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?
Yeah it’s a common complaint of Majora’s Mask, too, even though it’s less of a time limit and more of a timeline that you repeat over and over. It’s just that extra mental barrier for people to deal with, that seems like it affects some people more.
I hear the time limit isn’t in Pikmin 4 though?
As someone who gets random fragments of time for spare time (due to being a key participant in too many family activities to have a consistent schedule–aka, parenting) any game that requires me to optimize a non-trivial activity to fit into a specific amount of time is rarely even worth my checking out. I have between 2-5 hours per week, in increments from 25m to 90m, for gaming. Often I’m exhausted from trying to fit things into my schedule during the day. I don’t need to think about doing stuff for a schedule in my ‘fun’ time.
Pikmin 4 may be worth a look, then. The time limit’s been removed for this one.
How do games like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and some of the Super Mario platformers with timers fit into this? I ask because they’re more on the casual side of the spectrum compared to something like Zelda.
Never felt like I made progress in Stardew Valley. Graveyard Keeper was ok at the start because all the tasks were pretty close together and time didn’t matter as much, but later in the story it got too busy.
Animal Crossing doesn’t feel like I’m making progress. Enjoyed the original GC one, but that was before getting married.
I did try BotW, and that was fun as long as I was just doing dungeons, but the less constrained parts were much harder for me to justify putting time into because they spanned multiple gaming sessions and I’d always forget what I was doing last time.
Mario’s great, but the kids have the Wii U. :P
Some games I find myself playing more of these days: Donut County, Grow: Song of the Evertree, FF13, Noita, Pixel Puzzles.
Outer Wilds was decent. Its loop is approaching an order that works for me. Ideally I want to do a minimum of 2 loops in the time I have available, to feel like I’m spending my ‘fun’ time productively/getting better, and often I only had time for 1 loop.