Seems like time and time again, Nintendo is always trying to sell games to an audience of people who do not wish to play video games. For a sequel, I figured Nintendo should focus on their core audience of Pikmin fans but it seems like they’re always changing things to appeal to people who don’t play games while in return alienating the people who want more sophisticated gameplay and challenges.
What are your thoughts?
What gets me the most is that we’re talking about the same company who created Super Mario Bros., a game famous for it’s lack of tutorial. People call the level design “genius” because it teaches you what power-ups and enemies are immediately.
What in the actual frick happened to this? Didn’t Miyamoto create Mario for crying out loud? What happened to these core principles? Money? Demographics for children?
Not that I’m advocating for super in-depth tutorials or anything, but comparing the complexity of SMB to something like Pikmin is a bit disingenuous. In the former your options for inputs are run and jump, which is a lot less than having to corral little plant dudes using a whistle and splitting them up/using them for specific purposes.
Having said that I think the best compromise is to have a tutorial that tells you what you can do/what buttons do what without making you actually do those things just to check if you’re too dumb to understand simple instructions. Also space out the instructions so that they happen while actually playing the game instead of in one big tutorial section right at the beginning.