Over the past few years, there has been a noticeable decline in hardcore gaming in some areas of the industry; it has been an aspect of gaming that has unquestionably been challenged by Nintendo's casual crusade so to speak, with the release of such revolutionary hardware as the Nintendo DS and Wii. Games are becoming shorter in length, easier in difficulty, which many would say is undoubtedly an appeasement to the casual market -- but is there a new shift in the zeitgeist, a revertion to a golden era of gaming?
Notably, Square-Enix -- the bastion of traditional gaming is delivering an antithesis to the casual gaming phenomenon, it has just recently been announced that Chrono Trigger; arguably one of the greatest installments of the Japanese role-playing game genre is to be released on Nintendo's handheld, dual-screened console. This follows a string of remakes by the Japanese gaming giants, most notably remakes of Final Fantasy classics on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance as of late. Are Square-Enix really supplying a demand for pure, traditional gaming though, or are they just flogging a dead horse -- advocating a golden age of gaming in which they were supreme -- scared of the new age of casual, social gaming, in which they can't find their sense of place, an age were they don't seem to fit?
Many will be delighted at this apparent reversion to a different kind of gaming to today.
Perhaps people are quite tired of what they perceive as the gimmicks of today's industry, Wii Fit is good and all, but it doesn't deliver what initially attracted so many people to gaming -- and that factor is pure escapism, the feeling that you are interacting in a new world -- surreal as it may be, spending hours upon hours of leveling up my black mage in Final Fantasy will always be more satisfying then complimenting real life factors such as mental aptitude and physical feature -- perhaps that is a principle that has been lost in today's gaming industry.
Gaming today is increasingly based on real life issues and problems -- war, disease, terror. Whilst this is certainly not a bad thing, after all, gaming has as much potential as any other medium to deal with real life issues, it seems that the proportion of these types of games are too high, which sometimes leads to the fantasy aspect of gaming being neglected.
I think gaming is about taking the gamer through a journey, an adventure from start to finish -- delivering a fantasy within and beyond the player's bedroom -- the notion that game's such as Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda were built upon. So whilst I don't hate casual gaming (I've played many the hour on Wii Sports) I think, at least there should room in every console for traditional, time consuming, social life destroying game play.
Whether this kind of gaming, with punishing difficulty level catches on is up to the gaming public at large -- we have a decision -- we can rejoice at this rejuvenation, or merely ignore this slightly geeky gaming world of yesteryear.