Here is my buddy @rmota_art watching something on a computer screen while I draw him. We treat our models really well here in Porto. Hahahahahahaha Thanks a bunch man!
god i am SO excited for dwarf fortress steam…… the accessibility they’re adding to it sounds fucking WILD for what dwarf fortress is and has been for the past like. what? 14 years? its gonna have mouse controls, and actual user interface, ACTUAL ART like gosh it was totally unimaginable that dwarf fortress would ever have this stuff a few years back and here we are
this honestly might be the biggest game changer since they added the z-axis
A while ago I mentioned how I was completely against the introduction of crypto-stuff on Kickstarter (or on any platform, for that matter). Since then I’ve researched alternatives and spoke with many other indie devs who ran crowdfunding campaigns on other platforms (either exclusively or beside KS).
Unfortunately the conclusion is that, unless you’re already famous (which I am not haha) any other crowdfunding platform is a waste of time. I won’t make names or figures since all was confidential, but basically every single person told me that if they could go back, they wouldn’t have done it.
But there’s more to consider. Nowadays most of my income each game (at least the initial one) comes from crowdfunding. I made a graph for 3 kickstarted games (Curse Of Mantras is still too new):
Revenues of my latest 3 games split between KS and Steam
Itchio is very small so I didn’t include it, on average 10-15% of the total. Of course, as time passes, Steam sales will (more or less slowly depending on the game) catch up. Anyway the point is that, even for a game that’s been out since 1 year or more like Hazel, KS money was still the majority of income. This also because on KS you lose about 5-10% of gross, while on Steam is normal to lose 30-35% of gross amount, which makes things even worse.
As you see there isn’t much choice for me if I want to keep making games. So don’t be surprised if soon I’ll announce a new crowdfunding for a game in the series Tales From The Under-Realm!
Demos on the way!
And now, let’s talk about the Steam Next festival. This time, I plan to participate with two game demos! One is ToA: An Elven Marriage. It will be a full demo with battles and everything, probably useful to get some early feedback (and maybe bug reports) on it. It won’t be super long of course, but it will introduce Lydia and Nathir, the two new characters, and continue Rei/Myrth romance storylines if you choose to.
I’m really enthusiast of the moon elves race lore, and also on Nathir “gambling” religion (I know said like this sounds bad, but just wait to read it). They’re both very original and interesting, so I’d be curious to know what people think of it.
The other demo should be of TFTU – After Midnight, but I’m not going to post anything for now since I’m not 100% sure I’ll have all the art needed to do the demo. It’s a normal visual novel so if I get the art in time, it shouldn’t be a problem, but as always I’m being very cautious.
If all goes well I’ll make another blog post later this month announcing the Kickstarter for this new gothic game in the Tales From The Under-Realm series, even darker and full of deaths (but also romance! yay).
I’ve already talked about market changes in the past, and how quick they are in the indie game developer’s world. In today’s blog I want to talk about what you can do when this happens.
First of all analyze
The first thing to do is to check your statistics and draw conclusions. This because it’s always better to verify yourself if what other people say it’s true. Or maybe, it could be for them, but somehow not for you.
turn based isometric RPGs are dead! or maybe not
I know what you’re thinking: yes there can be generalized effects, but sometimes a small group of developers can still find profitable what they’re doing. For example: let’s say that RPGs are no longer a popular genre on Steam (that’s false obviously but it’s just an example). A developer who has built a following over the years might find that it’s still better to keep doing RPGs, than trying to reinvent themselves doing a new genre.
Of course it’s not an exact science, and also depends how quickly you release games. Since I usually release at least 1 game a year, with an average of 2-3, I was able to see market changes much quicker than other indies releasing 1 game every 3 years!
I distinctly remember two episodes, in 2016 and 2018. I had just discovered that somehow the Steam algorithm changed, or perhaps was the market. Anyway, I suddenly had much lower revenues than in the past, and I told other indies, who though I was exaggerating or maybe was just my games. A few months later, those same people finally released new games and they all went to me scared screaming “WTF you’re right!”
This not to say that I’m always right (you know I am! just kidding), but that obviously if you release a game every 2 years you can’t really know what/if things changed. If you release 2-3 a year instead…
Find a solution
After you’ve analyzed your data, and discovered exactly what happened, it’s time to find a solution. I did this already many times in the course of my indie career. First big change was back in 2008 when I stopped doing strategy/sim games and moved to visual novels/dating sims. The other big change was in 2011-2012 when I did my first RPGs. The last big change I did was last year when I started doing crowdfunding and changed the way I develop games internally to be able to release games at good pace.
Sometimes a solution can be simple or obvious, other times can be a guess and very risky. But as the saying goes, if you keep doing a thing, and that thing doesn’t work anymore, it’s stupid not to change.
Yes: trying something new can be scary, and it’s not guaranteed to work, but it’s better than just keep doing the same thing that is failing over and over, and end up bankrupt a few months/years later.
A practical example
Let’s see how I applied this system myself. As said back in 2018 there was a big change. That’s when I decided to do some yuri only games (never done before) and also include more adult content (more erotic than hardcore, but a further step from the kissing and partial nudity of past games). While I don’t have and never had issues with adult stuff myself, for someone coming from tame otome games was a big risk!
Anyways, how did it go? Below you see the revenues on Steam of a few games, 1st week, 1st month and 1st year.
Now you can see that PS2 is outselling everything else ,but as already said in the past, what matters is the ROI. I spent 1 full year on PS2. So even if it sold more, in the same amount of time I could have done 3-4 games like Hazel, for example (PS2 script is indeed about 4-5 times Hazel! and let’s not forget all the branching and RPG gameplay coding part lol).
What’s interesting is that even considering games released back in 2016 (when it was MUCH MUCH easier to make money on Steam!) like C14 Dating or Heirs & Graces, recent yuri games with adult stuff like Volleyball Heaven outsell them! So it seems it was the right move, and that’s why last year I made 3 more yuri only games with adult content, and all of them did well, much better than my other recent releases (yes, even including At Your Feet lol!).
Also those graphs are only about Steam’s revenues. I didn’t include the KS. Including Kickstarter money, Hazel would be in 2nd place after PS2. I didn’t include it since it wouldn’t be a fair comparison with older games but of course in the end still matters.
In summary: I took a risk, but it worked. Of course I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I still tried. This is how you stay in business. Try new things until you find what works, what the market really wants. What people pay for, and not what the vocal minority says.
Conclusions
I must say that I was unsure if to post this last part. It seems like that I have something against certain genres of games or content. No. It’s not about me or my personal preferences – indeed I just finished a game with all romance combos, and I’m working on the first Loren spin off that once again has all romance combos. So I repeat, it’s not about my personal tastes: those are hard numbers, statistics. Which could even be different for other devs, depending on platforms, following, art style, etc etc there are too many variables to consider. But for me, that’s what happened. After doing 3 more yuri games last year, now I clearly know it wasn’t random.
As I said in the past, if you’re a fan of a genre, you should support the authors, spread the word, and so on. Complaining or voicing your opinion won’t change things. If I was just doing games as hobby, then it wouldn’t matter. But I’ve been in this business since almost 20 years and I want to keep doing this until retirement age (hopefully!).
To make you understand better my position here’s a comparison: imagine at your job one day the boss tells you that you can choose between two tasks. Both are identical to you, you have no preferences. But one pays twice vs the other. What would you choose?
It’s out since about a week so it’s too early to draw conclusions even if early numbers are encouraging. To be honest, I’m already happy that I’ve managed to finish it!
If you backed it on Kickstarter, you should have got a private message with the itchio links. I’m also going to send you the Steam keys in the next days, since the release on Steam is coming soon too.
Which is bad for two reasons: people browsing that category usually expect much more explicit stuff, while the game has nudity but in general very tasteful love scenes, and second because it prevents the game being viewed, or worse even purchased, in certain countries like Germany (this isn’t due to Steam but to some Germany laws I think).
The same thing already happened in the past for my games Volleyball Heaven and At Your Feet. But in this case it’s a pity, since it’s not just a plain visual novel focused only on romance/sex relationships: the game also has a very complex, detailed and fun card battling game, and I think it’s really bad if people can’t even try it because it’s labeled Adult Only.
Why this game was important to me
this was the old artwork of the game, done many years ago as prototype
This is not a postmortem since as I said it’s too early and I can’t draw any conclusions about the game performance and so on. It did a successful Kickstarter, but that money was barely enough to cover its development costs (not even including my own time).
But this game was important for a lot of reasons: it was a game in development since around 2013-14. I had this idea of the afterlife/limbo, but at the time it was supposed to be a sort of Pokemon-style battle game. I hadn’t a clear idea how the game would be, but since I put out the first sketches/concept art, fans seemed enthusiast about the idea. I admit I was a fool to let myself carry by this enthusiasm too, because you can’t do that, it’s dangerous. And indeed, until 2018-19 I still had no idea which gameplay to use, until I finally made my mind and picked card battles.
The main issue was that in 2020 I released Planet Stronghold 2 which, despite being one of my biggest/better games, greatly underperformed compared to my expectations. So it was clear that the market had changed, and maybe such big games weren’t profitable anymore. But I had already started doing it, already invested time and money.
At the beginning of last year, I was still struggling with a bad burn-out, and even if I didn’t post about this in public at the time, I thought to cancel the game. Yes, even after I had already spent so much efforts, I briefly considered that.
Why? Because I couldn’t see a reason to finish it. It was a dying genre of games – big games with a lot of romances that had to be sold at a proper price, since it’s not one of those silly porn VN with 3 scenes and no plot, no character development, etc.
Also, because I was tired, burned out, and I feared of working months and months only to get the same results, if not worse, than making one of the games mentioned above – short, silly porn games that seems to sell well on Steam nowadays.
In the end, I thought this: this year (2021) I’ll make a few shorter games, to give myself some breath, both economically (those games are usually profitable) and also to relax, not having to code anything complex.
It worked: TFTU – Hazel, At Your Feet, Summer In Trigue and Love Notes were all fun, good games but not a huge, epic, 10 love interest game with ALSO a complex gameplay. So that was good, and by the end of the year I was ready to resume working and finishing The Curse Of Mantras.
This game will decide the kind of future games I’ll do?
Honestly? Probably. I mean, I’m definitely going to do the 4 Loren spin-off games in any case (indeed I’ve already started working on the first game in the series), but all those games have “only” 4 love interests each. I think, unless The Curse Of Mantras does extremely well, this will be my last “big game” I’ll ever make. For the reasons above. I love being indie and making my fans happy doing those big games, but I also need to keep an eye both on my health and finances.
Time for some news about this game! First of all, you might remember that I wanted to put this game on the next Steam Fest event.
one of the final scenes of the game
In the end, I decided not to. But don’t worry, not because the game isn’t ready or not in a good state. Not at all! Indeed, I might start the full beta of the game towards the middle of this month!
The state of the game
As I already explained in the past, some devs use Kickstarter (or any other crowdfunding) as a way to recoup money spent, maybe to add more content, but when they do the campaign they might have already an alpha/beta of the game. In my case indeed, when I did the Kickstarter I had already done a lot of work on the game coding before. I had already started back in 2020, then paused it, and resume working on it.
Since the beginning of December to now, two months have passed, in which I’ve made very good progress, but I know that being a complex game the beta phase will take some time, so that’s why I put a longer deadline.
I wanted to participate on the Steam Fest, since with Summer In Trigue went well. The problem is, that with a visual novel is very simple to have a demo. You pick a point of the story, cut everything after it, and done.
one of Mantras’ exclusive cards
With a complex game like this ? Not so simple. Also because how the framework was coded. So in summary, even doing a demo could lead to bugs present only because I had to cut content from the full game to the demo (cards, scenes, gameplay stuff, etc).
I started doing it. But after spending 2h on it, I quickly realized that it wasn’t a good idea, for three reasons:
I was effectively wasting my time to work on a demo that, once the Steam Fest ended, I’d have removed. So hours that I could have put to improve the full game instead
if by mistake I left some bugs, it could have even backfired: imagine, people playing the demo, finding crashes / bugs, and it could have made a negative impression on them
I said in the past that indie games aren’t directly competing with AAA titles. Sure, especially if are visual novels (and even better with adult content, which is not present in AAA titles for sure). But I also said that it might be different for more gameplay-oriented games like this one. I really think the next Steam Fest visibility will be much lower due to big AAA titles coming out around same time
And last but not least: since the game is such in an advanced state, in the end I’d have both a full beta out on my own site and a demo on Steam, which means I had to mantain two bulids and anyone who is developing games knows that this is a bad idea!
What’s Next?
I’m taking some time to polish stuff, and the editor is checking some last texts in the game. Then, sometimes around mid-February, I’ll start the beta as usual on my own site using itchio. Anyone who pre-orders it, or anyone who backed it on Kickstarter using the beta testing tier will have immediate access to it (with option to also have a Steam key later).
How long will take before the final game is out? I have no clue honestly, it all depends on how testing goes. For my previous card game I think the testing lasted 2-3 months but that was because the framework was still new, so I think this time should be a bit faster.
In any case, as always I’ll be sure to announce here once the game is officially out!
First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! Let’s see what I’ll try to do in 2022.
Your dirty minds are thinking about some different kind of stimulation, right?
Of course, since I’m running a Kickstarter for The Curse Of Mantras, this is the game that will have my priority in the first months of the year. Like before, I’ve already done some work prior to the KS, and I’ve been working in the past weeks (slower since I sort of took some time off for the holidays). Gameplay-wise things are very good and even the writing/scripting of the story part is at good point so that (crossing fingers) I’ll likely deliver the game ahead of its deadline once again (still considering a longer testing time due to this game having a more complex gameplay than my recent releases).
Trouble in paradise… or better trouble in hell?
This year will be 10 years since the first Loren release! It would be cool if the tenth anniversary saw the release of the first new adventure for Saren and Elenor, ToA: An Elven Marriage. And I’ll try my best to do it, though being a RPG, it won’t be easy. Also because, after finishing The Curse Of Mantras I won’t probably have the energy to do another complex game, so I might do a shorter/simpler one “as break”.
This is all I can show for now about the next Tales From The Under-Realm game
Indeed, I have plans for the next Tales Of The Under-Realm game. I won’t spoil too much but it will be set in the town of Lothark, and will see some cameos/references from my other games: Apolimesho, and Samael. Remember General Samael from Loren? He’ll be one of the main characters of the story, back when he was only the Captain of the guards.
It will be a dark fantasy murder mystery and you won’t be able to see everything / discover all that happened in a single playthrough. I have written a rough draft/idea and honestly I can’t wait to work on this, since I think the idea, mood, the character routes, the deaths (there’ll be many) are really interesting.
As said in previous post, being a smaller title will be yuri only, but even if you don’t care for the yuri part I think the story should be still worth playing, and if you like my fantasy world of Aravorn there’ll be many references, and many grey-characters. And also, many possible deaths, obviously!
Beside this, there are also a few other games that I’m working on during breaks, of some I’ve posted a few sketches/preview art on my Patreon but it’s still too early to talk about any of them, since now my policy is to talk publicly about something only when I’m 100% sure I’ll be able to release it.
Conclusions
So that’s the plan: Curse Of Mantras release, then crowdfunding for the next Tales From Under-Realm game, then ToA: An Elven Marriage and if there’s time, some other game. But I doubt it, since two of those three games are very big games with complex gameplay. You never know though, last year I never expected to be able to release 4 games!
Happy Holidays to everyone! As usual in this post I’m going to review what happened in the course of the year.
But first, of course, let’s talk about the hot stuff that is happening right now: The Curse Of Mantras Kickstarter went live about a week ago and it’s going well! Below, the game trailer:
I started this year still feeling burned out from all the work on Planet Stronghold 2 in the previous year! Yes, seems crazy but it wasn’t until May/June that I’d feel like working on complex coding again. I promised to myself to never get burned out again, and I plan to keep this promise!
The Nameless God is my favorite omniscent narrator now
Anyway, in March I finally released TFTU: Hazel, which had a very good reception. I was very pleased with its sales, even if for some mysterious way the review amount on Steam was super low compared to my other games. Later after talking with other indies I found out that this appears to be the new norm. But anyway what matters is that it was a very profitable game and gave me a breath of air after the so-so 2020.
One of my favorite ending scenes!
After Hazel release I revealed to the world the craziest idea I ever had (probably too crazy lol): At Your Feet. The KS was successful, albeit I raised way less of Hazel. Direct sales had a slow start: on the opposite, on Steam it did rather well, much better than I thought! It’s still to early to draw conclusions of course, but it definitely overperformed vs my expectations, also considering the particular kink.
In summary, that game definitely was in the “experiments” category, and considering the crazy idea, it did well!
Alex is really one of the cutest character to ever appear in my games
Summer In Trigue on the other hand was much more like my “classic games”, funny writing/situations, with some more serious/deep moments etc but in general comedy setting (and without weird kinks lol). And I was very pleased by the results, even if because it was still one of the “old games”, in development since years, didn’t do any Kickstarter AND also because I decided to redo the art (was totally worth it though!), the game hasn’t yet recouped its cost (which instead with Hazel and At Your Feet happened within the launch week).
Ducks are the scariest animal ever!
In autumn I also did the Kickstarter for Love Notes, and it went as expected: yes, it didn’t raise a lot, but I knew it beforehand. The main thing is that the game is very tame (this artist doesn’t draw naughty stuff) and nowadays to have success doing a dating sim you MUST have at least optional nudity.
AboutCurse Of Mantras, I’ve already talked about it. I have registered for the next Steam Fest, so my next goal is to have a playable demo by end of February (not with all content but with at least 10-20 battles).
Conclusions (aka what the market wants)
Like always, some things worked and some didn’t. The important I think is to have fun while you doing what you do. And I certanily had fun!
Which lessons I’ve learned this year? Well, first that I should trust more my data. If out of 3-4 games I made with sci-fi setting, they ALL underperformed vs the game quality/lenght etc, it means that setting doesn’t work. So from now on, no more sci-fi games from me (I might do more sci-fi stuff like Black Mirror though, just not sci-fi meaning space, aliens and so on).
I was also pleasantly surprised to see, that at least for plain visual novels, releasing them during the “cursed periods” of September to December (when most AAA titles come out) had no noticeable impact on sales. So in future I won’t hold anymore a game release if it’s ready during this period. Maybe not if it’s a RPG since those could be more in direct competition with other bigger titles.
Another thing I’ve learned, is that I need to adapt to the market/platforms. As I said, At Your Feet did very well on Steam, very close to Hazel results. This is probably not related to the game kink, but the yuri/adult stuff power. On Steam (and on Kickstarter too to be honest), anything yuri + adult seems to sell twice other genres. Once again it doesn’t matter my personal tastes, I need to survive and follow what sells on each platform.
I’ve plenty of games with all romance combos in the works, like all the Loren spin off games, Curse Of Mantras, etc. However I decided that for all other smaller titles, I’ll likely go with the yuri only formula, including the next Tales from The Under-Realm game which I hope to work on later next year.
Next year is going to be “fun” since I have some very complex games to finish… but we’ll talk about this on next blog post at the beginning of the year.
Wishing you Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
On Wednesday husband treated me to a copy of Titanfall 2. I was playing Persona 4 on the Vita, but since finishing the campaign for Titanfall 2, I’m now addicted to the multiplayer.
I need to get back into playing Overwatch, but currently, after putting the kid to bed at night, this is the game I gravitate towards :D
thoughts and feelings about FF7, remakes, old games, valuing old art, and the harms of viewing human expression as a commodity to be used and thrown away.
one thing i think about reading this is like… it’s easy to emulate FF7 today (i could probably get it running in like ten minutes on this computer), but impossible for me, who didn’t play FF7 in 1997 (I was six!) or in the years immediately after (I didn’t have a PS1) to experience what it was like to play FF7 as a child in 1997.
that doesn’t mean i shouldn’t play it. there are plenty of reasons beyond just historical interest. as you say @lapinaraofperdition it’s an expression of those people, in that time; a connection still worth making. (after all I spend all my time watching old films and anime, often by people who are dead.) it can still surprise me in many ways. at the same time, i shouldn’t be surprised that when I come to this game with familiarity with modern control schemes, different expectations of narrative, the idea in my head of a ‘classic old game’… I don’t get the same experience that triggers nostalgia for people who played it in their teens.
anyway, as for remakes, your post made me think of something written in Dia Lacina’s review of NieR Replicant v1.22…
ah, I like this reply! <3 the analogy to translation is a very good one and makes a lot of sense. easy to see how suppressing the original work to sell only a translation would be bizarre, as would refusing to translate to preserve the sanctity of the original. and just like a translation, making a remake involves deciding what you consider the most salient points of the original work to try to preserve when you have to make tradeoffs.
(indeed just how all the japanese media i have encountered in translation has convinced me it’s a good idea to dedicate some unknown number of years to learning the language, no doubt there are people who have felt inclined to learn the ‘language’ of older games by saying ‘this is a remake? of what?’…)
thoughts and feelings about FF7, remakes, old games, valuing old art, and the harms of viewing human expression as a commodity to be used and thrown away.
one thing i think about reading this is like… it’s easy to emulate FF7 today (i could probably get it running in like ten minutes on this computer), but impossible for me, who didn’t play FF7 in 1997 (I was six!) or in the years immediately after (I didn’t have a PS1) to experience what it was like to play FF7 as a child in 1997.
that doesn’t mean i shouldn’t play it. there are plenty of reasons beyond just historical interest. as you say @lapinaraofperdition it’s an expression of those people, in that time; a connection still worth making. (after all I spend all my time watching old films and anime, often by people who are dead.) it can still surprise me in many ways. at the same time, i shouldn’t be surprised that when I come to this game with familiarity with modern control schemes, different expectations of narrative, the idea in my head of a ‘classic old game’… I don’t get the same experience that triggers nostalgia for people who played it in their teens.
anyway, as for remakes, your post made me think of something written in Dia Lacina’s review of NieR Replicant v1.22…
But 11 years is a long time. The Yoko Taro who released Nier in 2010 is arguably not the same Yoko Taro who has left his fingerprints on 1.22. That Yoko Taro hadn’t had a surprise success with the standalone sequel Nier: Automata—or the budget and support that comes with such success. This game was overseen by the Yoko Taro who was given the opportunity and the budget to revisit what many consider to be the better game, the maligned darling, the cherished broken treasure and give it the treatment that made Nier: Automata sell over five million copies.
Anyone who says they don’t like praise and success is lying (even if it makes them uncomfortable). Why wouldn’t Yoko Taro revisit Nier and bring it more in line with Automata? Even if it tragically means stripping the bizarre and chaotic PS2 lifeforce from the game and smoothing it out into a PS4 Greatest Hits that will one day be trotted out by Sony as the Nier Duology for the launch of the PS6. Whether the psychic landscape of the Yoko Taro who made both games is radically altered between them doesn’t matter to most people. The debate over remaster vs remake vs revisitation vs preservation isn’t a concern for them either—this is the definitive article until further down the line a new definitive article becomes available. This is the state we’re in.
Which isn’t to say this is a bad game, far from it. Every step of the way I loved my time with Nier 1.22. I got teary at the exact same moments I knew were coming before I even finished downloading it, and I liked finally being able to play as Brother Nier (even as I mourned Dad Nier). But forcing Nier to become brand-compliant with the accidental hit, especially while burying the original is a categorical loss. Transitioning Nier from feeling like a late-era PS2 game that got a last minute bump to become a PS3 game into a full-fledged end of a generation PS4 title is a massive aesthetic, mechanical, and contextual shift — even more so than Dad Nier vs Brother Nier, and I can’t say it sits well. And this is all too indicative of a broader industry trend towards scavenging it’s old media, not to exalt and bring back, but to harvest and re-sell at a higher price? Why bring back a $19.99 game when you can put in a lot of effort to sell it for $69.99? Why keep original versions around and available when you can shutter the stores that support them and tell customers that this new, more expensive version is “what it was meant to be all along” and watch their curiosity and enthusiasm short-circuit their skepticism?
And this is ultimately the root of the problem with Nier 1.22 — it’s forcing us into an era where the remake is the definitive text, the canonical copy of a game that existed for over a decade that formed connections with players and shows us an entirely different world of game making. The original text has murdered the exported release and the revision has come to strangle the original text because the best-selling sequel demanded it. What we’re left with is two nearly identical Niers each vying to be the true Nier. One must imagine Yoko Taro happy when he watches quietly as one snuffs the other.
Which… I can totally see what she’s getting at, and yet the truth is I am one of those players who came to the franchise with Automata‘s mega-hit status, and then went back to play Drakengard 1 and 3 and NieR Gestalt through emulation and became an obsessive fan desperate to play NieR Replicant somehow - I even considered fan translation patches. so I was totally over the moon when the NieR Replicant update was done so ‘faithfully’, that its additions all hit that vibe so well: not only could I finally play Replicant, but it was an updated and better version, with even more of my favourite voice actors. (I don’t especially agree with her remarks about the combat, I frankly do not have the time to dedicate to mastering some kind of Ninja Gaiden level of technical character action and I don’t especially just want to watch auto-combat either, but Lacina does like to be provocative lol.)
And yet she’s right about the franchise-making drive behind this whole move: the next NieR entry after that remake was a gacha game, which is very hard to condone. I dread to imagine, with the direction declared by Squeenix’s CEO, we might get NieR NFTs at some point. “You can be the exclusive owner of 2B’s left tit.”
NieR v1.22… is a much more conservative remake than FF7 remake was. I’m personally glad to have played both Gestalt (in emulation) and Replicant v1.22…, since part of the joy of it was coming to see how they’d fleshed out the original; but I find it hard to say that, if someone followed my interest and wanted to play NieR for the first time, I wouldn’t recommend they play Replicant v1.22… unless they had a real special interest in kinda janky PS3 games. With Yoko Taro’s earlier games, DoD and NieR and DoD3, you come at them as kind of like… ok, yeah, it has all these flaws, but you can see what it was going for; Replicant v1.22… can now say ‘indeed, now you can play what it was going for’.
I think the story may be different for FF7, since the remake is so different from the original visually and mechanically; the original basically succeeded in its ambitions, the remake is much more of a reinterpretation. Just like I would tell you to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion the series and End of Evangelion before you look at the rebuilds; it’s a complement rather than an attempt at replacement. And yet, I never finished the original, and I don’t have much motivation to push through all the random encounters and such to get to the rest of the story. Games take so much time! Whereas the remake was much less repetitive, so yeah, I probably will continue to play it (if I can just get access to someone’s playstation lol), so, part of the problem once again I guess..!
then i suppose the other major controversial case is the Shadow of the Colossus remake. that one was tough bc like… NieR’s appeal lay mostly in its story, so you can tell that story again. shadow of the colossus rested a lot more on its unique atmosphere, so in a sense the remake - despite having all the same bosses and very similar mechanics and visual design - loses something quite significant. but even though i’ve read articles about what was lost, i still played the remake when i got the chance, and still have yet to play the original!
i guess the answer is: no reason not to have both. those treasured memories of playing those original games aren’t going anywhere. if we write our histories well and discuss both originals and remakes in context, we can have a record of how all these works evolved. the biggest problem is game companies suppressing emulation, which makes it much harder for the people who desire to keep the old versions alive (e.g. speedrunners).
honestly it is kind of odd thinking about it. games and films often get remade. visual art sometimes does (e.g. ‘I redrew this drawing from a year ago’ type posts), but usually both versions are preserved. books may get rewritten but only rarely. i guess the difference is one of them is a product of a vast coordinated group of people coordinated by capital and subject to rapidly changing technical limitations so it gets caught in this discourse of ‘progress’, but the odd thing is, remakes of films rarely seem to endure as well as the originals outside of franchises like superheroes or public domain stories from a hundred years ago, where different filmmakers making a new take every few years has been established as a practice.
there is a certain clarity of purpose to a retelling. new art is always derivative of the vast weight of previous art that came before; sometimes it is worthwhile to simply make that explicit and say ‘this is my take on Dracula’ or whatever. i don’t think it’s bad to make covers, remakes, retellings etc. of itself, and a good retelling is as you say lapina, something that understands itself as a new work that’s responding to the original work rather than just trying to remake it with ‘better’, more expensive production values. a remake can be interesting in showing the changing values between two different eras. I think FF7 remake and NieR v1.22… are both of themselves exceptional games of their type.
but even then… trying to make everything into an expanded universe franchise-egregore sucks. just an increasing battle by clusters of symbols all greedy for psychic space. it is frustrating that for example major funding will be more likely to go to a compilation of Star Wars short films than a compilation of original short films around some other theme. but that’s the ecosystem I guess. don’t really know what would change it.
