Soapbox: spin-offs can be a way to get in rather than a liquidation

Ah, spin-offs. The shareholder-approved cynical cash grab created for a series that has gotten a little too big for its boots. The last desperate attempt at fashion relevance for a fading favorite. The woefully poor stab of a shoddy resurrected IP to attract a new audience.

They are the “Grandma heard that you liked to play boxes” of the fans; the officially licensed suitors to the throne of video games; titles should be treated with anything from mild caution to outright disregard for being so deliberately “unfaithful” to their respectable roots. Some of them certainly deserve all the criticism the internet can garner for putting an irrelevant famous name on a lazy idea and then daring to charge money for it.

Some of them, no everybody from them.

The best spin-offs or crossovers are a lot of fun when performed by the fans they were created to entertain for – I challenge anyone not to enjoy one of Omega Force’s Warriors titles with the theme of their favorite series.

The best spin-offs or crossovers are a lot of fun when played by the fans they were created to entertain for – I challenge anyone not to enjoy one of the Omega Force games. Warriors themed titles around your favorite series (which at this point could be absolutely anything from Gundam to Breath of the Wild to Fire Emblem to One Piece to Persona 5), ​​and the best examples from this financially trustworthy branch of game development manage to expand their source material in fascinating new ways.

Look at the way the Theatrhythm titles take on one of the many specific things that Final Fantasy The series has always been praised and then makes it its own contextless miniseries, allowing everyone to enjoy those great battle themes at any time without all those grind RPGs – possibly the one thing a Final Fantasy has ever done. . a final fantasy – get in the way. These offshoots couldn’t be more different from any of the original titles that blatantly loot for content, and the Theatrhythm series couldn’t be better for that.

And for those who are not yet in love with the well-known logo on the front of the box but who perhaps know that they like action, sports or fighting games and would love to play more in the same genre, these licensed by-products. they offer a precious opportunity to fall in love with a series they would never have come close to otherwise.

Let’s use the recently released Pokémon Unite as an example of this worldwide expansion phenomenon. It’s free to get started for anyone with a Switch (and later in the year for anyone with a compatible phone), which already removes the most obvious barrier to entry: upfront cost. Pokemon games are not cheap to buy even second hand (maybe especially second hand) and for new or expired players there is an astonishing variety of remakes, improved versions of previous releases, different versions of new titles and upcoming games to choose from.

Is Unite something of a “true” Pokémon experience? Can casual users hope to get a taste of traditional battles as they get acquainted with Aeos’s energy, goal zones, and new clothes for their Pikachu? No. And that’s good. It’s a fresh start, a chance to try out a new Pokémon game without having to worry about choosing the right kind of moves for the right kind of Pokémon, or wondering if you are supposed to recognize who the person is currently speaking to you. It gives people a chance to dive in and find out they have a favorite Pokémon and then maybe see him or a fellow Pokémon in a new Pokémon Snap photo on their friend’s social media or Brilliant Diamond trailer / Shining Pearl and feeling caring enough to them to finally try a game from the series that they had only seen from afar before.

This glimpse of new worlds can even work in reverse. At a glance, Dragon Quest Builders appears to be the biggest seller of them all – a Minecraft clone with a bankruptcy popular name attached posted by a respected developer that, frankly, should aim higher than copying someone else’s homework.

Only the Builders games were much more than that; They were good enough to convince some fans of an adorably dated RPG series that maybe there was more to this block-making game idea than viral hype and mountains of merchandise, and they also proved that Dragon Quest is the thing. Strong enough to thrive even without your usual creative crutches.

That’s the magic of good spin-offs – they can introduce new faces to long-established classics that may have been too intimidated or overwhelmed to tackle head-on, while also encouraging avid fans of a particular series to Try a genre or style that you may never have considered before. Maybe someone will be truly wowed by a Pinball FX 3 table themed to their favorite movie and then look for more challenges on the excellent Demon’s Tilt. Maybe Fire Emblem’s strategy doesn’t feel so strange to people who recognize some faces (okay, more than a few faces) from his time with Super Smash Bros.

A spin-off or crossover gives those with little time or interest, for whatever reason, a simple focal point, something to hold onto that can be easily understood without careful research.

Games, especially these days, are a constant stream of new releases spread across multiple similar but different pieces of equally expensive hardware. A spinoff or crossover gives those with little time or interest, for whatever reason, a straightforward focal point, something to hold onto that can be easily understood without painstaking research that can then lead them in new and interesting directions. You know someone, somewhere, has picked up the Splatoon 2 box, he thought “Isn’t he one of the racers in that go-kart game that I like?”, And then they took their chances with a team-based ink ’em up that they wouldn’t have even looked at if Inkling’s guest appearance in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe hadn’t gently got them there.

As veteran gamers, it’s easy to scoff at spin-offs, especially when companies like The Pokémon Company churn them out at such a rate that the names start to mix with each other: Unite, Masters, Cafe, Quest, Conquest, Duel, Rumble, and so on. on, but identifying a game as a “derivative” should not come with the free help of cautious judgment. The imaginative use of old titles and properties can take an all-too-familiar series and its equally-familiar players to exciting new places that they might not have ventured out of breath, bringing new fans – and new ideas – back with them.

What if it doesn’t work? The chance of a bad spinoff or crossover sinking a healthy series is next to nil, meaning fans can just stick with ‘the real thing’ and wait for the next unpredictable twist on their favorite game to appear.