Thoughts on "Star Fox"

I just recently read an article about why it would be difficult to reboot the Star Fox franchise, and I have a couple of comments. Here's the tl;dr of the article:

1. Shoot 'em up games aren't popular right now.
2. Star Fox never innovated or introduced anything new into the genre.
3. The characters don't appeal to anyone.
4. The length of Star Fox 64 is too short. People want length, not replay value.
5. Some opinions about how to extend the franchise.

I'm going to steer clear of that last one, because there's really nothing to say; however, I'd like to address the other four points based on my observations (I'm sorry I don't have stats to back this up, just take it as yet another anecdote).

The person who wrote the article linked above has made a several assumptions about the people who play games. These assumptions don't really resonate with me. Here's why.

I'll start with the first point, that there isn't an audience for the genre. I find this to be ridiculously silly. The number of people playing games today eclipses the size of any audience from the days of SF64 by orders of magnitude. The gamers of yesteryear are having kids, and those kids are playing games. In addition, new platforms have opened up games to people who wouldn't have touched them before. Nintendo recently made a statement saying that if their development teams wanted to create software for other platforms (meaning mobile/tablets), then those propositions would be considered. Besides, while the Wii U may be struggling for sales, the 3DS is doing just fine. With the ubiquity of mobile, and the household recognition of Nintendo branding, there is a huge potential for Nintendo to tap into.

Now would I want Nintendo to switch to making only mobile games? Of course not, but to say that there's no audience available is just silly.

While it's true that Star Fox may have never introduced anything genre shifting, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. As an example, World of Warcraft is in many ways an Everquest clone, executed very well. Rogue Legacy is basically a just another Castlevania-esque game, but once again it was executed very well. The point is that what Star Fox has done isn't about genre expansion, but genre refinement. People who perform music very well aren't thought less of because they aren't Mozart. Games (and works in other narrative mediums) can be valued for their execution as well as their new ideas. The fact that Star Fox 64 is still talked about while most other on rails shoot 'em up games are forgotten is a strong indicator that the performance stayed with the players more than other games.

Whether or not the characters appeal to a certain player is really a matter of opinion. I agree, it probably wouldn't appeal to the main American audience, but I've never identified with them anyway. I know lots of people who love playing games, but don't like "gamers." I doubt these people would care that the characters were anthropomorphic animals as long as the characters played their role in providing a memorable gameplay experience.

Also, saying that players are "hardcore" or "casual," and then saying that the kinds of characters in a game are any indication of what makes a game "core"/"cas" is a huge insult to the entire medium, but that's for a different post. In brief, it's just another one of those false dichotomies that allow simple people to simplify existence so they don't go insane.

The last point about game length is the easiest one to dispute. There have recently been MANY success stories (mostly from the indie sector) about short games with extreme replay value. Here's a few specific titles, just to jog your memories: Dwarf Fortress, Rogue Legacy, FTL, Banished, and Mario Kart 8. There are many, many more, but I believe these are most well known. The point is that assuming that players are more into the overdrawn melodramatic stories of things like Final Fantasy or Assassin's Creed is just wrong. This goes back to the audience thing, SOME people like long games, but there's a HUGE audience of people who love short games with lots of interactive material that allows for lots of replay.

I'd argue (and again this is my personal input) that games have never been about rushing to the finish. If there's a game that is really only meant to be played through a single time and never touched again, it would probably be better off in the film medium.

Anyway, I disagree that Star Fox can't be rebooted. The author of the article is probably correct in assuming that it can't come back as the "mainstream" console game that it was back in the N64 days. That's hardly a problem, though, because that market is limiting, and Nintendo has been trying to be free of it for years.

There are opportunities for Star Fox, but they are outside the bounds of the usual console audiences. The opportunities are there, and I feel like someone will come along and take them even if Nintendo doesn't.

Monomyth in Music: The Morrowind Theme Song

So I know I'm probably preaching to the choir out there when I say that The Elder Scrolls games are super 'mazinglicious, but I feel like I could add another level of appreciation to this great franchise. I'm going to interpret the opening theme of The Elder Scroll III: Morrowind in the framework of a monomyth (aka "the hero's journey," I prefer the term monomyth).

For those of you not in the know, the monomyth is a framework defined (not created) by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It has many parts and has had much said about it in the years since, and I'm going to use a weird mishmash of it that makes sense to me. You're probably going to get upset at this point and say that I'm full of bologna sandwiches, but that's just life and stuff.

In my mind the most important parts of the monomyth are

• The call to adventure; the thing that pushes the hero from a static existence into something bigger.
• The threshold; the point where the hero leaves the familiar and enters into something else. This other place has been called many things: the wild, realms of power, realms of magic, etc.
• Challenges and temptations; the hero must pass through these in order to reach...
• The Abyss; the darkest moment in the hero's struggle. Usually the test that must be overcome to receive the boon.
• Death; caused by struggling in the abyss. Often death in stories is not literal so much as it is a shedding of something about themselves meaning that, in a sense, their old being is dead.
• Rebirth; once again, not always literal, but in the case of Gandalf vs Durin's Bane it is.
• Atonement; being initiated into a higher state by the ultimate power.
• Return; the return from the realms of power with a boon for the benefit of all.

So all we have to do is map these steps onto parts of the song and convince you that it makes sense. Easy, right?

So there's the song, listen to it once, twice, or repeatedly until you fall asleep like I do. Here we go.

The first thing you hear at zero seconds is a drum breaking silence. It's easy to deduce that this is the call to adventure. The silence is the state that is broken by the sounding of a drum.

The step over the threshold into realms of power is indicated by the introductions of the strings into the mix. If we maintain that silence is considered to be the familiar state, then it should be obvious to conclude that by contrast stepping into a world full of wonderful, powerful sounds would indicate crossing the threshold*.

The first challenge begins around 0:35. The melody rises and falls as the hero is confronted with trials. Voices of instruments can be heard intermixing giving a feeling of the other stories that intersect with that of the hero. The most prominent of these is the horn. Just keep that in mind.

We progress through trials until about 1:10 when we enter the abyss. The tension mounts as the music swells, giving an indication of how the hero struggles in the abyss.

Fortunately he doesn't have to struggle long because he dies around 1:28 when the swell crests with the crash of a cymbal and a gloriously minor chord.

With death comes rebirth and atonement. From 1:28 to 1:33 a lot of things happen in the music all jammed into just 5 seconds. At the same time that the strings, which had been carrying the melody, are on a descending scale and diminuendo, the horn part plays an ascending scale while performing a crescendo to become the lead voice.

Now if we take the horn to be a symbol of majesty, power, and/or lordship, then this indicates the subservience of the hero to a greater power. In turn this highest power grants a boon and initiates the hero into a higher level of existence. This atonement causes the rebirth of the character. If you listen again you may also notice that the voice of the horn can always be heard, giving the sense that the highest power is present wherever the hero is, granting a certain kind of moral authority to the hero's task.

The following seconds indicate the return of the hero as he leaves the realms of power. The drums fade into the distance almost like something holding the hero, trying replicate the call once again, but it's not the drums that we hear last, but indeed, the strings. This indicates that the hero has returned home as a hero, bearing both the boon and increase in status granted during the atonement.


And that's that. Music is by its very nature an extremely abstract art form and it's very interesting to see when some of that abstraction lines up with some kind of narrative that resonates on an instinctual level. If you've read this far, I'm glad you granted me the time to talk about things that probably don't matter all that much, and I hope that your appreciation for The Elder Scrolls and music has increased in some way.

* For you more hardcore hero's journey analysts out there, I would say that between this point and 0:35 is the "meeting with the goddess."