"I learned a lot from him. One big thing I learned from him is ‘create freedom inside restriction." - Shinji Mikami on his design mentality & mentor Tokuro Fujiwara
You can't run away from restrictions.
Often when you see new games coming out, especially all these remakes and shit, you see a trend towards more "freedom". Games add more moves, more mobility, bigger arenas, higher jumps, more cancels, quicker camera turning, faster aiming, more degrees of attacks, more more more.
People tend to like this cause they like asserting their will onto games. The problem is that this is fake - developers don't remove restrictions, instead they simply shuffle & move restrictions around. Freedom & challenge are contradictory values in games, the more challenge a game has the less freedom it offers.
The reason this tends to work is because restrictions are moved away from the most immediate level (controls & player mechanics, the things players interact with first & most directly) and towards something a little longer term like interactions. So for example, certain remakes will replace tank controls with freeform movement, quick camera movement/aiming and decouple attacks from where your character's model is pointing. As a result, the game becomes trivially easy, so developers need to somehow counter-balance this newfound freedom. And since they're committed to being hands-off as far as the player goes, the most natural move is to simply limit your interactions - either by shutting down their effects, or by reducing the rewards.
If you can shoot anywhere on screen near instantly? Then enemies will need more HP to survive the onslaught, making each one of your attacks matter less. Have hitstun in a shooter like that? Well you know damn well it's not surviving for long, devs might even make it RNG-driven. Getting iframe finishers is too easy? Just nerf the iframes, make them feel like shit. Getting the first hit on an enemy in a beat em up is easy? Just turn off the hit's effect on the enemy, add a stagger bar. Enemies too easily launchable with basic running kick moves? Turn those off too! A move can cover the entirety of the screen and leave you in a relatively decent position to counter-attack? Shut that shit down too, have the enemy block it.
Games rarely actually lift restrictions. Moving them towards interactions is a problem though because games, action games in particular, are not about how you move, or how many attacks you have, or how much stuff you can cancel, or how fast you can run away, or anything like that. They are about those interactions that are increasingly becoming more limited & restrictive. I would rather have tank controls but every hit I do manage to score with that clunky control scheme to matter, than having freeform movement but feel like a fly buzzing around enemies & bosses barely being able to affect them.
That's what I believe Tokuro Fujiwara and Shinji Mikami picked up on ages ago - that if you have a strict set of limitations, you can make meaningful interactions within them. And even if their games don't perfectly live up to it all the time, you can still see that core mentality shine through. It's a spark that games will lose if the only concern is hiding shit away from whiny players who cannot learn a simple, consistent set of retrictions.
Another post which covers stuff I've written about before in a different way. I will shut up about this once we get consistent & juicy hitstun, knockdowns, launches, bounces, wallsplats, etc. back, instead of getting hitstun and maybe knockdowns locked away behind fucking stagger bars or so meaningless that enemies can initiate armored attacks from it. 😠
