Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [103]
In fact, his lack of consequence has its definite advantages. No soap opera recasting: “The part of Mario will be played by Crash Bandicoot.” No Zelda-style collective amnesia over what happened in previous games. No Dune-style flame-outs where later stories are hamstrung by the originals. Tell a story long enough, even one like James Bond or Batman where the actors keep swapping in and out, and soon enough it has to be rebooted. That consistency, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous “hobgoblin of little minds,” becomes an anchor weighing down new ideas.
Mario has no such consistency issues: all Miyamoto wants from the guy is a connection to gamers. He’s at one end of a tug-of war, pulling for Mario to be recreational, away from the half-hour cut scenes of the storytellers on the other end of the rope. But Miyamoto is only one man, and thus some very clever story sometimes sneaks in under the portcullis.
For instance, the end of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door reveals that the big treasure Bowser and Mario have been questing for the whole game is . . . a ruse. Mario has really been doing a demon’s work, and his collected Crystal Stars will reassemble the Shadow Queen, an evil force who was banished a millennium ago. And the body she’s coming back in is Peach’s. Now Mario has to attack the princess he’s been trying all game to save: very troubling. After Mario and company drop her hit points by seventy-five, the Queen becomes invincible. Round after round, she no-sells whatever he throws at her. The player undergoes a level of panic paralleling Mario’s dilemma: there’s no way to win.
Then, since this is Mario, things get better. In a cut scene, Peach fights back and escapes to safety, Mario gets his hit points maxed out, and the next round of the fight begins with the Peach-free Shadow Queen. Mario (and you at home) can without agita now finish the fight.
Most any other game would feature more realistic-looking characters, proportioned not like giant toddlers but like adults. But the hydrocephalic Mario look ties in with cartoon academic Scott McCloud’s theory of simplistic empathy; the more basic a drawing, the more human and relatable it is. We feel for good old Charlie Brown’s heartbreak more than Funky Winkerbean’s, because Charlie Brown is simpler. We feel more with Mario than with a more realistically proportioned hero like Master Chief or Lara Croft. (Not that the buxom Ms. Croft is the best example of realistic proportions.)
Most every other gaming hero that’s come since has had the burden of creating a personality for its star. Crash is silly, Sonic is snarky, Jak is stoic. Mario has the freedom to have no personality at all: that’s why Charles Martinet’s Father Guido Sarducci voice seems so risible. When Mario opens his mouth he’s a specific person. Mute, he’s our eternal alter ego. To update Joseph Campbell’s line, Mario is the face of a thousand heroes.
MARIO MAY NEVER FIGHT AN OPPONENT OTHER THAN Bowser, but Nintendo is seeing some new rivalries. Let’s look global. Nintendo is at the very top of Greenpeace’s yearly naughty list for electronics companies. Unlike every other hardware manufacturer, Nintendo has no recycling program to strip out harmful toxins and heavy metals in its old Gamecubes and Game Boys. Greenpeace is promoting a contest to see which company goes green first, but Nintendo is the only one not even trying. This despite the Wii using five times less energy than competitors.
It would be Nintendo style to have been working on such a solution for years, and not want to rush things to meet Greenpeace’s deadline, and thus be branded the most irresponsible company in electronics. But it would also be Nintendo style not to have any such plan (because that’s what the competition is doing), or to have even considered the matter. But maybe it’s learning: all of its Wii releases now come in ecofriendly