So Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars has recently been purchased from the Virtual Console in my household. Despite the fact that we already own the game for the SNES (That still works) we just wanted a backup copy on the Wii for the day the SNES finally knells over and dies. We’ve played this game dozens of times but still get a kick out of it as if it’s the first time we played it. Fast-forward to Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword was quite a good game, perhaps even a great one. However, it was still lacking. It was not the main quest, it was not the story, and it was not the musical score. Instead, Skyward Sword is following a trend of gaming that forces the Zelda franchise to deter from its roots. Modern games are becoming far too linear, and it’s a trend that I would like to see die down.
Flash back to the past. Super Mario RPG was a fantastic role-playing adventure that remains one of the most replayable experiences in gaming because of its utter cluster of secrets that was scattered all over the place. While the quest itself was fun as it is, the fact that you could go back to several different areas and see different events occurring (depending on what you accomplished and discovered on your way to the ending) added a layer of life to the game long after the quest was over. There were hidden locations, hidden events, and even hidden bosses. There are items in this game so rare they are part of old-school gaming folklore. With dozens upon dozens of different characters you can run into you can play this game many times and still find something new and exciting years after first beating Smithy.
Flash forward to today. Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess’ biggest flaw is that unlike what we experienced with Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time, there is very little reason to go back and re-discover certain areas and try to find secrets that you couldn’t discover while hellbent on rescuing Zelda. The desire to go back to the assortment of towns, taverns, dungeon areas, etc. and re-meet some of the characters is far weaker when compared to the Zelda games from Link to the Past through Wind Waker (which was post-quest exploration at its peak) because, well, there isn’t much offered outside the main quest. There is no invitation of expanding your adventure past the quest spectrum. And before you think that Zelda is the only culprit of a more-linear gameplay, there’s others.
Your first-person shooters have definitely ditched the 90s style of open-space environments in favor of high-octane action sequences that requires following strict directions and going down a specific path. While the games of today seem to play these games with minimal complaints, I personally miss the good ol’ days of Doom, Goldeneye, and especially the very ambiguous Perfect Dark. Perfect Dark gave you a slew of operatives, but never guided you on which way to go—you were free to explore the entire area and find different ways to completing said mission. You just don’t see that in enough shooters. You feel more in control and more like an agent as you scour the area in search of what to do as opposed to an invisible arrow telling you where to go. With the exception of your more RPG-related shooters like Bioshock and Fallout, your shooters are short, straight, and to the point.
RPGs are also becoming a bit more linear. The Final Fantasy franchise is nowhere near as expansive as it used to be (Go back to Final Fantasy VI and talk to me later), the Pokemon games have become a little more restrictive and less spacious, and you have other RPG franchises like Kingdom Hearts, the Game Boy Mario sports RPGs, and Golden Sun not evolving and widening their scope. You would think that evolving technology, stronger systems, and more possibilities would propel the role-playing genre into new heights. But sadly unless you are the Elder Scrolls, you probably won’t be seeing the grand-scale open-environment games that the 90s SNES gems used to dream about evolving to someday.
Chrono Trigger was so big and flexible it had over a dozen different endings that span different timelines and storylines. Today you’ll be hard-pressed to find a game with at the least 2 endings. Super Metroid, one of the greatest games in history, literally threw you in a brutally ginormous world with absolutely no direction on where to go and how to survive. Let’s not even discuss what happened with Metroid: Other M. Even Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, despite being excellent games, are a bit more linear than Super Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine. I am still clamoring for that one day when Nintendo decides to make a Mario game with an overworld as big as Hyrule Field.
This trend of linear gaming started out with the easy-to-make shooters but has quietly been sneaking into other genres like action, adventure, and even RPGs. There is no reason why Pokemon Black and White have half the badges (and half the amount of interactive characters) of a game that came out 10 years before (Pokemon Gold and Silver). There is no reason why Zelda couldn’t have an overworld closely resembling the scope of Skyrim (Or to a more relatable example, Majora's Mask). And even platformers are adapting much more into the linear, simpler 2-D Mario as opposed to the N64 platform style which gave us Mario 64, Banjo-Kazzoie, Glover, Silicon Valley, Donkey Kong 64, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Spyro, and more.
Hopefully with the next generation, this trend will die away and with the improving technology we can create more games like Elder Scrolls that allow us to embed ourselves into the environments and interact with everything and everyone involved---as opposed to games that just make us trot through the area with minimal lag time and minimal reason to go back. In the meantime, developers should start replaying the 90s games and be inspired to expand their horizons and start re-introducing the spontaneous gaming of the Genesis and SNES to a new generation. We need less Final Fantasy XIII and more Final Fantasy VI.
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