I spent almost all of my free time last weekend playing Spider-Man: Remastered (originally for the PS4) and then Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I actually 100-percented SM:R (though there’s technically 3 trophies I’ve yet to collect since they were added as part of an update that added a New Game + mode that I’m going to do eventually, once I’ve had a break from the game), which makes it the first game I’ve ever gotten all of the achievements for. It makes a lot of sense, though, since most of the non-story achievements involve exploring, traversing the world, and taking the time to look around or find interesting places to perch. I’ve always been about that stuff, which I wrote about extensively in my review about three months ago, but going directly from Spider-Man: Remastered to Spider-Man: Miles Morales has really made me reflect on my experiences with these games as a whole.

I’ve still got a ways to go with SM:MM [turned out to be not as far as I thought, since I beat the game two days after writing this], since I feel like I’m barely into the game, but it was immediately noticeable that the traversal had changed. Sure, the animations of the particular Spider-Man I was playing as were wildly different, but the rate of movement was much faster. Now, as I dash around the city, I rarely run into a situation where I wind up cussing out the game for not giving me the target I want for a web-zip or for ruining the momentum I’ve built up by having Spider-Man jump off something at a more vertical angle than usual. It really, truly feels like they improved on the systems from the Remastered PS4 game and my experience running around the city feels even more rewarding than it used to. Not to mention the music is so much better, so much more active. Less orchestral swelling and more beats to jam/beat up bad guys to. It really matches the incredibly different styles of the two Spider-Men.

Peter Parker moves with grace and an economy of motion that matches what you’d expect to see from a gymnast or ballerina. Miles Morales moves with the exuberance of youth and the fluid motions of modern dance or breakdancing. It even shows up in their fighting styles, highlighting not the differences in their age and experience, but in their physical sizes. Peter Parker is larger and tends to create clean lines of motion that allow him to put his back and weight into his blows. Miles Morales makes up for his smaller stature by building up quick momentum in either himself, his opponent, or the both of them, throwing his entire body into each of the big hits that he managed to deliver from unexpected angles thanks to his quick movements and use of web-assisted blows.

Taking the time to think through these two different games and their individual Spider-Men has gotten me thinking about the franchise as a whole. I’ve always been a big fan of the various Spider-Characters. Peter Parker’s near-constant underdog status appeals to me, given that I’ve got a bit of my own “Parker Luck” (the term used in comics circles to describe how Peter Parker almost always winds up back at square one without a spare dime to his name no matter how high he rises) and have had to shoulder a heavy mantle of responsibility from a young age. Plus, he’s one of the few popular superheros who actually stays fairly local. In most of the comics, movies, and video games, he doesn’t go far beyond New York City. The more recent Marvel/Sony movies, starring Tom Holland, have him leave the city the most in the shortest amount of time (though the comics, in their ridiculous expansiveness, also take him away from his home fairly frequently), but that’s not what he usually does. Most of the time, he sticks around New York, fights all the villainy and whatnot that shows up there, and does the local heroism thing.

Spider-Man stories are always at their best when they focus on the people he helps rather than the villains he’s fighting. That’s probably the biggest difference between SM:R and SM:MM. The later has a heavy focus on local folks who need help, with each side quest focusing on a person dealing with specific issues, including things as large as a conspiracy to create more crime so someone can become a crime lord and as small as finding someones’ stolen car. Sure, there’s bigger stuff going on that sets the stage for all these smaller quests, but so much of the game reflects Miles Morales’ entry onto the superhero stage and his place as a very locally-focused hero. Peter Parker says he does that stuff too (at least there’s text saying this in SM:R), but we never actually see him do it. The most “Local” thing he does is help a man find his lost pigeons and that’s an incredibly brief collection quest. It really feels like a significant improvement from one game (SM:R) to the next (SM:MM) and I’m really hoping that they’ve kept this element of it in the next game which, admittedly, I haven’t heard much about other than that it is short.

I really appreciate that the games have all stuck with a fairly limited scope, even if the heroism on display isn’t always super locally focused. It feels nice to be able to move around a reasonably-sized map (that still feels plenty big when your next quest is on the oppsite side of the map and you’re not using fast travel because you need to stop more crimes in literally every district of the city for gear upgrade tokens and per-district achievements) and be able to quickly gain a high degree of familiarity. Plus, since the map is fairly small, it forces everything to play out in these areas that you’re potentially already familiar with. I mean, it’s super fun to eventually have a boss fight in an area you were using as a vantage point to wait for crimes to pop up and the fact that most events just happen on the map means that there’s very little loading to be done. Sure, there’s stuff that happens on their own smaller, super-limited maps (basically little combat gauntlets), but most of it moves fairly seamlessly from traversal to event. The main plot stuff tends to cut away and back, frequently restricting your movement to the area the quest takes place in, but I’m willing to make some concessions to the developers who probably just wanted to avoid setting up ways to suspend mission progress mid-mission.

It just feels nice to enjoy a reasonably sized game. I love a massive, sprawling, open-world games as much as your average person does, but that’s decidedly less than your average video game enthusiast. Most of them are just so big and empty. Once you’ve looked at enough copses of trees with similar arrangements of monsters and the same collections of resources tucked away in them, you’ve seen them all. Skyrim was fun to explore exactly once and I never made it all the way through it since I realized that most of the stuff hidden around the map was the same set of caves and dungeons that had been created by mixing and match parts. It was massive but really lacked any sense of wonder, which is what made Breath of the Wild really stick out (and why Tears of the Kingdom, despite being bigger and with a bunch of super-fun elements added in, couldn’t knock it off its perch as my personal favorite open-world game (which, you know, ignores the fact that TotK technically wasn’t an open-world game, given how much stuff was gated behind plot progress)). Spider-Man doesn’t need all that. It doesn’t need wonder because it’s fun and enjoyable just to move around in that game. That, plus all the alerts and map markers in the game mean that you don’t really need to search for stuff. When it becomes relevant, it will be incredibly obvious. You can focus on just moving around, chasing quests, hunting for collectibles, and hoping that you don’t have to deal with another slow-paced “non-hero-walks-around-and-avoids-danger” mission.

I feel the same way about this stuff as I feel about movies. Sure, a movie that runs for three hours could be incredibly interesting and engaging, but most movies don’t need to be that long. Most movies don’t even need to be two hours long. I miss movies that are under one hundred minutes long. It feels like they’re becoming super rare these days, outside of animation or children’s entertainment, and I just really appreciate a piece of media that is exactly as long as it needs to be and no longer, be it a movie, a TV show, a video game, or even a book. Things don’t need to go on forever. Endings are fine as well. Sure, I might be disappointed if this new Spider-Man 2 game feels short, but I’d much rather have that than deal with the kind of endless escalation, resetting, and “surprise twists” that plague comic books so they can keep running the popular characters endlessly.