Despite having been removed from the constant snark of social media for some time now, I cannot help but feel cynical and sarcastic during most consumer-oriented gaming events. Be it the Video Game Awards or E3 press conferences of years past, I find my face buried in my hand during some overpriced performance engineered to desperately generate excitement in the crowd in the most embarrassing fashion possible. At best, half of the game announcements in any presentation put on by the likes of EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and Sony are not only of complete disinterest to me, but poking at my disdain for AAA gaming trends.
Yet I, like many other Millennials whose primary caretaker was the television and game consoles of their youth, have taken mass media consumption up as a hobby, decorated with pompous and pretentious over-thinking disguised as intellectual analysis and study. In a world where leisurely entertainment can be considered a hobby, the bread and circuses equivalency becomes not the media itself, but the announcement and promise of even more media in the future. Chasing the ever elusive feeling of happiness, it is a rapturous spell that events like E3 promise, allowing us to salivate over and dream of the games that are to come.
This year, I must confess to an additional interest: the potential future movements of Microsoft in the wake of Sony’s apparent shift in priorities. Though it is nowhere near as great as the hubris the company possessed when entering the seventh generation of consoles with the PlayStation 3, I feel Sony is sitting far too comfortably atop their current gaming throne. We don’t have concrete sales data to suggest either side is “winning”, and such sales data is unreliable as all corporations are running on limited supply due to Covid-related restrictions. All we know is that both systems regularly sell out swiftly any time they are back in stock. One could perceive, then, that now is the time for Microsoft to strike.
However, as many are already aware, Microsoft isn’t aiming to bring players to their next-gen consoles. Not exclusively, at least.
Some years ago, back when I was still in my twenties, I had discovered all of my efforts to grind in EarthBound had been a waste of time. During my youth I thought the occasional level in which only one or two stats would see an insignificant boost was just poor luck. During my adulthood, however, I realized that any significant level gain typically coincided with a large jump in required experience points to reach the next level.
Rather than pace back and forth in specific dungeons and hazardous areas, coaxing foe after foe into a brawl so that I might slowly climb towards greater feats of strength, I decided to… just play the game. To progress linearly, tackling all foes that came my way and gritting my teeth in preparation of getting my flattened posterior handed back to me inside a Mach Pizza box. While my first assault on the arcade and climb up towards Giant’s Step – the first dungeons of the game – were a bit more troublesome than usual, EarthBound typically leveled me up to the strength necessary to take on each location’s challenges. The experience rewarded for defeating enemies was already calculated by the developers to match the amount required on an unknown “table” that defined the ideal level for each section of the game. While a player could certainly grind in a dungeon’s entrance for a few levels, they’d fail to gain many – or any – substantial new levels on their way towards the boss.
As I progressed towards the game’s end, I found my characters and their levels were approximately the same as I’d grind them to in prior playthroughs. I always found the game to be so challenging that you “needed to grind”, but the reality was that the game minimized the benefits of grinding in order to maintain a challenge. It would require an immense amount of patience – an amount I certainly did not possess as a child nor had the time for as an adult – to perceive any benefit.
It was this experience that encouraged me to approach all my prior childhood role-playing games without grinding. No more pacing back and forth in forests on the overworld map, sailing across the world to the perfect spot with the most rewarding foes to fight, or sticking to the ideal corner of a dungeon to get some farming in. The more of these games I play without grinding, the more I realize I never needed to do so. At best I’d simply be overpowered for one or two dungeons, gaining almost nothing until smacking right back to where I was supposed to be. Alternatively, avoiding the grind encouraged me to explore each game’s mechanics more deeply, developing a deeper appreciation for its design than I had before.
For this reason, I find The Witcher 3 and Xenoblade Chronicles’ “solution” for grinding interesting yet flawed, while having a begrudging appreciation for Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s inclusion of this trope in an arguably efficient manner.
Destiny was my calming chaser to follow every nerve-wracking session of Alien: Isolation. I felt jittery down to my fingers and my toes, too alert and nervous to head to bed and get some sleep. I loved the game, but the first-person perspective would gradually become too much for me to bear. I never completed it. A couple years later, Capcom would release the Resident Evil VII: The Beginning Hour gameplay teaser. Despite there being no proper risk throughout the demo, I felt that same sense of frightened nervousness as I had playing Alien: Isolation.
As a result, Resident Evil VII: Biohazard was the first mainline entry in the franchise I had not purchased since discovering Resident Evil Remake on the GameCube. I had concluded that first-person horror and I just did not mix.
Yet I could not hold back my excitement when I saw the trailers for Resident Evil Village. Just as VII: Biohazard seemed to call back to that old mansion of the first game, Village seemed to be beckoning back to the rural European hamlets and castles of Resident Evil IV. There was no way I could avoid this one. However, I felt it necessary to go back and play through Resident Evil VII and familiarize myself with fresh-faced protagonist Ethan Winters.
I’m glad I did, and I’m just as glad to have done so on stream. The crowd of viewers peering over my metaphorical shoulder provided a calming effect to what would have been a dreadfully nerve-wracking sense of isolation. Though they often mocked my decisions or frightful yelps, it allowed me the courage to creep forward through the Baker household… even if it was on the easiest, most cowardly difficulty setting. Nonetheless, Resident Evil VII captured so much of what I loved about the earlier games in the franchise while carving new, gruesome and terrifying territory for the survival horror franchise.
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