this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
95 points (95.2% liked)

Nintendo

18549 readers
22 users here now

A community for everything Nintendo. Games, news, discussions, stories etc.

Rules:

  1. No NSFW content.
  2. No hate speech or personal attacks.
  3. No ads / spamming / self-promotion / low effort posts / memes etc.
  4. No linking to, or sharing information about, hacks, ROMs or any illegal content. And no piracy talk. (Linking to emulators, or general mention / discussion of emulation topics is fine.)
  5. No console wars or PC elitism.
  6. Be a decent human (or a bot, we don't discriminate against bots... except in Point 7).
  7. All bots must have mod permission prior to implementation and must follow instance-wide rules. For lemmy.world bot rules click here

Upcoming First Party Games (NA):

Game | Date

|

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD | Jan 16, 2025 Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition | Mar 20, 2025 Metroid Prime 4 | 2025

Other Gaming Communities

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
slimerancher
CosmicSploogeDrizzle
[email protected]
picandocodigo
95
Miyamoto wonders why Pikmin hasn't sold more and why people think the games are difficult (nintendoeverything.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/nintendo
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Seems like time and time again, Nintendo is always trying to sell games to an audience of people who do not wish to play video games. For a sequel, I figured Nintendo should focus on their core audience of Pikmin fans but it seems like they're always changing things to appeal to people who don't play games while in return alienating the people who want more sophisticated gameplay and challenges.

What are your thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well that's Nintendo for you. I got disappointed by the Yoshi and Kirby going kindergarten level difficulty, so I haven't buy any sequal on switch. It looks cute and have nice mechanism, and maybe some harder extra level that's not required for completion dotted around. But it's not enough, like even little big planet have more variety of difficulty than wiiu/switch Yoshi/Kirby. And LBP isn't a hard game to begin with.

Cute and hard game with proper progression is how you curate a new generation of players. Cause they ain't playing gore flying hack-and-slash from 5yo.

[–] TheMinions 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you talking about Yoshi’s Crafted World? I found some of those bosses genuinely hard when you didn’t play on Easy mode with the wings on.

Two player also made it a lot easier, but my second player was my 5 year old, and he definitely couldn’t have beat it without help.

[–] Grangle1 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn't just about story/aesthetics, it's also about difficulty. Most young kids don't have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.

I could split Nintendo games (I've played) into three groups based on target audience:

Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi

All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there's more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.

Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)

I'd consider frankly pretty much all Zelda games more mature. I haven't played them all, but the pattern I've noticed is that the more recent games feel easier (though the open world makes them more time consuming). The bigger puzzle dungeons of older games could get quite difficult sometimes. Easy to get lost and confused. The 2D games often were extra cryptic and combat was more punishing.

As a kid, I bought oracle of ages as my first ever Zelda game and couldn't figure out where to go after the first dungeon, so had to sell it. As an adult, I beat it and the seasons equivalent just to see what I missed out on. I had to use a lot of save states and recall some bizarre minigame that was just horrible, horrible, horrible (90% of my save states would have been that one minigame). I had to Google multiple times where to go. I dunno how kids could do it. Sometimes I wondered if it was all a ploy to make kids call that pay number for video game tips that predated the internet answering all these questions. Also, I seriously question why I even put myself through that. It wasn't that fun.