My Mission:

For real this time.. (Hint: It's a reference to the 'About me' page.) Sure you can consider me a Mario fan circa right now-. This is despite, to be honest, a disinterest in his contemporary fandom (because they're all children! I'm kidding.. it's the adults that are the problem), but it's time to be a frank on another matter:

I haven't been a dyed-in-the-wool 'Nintendo fan' since (well, I grew up and) the WiiU's awkward era. The rather hard correction after that did renew my zeal for Mario titles at least, but the cracks in the company's culture were showing. Actually.. if you're a OG Nintendo stan, the company hasn't changed their core principles since they entered the video game market. Disapprove their litigiousness? Well did you recall how they attacked piracy on the NES and subsequent? What about censorship? People used to complain about that when discussing older games. Maybe depending on who you ask, that's now in style, but the point is it's not new. Let's not get started on how they hate that used games sales are a thing. Just my opinion, but I think people confuse the Japanese companies of yore with how things are now. Western or not, AAA or indie, gaming has gotten homogenized beyond the smallest projects- and even those can pick up the fleas. Did you think this was a Nintendo rant? No, it's a modern gaming one. Go back a generation or two and suddenly it's a different world. If the games logically have not changed, that can only mean the industry has, hasn't it?

I'm well aware of the great media Nintendo has created, much of which I'm still discovering or revisiting, but I'm not with their post-Switch zeitgeist. Is everything untouchable for me? I won't say that, but for now I'm tired of the lack of creativity, greediness, reliance on derivative content (reissues, remasters, re-whatevers), attempts to remove your ability to own content, lackluster or even agenda laced localizations, politics, and the dearth of community spaces that that aren't Reddit or Discord. The slow boil is too much!