Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Why Chibi-Robo Makes Me Sad

I love Chibi-Robo. I played the flower DS game first, and mildly played the original on the Gamecube.

I loved the unique gameplay. I loved the stories, and how it centered around making friends or helping out instead of violence and carnage.

(I also love violence and carnage, don't get me wrong. It's simply easier to find a shooter than it is a nonshooter with a story.)

When Zipline was announced, I immediately preordered it. Well, when the article crying that if "nobody bought this game then there would never be another Chibi-Robo" then I ran to Amazon for the amiibo bundle.

I got the game yesterday. Within minutes of being home, I loaded it up and started on Chibi-Robo's new adventure. In another few minutes, I hated it.

I hadn't even finished the first level.

It's a platformer, just like every other Nintendo game anymore. It felt like Kirby. It felt like Yoshi's World. It felt as much a  "Chibi-Robo" game as the "banana cream" pie you buy at the store that contains banana flavor, not bananas.

I wanted a Chibi-Robo game. I wanted to explore and pick up trash and make little kids smile and heal some broken hearts. Instead, I have an ugly ( what the shit why do DS games still look like crap???) run of the mill platformer that is exactly the same as every other Nintendo platformer they come out with.

It's this crap that makes me hate the video game industry. Because they cheated Chibi-Robo. They tried to play it safe by making a carbon copy of other successful games instead of actually making a new Chibi-Robo game.

And so the fate of Chibi-Robo lies in the fate of a half assed, unimaginative clone. And most likely, it will go one of two ways: they will decide it is  successful, and continue to spit out Chibi-Robo flavored platformers instead of a traditional Chibi-Robo style game, or it will tank, for the reasons I listed, and Nintendo will decide that "nobody likes Chibi-Robo" and it will be put on the shelf indefinitely. They have decided on middle of the road blandness over creative originality.

And this is why Chibi-Robo makes me sad.

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