Besides writing best selling books, I’ve kept myself occupied during the Corona-chan lock down by going back and playing some classic games. Mainly I’ve been revisiting celebrated titles from console gaming’s 8 and 16-bit golden age.
To say it’s been a trip down memory lane would be an understatement. I’ve been focusing on Friday night rentals of yesteryear I’d failed to beat before I had to return them–as well as gems I somehow missed the first time around.
The Internet Archive even has every back issue of Nintendo Power, so the re-creations of those long-lost after school decompression sessions with a new kart slotted in my SNES, a crisp copy of NP flopped open on the couch, and a bowl of popcorn in my lap are almost perfect. Archive.org doesn’t call its old web site search feature the Wayback Machine for nil.
One thing that hits you over the head when you go back and play the old 2D sprite-based games is the real craftsmanship behind the bright colors and pixels. Roger Ebert, may he rest in peace, was rightly pilloried when he decreed that video games can never be art. He was working within a Late Modern framework. The Medievals understood that an art is a work performed to a standard. Considering the subject matter of many games–particularly role-playing games–that definition is especially apt.
An important reason for Generation Y’s definitive nostalgia is that they grew up in a time when multiple consumer arts were reaching their high water marks. The concept is alien to Millennials and Zoomers, but if you were a kid in the 4, 8, and 16-bit eras, you had every reason to expect that each new installment in your favorite movie, TV, and game series would be better than the last. The excitement over the premiere of Super Mario Bros. 3 or a new season of The Simpsons was justified.
Finite human and technological capability meant that the ride had to end sometime. Consider Japanese Role-playing Games. Video RPGs had some pedigree among PC hobbyists with series like Ultima and Wizardry, but it wasn’t until Western RPGs were filtered through Japanese sensibilities that the genre really took off.
Dragon Warrior–as Dragon Quest is called in the States–was the first JRPG to make an impact on the American market. Thanks to a clever cross-promotion in the aforementioned Nintendo Power, every kid in the early 90s knew at least one classmate who’d gotten the game with his renewed subscription.
If Dragon Warrior got the JRPG genre’s foot in the door, Final Fantasy blew the door off its hinges. The genre took a while to get traction in the West, but it had become a staple of gaming by the early 90s. There’s a reason why the Super Nintendo was known as an RPG machine.
From about 1990 to 1995, each new entry in a JRPG series boasted more complex, compelling stories and better graphics. Watching the opening of 1994’s Final Fantasy VI was the first time a video game actually took my breath away.
The heights attained by the JRPG arts in the high 90s resembled the incredible degree of realism to which representational painting had risen in the Victorian Age. The problem that painters ran into wasn’t a technical limitation on accuracy. It was that they’d advanced to the point of being able to reproduce their subjects with perfect accuracy. They’d painted themselves into a corner.
2D JRPGs hit a similar dead end in the mid-90s. The video game analogue to Dürer’s Young Hare was legendary JRPG house SquareSoft’s Chrono Trigger.
Released almost exactly at the start of the last year in the SNES’s life cycle, Square’s 2D swan song featured stunning graphics–including character designs by DQ and DBZ artist Akira Toriyama–a combat system as innovative as it was flawless, and so many possible endings based on player choices that to this day, nobody’s sure of the exact number.
It’s no coincidence that Chrono Trigger was the last great 16-bit JRPG to launch before cultural Ground Zero.
16-bit JRPGs had reached the point of drawing every hair on a rabbit or making a chapel ceiling look 3D. The only room for innovation was on the technical end, so Square et al. followed the rest of the industry into the new world of 3D polygons.
In fairness, that screen shot from Final Fantasy VII depicts the early days of 3D gaming. But consider the CG FFVI opening created for the Final Fantasy Anthology, which came out two years later–an eternity in software time.
The 3D-rendered intro looks impressive for the time, but it just doesn’t evoke the same type or degree of awe as the 2D opening. The difference is even starker for the fact that the original intro directly follows the CG prelude.
If you initially got chills at the start of the video, watch it again with the sound muted. I guarantee you that those pangs of nostalgia came from hearing the piano rendition of “Terra’s Theme”.
The art alone isn’t enough to carry the newer intro–precisely because it shows too much. That’s because the switch from 2D to 3D constitutes a transition from a cool medium to a hot medium.
Your senses interact with 2D games so differently from fully realized 3D games that the former can never provide the same experience as the latter.
Children of the 2D era have long wondered what happened to the great games of yesterday. The answer is as simple as it was inevitable. Victory defeated JRPGs.
It doesn’t help that most of the games industry hates its customers, either. Deny them your hard-earned cash. Stick to the superior classics. You can find these and many more ways to have good, uplifting fun in my new best selling book!
