By Nelson Schneider - 03/15/15 at 02:20 PM CT
There has been a disturbing trend in the games appearing on Nintendo’s struggling WiiU console. Where, in many cases, there were once cohesive story/campaign modes, engaging single-player content has now been replaced with a large number of disjointed little tasks. I like to call this newer style of game design “Checklist” gameplay because the games that employ it amount to little more than presenting the player with a list of discreet tasks and giving them a star/medal/badge/whatever for completing each task.
Checklist Gameplay also closely resembles one of the more insidious and banal trends of the 7th Generation: Achievements. It is surprising that Nintendo, despite expressing no interest in an overarching and all-inclusive Achievement/Trophy system like those employed by Live, Steam, and PSN, has decided to transform so many of its first-party franchises into little more than Achievement hunts.
Recently, I have been sorely disappointed with “Super Smash Bros. for WiiU,” “Hyrule Warriors,” and even “Pikmin 3” for scrimping on engaging and cohesive content in favor of adding Checklists. “Super Smash Bros. for WiiU” discarded the excellent and nostalgic Adventure Mode from “Melee” and even the not-so-well-received Subspace Emissary campaign from “Brawl,” only to replace them with a whole slew of short, uninteresting tasks. “Hyrule Warriors,” not being a true ‘Zelda’ game has a bit more leeway for making odd changes, but I still find it suspicious that the Checklist-style Adventure Mode has far more content than the cohesive Legend Mode. Even “Pikmin 3” suffers from a relatively uninspired and short campaign in order to stuff-in a bunch of uninteresting Checklist-style Mission Mode objectives (with more available in the eShop!).
Perhaps the biggest offender to come from Nintendo’s in-house development teams, however, is the ‘NES Remix’ series. These two WiiUWare games have now been bundled into a physical compilation, but the new format does nothing to disguise the fact that both of these little games is nothing more than a collection of Checklist objectives pasted on top of ancient NES titles. There is literally zero attempt in the ‘NES Remix’ games to create a cohesive experience, instead allowing – or indeed requiring – the player to jump around between old 8-bit ROMs that have been hacked into an modern overlay which directs and tracks the player’s progress through a disjointed Checklist of activities that each take a minute or less to complete.
What happened here? Why did Nintendo suddenly change gears from crafting cohesive, engaging single-player experiences to simply throwing out lazy lists of objectives? My theory is that Nintendo is simply following the market. Checklist gameplay, aside from being part and parcel of the Achievement/Trophy Whore’s daily diet, is also the core of almost every popular mobile phone game. With Nintendo’s traditional audience of casual gamers, kid gamers, and Japanese gamers all migrating from the Wii to mobile phones in the transition from the 7th to 8th Generations, Nintendo must feel like they need to directly appeal to this fleeing audience. The company certainly knows the ship has long sailed, hit an iceberg, and sunk to Davey Jones’ Locker with regard to winning back any of the so-called hardcore or core gamers that they lost with the N64, so Nintendo must aggressively attempt to hold-onto their as-quickly-lost-as-acquired Blue Ocean demographic.
Nintendo’s most devoted fanboys are never willing to admit that the company has ever done anything wrong, but will gaming’s one-time savior be able to hold-out with an audience consisting only of their most sycophantic followers? Their adoption of Checklist gameplay might just backfire and not only fail to capture the mobile gaming audience Nintendo so desperately wants to win back, but alienate the last few remaining core gamers in their audience. Even more nonsensical is the decision to put all of these Checklist-style games on the WiiU instead of the 3DS, which more closely resembles the mobile devices whose simple, time-killer games forged Checklist gameplay in the first place. The “Glorious” PC Gaming Master Race has become a surprising ally in Nintendo’s corner, commonly declaring the WiiU to be the only console worth owning as a complement to a gaming PC. But after playing through a large number of Checklist-style games, I wonder how many PC gamers might change their tune.
