In my teenage years, I often played Tennis. In those tense 40-40 moments, where the word “deuce” was tossed around like an egg salad, it could feel confusing, disorientating, and overbearing. But a quick glance up at the crowd would show me the faces I was fighting for. Jesus was there. Bob Marley, Elvis, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Griffin from Family Guy – they were the ones who pushed me forward. I looked at my opponent again. Hitler stared back at me. I knew what I must do; I quickly took advantage and struck my opponent down with a fierce serve.
Wii Sports kept me coming back to its various games time and time again, even when there wasn’t anyone else to play with. Fighting against Mike Tyson in Boxing after embarrassing Harry Potter on the green was exhilarating. Bafflingly, it’s entirely absent from the upcoming Wii Sports sequel, Nintendo Switch Sports.
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Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker – but it does appear to be a complete misunderstanding of what made games like Wii Sports modern classics. Mii characters have become iconic thanks to games like Wii Sports, and now star in their own games like Tomodachi Life and Miitopia – hell, they’ve even been introduced to the Super Smash Bros. series. Love them or hate them, they have become a staple of Nintendo’s history and are entirely fused with the legacy of the Wii, one of the best-selling consoles of all time. Their exclusion here is disappointing.
Not all is lost, of course. There are player avatars in Nintendo Switch Sports, but these… I’m trying to be nice… abominations do not deserve any praise. They look more like Xbox Live Avatars than anything else, and those were, in the most polite way possible, charmless imitations of the Miis in the first place. My Xbox Live Avatar looks ridiculous and rides a weird unicorn. You know why? Because I don’t care about it. The stylized and simplistic Mii characters can roughly imitate any human face, while the more detailed avatars lack the necessary nuance. With added detail, Miis become haunting mimicries of humanity that lack a soul.
But this is Nintendo, after all. The little avatars we see in Nintendo Switch Sports are certainly not photorealistic, but they evoke that same XBL Avatar energy. These go beyond simplistic caricatures, and that universal charm has given way to something with all the personality of Mark Zuckerberg’s face. Horrific simulacrums resembling something vaguely human.
If we were to throw Nintendo Switch Sports characters, XBL Avatars, and Facebook’s weird metaverse creations into a hat, mix it around, and show them to people at random, the average person probably wouldn’t know that the styles are – I assume – supposed to be somehow distinct. But it all blends into a mess.
It makes sense if you look at it from Nintendo’s perspective. Wii Sports was a casual phenomenon, and Nintendo Switch Sports is aimed at those people who have been pulled back into the Nintendo ecosystem with games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Big Brain Academy, and Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training. These players are happy with a more approachable, familiar, and less “weird” presentation. At some point along the way, Miis definitely became weird. We can admit that.
Nintendo 3DS’ built-in StreetPass Quest developed the Miis at the start, slowly fleshing them out with personalities. Then the short-lived mobile game Miitomo came along and had Miis interacting with one another, wearing absurd clothing and saying absurd – and at times inappropriate — things. Before we knew it, Miis had their own distinct style – they were goofy. Thanks to the singing of Tomodachi Life and the inanity of Miitopia‘s battle system, Miis became defined, silly characters in and of themselves.
If the Miis, in their current state, were in Nintendo Switch Sports, it’d likely be a far sillier game than this looks to be. But I also fear it might be too serious. If Jesus isn’t cheering me on as I take down Hitler, I’m not sure I’ll be able to make those same fond memories.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
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