this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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I'm going to put myself on some thin ice here, but a lot of the representation talk in gaming, including the discussions surrounding The Legend of Zelda seems pretty reductive: I don't know if there is much progress in a world where we simply change the surface-level signs of representation of a game, when the gameplay and the mechanics of interacting with the gameworld stay the exact same from game to game. If the form is seen as unchangeable and we can only have variations in content, gaming is dead as a medium and any changes in representation will fail to matter (although admittedly most artforms are as dead under late-stage capitalism).
I completely agree with you and it actually is exciting in a way to see the zelda formula messed with in this way - I'll be the first to hate on combat being the primary way you interact with the world around you. The problem is that it comes across like nintendo is only changing things up because girl game, and the mechanics they do change end up feeling sexist asf when viewed in that context. At the end of the day, you're still put in a role where you identify with and play as a royal, which I don't find nearly as exciting as the person in the vid.
I really don't know how you'd come to that conclusion if you took into account the trajectory of what Nintendo has done with Zelda recently. The sort of systems-driven and open-ended gameplay of Echoes seems to be much more of a continuation of what they already started with BOTW (especially the 2d prototype they created for that game) and continued exploring with TOTK than something they would have come up with if they started out from the idea of having Zelda as the protagonist and designed the game downwards from there. This is obviously not how Nintendo always operates, and I'd bet money that the Princess Peach game that came out this year actually was the result of some market research telling them they'd need a game to market to girls specifically and that was then designed from that idea downwards, but I really don't think that is how they're conceptualizing Zelda games right now, where the team and their games seems to have been successful enough to be free from such concerns.
Fair enough regarding the progression of the game design across the series. Nintendo games do be pricey, so I didn't take it into account because I haven't played most of them. But that actually makes even more sense regarding why they feel comfortable bringing in zelda as mc for the first time now.
i.e. they would only cast zelda for the mc role if she was more suited to the gameplay than link. Read: Link has been more suited to be the protagonist of each mainline game up to this point. So now that they're cooking with a different gameplay formula (not a bad thing on its own) they feel like zelda can take centre stage (also not a bad thing on its own).