His primary argument for why Nintendo is better than everybody else is because Nintendo innovates. I'm going to try my best to not strawman him but his reasons for supporting his viewpoint were the d-pad, the analog stick, motion controls, and the Wii U's tablet controller. Those innovations came from Nintendo and others are using them now. At least, that's his perspective, which I'm going to be dissecting right now.
First and foremost, what's going to be at the front and center of what I have to say today is "Making innovations is not the same as perfecting them." Or, to put it another way, just because you make an innovation, doesn't necessarily mean that you got it right the first time.
The best evidence he has in favor of his perspective is the d-pad, which is an innovation Nintendo made and, yes, Nintendo did get it right quite well. Although Sony is the only company I'm aware of to get the d-pad right consistently, Nintendo doesn't always do a poor job either. That said, that by itself does not prove his point.
To illustrate, let's go to the analog stick. Nintendo created the analog stick for the Nintendo 64 to make gaming in 3D space a lot easier and more fluid. However, Nintendo had a few problems implementing it. First and foremost, the Analog Stick on the N64 wasn't perfect, it wasn't all that tough or durable, it harmed a number of people because it wasn't padded or smooth to the touch, and because there was only one analog stick, the only N64 titles that had camera control were the ones like Super Mario 64 which used the C buttons for that. Most famously, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask had no camera control at all despite the fact that those were two titles that would've benefit a lot from it given how open and combat-centric those games are.
During that same generation, Sony created the Dual Shock Controller which had two padded analog sticks instead of one. Now, in all fairness, the analog sticks on the dual shock were not utilized on the original Playstation because the default controller didn't have them and because it was new nobody knew what to do with them at the time. Then Sony carried dual-analog sticks over to the PS2 and suddenly, wave after wave of video games started incorporating camera control into their 3D games, which seems obvious in retrospect but only because it's been true for long enough that it's been internalized by those of us who've been gaming for a long time.
The Game Cube had something like that called the C-stick which had notches on it so it could be pointed in 8 directions as if it had 8 C buttons instead of 4. However, that's not really something Nintendo created it's just something they and Microsoft did to compete with the PS2.
Next, the Wii popularized motion controls. I say popularized because Motion Controls existed well before Nintendo but I'm getting ahead of myself. Nintendo's use of Motion Controls ended up spawning the Playstation Move and the Kinect on the XBox 360. However, ignoring the fact that Kinect is bad and the Move was underutilized, the Wii's Motion Controls were not all that great. Though there were tricks the Wii-Mote and Nunchuck had to mitigate problems, it still came with some issues. First and foremost, the lack of a second analog stick meant that camera control was no longer a thing. For games like Super Mario Galaxy this wasn't all that much of an issue because it was more similar to Isometric cameras than anything else. However, other games, Like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess suffered for lacking camera control when a regular controller would've allowed it, and games with behind the back cameras like Mad World had to deal with the limited controls. Though No More Heroes could control the Camera with the d-pad, that was really the best that could be done.
I'm not going to cry about the underutilization of the Move primarily because I'm not that big of a fan of motion controls to begin with. However, I will remind everyone that games like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword would work a lot better if it had a controller, something I may discuss at a later time if I feel like it.
Many games did benefit from Motion Controls such as Metroid Prime Trilogy and Red Steel 2. However, these games do not necessarily indicate that every game would benefit from motion controls, at least not Nintendo's use of it. But I'll come back to this.
Next is the Wii U's tablet controller. It was a tablet attached to a console that could play games on it. It had a lot of regular controller functionality and the touch screen made for some interesting improvements to old games, such as Wind Waker. However, this controller would not benefit all games or even all that many of them. Star Fox Zero proved that relying on the Tablet Gimmick can ruin a game's ability to be controlled. As I said, games can benefit from them, but most didn't, particularly the ones that came right out of Nintendo.
As MatthewMatosis once stated "If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and if you really can't resist fixing it, at least figure out what your fix adds to the overall product."
Now, yes, many people do want more companies to innovate, and yes, I am among them. However, not every innovation is worth going through with either because it doesn't do what other things can't or because the innovation doesn't get enough attention to be done well.
Nintendo may be innovating more than other companies but that doesn't mean they're getting those innovations right all the time or even consistently. And likewise, just because other companies aren't innovating doesn't mean that they're not good at what they do.
What many people fail to notice when it comes to innovation is that innovation is not necessarily good. An innovative product can be terrible, and great product may not be innovative, they're not the same and they're not mutually exclusive.
To illustrate I'm going to post an image that took me ten minutes to make in a program I'm not too familiar with and with the art skills I have that are not that good so you'll have to forgive the quality of the image itself. Here is a graph of innovation versus quality.
As we can see in this graph, we have a scale that goes from 0 to 10 with the origin at 5 because that is average to me. The 10 and 0 are a bit far from the circle but that's okay because I'm simply illustrating a point.
Quadrant 1 represents games that have or use innovations and are good. Quadrant 2 contains games that are high quality but not particularly innovative. Quadrant 3 has games that are not innovative or good. And Quadrant 4 has games that are innovative but not good.
Bearing in mind, the games I chose are not games I particularly like or hate or games that I think are good or bad. They're simply games that illustrate the point better than something more obscure might.
In Quadrant 1 we have God Hand, a game that innovates in at least 2 ways but is also a very good game. The two innovations are customizable movesets and dynamic difficulty. While these two things were not necessarily taken to their logical extreme, at the very least the game itself was good enough to support innovations at that level.
Opposite from God Hand in Quadrant 3 we have Shovelware, which are essentially just games that make use of tired tropes and lazy development that are shoveled out the door to make fast money, pretty self-explanatory on why they're not innovative or good.
On the other hand, we have Skyward Sword which is a game that makes use of the Wii Motion Plus add-on and a simulation of 1-to-1 sword play but as a game it's not that good. It's not the worst thing ever but it could be better.
And Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is an example of a game that's not particularly innovative but nowhere near bad. Even disregarding the original release, Executions were done in DMC4 and GoW first, it's not the first game to use multiple playable characters, and everything about it is stuff you've likely seen in games that came before it. However, its strength is not that it does new things, it's that it does things you've seen before and does them really well.
Innovations by themselves are not automatic merits and tropes and cliches are not automatic detriments. What makes them merits or detriments is how they are used and how effective they are.
So the next time someone says "It's innovative" as a defense for a heavily flawed game, tell them that innovation for innovation's sake is not automatically good.
Depending on how things go, my next two posts may be about the Legend of Zelda, the first on Skyward Sword and the second on Breath of the Wild. I hope you'll join me then, thanks for reading.
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