Why Retro Games Feel More Engaging Despite “Outdated” Design

 

 

I didn’t really grow up playing video games. My childhood gaming experience as someone who lives in a developing country was during computer class at school, where I would play Sonic Advance 2 on the school computer for 30 minutes, until the save is lost forever since we always switched seats. My first real “console” was actually a handheld, the 3DS, back in 2016. Owning consoles or playing current-gen games as a hobby was a very recent phenomenon in my country, and the Switch was my first home console as a birthday present in 2019.

 

Because of this, I got to experience many of the old classics from the perspective of a modern gamer. A modern, often times impatient gamer that expects games to respect my time and be able to engage me with exciting and intuitive gameplay mechanics. It’s why I dropped supposed masterpieces like Genealogy of the Holy War and Ocarina of Time - they felt too much like slogs and not even the story/characters were interesting enough to compel me to continue. The first old-school game that got me to change my mind, however, was Grandia 1.

 

Immersion through “Inconvenience”

I came to the Grandia series last year as I was looking for a traditional JRPG with good combat after being somewhat underwhelmed by my first turn-based RPG experience with Shin Megami Tensei V. Like most modern gamers trying old-school titles, I did fairly extensive research on the core gameplay of Grandia 1 before giving it a shot, and most of the negatives I saw people list out for this entry was concerning new skills being obtained by repeating using specific weapons or magic schools in combat, the maze-like dungeon designs, and as an unintuitive compass. Gameplay-wise the sequel, Grandia 2, seems to be almost universally agreed to be superior in every way imaginable, but the first game is generally agreed to be ahead in terms of story and worldbuilding.

Since I preferred the aesthetic and character designs of the first game, it was the one I started with. And yes, sometimes I became a bit frustrated with some parts or elements of the game, especially the rather slow opening. But by the time I onboarded the Steamer and read Lily’s letter to her son Justin, I was completely hooked into the world of Grandia 1, all the way till the less exciting but just as engaging second half of the journey. And when I saw Sue’s EXP passing items - the colouring books and crayons - in my inventory after she left my party, there was no way to hold back my ugly crying fit. 

 

Aside from the simpler yet more impactful story moments like that, I was almost always making some kind of gain in every battle, as I would level up my characters’ weapons and magic schools mid-combat. The tiny “weapon/magic level up” text, on top of the top-class combat system that the Grandia games are known for, kept me so engaged that I actually never turned on auto-battle at all in my entire 90+ hour playthrough, despite the game’s overall difficulty never really forcing the player to make full use of its intricate battle mechanics. I feel like every action that I take in terms of combat, be it to engage in them or avoid entirely, matters, and that’s just brilliant. 

 

 

Grandia 2, at least when playing on Hard Mode, provided a much more mechanically engaging time for me with its enemy design, especially bosses, in exchange for the much more drab environmental design. However, it took me an embarrassing amount of time before I understood how to level up my Moves and Magic in Grandia 2, and even though it was much more convenient and arguably “better designed” as a video game mechanic, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. I didn’t feel like my characters were getting stronger after each battle since I had to manually unlock skills and magic for them via menus. And I’ve said it before, I hate grinding in video games. But I was more engaged by the progression system in Grandia 1 even though it’s technically “more grindy”. In fact, despite the improved battle system, I actually did turn on auto-battle for Grandia 2 at one point when I never once did this in the original. And when I lost a key party member (which was a heart-wrenching moment) and found this bag of “Missangra” that gave me back all the Special Coins I spent on him, there was a hollow feeling inside of me. It feels like the game was repaying me a debt: for "wasting" my resources into building him, instead of the feelings the crayon books and secret scrolls gave me, even though they weren’t “fair” repays, being only ⅓ of the exp instead of all the resources used.

The same thing happened again when I was playing through the Mother series. I started with Mother 3 since I heard aside from the allegedly superior story, characters, and worldbuilding (which I ended up getting disappointed by), the general gameplay and game feel are better optimized and fleshed out than the previous titles. And while it’s true that Mother 3 had less frustration-inducing moments due to more streamlined menuing, recovery/save system, and fleshed-out combat, I found myself frequently forgetting what to do next, a sign of a game failing to engage me mechanically and narratively. 

 

It wasn’t until I played the previous 2 games that I realized why. Despite the sketchbook 8-bit aesthetic of Mother 1, abundant random encounters, and supposed “obtuse” progression, I was fully engaged in simply traversing its world as I picked up clues on where to investigate next by talking to the various NPCs. At one point, I was talking to a bunch of kids in a school to recruit my next party member, and my character caught a cold. In the Mother series, catching a cold as a status ailment will slowly sap a party member’s HP with every step/action they take, and eventually if left uncured, they will die from it. I actually…. wasn’t angry when this happened to me. In fact, I just laughed out loud since it was actually just a commentary on the infamous “deadly Japanese cold” - I thought it was quite clever.

Similarly, Earthbound/Mother 2 had a unique mechanic where Ness would sometimes suffer the “homesick” status ailment that prevents him from doing what you command him to in combat. Instead, he would daydream about mom cooking his favourite food, and you “cure” this by letting Ness call his mom via a phone booth in town so he could cheer up after hearing her sweet voice. The game was also often criticized for its incredibly restrictive inventory system where the same items don’t stack and key items are counted as inventory items instead of having its own tab like in Mother 3. As per tradition, you also have to call your dad to save/receive money earned from combat encounters then withdraw it from an ATM in town, and when you buy items from shops, they don’t tell you what it does until you buy it. You also have to pay the local hotel or hospital to replenish your HP, PP, and cure certain status effects, unlike in Mother 3 where taking a dip in the conveniently placed hot spring in the area will fully heal your party for free, and you can save as well as manage funds via the abundance of "save frogs" scattered around the world.

And yet, even with all of these outdated, cumbersome mechanics, I was never got lost or became disinterested while playing the first 2 Mother games, unlike when I was playing the most modernized and “well-designed” entry in the series. I was even more immersed in their worlds, as I truly felt like a child with his ragtag group of friends going on a globe-trotting adventure with nothing more than our kid-sized backpacks. The devs openly admitted to adding these features in to inconvenience me, yet I was only more invested in the game instead of being turned off. 

 

What Makes A Game Timeless

There is an argument to be made that perhaps this would only apply to the RPG genre because of the emphasis on “role-playing”, so let’s step outside the realm of RPGs next: Metroid games. 

 

A few months back, I completed Metroid Dread, the impossible sequel 19 years in the making. It is undoubtedly, the best feeling Metroid game to date. Samus controls like a dream while also maintaining semi-realistic physics - there is still weight and momentum to her actions despite her boosted speed, unlike in Zero Mission and Fusion. The background environments are more detailed and alive than ever thanks to modern hardware and Mercury Steam’s impeccable art design. The story is more exciting and fleshed out than ever while still maintaining the unique feel of Metroid storytelling (though they could’ve handled that Quiet Robe loredump much more gracefully), and the music while clearly reflecting the inexperience of its new composers, is quite serviceable when playing - if only the devs just add the setting to lower sfx because they’re overpowering the music most of the time… In the end, it was still a fantastic game and one of the top Metroid titles for me. But there has been a notable shift in the design philosophy of Metroid games since Fusion, with the focus on gameplay difficulty in terms of action and fighting, aspects that were strongly criticized in the older titles.

I saw many people start claiming it has dethroned Super as the new “best Metroid game”, and that the former has “many outdated designs that hurt the playing experience” that makes it “not as good as people make it out to be”. And I have to strongly disagree, even as someone who first played Super Metroid in 2017 and had zero nostalgia for the series whatsoever. The genius “invisible” tutorialization in Super Metroid is something no other Metroid titles have successfully replicated and actually made me care for the nameless space animals in the game. The way Super let you take on Ridley at the beginning of the game despite having zero power-ups to contrast with how powerful you’ve gotten when you faced him again later midgame. The slower, floatier physics of Super Metroid actually enhanced the atmosphere and gameplay. The planet feels grounded (heh) with realistic physics that affect Samus’ momentum, and it enabled neat tricks like single wall-scaling - something I still sorely missed in Dread. 

 

 It’s hard to explain, but the “clunky” physics of Super Metroid, in its own way, create an incredibly organic and immersive playing experience where I truly feel like I am Samus trying to overcome the environmental hazards and enemies. It’s a much different feeling from mastering Dread’s fairly complicated controls to execute sick platforming tricks and blasting through enemies in a spectacular fashion. Combined with its masterpiece of a soundtrack and timeless pixel art graphics, Super Metroid’s immersion somehow manages to feel leagues ahead of its progeny despite the massive 27-year gap in technology. 

 

The best way I can put it is: Super Metroid feels like an incredibly well-designed adventure experience, while Metroid Dread feels like an incredibly well-designed action-focused video game. And from my experience, atmosphere and immersion are timeless qualities of games that usually can’t be really replicated or replaced, while mechanical depth is, arguably, something that can be improved with technological advancement - which is why many fans believe that Dread “evolved” the controls and physics of Fusion and Zero Mission, games previously regarded as “better feeling” control-wise than Super.

Only time will tell the impact Metroid Dread will have on the gaming industry moving forward, and despite how much I enjoyed the game, I won’t lie: I miss the magic of Super Metroid and Metroid 1 that is likely forever left in the dust from now on due to the series' shifting focus to gameplay mechanics and difficulty over a truly immersive atmosphere and cleverly subtle storytelling.

Final Thoughts

As technology develops and the consumer media landscape progresses, the gap between generations will only ever widen and sadly, more beloved things from the past will become lost to time. There has been a relatively conscious effort from companies to make old games become more accessible to the younger audience, with classics like Radiant Historia, SMT: Strange Journey, Final Fantasy VII, etc. getting remakes. However, it isn’t by accident that many of these modern facelifts are controversial amongst people who have experienced the original, and most of the time, the “downgraded” atmosphere/immersion and storytelling are things that tend to get criticized in these supposed “upgraded” versions, and I’d say rightfully so.

Some franchises are less severely damaged by this new direction in game design, or at least have a smoother transition to it, like the Metroid series, but this is a pill that becomes harder to swallow for me the more I experience the genius of these old games for the first time as a modern gamer, as a “filthy zoomer” who wasn’t even there when these classics were actually released. And like I mentioned previously with Genealogy of the Holy War and Ocarina of Time, not all old games are “magical” to me simply because of their retro designs. Atmosphere and immersion, I believe, are more important in certain genres than others. Like in role-playing games and adventure games with a focus on exploration, not strategy/tactical games like Fire Emblem or action-adventure games with a focus on puzzle solving like traditional Zelda games. In these types of games, I’d argue that map/dungeon design and mechanical depth are much more important - though story, characters, and world design are also important driving forces, which was admittedly why I never got into the Zelda series.

I guess the point of this incoherent rambling of a blog is to encourage modern gamers to: 1/ give old titles a try to broaden your gaming horizons and deepen your appreciation of the industry and 2/ try to understand why old fans are so protective of the originals instead of strawmanning their arguments as purely being fueled by rose-tinted nostalgia and brushing people off as simply “purists” or “elitists”. Not to say there aren’t bad apples on both sides, but we should all strive to understand, appreciate, and learn from the past. After all, we are nothing without history.