Season’s Wii-tings II: Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

Previously on Cross-Up…

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m a hypocrite.  And then I remember that I am, so I go about my business.  But then I remember that I brought up that point for the sake of a blog post, so I guess I’d better go into detail.”

Okay.  So in the last post, I mentioned that I tend to have a bad reaction whenever the Game Grumps go back to the NES/SNES well -- playing 2D platformers and such on an extremely regular basis.  It’s true that they can get a lot out of them comedy-wise that I appreciate, but then I remember how much fun it was for me (and the Grumps, I bet) for Dan to experience Shadow of the Colossus for the first time.  I suppose there’s always Steam Train -- or failing that, the Best Friends Zaibatsu -- to offer up something fresh, but it still leaves me wary.

Except when they play something like Donkey Kong Country Returns: Tropical Freeze.  I wanted to stand up and cheer when they started a playthrough on that…which is ass-backwards, considering that it’s pretty much just a 2D platformer that just happens to look amazing.  So that pretty much means I’m a hypocrite, right?  Like, I just want the Grumps to play the games I like, and what I want to see?  That’s the impression I’m getting, unfair as it may be to some of the funniest guys online.

In my defense?  There’s a reason why I want them, and everyone, to play Tropical Freeze.

On Donkey Kong and the Pursuit of Next-Gen

So when did “epic” start being a thing?

I would ask if people still use that term, and play it as being a synonym for “cool” or “awesome”, but not that long ago it popped up in a commercial or something, and my brother scoffed at the idea.  “I hate it when people use ‘epic’,” he said, more or less.  I don’t blame him.  Setting aside what an epic is supposed to be and what it actually means, it feels like it’s a bit of a reach in terms of the modern-day lexicon.  It’s verbal escalation; being cool isn’t enough, and being awesome isn’t enough, so obviously the only way to top that is by being EPIC, right?  But the tradeoff is that you get diminishing returns; it makes what was once incredible seem commonplace if you overuse it.  That, and it just makes you sound like a doof.  Or a bro.  Doofbro.

That strive to be epic -- to act in excess -- is a real problem, if you ask me.  It feels like there’s this constant pressure to be “bigger, better, and more badass”, as CliffyB once put it.  But that’s unsustainable, and unrewarding when you get down to it.  It’s not always about adding in more, and more, and more; an audience is more than capable of building tolerance, and too much epic can lead to them getting burned out.  Or to put it another way, it’d take ten summer blockbusters just to get them to normal.

So what’s the solution, then?  Hard to say for sure -- but if nothing else, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze gives us one possible answer.

On Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

I finally started playing Ni no Kuni in earnest.  Finally. 

The game has been out for more than a year, earned its fair share of praise, has been touted semi-recently for reaching the “1.1 million sold” milestone (1.7 with Japanese DS sales, but either way makes for a much more respectable number than the “we JUST started making a profit” Tomb Raider 2013), and manages to prove pretty handily that the JRPG is not only possible in the HD generation, but proves that the genre at large isn’t a broken model.  It’s just been proven by certain companies how easy it is to get it wrong.

For one reason or another, I’d only just started picking away at it in the past few months.  Blame DmC for that (I certainly will); it was my expectation that I could clear that game fairly quickly and get back to something good, but one thing led to another, and here we are -- with me lagging well behind the gaming populace.  That’s a mistake I’m willing to rectify, to the point where I’m about ready to REFUSE playing anything else -- barring the occasional multiplayer game -- before I finish it.  And while I don’t know how much farther/longer I have to go, I can say with plenty of confidence that there’s a reason this game has earned the praise it has -- and why I’m so very thankful it exists.

But it’s not for the reason you think.

I Hraet You, Donkey Kong

How much stock do you put into the phrase “history repeats itself”?

I’ve never exactly held it up as mankind’s one and only truth, but there have been times where it’s come to mind…whether I like it or not.  Case in point: last year I had the misfortune of playing DmC, a completely-unnecessary and gutless reboot to a beloved, stylized franchise -- with said reboot missing the point of the original in exchange for layer after layer of stupidity and bad decisions.  Cut to the present day, and I find myself forced to watch RoboCop… a completely-unnecessary and gutless reboot to a beloved, stylized franchise -- with said reboot missing the point of the original in exchange for layer after layer of stupidity and bad decisions.

If history really does repeat itself (and that’s suspect, considering that one of my nightmares was a game, and the other was a movie), then that means that I’m due for an analogue to Metal Gear Rising.  I have no problems naming it as my 2013 Game of the Year -- even if The Wonderful 101 could have taken that spot if not for Rising’s presence -- and I feel like I can count on Raiden’s game to offer up plenty of good examples to create by.  But that was then, and this is now.  So is there a game that can rival last year’s winner?  There just might be; in terms of the timeframe and quality, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze makes a VERY strong argument for itself.

There are just two problems.  First?  I’ll gladly acknowledge that DK’s latest is amazing -- but I have no idea how to approach it yet.

Second?  If this post is supposed to invoke the spirit of posts past, then I should talk a bit about I Hraet You -- and a certain issue I may have dive-bombed into.