I tell myself that E3 is nothing but a week long commercial,
a hype generator cooked up by business people in business suits engineered to
make me want to give them money and treat them like gods and the games shown
like holy artifacts, each trailer a hallowed gift. I tell myself to sit back,
to be measured and aware of what E3 really is. But there was real emotion last
week, there was genuineness, and there were games no one thought would ever see
the light of day, games that look refreshing and imaginative, nostalgic games,
and games that look like they are really taking the medium to a new level.
Sure, the usual onslaught of cars, guns, and bloody killing sprees were there,
and yes, all the corporate shilling was intact, but for me all of that was
overshadowed by some of the most exciting video games I’ve seen get the
spotlight at E3 in a long time.
These are, in no particularly ranked order, the games that stood out to me the
most this past week. Whether they were extensively demoed or simply teased, it
doesn’t matter. As long as it was a game that was announced or shown off in
some fashion at this year’s E3, it’s applicable for this list. There are other
games not present that I’m very interested in, but they didn’t make the cut
either because I’ve already known about them for a while and didn’t find out
much new, or because these ten games just eclipsed them somehow in term of
surprising me or leaving an impact on me this particular year. These are the
titles I’ll fondly remember from this E3, and the ones that I’m just really
jazzed about right now.
Nintendo had a rough E3 this year. Many people, myself
included, were a bit underwhelmed by their
Digital Event, people are
complaining about
Star Fox Zero’s
controls, and some misguided individuals are petitioning for the cancellation of
Metroid Prime: Federation Force. But
if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that
Super Mario Maker just looks swell.
Easily Nintendo’s star game for me this E3, Nintendo’s celebration of
Super Mario’s 30
th
anniversary looks to be delivering on its full potential with robust and easy
to use level creation and sharing options in addition to pipe-loads of quirky
charm. It hits all the right nostalgic notes, but it’s also an innovative and
spectacular idea. On top of all that, it’s kind of like a direct sequel or
expansion to
Super Mario Bros.,
Super Mario Bros. 3 and
Super Mario World all in one (like a new
“Lost Levels”, except for all three games, and with not necessarily all
brutally tough levels).
Super Mario Maker
feels to me like an apology for that
lazy Super Mario All-Stars port Nintendo released for the series’ 25
th
anniversary back in 2010. It had a
very strong showing at the
2015 Nintendo World Championships before the show even started, and continued to make me
smile all throughout the week. Like seriously, I can’t not smile watching this
game.
In the past, I’ve railed on CG trailers and how their abundance
at E3 always annoys me. I’d almost always rather see actual in-game footage
instead of just a pre-rendered movie that tells me nothing about how the actual
work is going to turn out. This E3, however, I’ve realized that CG trailers
have their place, and they can be done well. Right from the get go, I was
interested after seeing “from
Keiji Inafune and the makers of
Metroid Prime”
(umm…yes, please!), but even beyond that, the music and art design of
ReCore immediately set a tone that
pulled me in, evoking the likes of both
Kino’s Journey and
Metroid itself, while
also being something fresh. The trailer for
ReCore
also does a great job of telling a succinct little story that effectively gives
me an idea of how the game’s central mechanic is going to work, and the reveal
of the title at the end drives this “core” concept home (sorry, I had to).
ReCore, you have my attention.
Do I even need to say anything? I think Cuphead’s footage speaks for itself. Shown for all of one second
during an indie montage at Microsoft’s conference last year, it was the kind of
thing that made me lean forward and say, “Hey, wait! Wait! What was THAT?” The
description for the E3 2015 trailer on YouTube reads “Inspired by 1930s
cartoons, the visuals are hand drawn and inked and the music is all original
jazz recordings”…now that is how you
sell me a video game. I love visually-creative platformers as a general rule,
but Cuphead really stands out to me
because of just how utterly seamless it looks. There is nothing about Cuphead’s presentation that gives away
its status as a video game; it’s just a playable cartoon.
I love seeing small indie developers with hugely creative
ideas get the spotlight at E3, and this trend has become more and more
prominent in the past couple of years. One of the most unique and special
things about video games, and one of the many aspects of them still brimming
with potential, is their ability to let us inhabit the role of anyone or
anything, to let us walk in the shoes of someone or something else. The potential
here to explore different life experiences other than our own and build empathy
is enormous. In Beyond Eyes, the
player steps into the shoes of a young bling girl looking for her lost cat. As
she moves through her world using her other senses, the landscape and objects
within it materialize around her, like watercolor paint expanding across a dry
canvas. In one scenario, she might hear some rushing water and think it’s a
fountain, only to get closer and realize that it’s actually a sewage pipe. Not
only does the game’s art look beautiful and the concept show a lot of promise
and originality, but this game is just one example of the power and potential
of video games as a unique artistic medium, something that I really like to see
at E3 in-between all the gun scopes and improved car textures.
…Speaking of which.
Partway into the EA press conference, of
all places, out onto the stage comes a shy, visibly nervous man with a
tattooed hand and small doll made out of red yarn in his shaking hands. He goes
on to explain that he got the idea for his game, called
Unravel, about a small creature named Yarny that traverses
beautiful environments inspired by Northern Scandinavia and leads a thread that
connects all of us together, or something poetic and beautiful like that, when
on a camping trip with his family.
Unravel
is a game aimed directly at my soul and my sensibilities. Saying in
an interview that he doesn’t believe in “heavy-handed storytelling”, the game’s
creative director, Martin Sahlin (the aforementioned tattooed man) says that he believes in "filling the world with interesting things, with clues, with details” that the player can discover on their own, adding that it's also fine if they don't because "it's more about the atmosphere and the feeling of the whole thing". So
Unravel takes what I
love about the
Pikmin series (a small
character running around huge photo-realistic environments) and presents a
puzzle-platformer with reason and context for its level design, all wrapped up
in a minimalist presentation? I think Martin Sahlin might be my soulmate.
The yarn genre has really been taking off recently, hasn’t it? I love colorful Nintendo platformers, so naturally I
anticipate playing and enjoying
Yoshi’s
Woolly World. But what sets this spiritual successor to
Kirby’s Epic Yarn (which is one of my
favorite platformers from the last console generation) apart from the likes of
something like
New Super Mario Bros.
is just how much handcrafted effort seems to be being put into this game.
Obviously, the game’s artistic design is a huge draw, with everything being
crafted out of wool, fabric, and giant knitting needles; it truly looks like
something I can reach out and touch and feel. But I just love that the
developers actually crafted real-life Yarn Yoshis during the game’s development.
In addition, the composer for the game, who is trying to have a different song
for every level, actually took up guitar lessons to make sure the soundtrack
was up to par. I’m really looking forward to finally playing this during the
cool autumn months later this year.
One thing that made this year’s E3 stand out to me was a theme of change, of
growth, of this medium and this industry finally beginning to take the first
steps of reaching maturity. Sure, there was the usual onslaught of
sense-assaulting cartoonish violence, cheers for particularly brutal digital
decapitations, and all the familiar faces and concepts present, but there was
also creative-looking new worlds and ideas, more of a focus on narrative and
how games can evoke emotion. The words “emotional narrative” were uttered onstage
at Sony’s press conference, as opposed to another bland, self-defeating joke
about “f*cking blood and guts! Video games, am I right?”. In addition, there
was a very notable effort in making games and the gaming scene more diverse, to
reflect a growing and diverse audience. There were
more female presenters on stage and a surprisingly ample amount of
new games featuring female protagonists or at least a woman in a strong central role.
Then there was
Horizon: Zero Dawn, a
game starring a woman that takes place in a world unlike anything I’ve
ever seen. The game’s extensive and fantastic trailer/demo begins with a well-acted
narration over beautiful panoramic landscape shots that tells the story of a
modern civilization like our own falling and eventually being reclaimed by
natural forces. We then see hunter-gatherer tribes emerge in a “post-historic”
world that tells tales of the “old ones” that went extinct. We’ve seen this
tale before, but it’s told so well through visuals, narration, and some truly
gorgeous music that I was completely immersed and already on board with this game.
Then the twist came: “…for this world was never ours…we’ve always shared it…”,
the female narrator suddenly says as we see otherworldly mechanical animals
enter the scene, first in the form of a few small scavengers, and then followed
by massive robotic dinosaurs with disks for heads that come stomping across a
stunning, sunlit prairie, like some kind of cyberpunk
Jurassic Park. It’s wonderful, and the juxtaposition of the natural
elements and the unnatural, metallic creatures makes for an immediately intriguing
and fresh-looking world. That would have been enough to get my interest, but
then the trailer seamlessly transitions into a lengthy gameplay portion where
the familiar narrator, now fully revealed as our player character, starts
creeping through wonderfully-rendered plants as she hunts mechanical deer in
order to harvest some kind of green canister attached to their backs. Before
reaching her prey, she kills a smaller beast, after which she subverts every
law of E3 by expressing remorse and actually
apologizing to the life she’s taken. It all culminates in a
thrilling
Shadow of the Colossus-esque
battle with a robotic T-Rex thing. In a word: it’s breathtaking, a genuine
surprise, and I can’t wait to see more (ok, more than a word).
…did I say
Shadow of the Colossus?
It’s real, and Sony opened their show with gameplay of it.
I know I said I wasn’t putting these games in any significant order, but I
obviously saved these last three for a reason. After years of rumors,
cancelation scares, and many dashed hopes,
The
Last Guardian’s long-awaited, often doubted, and always hoped for return
kicked off an hour of dreams. I said this E3 was special for showing signs that
this troubled and stagnant industry is changing, but it was equally as special
for how it spoke to a generation. How it resurrected old legends and made me
cover my mouth in stunned disbelief. I just don’t even really need to say it,
do I?
The Last Guardian. It’s one of
those games, those ones I sigh about at the
end of every E3 press conference cycle because once again it didn’t show up.
But this time it did.
The spiritual successor to
a work of interactive art that defined an era of
video games for me and remains one of my most cherished interactive experiences,
The Last Guardian also just looks
like an incredibly touching and ambitious game, and it’s central “mechanic” revolving
around the bond of a young boy and his giant gryphon-cat-bird friend has me
enchanted all over again. Sure, there have been many games since
The Last Guardian was first unveiled
back in 2009 that have aimed to capitalize on the emotional potential of interactive
art, but
The Last Guardian still
excites me due to its promising concept and its masterful pedigree. It also
just makes me tear up every time I see it (why does Trico have to look so much
like my own dog?). I don’t even know if I’ll be able to handle this game when
it hopefully, oh please hopefully, releases next year.
So they
opened with
The Last Guardian? I mean, what could
they possibly have if they…Oh. Ooooooh. Even though it was set up by Adam Boyes
beforehand,
Final Fantasy VII fans
have learned better than to trust a smug presenter promising the world. Even as
the trailer went on and a recognizable
Midgar began to be more and more slowly unveiled,
with talk of “reunions” and “promises” accompanying the proceedings, I still
wasn’t convinced. At first I thought it was a proper, full-fledged sequel to
FFVII, then perhaps another movie. Even
at the end of the trailer, at first only a logo appeared with no title. Well,
in order to dissuade any confusion, to make things perfectly, perfectly clear,
a single word appeared with booming fanfare afterword:
“Remake”
Now
this is how
you use a CG trailer. And what a fantastic trailer it is. Every word spoken,
every shot, just designed to evoke specific emotions in those watching, just
toying with all the fans hoping and anticipating. Now, I like
Final Fantasy VII a lot, and there’s
plenty of things that I admire about it, but I’ll admit that I don’t have as
emotional a connection to it as many others, due to me not playing it when it
was in its prime. I still remember how huge it was at that time though, and
still have a lot of nostalgia for finally playing through it myself one summer
years ago (though, I must shamefully confess, I never finished it, stopping
just before the crater and
Sephiroth; I hope to go back and run through the
whole thing again sometime, this time to completion). I realize how massive the
FFVII remake’s announcement is, and I
think the way it was announced and the trailer itself is all brilliant, but it
was almost immediately followed by an announcement that was my personal moment
to start shouting things at my computer screen…
Shenmue III (When it’s ready)
Even as I write this, as I continue to look at the kickstarter (and yes, I
backed it, of course I did) and the title: “
Shenmue
III”, I still can’t quite believe it, and I laugh to myself. Let me back
up. I received a
Dreamcast on Christmas day of 1999, right after it launched,
and it blew my mind. Way ahead of their time, the games for that console
delivered experiences I’d never dreamed of (heh…) in video games before.
Sonic Adventure’s clean visuals and
sense of speed made my jaw drop,
Jet Grind Radio’s pioneering cel-shaded visuals and unique style were unlike anything
I’d ever seen, and then there was a little game called
Shenmue that made me realize the potential of video games. Never
before had a game felt so real to me, had so much to interact with, and
transported me to a place like the way
Shenmue
did. At the time, its detailed, fully interactable world, voice-acting (now
notorious), and potent story-telling fully transported me, and not only
cultivated my love of eastern culture, but cemented my love of video games.
I could go on. But suffice it to say, when
Shenmue II was released in the west as an Xbox (at the time I only had a GameCube)
exclusive, I was pretty bummed. I never played it, but I always, always wanted
to. Well, now it’s finally time to get on ebay and pick up an original Xbox, I
guess.
What made the announcement of
Shenmue III (or to be more exact,
its kickstarter) all the more potent was not only just how long it’s been since the release of
Shenmue II (
fourteen years), but because the continuation of Shenmue has long
been nothing but a dream: the series’ continuation has become
a joke, and has
always been something I never thought would happen. But in front of a
bewildered audience still recovering from
Final
Fantasy VII’s return, a shower of flower petals and
Shenmue creator
Yu Suzuki showed me that nothing is impossible, and
that the legacy of
Shenmue lives on,
long after those enchanting Dreamcast days met with an all too abrupt end.
While not in fact a video game, I had to mention the always
entertaining and somewhat revolutionary live stream that GameTrailers put on
this year. Filled with genuine human moments and giving off the vibe of a bunch
of friends hanging out and talking about E3, GameTrailers’ stream was the cure
for the stiff, PR-fueled interviews and more “professional” streams that litter
the internet during E3. Their stream was a constant highlight throughout the
week for me, as I would dip in to see what they were up to, only to see Brandon
Jones’ hilarious impersonations of his colleagues,
Michael Huber crying about Shenmue, and more serious conversations
about the potential of video games. The GT crew feels like a family and I just
loved seeing their shenanigans all throughout the week. Also,
their reactions
to Sony’s “Triforce of Dreams” are simply the best thing on the internet.
Some disappointments from Nintendo aside (that were, honestly, tempered by some
great times with the still awesome Treehouse Live and some definitely
fantastic-looking games on display; also puppets and Miyamoto visiting shrines
and Mario courses on graph paper), this was a great E3. A legendary E3 even.
And even though I tell myself it’s just a big, loud, silly, week-long corporate
magic trick, hell if it isn’t a lot of fun, and hell if I’m not just excited
for video games right now.
