When I was twelve, the X-Men were king. More than king, it was the one superhero book that all other superhero books wished to God they could achieve (even my beloved Batman). Certainly, the climate of the comic book industry at the time was a bubble ready to burst, but at that moment, it was the perfect product of a gifted writer paired with the best artist the industry had ever seen. They were breathing new life into a thirty-year continuity, and, as far as 1991’s X-Men #1 was concerned, selling more copies than any other comic before or since will ever come close to. It was really a thing.
When I was twelve, though, it took a lot of work. Sure, I got into the X-Men because I loved Jim Lee, but trying to crack all of those relationships, rivalries, and history was like starting at a new school and gunning to be the prom queen. Eventually, I did a pretty fair job of figuring it all out, but by then, I was sick of the soap opera, tired of the characters dying, lovers quarreling, monsters attacking, and just about everything else that happens with mutants living in a judgmental world. It’s just the way it was.
I’ve always loved comics in my way, and I’ve gone round and round with them ever since. Eventually, after Morpheus had left the building and the Losers took their final, sweet revenge, I decided I needed to check in with my old friends at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. So I did what any sensible comic nerd would do: I asked a friend to get me up to speed. His reaction? “Wait, you haven’t read these books in close to 20 years? You’re screwed. Don’t even try.”
Of course I did anyway, but he was absolutely right, there’s just too much to catch up on and so much that have wound around to concepts familiar enough anyway, and this was a something that, more or less, comes out monthly. I didn’t want to put the work in, my money and precious time were better spent finding either new experiences or warming to books that I’ve already been following. But what bored me about those other comics is what brought me back around to X-books to begin with. What I’m getting at is that continuity has always been a problem in the comic book industry. While there are certainly the devoted followers that following these books and characters for years (to the point where they’re almost family), decades of back stories both hamstring writers and deter new readers from enjoying the work. It’s a double-edged sword, and something the Big Two publishers have been wrangle with since, well, at least Crisis on Infinite Earths, or maybe even earlier.
In comparison, the games industry is still a relatively young medium, but those same problems are starting to bubble to the surface. Now that the core audience has grown with multiple console generations and has a little more disposable income we can see series of games hitting 6, 8, or even 10th iterations while struggling to keep their own continuity in line, and this has caused some serious problems. This year alone, Resident Evil 6 was criticized by more than a couple of games writers with trying too hard to keep hold of its bio-terrorist story while also going in new directions for the franchise. The result, according to Jose, was “layered campaigns [that] give the impression that it all should come together, It simply doesn't.”
The problems certainly didn’t start with faster zombies and limited resource space. For all of the love that it gets, the Castlevania series has been eating itself alive for years and completely based on its own set of rules. If Dracula only resurrects himself once every century, there should probably only be about 4-5 games at the maximum. Instead, we’ve been seeing spin-offs of varying quality for the better part of a decade that for better or worse have been driving the series into the ground. Handheld entries were the strongest of the bunch, but even those only incrementally grew the formula at a glacial pace. The two console entries of the PS2/Xbox era were mediocre at best when released and haven’t aged any better since then. Vampire-killing needed to move on.
So, was Lords of Shadow the right move? I would argue yes, at least in this case. Konami wisely saw that the Belmont family had run its course at this point, and emulating an already successful franchise like God of War was a natural step to higher worldwide sales. More so, the GoW series wasn’t that far removed from a smart evolution of Castlevania mechanics to begin with: whip-based combat, a more structured limited-open world environment (though not quite level-by-level of most early Castlevanias), gameplay based on skill rather than power leveling and item farming. It didn’t have to emulate the ultra-violence and occasional gratuitous sex its antecedent (something other GoW clones idiotically chose to follow), and smartly decided to dodge these tropes as well.
Then again, was LoS a great game, or even a good GoW clone? Not really if we’re being fair. It was overlong and confining. But I still see this as a necessary step. It’s what they call in comics a “jumping in point” for new players while keeping a classic franchise alive for the long term.
Do we need another Final Fantasy series, then? I would also disagree. While it can’t hurt to have more franchises that reinvent themselves with each subsequent release, trying to start something like another Final Fantasy series at this point would be trying to catch lightning in a bottle. The console industry and FFs have symbiotically grown over the last 25 years, and now that we’re using design principles and strong enough hardware to tell and consume stories in a variety of ways other than via simple text windows, I can’t see how another startup franchise would have the same lasting effect.
So bring on the DMCs, the Mirrors of Fate, the Princes of a different Persia. I’m not naïve enough to think that they’ll all be great, but I’ve seen enough Batman movies to know that it’s the healthy move for growth.