Today, as I took a break from the frenetic pace of my work day and turned my mind toward what I should write for today’s blog post–I landed on writing about my time listening to A More Civilized Age and watching The Clone Wars as a part of my foray into media review and discussion podcasts, a topic I will now be addressing another day–I remembered my first foray into media discussion podcasts and why I not only fell off the train but stayed away from all of them for multiple years. In fact, the only reason I’ve gone back is because the idea behind the current run of Media Club Plus (which I recommend more strongly than I’ve ever recommended anything), of watching Hunter x Hunter with someone who hasn’t watched much anime at all, was so charming that I couldn’t deny myself the opportunity to follow some of my favorite podcasters on this particular journey. It took a lot to overcome the reason I stopped listening, a reason that seems pretty trivial and small when you consider it on its own, but this reason was the final straw of a growing resentment that had been building for a while. You see, the podcast I listened to back then (merely because it cross-polinated with other stuff I listened to) was the video game review podcast “The Besties.”

Most of it was fine, but the last episode I listened to was the finale in a series they did where they ranked every single Legend of Zelda game by having them go head-to-haed in a bracket they discussed and voted on in their little group of four. Now, I’m willing to let the hosts all have their own opinions and I don’t need to agree with everything that they say to enjoy their podcast, but they eventually ranked A Link to the Past as the best Legend of Zelda, primarily citing its pixelated and 16-bit nature as something that allowed it to stand the test of time in a way that other games could not. There was a lot of interesting discussion, but it eventually ended with three of the four hosts voting for ALttP and the lone dissenter voting for Breath of the Wild. Now, I fall on the side of the lone dissenter and I know I was more invested than I otherwise might have been because said lone dissenter voiced every single argument I would have made, including refuting the suggestion that the stylized graphics of BotW wouldn’t stand the test of time. I mean, Nintendo stopped going for realistic graphics a while back and the cartoony graphics of BotW sure look great on modern screens. Much better than, say, the aged pixels of a game that relied on the nature of CRT TVs to complete their form, an effect entirely lost these days and that makes older games look pretty terrible unless you’re doing something to shrink the size of your screen (like the various Nintendo Online emulators do) or doing some other kind of post-processing.

I was mildly offended by the final result because it was so clearly a case of nostalgia overruling sense that I wanted to write in to the podcast about it. However, since this exact problem had been showing up time and again with these hosts, with a massive preference given to either older games brought forward through time with their pixelation intact or new games that shamelessly pursued that old aesthetic without any nod to modernity, I just gave up on listening to the podcast. It had become a tiresome theme, by that point, in not just the podcast but in all the video game reviews that at least two of the hosts (both well-known writers in the game reviewing space) wrote while I was following the podcast. They had the things they liked and did not seem to even think that their opinions about video games should not be presented as undeniable fact. Their preferences were not a fair metric to judge a game by and while it is the perogative of every writer discussing something like that to couch said discussion entirely within their opinion if they so wish, they still ought to at least attempt to look past their preferences to see what someone who enjoys this or that other type of game might appreciate that they do not. It was more than I was willing to put up with and had, over time, poisoned my trust in their assessments to the point that I stopped paying attention to whether or not they recommended the games they talked about. It was much easier to find other sources or decide for myself. So, with this final straw, I decided to stop listening and find some other way to fill my podcast time.

I played a lot of games as a child and will always have a special place in my heart for games like Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, and Majora’s Mask. I wouldn’t describe any of them as the best of anything, though I would probably still describe them as something worth experiencing if they’re the sort of games you’re into. I wouldn’t even hold them above most modern games because, aside from several drastic missteps, modern games are so much better than the older ones. Sure, it’s fun to replay Chrono Trigger, but I’m not getting anything new from it other than a fun way to spend my time. Which is enough, mind you, but I’d rather play something I’d enjoy AND that gives me a new story or idea to chew on. A game with replay value doesn’t need to have something new to offer you every time you play it, but the best ones do. That’s why I played some of the Dragon Age games as many times as I did. There were new choices to make, new stories to experience, and old places to explore in new light. The same is true of a massive, open game like Breath of the Wild or even Tears of the Kingdom (though, so far, to a lesser extent than BotW).

Every time I’ve played Breath of the Wild, I’ve found something new and exciting. Whenever I replay Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven stars, I have a great time but I already know where everything. There’s no new light for this old, familiar world. There’s no change to make, to experience it anew. Hell, there isn’t even an interesting final revelation that will make me see the entire game in a new light as I replay it. The game was a lot of fun and it was an interesting slice of time, a moment captured, but the game doesn’t really live on. There’s little new to discover once your first playthrough is done. And, yeah, there is explicitly that in Chrono trigger, but doing every single Alternate Ending combined takes less time to bust through than the first full playthrough does. There’s no new discoveries, only different ways to end the game. And sure, you can probably say the same of most of the games in the Dragon Age series and just about every other Open World RPG ever made, but most of that exists as alternate versions of the entire game rather than slightly tweaked endings.

I don’t think it is bad or wrong to enjoy old games or to indulge in some harmless nostalgia. I just don’t think it’s worth discounting the present because it can’t make you feel the way you used to in a time or mode of life you will never be able to capture. I mean, I think I probably enjoyed Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars more than the modern remake because I didn’t have to battle exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, and depression to play it. Sure, I had a lot of other horrible stuff going on (aka, my entire childhood), so the experience is a bit closer than it probably is for most other people, but there’s no denying that the ability to carelessly pursue a game has a massive impact on your overall experience of it, one you need to be able to reckon with if you want to comment on modern games when you’re maybe so busy you don’t even have the time to get through an entire game before you’re supposed to review it.

This podcast and those hosts aren’t the only ones doing it, of course. I see it everywhere I look. Things that are old are given preference just because they’re older and things like them are given preference because they feel similar enough that the reviewer can fool themselves into feeling nostalgic about them. I see it in movie reviews, in discussions of books, in even the recommendations my friends make of what media they enjoy. I don’t mind a comparison here or there since touchstones are an important part of conveying things that are difficult or time-consuming to put into words, but I am tired of seeing something new be rejected merely because it does not echo or rhyme with the past. It’s frustrating and so incredibly rampant in the video game sphere. Nothing new is ever good enough, everything old is always better, and people absolutely do not see themselves crossing the line from one side to the other as something they initially decried ages enough to become sacrosanct and an absolute paragon of its genre. I wish I had a solution for all this, but it feels like human nature to prefer things the way they have always been than to consider how something new might be better. Incredibly frustrating human nature.