Fun Club What’s the most pretentious first-party Nintendo game?

[Yamanoi]

 

[neon]

the word pretentious was a mistake
its totally rustys real deal baseball btw

 

[Razgriz]

"pretentious": attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed.

Okay smarmy dictionary description aside; a pretentious game to me is a game that tries to be more than it's actually capable of being. It's a game that tries it's damnest to be an earnest depiction of what the creator truly believes, but either what the creator believes is an incoherent mess that dominates the rest of their game or they're using the medium in a way where it feels extremely condescending. Author behaviour surrounding their game also tends to inform if a game is pretentious or not; nobody called Tetris pretentious because it's mainly made to entertain and it's really good at that.

Two big examples that for me serve as a baseline is David "I don't make games for [homophobic slur]" Cage's oeuvre of titles being mostly known for accidental camp whilst trying to handle Serious Subject Matter with all the experience of someone who obviously has no idea beyond what he read in his high school history books about said Serious Subject Matter. The other example for me is TLOU2, where Neil Druckmann implicitly agreed that his game deserved to be mentioned in the same sentence as Schindler's List (by telling off a journalist dealing with an insane fanboy comparing TLOU2 to it to be "less mean to the fans", when that comparison was the entire tweet.)

So for Nintendo's titles... honestly the only one that jumps to mind as fitting all of these criteria is Metroid: Other M. It's a rare Nintendo game with a big focus on story, Sakamoto went out of his way to talk about just how personally involved he was with the narrative and how he stayed up to storyboard and direct every single scene. He also forcibly oversaw the English voice direction even though he didn't speak a single sentence of English at the time. And what we got... was a game whose mother metaphors are subtle as a brick, is without a doubt one of the most sexist games of its generation (to the point where even most dudebro reviewers picked up on it) and the aforementioned voice direction made Samus sound like a robot.

Besides that one, Nintendo's list of games just doesn't really have that type of high profile failure, and I think a big part of that is also because pretentious games come out of a very specific type of culture of videogame pitches that Nintendo kinda doesn't have. They used to stumble with it (Retro almost went in that direction because fuck Jeff Spangenberg) but Other M was their wakeup call to avoid that sorta thing in the future.

 

[KCannon]

So for Nintendo's titles... honestly the only one that jumps to mind as fitting all of these criteria is Metroid: Other M. It's a rare Nintendo game with a big focus on story, Sakamoto went out of his way to talk about just how personally involved he was with the narrative and how he stayed up to storyboard and direct every single scene. He also forcibly oversaw the English voice direction even though he didn't speak a single sentence of English at the time. And what we got... was a game whose mother metaphors are subtle as a brick, is without a doubt one of the most sexist games of its generation (to the point where even most dudebro reviewers picked up on it) and the aforementioned voice direction made Samus sound like a robot.

Besides that one, Nintendo's list of games just doesn't really have that type of high profile failure, and I think a big part of that is also because pretentious games come out of a very specific type of culture of videogame pitches that Nintendo kinda doesn't have. They used to stumble with it (Retro almost went in that direction because fuck Jeff Spangenberg) but Other M was their wakeup call to avoid that sorta thing in the future.

Geist kinda fits that bill too, since it was touted as the "Halo Killer" and advertised as something to attract the mature FPS crowd.

 

[1upmuffin]

Geist kinda fits that bill too, since it was touted as the "Halo Killer" and advertised as something to attract the mature FPS crowd.

(Prime doesn't count since it preceded Halo.)

Are you saying Metroid Prime came out before Halo or am I misreading?

 

[KCannon]

Are you saying Metroid Prime came out before Halo or am I misreading?

No, I got confused by the dates. I now remember MP came shortly after.

 

[LiamRobertson]

I liked what I played of it, but maybe Astral Chain? The story just seemed a bit out there for the sake of out there with standard sci-fi critiques on human nature and morality.

Really? Felt pretty tongue in cheek to me like all PlatinumGames.