Want to hear the least substantive video game review ever? I'll tell you it right now. "This game is positively terrible. You just end up hitting the same buttons over and over again, like a rat at a feeder pellet. You just sit there and hit the button until you can move forward, and you then hit it again until you clear the level. And after doing that enough, you beat the game." I mean, that says nothing about the game whatsoever, except that it's repetitive. If I was to actually write a review like that, the people calling for my head would be right to do so, for once.
Here's the big catch in all that – what game did I just describe? A part of the Final Fantasy series? Maybe Quake? Or Ratchet & Clank? Heck, you couldn't even tell me what genre I just described. Role-playing games, first-person shooters, some sports games – maybe even an real-time strategy game. It's pretty vague, isn't it?
I bring this up because, in too many forum discussions (yes, even here), I have seen this accusation levied against plenty of games, and even genres. It's like the one argument you can always predict will come out of a video gamer's mouth – at some point, in their lives as a gamer, you will hear a gamer describe a game or genre they don't like in this regard. I'm not going to pretend to be the exception – Doom was the first game I ever described like that. Or maybe it was U.N. Squadron. Or possibly Bad Dudes. The point is, I'm not so sure when I first said that, but I certainly have many times.
Perhaps the reason this one gets thrown around so much is because, at heart, it's fundamentally true of nearly every video game. Yeah, you can sit there and hammer on the fight command in a role-playing game. But you're just as prone to just mashing the fire button on a first-person shooter. The guy playing a massively multiplayer online game is spamming his macros just as intently. Fighting game fans end up going with the same moves repeatedly (as far as I can tell, the difference between a regular fighting game player and an expert is the expert figures out how to string their five favorite button presses together).
And let's all be honest – you can get away with that with quite a few games. You can, more often than not, just blitz the appropriate button until either your thumb or the controller is busted (in my case, invariably the controller). And you'll end up winning. Sure, maybe not with all the fun stuff available in the game (though in the case of Okami, you probably can anyhow). But you still win. Particularly once you know what you're doing, games are often just an excuse to hit the same button repeatedly in an appropriately-timed sequence until it throws an ending at you.
The big catch there is the "once you know what you're doing." More often than not, it's more fun to push through the game without relying on just one particular button/move/strategy. And beyond that, it often takes time to find the appropriate button. It's not like you're just going to buzz through Final Fantasy with just the Fight command, after all. No, not even the first one, though you could do better there than in later installments. I mean, you could just inflate your levels to absurd points by just fighting imps in the beginning until you hit the level cap – but in the time it takes to do that, you could easily beat the game a dozen times, actually having fun with using different moves and strategies.
Now, with that all said, there are times when this is a valid criticism. After all, the general set-up of a game usually prevents you from leaning on an amazing ability through the whole thing. Maybe you only have limited uses. Maybe it's not as simple as a single button press. Maybe it's not available until really late in the game. However the designers put it together, the basics are there – you aren't able to just romp through everything until much later. However, should you be able to just get ultimate power immediately and use it easily and freely, then it is fair to start using this complaint. And I don't mean things like power-leveling to the level cap in a role-playing game. I'm talking about things like discovering a combination of basic tactics that make it nearly impossible for enemies to hit you in the first level.
Yeah, there are times when you just don't like a game, or an entire genre. But you have to come up with something much more plausible than effectively comparing people to rats at the feeder bar, hoping a pellet will come out. If you boil it down, all video games have that going on. I know most are more complex than that, but you can credibly say that you just need to hit a button enough times to win with enough games that the critique is mostly meaningless except for those few that let you become super-powerful close to the beginning with little effort. So if you're not going to like a game or genre, come up with something a bit more plausible. If we start raising the level of discourse in forums, it will reach all levels – even the top reviewers.
