Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
Mina the Hollower is finally out, and I’ve been working through it and having fun. Much like its predecessor Shovel Knight, the game is very much about being both incredibly and secretly modern and evoking an older age of games. This time around, its main touchstone is The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, possibly the single best title for the Game Boy and a remarkable creative achievement. Great remake, too.
It’s actually a strange coincidence the game released right after Nintendo announced the retirement of Takashi Tezuka, an incredible game director and producer who wildly upended the industry within the length of about a decade. He was the director of Link’s Awakening and, crucially, was the person most responsible for the single most important element of the game: the writing. Directly inspired by Twin Peaks and made in a space of wild creativity, Link’s Awakening was all about deconstructing, parodying, and poking fun at Zelda conventions. This came in a number of ways, but the biggest was in its story and storytelling. There’s no princess to rescue, no Ganon to fight. Link is a stranger on an island made of dreams, where every NPC is weird, surreal, and seemingly off in their own world. “Suspicious guys,” as he’d later put it. And this… worked! It worked really well! It made the story feel more personal and urgent, it made the setting feel richer than Hyrule, and pretty much every single Zelda game afterwards followed that tone. Some may be darker or lighter or more serious, but they all have these charismatic weirdos, and I do really think that’s a big part of why Zelda’s endured.
This is something Mina the Hollower captures perfectly, even more than Shovel Knight. Every NPC operates on a spectrum of silly, pompous, self-aggrandizing, comically dour, aloof, and dejected. It leads to a game that is funny and irreverent, and one that feels fairly lived in. There are a ton of jokes in Hollower, and a ton of kinds of jokes, but they largely all come from some kind of character core—even if that “character” is a gorgeously-animated boss. Precious few of them are easy lampshades; none are cloying winks and nods, the kind that you do find in way too many games. I don’t know if I’ll remember many of the individual characters or gags after I finish the adventure, but there is a great command of tone and storytelling here, and a lot of it does come from this focus on eccentricity.
So today’s prompt is about exactly that: what are your favorite examples of this kind of literary direction, this focus on very eccentric casts in games? Because there are a few games that have eccentric main characters (like Mass Effect) or an eccentric tone (like EarthBound), I don’t think there are that many games that actively capture this feeling. Like, I thought of Fallout initially, and New Vegas is kinda there, but not consistently, and Fallout 3 and 4 don’t come close. It’s a space that seems more amenable to indies; Undertale and Deltarune both capture this… which fits, since Toby Fox loves both Nintendo and Homestar Runner, one of the preeminent non-gaming examples of this kind of cast. This is an even more nebulous prompt than most, especially since the phenomenon I’m describing can be boiled down to “you know it when you see it.” But if you see it, you know it, and I’d like to know more.
And, as always, what did you play this weekend? EDIT: and make sure to check out the latest installment of Lily-Bones’ “Game News Roundup!” It’s fantastic!