I've made a personal goal to get through all of the Final Fantasy games in the next year or so, so I of course started with Final Fantasy VI, my personal favorite and one of my top 10 games of all time. I'm nearly through the whole thing and I must say, I'm enjoying it immensely, as I knew I would.
But as I played through it, I could see some chinks falling out of the vineer here and there. The game isn't nearly as flawless as I have been harping for years. Ok, I knew it wasn't flawless, no game is, let alone games from 20 years ago, and most of FF6 flaws are due to limitations of its time - the dialogue and story is rushed and awkward in places, particularly where the game doesn't bother to provide checks to see who's in your party (all largely due to memory restraints in the cartridge, I'd bet). I maintain that the game's story is amazing through and through, but being older now and more savy than I was in 1994, I can definitely feel the spots that the great Final Fantasy 6 is showing its age.

I also recently played Mighty No. 9, a game that's gotten a lot of flack, particularly from so-called "major" gaming outlets. Some of these criticisms have been more than earned by Inafune and his team with numerous delays, early gameplay footage that wasn't indicative of the final product (though what we saw at E3 last year was more in line with the final product) and some admittedly shady business dealings. But all that aside - and perhaps because I neither contributed to the project nor followed it that closely despite my love for the old Mega Man games - I really enjoyed the game. I thought the "new" mechanics worked very well despite some steep (and often unfair) difficulty curves and I felt like it was a worthy successor to Mega Man.

Most of the games media seems to disagree with me, lambasting not only the drama surrounding the game but also calling it an uninspired mess. Some people took issue with the controls but it seemed like the folks that didn't like the game hated everything about it, from the character designs of Beck and his "siblings" to the story and the voice acting right down to the mechanics. They said that "the spirit of the Blue Bomber is nowhere to be found here."

But I disagree. I think that good old Rock is everywhere in this game. I just think that we don't want another Mega Man game.

Another game came out in the past decade that people feel is the superior successor to Mega Man: Shovel Knight. But Shovel Knight just felt different. Not in the bad way. But it felt more modern, more updated. And people loved it. And rightly so, it's a great game (well, I mean, it looks like a great game, I unfortunately still haven't gotten around to playing it). But it's a great game because it took the spirit of Mega Man and made it new.

When Inafune made Mighty No. 9, he took the spirit of Mega Man and made Mega Man all over again. Sure he added a dash mechanic that made the game feel faster, but everything from the corny story to the oft-unfair difficulty curve is ripped right out of the old Mega Man games. The fact that people didn't enjoy that tells me that people don't want a Mega Man game - even if they hid that behind claims that Mighty No. 9 didn't resemble Mega Man at all. But the truth is, it did. In everything but name, Mighty No. 9 is Mega Man.

They want to be reminded about the games they love with something made fresh and new from the ground up. They want a balance between retro and modern, a balance that Shovel Knight delivered beautifully, largely with concept and aesthetics.

I started this op ed with my little FF6 anecdote because this has happened to me before, this nostalgia blindness to a game's faults, and I truly feel that if these games had been released today without their ties to nostalgia, even with our seeming clamour for more retro experiences out of the indie sector, they would not be seen so favorably as they once were. If Mega Man was released today, I doubt anyone would cast it a second glance. Why should we hold Mighty No. 9 to a standard that no one was ever given any reason to expect?

I had this same issue with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Having grown up primarily in the 80's, I wasn't quite as poised to enjoy the N64-era games as many others. I had moved onto the Playstation largely because I bought a used model from my friend, and didn't have much of a chance to play the old N64 games. So, without that nostalgia blindness, I'd always thought those old games looked...well, rather janky and unpolished. But of course that was the time. Early 3D was often janky and unpolished.

But after I played Windwaker on the Gamecube, I'd always had a desire to see how the story tied together with Ocarina of Time. So when it was released on 3DS, I jumped at the opportunity to give it a try and, speaking as someone with no prior nostalgia for the title nor any particular love for the Legend of Zelda series, I have to say I was, to put it charitably, underwhelmed.

To put it less charitably, I did not enjoy Ocarina of Time one little bit.

I'm not here to deflate our nostalgia bubbles. I'm still very much guilty of wearing nostalgia blinders myself, and there's nothing wrong with that...except when nostalgia is used to guide the direction of large-scale products only to discover, no, that's not what we really want. It's possible, likely even, that people wanted to hate Mighty No. 9 before it even came out due to the miasmatic pall surrounding the project, but I think Inafune's real problem may have been misunderstanding what people want. But if he misunderstood, I think it's because we all misunderstood. We don't want Mega Man again. We think we do, but we don't. If we get another Mega Man game, we want it to be new. Maybe we want the old aesthetics, but the old mechanics were awkward and jarring. Maybe we want the old concepts (which I personally felt Mighty No. 9 delivered fine), but we don't want those old sensibilities.

We want retro games but we don't want old games. Mighty No. 9 seemingly went in the wrong direction, bringing us an old game with a new look rather than a new game with an old look.