PixelLinkr #50: The Story Behind the Puzzle

EarthBound's North American marketing campaign in 1994 consisted of scratch-and-sniff inserts in gaming magazines that smelled bad on purpose. The tagline was "This game stinks." It was designed to sell a game about battling sentient pizza, talking piles of vomit, and a final boss that is the collective evil of humanity, using baseball bats and bottle rockets in a suburb that looks like 1980s America. The campaign did not work. The cartridge became one of the most expensive Super Nintendo titles on the second-hand market as its reputation grew through emulation and internet communities in the 2000s. Nobody has since used "this game stinks" as a marketing strategy.

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🟢 Easy: Turn-based JRPGs

Games: Final Fantasy VII · Final Fantasy X · Final Fantasy VI · EarthBound

Final Fantasy VII was planned for the Super Famicom but moved to PlayStation when the team determined the story would require more storage than cartridges could hold. It shipped on three discs and was among the first major RPGs to use pre-rendered FMV cutscenes throughout. The Western release arrived in 1997 with a translation that has since been corrected, but whose specific errors (No cloud of memory and chain of iron and blood) became part of the game's cultural memory before the corrections did.

Final Fantasy VI is the one the genre historians reach for first. The ensemble cast (fourteen playable characters), the absence of a single protagonist in the traditional sense, and the moment in the second half where the villain wins and the world ends -- all of it was unusual for 1994. The opera sequence, staged in a 16-bit pixel theatre with a MIDI score, remains one of the stranger artistic decisions in the SNES library and also one of the most effective.

EarthBound's final act strips away the combat music and asks the player to use thought as the weapon. It is either the most emotionally sophisticated moment in an SNES game or an impossible trick that should not have worked. It worked.

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🟡 Medium: Games set inside a school

Games: Bully · Final Fantasy VIII · Persona 4 Golden · Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

Bully was released in the United Kingdom under the title Canis Canem Edit, where the word bully was considered potentially provocative as a product name. Rockstar spent months before release consulting child welfare organisations about the game's depiction of schoolyard conflict. The consultation resulted in a game that is notably less violent than almost everything else in Rockstar's catalogue. The school hierarchy, the cliques, the seasonal social calendar -- Bully is the most detail-oriented simulation of institutional adolescence the studio ever made.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair moved the killing-game structure from the confined academy of the first game to a tropical island. The rules are identical. The institutional claustrophobia has been replaced with the false cheer of a school trip, every familiar surface swapped out while the same logic runs underneath. Persona 4 Golden uses the school as the social hub around which the dungeon-crawling and the murder investigation orbit -- the everyday rhythms of term time anchoring what is otherwise a fantasy about facing the things you refuse to acknowledge about yourself.

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🔵 Hard: Sequels that abandoned the defining genre

Games: Yakuza: Like a Dragon · Jak II · Castlevania: Lords of Shadow · Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

The decision to make Yakuza: Like a Dragon turn-based came partly from Hiroshi Harada, the actor voicing new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga. Harada requested a Dragon Quest-style system to reflect Kasuga's lifelong obsession with Dragon Quest. The request was accepted. A franchise built on brawler combat became a JRPG with job classes, party composition, and summons. The transition worked well enough that subsequent entries continued in the same direction.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is the only mainline Zelda game with a traditional experience-point levelling system. It is also a side-scrolling action game rather than a top-down adventure. Nintendo has not returned to either choice in any subsequent entry, and the game occupies a peculiar position in the series: clearly an experiment, clearly completed, never repeated.

Jak II and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow both moved toward games that were popular at the time of development. Jak II arrived as Grand Theft Auto III had demonstrated what an open city could do; Naughty Dog used that as the model and abandoned their platformer. Lords of Shadow arrived as God of War had redefined action game expectations; Konami built toward that template. Both choices were commercially understandable. Both choices ended something.

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🟣 Tricky: Bosses who join after you defeat them

Games: Chrono Trigger · Tales of Symphonia · Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age · Dragon Age: Origins

The Magus decision in Chrono Trigger was reportedly debated during development. Some team members felt that making him a recruitable party member would undermine the impact of the second act, where he has been positioned as the primary villain. The compromise was to make recruitment optional: players who defeat him in standard battle mode cannot recruit him at all. Only players who find the specific dialogue path get the option. The game was made in 1995 and the debate about whether the choice is worth it is still running.

Dragon Age: Origins writer David Gaider built Loghain Mac Tir's backstory specifically to make his betrayal comprehensible before the Landsmeet confrontation arrives. The game was designed so that players who had tracked his history would face a genuine question at the moment of choice rather than a simple villain moment. Spare him and he joins the Grey Wardens. Some players cannot do it. Others find it the most interesting thing in the game.

Tales of Symphonia and Dragon Quest XI follow the same structural beat: a figure positioned early as a mentor or potential ally, then revealed as an adversary, then returned as a voluntary ally once the real stakes become clear. Both games use the arc to make the recruitment feel earned rather than arbitrary.

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If any of those school-set games are in your backlog, Persona 4 Golden is the one to start with. It holds up completely.

Today's CineLinkr is running westerns, dark comedy, and a tricky category about loves that ended on the wrong side. Different mood, same format.