The Legend of Rolfe: Skinner's Box

    I still remember my first time going through the Romani series of sidequests. One of the minor locations in the game, the Romani Ranch, is a farm you can't reach until the final day of a cycle, and it's where you need to go to save your horse. When you get there, you see a little girl in astounding physical pain and confusion, waddling aimlessly and struggling with coherent sentences. Her sister is numb with grief, too numb to care about the end of the world. There is nothing you can do.

    It's only way later in the game that you get the option to visit them earlier, and you learn that this place is under attack, cursed by plague after plague, from boulders trapping them inside their walls, to unexplained forces lurking at night to attack the cows and the kids.

    That little girl is there, cheerful and well. Her name is Romani, and she thinks it's aliens attacking the barn, and asks for your help fending them off, since her sister thinks she's only kidding around.

    The image of her gripping her head in agony flashes in my mind. I grip my controller tighter.

    They only appear at 2:30AM, and it's barely past midday, so it will be a while until the fight starts. But this is weighing on me too much, and I'm too afraid of missing the time and dooming Romani to her catatonic state. I wait in the farm for the whole day.

    Night falls, and everything is dead quiet. Nothing to do or see, but the looming fear of failure, and the horrifying face of the moon, inching so, so atrociously slowly.

    ...So! The Angry Video Game Nerd, huh? The nonplussed entertainment dork that has his fingerprints soldered on nearly all video content on the internet. He certainly dribbled all sorts of manure and fornication synonyms into my young skull, and it was yet another reason for my mother's disappointment, but can't say that long forgotten attachment is why I'm talking about him.

    See, my sister sent me his Majora's Mask review a couple of days ago. We had a little back and forth about my opinions on it, which led her to think broadcasting my thoughts in some way would be a good idea. And, well, I couldn't possibly live with myself with this empty section of my blog festering in its depths. So how about we prove a family member wrong today?

    ...This is the part where the Content Creator would say we're doing this to celebrate spooky season, but it's the first blog post on a neocities website with no SEO. But don't let me stop you from putting some $1 fangs and a cape on! I'll give you some sticky candy and giggle at how you struggle to put your teeth back on.

    The question that's reasonable to ask is: what does this video say? Usually, one would expect that question to be a little weird to answer for James Rolfe's AVGN character, since, to wit, it's not designed with that kind of lens in mind. Broadly, games, consoles, and peripherals are not so much to be understood as essay subjects, but as building blocks, stacked together to make absurd, hyperbolic, and explicit effigies of excess. Middle fingers, explosions, killer cyborg Jesus, the works.

    Well, perhaps this is because my memory isn't worth beans, perhaps it's because his style has changed over the years, and perhaps I should have bothered to check before writing a whole bloody article about it, but while this video, too, has its fair of smoke and mirrors, everything is presented in a much more grounded fashion. The Nerd speaks highly of the game's reputation, lets us peek behind the curtain to see the shortcomings of his experience, and all but tells us he's doing this to get a game off his bucket list, in a way I see no reason to disbelieve. It's a game review with a handful of skits.

    Handily enough, it's a game review with one major argument, of which most of the footage is branching off of. And it's something I can even paraphrase:

[The time mechanic] has no reason to be there.

    Now, Zelda is a funny little green guy. And the game he's from is primarily known for its exploration and puzzle-solving. Big, sprawling dungeons, leading you back and forth looking for keys and items and skelytoons to shoot them beams at. Majora's Mask does not deviate from this format at all, so it seems like a contradictory game element to just plop in there, doesn't it?

    What's more; this is a 3D Zelda. You know what those pesky little things love? Dialogue. You know what resetting your game makes you re-read? Dialogue. Why would they design the save system in their new Zelda game to force-reset your game and make you re-do entire portions of the game over again? Dialogue.

    Finally, the time system works on a schedule. Which means certain events only take place at certain times in-game, and you're not given a good way to navigate time other than skipping 6|12 hours or starting fresh. This means, at certain points, you'll have no choice but to wait around for event flags to trigger!

    In short, anything that this game could possibly have as a negative gets compounded many times fold by the presence of this dang clock, so why is it there in the first place? What were they thinking?! Stinky poopoofart?!? As the Nerd says.

    And. Well, I can painlessly give him as much as the remake making a good call in letting Song of Double Time warp you to any time you want. And that the bank-teller's dialogue tree you interact with every once in a while is mildly unoptimized.

    But the first response one can give to the arguments presented here is that... well... it's the point of the game, innit? It's understood that, as part of any game, accepting the mechanics through which it presents itself are part of the implicit transaction. You play Mario to jump on that turtle, you play Kirby to suckle enemies, you don't play Pokémon. Without any of their features, those games would fundamentally not be, because they're built around the core pillars of their design, and the time limit is very much that for Majora's Mask.

    The overworld is puzzling and dungeon-like in short bursts, permanent checkpoints are littered throughout your time traversing Termina, and it's a much smaller and self-contained world than most Zelda romps, all in service of accommodating and enhancing your time-constrained time. Removing this would inherently make the game lesser-than, languid, lacking.

    The second response one can give is that, and this is not to hurt $500.000,00 net worth owner James Rolfe's feelings, who's reading this right now; some of the issues he was facing weren't issues. They were misplays.

    You're shooting the Ice Arrows too close to the wall, that's why platforms aren't forming. You don't need to talk to the Bomber in East Clock Town, you're playing tag with him, you can just talk to the guard and shoot a bubble at him like the game just taught you how to catch him. You're not supposed to mindlessly shoot arrows at Wart's bubbles, it's an eye boss in a Zelda game, you're supposed to experiment with items until you can hit the. The eye. Why did you forget every single boss ever spawns a Heart Container and walk right past it. I'm going to have a stroke, Nerd.

    Now, of course, there are frustrating mini-games that the timer really does grind your nose against for hours on end. The Powder Keg despawning on a day passing is very silly, I've never seen anyone beat Goron Race first try, and James should be thanking cyborg killer Jesus he doesn't know what the Beaver Bros. are.

    But.

    And this is the part where I might lose you.

    Does it NEED to feel good? Do you NEED this video game to be a constant shot of adrenaline down your gullet that you got from Hunter from middle-school? Because saying yes to this, or even a lot of “no, buts” might fail to account for an important, intimate element, that the Nerd only mentions briefly, which leads to my third response.

    Context. This game isn't a series of fun snapshots testing your reflexes and pattern recognition. It's certainly doing that as well, but that might not even be why someone plays this game in the first place. What hook a kid might have looking at a video game, barring any brand or abetting, is getting to play a role and explore a world. And this world we're given to walk is dying.

    Think about the Moon. Think about how its gnarled visage towers over your from the start of the game, and never goes away. Every single landscape littered by its presence, an entire section of your screen dedicated to its great impact on the world. The game will not allow you to forget about it for even a second. Because it should be tense, shouldn't it? Uncomfortable. Sad.

    If this sounds too weird or unrelated, please remember that one of the specific things the Nerd complains about is a quest with some farmers that rip you off, make fun of you, and try to run Romani Ranch out of business, is hard and costs Rupees, so it's annoying to do. Like. Yeah, Mr. Angry, if that's your real name! That's the point! You're not supposed to milk serotonin from the bunghole Luigi brothers, this isn't 2007 deviantart!

    And worst yet, most story beats go entirely ignored in favour of these complaints. We don't hear a peep of Skull Kid's story or who the Four Giants are, which are pretty central to your understanding of the game, so let alone any other piece of world building that ever tries to get its head out of the water while the Nerd pushes it down.

    This video is 40 minutes long.

    All of these elements altogether paint an image of James playing this game incuriously and uncharitably, and belies an understanding of video games as machines that give you the good feeling when you press the good feeling button, rather than a series of mechanics and experiences holistically built to present a particular story.

    There are games meant to turn your brain off and blast you with good kinaesthetics. But even in those, I think one would do well with their time with a game if instead of being annoyed and holding their every second under systematized scrutiny, they let themselves to sit in the dark and be afraid of the aliens and the moon every once in a while.