What was Nintendo's golden decade?

[Mutsukki]

And like I said, I think that's bullshit and totally playing on the safe side. People sometimes get bored of Mario everywhere, they want they concepts, new worlds to explore. If Nintendo can't put these out anymore like they used to, so yeah, I say they lost a part of their creativity. How come what you play at doesn't matter? If Pikmin was a big Mario throwing a bunch of tiny Mario at some giant goomba, would that really be intersting? No. Epic Yarn (as one of the most recent examples) can get away with it because Kirby is in almost anything and fit the cute style, but maybe a new IP would have been something more fresh?

How can you say that from a game making point of view it doesn't matter? Videogames aren't just gameplay anymore, that's for Atari, even in NES some immersion was required. You can lay out a game and just put characters later, but that's always (supposed to be) a well thought process on how the characters and the game co-relate, not some thing about not caring about characterization. Characterization, immersion and "soul" are really just as important as gameplay.


Now, onto your Galaxy argument. I sure hope that wasn't on purpose, because then they've been shitting on us about Super Mario 3D Land being about taking the linearity of the 2D games into a 3D world for the first time. I actually think Galaxy do have it's fair amount of exploration, but it's nowhere near 64 and Sunshine, and that's not a good thing at all (by the way I love Galaxy 1 and 2, it's one of my favorite games ever, just so you know). They can still make 2D games linear, or even do hybrids like they did, but 3D games should focus on something different, otherwise it's all streamlined and feel the same. I don't think that's what they're striving for at all.

Skyward Sword is a mess. I like the game, but it seriously is. It shows every bad habit Nintendo had aquired during these last years and put it on a game. To annoying in-your-face messages about what do to and what's happening, to the most linear Zelda ever. What you said about Japan and West make zero sense. Japan is a big fan of open world games. Otherwise MMORPGs wouldn't be so popular there, or really, RPGs in a whole. Your argument falls all over the place when you realize Monster Hunter is one of the huggest franchises ever there, and it's nothing but the opposite of linear.

By the way, Japan loves Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker (among..all others), so I don't get where the series isn't popular there. Skyward Sword took the Final Fantasy XIII route, and the Japanese crowd hated that. They hated that their huge world to explore had been dumbed down to a single line moving forward, so that they could please new and casual players.

I'm a huge Nintendo nerd like you wouldn't believe and I'm still buying their games, but I try to be real here and while Nintendo isn't all that bad like Capcom, EA and Activision have been, they sure aren't going on a good path nowadays and I'm pretty sure most things they do (at least Mario and Zelda, which they handle directly) will become stale before long.