Is there an inordinate amount of hate being projected at Nintendo lately? Commenter SageofMusic seems to think so, and he'll tell you why in today's Speak Up on Kotaku.


For some reason, people are starting to hate Nintendo. There are some valid reasons regarding their online practices and they're recent 3DS debacle, but when it comes to games, I've always thought they were nigh-peerless. They always have fantastic art direction, gameplay is almost flawless, and their graphics are always the best for whatever system they're developing for. So I've come to the conclusion that people are angry at them for one reason: Their games are too much the same.

This is valid in some ways. After all, each series has its own tropes and consistencies. But that's what makes a series a series. If suddenly Zelda was a first person shooter in the vein of Call of Duty, it would cease to be Zelda. It would suddenly become some sort of weird alien creature that has taken on the form of Zelda, but is unable to express itself in a matter like Zelda. If Mario was to become an action-RPG with grim dialogue choices, it would seem like they had completely abandoned every gameplay design Mario stands for. Yet whenever I read the comments on a new Mario or a new Zelda, the same ideas keep popping up: Nintendo is just rehashing its series. Skyward Sword is no different from Twilight Princess or Ocarina of Time. And in writing comments like these, you truly show your ignorance of the painstaking hard work that people put into these games.


Why does nobody say that God of War is just rehashing the same gameplay concepts since its inception? Why does nobody say that Bioshock was just the same as System Shock II but set underwater? Or that Skyrim is the same as Oblivion just with a few gameplay tweaks? Naughty Dog basically made the same game 3 times with differing story lines in a matter of 5 years, yet when there's only two Zelda games in that amount of time, people say they're just copying the last game. Is it just because they have a grudge against Nintendo? Is the nostalgia for Ocarina of Time so overwhelming that anything remotely similar makes you pine for the good old days?

People need to realize something: if you're expecting a series to change dramatically from one game to the next, you need to look up the definition of series. And while you're at it, stop whining so much about video games. Frankly, it's getting rather annoying.

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About Speak Up on Kotaku: Our readers have a lot to say, and sometimes what they have to say has nothing to do with the stories we run. That's why we have a forum on Kotaku called Speak Up. That's the place to post anecdotes, photos, game tips and hints, and anything you want to share with Kotaku at large. Every weekday we'll pull one of the best Speak Up posts we can find and highlight it here.