TreyofHearts
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[I don't know if this belongs here, but I'm a greenhorn without blogging privileges and this is the most frequented aspect of the forum. Like any other huddled mass yearning to be heard, I want to cast this idea as wide as possible. If nothing else, this should provide a decent talking point for Pokémon-related, pre-E3 speculation.]
Less than a week ago, Nintendo detailed their E3 strategies in a way only Nintendo could. We laughed, of course, but nevertheless it seems that they're putting their right foot forward. They've termed their goings-on as the/a Nintendo Digital Event, forgoing a conference at E3 proper for a second year in a row. In addition, they've announced an officially-sanctioned tournament for the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS, among other things. It's all very exciting, to be sure, but that's not what we're here to talk about.
Much to-do has been made about the when's, what's and how's of the next Pokémon title(s), given the ostensibly arbitrary qualities of the last few releases. As a whole, Generation V seems to be something of an anomaly, what with having shared its platform with the previous Generation and teased out its length more than two years into the next [hardware generation]. The pre-release campaign of X and Y was a veritable parade of anticipation that even managed to headline Nintendo's E3 forum--a first for the series. Whatever could be/has been said about the game itself, X and Y was, if nothing else, a great marketing stunt, and, luckily for Nintendo and Game Freak, it paid off. X and Y is sitting pretty at the head of best-selling Nintendo 3DS games (12 million and counting), and they're set to outpace the last couple of installments. It won't, however, save the 3DS from its fate as the poorest-selling Nintendo handheld to date, and, more likely than not, neither will the next game(s).
On top of that, Game Freak is at something of a crossroads. We live in a post-Black 2 and White 2 world now, and no matter how differentiated a third version of X and Y would be, it would basically be sales-assassination. None of them have broken ten million copies sold, and I doubt Nintendo would do with anything less. Nintendo's CEO himself, Satoru Iwata, basically mandated Black 2 and White 2, which, while not unjustified, is still a bit out of line, as it would be the first in a decade (he was appointed in 2002). It's not as if he's off-hand with the series, either; he was HAL Laboratory's CEO years before he was Nintendo's, and he had a hand in the Nintendo 64 games before he eventually receded into the role of an executive producer. Oddly enough, his involvement with the game series seems to mirror Nintendo's overall dependence on it--or lack thereof.
Now, I don't at all pretend to be privy to the demiurgic realpolitik that dictates these companies' economic maneuvering, so feel free to skip these first eight paragraphs if you're fearful of a yammering bordering on a shelf of tinfoil hats. But it seems that Nintendo, as of late, is growing increasingly aware of the fact that Pokémon is one of their few aces in the hole. It's not terribly surprising given the shortcomings of the current hardware they have on market, but last E3 pretty much spoke for itself. As far as I can tell, they haven't displayed that much confidence in the game series for the better part of the last decade. Granted, the series has yet to re-reach the heights the first two Generations had attained since then. Of course, it wasn't eclipsed by an unending anime either (not totally, at least).
The point is that this is the first time in the past decade that Nintendo has had to depend on the main series games to actually drive their hardware. As I recall, the Nintendo DS wasn't just a novel upgrade to the Game Boy Advance SP; it was a sea change in company philosophy and the way they developed games. This was codified in the Touch Generation of games, which produced the Nintendogs and Brain Age series', both of which have outsold every Pokémon title released for the Nintendo DS. (Diamond and Pearl and Black and White were, respectively, the fifth and sixth best-selling titles, behind New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart DS in addition to the aforementioned titles; HeartGold and SoulSilver were eighth; Black 2 and White 2 and Platinum were twelfth and thirteenth. Even the poorest-selling title in the entire series, Crystal, was eleventh in its list.) But by 2006, when the Touch Generation was launched, there were eight movies, as many seasons (spanning more than four hundred episodes), and god knows how much corresponding merchandise (all of which has doubled since then). Meanwhile, the biggest game-related effort from any given studio at the time was... what, Pokémon Channel?
The dearth of quality spin-offs is, if you'd asked me, the biggest weakness of the game series. Even the most novel of them are, objectively, middling at best, and moreover their content usually depends upon the extant main series game (namely, Pokémon Stadium, Colosseum and their sequels, which were more than a decade ago). All the same, Pokémon has never had anything on the level of, say, World of Warcraft, Persona, Dragon Quest Monsters, Bravely Default, or even Final Fantasy's other myriad--and often much-maligned--sequels, spin-offs or expansions. Even Lightning Return's was more excitable than Pokémon Battle Trozei; Persona 5 is probably the most highly-anticipated Megami Tensei game to date.
The emergent problem is/was that it isolates Game Freak into an echo chamber as apposed to a wind tunnel--a place where they can tinker away to their hearts' content. And since they have to regularly feed the monster that is the rest of the franchise, they have virtually no room for experimentation (hence the third versions). If there were spin-offs even remotely as anticipated as the dyad games, they would have something to bounce off of. The main series' formula (probably) wouldn't be thrown into as much relief as it is now, and at least there would be an alternative. But I digress.
What I've discovered has made me more giddy than a Millennial should legally be allowed to be. And if I'm right, we could, within the year, see nothing less than a sea change in how we play Pokémon and games in general (again). But if I'm wrong, I'm very, very sorry for making you suffer, reader.
[Non-masochists start here.]
Not two days after Nintendo announced their E3 plans, a peculiar patent was published detailing a node of sorts designed for exchangeable keys, but before I delve into that, watch this:
A month after the fact, Motorola announced Project Ara, a joint-venture with Phonebloks creator Dave Hakkans. (You can see/read much more about it here and here.) To make a long story short, they'll be releasing a "modular smartphone" at the fiercely-competitive price of $50 next January. Coincidentally, Nintendo is aiming to branch out into bluer oceans before the following April.
In a policy briefing in January, Iwata detailed their outlook for the fiscal year, admitting to the blunders of the Wii U and the 3DS. His most salient spiel, however, was the nebulous "Quality of Life" platform, a factoid that most news outlets have scrutinized--not unjustifiably so, but if one reads between the lines, there's a whole soft underbelly of tidbits to nibble on.
He talks of "expansion" and "blue oceans" as a matter of course, and if it seems to invoke déjà vu, you may be trapped in the Matrix. If not, you may have remembered that this is virtually the same rhetoric he used to sell the DS and the Wii nearly a decade ago. Similarly, he says that it will stand apart from their other hardware as a sort of "third pillar," yet somehow still capitalize on, well, their being Nintendo. He doesn't say how, but he does mention when. The "Quality of Life" platform will be unveiled to us sometime before the end of next April, and, presumably, be launched shortly thereafter. As others have speculated, it would be wise to replace the 3DS in the marketplace sooner rather than later. Some guy named Tomita managed to plunge a spile into their revenue, which, among other things, may explain the "low-entry" 2DS SKU. I imagine that they will want to discontinue it as soon as possible, assuming that this case continues indefinitely. In any case, the writing is on the wall, and Nintendo is scribbling a response.
In other news, Disney Infinity is coming out with a play set based on the cinematic Avengers! Nick Fury and Phil Coulson awesomely announced it last month, and if you don't blink you can even spot Groot and Rocket Raccoon from the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy in the trailer.
While I haven't actually indulged in the likes of Infinity and the Skylanders series myself, the appeal is tantalizingly apparent. And frankly, it seems like something Nintendo would and should have done years ago. Ironically enough, the Wii U GamePad incorporates NFC functionality... and the only game that uses it is Pokémon Rumble U. To make up for this, Iwata has stated that they plan on capitalizing on the functionality during E3 this in the briefing, but by the time they do, these other games will be nearly three years ahead of the curve. It's baffling, really; I'm sure that I don't have to explain the massive potential this has in store for Pokémon alone, to say nothing of their other properties. It's worked out pretty sweetly for Activision, and they don't have even a modicum of the brand recognition that Pokémon does.
This all boomerangs back to what I said about the sorry state of non-main series Pokémon games. Most of them suck, and the ones that don't are still too dependent on the main series. Why don't we have an open-world RPG developed by Level-5 (the developers behind Dragon Quest IX)? Or a tactical RPG as good as a Fire Emblem Awakening? How about a spin-off taking place in a region that might appear in the next game, not unlike the Sevii Islands? Why isn't The Origin a prequel about Lysandre and Sycamore in their youth, chronicling the rise of Team Flare and the discovery of Mega Stones? Did you seriously just make a four-part commercial about how super-special-awesome Mega Charizard X is? And your making another one? ...I'm cool.
So. The patent.
As you can see, they've seemed to have dropped the second screen, and it doesn't detail the 3D slider in the specs (which is good; it drove up the retail price of the 3DS and caused a lawsuit). I think both prospects of its design is for the best, but that raises a particular question that cuts to the heart of recent Nintendo's issues and future problems: how, exactly, do they move away from the 3DS' namesake (or, alternatively, the Wii U's GamePad, for that matter) without seeming wishywashy? I don't really know. It was probably a mistake to name it such in the first place, but, then again, such is the power of memes.
Both DS and 3DS were originally code names that happened to catch on, and at least it worked for one of them. In a nutshell, their biggest mistake was assuming that lightning would strike twice--thrice in the case of the Wii U. If the briefing is anything to go by, they don't seem as bemused this time around, and the fact they have arrived, somewhat serendipitously, at a crossroads they've came across almost precisely a decade ago is almost scary. But not hopelessly so.
The patent, of course, could be folly; they're filed all the time, after all, and few enough of them come into fruition. Most of them are just rubber balls thrown discerningly at a conceptual wall. A cursory search, however, yielded conspicuous results: several Nintendo-related patents were filed in 2009, but most of them were published more than a year afterward. The most recent one had a layover of about six months. Again, probably meaningless, so I looked elsewhere.
This is the 3DS' prototype, revealed in an Iwata Asks interview in early 2010. Its designer, Kenichi Sugino, jokingly suggest releasing it as such, leaving placement to the discretion of the player. Mercifully enough, they didn't, and the result was much easier to look at.
Nintendo has a history of never giving up on an idea, no matter how far-fetched. The current hardware on market is proof of that. The 3DS hails from the Virtual Boy; the Miis trace their origins to the NES; Game Freak, for their part, have been vying to realize Pokémon Bank since Crystal. During the briefing, Iwata spoke of a "leapfrog strategy" that will involve some sort of "non-wearable technology." How this jibes with a "Quality of Life" platform is frighteningly formless, but if anyone can do it its Nintendo. And if I'm even on a fraction of the money, next E3 will be gangbusting.
To wit: I believe that this patent details Nintendo's "Quality of Life" handheld--and it will be a handheld--that will expand the definition of gaming into the fourth dimension--our own. A "4DS." (Fourth developer's system? Four devices set? Four dudes surfing? Four Dragon Ball characters that Charizard is obviously a pallete swap of?) It's more intuitive than the 3DS--more indicative of its actual strengths--and the brand itself is still going strong. The DS is the all-time best-selling gaming hardware on the market (the PlayStation 2 was discontinued over a year ago). Of course, this reasoning bit them in the backside before, and I'm not against another name. Neither is Rusty.
In any case, it seems likely. As an aside, Rusty's Real Deal Baseball was announced in a Direct and developed internally by Nintendo. It's neither here nor there, of course.
The device pictured above is described as a "pressure sensor." How it works, of course, is unobtainable, but it alone speaks volumes. It's most likely the Wii Vitality Sensor--fully-realized and considerably less cumbersome for its absence. Unless, of course, it's a numeric keypad; it wouldn't be too radical given the other things the patent describes: multiple joysticks and D-pads, as well as figurines--all swappable. And if Nintendo poses to fare against the likes of Project Ara--as of yet, it's only real/potential competition in terms of modular hardware--and other smart devices, it needs to, well, be itself. To keep calm and switch on.
The patent is probably insurance for a device that's been in development for about five years. If so, it predates Project Ara, hopefully preempting another random lawsuit. I imagine that they will be multiple SKUs: a standard one, a health-related one fitted with the new Vitality Sensor, and plenty of bundles. As for Pokémon, the optimal solution would be to prepare the Generation VII games for launch day, which they're surely already working on (it also means that the follow-ups to X and Y will most likely be released this year). New ways to play and connect with others could be as boundless as space itself. Like the Pokémon themselves. And dragons that are better than Charizard.
Less than a week ago, Nintendo detailed their E3 strategies in a way only Nintendo could. We laughed, of course, but nevertheless it seems that they're putting their right foot forward. They've termed their goings-on as the/a Nintendo Digital Event, forgoing a conference at E3 proper for a second year in a row. In addition, they've announced an officially-sanctioned tournament for the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS, among other things. It's all very exciting, to be sure, but that's not what we're here to talk about.
Much to-do has been made about the when's, what's and how's of the next Pokémon title(s), given the ostensibly arbitrary qualities of the last few releases. As a whole, Generation V seems to be something of an anomaly, what with having shared its platform with the previous Generation and teased out its length more than two years into the next [hardware generation]. The pre-release campaign of X and Y was a veritable parade of anticipation that even managed to headline Nintendo's E3 forum--a first for the series. Whatever could be/has been said about the game itself, X and Y was, if nothing else, a great marketing stunt, and, luckily for Nintendo and Game Freak, it paid off. X and Y is sitting pretty at the head of best-selling Nintendo 3DS games (12 million and counting), and they're set to outpace the last couple of installments. It won't, however, save the 3DS from its fate as the poorest-selling Nintendo handheld to date, and, more likely than not, neither will the next game(s).
On top of that, Game Freak is at something of a crossroads. We live in a post-Black 2 and White 2 world now, and no matter how differentiated a third version of X and Y would be, it would basically be sales-assassination. None of them have broken ten million copies sold, and I doubt Nintendo would do with anything less. Nintendo's CEO himself, Satoru Iwata, basically mandated Black 2 and White 2, which, while not unjustified, is still a bit out of line, as it would be the first in a decade (he was appointed in 2002). It's not as if he's off-hand with the series, either; he was HAL Laboratory's CEO years before he was Nintendo's, and he had a hand in the Nintendo 64 games before he eventually receded into the role of an executive producer. Oddly enough, his involvement with the game series seems to mirror Nintendo's overall dependence on it--or lack thereof.
Now, I don't at all pretend to be privy to the demiurgic realpolitik that dictates these companies' economic maneuvering, so feel free to skip these first eight paragraphs if you're fearful of a yammering bordering on a shelf of tinfoil hats. But it seems that Nintendo, as of late, is growing increasingly aware of the fact that Pokémon is one of their few aces in the hole. It's not terribly surprising given the shortcomings of the current hardware they have on market, but last E3 pretty much spoke for itself. As far as I can tell, they haven't displayed that much confidence in the game series for the better part of the last decade. Granted, the series has yet to re-reach the heights the first two Generations had attained since then. Of course, it wasn't eclipsed by an unending anime either (not totally, at least).
The point is that this is the first time in the past decade that Nintendo has had to depend on the main series games to actually drive their hardware. As I recall, the Nintendo DS wasn't just a novel upgrade to the Game Boy Advance SP; it was a sea change in company philosophy and the way they developed games. This was codified in the Touch Generation of games, which produced the Nintendogs and Brain Age series', both of which have outsold every Pokémon title released for the Nintendo DS. (Diamond and Pearl and Black and White were, respectively, the fifth and sixth best-selling titles, behind New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart DS in addition to the aforementioned titles; HeartGold and SoulSilver were eighth; Black 2 and White 2 and Platinum were twelfth and thirteenth. Even the poorest-selling title in the entire series, Crystal, was eleventh in its list.) But by 2006, when the Touch Generation was launched, there were eight movies, as many seasons (spanning more than four hundred episodes), and god knows how much corresponding merchandise (all of which has doubled since then). Meanwhile, the biggest game-related effort from any given studio at the time was... what, Pokémon Channel?
The dearth of quality spin-offs is, if you'd asked me, the biggest weakness of the game series. Even the most novel of them are, objectively, middling at best, and moreover their content usually depends upon the extant main series game (namely, Pokémon Stadium, Colosseum and their sequels, which were more than a decade ago). All the same, Pokémon has never had anything on the level of, say, World of Warcraft, Persona, Dragon Quest Monsters, Bravely Default, or even Final Fantasy's other myriad--and often much-maligned--sequels, spin-offs or expansions. Even Lightning Return's was more excitable than Pokémon Battle Trozei; Persona 5 is probably the most highly-anticipated Megami Tensei game to date.
The emergent problem is/was that it isolates Game Freak into an echo chamber as apposed to a wind tunnel--a place where they can tinker away to their hearts' content. And since they have to regularly feed the monster that is the rest of the franchise, they have virtually no room for experimentation (hence the third versions). If there were spin-offs even remotely as anticipated as the dyad games, they would have something to bounce off of. The main series' formula (probably) wouldn't be thrown into as much relief as it is now, and at least there would be an alternative. But I digress.
What I've discovered has made me more giddy than a Millennial should legally be allowed to be. And if I'm right, we could, within the year, see nothing less than a sea change in how we play Pokémon and games in general (again). But if I'm wrong, I'm very, very sorry for making you suffer, reader.
[Non-masochists start here.]
Not two days after Nintendo announced their E3 plans, a peculiar patent was published detailing a node of sorts designed for exchangeable keys, but before I delve into that, watch this:
[video=youtube;oDAw7vW7H0c]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDAw7vW7H0c[/video]
What's interesting about this video is that it was uploaded to YouTube approximately one month before the patent was filed. And what do they have to do with each other? Probably nothing. But the timing is all too suspicious.A month after the fact, Motorola announced Project Ara, a joint-venture with Phonebloks creator Dave Hakkans. (You can see/read much more about it here and here.) To make a long story short, they'll be releasing a "modular smartphone" at the fiercely-competitive price of $50 next January. Coincidentally, Nintendo is aiming to branch out into bluer oceans before the following April.
In a policy briefing in January, Iwata detailed their outlook for the fiscal year, admitting to the blunders of the Wii U and the 3DS. His most salient spiel, however, was the nebulous "Quality of Life" platform, a factoid that most news outlets have scrutinized--not unjustifiably so, but if one reads between the lines, there's a whole soft underbelly of tidbits to nibble on.
He talks of "expansion" and "blue oceans" as a matter of course, and if it seems to invoke déjà vu, you may be trapped in the Matrix. If not, you may have remembered that this is virtually the same rhetoric he used to sell the DS and the Wii nearly a decade ago. Similarly, he says that it will stand apart from their other hardware as a sort of "third pillar," yet somehow still capitalize on, well, their being Nintendo. He doesn't say how, but he does mention when. The "Quality of Life" platform will be unveiled to us sometime before the end of next April, and, presumably, be launched shortly thereafter. As others have speculated, it would be wise to replace the 3DS in the marketplace sooner rather than later. Some guy named Tomita managed to plunge a spile into their revenue, which, among other things, may explain the "low-entry" 2DS SKU. I imagine that they will want to discontinue it as soon as possible, assuming that this case continues indefinitely. In any case, the writing is on the wall, and Nintendo is scribbling a response.
In other news, Disney Infinity is coming out with a play set based on the cinematic Avengers! Nick Fury and Phil Coulson awesomely announced it last month, and if you don't blink you can even spot Groot and Rocket Raccoon from the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy in the trailer.
While I haven't actually indulged in the likes of Infinity and the Skylanders series myself, the appeal is tantalizingly apparent. And frankly, it seems like something Nintendo would and should have done years ago. Ironically enough, the Wii U GamePad incorporates NFC functionality... and the only game that uses it is Pokémon Rumble U. To make up for this, Iwata has stated that they plan on capitalizing on the functionality during E3 this in the briefing, but by the time they do, these other games will be nearly three years ahead of the curve. It's baffling, really; I'm sure that I don't have to explain the massive potential this has in store for Pokémon alone, to say nothing of their other properties. It's worked out pretty sweetly for Activision, and they don't have even a modicum of the brand recognition that Pokémon does.
This all boomerangs back to what I said about the sorry state of non-main series Pokémon games. Most of them suck, and the ones that don't are still too dependent on the main series. Why don't we have an open-world RPG developed by Level-5 (the developers behind Dragon Quest IX)? Or a tactical RPG as good as a Fire Emblem Awakening? How about a spin-off taking place in a region that might appear in the next game, not unlike the Sevii Islands? Why isn't The Origin a prequel about Lysandre and Sycamore in their youth, chronicling the rise of Team Flare and the discovery of Mega Stones? Did you seriously just make a four-part commercial about how super-special-awesome Mega Charizard X is? And your making another one? ...I'm cool.
So. The patent.
As you can see, they've seemed to have dropped the second screen, and it doesn't detail the 3D slider in the specs (which is good; it drove up the retail price of the 3DS and caused a lawsuit). I think both prospects of its design is for the best, but that raises a particular question that cuts to the heart of recent Nintendo's issues and future problems: how, exactly, do they move away from the 3DS' namesake (or, alternatively, the Wii U's GamePad, for that matter) without seeming wishywashy? I don't really know. It was probably a mistake to name it such in the first place, but, then again, such is the power of memes.
Both DS and 3DS were originally code names that happened to catch on, and at least it worked for one of them. In a nutshell, their biggest mistake was assuming that lightning would strike twice--thrice in the case of the Wii U. If the briefing is anything to go by, they don't seem as bemused this time around, and the fact they have arrived, somewhat serendipitously, at a crossroads they've came across almost precisely a decade ago is almost scary. But not hopelessly so.
The patent, of course, could be folly; they're filed all the time, after all, and few enough of them come into fruition. Most of them are just rubber balls thrown discerningly at a conceptual wall. A cursory search, however, yielded conspicuous results: several Nintendo-related patents were filed in 2009, but most of them were published more than a year afterward. The most recent one had a layover of about six months. Again, probably meaningless, so I looked elsewhere.
This is the 3DS' prototype, revealed in an Iwata Asks interview in early 2010. Its designer, Kenichi Sugino, jokingly suggest releasing it as such, leaving placement to the discretion of the player. Mercifully enough, they didn't, and the result was much easier to look at.
Nintendo has a history of never giving up on an idea, no matter how far-fetched. The current hardware on market is proof of that. The 3DS hails from the Virtual Boy; the Miis trace their origins to the NES; Game Freak, for their part, have been vying to realize Pokémon Bank since Crystal. During the briefing, Iwata spoke of a "leapfrog strategy" that will involve some sort of "non-wearable technology." How this jibes with a "Quality of Life" platform is frighteningly formless, but if anyone can do it its Nintendo. And if I'm even on a fraction of the money, next E3 will be gangbusting.
To wit: I believe that this patent details Nintendo's "Quality of Life" handheld--and it will be a handheld--that will expand the definition of gaming into the fourth dimension--our own. A "4DS." (Fourth developer's system? Four devices set? Four dudes surfing? Four Dragon Ball characters that Charizard is obviously a pallete swap of?) It's more intuitive than the 3DS--more indicative of its actual strengths--and the brand itself is still going strong. The DS is the all-time best-selling gaming hardware on the market (the PlayStation 2 was discontinued over a year ago). Of course, this reasoning bit them in the backside before, and I'm not against another name. Neither is Rusty.
In any case, it seems likely. As an aside, Rusty's Real Deal Baseball was announced in a Direct and developed internally by Nintendo. It's neither here nor there, of course.
The device pictured above is described as a "pressure sensor." How it works, of course, is unobtainable, but it alone speaks volumes. It's most likely the Wii Vitality Sensor--fully-realized and considerably less cumbersome for its absence. Unless, of course, it's a numeric keypad; it wouldn't be too radical given the other things the patent describes: multiple joysticks and D-pads, as well as figurines--all swappable. And if Nintendo poses to fare against the likes of Project Ara--as of yet, it's only real/potential competition in terms of modular hardware--and other smart devices, it needs to, well, be itself. To keep calm and switch on.
The patent is probably insurance for a device that's been in development for about five years. If so, it predates Project Ara, hopefully preempting another random lawsuit. I imagine that they will be multiple SKUs: a standard one, a health-related one fitted with the new Vitality Sensor, and plenty of bundles. As for Pokémon, the optimal solution would be to prepare the Generation VII games for launch day, which they're surely already working on (it also means that the follow-ups to X and Y will most likely be released this year). New ways to play and connect with others could be as boundless as space itself. Like the Pokémon themselves. And dragons that are better than Charizard.
