there's a certain thing that's been on my mind lately, and people talking about all kinds of stuff keeps kind of leading me to various facets of...trying to understand why i hate so many game mechanics in such specific ways
not that i don't already know. it's just hard to convey, the kind of thing that makes you feel kind of wack when you actually say it. "making the mechanics better doesn't make the game better!" especially because my current go-to example of a game that i think would be worse with different mechanics is beside the point.* this isn't some ludonarrative thing, or about themes or whatever, or as an aside, the way that i think musou games fit perfectly into the oldest traditions of human artistry. because
i think it's good when you press the button and you hit a guy.
or when you're playing a guy who's holding out his sword and you attack by running into people. when you press the button and you jump, even if it doesn't take you anywhere. i think it's good when you use some giant magic attack that wrecks a screen full of enemies. it's good when you shoot a demon and it explodes gorily, even if it was flying and you didn't have to aim up. it's good to play the game. even if you don't get good at it, don't see the end, don't understand what's going on.
people think it's fun to be good at games. they're wrong.* what's fun is to share experiences with other people, and free yourself from the burdens of expectation. it's fun to play games and love them because they're games. and while this is not universally true, it feels often like people these days have forgotten that it's fun to just play games and developers feel the need to assure players that there's fun somewhere, and here's how you can find it. here's the cool thing in the game that you can learn the timing for.
i'm especially ornery about combat. "good combat" right now feels like it tends to mean stuff like i-frame dodging, or timed attacks/counterattacks. or other methods by which you can basically totally avoid damage by "skill". obviously stuff like learning boss patterns or reacting to certain attacks has always been a thing. obviously i like fromsoft games and devil may cry. obviously trends change and this probably won't last forever. but right now, i'm sick of it. i don't want the game to tell me i perfect dodged and put the enemies in a slowdown state. i don't want the big button prompt that shows the fancy animation. (i know somebody worked hard on it. i love them. i still don't want it) i think in codifying these things games have decided they're the point, and i wish they weren't.
it's cool for games to be simple, or easy, or inscrutable. i'm not playing symphony of the night to learn complicated boss patterns and barely scrape out a win. i want to jump around the haunted castle and punch dracula after an hour or two. or slice him really fast if i got super lucky, or summon magic swords that cut across the whole screen. it's cool when a jrpg lets you get something god-busting and holds up that end of the bargain by actually letting you roll over the end of the game. it's also cool to have impossibly close calls, or to decide that you really like a game and get so good at it that you learn how to do something you would've thought was impossible
but no one thing is everything games have to offer.
except playing them. because they're games.