Collect-a-Laylee

I’d like to preface this piece with a disclaimer: I haven’t been much of a gamer in years. I purchased a WiiU last year, and I enjoy the games I have for it, but I haven’t had the enthusiasm I used to in close to five years. I guess I’ve moved on, a fact made that much easier by gaming culture having become really toxic (more on that another day). So anything I say from here-on in must be understood with that lens.

Anyway, let’s talk about Yooka-Laylee:

So Playtonic Games, comprised of former Rare Ltd. employees, decided to create a retro-style video game platformer via crowdfunding. Said game would emulate Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie in aesthetic and mechanics, and for many, especially after the initial trailer, this was the Banjo-Threeie they never got. The anticipation was high, and people were expecting a grand masterpiece…until reviews came in.

I’ll say now that people’s fascination with Metacritic astounds me. Its system of weighing averages doesn’t make sense when the site refuses to show its calculations, and its numbers come off as arbitrary because of that. I find that plenty of games the site was unfavourable/mixed on were, honestly, a lot of fun (like Yoshi’s Wooly World). Not that I begrudge the reviewers featured, mind you, but…moving on.

I mention this because Yooka-Laylee’s reviews weren’t even that bad; on the contrary, they were decent. But the underlying concern seems to be the same: its aesthetic. Many critics felt as though the style of platformer it pays homage to, the 3D, open-world collect-a-thon, doesn’t work in 2017. Video gaming has moved on, so shouldn’t this be considered obsolete? Is there a need for this anymore?

Personally, I’m not a big fan of collect-a-thons to begin with. I never have been. For one, I’m terrible at video games. I enjoy them, but I find it takes me longer than many of my peers to complete them because I get stuck so much more frequently than I intend. And two, collect-a-thons are tedious. My goal with a video game is to enjoy the experience, and collect-a-thons get in the way by making everything a chore.

I’ll use two examples, one past and one recent, to demonstrate this. The first is Donkey Kong 64. Considered one of the best Donkey Kong games ever, let-alone one of the best games on the N64, Donkey Kong 64 thrives on collectibles. There are eight worlds, as well as an overworld, and the developers, Rare Ltd., reasoned that jamming them full of collectibles would entice exploration and create a fun challenge.

This isn’t a bad idea in theory, especially with five playable Kongs that you can swap via DK barrels, but the complication comes in execution. Each of the eight worlds has 500 specially-coloured bananas, or 100 per character, that are needed to unlock the level’s boss battle, as well as 5 Golden Bananas for each to find either via mini-games or special objectives. On top of that, 5 of these Golden Bananas per level are blue print bananas that can only be found by defeating certain enemies to encode a map of King K. Rool’s ultimate weapon. If that’s not bad enough, there are special medals scattered throughout, special balloons that reveal bananas, special coins that act as currency scattered throughout, fairies that have to be photographed to increase health and stamina, film canisters to photograph them, crystal coconuts that increase your Kongs’ special powers, specially-marked ammo boxes for each of the Kongs’ weapons, music notes for each of the Kongs’ musical instruments, watermelon chunks that restore health, oranges that act as grenades and one DK Star per level that triggers a special mini-game. And that’s not forgetting the respective power-ups, musical instrument upgrades and weapon upgrades that each Kong accesses over time. Oh, and did I mention that there are 2 secret medals that need to be found via special mini-games to access the final boss?

If it sounds like that last paragraph was dense and complicated, don’t worry: it’s even worse in-game. Not only do you need all of those items to 100% complete the game (or 101% if you find the secret Golden Banana), but the items are scattered so haphazardly that completing tasks requires swapping Kongs constantly. It usually requires backtracking, swapping out, collecting what you need, backtracking again, swapping out once more, collecting what you couldn’t access before, backtracking a third time, swapping out again, backtracking a final time, swapping to your first Kong and continuing onward. It’s gruelling and frustrating, and while it’s neat in theory, in practice it makes Donkey Kong 64, a relatively fun and well-designed game, a nightmare to finish. I haven’t played it in years, but even as a kid that sort of swapping was tedious.

I’ve heard many defences of the game mechanics: it was because of technical limitations. The game’s flawed, yet the good outweighs the bad. People are being overly-critical in hindsight. While I understand the first defence and sympathize, the second is subjective and the third is harmful to discourse and the advancement of gaming as an art-form. But if me picking on Donkey Kong 64, an almost 18 year-old game, is being “unfair”, then don’t worry: I’ll attack LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga instead.

I adore LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga. It’s easily my favourite piece of Star Wars media, and this is including the films. But it’s far from perfect, and its collectibles are one of the reason. To be fair, the system used is optional, making it a challenge to find all the studs, LEGO canisters and red bricks, yet not mandatory to complete the game proper. Even Free Play mode simplifies collecting everything by giving you an immediate roster of playable characters, whom you can cycle through on the fly, to complete objectives that were impossible in Story mode.

The complication, however, is, again, that some of these collectibles require cycling back-and-forth between characters to access hard-to-reach areas for little-to-no reward. It’s not as bad as Donkey Kong 64, at least you don’t need to backtrack to swap out, but it can be tedious when you forget that that one cluster of studs needed to fill your Stud Meter was in an area you can’t reach without a character you haven’t purchased yet.

On top of that, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga encourages exploration for the sake of unlocking Gold Bricks. But if you don’t have the patience to find that one canister, or aren’t fast enough to collect all those studs from an exploding door before they disappear, then what’s the point? The game might be way too lenient with lives, but that doesn’t mean that 100% completion isn’t still a chore. Because if me not being able to do so 10 years later is indication, then it is.

This is the trouble with collect-a-thons: they punish you for not collecting what you need to progress forward. Collectibles on their own aren’t the problem, and in small doses they can be fun to search for. But when they detract from the enjoyability factor and become a chore, well…why have them? They teach patience and perseverance, but that often becomes an addiction. And addictions aren’t healthy.

Which is probably what reviewers were concerned about with Yooka-Laylee, a fact made worse by the game adopting an aesthetic that was abandoned in the early 2000’s. And yeah, this doesn’t mean the game sucks. Unlike Mighty No. 9, it looks to be competent and playable. Chances are, even, that people will enjoy it quite a bit! But that doesn’t make the complaints less-valid. Nor does that change my outlook on collect-a-thons.