…at least in some ways.
I love the Nintendo Switch, it’s probably one of my all-time favorite consoles. It’s very convenient, especially when traveling or when wanting to play games in bed or in a different room of the house.
But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t missing what we used to have before the Switch came along.
There’s a certain thing I feel like I’m missing every single year: the charming little AA game. Or, at the very least, the low budget AAA spinoff.
Back when Nintendo and Sony were making dedicated handheld devices, there was an incentive for big game companies to split off a smaller team to make simpler games. Without having to necessarily push themselves to make something that pushed the boundaries of the latest home console, they could put out something lower budget on a handheld. Each game didn’t have to change the world, they just had to be good enough.
Now, the “home console” and “handheld” experiences have been merged. People want to play console-quality stuff in the palm of their hands. We expect to be able to play Tears of the Kingdom in the Switch’s handheld mode, or Genshin Impact on our phone, or Horizon Forbidden West on the Playstation Portal.
And with that, for whatever reason, it seems like most developers have given up on making the smaller, humbler, “AA game.”
Yes, some of it is nostalgia on my part, but there are some franchises that just seem like they’re literally worse (or more stagnant) because of this. Things like Pokemon, Kirby, Dragon Quest, and Shin Megami Tensei seemed to thrive on handhelds. They could even bounce back and forth between “mainline titles” and experimental spinoffs all within the same handheld generation.
Now, it seems, there’s a pressure to put all your eggs into the basket of the meaty mainline game. And when companies do make spinoffs, they’re free-to-play mobile games.
Consider something like Pokemon. By this point, we could’ve gotten a ton of fun and experimental spinoffs in different genres on the Switch. Instead, we have a small handful, while another handful were thrown to be tested in the flames of the iOS app store. Some of the mobile spinoffs have, at this point, been discontinued and deleted!
I think a large part of the problem is that there’s too much of an expectation for Switch games to be grand “console quality” experiences. I don’t know if the assumption is coming from the player side or the publisher side, but the bar is in a weird place. Games still get rushed or developed with a lower priority team, but instead of having a charming pixel style or low-poly art direction, we just get “console 3D, but rushed and bad.”
Not to be mean, but when I play something like Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, I get a strong feeling of “this kind of thing was meant to be on 3DS, not console.” Everything feels weirdly empty and rough around the edges. If it were low resolution on the tiny handheld screen, I feel like it wouldn’t be noticeable. But by being on the Switch on my TV…it feels distracting. The very nature of being on a small handheld lowered our bar for perfection back then.
I just want the fun, weird AA games back. I know this void has basically been filled by “indie games” but the creation of indie games is already a fraught and risky process. A seasoned AAA game developer at least has the money to guarantee people salaries through the production of these small experiments. They also are able to take advantage of the experience, knowledge base, code, and assets they have from their previous games.
When you’re making something like TemTem or Coromon, you don’t have those advantages. At lot of indie teams have to gamble their whole existence on the success of their games, if they want it to be their source of income. This also affects what type of game you choose to make: it could lean you towards making something with more “replayability” or “modular content.”
I’m not sure I even entirely understand why the big companies don’t pursue this more, with an appropriate art direction to match. Two of the only examples I can think of are the “HD-2D” games (Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, etc) and the Voice of Cards trilogy. They seemed to know exactly what their scope was, and stuck to it, free from the pressure to make something that feels like a grandiose “console quality” experience.
Is there a worry that people won’t buy something if it has 2D art?
Is there a worry that people won’t buy something if the playtime is too short?
I don’t really get it.
Maybe there are just aren’t enough consumers anymore. People are satisfied enough with their Fortnite, Roblox, and live-service choices, so they don’t have an interest in buying more games per-year. Or maybe CEOs use this “mid-budget, low risk” project category for making remasters and remakes. But even if that’s the case…I still think some of these major companies (like Nintendo) could afford to put out short games, less than 60 USD, with an appropriate art style to make them shine.
I pulled out my DS recently and found myself playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2, Pokemon Pinball (Ruby and Sapphire), and Pokemon Trozei. They’re fun.
I’m also reminded of series like games like Ace Attorney, The World Ends With You, Trauma Center, and Ghost Trick, which I feel like wouldn’t have gotten greenlit at all if they were started in the 2020s and had to live up to the expectations of a console game.
Why can’t the big companies go back to greenlighting small, humble game ideas like these anymore?
