The Best Feeling In A Game

Ask anyone what the best feeling in a video game is and you'll get a wide variety of answers, the thrill of winning and dominating your foes, the chaos you and a friend can create with a large sandbox, the feeling of discovering a world of lore and fighting their way through it, the terror of having to survive against overwhelming odds. For me though the best feeling in a video game is when the world feels like it could go on forever, that this stretch of world your in is just a small part of something bigger and who knows what lies over the next hill (answer: whatever assets the dev was too busy to delete).

The first time I felt this was when I was 5 and got my first gaming console, a Nintendo Gamecube, along with a copy of Super Mario Sunshine. My mind was blown by just how big the world of Isle Delfino was, how you could see other islands in the distance and how you could swim in their direction, I wanted to see those places and go there. Well I was a dumb child who kept restarting the game to mess around in the opening area so I never went that far, making it to about Pianta Park, the third level, before I quit the game. Which is odd because I breezed through Sunshine when I picked the game back up in 2015 and beat it... not 100%, that would be insane, I've seen the reviews. But I got to Bowser and his god awful voice acting and flipped his acid tub over... seriously, it's rather sad that he fights you in his bath tub, thank god for Galaxy.

The next case would be Halo: Combat Evolved on Xbox, namely Level 4, The Silent Cartographer. In this level they stick you on an island with a few marines and a car. And that was when the real shit began, because there's a second car on the other side of the island and suddenly it turns into Demolition Derby if you get a buddy. But I was truly fascinated by the ocean of the Silent Cartographer, and wanted to see how far I could go, I don't know why, maybe because I was like 8 when I got Halo 1 (yes, my Mom knew what she was doing). But I wanted to know what was further out in that ocean, unaware that the real treasure lay inside the island itself. Unlike Sunshine however, I was a bit smarter and I beat Halo 1 on Easy, helps that it was more linear than Sunshine.

The final big case from my childhood is Spider-Man 2 on Gamecube, in that game New York felt massive, a place you could explore for years and not see everything. You could swing over to the other sub islands, which helped to world feel that much bigger, like there might be even more waiting for that nice spandex ass of yours. Plus the web slinging was so nice I hardly did anything else, which was a problem because I never beat the game, just the feeling of being free to go where I wanted in this concrete jungle was enough.

Sadly this feeling would fade slightly as games got more linear and more about the bang bang shooting than about exploring. But there were rays of hope, even as shooters began to dominate, Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess were fantastic, and Assassins Creed 3 and 4 were always a great time. Ironically the game that did nothing for me was Skyrim, I know, I must be some heretic. Something about the way that game is built always thew me off and I could never quite get into the hang of things.

But occasionally it felt like publishers were trying harder and harder to snuff out that feeling of infinity. 2014-2016 stick out as a particularly down for exploration gaming, with the Assassins Creed series dropping in quality hard after 4, Halo 5 being lackluster to say the least, and multiplayer only shooters becoming as common among gamers as measles among anti-vaxxers.

That said, I found some comfort, I've always been a fan of 2D platformers, First Person Shooters, and real time strategy games. Plus, I got into Kingdom Hearts and revisited Zelda, but I still couldn't help but feel that something was missing. And then the answer the prayer I didn't know I had came in late 2016, Final Fantasy XV, now for me it was a decent game that railroads way to hard at the end. But it started something, it was the first push of a ball that still rolls, one that sees exploration based games making a comeback.

A few months later Sony and Nintendo went head to head with their own open world games, Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch and Wii U. Now, while I think the story was amazing in Horizon, some of the most haunting stuff written; Zelda caught my imagination, it's wide openness began to rouse me from my rut of just blasting through games. Then we had Mario Odyssey, which bough back the old style that Mario 3D World had tossed out and encouraged people to see the sites and do anything they could get away with. 

2018 may have only given us Spider-Man (PS4) but the scale of New York and the fluidity of the movement bought me back to the Spider-Man 2 days, where it felt like anything beyond New York could be reached with grit and determination. Sadly there were no other little islands but i feel like that's fine given how big the game is already.

This all came to mind oddly enough, just a few days ago, I went back and decided to 100% Kingdom Hearts III, and take my time to get it done where before I blasted through it to reach the end. The moment came when I was running through a forest and I turned to see a bunch of trees and a hill beyond some rocks. And, just like I was 5 again, I wanted to see what lay beyond that next hill, where that hill took me, what lay deeper in the forest. But then I realized that those rocks were, but then all of these memories hit me and I realized that that's one of the thing I loved most about gaming, one of the things that had been missing for so long, and what had finally come back.

And damn, is it good to have that back.