3D Dot Game Heroes Brings Back the Magic
by Chris Lawrence
06/01/2010
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I am twenty two years old
as of this writing, and most of those years have seen time spent
in front of a video game console of one sort or another. My
first was a Colecovision, followed by an NES, a little while
after that came a Super NES, and so forth. As I've grown older,
I've grown ever more conscious of the fact that gaming is a
habit that many people grow out of. Sure, the numbers will tell
you that the biggest market of gamers is men somewhere in the
25-35 year old range, but the fact remains that in the eye of
the general public, gaming is still to some extent seen as something
childish, a plaything to be set aside in lieu of the advent
of adulthood.
At the same time, over the years games have
matured alongside gamers, ever hungry to elevate themselves
to a state of legitimate artistry. Budgets have grown, development
cycles have begun to flirt with the threshold of the decade,
and narrative, special effects, and musical scores in games
have essayed to eclipse the novel, the film, and the orchestra,
respectively. Not all that long ago, a man named Hideo Kojima
decided that if he wasn't going to be the best damn director
in the film industry, then he was going to be the best one in
the gaming industry. And yet for all of their efforts, critics
still scorn the idea of games as art. A few short weeks ago,
Roger Ebert reaffirmed his disbelief that games could ever have
the critical and artistic merit of the media that preceded them. |
But the present state of the industry precludes
an obvious question: what did games have to prove in the first place?
Are they art simply by virtue of the number of zeroes in their budgets,
or the number of hours their developers sweat over them? If one were
to draw up a list of the top ten highest selling multimillion-dollar
digital narratives this decade, the original Super Mario Bros. (which
until being recently supplanted by Wii Sports was the highest-selling
game of all time) would probably still boast higher sales than all
of them combined. So were video games not legitimate works of art
to begin with?
Of course they were. Art, in its simplest sense,
is a work of creativity, made with the intention of being appreciated
by an audience – whether that audience be solely the artist,
the love of his or her life, or millions of complete strangers around
the world. While not all games are creative, there have been creative
video games for as long as there have been video games at all, and
they most certainly have always had an appreciative audience.
When we strip away the pretentiousness of the the
last decade, we are left with the most fundamental quality of any
game worth it's salt – pure, unadulterated fun. Super Mario
Bros. sold 40 million copies not because it had mesmerizing graphics,
or a soundtrack by John Williams, or an epic, sweeping story, but
because it was fun. Granted, a big chunk of that 40 million is owed
to the game's status as a pack-in with the NES console, but to put
things into perspective, would Nintendo have sold as many toasters
if they had chosen instead to include, say, Ice Climber?
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The big companies are starting
to rediscover the value of unburdened, uncorrupted fun. Final
Fantasy will always have it's place, but the pick-up-and-play
games of yesteryear are seeing a resurgence. Mario has returned
to 2D, Mega Man has returned to 8-bit, and Link has returned
to top-down dungeon crawling, even it that crawling is now performed
with a stylus. Indeed, a sort of neoclassical renaissance is
underway in the gaming world.
But like the neoclassical music genre, not
everything is perfect about this return to the old ways. Megaman
9 and 10 feel like a breath of fresh air now, but 8 largely
identical games preceded them in the late 80's and early 90's,
not to mention 20+ spinoff titles that weren't much different
in their own right. The Zelda games on the DS are a pleasant
throwback, but they're way too easy – the spectre of “casual”
gaming hangs over them like the hardcore hangman's noose. And
let's not forget that in the case of New Super Mario Bros. Wii,
nearly the same game has already been out for four years –
on the Nintendo DS. |
To be sure, all of these games are fun for what
they are, but each points out a disquieting paradox in the engineering
of a neoclassical video game. Good video games are greatly concerned
with innovation, and good retro games are greatly concerned with fidelity
towards the originals. These two prerogatives are seemingly irreconcilable.
What is the solution for this predicament? I still don't really know.
At the same time, however, I must concede that From Software seems to
have a pretty good grasp of the situation, because their latest title,
3D Dot Game Heroes, really is a breath of fresh air.
To anyone who has bothered to read this far, it
should come as no surprise that 3D Dot Game Heroes is basically an
HD love letter to the original 1986 Legend of Zelda. The graphics
are similar, the soundtrack is similar – hell, even the clunky
sword-swinging animation is similar to the 8-bit original. For all
intents and purposes, this game is the Legend of Zelda, reprogrammed
for the Cell Processor. And yet this game, apart from all other neoclassical
games I have played, doesn't make me think “this is like that
game I loved when I was a kid.” No, 3D Dot Game Heroes is the
game I loved when I was a kid. Sure, in some regards the game is a
clone. It is directly emulating its original source material, and
at the same time it isn't the original. But from the moment I booted
the game for the first time, not once did I think of 3D Dot Game Heroes
as a throwback; a pale imitation of that which has come before. To
me it was simply a game – a really, really fun game.
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Part of that, I think, is the
game's uncanny sense of self-awareness. Like many of its retro
contemporaries, 3D Dot Game Heroes knows its source material
well, but what sets it apart from the pack is that it doesn't
forget its own place along the gaming timeline either. This
is a game that is completely aware that it exists in a genre
that has moved on in the 25 years since an old man gave that
original intrepid adventurer a wooden sword. It makes fun of
its own nostalgic mechanics left and right, asks the player
to deconstruct the most enduring tropes of the genre regularly
– such as the simple act of purchasing sleeping bags –
and references everything from Dragon Quest to From Software's
own Demon's Souls with a wink and a grin.
At the end of the day, 3D Dot Game Heroes
captures the fun of the Legend of Zelda perfectly by copying
neither its mechanics precisely nor its art direction precisely,
but by honoring the simplicity of that original, untainted sense
of fun, and it does so through its lighthearted, not-too-serious
examination of the genre that Zelda gave rise to. In this regard,
3D Dot Game Heroes does for the adventure game what Braid does
for the platformer – it takes a long, hard look at the
genre, and then very carefully proceeds to turn it on its ear.
Both are what I would call postmodern video games.
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3D Dot Game Heroes doesn't merely remind us
what a fun game used to be like; it is that fun game – in the
past, present, and future. And in that regard, From Software's latest
little gem really does bring the magic back. One last thing –
if you really want to enjoy this game, do yourself a favor and stay
away from Gamefaqs. Part of the fun of the original Legend of Zelda
was that there was no internet to save the day: it was entirely up to
you to map out Hyrule, keep track of which shopkeepers had the best
prices, and which rocky walls were concealing secret passageways. Progress
in Zelda was hard earned and all the sweeter for it. 3D Dot Game Heroes
is best played when it is given the same sort of consideration. Gather
your own field data for a change, and pat yourself on the back for every
new and exciting discovery.
Buy 3D Dot Game Heroes on Amazon.
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