's in the convent before sneaking out to freedom after Rolph alerts the other Nazi guards (Climb every mountain)
Combine that with some obvious open world elements
1. Maria's journey to the Vonn Trapps (I have confidence)
2. Maria and the Children running around town (Do Re Mi)
That sounds like a typical Video game to me. All you need to do is make each song a fun music/rythm type activity that can be used as a boss battle/boss rush at the end and you have the structure of a typical video game within the film.
Edit; you could even have some form of reverse stealth section when the Captain Von Trapp, Max and the Baroness are returning home and Captain Von Trapp doesn't want the Baroness to notice that his Children are climbing trees while dressed in drapes.
Friend of Sonic
Member
So GTA V when
From what I've read Nintendo had just bought Retro Studios for a lot less money (a few million vs hundreds of millions it would cost to buy Rare) and they didn't want to spend that much on Rare.
It's of course hard to say what would of happened with Rare had Nintendo bought the studio. It's very possible they would still be putting out high quality games but it's also possible some of Nintendo's third party deals like Bayonetta 2 would have never happened if Nintendo was funding a bunch of games from Rare.
CEJames
Member
Next year...with CoD and Overwatch.
Green Card
Member
I'll put up with FE sex scenes if it means the story won't be shit.
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Wonder Peter
Member
If they really want that they should find Bayonetta 3
Skittzo0413
Member
Monolithsoft already sorta works as a "Touchstone" for Nintendo's Disney albeit with only one series so far that isn't really pushing any envelopes content-wise IMO. But they definitely could start developing more "mature" games (I'm not sure what that means to some people in this thread but apparently people want it to mean story-heavy games with dark themes?), or Nintendo could spin off another partner studio to do those type of games too.
That would be a much better way of achieving first party titles with these themes than buying another company, creating a new brand (like Touchstone) or just shifting to making "mature" games internally.
That would be a much better way of achieving first party titles with these themes than buying another company, creating a new brand (like Touchstone) or just shifting to making "mature" games internally.
I think the whole "Nintendo would have been better off buying Rare to bolster their mature games output" argument is a bit flawed, as the likes of Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day are outliers for their normal output to begin with. Even after MS bought them, Rare still largely focused on making family-friendly games since that was an area that MS's lineup had been sorely lacking in. It might sound hard to believe, but it's been over 10 years since they've released an M-rated game themselves.
daTRUballin
Member
While what youre saying makes some amount of sense, I still think your stance is a flawed one to have as well. Perhaps the reason why Rare mostly released family friendly games under Microsofts ownership has to do with Microsoft wanting Rare to make these sorts of games in the first place. If they stuck around with Nintendo, maybe Nintendo wouldve commissioned them to keep making entries in those mature franchises to help their systems have more of an appeal for adult gamers. Or they couldve even created new ones.
After all, they made more darker/mature/violent games on Nintendo consoles than on the Xbox systems. I wouldnt have expected them to suddenly stop making these sorts of games after the N64. Sort of how they kind of just stopped making them after 2005 under MS.
Theres also the fact that Rare attempted to make all sorts of mature games for the Xbox consoles (including a horror game!), but all of these ideas were either shut down or didnt get far into development. But thats beside the point, I guess.
Hadn't most people responsible for the N64 games left by that time? I always understood that the Rare MS bought wasn't the 'same' Rare that made Perfect Dark and Banjo
daTRUballin
Member
Not at all.
What you just said is just a myth that has been spread around and believed by many people for many years now. Not sure where it came from. Only the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark team was affected by significant employee departures before MS bought Rare. A couple of others left too here and there, but the rest of the teams remained largely intact. It wasnt until the Kinect years when most veterans of the company started leaving.
A very stubborn myth then. It does explain how Perfect Dark Zero wasn't the stellar sequel people hoped for.
I dunno, I get the feeling that Iwata would have pushed them to keep working on more family-friendly stuff during the Wii era, though I imagine that games like Perfect Dark Zero still would have come out in the early goings to help fill the void that was left behind when Silicon Knights and, to a certain extent, Factor 5 jumped ship for their exclusivity deals with the other platform holders, but other than that, I think the only major thing that would have changed would have been Rare working on another big mass-market blue ocean series than Kinect Sports; maybe even them doing a new DKC themselves or finally finishing off Donkey Kong Racing.
Badlucktroll
Member
I could see Nintendo creating a new teenish/M rated shooter IP thats similar to Destiny Or Halo that ISN'T METROID. Maybe created by a western dev.
daTRUballin
Member
Its really hard to say how things wouldve went if Nintendo had kept Rare considering Nintendo themselves have went through so many changes these past 15 years. Whether its management changes or the type of games and systems theyve been releasing or just the direction of the company changing in general. I dunno if Nintendo wouldve pushed them to do more family friendly stuff, but if I were in Nintendos shoes and if I had a developer like Rare by my side, I would hope they would provide my systems with more games like Perfect Dark, Killer Instinct and Conker, but hey. Nintendo does what Nintendo wants to do and theres no stopping them.
As for what games would have been released by Rare on Nintendo systems, well.......we only have their slew of GameCube projects they were working on before the buyout to go off of. Heres what we know was being worked on before MS came into the picture and messed with things:
Donkey Kong Racing
Star Fox Adventures (the only one that was actually released)
Kameo
Grabbed by the Ghoulies
Perfect Dark Zero
Your Garden (Viva Piñata before it was called Viva Piñata)
Quest (this was a new IP that was cancelled sometime after the MS buyout)
Looking at that list of games.......yeah. Most of them were family friendly, so maybe you were right. But Im sure most of these wouldve been finished and released at some point, and who knows what Rare wouldve made afterwards?
Id also recommend checking out this older thread that goes more into detail about all of these GC projects plus all the handheld games Rare was working on at the time. Basically all the stuff that never came to be because of the MS purchase but that we know was being worked on.
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=707777
Japanese devs are a bit slow to move to a new console, PS4s first 2 years were pretty dry for Japanese games but now look at it... there were still PSP games being released last year in Japan... pretty soon the floodgates will open.
Blood Diamonds
Banned
So mature just means weeb vita shit?
axisofweevils
Holy crap! Today's real megaton is that more than two people can have the same first name.
Yep. Nothing's really changed.
DS had a Grand Theft Auto game
Wii - Nintendo's most family friendly console - had House Of The Dead: Overkill.
Wii U launched with Zombi U. They even chose to use that as the focus of their Non-Specific Action Figure skit, instead of something like Mario. Hell look at the games Nintendo part funded like Ninja Gaiden: Razor's Edge, Devil's Third or Bayo 2.
Well I mean, Doomguy is pretty kawaii.
NOLA_Gaffer
Banned
Where was this Nintendo four years ago when the Wii U was floundering? Christ.
Funding Bayonetta 2?
There's a laundry list of things that went wrong with the Wii U, but being prudish around mature games wasn't one of them.
You can definitely fault them for not courting people in general, but the specific point of interest of this thread is in the M for Mature angle and this is the logical conclusion of what had been building up during that time frame.
SciencePilot
Member
I have no problems with these kinds of games existing on the platform, but they won't really interest me. I'm not interested in very violent or sexual games. That's part of the reason I've liked getting Nintendo systems, since they don't usually focus on that kind of content.
Mature only refers to games with either sexual or violent content or both. It doesn't refer to games that might have a "mature" theme or setting because that is not content that would be restricted from under-17 crowd.
I can accept the logic behind Nintendo offering more "mature" content in its catalog, but I think disregarding the prior examples as "not enough" does a disservice, as does the notion that it's the only means to obtain that same content from 3rd-parties. SNES certainly didn't suffer from people not trying to get mature content onto it. Even when NoA were leveraging censorship on 3rd-parties, the content still made its way to the SNES in some form, and that doesn't even speak to NCL never shying away from it or NoA's reversal of stance (albeit too late to change the narrative) with the later days of the SNES and N64 after the formation of the ESRB, despite the paltry M-rated content with Nintendo's name on it. So clearly there is a means to achieve the goal without offering that kind of content at a 1st-party level.
Games with homosexual themes have a long history of being arbitrarily bumped up a rating by the ESRB's puritanical logic. That's nothing new, so don't be too shocked. It's one of the reasons I want Canada to be free from it and establish its own ratings criteria rather than be beholden to America's.
.... you mean a hijab, right? It's best to be fully educated on the subject, so people don't get a wrong impression.
Games with homosexual themes have a long history of being arbitrarily bumped up a rating by the ESRB's puritanical logic. That's nothing new, so don't be too shocked. It's one of the reasons I want Canada to be free from it and establish its own ratings criteria rather than be beholden to America's.
.... you mean a hijab, right? It's best to be fully educated on the subject, so people don't get a wrong impression.