Not all games are created equally, and as a critic and formerly as an employee at Gamestop, I have often had to give my opinion on games. Would I recommend a game? Yes or No? Sometimes it’s an easy answer. Sometimes, someone will ask me about a game I love yet I would still have difficulty recommending it. Critically, some games just don’t amount to much and what fun they can provide is niche and hard to pin down. These are your guilty pleasure games; your Dynasty Warriors and your Earth Defense Force s. Your Dragon Ball Z and your Deadly Premonition type games. These games are bad on paper, but I can’t help but love them. Experiences may vary.
But why is this the case? For one, there’s no scientific formula for fun that is currently ascertainable. Games, by their very nature, are subjective and, as such, are going to be hit-or-miss for consumers at large. For me, as often as I have to play the hits, the games that miss wind up feeling pretty refreshing.
Dynasty Warriors is a hack-and-slash title with very few things that appeal to critics. The story is simple and barely changes from game to game. Players take on the roll of a general in one of a few various forces struggling to overtake China. The soundtrack is this bizarre, riff-heavy, guitar-powered rock. The voice acting is corny. And when you get down to it, the gameplay is pretty mindless. Players run around the battlefield, mashing the square button, slaying an obscene amount of enemy soldiers in 1 on 20ish combat. Every so often, an allied general will report that they are in need of help, and the player must stop what they’re doing to run and save them.
This mindless gameplay is just what the doctor ordered at times. As the player’s kill count gets into the hundreds or thousands, and enemy bodies fly about the battlefield, it becomes apparent how Dynasty Warriors differentiates itself from other games. It’s a power fantasy with very little basis in reality. It’s got fun things to collect, and for fans of the series, offers a familiarity that continues from game to game. The infamous, pike-wielding Lu Bu still poses a threat and offers a jitter of excitement when he appears on the battlefield; suddenly you have to pay attention to try to take him out. It can even seem a little unfair and unbalanced at times. But the game never feels like any other, and that is precisely what makes it so much fun for me. It’s different in its unabashed, action oriented, over-the-top badness.
Polished AAA titles often have a consistency about them. They, more or less, just work. Even when the physics are extremely unrealistic, they’re still reliable and almost scientific in their fictional setting. When a game is less refined from a technical standpoint, this rigid science goes right out the window. Earth Defense Force is a glitchy mess of a game at times that charges players with fending off a horde of giant, Earth-invading, insects. As they crawl about, and the environment crumbles around the player…as explosions dominate the surroundings, weird things happen. The same is true about the surprisingly popular game, Goat Simulator , where the physics engine seems half-realized. But when mostly innocuous, harmless things happen, the human response is often laughter. There’s something funny about a game totally breaks immersion and shows its shortcomings in ways that are undeniably unreal. This notion that the unexpected is around the corner and that the experience will be unique to the player can have a certain novelty to it.
There are things that gamers and critics feel a game should do to be considered good. This is true of all media. But when something does things the things it shouldn’t from a general consensus, it gives players more variety in their choices. I may be a music snob, a film buff, or any of those phrases that denote a refined taste in art but the truth is that I can get behind a catchy pop song or an Adam Sandler movie from time to time. They may be mindless entertainment but, as humans, we have a wide range of tastes and moods. It’s nice to have options to suit those moods and, sometimes, we just don’t want something demanding. And other times, we just don’t want more of the same. Besides, when you only play the “best” of what gaming has to offer, you skew your perspective and lose appreciation for games that are actually pretty good. It’s rewarding to play games from all ends of the spectrum of goodness. Play something weird, play something bad, play something unconventional. Then return to your Call of Duty or your The Last of Us.