karenplaysnancydrew:

(this has been in my inbox forever. so sorry! but finally answering this.)

Okay well it’s kind of hard for me to describe but I’ll try. Some things I haven’t liked about the newer games:

• First off they no longer use Kevin Manthei for the music and that’s obviously a damn shame. I miss the music from the older games.
• I don’t like a lot of liberties they have taken in the games. I choose to accept them and get excited about them because I can’t change them, and sometimes it’s great and really works! But then deep down I’m like… you just turned Nancy’s mom into a spy? And decided to put a face and character to Samantha Quick (when VEN wanted to be so mysterious about her that they didn’t even list a voice actress)? And now they’re adding Sonny Joon as a character. Which honestly I am sooo excited about but I feel like it’s way too much all at once. Like… I remember Nik saying that they had a plan for Sonny and it was very long and mapped out, which is SUPER GREAT AND COOL but is that really happening? Because all of a sudden we’re getting everything Sonny all at once and I’m confused about how that is synonymous with a long and detailed plan.
• It also seems to me like they feel like there’s a lot of pressure on them to produce games at a faster rate than they did before. They’ve always released two games a year but the games now have more complicated graphics, dialogue, puzzles, and plots than they used to. I’m pretty sure there’s also a bigger fanbase so they have a lot more going on and a lot more pressure to perform.
• Because of this I feel like a lot of the newer games are never quite fleshed out. SAW seemed like it was leading up to a lot more than what we were given, and I think there was a greater story that existed but never got to get told in that game. I also think that this failure to properly flesh out plots is the cause of confusing and ambiguous endings. Both TOT and TMB have really confusing endings and even though I’ve played those games multiple times, I still couldn’t even tell you exactly what of or why the culprits were guilty (if that makes sense.) SPY also made very little sense to me by the end of it as we were overloaded with information and given almost no clarity.
• Another thing people complain about a lot is ‘Nik’s humor and “quirky” characters’…and…I’ve gotta agree that it’s overwhelming a lot of the time and I don’t like how the same brand of humor (which in and of itself is often overwrought and exhausting) worms its way into every character.
• I also have extremely mixed feelings about multiple ending scenarios, which have become more common with the newer games.
• Overall the older games are just better (in, what seems to me, almost everyone’s opinion.) Something intangible about the atmospheres and weird silliness of the old games hasn’t been replicated in the new ones.