Despite my best efforts, I recently came into possession of a 3DS XL. When the original Nintendo DS came out, I swore on my life that I'd never own one of these gimmicky, glorified doodle pads that cost more than half of what a real console cost, but I've finally caved. I justify the decision based entirely on the fact that I was able to get a limited edition Legend of Zelda 3DS that's gold colored with an image of the Triforce emblazoned on the top, but deep down I'll always know I've spent a large sum of money on a handheld toy intended for children.
The decision was also influenced, however, by a group of friends who are all fans of the Pokemon franchise. You remember Pokemon, right? That game from the mid 90's about 10-year-olds who leave home to wander the world free of supervision, capturing dangerous wild animals in cramped plastic spheres and forcing them to savage each other for sport and money? Of course you do. Even grandparents who call them pokeymans or refer to all of them as either Pikachu or Pokeychu at least know what Pokemon is to some degree. When I was a kid, my dad made up his own pokemon named Squeegee just to pester us when we played the game.
The point of all of this is, I was eventually convinced to get a 3DS so that I could give the new Pokemon generation a try. I haven't played a pokemon game before this since the third generation, and with the franchise now in its sixth and sporting over seven hundred of the little creeps to capture, getting back into it was a little bit overwhelming. However, this blog post isn't actually going to be about pokemon. This post is going to be more about the aspect of the game that bothered me more than any other change, which is saying something because they've declined to the point of trying to pass off ice cream cones with eyes, piles of garbage and a set of car keys as pokemon. (Here's a fun project you can try at home. Get a bag of plastic googley eyes, a hot glue gun, and a random household object. Glue some of the eyes someplace onto the object and make up a name that combines something that describes it with something it does. Congratulations, you've created a pokemon. Send it to Nintendo and wait for your royalties check.)
The aspect of the game that bothered me the most is a term you'll find frequently among gaming communities, and that term is hand-holding. The term means pretty much exactly what you expect it might. It's when a game takes you gently by the hand, assures you it's gonna be okay, and then proceeds to do everything for you as if you had no idea what a video game was and were very lost and confused as to how this device made it into your hands.
I'll give you an example. When you begin this game, you enter a forest full of tall grass- regions where wild pokemon will attack you, and you have to battle them with your lone starter pokemon. In previous games like those from my childhood, if you didn't remember to get the secret potion hidden in your bedroom or buy some from the store before entering the forest, if your pokemon fainted it was your own damn fault. Too bad for you, guess you lose a bunch of money and have to start over. You learn a lesson about being prepared and you don't make that mistake again. In this new game however, an irritating two-dimensional character followed you around and offered to fully heal you for free anytime you liked. No lessons were learned except that the healbot in the pink shirt is evidently a magical walking hospital to be maliciously abused.
Now, this isn't to say that there weren't any tutorials in the early games. In fact, in Red and Blue versions, the first pokemon games, there was even a mandatory tutorial on how to catch pokemon. A man stopped you, you entered a cutscene where the game demonstrated how to navigate the menu, select a pokeball, and use it on the wild pokemon. Then it was over and you were free to go. No more tutorials, no more help, no more hand-holding. That was it. In this new game, however, the tutorial phase seems to last for the entire first half of the game. Your group of two-dimensional cardboard cutout characters the game forces you to be "friends" with follow you around and act like morons, adding a babyish and irritating glaze over the game's potential fun.
Another feature that's been persistent through most if not all of the games thus far has been the presence of a Rival character. In Red and Blue versions, your rival was a tough competitor who almost always gave you a run for your money. He appeared without warning at times, and his team was actually difficult to defeat in many cases. This, however, served a purpose. The game developers weren't just being sadistic by creating this obstacle you'd have to fight time and again to overcome. If your team wasn't strong enough to defeat your rival's team, it meant that progressing in the game beyond that point was going to be too difficult for you. Many transitions of the map in that game were designed to become impasses when you crossed them until you defeated a certain gym or found a certain move that would allow you to backtrack. In many cases, your rival served as a checkpoint before these impasses to make sure you didn't find yourself in a situation where you were trapped in an area too strong for your under-leveled or poorly constructed team. The point is, you learned from experience. The game didn't baby you and tell you exactly what to do and put band-aids on your boo-boos. It would coldly defeat you and tell you to go work harder. And you learned from it. Even if surpassing that obstacle meant just training one pokemon to a super-high level so you could brute-force things, it forced you to work for your progress.
In the new game however, your rival is one of the weakest trainers in the game. Her team is never full all the way to the end, she's never a challenging opponent, and there's nothing gained from defeating her. You don't learn anything except that your neighbor sucks at pokemon. Then right after that, you can stroll into a gym (or boss-area) full of confidence from your triumph only to get curb-stomped by trainers who are an actual challenge.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old codger, back in my day, games just weren't this... childish. By this point, you may be dismissing all of this because well, it's a children's game. It's designed for children. Of course it's going to be easy and hand everything to you. But what I'm saying is that video games have almost -always- been for children, but up until recently they haven't been anywhere near this level of insultingly brainless. It isn't limited to Pokemon games, either. I've also been playing the new Legend of Zelda game that came with my special 3DS, Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. While some of the age-old difficulty and puzzle depth remains intact, there are literally areas in this game where NPCs are dotted around puzzle rooms to hand you solutions to the puzzle at hand. For instance, in an older Zelda game, you would walk into a cleverly hidden puzzle room and see a collection of moving platforms, switches, pressure plates, impassable obstacles, and a really shiny treasure right in the center of it all. You'd have to figure out how to move the platforms, what order to hit the switches, what box to place on the pressure plate and what barely-visible eye switch to shoot with an arrow in order to reach your prize. It may have taken upwards of fifteen to twenty minutes to riddle that out, and sometimes you just couldn't do it. Tough break, guess you don't want that heart piece badly enough. In those instances in A Link Between Worlds, however, if you make it across the more obvious points of the puzzle, you reach little "thief" NPCs who mutter to themselves when you speak to them. They literally mutter solutions to the problems. The game is handing you the solution to the problem with absolutely no progress required.
Furthermore, there is literally an item in the game that you get very early on called "hint goggles." You put them on, and it shows you the solution to the puzzles in the game. Not in cryptic hints, as were present in older Zelda titles, but literally hands you the solution to the puzzle on a silver platter because you used a get-out-of-thinking-free card. In an older Zelda title, if you had trouble figuring out the sliding ice-block puzzle, you could just get stuck there until it finally clicked in your brain or you wimped out and bought the guide book. It forced you to think. Learn. Solve the puzzles by using your brain. Abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, problem solving, patience. You learned these things from these puzzles. Why then, are new games handing the solutions out like plastic trophies at the end of a tee-ball season? It's literally the same as saying, "Look. I know you didn't hit a single ball the whole season, even though it was stationary and resting on a stick right in front of you, and your foot never even touched a base, and you peed yourself in the outfield more than once. Hell, our team never even won a game the whole season long. But you know what? You showed up, sat on a bench, wore a uniform and chewed bubblegum. So here. Have a big plastic shiny reward for doing nothing. Good job, kiddo."
Guys, kids aren't stupid. They may be loud, messy, obnoxious little bundles of financial suicide, but they aren't stupid. I spoke to dozens of parents while working retail electronics over the holidays who were buying iPads and other tablets for their four and five-year-olds so they'd stop playing with theirs. After talking with them I learned that these kids nine times out of ten didn't only know how to slide the screen around and poke the buttons, but they knew how to play the games. They knew how to launch the Angry Birds to blow the castle up in one or two hits. They knew how to get on the internet, go to websites, get on the App store and buy new apps. These kids are toddlers, and they've figured this out. So why the hell are we continuing to treat them like mentally deficient sheep who need a guiding shepherd for every waking moment?
From a company standpoint I can understand these design decisions. Kids these days don't have the patience for solving puzzles or learning or challenging things. Why would you make games that are hard for kids who won't buy the next one because they couldn't beat the first?
But riddle me this. Why are these kids like that in the first place? Could it be because maybe this generation is too busy molly-coddling their kiddos, handing them everything for free and rewarding them for lack of progress? Maybe it's just being ingrained into our society that if we show up and look around, if the answer to the puzzle isn't made obvious in the first glance, we don't have to solve it. It'll eventually solve itself, or someone will hand us the solution.
All I'm saying is, it's going to be a sad day when you march down Victory Road with your assembled team of googley-eyed household objects and instead of battling you, the Elite Four just congratulate you, shower you with money and praises and cupcakes, and then gently take your hand and lead you into a degrading tutorial on how to push a big red button and have all the pokemon you haven't caught delivered to your PC free of charge because you earned it, slugger.
-The Sarcastic Soul
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