What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Heads up: the following is abnormally wordy even by my standards, and I'm the kind of person who regularly runs into the Discord character limit by accident despite the Nitro subscription increasing it. The underlying context is a set of two videos that by themselves reach almost 3 hours of runtime. I tried to sum up some of the main points enough that you don't strictly need to have watched the videos to follow while also not needing to slog through a play by play of the same video I recommended you to watch if you did. While I believe the subject is interesting, I fully understand if you don't have the time to dedicate to this. If you do and weren't scared away by the size of the scroll bar, feel free to read on.
This all starts with the seemingly straightforward question in the title: How many Super Mario games are there? You would think it would be easy to answer given that this series is so massively impactful in video game history that to many it defines what a video game is. The truth, like most things, is a lot more complicated. jan Misali, who you might also know for their Conlang Critic series and various video essays on other deceptively complex subjects they find interesting, gathered data through a survey to collect people's answers to that question, and made a video on the subject. The video is about 45 minutes long, and that's only because they deliberately cut it short. The discussion that sparked from this video eventually led to them starting another survey at a larger scale with a revised methodology, culminating to a sequel to the previous video, this time with a two hours runtime, and it, too, was cut short. If you have the time to set aside for this, I would greatly recommend watching both videos as they're very insightful and most of what I have to say is commentary to these two videos (and doesn't even come close to covering as much as the videos themselves do).
Like all good debates on the internet, it starts with an ambiguity issue: What is a "Super Mario game"? In simpler cases, a video game series can be defined as the first game and its sequels and that's enough to establish an uncontroversial list. Things get more complicated when we look at an entire franchise especially one as massive as the Mario franchise, which contains a ton of video games, an even bigger pile of non-video game media... and works that blur the line. You can probably see where this is going, but I'll get back to that particular can of worms later. Focusing on the video games, among the entire franchise, the question focuses on the "mainline" series. That is what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series, distinguishing them from spinoffs and other games that are part of the franchise. You'll note that I specified "what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series", not "what the "Super Mario" series is".
Using the video runtime as a yardstick, we are 2 minutes into the first part, and there is already a binary tree's worth of debate, and it's only getting bigger from here: the existence of a mainline series as a separate entity from the overall Mario franchise is commonly accepted, but not unanimously. Among those who do agree, there is disagreement on the scope of the mainline series (with how gargantuan the franchise itself is, even the spinoffs have their own spinoffs, and it would be a perfectly reasonable take to consider some or all of them, such as the Mario Kart games, as a core part of the series). Among those who agree on the scope, there is disagreement over what the first game of the series is (do we start at Super Mario Bros? Mario Bros? Donkey Kong? The Game & Watch series?). In order to keep the video at 45 minutes and not 45 hours, jan Misali picks one definition they feel is reasonable among others: the Super Mario series is one distinct series among others in the franchise, made up of Super Mario Bros. on the NES and its sequels, which are mostly platformer games. With this baseline established (even if the survey doesn't 100% agree), how do we figure out which of all the Mario games are the sequels to SMB1? There are many methods to go about this... And not only none of them converge to a single answer, they all diverge in different ways. Let's start with the most direct source of data jan Misali had access to as a direct result of the process of making the videos: the surveys.
jan Misali isn't just presenting their own thoughts on the matter, they're also analyzing the data gathered from a survey they made before recording both videos. The first one merely presented you with a premade list of games and asked you which of them you considered to be a Super Mario games, and the second one goes more in depth but still had the same overall goal. If there was any sort of consensus (assuming the survey wasn't sabotaged or otherwise flawed enough to distort the ability to interpret the data to the point of uselessness), you could derive the broadly accepted list of Super Mario games from looking at the most common answers to the survey, right?
If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which games people overwhelmingly (>95%) agree are part of the series", the survey gives us Super Mario Bros, Super Mario bros 3, and Super Mario World (by the time of the second video, the second survey added Super Mario 64 to the list, as well as Super Mario Bros. Wonder)... which almost anyone who has an opinion on the subject would agree is a grossly incomplete list. If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which is the list that the most people agreed is the full list of the Super Mario series", you end up with a much more complete list of 18 games which by definition is what the highest percentage of people answering the survey agree on. You could consider it the survey's overall answer to the question... except the percentage in question is less than 2% (although in the second survey analyzed in the second video, this same list, with the at the time newly released Super Mario Bros. Wonder added, actually stood at just above 5%. Closer, but still very much a minority group within the survey). Almost everyone who answered still disagree to some degree with that answer. While there is plenty of insight to be gained from the data (including regarding the limitations of the survey itself), it also conclusively establishes that public opinion (or at least in jan Misali's audience) doesn't have a truly agreed upon answer to this question.
So, we have an answer, but not the answer, and even worse (...or better, if you like analyzing seemingly trivial arguments that secretly hide a rabbit hole of semantics, linguistics and cognitive science) the only thing we can say about "the" answer is that it cannot exist. So let's try finding more answers by going from another angle. If we learned anything from politics, it's that an answer derived from polls can absolutely be wrong, so it makes sense to consider that there is an authoritative source that can give a definitive answer over public opinion. The most obvious lead would be Nintendo itself, the owner of the IP... except that instantly fizzles out because while Nintendo does provide a list of mainline Super Mario games on their website, the one they give you isn't the same depending on whether you ask Nintendo of America or Nintendo of Japan. We can also look at what Wikipedia deems to be the list of Super Mario games, which naturally is different from both Nintendo US and Nintendo JP's list, and on top of that is arguably inconsistent with itself: the page's release timeline lists Bowser's Fury as an entry like the others, but the infobox that redirects to the various Mario games under the "main games" section lists it between parentheses as a sub-entry to Super Mario 3D World, the same way it lists New Super Luigi U as a sub-entry to New Super Mario Bros U which the release timeline in turn omits completely. There are rational reasons to do it this way which I won't go into since jan Misali explains it in the videos themselves, but technically that means Wikipedia doesn't have an internal consensus either. The Super Mario wiki, while unaffiliated with Nintendo, is also a good candidate for an authoritative source, which gives you another, different, answer. We could go on, but let's stop here and conclude that, once again, there is no agreed answer.
Neither polling the public nor going by the authoritative sources have given a concrete answer, which leaves us in front of the semantic rubble trying to piece back a coherent understanding of the Super Mario series. Not to try and find the Correct™ answer, we've already established there isn't one, but it would give us valuable insight as to why no one can agree to a specific answer in the first place. jan Misali spreads this approach over both videos as they give their reasoning from various angles. They deliberately haven't gone over this exhaustively, and neither will I (not that I would be able to), but I do have thoughts I'd like to share based on their observations... Which yes, means I've written 1,5k words establishing the base around the videos I want to talk about despite operating under the assumption the reader has already watched them before going over my own thoughts. I'm certain I could have been more concise, but I felt this was necessary so that this post could stand as a coherent chain of reasoning and not a completely disjointed rambling that won't make sense to anyone who hasn't made the significant time investment that fully watching the video essays represents, and still not make sense to most who did (and if I misunderstood something critical, someone reading this can point it out from my attempt to lay out the context rather than after 12 confused replies down the thread). I'll try and tie my thoughts together in broader parts with increasingly silly titles.
I will start by addressing this not because it's the most important (if anything it's the least important detail I have something to say about) but because it lets me introduce a talking point I'll reuse later. Something that jan Misali mentions early on is what they call "home console purism", defining it as the belief that the mainline Mario series, as a rule, cannot include handheld games. While they don't explicitly state this at any point nor do I have a specific reason to believe implying it was their intention, it somewhat came off to me like bringing it up as a flawed argument just to dismiss it, especially after it was brought up again regarding Super Mario Run as a comparison to the belief that mobile games "don't count". If you leave it at that, I absolutely agree that it's silly to exclude a video game for that reason, especially with the Switch blurring the line. After thinking about it, though, while I'd still disagree with using it as a reason to exclude a video game from a series in this specific case, I think it deserves to be looked at in more detail.
The least charitable interpretation of this argument is that handheld and mobile games are deemed to not be worthy of being included alongside the "real" games released on home consoles or PC, usually with a side of implying that you're a "fake" gamer if you play them (not to mention the higher layer argument from the same basis that also excludes any console games, leaving only PCs as the "true" gaming platform and everything else as lesser toys for kids) which can safely be dismissed as elitist gatekeeping. However, from a perspective of classifying games within a series, there is a much more sensible way to approach this argument.
Nowadays, between the handheld PCs like the Steam Deck which can give desktop PCs a run for their money in terms of specs and the Nintendo Switch that refuses to be classified as a dedicated home console or handheld, the distinction would look a lot sillier, but the handheld game market used to be closer to an isolated sub-segment of the overall video games market than a fully integrated part of it. Disregarding the whole "exclusive releases" circus, faithfully porting a PC game to a home console was generally agreed to be feasible. Handheld consoles were another matter entirely. Most (all? was there a handheld notable for outperforming contemporary home consoles?) of the time, handheld consoles had vastly inferior specs to contemporary home consoles and computers making faithful ports of a given game to them a pipe dream if the game was too resource intensive, and a tendency to have a much more varied control scheme than you'd expect from home consoles, sometimes to the point of "porting" an existing game requiring restarting the game design process from scratch.
Where this starts mattering in this context is what this means for releases within an individual game series, and how game studios would treat developing a given entry for each system. Some just stuck to only home consoles or handhelds, some would aim for the best compromise between having a unified experience for a given game no matter which device you were playing it on and leveraging a specific console's unique features, some would confusingly release games under the same title on different platforms but actually make them completely different games (even Nintendo themselves are guilty of it!), and, most relevantly, some would deliberately make handheld games stand out from the home console games as a sub-series.
This outlook makes a lot less sense if you look at the Super Mario series in a vacuum, which, as a mainly platformer series, struggles a lot less with making a handheld release that convincingly fits the vibe of the home console releases than other genres might (in no small part because designing a 2D game makes just as much sense as it does in 3D for this genre, making the specs gap between handheld and home consoles a lot less important), and as a first party franchise, Nintendo isn't going to be blindsided by a new console's weird features like a third party studio might since they're the ones making the console... But if you consider the market in general across the years, siloing the home and handheld side of a given series as two separate entities, with the home console being granted the "mainline series" role was a very real phenomenon. If you start from this premise and look at the Super Mario series which debuted on the NES, it makes sense to apply the same framework and say "None of the handheld games are part of the Super Mario series, they're part of their own series". I would still disagree, but it's definitely a lot more sensible to base it on past observations of the market than gatekeeping.
To elaborate, I would find this argument a lot more convincing back when the DS (which was so atypical that even porting a game from another handheld to the DS' bespoke dual screen and touch screen setup was a non trivial affair, let alone the home consoles) was the current-gen Nintendo handheld than now where the Switch 2 (a console with a mostly conventional control scheme and powerful enough that porting an arbitrary PC/home console game to it without visibly changing anything about the game makes just as make sense as any other platform) is about to come out. And with this I'm finally arriving to the talking point I wanted to introduce. If the evolution of the broader market can affect the validity of someone's criteria to determine which games are (or aren't) part of the Super Mario series, then we can generalize that to the following: A game can be (or no longer be) considered part of a series depending on when you ask even if absolutely nothing has changed about the game in isolation.
One thing that jan Misali picked up on from the original survey is a major ambiguity that made answering (and therefore interpreting the resulting data) harder is the remakes, remasters, enhanced versions with their own release, and other related weirder cases. These games range from almost completely identical to previous releases to non-controversially a variant of the same title but still different enough to provide an experience meaningfully separate from the original title, to different enough they're arguably not the same game, adding a dimension to the answer that makes enforcing a flat "yes" or "no" choice less useful. This is why the survey that led to the second video made it possible to call an entry a "mainline Super Mario game", a "major spinoff", a "minor spinoff", "not canon" and finally "not a Mario game" (and "unsure", just in case) at the same time as you answer whether you think the title is a distinct entry in the series (or you're unsure), to be able to clarify the general sentiment that if a game saw more than one release under different versions, they can all be acknowledged as an incarnation of that game without making each individual release an entry to the mainline Super Mario series of its own. This allowed the answers to be more nuanced, but this by itself doesn't help answering the original concern: if multiple releases can all be the same game, and that game is part of the series, can more than one of these releases be called a "distinct" entry? If you think there can't, which one is it? And this last question is what I'm going to focus on for my next thought.
Forced reference aside, let's look at other franchises for comparison. Doom Eternal, originally released on PC in March 2020, got a Switch port later in December that year. Thanks to skillful optimization allowing it to somehow run on glorified 2015 Android tablet hardware, this port is faithful enough that I don't think it would be controversial to call it the same game as the PC release compared to, for example, The Sims 2, where while a game named The Sims 2 was released on the Nintendo DS, it is so radically different from the PC release that I would consider it an entirely separate game (and for that matter not a part of the mainline Sims series, but I'll put away that thought before I completely lose the plot). If I asked "Between the PC and the Switch release of Doom Eternal, which is the main release?" and we assume "both" isn't considered a valid answer (which is itself debatable) I would expect the natural answer to be the PC release simply because out of two functionally equivalent releases of the same game, the PC release came first. Similarly, if we consider, as a general rule, that there exists one, and only one, release of a given game that embodies a distinct entry in the mainline Super Mario series, with any other release not counting (while still accepting that they're a version of that game), the earliest release being the distinct entry makes intuitive sense. After all, they're the original version of the game. If it could be of the future ones it would mean a release could stop being the distinct entry in a mainline series despite nothing having changed about the release itself, which doesn't make sense... right?
Time to bring up that one point from earlier: there's nothing inherently preventing the status of a game release as a mainline series entry from being affected by external factors. Quick disambiguation note: I've been using the word "release" in the context of video games being made available for purchase, but the word "release" can also be used to mean a software update, no matter how minor. Video games also being software, this distinction is now going to matter. To avoid confusion, I will only use the word "release" to mean a game being made available to purchase and refer to a new software version for an already released game as an "update". With this cleared up: before internet connection became a standard feature in consoles, the general expectation was that releasing a game meant permanently locking down the state of its software. Game companies would not want to update a game between releases and end up with different versions of a physical game in circulation if they can't ensure that the customers would get the most recently updated copies as it would inevitably confuse players, so it would only be considered for truly major issues that weren't caught in time for the release. As broadband internet came into the picture, it suddenly became a lot less important to make sure the game stayed the same after release as you could simply get the customer to upgrade their game over the Internet. This quickly became standard operating procedure for PC games, with consoles catching up a bit later, including Nintendo's. And with it, came the practice of content updates over the lifecycle of a game before the next release.
Even if the individual updates don't change the game to a meaningful degree from one update to the next, as they pile up you can eventually end up with a wildly different game than what it was when it originally released, even if it's supposed to be the same entry into its series. If you agree that the release you accept as the distinct entry of its mainline series can change its characteristics over time, wouldn't it make sense to also agree that which release of a game you consider to be the distinct entry of the mainline series can also change over time? Let's turn to another series as an example: The Elder Scrolls, and specifically Skyrim which is infamous for its amount of re-releases. It is at the time of writing the latest game in its series, and has been since 2011... but is the by now almost 15 years old original release really still the main entry in the Elder Scrolls mainline series? As far as Steam is concerned, the game you can purchase if you search for Skyrim on its store isn't the original release, nor is it even the Legendary Edition release from 2013, but the Special Edition from 2016 (while also letting you buy the Anniversary Edition as a DLC to the Special Edition). With the original release no longer being on sale and the more recent Anniversary Edition being classified as a DLC rather than a "proper" release, it would make sense for me to call SE the "distinct" entry representing Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls over the original release. Is there an instance of this happening in the Super Mario series? It would be a huge stretch, but you could argue (although frankly I wouldn't agree) that Super Mario 64 isn't a distinct entry in the Super Mario series because you consider the Super Mario 64 DS remake to be the "true" entry in the series. Sure, claiming that Super Mario 64, the first Mario 3D platformer isn't a mainline Super Mario game sounds ludicrous, but so does "Skyrim (2011) isn't a mainline Elder Scrolls Game but Skyrim Special Edition is" and I did consider it a plausible argument. A slightly less unhinged instance would be to consider New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe to be the representative entry in the mainline series over New Super Mario Bros. U.
By this point I've highlighted ambiguities over the meaning of pretty much word in the question "How many Super Mario games are there?".
There is one left to achieve total semantic obliteration: games. This was inevitable, really. How could you overanalyze this question and not bring up nitpicking over the meaning of the term "video game" itself? jan Misali has already done most of the work for me, as part of the second video involves them mentioning that attempting to derive an appropriate list of mainline Super Mario game solely from an objective definition while is doomed to fail. Whatever the approach, you will always be working with an unstated semantic "guardrail" of some sort that cannot be comprehensively worded into the definition. The first basic example they give is "Anything with 'Super' in the title is part of the Super Mario series." Under any reasonable context we know what is meant by "anything" but without it, this definition includes infinitely many things that very obviously aren't Super Mario games. But even progressively narrowing it down to something that sounds sensible will still leave a semantic hole that includes something absurd. This culminates into the following bit:
So, maybe you can use this "has Super in the title" method as a starting point and add more stuff to it until it becomes a useful definition. And, in the comments from part 1, many people have tried to do exactly that. And very often what they come up with something like: "The Super Mario series consists of the games developed by Nintendo for Nintendo consoles that have 'Super Mario' in the title, excluding RPGs, party games, Mario Kart, sports games, and reissues of previously released Super Mario games."
At which point jan Misali unleashes their inner Diogenes and reveals what I've been hinting at in the header: Behold, a man mainline Super Mario game! However, while I'm all for leveraging semantic technicalities for the sake of comedy, I think this is a part where jan Misali loses the plot a bit. Even accounting for a VERY permissive understanding of what a video game is, I don't think I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater plausibly counts as one. Obviously knowing the incoming storm in the comment section, they supplied the following definition for a video game: "interactive software with a visual display for the purpose of entertainment". I agree that if you accept that's what a video game is, I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater is in fact a video game. What I don't agree with is that the definition itself is accurate enough.
jan Misali's last argument in the video in favor of IaaT:SMS being a video game is regarding the value of knitting as entertainment, which I'm not disputing, but that's not where I believe the issue with this definition is in the first place. IaaT:SMS does have interactivity, yes, and it was designed for the purpose of entertainment, but to me that is not enough to constitute a video game. For it to be one, the interactivity needs to be a necessary part of the entertainment, which isn't the case here. The interactive part, inputting your measurements, choosing a file and scrolling through the selected knitting pattern isn't the entertaining part. The entertaining part, which is knitting a sweater, requires none of the interactivity provided by the software; a completely non interactive slideshow of the various patterns would accomplish the goal just as well. And, while this was ultimately just part of jan Misali's overall point that you cannot bolt together a purely objective definition without relying on some level of unstated common sense, I think that point would have been better served by highlighting the holes in the provided definition of a video game itself than taking it at face value to poke a hole in the definition of the Super Mario series that relied on in the first place (not that this is even required, as jan Misali proceeds to show more examples of games that clearly wouldn't be argued in good faith by anyone to be part of the mainline series and are still noncontroversially video games, and then goes on to explore the ambiguities in pretty much every other part of the definition). You know what else counts as a video game under that definition?
You will note that even with my caveat, you could still argue that a lot of these still fit this alleged definition of a video game, so whatever a video game is, it's not just that. Instead of continuing this list and losing the plot myself for the second time in the process of writing this, I will point out that jan Misali's second video has been classified under the "I am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater" game category, meaning that apparently Google agrees that this is in fact a video game. Shows what I know.
And of course, you can't cover debating what's a video game without also covering the video part. When people ask "how many Mario games are there", the video game part is implied, but there is definitely an argument to be made that being a video game is not necessarily a prerequisite to be part of the mainline Mario series, especially if you hold the belief that the Game & Watch games aren't actually video games (I personally do think they are, but it's debatable enough for jan Misali to not be fully sure, at the very least) but are still significant enough to be part of the mainline series (there is a Super Mario Bros. game in there, after all, and it's even a platformer!). This can also be further argued to include other media that aren't even games (if the NieR series can include stage plays, what's preventing the Super Mario series from including, say, its licensed movie?), though I personally don't have any non-video game candidate in mind to argue in good faith that they should be part of the series.
At this point I don't think I have much else to add that isn't basically paraphrasing jan Misali themselves, so I'll wrap up this post so I don't have to spend another day adding to it and proofreading, and I'm fairly confident that between it and all the other interesting points the video raised that I haven't mentioned there will be more than enough jumping points for discussion (and if I forgot something I wanted to add, I can always do that later). What are your thoughts on this? And did you realize before I pointed it out that I wrote over 5k words about the question without giving my own answer at any point?
These are, according to me, the 23 games making up the mainline Super Mario series, as of writing this. If you're interested in knowing my specific arguments for including or excluding a given video game, I'd be more than happy to elaborate in the comment section if asked to. I just won't do it here because covering all of the games that are or aren't debatably mainline would probably double the already absurdly high word count, and I'd probably still miss something.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
In some games like Terraria or Horizon Forbidden West, you can have a "fake" set of armor on top of your "real" set of armor. The "fake" set defines how your character looks, while the "real" set determines your stats. This isn't a common thing in a lot of games, but in basically any game with different outfits with stats, I hear this being a requested feature. Whenever someone mentions this feature in a comment, people will chime in that it's cool and they wish [insert game here] would add it. The Horizon devs being one example of a studio who heard about this from the community of their first game, Zero Dawn, and added it to the sequel.
I really don't like this, even having it available as an option for single player games. Let me explain...
I think it really ruins the whole point of stat changing equipment in games. A big part of video games with customizable equipment and builds is designing a build and a character appearance that you like. Do you want to be slow with powerful attacks? Do you want to be fast with weak attacks? Do you want balance?
I'd argue that making a set that looks good while balancing the stats is another one of these things that adds to meaningful character creation decisions. Do you take the insane armor, or the really decent armor with worse stats that looks cool? Find a cool hat the character you're roleplaying as totally would wear? Oh, it has worse stats than the helmet you were using... But it weighs less! Maybe you can use a heavier chest plate to compensate for the stats you lost?
This also makes armor that both looks cool and has great stats into very valuable items that players want to get.
Of course for PvP games, having the type of armor that a player has on instantly give away their power level is important. On a Minecraft server, if you see two hostile players, one has leather armor, and the other has full netherite, you know the netherite guy is going to have better gear.
You might think this only matters for PvP games, but not allowing this mechanic in mostly single player games also adds a lot to the game, since you'll likely either see friends play the game or watch videos of other people playing the game. Each armor being intrinsically linked to certain stats creates a link between what you know that armor does and what kind of player would use that armor. In Elden Ring (which also has PvP, but bear with me), if you see someone wearing Bull Goat (the heaviest armor with the best stats), or wearing nothing but a jar on their head (to get worse defense but faster dodge rolls and some buffs to consumable throwing items), that tells you a lot about their play style just looking at their character's appearance. If both of these people could wear whatever armor they wanted and make the functional armor invisible, I would have no idea what build they had.
Using armor that looks good but has bad stats can be a fun flex to show you're good at the game, and choosing to have terrible fashion in exchange for stats is hilarious, as per this ProZD skit. That concept is a fun part of gaming culture I wouldn't want to see destroyed.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
This one's a long one folks.
I like to compose my thoughts on stuff now and then, and ya'll have shown a willingness to engage, so I wanted to share one of those with you. I guess I could do a video essay, but that would take me a while to accomplish and I like this niche of the internet a lot. I'm also not very good at video editing. So it's for you first, so to speak. Let's drop a bunch of what we're concerned with/worried about and go hard on something cool and fun on a lazy Sunday, is what I'd say to you if we were in person. I think I could expand some parts, but I like discussion so I've saved some for that. I do lay out a bit some boundaries of the discussion I'd like to have, but it's meant more to constrain the experience of reading it than it is to delimit the discussion itself.
In this piece I would like to express why I think Elden Ring is a masterpiece, a kind of great work. In doing that I intend not to merely express opinion, but to analyze and understand. To deliver an advanced opinion, if you will. That, for no other reason than to simply commit the words to the page, for the hell of it. It's not an attempt to unload feelings, to rationalize or reframe things outside the game, nor an attempt to obtain agreement/consensus or some form of emotional catharsis. It's a statement, an argument meant to be taken in, considered, and discussed if folks want to do that (I would!). It's in the discussion we can go through the details of things like the feelings, how it can operate as a vehicle, where it could be improved, etc. No work is perfect, but some get closer than others, and I think this one bears some witnessing by more than just forefathers one and all.
Before I begin, I would like to set the stage. This is not a review in the traditional sense. It's not about just the game, but how it came to be and why that can matter. The piece assumes some things. That you know this game exists, that its DLC exists, that there is a complete work out there called "Elden Ring" which includes "Shadow of the Erdtree". That's about it! You don't need to have played the game at all, and in fact I'd be interested in perspectives of folk who consider other forms of art as deeply as I'm attempting to do with this here. My statement is that this game deserves a place. It earns a spot alongside other works we consider "great" regardless whether we have ourselves accessed them. In different language, my attempt is to justify the statement, "Elden Ring is a masterpiece", to as wide an audience as possible.
The piece is constrained to analysis in a really broad way. I'm not really trying to talk about what I like in particular, what works and what doesn't, what's good and what's bad or how I feel. That is all for the discussion, it's not the point of this piece of writing to engage in that way with it. Trying to tailor my words to thoughts/feelings I don't yet know, is just not something I'm very good at doing. I hope to foster a fruitful discussion, not have an argument, nor persuade folks to go buy something.
I want to be considerate of my audience, too. We are reading, here. You don't get to have things like body language, tone, and reflection of feelings to take in and supplement your understanding while you read it. No combination of words, however flowery and well structured, can deliver what those things do. That circumstance operates in the reverse: I can't see your face, hear your tone, watch you and know whether what I've said is making any sense to you. So, in constructing this piece as well as in you considering it, these facts must be kept top of mind to get to the sort of discussion I'd hope to foster. If you read something and think to yourself, that you're being accused, that something you enjoy is being attacked, that something you experienced is invalid, understand that you are misapprehending what I am intending to communicate. I won't engage on that level with it, because text can't do what talking to you myself can do. I have to render my thoughts with tools that can only do so much.
As well, this piece is not a research paper. I'm not attempting to provide sources for everything, because what I'm more interested in is delivering the broad point. That said, I have investigated what material exists - interviews, articles, statements and history. It's not my intention to display to you, how much of these things or how many of them I know. I leave it to you, the reader and discussion partner, to assert when something I've written doesn't align with what exists, when a piece of the history doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
Ok, stage set, let's go.
Elden Ring is a masterpiece. What does this mean, coming from me? What does it mean to use that word, in a world where words have fluid meaning? What distinguishes a work such that I can use that word, and you, regardless of your history and experience, can accept it?
I can only offer what I have, so here goes. Elden Ring is a work which has a goal, an intended form, and it is my statement that it not only achieves that form, but that it does so, so completely and so well that it deserves recognition outside of its medium. That for something to be a "masterpiece", it must be understood as having been so successful that those who do not directly access it, can understand and accept such a status. To what end ultimately isn't really my point; you decide on that. It makes no difference to me, because at the end of the day I can just go play the game and enjoy it regardless what anyone thinks/believes about it (here's my ng+ build if you wanna see).
That's a different statement from simply saying the game is good, that it is fun to play, that it does specific things well, that it avoids certain problems and/or that it sold well. None of those things are really part of the analysis here, because my goal in writing this is to deliver justification for calling this game a kind of "great work". A work which can stand alongside other works, other things recognized outside their medium for being exceptionally well crafted and capable of delivering exactly what they intended to deliver. It's this quality, these aspects, which make for a masterpiece, is the underlying assumption of my piece here.
So, to be more practical, what does this game do, that other popular and successful games do not? What about Elden Ring merits such an elevated status? This is what I hope to deliver here. To do that, I think an analysis needs to tackle not just the qualities of the game itself, but the medium it belongs to, and the relationship between that medium and broader ideas of what constitutes art.
Going back as far as I can remember, there have been debates on the artistic merits of video games. Though games began as a sort of commercial plaything, a toy, it was clear as more people made them that potential existed for something more. That, with enough effort, enough detail, enough attention and success, a video game could be something similar to other forms of art, like books, movies, paintings, music, and so on. It is because of its history as a commercial product that this discussion often gets very muddy. For the sake of keeping this piece on track, we're going to define how we're looking at it.
Video games can be art. They have the necessary ingredients. Though they exist as combinations of other forms, various media, and though they exist as works which demand multiple individuals contribute (in most instances, at least), they possess the qualities that make artistic works what they are. I mean this in the broadest way. Art, broadly, is expression, it's a thing a person made. We can very quickly end up in very different discussions if we get more precise than that, and again I'd like to keep my piece on track here. If a person makes a thing, that thing can be art. It depends on some further details, whether it counts, but this is the foundation. Video games have that foundation.
Not only do they have that foundation, but because of how a video game is constructed, it has the potential to exist as both, a singular work of art and as a multitude, simultaneously. The music of a game can stand on its own, as its own artistic expression, its own work. So too, can visual elements, voice work/acting, modeling and animation, so on and so forth. Where video games become a unique medium, in my view, is when all of these pieces are working in tandem: They each stand on their own, like columns which support a structure, and inside that structure is where the Art of the Game lives. With other media, it is as though they are houses unto themselves. The video game has the potential to be to the house, a neighborhood - an array of houses, each beautiful and luxurious, which come together into a neighborhood that is unto itself a beautiful thing.
It's the beauty we're after, in my opinion. Look for the beauty and we find the meaning, and Elden Ring is a beautiful work. Because this particular work is a video game, it means this is a double edged sword - we can miss a forest for the trees, and we can get stuck on the beauty of one aspect not realizing how it contributes to a larger, more complex beauty.
What makes something beautiful, from this viewpoint? What does it mean to say, "this is beautiful", and further what does it mean to call a video game "beautiful"? Why is beauty being used as a measure, and not something else?
Let's see.
"Beauty", for the sake of this piece, is the extent to which something exists as the object of intention. It is not appeal, on its own. What makes something "beautiful", is how close it comes to being what was envisioned by the creator, how successfully it exists in the minds of others as the thing the artist meant for them to have, as best as can be understood. What defines a "masterpiece", in this view, is when the alignment is so strong, that even when individuals cannot access the work directly, they still receive some of what was intended. The work "stands alone", in that one can experience it, know nothing more about it, and come out of that experience with an understanding that aligns with what the artist intended to convey.
Video games, as a medium, make this type of analysis both easy and difficult. Video games are meant to be played, they are experiences. So, it's easier to see when an experience is what was intended - you press the button, it does what it's supposed to do, gun goes boom, there's a speck of beauty in that. Where it gets more fraught, is in trying to consider the extent - did the gun go boom the way the guy who made the model thought it should? Was my time pressing the button understood as more than simply pressing a button, as more than "gun went boom"? So on and so forth. We'll come back to this with Elden Ring, but for now just sit with that.
Why measure in this way? Let's return to the metaphor, of a neighborhood. The neighborhood is a distinct idea, something independent of the individual houses of which it is composed. In order to evaluate the neighborhood, we need something more than what we use to evaluate the houses. The attempt in this piece, is to establish such a tool, a form of analysis which allows us to consider the whole alongside its constituent parts, because we are dealing with a medium with many interconnected, constituent parts. We need a means to understand and evaluate the whole, and I've chosen the word "beauty" to represent this, defined it as I have so that the fullness of my statement, "Elden Ring is a masterpiece", can be understood.
I chose "beauty", because so much of the discussion of the medium gets lost in those constituent parts, and in defining aspects in which those constituent parts intersect with preference. I wanted a more positive word, one which predisposes toward seeing things for what they do, not what they aren't. The point here, my point, is to render an image of the whole so that you can decide too, whether it earns the place I think it does. Perhaps too, along with that, it will mean understanding other works a bit differently - I am a philosophical guy, after all, I gotta try to bend and contort some concepts now and then to stay on top of it, keep my knives sharp. And for those of you who already hold this game in high regard, perhaps with this you can bring that feeling of awe and wonder to its maximum, because hey that's a pretty cool experience to have, yeah? Take what you can get.
So after saying all of this about what a game is, what art can be, what beauty is and how it applies to a game, how does all of this come together in Elden Ring? What about Elden Ring merits such a detailed and strong set of statements?
There are multiple factors I think are worthy of consideration.
First, that the game exists as the end of an iterative process. Unlike some other forms of media, in video games we bear witness often to "rough drafts" and "second attempts" directly, the parts of the creation of art which usually go unseen. It is partly because of this aspect we see franchises change and become different; their rough draft merited a response, and so the next iteration is made to accommodate that response. It matters, crucially so, how this happens, and Fromsoft created conditions which meant they could take a singular vision to the point of becoming a masterpiece.
Elden Ring did not begin when Fromsoft decided to make it. It began when Hidetaka Miyazaki lucked himself into a project that was on its last legs, and just made the thing he wanted to play. That project, whatever it was called then, got infused with a vision, a distinct desire, and so took on an aspect inherent to any great work: Vision. It became the object of a single person's mind, the clay they molded rather than that which comes together as the result of a mix of various incentives and pressures. It became "Demons Souls". Those incentives and pressures always exist, but what makes Elden Ring distinct and what elevates it to the level of becoming a "masterpiece", is the existence of that singular vision within that mix. What that means of the man, I am not here to say, but I will share briefly this one time - damn, dude, wow.
Second, along with this vision, there was a structure which allowed this iterative process to happen relatively undisturbed. Fromsoft is not like every other company. They have kept their people, their teams, and allowed them the time and space to take their ideas further. This quality is important to the iterative process - it means teams can do what an individual does on their own. They can fail and try again, putting into the next iteration the knowledge and experience of the first. Video games are often not the product of a single individual, and even when a singular vision exists, the near infinite variation inherent to having teams of people means, if you don't keep teams together, the games will change, the works will take on new characteristics. There's a whole world of reasons why these conditions don't come about in the first place, which Fromsoft successfully avoided.
Fromsoft created the conditions for a singular vision to take root and for teams of people to continuously attempt to cultivate and realize it. They had done it before, with Armored Core and Kings Field, so not only did the conditions happen, the company had experience with it, understood the process. So when Miyazaki made his play and was allowed to express his singular vision, there was a structure in waiting, a group ready to carry it as far as it could go. That was the history. From Demons Souls, came Dark Souls, which became three games. From these came Bloodborne, and Sekiro, iterations in new directions which allowed for more attempts at understanding and changing every aspect to better align with the singular vision as well as integrate aspects of others' visions. At the same time, they grew, added on, took on more talent and allowed their talent to be transferred, for more to understand and work together.
Third, they succeeded. Each game sold better than the last, which meant the next iteration could be more, could grow in complexity and detail, until eventually we get to Elden Ring, where it all culminated.
Taken together, these conditions mean a kind of situation that cannot be easily emulated. Try as they might, there is no "soulslike" which benefits from these conditions, from the history in the way Elden Ring did. Part of what defines the masterpiece is that it is unique; this is how that happened, part of why Elden Ring does that. One can hope others in the world see and understand, follow a similar path, but there will never be another "Fromsoft of the 2010's" plugging away at their idea of an action roleplaying game. There will never be another Elden Ring, which is part of what makes it the masterpiece.
Now that we've got our analytical tools in our belt, and understand how we got here, let's look at the thing and understand it.
There's of course a shallow way of answering the question. Elden Ring is a fantasy action roleplaying game. That's the genre it fits into. But I'm intending to say quite a lot more, so we need to offer up a better description than that, something which communicates the idea that there is more in this than what the genre description implies. It won't be something you can slap on the back of a box, and we're not trying to persuade for sales, so we need a description that tries to get at what makes this game unique and important.
Elden Ring, as a complete package, the game + DLC, is a project that took almost 20 years to happen. It is an artisanal video game, a professional video game, a video game in its fullest and most complete sense. It is the product of a history, of a time and place, of people and a company. These are true of every game superficially, but hopefully what I've done has been to lay out why this one is different.
Ok, sure, but what is it? I've said a lot about things being what folks intended, about why matching intent with production matters, but I haven't yet laid out what Elden Ring is trying to do.
We have the benefit of knowing. Miyazaki has been open and upfront about what it was he was trying to make, so we can take that material and use it to evaluate. Elden Ring is supposed to be akin to his own experiences, of engaging with Western fantasy as a younger Japanese person who did not completely understand the language of the books he was engaging with. We are meant to press a lot of buttons, and come out of that feeling like we were that person, exploring a strange place and overcoming the hurdles inherent to obtaining that understanding.
So let's see how we get to this experience from pressing a lot of buttons:
We are given a wide variety of tools, a set of mechanics which allow us to shape our character into whatever works best for us. We are given a gigantic, detailed world in which we can find those tools and a whole lot else, things we never expected, so that we can also have experiences within the experience - learning and using tools, achieving an unexpected result, having to run and go hide so we can step away and take care of something Out There in the Real World. We can come across Weird Shit and figure out what it is, usually by way of having to engage it in combat. We are given challenges and obstacles, so we can have the experience of overcoming, of discovery and achievement. Importantly, we aren't being asked to pay for any of those experiences, so we can just keep going, thing to thing, all along the way without interruption or psychological prodding.
We are given a world in which complex characters express themselves and work toward their own ends, a sense of a place which is governed by its own laws and contains its own stories. A sense of scale and grandeur, so that within our exploration we can experience The Sublime, as one does when they travel to a fantastical place. This is exposed to us in pieces, things we must gather and assemble, as we do in our real world with real things. In doing so we come to find a world guided by the very human feelings and motivations of those complex characters, and have the opportunity to fully understand, the why of it, if we want to. We see multiple stories unfold, progress and conclude, of things like "when friends become enemies", "when abandonment consumes someone", "when someone stands up for themselves". We get to see how others experience the world alongside us, driving home that much more that sense we are exploring a different, fantastical place.
These things are rendered for us in multiple forms: As visual elements, as animations, as music, descriptive text, and so on. We are given guides for what events mean and how they inform who we encounter, how characters' feelings mix among the others, through the interplay of these various elements, with the gameplay serving as the glue which holds it all together. That gameplay is consistent and predictable, allowing for us to have the experience of practicing and improving. And then, the game delivers challenge after challenge after challenge, so that you have the final and ultimate experience, of facing what seems impossible and doing it anyway. Like reading a book in a language you aren't sure about, it seems flat out unworkable, until you get to it and before you know it, you're done. And now we're back to beauty - it is what it was meant to be.
In so many other words, we are transported to this other place, where things are different, and by simply engaging with it, we can become part of it. We can know it, feel for it, understand it, as we do the world in which we actually live. What makes Elden Ring the masterpiece, is that it achieves this for so very many people, all together. The extent of its beauty is such that millions of people played it, that thousands compiled its lore, that dozens got so damn good they can no-hit every boss in the game. It spawned legends, like Let Me Solo Her. It created careers, in the case of endeavors like Bonfireside Chat and VaatiVidya. With its DLC, it provided the tools to prolong the experience well past its end, created even for people well familiar with it a second shot at that first time experience, which several million more people got to do recently.
When we consider this alongside all else, the history and development, it is a work of beauty, as laid out prior. It is exactly what it means to be, and did that so well it created new things in its wake. Just like Lord of the Rings, Three Kingdoms, The Illiad, and so on, did. It delivered both an experience unto itself and a cultural moment that I think means it stands just as tall as those other works. That it is a video game, just means that looks different. It is of its medium, just as those works were.
We will see countless imitations, derivatives and evolutions, and there will inevitably come another such work with such a wide impact and depth to itself. But for now, at the moment, I think we can look at Elden Ring and appreciate it for being one of those great things, standing alone. It will be a game which we'll see again much later in time - there's a whole generation of people who are currently experiencing the beginnings of what will one day be "I wanted to make something as great as Elden Ring". It won't just be soulslikes, action RPGs, or even just fantasy works as a broad category. People who experience something like this go in all kinds of directions with it, and I for one am beyond excited to see what comes from that. It will deliver for years to come, which is the final part of what makes it the masterpiece.
One final note, just a thing I'd like to bring attention to, is that all along the way, Fromsoft games have been delivering on a level I have not seen much with video games at large. They're like the opposite of the industry in this respect - instead of being a skinner box/gambling machine, these deliver a "good enough" experience of overcoming adversity that they've been the catalyst for positive transformations in people. I love those stories, there's zero shame in it by my measure. Along with everything I've written, the fact that happens with consistency is something really very special that deserves cultivating, in my opinion, and further emphasizes just how much has been given to us. There is so much that can be done with that if folks can bring things together in the right ways, deliver on the right kinds of experiences.
I hope that was enjoyable. I appreciate you reading it. As I wrote at the top, the piece is focused but the discussion doesn't need to be so constrained. I'm primarily interested in craft and experiences, what folks think about the points or if they have something similar to say about something else. Criticism is welcome, as always. If you have the co-op mod you've just met a prospective party member, too. I'm pretty good at it. Happy Sunday!
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
