As a kid, my taste in games was considerably more limited from what it is today, so if nostalgia had to revolve around my past experiences, the games I’d regard as nostalgic would be low in quantity, not to mention the fact that I simply lost interest in some of the games I played as a kid but despite this fact, it just happens that there are games out there that I do have nostalgia for.
I would say the biggest example of a game that I have a lot of nostalgia for would be Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal as I spent a considerable amount of time playing them as a kid and I have a lot of attachment to them for that very reason. I would stay up at night and be tired on school mornings because I wanted to catch those night time pokemon in the wild, it felt so immersive to me back then as it felt like an extension of my life and this was all thanks to the real time clock, where each day and each time of day brought about something fresh which meant that to fully experience the game, you had to play every single day both day and night. It was a concept that was ahead of its time, something which we take for granted nowadays. The personalization of your team has always been one of the main attractions to Pokemon as well as the invested empowerment brought by leveling up, which was enough to compel me to play the game for countless hours but on top of that, it had a whole world to explore filled to the brim with secrets, I would wake up and follow my usual routine in game, almost as if it was a daily routine in life “it’s friday so I’m off to the union cave to catch a lapras” or “it’s the day of the bug catching contest, I should head to the park and take part in it to see if I can win or catch a scyther”. These simple pleasures made this game so memorable to me. The feeling of wanderlust enveloped me completely in the game, almost as if I was playing Skyrim, on top of that it also added a lot of quality of life improvements.
In retrospect is Pokemon Gold and Silver good? Well that’s difficult to answer. While it does use old school turn based combat, you’d never really know because fights are entirely one on one so you wouldn’t have to worry about the tedium of selecting commands for an entire party, though this did become a problem in later installments with double battles. The systems used in Pokemon have always been rather questionable in regards of how the game’s variable values are programmed. It may appear to be a simple kids game on the surface but underneath all of that there’s a very convoluted system that is an absolute pain for those looking to min-max to get to grips with and utilize. This has been an issue that has plagued the series for a long time and it only get worse in later entries but Pokemon Gold and Silver, save for the egg hatching mechanic, doesn’t introduce too many convoluted systems like natures, so it’s not the most complex Pokemon game out there thankfully. I think if you’re going into Pokemon Gold and Silver, you need to set your expectations low, especially nowadays but I do think that you can have a fun time with the game even today as it isn’t too flawed to have fun with but it does narrowly avoid suffering from some issues that would have made the game a chore to play.
On the other hand, we have a game that I played and enjoyed as a kid that I simply couldn’t enjoy as an adult, Spiderman 2 Enter Electro on the playstation is a game that I have a ton of nostalgia for. Now I’m not really the biggest comic book or marvel fan out there but this game and I go way back. I remembered so many of the levels, the music, the scenes and felt nostalgic for the game for the longest time after I misplaced it. Upon reacquiring the game and playing it again, I found that the game wasn’t really all that good to begin with, in fact it’s pretty bad but despite all of this, I still have nostalgia for it and the game still lives rent free on my head as a childhood memory, a good childhood memory. I still have a fondness for the game for that reason but as my review shows, the game isn’t all that great in retrospect.
So as you can see, Nostalgia doesn’t affect my opinion on games. That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel it, of course I do but I know well enough when something is nostalgic to me and when something isn’t, in fact I’s even go as far as to say that this extends to games I played as an adult in recent years that take me back to the style of game that I grew up around. Musashi Samurai Legend is one of those games. I absolutely adored the experience overall despite having to trash on it in my review for having a flawed combat system but I still had a great time with it. It reminded me of games that came out around the time I was growing up and the story felt like it was catered towards pre-teens that grew up in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and as one of those people, I resonated with the game so much, yet I still had to trash the game so that my review would not be tainted by my nostalgia.
You see, despite all of this, people assume that my hatred towards modern gaming is solely due to nostalgia which certainly isn’t the case. While I won’t deny that design wise, certain genres have improved and new standards are in place, I feel that modern games don’t experiment as much as older games do and don’t take risks. This is one of the reasons why the classics are better, not because of nostalgia but because risk taking brings about fresh and innovative experiences which are lacking in the current gaming generation. Now sure you can make a case for indie games all you want but those games don’t have the budget to reach the heights of the classic middle shelf games that greatly benefited from having a much higher budget and bigger teams working on them. Nowadays it’s either one or the other, high budget soulless garbage or low budget passion projects that feel lacking. It used to be that you had games that featured both high budgets and passion, those days are over now.
So it’s not nostalgia that is making me dislike modern gaming, if that was true then Star Ocean 6 wouldn’t be my favorite game in the Star Ocean series would it? Thing is though, games like Star Ocean 6 are rare nowadays, most games are either average or trash, plain and simple. Whenever something is above average nowadays, it’s a huge deal, just look at Nier Automata for example, Above average game but not great, yet everybody goes nuts for it. Games like Nier Automata were a dime a dozen back in the 2000’s but nowadays they are rarely seen. So much so that if Nier Automata released in the 2000’s, no one would care, heck nobody cared about Nier when that game came out… but that game came out at a different time, before the industry started to starve us by not releasing good games.
It should also be noted that most of my favorite games that released back in the 90’s and the 2000’s were not games I played as a child, rather they are games that I played later in life. I was a fully grown adult when I played Valkyrie Profile 2 for the first time, I never played that game as a kid and if I did I probably wouldn’t have understood it but the game released around the time when I was still in school and at that point I just got my Nintendo Wii and was playing that as well as all the gamecube games I had like Smash brothers melee and Kirby Air Ride to name a couple of examples. Of course I also played a lot of Final Fantasy back then as well but aside from 5 and at a push 6, I’m not really all that fond of the Final Fantasy series anymore as I just lost interest in it over time but back in the day I thought they were some of the greatest games ever. YS 4 The Dawn Of YS, a game that came out the same year I was born, when I was still urinating in diapers is a game that I beat for the first time in 2023 and it quickly became one of the most impactful games I have ever played in my life. The redbook audio and anime artwork blended in with a classic sprite based RPG in ways I never thought possible and since the game was released in the early 90’s, the synthesizer was still trending at that time so needless to say, the music has that 80’s synth style music but with the 90’s anime artwork overhaul to make something truly special, something that you would never see today. Is that really nostalgia? Or did I simply discover something great for the first time?
So while it may be true that I am living in the past these days, it’s because I continue to live in the past that I can still find pleasure in gaming. If I was to stick to only modern games, I would have lost interest in this hobby because it just isn’t enough to keep me interested but fortunately there’s no shortage of classics out there still waiting for me to discover them. My biggest regret growing up was that I missed out on so many games as a kid, though a lot of that has to do with lack of internet and needing parents to get me the money to buy games with. Back then you had to go to game stores and pray that you find the game that was advertised in a magazine, something that felt like an impossibility but now, thanks to the internet, classic games are so accessible now, making it the perfect opportunity to go back and play all the amazing games I missed and couldn’t admit to growing up with, yes that includes every tri-Ace game ever made, I wish I could have been one of those people who grew up with Star Ocean 2 and Valkyrie Profile 2 but no, I played those games many years after their release, I was late to the party. In a way, that’s always been my problem as a gamer, being late and missing out on all the amazing games of the past. Thank god I haven’t got much to worry about in that regard nowadays, because there’s not much to miss out on now, it’s just the same old shit time and time again.
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