With a wealth of old and new ideas in the gaming industry, one of the most rare occasions is for studios to actually STOP competing for a sec and actually shake hands on a project and collaborate to bring a new or old franchise more originality.
From bringing Link into SCII, to Team Ninja redefining the classic style of Metroid games pre-Prime, these games while being large departures at least keep franchises new and fresh even if the departures are almost alienating to fans of the previous vision.
Metroid: Other M is not exactly a "bad game", but its hard to re-adapt to TN's arcade like controls where the FPS mechanic is few and far between, that and actually giving Samus a more vulnerable personality gave some fans like me the impression that the game tried to make Samus too human from her almost cold-hunter shell in Prime.
That said, without Collaboration in a broader sense we wouldn't have some of the most blockbusting titles that are pretty much better than companies native titles, such as Marvel VS Capcom being easily a better franchise than the notoriously famous yet bland Street Fighter Series due to almost an additional plethora of characters, features, and the like.
Due to this, there are some collaborations just begging to happen, such as one I thought of earlier today, that WB/Rocksteady (Batman Arkham) should at some point collaborate with Team Ninja to make a Japanese-style Batman game (maybe explore Batman's ninja/samurai training background). Also it would be interesting to see Batman partake in a more Ninja Gaiden atmosphere that helms to more of the recent anime/premiere adaptions of Batman.
But my issue with this is, why don't people do it more often. Yes competition is the most known way of stimulating new and fresh ideas, but recently that hasn't been the case. Series like Battlefield and Call of Duty don't win in competition for new ideas, they win competitions by sticking to OLD ideas and keeping people in their markets by just having them play pretty much the same gameplay through each new title.
As if though it is almost frowned upon or blame-stricken for studios to collaborate since new ideas are almost hypocrisy and blasphemous. Kind of like how Other M was almost completely destroyed by critics because of giving Samus Aran a real personality, even IGN's article title being over-the-top with "Killing Samus".
I might not have liked the new Samus, but I don't think they actually BUTCHERED the character as IGN's persecution specifies. The only reason she DIDN'T have a personality in Prime is it was a bare-bones FPS made by an american branch of Nintendo, and usually the usual blunt perspective of FPS games is that the character has no real personality. Japan loves and is famous for creating exasperating character backgrounds and personalities, and while we don't openly admit it, they are pretty much the kings of taking a bland franchise and giving it life with an amazing story. You go from Prime where everyone's two-dimensional from Other M where everyone seems like an actual person.
I'm pretty sure Team Ninja could do the same with Batman. While he is a mean bad-butt take-all-names beat-em-up, the only reason he became batman is to take out his anger and parents' death on criminals. Maybe Team Ninja can explore his inner pain while he is actually doing his vigilante work. Batman's a jerk to his enemies, and maybe some people want to know why in game-play form.
This pretty much ends my rant for now, hope you enjoyed this thought-provoking post.
Thanks for reading,
Cyrain.
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