Rewriting Characters

You know something that has always bothered me to no end? It is sequels. More specifically, sequels that actively go out of there way to destroy their foundations. Personally, while it isn’t my hope that games do this, I am perfectly fine with the sequels not making any major changes to the original so long as they do not make the game worse. I actually think that it might be harder to do so these days when games are typically built upon the same engines as previous ones. And yet, somehow they can still manage to ruin things by having established characters take on different personas. You all know what I am talking about here right? If not I will spell it out for you. One of my biggest pet peeves is when they decide to completely rewrite or ignore a character’s backstory just so it can work in a new game. Look, I am not saying that you can’t give new information about a pre-existing character. I just don’t want it to conflict with the information that we already have about the character. Take for instance the new God of War series. I don’t have a problem with how Kratos has a different personality in the new series because I feel they have done enough to show that this character has grown from his past. Sure, he might not be as angry and has mellowed out with age, but that is fine so long as they don’t ignore what he has done in the past. He is showing how he doesn’t want his son to end up like he once was by actively being a responsible father. It is a good thing he is a main character since that would usually just be a one-way ticket to dying early. Hopefully that isn’t something to worry about because I like this new overbearing dad Kratos. Not sure how I feel about giving the new series the exact same name though. Well, at long as the foundations are still there the game is alright with me. Unlike this next one.

Before I mention it though I want to talk a little about something I heard. I heard that Horizon: Forbidden West does completely ignore all of the progress you made in the previous game to have you start a new adventure and completely reboots Aloy’s personal growth. That is kind of annoying since I was having fun with my first experience of Horizon: Zero Dawn and was thinking of trying out the sequel after. Looks like I might put it on the backburner then. However, this is a game I still have some interest in despite that. A game that I can’t see myself playing no matter what the circumstances are is Metroid: Other M. Truth be told this game could probably be it’s own blog post for how much they destroyed pre-existing characters, especially the main protagonist Samus. However, I don’t want to spend all my time bash it because it has been done to death and it is not really worth the effort to get worked up about it. I just want to mention the biggest problem with it all in my personal opinion. Now, you may remember that in a previous post I talked about Samus and her ability to lose all of her items at the sart of each game. Well, in this game she has all of her items from the start so instead a character named Adam forces you to not be able to use certain abilities unless authorized. This leads to a moment later on where you are running through an environment that is continuously giving you damage since it is too ho and once you reach a certain point, Adam authorizes you to not take heat damage anymore. Yeah, it already sounds dumb right? It is even worse when you take into account Samus’ personality as established by previous games in the series. Samus in the past has been show to have great battle instincts, good judgment, and the courage to if necessary, take matters into her own hands. Tell me then, why she is just blindly running into fire? Not only is the story and gameplay discontent so bad it is laughable, but I can’t think of any reason why Samus would just blindly follow such a stupid order. Not only that, but I can’t imagine Adam giving such an order in the first place. He is smart enough to realize that this should have been an unnecessary order right? Or did he only give the order because he realized Samus hadn’t turn activated the Varia Suit on her own yet and was going to keep taking damage unless he said something? I honestly don’t know, but here we have Samus deciding to turn her brain off and walk through fire. That probably could have been cooler under better circumstances, but this is what we got instead. Oh well, onto the last one.

Okay, so remember earlier how I said that I hate sequels that aren’t doing anything but trying to destroy an existing character’s growth? I can’t understand if you don’t due to the whole mini-rant there, but if you scroll up you will find I did say that at the beginning. Well, there is actually something that irritates me even more then that. That is reboots that try and act like the established character we have grown fond of has been a mistake this whole time. Not only does it feel unnecessary, but it also feels like aslap in the face to fans of the series for just destroying established canon and personalities for a quick buck. There is no game I can think of that encapsulates this more than DMC: Devil May Cry. This game decided to make Dante, one of the most charismatic protagonists in any action game, into a whining teenager with no really interesting qualities. They change so much of his backstory that I have to wonder why they just didn’t make a new game out of it. They instead decided to create what feels like a cheap knock-off of the original Devil May Cry games. For instance, why are his parents an angel and a demon now? What purpose does that actually serve? Why introduce new characters if they barely contribute to the plot? Why introduce old characters if you wanted them to be the same but with less depth? I just can’t wrap my mind around it. At least Metroid: Other M was trying to tell it’s own story and was trying to give its own reasons for doing so in its own way. Sure the story wasn’t great and it had some issues, but I can’t be that angry at it because at least it tried. What was the point of changing all these characters in DMC: Devil May Cry from there original counterparts if the story doesn’t even feel like more than a mediocre reboot. There is a reason why they decided to scrap that whole thing and make Devil May Cry V instead. Look, I am a reasonable man, but you have to give me a reason why you decide to change something. If there is a good reason, then I can accept it, but don’t just do it for the sake of mixing things up. Please. I begging you here. Don’t. Do. It. Okay, I think that is a good place to call it for tonight. See you next week.