I like to imagine that he always had a framed photo of Clanker lying around

I have to admit, it would be cool if the fury shadows were each of the playable 3d world characters instead of just Luigi.

For all the talk of box gardens, it's amazing you didn't mention Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, which was directly inspired by them.

The reason he has a picture of Clanker just hit me. It's a literal framed objective.

I love how he says it's fun from it's very first level to second to last, because Champion Road is impossible.

Posting a normal video on april's fools is more subversive than posting an april's fool video

I kinda want to bring up Okami. It's one of my most favourite games and it is done beautifully. It also has a small side objective in which you can feed animals. You approach the animals, find the bag of food they like and then you feed them and get your reward. You don't have to interact with these animals ever again. But you can! You can headbutt them, you can pick them up (or try too when they are too big), you can bark at them, you can use your brush techniques at them. And each and every one of the animals, and there are a LOT in this game, are programmed to react to this. When you headbutt a cat, it will fly away and then hiss at you. If you try to pick up a horse, it shakes you off and runs away. If you do the same to a tiger, it gets mad and hits you. If you let flowers bloom, vegetarian animals will come to eat them, carnivorous will come and play with them. If you let flowers bloom in front of monkeys they will cheer at you. This serves no gameplay purpose at all, but it is fun to do and gives the game an incredible charm. It's this charm that I want to see more in games. And Nintendo's most recent games don't have it anymore.

It definitely goes to show that some of the most memorable shrine challenges in BOTW are the ones where you aren’t in the shrine at all. The little island garden where you’ll be murdered for crushing flowers, the giant monument to Gerudo warriors of the past, the pitch black forest, the deserted island where you start with nothing. I loved the puzzle-based shrines, but none are nearly as clear in my memory. They were fun, but not memorable, not in the way those other shrines were

I think we can all agree that Ceave should have a gardening show

The April Fools joke was that he made a real video when we expected a joke video. Got us good, Ceave!

10:30 The fact that I could recognize three out of four of these just from the reductions is really telling about how iconic Mario Galaxy's levels were.

I feel like this has been going on for a while. Sunshine had those platforming areas without F.L.U.D.D that didn't feel like part of the world, they just felt like they were there specifically for that challenge.

Me: Carefully analyzes wording of intro trying to decide if video is sarcastic or not

"Nintendo's Obsession With Gameplay is Dumb" must be the same mindset people had when they were making automatic levels in Mario Maker

I love minimalist interior design and have done for a long time. This reminded me a lot of how I thought about it when I started, to how I see it now. In the beginning I didn't want anything that wasn't functional because it was unnecessary. As I grew older I started to realize I lived in empty boxes and that "useless" things as plants and paintings were what brought the home to life. That made sense in my head at least:) Anyway great video!

Or what if all the Mommy cats, were distinct from each other, maybe themed personalities like pirate, or punk, and the missing kittens playing off that theme? Now even with the same exact objective there is something that makes them stand out from each other.

The fact i could immediately tell what stages and what game the images at 10:10 were from shows how memorable Nintendo games truly are.

I thought this was a April Fools video, but Ceave never does that.

I think luigi's mansion 3 was a really good balance of gameplay and character it was a pretty fun game but it also had characters and a story and like. When was the last time you saw a mario cutscene with personality?

this is one of those obscure unconscious feelings you're never able to quite put your finger on. great job on explaining your points!

I would have appreciated a video on what Mario would gain from fifteen hours of unskippable cutscenes, but this works too.

"[3D world] is just a ton of fun from its first stage to its second to last" This is the most accurate description of this game I've ever heard.

This video resonates even more strongly after playing Tears of the Kingdom. It's an absolutely incredible game brought down by the fact they don't try to reframe reused content, objectives, enemies , or even story elements AT ALL. The entire game is simultaneously brilliant, while also feeling very focus-tested.

Holy shit you’re not just a voice and have an actual physical body? My god I had no idea.

10:37 I instantly recognized the Desert level and Cookie level from Super Mario Galaxy and now I want a whole quiz show where you show "bare minimum levels" and have people guess what actual video game levels they are

I love how the fire flower fire power power up fire ball’s name just keeps evolving

This is such a great statement and huge props for putting it into video form Ceave. This is something I have felt a lot recently too but I couldn’t ever really put it into words, until you made this video. A lot of the reason people look back at Nintendo’s older games so fondly and with so much nostalgia in my opinion is for how lovingly crafted they were. Not only were they fun gameplay wise but their worlds were all so unique and beautiful for their times. When Mario sunshine came out it was so fun to dive into the adventure of Mario falsely accused for a crime he didn’t commit on a vacation resort and all the crazy adventures accompanied by it. Mario doesn’t need to have deep storytelling, it never has even had it. But it has lost its charm. We went from sunshine’s amazing premise and fun adventures to “oh no, bowser is big and angry, find some cat shines to calm him down”. Why are we even helping bowser junior? Bowser has always been and enemy and even Mario looks not interested to help out. It just seems rushed with little thought put into it. And all the little adventures are gone. It starts to feel the same after a while. I would just like to see Mario go on some of those crazy adventures like he used to go on, with the coating to back it up, and keep it all fresh and interesting. Good job and a great video Ceave :)

I love how “fuzziful” just becomes a normal word that we become used to hearing.

you see, this is an april fools prank. the absence of a prank can be a prank in itself, and Ceave has outplayed us all in 4D prank chess

0:19 "digital crack" yea that sums up Factorio pretty well lmao

Very interesting case about contextualizing challenges. I have never really seen these challenge rooms in Nintendo games as artificial, but when comparing it to something like banjo and kazooie you make an interesting point. Also for me in particular, I really like the shrines in BotW because of the many different ways you can solve them (or skip them). I wonder if Nintendo would continue to make fun gameplay but add a little extra in the stpry / contextualizing department. It could make their games even better.

It’s crazy to see Ceave’s total transformation from a KZfaqr doing 2d Mario completion challenges to one of the most insightful game design commentators on KZfaq. Tbh I loved him then and it’s even better now.

I love how Ceave has evolved from making Mario Maker tips and tricks videos, to challenge videos, to incredible game design analysis videos.

The locked 8 axis movement in 3D World makes aiming the fireballs at enemies a total nightmare

When I played A Hat in Time i noticed that some platforms in this game are awkward to jump on unlike newer mario games where platforms always perfect shapes (like sometimes hills aren't hills anymore but just stairs made out of grass). That's what i like in A Hat in Time that environments don't have perfectly shaped platforms like in real world.

i’ve felt this way too! i’m glad you made a video about this because when i’ve expressed this people have called me “ungrateful” or something to that effect. my problem is these don’t feel like places that existed before mario got here, which is crucial to immersion in any media. it feels like they were like, conjured up by some weird god-like entity and when mario leaves, they’ll disappear too. there’s nothing that indicates these places existed, there’s nothing that indicates it’ll exist when he leaves, there’s nothing that indicates any kind of life existed here. the platforms don’t even have any kind of wear or unevenness. they’re all perfectly shaped “video game floor” like you said. bowsers fury has the cat theme going on, but why? why are there so many cats here? why are the bells here? if you remove the ears from enemies and the giant bells or change them to something else, nothing in the world feels out of place. what if some of the islands were cat-themed? maybe big rotating scratch posts? giant cat toys for obstacles/platforms? i don’t know, but it just feels like there’s nothing giving them personality or a soul like you mentioned

Who's that guy in the thumbnail? He looks like some red luigi.

It's weird to think the Shrine sameness might have been a deliberate choice and not a time constraint problem. You never cease to surprise me.

Great analysis. I started thinking about the illusion of new content by coating as it is done in WarioWare, specially the first game: like half of the games are press A at the right time, except a new scene is given in each one.

I don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed that I recognized two of the four gameplay maps before you even revealed what game they were from.

26:20 "Waluigi's lost Smash invitation" I'm dead xD

I would also have liked to see some explanations on how and why Bowser became like that, on why he doesn't even care about attacking his own child or on what was this black goop and what caused it to appear. Like Bowser didn't see Mario, he didn't have any objective and he didn't even kidnap the princess, he just became mad while picnicking with his son which, when you think about it, is the worst moment to become mad. That is what led me to realize how gameplay is prioritized over anything else: the fact they didn't even bother to give us the simplest explanations. I honestly was wondering what was I even playing when I first got in the game, I felt lost because of the so ridiculously bare-bone "story" they were giving us. As you said, Bowser Fury is just "we throw you in a gigantic gameplay focus area, now have fun" without any depth whatsoever added on top, but even though the lack of scenery is part of the reason why that is, I definitely think that the lack of a story (not a deep one, I know this is a Mario game, something like 3D World's is enough) also is a big deal in that equation.

I actually really like the mini-challenges in Odyssey. Sure, they seem artificial, but it seems in-place for a game such as Odyssey.

I loved the challenge rooms in Odyssey because they just felt freaking surreal. But if the whole game would be like this... It wouldn't be that great. For me it's just a setting itself.

Thank you for making this video in honor of the recently deceased plumber Mario.

I love that little part at the beginning because I’ve always wanted to hear someone talk about how great 3D world is

that fact that i had to do a double take to realize it wasn’t just a straight screenshot at 21:21 really nailed home the point for me

26:30 fuzzies lost smash invitation, fuzzies lost smm2 invitation, fuzzies lost mario party invitation

I think the conclusion of the video could have benefitted greatly from explicitly pointing out that both SMO and BotW have a *mixture* of environment *and* pure gameplay. Yes, SMO does have a lot of moon obtained from "artificial" means, but also plenty from unique ways, like saving a bowl of soup from a big mean bird, or by gathering musicians and repairing the power grid in order to prepare to celebrate with a giant throwback festival. Yes, BotW does have shrines, but they also have quests for plenty of other things, like you need to find a place in the giant open world where a picture was taken a hundred years ago to regain your memories of the past, or you need to find people to help out a new growing settlement with their names also required to end in "-son", or you need to help all the people in a town to show you care about them and gain the trust of their leader. In my opinion, that would have been the perfect segway into a "but..." where he explains that Bowser's Fury goes too far into pure gameplay elements with no contrast. I think it kind of diminishes the point where you directly compare BotW and SMO with Bowser's Fury, when you could instead use the first two as the "just right" mixture of pure gameplay and environment and meaningful objectives, and then Bowser's Fury being the example of going too far to one extreme.

"intricicately" "intricicacies" "fuzzyful" "in my humble opipinum" "relephant" What the wiggler am I waffling about?

The start perfectly sums up why I think 3D World is one of the most underrated mario games. Probably because it was 1. Released on the Wii U ( honestly an underrated console in itself ) and 2. Because people say it's too linear but that doesn't stop THEM from loving Mario Bros 3, another linear game just with different stages, power ups and one less dimension. But I think 3D World is better top 10 I'd say ( Mario World is better than Bros 3 change my mind ). 9/10 easy. *In my opinion*

I felt this same problem when playing through Paper Mario and the Origami King. Everything was focused on gameplay to the detriment of everything else.

This makes a lot of sense. You can tell Nintendo stopped focusing on the “garden design” just by analyzing the atmosphere of their new games. In Mario odyssey, each level is just floating in the sky. It weirds me out so much when I’m on the edge of New Donk City and just see an endless void of nothing below me. Why can’t there be buildings blocking my way instead? Then it would feel more like a real city. Instead it’s just floating island level number 500. Just compare Princess peaches castle stage to the original one from sm64. Mario 64 has clear tall walls that make you believe you are in a real location. Odyssey is yet again a floating island, and if you look out, all you see is an endless field of nothing. Mario galaxy has floating islands, but in that game you are literally in space flying to each planet so it makes thematic sense. In the new Mario games it just feels like you are in another level rather than another world. Same goes for breath of the wild. In previous games, the dungeons were so atmospheric. Each one had its own aesthetic and music. Think about the water temple in skyward sword with the heaven and hell theme, or the forest temple in ocarina of time being really spooky with its creepy music and enemies. In botw, it’s just generic sheika designs everywhere. Barely different music, no varying enemies, no actual atmosphere. For Christ sake even the bosses are all the same looking. The only thing that comes close to atmospheric is Hyrule castle, which has cool environments and music. But that’s not even a real “dungeon.” In conclusion, Nintendo has stopped making atmosphere a priority. They decide to prioritize gameplay but sacrifice soul like you said. I really doubt they will ever go back, because what they make now sells, and what sells gets made more.

Why is everyone uploading on April Fool's, and half of the time it's a legitimate video

I don't fully agree on the idea that putting a coat of paint over the same challenge will make it good? I know a good setting is a lot more likely to make a game memorable but that doesn't need to be mutually exclusive with fresh gameplay ideas.

{Too much a focus on gameplay! TOO MUCH GAMEPLAY! That's like saying games are too much fun. Do you really want more grinding, leveling, and button mashing with flashy aesthetics?} This was the first video I saw today, but after a couple of seconds I remembered what the date was. I cheerfully clicked on the video, only to be given a very very compelling case for why Nintendo is stripping things down too much. Dang Ceave you make my head spin.

I was going to sit half an hour watching this video ironically, but it isn't an April fool's video, so I'm going to sit half an hour watching this video unironically Edit: I did it (I also April fooled myself by sitting 31:39 minutes instead of half an hour)

I had a similar idea like this, but this video put this issue to words! Although I also enjoyed these games, there was something “plastic” and “dull” but I couldn’t put my finger in it. I really hope Nintendo can learn from this issue and give a sense of identity and nostalgia to what are already engaging games.

I thought at some point, you were going to bring up that Miyamoto quote where he says: "It's fine without a story, do we really need one?"

Petition to have Ceave use Killer Bean Forever music in his videos unironically

25:22 Damn, Ceave going for the edgy jokes 😳😳

Nintendo is dumb, I agree. Like for example Mari- *gets shot*

I have a question about this. I definitely agree with you on this and have noticed it in my playing of Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, but what would you say about the fact that these two recent games are commonly considered some of the best, if not the best, games on the Switch? Would you say that they managed to achieve this despite their lack of “coating” because other parts are so good, or that since they didn’t have to coat anything they could work more on other aspects of the game, or that it doesn’t really have an impact now but will down the road when Nintendo fans are burnt out from “uncoated” games? I doubt you’ll see this, but if you do or if someone else has their thoughts I would love to hear them.

Other AAA games sort of hit the same problem from the opposite direction where everything is so needlessly detailed that you tend to look past everything for the gameplay elements. Then it doesn't matter that things are coded differently since you only see the gameplay objects at that point.

Oh and there's another problem with this design philosophy, or maybe more just about Miyamoto, and to show you it, we need to talk about Koizumi. Yoshiaki Koizumi wanted to do cinema, to do art, he ended up making Nintendo games, even as director, and so he did some of the best Nintendo games ever like probably his best piece of art, made without the intervention of Miyamoto: _The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask_ . And what a masterpiece it was, being excellent gameplay wise ANS thematicly wise, with great messages included even in the gameplay itself, the game is actually build around what it wants to say. It was fresh, so rare in Nintendo games to have a focus on the thematics along with the gameplay. After that, Koizumi worked as the director of _Super Mario Galaxy_ but Miyamoto didn't really like his philosophy or putting things other than the gameplay first, even alongside the gameplay, to put story and morals in HIS franchises. Koizumi probably already tried to do this in _Super Mario Sunshine_ but Miyamoto stopped him. For Galaxy, he had to be smarter, themes would be hidden, in the music, in the universe, in the story book. Koizumi wrote Rosalina's story book in one night to not be influenced which Miyamoto found interesting. With Miyamoto not seeing what he did, Koizumi talked about family, its loss, its gain, through Rosalina, comparing it to the terrifing eternal silence of the infinite spaces, making one of the best Mario game ever. BUT THEN, MIYAMOTO remarked it and basically destroyed Koizumi artistic carrer, he would never be a director again, just a simple producer with no artistic ambitions and for all HIS games, the gameplay would now be putted first AND ALONE. No one cares if Zelda M.M. is better than O.o.T. or if Galaxy 1 is better than Galaxy 2, the games are still good, Galaxy 2 is actually better in game design than Galaxy 1. But the games will never reach their full artistic potentiels. And that's another reason why putting the gameplay first before anything else is, in a way, bad. Hopefully, there's still hope, last year, a Mario game with excellent story and a moral released with _Paper Mario: The Origami King_ .

I just wanted to say I appreciate the sections are green star 1, green star 2, green star 3, collectable stamp, and top of the flagpole. Now you have to hit the top of flagpole with the other 4 characters though

Bowser’s Fury lacks so much coating because it was a low-budget bonus addition whose dev team ended up making it into a relatively substantial standalone adventure.

A majority of this issue comes from Miyamoto himself with keeping things as "pure" as possible. Not everyone at Nintendo thinks that way, but over time, they've been restricted more and more from putting their own spin on things. Why else would a harmless thing like Rosalina's backstory be so frowned upon that it had to be snuck into the game? Someone else commented this but it does describe Miyamoto to a T: he's the type of guy who would make an extremely delicious batch of chocolate chips and will look at you in horror if you ever use those chocolate chips in any kind of recipe.

25:22 Uh Ceave..? You- you forgot to add the cat part of the word... no??? Okay...

I'm so sad Ceave didn't talk about Hollow Knight, because it's *incredibly* atmospheric: you don't platform on a specifically designed platforming challenge making use of conveyor belts, you jump across a crystal-lined ravine using conveyor belts erected by an ancient civilization that are being used to transport the crystals that are being mined from the area's walls by the area's enemies. Nothing in Hollow Knight feels out of place or video-gamey. (Except maybe the saws in the White Palace.)

That box garden thing is a great way to describe the vibe I've always gotten from my favourite 2D Zelda games, like LttP and Minish Cap. Even though their worlds are pretty small, every screen somehow feels gigantic and mysterious because of how thick the atmosphere is. Exploring the caves of Death Mountain or looking down from the the cloud-top area in Minish Cap always made me feel like I was legitimately at the edge of the world, pushing the boundaries of the game map into unknown territory (even though not much was really there). Same goes for certain dungeons in Twilight Princess- getting stuck for an hour on spatial awareness puzzles somehow came off as overcoming daunting and ancient trials rather than being too stupid to remember which way the water staircase was pointing, etc. Ironically I rarely got that feeling from BotW, the game Nintendo designed entirely around the concept of exploration. You could chalk it up to me just being older, but I have gotten that childhood Zelda feeling from one modern game- namely Hollow Knight- so there must be something more to it. Anyway, this was a very insightful video.

I'm not sure if Bowser's Fury is a great example to use given it was probably a lower budget project given its purpose as a sorta bonus scenario for a Wii U port.

I always thought that gameplay was the most important thing which I still do think, but context and/or art is also very important. I probably wouldn’t enjoy games nearly as much if everything were just colored blocks

Grab the kitty like a president. That made laugh

I kind of wanted a secret where we find that all of the shrines are connected into some kind of mega-dungeon, but then i realized that was just portal, so i went and played portal again.

Breath of the Wild's repetitive korok seeds bothered me a lot more than the shrines. Copy paste characters with the same dialog and types of hiding places and puzzles are much less believable than environments that look the same. Honestly if we just had different forest, mountain, desert, snow, and air shrine designs that would have gone a long way. Bowser's Fury would probably be less visually repetitive if it were truly it's own game. Each group of islands do look fairly distinct. Mount Magmeow didn't have to have a giant cat face etched in rock for gameplay purposes at all. The main thing that bothered me were the lighthouses talking to you. I'm pretty sure those should have been characters that lived in the lighthouses. Also Bowser Jr's cutscene should have been voice acted.

You've really clarified to me tons of problems I've had with Nintendo games but never really understood why they were problems at all. Watching playthroughs of Bowser's Fury, I didn't get why every single cat was a calico. They're already going so far as to literally repeat the same task multiple times. Now presumably they're using the rule of 3 to elevate the challenge each time, with more cats in more complicated locations (usually the function that makes 3D Land levels so good in the first place) but they can't even reskin the goddamn cats! Make one family calicos, the next one tomcats, and the last one could be more colourful and wild to look like they belong in a Mario game. But no, just the exact same calico skin every time. Breath of the Wild is one of my favourite games of all time. The first time I played it, I didn't really notice anything wrong with the shrines or divine beasts because I was so busy having fun with the unique puzzles (or getting frustrated with the gyroscope ones). I started to get tired of the tests of strength, but they were paced out enough I didn't take much notice. Second time playing through on my switch, the shrines weren't really fun anymore. It was either plain old boring, or actively frustrating that I can't seem to do this puzzle I KNOW I've done before. The third time I played the game (now in Master Mode) I found the most pleasure in actively avoiding fast travel and discovering every little piece of beauty. Visiting a glowing Satori Mountain for the first time, discovering little hole in the wall locations, just beautiful experiences like that. The shrines and divine beasts were absolutely nauseating, though. I couldn't get through them fast enough, considered learning the wind bomb technique just to skip the puzzles at hand, used any skips I'd learned from watching speedruns of the game. And now I understand - they're goddamn boring once you lose the novelty of a new puzzle. I wanna be a Nintendo Fanboy so bad, they have so much potential and I've loved their games for ages, but they seem to just keep getting worse.

Last time I was this early, Ceave was still making the Mushroom Kingdom Championships in SMM :D

Yep. World building and narrative is usually as important for me as gameplay. It's the difference between going to a theme park with great rollercoasters but no theming and going to a theme park where every world you step into is rich and specific and immersive. I'd rather go to the latter, even if the coasters weren't as good.

I completely agree with the BOTW shrines, they not only all looked almost identical, that the reward was always the exact same piece of heart/stamina. Sure you got clothes sometimes, but it's not like you get items that draw a visual or thematic connection to the shrine puzzle.

the april fools joke is at 11:17, where ceave accidentally says "opinion"

*sees notification*: Oh, another April Fools video. Let's see *opens video and sees 31:39 at the bottom*: - Oh wow, he really put a lot of effort for a April Fools video. That's odd. *3 minutes in*: - Oh, this is actually a genuine video. Now that's the ultimate April Fools.

i was thinking how i felt like mario odyssey feels a bit like a thinly coated facade, like you could pull back the curtain and see the gears at any points, like the illusion is extremely easily broken compared to some earlier mario games. idk

25:21 "we grab the pvssy like a president" Ceave spitting fire

I think you "framed" this episode completely wrong. By saying "gameplay first", that means that it's an issue of priority, rather than of focus. What do I mean about this? Lets say you have 2 games, one whose narrative is designed around a pre-conceived mechanic of painting the ground with your bullets and you have another game whose mechanics are designed around a pre-conceived premise of a realistic Japanese samurai game. By grounding the game's narrative around just those mechanics, you get a story thats very lite, shallow, and hollow. Where with restricting a game based on realistic narrative/astatic, you can no longer introduce non-sensical cartoony mechanics like bouncing off a a chair to get a springy jump. These 2 games I am referring to is Ghost of Tsushima and Splatoon. They represent the 2 sides of "Gameplay First" and "Narrative/Story/Esthetic First" where one would serve as the foundation and everything is catering/built around that. You can still do great things with an "X-First" appreoach while still putting focus on all areas if you choose to. A great example of "focus on all areas" while still having the "gameplay-first" approach would be Sunset Overdrive, so do give that a look if you so choose. And that brings me to my point: The issue you described here. . . that is not the same issue as "gameplay first". What you are referring to is things along the line of "lacking effort in specific areas" or "lack of coating". Notice both are an issue of "lacking", not of "priority". If the art is lacking, the gameplay is not at fault for that. If the art is lacking. . . it's because they lacked to put in some art. The gameplay in this case would not restrict them from adding art nor is it impossible to do it in a way that wouldn't be stepping on the gameplays toes. It's not as much as they were restricted it as much as they were just simply not focusing on it, that they didn't care, that they didn't choose to. If I am going to be blunt. It's a sign of laziness. A choice of not putting in effort for no other reason other than because they wanted to do the bare minimum, bare minimum being making gameplay. They chose not to do more than that with something like adding extra details to "why random platforms" or things of that nature of dolling it up, "coating", as you stated it. That was not a self-imposed restriction by design. That's just being lazy and choosing not to for the sake of minimalization. It's like mini-golf. It's not a full golf course. it's not grass, sand, or water you are golfing on. Its all rugs, fabrics and carpets. It's not that it couldn't be grass, sand or water. It's that they chose not to. Minimalist by design where minimalist is not preferred nor is anything suggesting that it should be this way. No philosophy is dictating the notion of not giving the platforms special attention to detail to give them a nice texture that engrains it more to the world around it. That's not philosophical dictation at play, that's just a choice of not putting in the effort. So now we are back to what I mean when I said your framing was bad. I'm not disagreeing with your points, far from it. I agree entirely with the final notion. However, the framing of "Gameplay first" is framing it as a topic of priority. This issue you are poining out is not that. This is an issue of effort. Your meaning shows this a bit more clearly but your framing used from that term does not. Even if you have a top priority of gameplay, it doesn't mean you just forget about your other priorities entirely. The issue is that they aren't being well-rounded with their focus. You can prioritize something while still being well rounded with the focus on their other priorities. The issue stems from that they aren't trying to be well rounded and balance it. This is why I call it an issue of effort. Because it's not that gameplay has a higher priority, rather that they don't put any focus on anything else. "Gameplay-Only Focus" where it is of "exclusive" priority rather than just "primary" priority. Perhaps the main issue is the use of "first" as far as framing goes. I only point this out because i personally find that "gameplay-first", being that of the approach of designing your world around your gameplay mechanics rather than designing your gameplay mechanics around your narrative ascetics, to be the right approach and that by mislabeling the issue, you are painting a good practice out to be something negative due simply to shifting the blame to the wrong area with your framing. . . and I don't like the idea of scolding a good practice based around simple mislabeling and confusing what the issue actually is: Neglection. Look up Second Wind mod on how it personalizes each and every shrine. Same shrine, but given a better sense of individuality. The issue that mod fixed, that issue wasn't "gameplay-first" or how art effects gameplay, it was just simple attention to detail. It was just the simple choice of doing more. It's not a choice of sacrifices for gameplay sake, it's just simple neglection.

"Some produce digital crack" **Shows Factorio** I *FEEL* that

This video put into words what I had started to feel with BotW's shrines. They at least have the in-universe justification of being deliberate puzzles that characters built, rather than just boring terrain that happens to be puzzling. The sameness isn't quite as bad because they only occur as breaks from the much more real and vibrant overworld, but I would love to see even a small change that at least made the shrines in one region feel different from those in another region, like if the music had a new instrument added in (Drums for Eldin, harp for Lanayru, sitar for Gerudo Desert, etc.)

i’ve been saying this for YEARS THANK YOU

The "digital crack" statement about Factorio could not be more true

Given the title, I was expecting this to be an April fools joke for like the first 10 minutes.

So what you're saying is we need to save Marin from being trapped as a seagull forever !

Can't stop thinking about how in Spyro 3 the majority of dragon eggs are found by directly helping a denizen of the level you are in, and the challenge takes place in the level itself in a really natural way. On top of that from every dragon egg a different baby dragon with a unique name and colouration from like 20 different animated dragon bases is hatched. Really there's a lot that can be learned from Spyro 3. I remember first playing it when I was like 10 and just being gobsmacked at the level of detail.

I would feel more comfortable, if this were to be uploaded tomorrow. But Ceave never fools us on the 1.4

100 percent agree. Breath of the Wild might be my favorite game of all time. But one thing that always baffled me- the npc writing is just terrible! Most characters have nothing interesting to say. I think this is a symptom of the gameyness you're talking about- their sole purpose is to lead the player to the next task.

Imagine how much more engaging the scarecrow challenges could have been if say, you would stumble across luigi in different areas. He's trying to do something important, but isnt up to the challenge himself, so you capture him as mario and have to do the platforming challenge without using cappy to bounce off of because mario is in a capture. After helping luigi, he rewards you with a moon.

Next platformer produced by Nintendo: Sentient Jeans in The Concrete Dimension.

Holy fuzzy. I never realized *that* was the reason I kinda stopped playing newer Nintendo games. I never thought *that* was the reason I didn't like BoTW. It makes so much sense now, what an incredible video Ceave!

Your newer analysis'es are absolutely great and intriguing. Love the development.

I feel like I'm witnessing a crime whenever the subtitles dont exactly match up with what Ceave's saying-

I was trying to figure out why i was really not enjoying tears of the kingdom, and this video made me realize the answer. tears of the kingdom is the epitome of this "gameplay obsessed" design philosophy. Its literally just a fun new mechanic attached to a breath of the wild asset flip.