Major changes to established franchises

[moggett88]

I am a Zelda fan, and recently finished playing Skyward Sword, but found myself not really enjoying it...when I had a think about why, I realised that it was because I had done it so many times before. The main players are always the same - male courage has to save female wisdom from male power. Now, I know there has been a lot of talk lately about gender balance in games, and I'm sure changing Link into a woman would be a very positive step in some people's eyes...but I don't really care about that.

What I think would be interesting is playing with the same three main players but from different perspectives. Why is Power always the villain? For a change why not play as a vastly powerful being, trying to bring the world back into balance after an evil genius (Wisdom) and their incredibly devoted and dedicated childhood friend (Courage - not strong or smart, but determined) make a bid to take over the world? Or play an incredibly intelligent but weak hero trying to use their smarts to save their powerful but simple friend from an fairly average assailant who will stop at nothing when it comes to hunting them down, no matter the damage they do to the world in the process?

These are fairly small shuffles - same characters, same universe, just told a different way - that I think would really make the franchise interesting again.

Obviously I've thought about this a lot, but I don't know as much about other franchises. So, how would you alter a franchise that's been around forever to bring it back to life?

 

[shrekfan246]

Sonic the Hedgehog has already done it, if current patterns mean anything. The switch to 3D really threw the franchise off-balance and onto a slow spiraling downturn that bottomed out with Sonic '06, and since then it's been rapidly coming back into its own. I don't know how I'll feel about Sonic Lost World being Super Sonic Galaxy, but it's looking like it's going back toward a slower, more platform-focused pace like the classics and mixing it even better with the improved speed and controls of the most recent modern games.

 

[badgersprite]

You can totally radically alter franchises and have it work. Like, for example, Mario is in a whole ton of games with radically different gameplay and that's been a huge key to his success. Usually, the reason why changing a franchise fails isn't necessarily because you changed it, but because you changed it simply to emulate current trends, or because you tried to adapt old elements of the games into a new environment without any thought as to whether or not that would actually work in that context, or just didn't do a decent job of implementing those mechanics. See King's Quest: Mask of Eternity for a damn good example of how to fail at change.

I think one of the most obvious changes that could succeed at improving a franchise is, of course, if Final Fantasy did away with their complete and utter dependency on cutscene based storytelling in favour of something much more organic and gameplay-centric with a greater level of freedom to move around and explore and talk to people and interact with the world in interesting ways, maybe even taking a few cues from old-style adventure games on how to do that sort of thing.

Bear in mind, I'm not saying Final Fantasy would have to abandon cutscenes completely. I'm saying they need to stop relying on that as their sole method of story delivery, because that is really not engaging. You learn a hell of a lot more by controlling your character and having them wander across a particular location and examining the objects there or by talking to an interesting NPC than you possibly could by having obtuse exposition drilled into you by heavy-handed cutscenes that interrupt the game every five minutes. I mean, even decades ago adventure games gave you the freedom to run around and talk to people and interact with objects in interesting and funny ways, and they had linear stories with defined characters and were usually fully voice-acted in their later years.

They wouldn't even have to go anywhere near the level of expansiveness and freedom of Western RPGs, and they certainly wouldn't have to go sandboxy or anything. They can still have linear story progression and a linear path of progression or what have you and be totally fine. Like I said, Final Fantasy could probably learn more from adventure games than anything else.