It is my duty as part of Hater Week to defend franchises. I’ve not read Nathan’s piece, but I’m sure he’s going to go all in on them as being repetitive, infinitely inbreeding, and responsible for much of the creative death of the industry. I’m sure he will posit that resources are better spent on creating new narratives and stories. And while I will concede that franchises can get disgusting, I think that is less a function of franchises so much as the system and the companies that produce them. And yes, while franchises can lead to companies trying the same trick over and over again, eventually dying a stale death, you also get a ton of outliers. Franchises are fine, calm down.
There’s like five million ways franchises can bankrupt creativity. But they also pay the bills and let designers iterate on concepts and worlds through a combination of player feedback and hindsight. You know what franchises get us? Mario 3. Dark Souls 2. Pac-Man Championship Edition. The really good versions of Tetris. The various Rhythm Heaven titles. Mother 3. Baldur’s Gate 3. If you hate franchises, then you should go back and play the original Witcher because that shit is ROUGH, my brother. You really think they should have stopped at Street Fighter? Are you sick? The original Assassin’s Creed is stodgy as hell. You think it would have been better if they’d stopped at the original MSX2 Metal Gear? And while the series spun its wheels after Keita Takahashi peaced out, if I’m gonna play a Katamari game I’m gonna play We Love Katamari and not the original.
Certain people named Nathan would have you believe that they should have stopped at the first game here. Credit: Nintendo, Bandai Namco Games, Interplay Entertainment, Capcom
While franchises can often become sprawling, evil things, they are often a thinly veiled excuse to do something entirely new. New Vegas tells a far more interesting story than Fallout 3. Dragon Age II and KotoR II do some real wackadoo shit. Freespace II is one of the best games period and only got the runway to do that after Descent: Freespace, a game that itself is unrelated to the game Descent but used the franchise for legal reasons.
And while franchises are often used to create endless crap that we don’t need – little bits of useless plastic, endless special editions of games that barely exist in physical form, movie adaptations that almost uniformly suck ass with limited edition Claptrap popcorn buckets – there’s rare instances where this is done in a way that kinda rips. Fangamer rocks at making merch. That one D&D movie was kinda tight. You don’t have Gunpla the same way without the existence of Gundam as a franchise. Warhammer’s expansion outside of tabletop miniatures and into games has been more or less a net good, and they’ve been on a hot streak in the last few years.
You think you’re better than franchises? You think you’re Mr. Fancy Pants One And Done? Look into your heart and tell me that. Hide your limited edition merch and tell me you’re fine with that. Once again this week, Nathan is wrong as hell. I even bet he had a poster from a franchise behind him as he was typing that blog out.
