I mean, it's unfair to expect Miyamoto to be the best in the business.
He grew up without video games being a significant part of his formative experience, with no formal education on game design, and with very little in terms of a body of work to study and learn from. He had to figure out most things entirely for himself.
He's competing with young people who grew up able to study and learn from the hard-earned lessons of the past, sometimes even in formal scholarship on the subject. Not only that, there's vastly more of them: there are simply entire orders of magnitude more game developers in the world than there were in Miyamoto's heyday. The law of averages alone means there are likely to be many designers with more talent and a more nurturing environment to develop that talent, and they have the technology (in terms of design) already built up for them to study and apply coming in.
Of course he's not going to be the dynamic force he was back then. It's a testament to his devotion to his craft that he can even keep up at all.
Ok but a business is affected by this. "It's cute that he's trying" is not a valid reason to allow poor games to be released for a console that only gets a couple games per year.
If Star Fox Zero was a $15 Steam game people would think very differently about it. But it's a game that bears a big responsibility, yet it doesn't seem to take that responsibility seriously.
So was Bosman wrong about the gender issues or is the idea of anyone complaining about the terrible representation of most female characters in Nintendo games just too much for you?
Nintendo is one of the most feminist companies in the entire videogame industry.
They are absolutely not terrible by any standard (so what Brittany uses Pink as her colour in Pikmin 3, Alph is blue , so sexism right ?). She actually has a personality.
Nintendo is one of the most feminist companies in the entire videogame industry.
They are absolutely not terrible by any standard (so what Brittany uses Pink as her colour in Pikmin 3, Alph is blue , so sexism right ?). She actually has a personality.
Someone who doesn't understand the usage of pink and gender roles probably isn't the best person to decide if Nintendo is one of the "most feminist" company in the industry.
In regards to the Sticker Star side of the discussion. I don't understand why people are so eager to blame Miyamoto for what they don't like in the game. I don't think Nintendo PR played up his role in "fixing" the game...unless I'm misremembering one or two articles mentioned his tea table flip and then a bunch of outlets ran with it because of the reception to the game's lean story. With that said, we genuinely have no idea what IntSys's plans for the game originally were insofar as we don't know if they'd have made for a better or worse game. So Miyamoto may have helped the game to be better than it was otherwise going to be.
And as others have said, everything outside the story that Miyamoto gets blamed for, I don't recall there being any indication he was significantly involved in.
So I guess my point is, if you don't like the game, blame Nintendo/IntSys, but specifically blaming Miyamoto seems based on our not having enough information. It's like when fans blamed Marvel for the Sins Past debacle and then it came out that JMS's original plan may have been even worse.
(FWIW, I say all this as a fan of the game, but I don't think that affects the content of what I wrote.)
While IntSys isn't some infallible thing, and while Miyamoto never claimed to be responsible for design changes, I don't think it's unfair to blame Miyamoto. After all, Sticker Star was described as feeling (at one point) like TTYD2. I think we can all agree that their first efforts to make Paper Mario 3DS was not like what it ended up being, so I think it's fair to assume that since Miyamoto was behind making them make one major change, he was likely behind the other.
Nintendo is one of the most feminist companies in the entire videogame industry.
They are absolutely not terrible by any standard (so what Brittany uses Pink as her colour in Pikmin 3, Alph is blue , so sexism right ?). She actually has a personality.
Nintendo is one of the most feminist companies in the entire videogame industry.
They are absolutely not terrible by any standard (so what Brittany uses Pink as her colour in Pikmin 3, Alph is blue , so sexism right ?). She actually has a personality.
Dont' be such fanboy. Nintendo is not feminist at all.
Many female characters use the pink colour in the games, because just like the video said, "pink is for girls". They have used that horrible idea in most of their history. And not only with characters, also with consoles, like those editions for girls just because they have the pink colour. They still do that with many 3DS models.
Princess Peach, a princess that is all day screaming and crying, and does nothing to save herself. Yeah, very feminist! And Zelda is quite the same, but only does something when she dresses like a man (Sheik). Even when she was a pirate in WW her role was quite irrelevant, and when she discovered she was a descendant of the royal family, she did nothing.
I haven't played Pikmin 3, but as far as I know, the role of the female character is secondary, being Alf the main character in the end.
Fire Emblem female characters appear with such horrible outfits... and they are usually the weakest ones. Very feminist, yeah!
Even most of their casual games are targeted, guess what, for girls!! You may think whatever you want, but that's not feminist at all.
Female characters in XCX could be an exception, Elma is a real badass. Fortunately the people of Monolith go their own way developing games.
And Samus could be a very feminist protagonist. An independent and strong woman, participating in a role taken mostly by men in the industry, and doing it everything by herself, taking her own decisions, without needing any help from outside. Retro Studios did a great job in the trilogy when they developed the character. She would be considered a feminist videogame icon, if it wasn't for Other M, where her character was destroyed, bringing us a weak girl that cries all the time and is unable to do anything by herself, unless a man tells what she can and she cannot do.
Like it or not, Kevin is right in the final part of the video.
Has the time come when we can finally agree that Miyamoto is just a bumbling old man with no idea what he's doing anymore? Like yeah, he was a master at his peak but those days are long gone.
Miyamoto made suggestion and then they also looked at polls they put out and they saw most people liked a paper Mario that doesn't have much h story, so they were literally just going off of fan feedback
No, they looked at a poll on Super Paper Mario what people liked most about that game, and story was not high up in that poll. So they figured that if people don't like the story in a game that means people don't want story, not that they didn't enjoy the story. After all the poll didn't ask if people want story in Paper Mario games or not, or waht they like most about the whole series, but what they enjoyed the most in Super Paper Mario:
"Tanabe: Yeah. With regard to the story, we did a survey over the Super Paper Mario game in Club Nintendo, and not even 1% said the story was interesting."
That's just flawed logic.
If they hade looked at a poll for thousand year door, I'm convinced a lot more would have said the story was interesting.
Someone who doesn't understand the usage of pink and gender roles probably isn't the best person to decide if Nintendo is one of the "most feminist" company in the industry.
Besides, Nintendo’s platforms have almost the same number of female users as male users, which is extremely rare in the gaming industry. In cases of other companies’ platforms, the user proportion between males and females is about 70:30, or something like 75%:25%.
And some of their biggest games are literally made by evenly split development teams. Which you don't see anywhere else.
They have entire game series that primarily target females over males (Style Savy, Animal Crossing) on top of their far more gender neutral mainstay series (Zelda's mountain of great female characters).
But thats all moot because Brittany wears Pink clothes, Princess Peach (a character created over 30 years ago) is a damsel in distress (I actually agree with those who bring this up as an against point) and the 2nd remake of a SNES game doesn't change the protagonists to include a female charakter.
It wasn't just that poll. There was a lot of complaints that Super Paper Mario was too much story at the time of release. They obviously took their reaction to that critique too far for some.
Is it actually mean? He is just accurately representing how the guy operates. I am sure Miyamoto is a decent guy, I am also sure that there wasn't a single unfair criticism present in the end bit. You are what you are; you have to own that or change.
I think the usual criticism of Princess Peach is that when she got her own starring role in a title her 'superpowers' were being Super Emotional - which is actually pretty funny - but does have unfortunate implications.
Of course, she did get her own starring role in a title.
Called it, sorta. Not the focus of the video but it certainly sparked the topic again. This strange idea of Miyamoto being some senile dinosaur getting kicked out of the company will somehow magically make Nintendo a more modern company and solve all their problems won't ever leave.
Next prediction, someone seriously suggests that Nintendo should go all mobile/third party yet again and act like there won't be any long time repercussions from such a drastic move.
Is it actually mean? He is just accurately representing how the guy operates. I am sure Miyamoto is a decent guy, I am also sure that there wasn't a single unfair criticism present in the end bit. You are what you are; you have to own that or change.
Called it, sorta. Not the focus of the video but it certainly sparked the topic again. This strange idea of Miyamoto being some senile dinosaur getting kicked out of the company will somehow magically make Nintendo a more modern company and solve all their problems won't ever leave.
Next prediction, someone seriously suggests that Nintendo should go all mobile/third party yet again and act like there won't be any long time repercussions from such a drastic move.
I think firing him would be a huge mistake, you can critize his current position though.
I just want someone at Nintendo making the fun decisions and being able to push them:
- That coffee book with those Mario sketches and plans
- One global virtual console with all the games in a subscription model
- The best Metroid game ever
- and more dreams
Called it, sorta. Not the focus of the video but it certainly sparked the topic again. This strange idea of Miyamoto being some senile dinosaur getting kicked out of the company will somehow magically make Nintendo a more modern company and solve all their problems won't ever leave.
Next prediction, someone seriously suggests that Nintendo should go all mobile/third party yet again and act like there won't be any long time repercussions from such a drastic move.
Dismissing criticism with hyperbole isn't very smart either. You know that you can always try to change the focus of the thread to the actual topic rather than flame the discussion even more. Unless you want to do that.
Miyamoto made suggestion and then they also looked at polls they put out and they saw most people liked a paper Mario that doesn't have much h story, so they were literally just going off of fan feedback
That's a misinterpretation of what the polls suggested.
The online surveys asked the players to rank what they believed were the most important things about paper mario. Naturally things like gameplay, art, music etc. came in first, because paper mario 64, TTYD and Super had such stellar content in those regards.
Nintendo, and especially Miyamoto it seemed, misinterpreted that to mean that people either didn't care about the story or that they flat out didn't want one.
It's also well known that, at first, Sticker Stars was going to be a traditional Paper Mario game, before Miyamoto asked them to remove the story.
Nintendo is one of the most feminist companies in the entire videogame industry.
They are absolutely not terrible by any standard (so what Brittany uses Pink as her colour in Pikmin 3, Alph is blue , so sexism right ?). She actually has a personality.
I agree. All you have to do is play Super Princess Peach and Metroid Other M and you will see that Nintendo cares about women. They are quite possibly the most feminist company in existence, actually. They care about women and would never advocate hitting them with a closed fist, even if the woman in question was disobeying your commands.
I absolutely do not agree with this.
Too often in Nintendo games, the female characters merely exist as a plot device for Mario / Link to go and rescue. Most recently we've had Linkle who is pretty much an incompetent, ditzy copy of her male version. They didn't even bother to think up a an actual proper name for her (sticking "le" on the end and calling it a day was stupid).
On topic, Bosman's video pretty much stated my entire problem fullstop with Nintendo right now. The free passes that they get are absolutely insane.
And some of their biggest games are literally made by evenly split development teams. Which you don't see anywhere else.
They have entire game series that primarily target females over males (Style Savy, Animal Crossing) on top of their far more gender neutral mainstay series (Zelda's mountain of great female characters).
But thats all moot because Brittany wears Pink clothes, Princess Peach (a character created over 30 years ago) is a damsel in distress (I actually agree with those who bring this up as an against point) and the 2nd remake of a SNES game doesn't change the protagonists to include a female charakter.
Not sure if you're trying to be intentionally misleading or not, but that Q&A you linked to there, was in 2012 and so is mostly regarding the Wii and DS. If we move to Wii U, we see something like this: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=884312 I know that's E-shop usage, but it does indicate there being a fairly low amount of female users on the system. 3DS I don't see any info on.
Then we go on to your example of "some of their biggest games are literally made by evenly split development teams", which is also misleading, since we know of only Animal Crossing having this. Unless you can provide examples of any other of "their biggest games" having that?
I mean it's fine if you want to argue for Nintendo not being sexist, but what you're trying with the above examples, is definitely not doing you any favours.
Need an accurate source on this. Miyamoto was literally quoted by the developers of the game as asking them "is a story really necessary". That has virtually nothing to do with the developers' choice in making a non-traditional RPG and is even less of a direct proposition than him telling the Splatoon team that they had next to no compelling incentive to string the game together thematically. The problem is that IntSys had no ambition to challenge his notion since Taro Kudo, the game's director, basically went "I pretty much entirely agreed with him", and that's even setting that aside the game itself wasn't compelling to begin with.
Again; Sticker Star actually has it's fair share of colorful writing and some cool NPCs even with the limitation of "existing Mario characters". There's just a lot less of it and they failed spectacularly in creating a world that feels lived in. That's not a problem attributed to Miyamoto constantly looming over the team like some malevolent boogeyman. That's a problem of the team failing in building a world and designing a really poorly executed mechanic. The first Paper Mario game had the most basic story since it was really just Bowser kidnaps Peach and they managed to make a solid world out of that alone. Why couldn't they do it here?
Not that I trust IntSys to make compelling new characters anymore after even Super Paper Mario had most of it's new characters be composed of shitty geometric shapes and since IntSys admitted they didn't want to just stick to formula when it came to the Paper Mario series.
Actually let me ask this question - if Miyamoto didn't step into Sticker Star and ask whether or not the story is necessary, and if Sticker Star actually had a story, do you seriously believe the game itself as we've experienced it would be any better for it?
There would be different IPs. Games with stories. Games with online play. Perhaps most importantly, a younger manager more in tune with contemporary trends understanding the consumer and his developers. Hopefully Shinya Takahashi is it.
Dont' be such fanboy. Nintendo is not feminist at all.
Many female characters use the pink colour in the games, because just like the video said, "pink is for girls". They have used that horrible idea in most of their history. And not only with characters, also with consoles, like those editions for girls just because they have the pink colour. They still do that with many 3DS models.
Princess Peach, a princess that is all day screaming and crying, and does nothing to save herself. Yeah, very feminist! And Zelda is quite the same, but only does something when she dresses like a man (Sheik). Even when she was a pirate in WW her role was quite irrelevant, and when she discovered she was a descendant of the royal family, she did nothing.
I haven't played Pikmin 3, but as far as I know, the role of the female character is secondary, being Alf the main character in the end.
Fire Emblem female characters appear with such horrible outfits... and they are usually the weakest ones. Very feminist, yeah!
Even most of their casual games are targeted, guess what, for girls!! You may think whatever you want, but that's not feminist at all.
Female characters in XCX could be an exception, Elma is a real badass. Fortunately the people of Monolith go their own way developing games.
And Samus could be a very feminist protagonist. An independent and strong woman, participating in a role taken mostly by men in the industry, and doing it everything by herself, taking her own decisions, without needing any help from outside. Retro Studios did a great job in the trilogy when they developed the character. She would be considered a feminist videogame icon, if it wasn't for Other M, where her character was destroyed, bringing us a weak girl that cries all the time and is unable to do anything by herself, unless a man tells what she can and she cannot do.
Like it or not, Kevin is right in the final part of the video.
In the last Mario mainline game, Peach is a main character, you can even do the full game playing as her.
The same can be applied to Zelda, that in the last main game (Skyward Sword), she and Impa kick ass and Link is there following their footsteps.
You haven't played Pikmin 3, and it shows. She is one of the main characters.
And yeah, all the metroid saga showed an empowered female character, but lets just throw everything out of the window because of one game missed the mark on her characterization.
Also, nintendo has pushed and funded games like Splatoon and Bayonetta. Let me know when you have the chance to play as a female character in a shooting game. Or an action character game with a female protagonist (I can only think of Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge and Remember Me in the back of my head).
But, hey, let's keep cherrypicking. There is room for improvement, of course. But the problem is more an industry wide problem than a Nintendo problem.
You can say all you want about Myiamoto but today he's still a guardian of game's artistic integrity.
I'm happy even if he fails: that means he's alive and well. Nobody is perfect. Failure is part of life. If he doesn't fail that means he's not working.
I feel gaming needs Myiamoto even more. There's an high chance that videogames are going to be brainless online games or movies with little to no interaction. Loose Nintendo and your going to loose gaming.
I wasn't criticizing Super Princess Peach, I was lauding it for having the strong female protagonist we all want. Though I must say, I wasn't thinking of the plot at all. I was mainly referring to how she uses her uncontrollable female emotions to her advantage. Making her a clever character, while still maintaining the core aspects of a real life woman.
Nintendo loves women, even when those women are being unreasonable and want to be let out of the house.
In the last Mario mainline game, Peach is a main character, you can even do the full game playing as her.
The same can be applied to Zelda, that in the last main game (Skyward Sword), she and Impa kick ass and Link is there following their footsteps.
You haven't played Pikmin 3, and it shows. She is one of the main characters.
And yeah, all the metroid saga showed an empowered female character, but lets just throw everything out of the window because of one game missed the mark on her characterization.
Also, nintendo has pushed and funded games like Splatoon and Bayonetta. Let me know when you have the chance to play as a female character in a shooting game. Or an action character game with a female protagonist (I can only think of Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge and Remember Me in the back of my head).
But, hey, let's keep cherrypicking. There is room for improvement, of course. But the problem is more an industry wide problem than a Nintendo problem.
If they're such a feminist company then where are all the women in managerial positions? Female game directors? Female faces of the company who also have say in the company?
Miyamoto is out of touch. Out of touch with the market but also out of touch with himself. He doesn't acknowledge what makes his best games so special to everyone.
And doesn't understand the way fans are attached to some IPs. The guy should leave before hurting even more his name.
Dont' be such fanboy. Nintendo is not feminist at all.
Many female characters use the pink colour in the games, because just like the video said, "pink is for girls". They have used that horrible idea in most of their history. And not only with characters, also with consoles, like those editions for girls just because they have the pink colour. They still do that with many 3DS models.
Princess Peach, a princess that is all day screaming and crying, and does nothing to save herself. Yeah, very feminist! And Zelda is quite the same, but only does something when she dresses like a man (Sheik). Even when she was a pirate in WW her role was quite irrelevant, and when she discovered she was a descendant of the royal family, she did nothing.
I haven't played Pikmin 3, but as far as I know, the role of the female character is secondary, being Alf the main character in the end.
Fire Emblem female characters appear with such horrible outfits... and they are usually the weakest ones. Very feminist, yeah!
Even most of their casual games are targeted, guess what, for girls!! You may think whatever you want, but that's not feminist at all.
Female characters in XCX could be an exception, Elma is a real badass. Fortunately the people of Monolith go their own way developing games.
And Samus could be a very feminist protagonist. An independent and strong woman, participating in a role taken mostly by men in the industry, and doing it everything by herself, taking her own decisions, without needing any help from outside. Retro Studios did a great job in the trilogy when they developed the character. She would be considered a feminist videogame icon, if it wasn't for Other M, where her character was destroyed, bringing us a weak girl that cries all the time and is unable to do anything by herself, unless a man tells what she can and she cannot do.
Like it or not, Kevin is right in the final part of the video.
Well, if what are u doing is separating all the good into "not Nintendo" job then of course nintendo is sexist. I mean holy god.
Elma from XenoX don't count because Monolith does not count? I mean wow, u are going extra miles here.
Fire emblem girls are the weakest? So now u are resorting into lies? Since when is Lyndis weak? Caeda on Shadow Dragon had one of the best growth stats. Hell most of pegasus girls usually had great stats. Nowi and Nah also had great status growth. At least tries to research first before u tell bullshit here.
The fact that Nintendo games actually tries to please all gender with Animal Crossing, Tomodachi Collection, Kirby series, Nintendogs, Layton and of course Mario series itself.
Also what is with all pink nonsense. Kirby is also pink. Is it sexist here? Hell Miyamoto first wanted it to be yellow, so Miyamoto is now feminist. You guys give even more thought here than Nintendo themselves when they are choosing the color here.
If they're such a feminist company then where are all the women in managerial positions? Female game directors? Female faces of the company who also have say in the company?
I have been feeling the same way about Miyamoto for some time. He just seems increasingly out of touch. Though, to be fair, alot of Nintendo seems to be stuck with a dated "games as toys" mentality that leads to technically sound but boring games.
So was Bosman wrong about the gender issues or is the idea of anyone complaining about the terrible representation of most female characters in Nintendo games just too much for you?
The thing is, he starts with "story/lore doesn't matter", which is a valid observation regarding Miyamoto's design philosophies, then follows it up with "make story/lore bland in specific negative manner" - but it's quite an assertion to claim this is an intended result when we have just claimed that the intended result is that story/lore doesn't matter. Because then, it matters, it specifically has to be bland in that specific manner. What?
Expected follow-up: "but they always end up like this". Well, correct, but when chef that doesn't really care about taste will stick to one style of flavoring his dishes, is that a separate problem?
I've been thinking about Miyamoto's role in games lately and I have some thoughts (before even watching this video, which I will do in a bit). I think Miyamoto is still a genius when it comes to games. As someone who likes Star Fox Zero (though it's not perfect), I think he did a fine job with the game and some of the gameplay elements are really solid. For example,
fighting a battle in space in your Arwing and then switching to the Walker to board a ship and reprogram something feels pretty awesome
. Then there's Pikmin, which he obviously cares a lot about (I haven't played the game, but I've heard nothing but good things about it).
That said, there are 2 things I've come to think about Miyamoto:
He's not perfect.
I disagree with his approach to story in games, as well as applying "formula" to parts of the games that don't really need it.
Regarding #1, nobody's perfect, so this shouldn't be a question in anyone's mind. He, like anyone, can make mistakes. Other famed video game directors like Hideo Kojima, Masahiro Sakurai, etc. all make mistakes too, so this isn't a slight on Miyamoto in any way.
Regarding #2, I'll split this into 2 separate things. Let's talk story first. Not every game needs story. I agree with this, because a game can be a great game without a story, or even just with a story that has 0 depth. A game is a game, and it's meant to be played. If it chooses to tell a story through that gameplay, then that's cool. I feel like Miyamoto has a problem with telling a story, especially lately, in any of his games. He based too much of this anti-story nature on the response to the survey on Super Paper Mario (couldn't get the Iwata Asks page to load, so I linked to an article that links to it) I'm fine with him making games that don't need a story, but then it becomes a question of whether or not this should affect games that already use story (and quite effectively, I might add).
A lot of my Miyamoto thoughts (on story, in particular), admittedly, come back to Paper Mario Sticker Star. Don't get me wrong, the game was broken for reasons that had nothing to do with story (won't get into that here), but the total removal of a story in a Paper Mario game is a sticking point that I'm not alone in totally disagreeing with, and it was definitely Miyamoto's idea. I wouldn't be so upset about Sticker Star if the game itself was actually solid, sure, it would've been fine as a handheld entry without the broken mechanics. But now, with Color Splash on the way, looking to follow in Sticker Star's footsteps, it's concerning.
But it's not JUST Sticker Star. Star Fox Zero, instead of creating a new story, went for reusing the same story from Star Fox 64 (despite 64 itself being a reboot of the original, and Star Fox 64 3D being a fairly recent remake). Star Fox Zero individual missions feel different enough that it's not a big deal, but Star Fox games CAN have a legitimately cool story (even when cheesy). So why steer back into the same story from 64?
As for applying formula to games that don't need it, I think limiting Paper Mario games to characters only from the Super Mario universe was a severe limitation to story development. I don't need to bring out the whole comparison of the generic Toads in Sticker Star to the vast cast from TTYD. My point with this is I hope they drop this whole "Mario needs a formula" idea. The spin-off games don't need a formula, and Paper Mario is a spin-off.
Overall, I want Nintendo games to stop being bite-sized. Handheld makes sense for that, but console, let's get some full experiences again. I'd like a full RPG Paper Mario game again. Hopefully on NX. But I'm diverging from my point so I'll stop here.
Because his sarcasm is combining two seperate things; mechanics and narrative.
I assumed his critique here was upon the narrative, because mechanically even in Other M there's no question that Samus is anything but a fucking bad ass bounty hunter.
e: and if we get into mechanics that have unfortunate implications, Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinites sole mechanical purpose is as a slightly more shit dog than Fable 2 has, because fetching things for a man to do his job is womans work.
The cast of FFX2 spend the whole game playing dress up because women love shopping and clothes. In a vast number of RPGs the only thing worth protecting in a woman is her vagina and tits, because thats the only thing armour is made to cover. Etc etc etc.
If you start cherry picking things completely out of context, its difficult to wonder what agenda you might be pushing.
If they're such a feminist company then where are all the women in managerial positions? Female game directors? Female faces of the company who also have say in the company?
If they're such a feminist company then where are all the women in managerial positions? Female game directors? Female faces of the company who also have say in the company?
If they're such a feminist company then where are all the women in managerial positions? Female game directors? Female faces of the company who also have say in the company?
Watch the E3 videos from last year, they were front and center quite often.
Nintendo has some big issues still with representation, but its obvious you didn't pay attention.
