Everything Everywhere Once A Week (11/11/2022)

Hi and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week! I’m still recovering from COVID, but I’m at least out of the woods and onto the grassy path back home at the moment. I’ve got a few topics I wanted to cover this week, though, so let’s start a little spicy to clear our throats.

Genshin Impact Should Feel A Little Embarrassed About How Hard It Stans for Elon Musk

None of us are prophets. We can’t always tell when something will turn, or when a person we think is cool will turn out to be dumb and terrible, but it’s also not always super hard to guess. Genshin Impact, for whatever reason, decided to put a lot of chips on Elon Musk early on with two small references: a character named Ella Musk and a fairly important high-level area called Musk Reef.

On these own, these are kind of nothing. You could even try and convince yourself that Ella Musk, a character whose motivations are bridging the gap between humans and monsters through language, is not a particularly flattering analogy for Elon. But it got less subtle in 2021 when developer Hoyoverse held a contest just centering entirely on Ella and Elon Musk.

People who followed @Paimon2themoon — itself an already groan-worthy meme by October of last year — would win the fantabulous prize of watching Musk stream the game. At the highest possible threshold, Hoyoverse would invite Musk to their studio so their CEO could meet him. That was the contest.

The whole thing was canceled as people made it well known that Musk is kind of a clown and this weird level of king worship that Hoyoverse was paying was, at best, cringe. Musk then also seemed to be convinced he was going to be in Genshin Impact as himself, using that emoji that he uses constantly when he’s extremely mad.

It’s not like this was unforeseeable. Even by the time his name was put into the game, he was already throwing temper tantrums about people making fun of him, talking mad shit about trans people, and calling cave divers pedophiles for no apparent reason.

As the dude seems to be speedrunning destroying a pillar of communication on the internet in the last decade with stupid idea after stupid idea, my Genshin dailies still have me talking to Ella Musk and going to Musk Reef. I don’t think it should be changed, but they should feel a little embarrassed.

Just Admit You Want to Be Breath of the Wild, Sonic Frontiers

I’ve only played Sonic Frontiers for an hour or two and will probably play it for longer but I’m not exactly blown away by the experience. Maybe it gets massively better, but I’m a little surprised by the positivity around the game from the reviews.

All that said, as I am playing this game, I keep going back to this quote from Takashi Iizuka, head of the Sonic Team.

"From the development [team's] perspective, they're going out and making an action game. They see Breath of the Wild as a role-playing game, it's not similar at all to the action game that they're making," says Iizuka.

Which, first of all, what an actually insane thing to say. You don’t begin and end comparisons at genre, especially when they’re as fluid as both Sonic Frontiers and Breath of the Wild. Second, holy shit this game wants to be Breath of the Wild so bad and it’s so fucking weird they’re just not admitting it.

There’s musical motifs that are identical! The game clearly wants to ape one of the best games of all time and I don’t get why they’re running away from that comparison under than having to admit it doesn’t match up.

Honestly, more games should take influence from each other and they should do it openly. The idea that ideas have to spring completely uninfluenced from someone’s brain to be good is specific only to creating video games. We don’t tear down a movie for being influenced by Scorcese or a book for smelling a bit too much like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

If we admit these influences, we can also probably start applying them better. Sonic Frontiers apes a lot of Zelda’s superficial aspects, but doesn’t take the influence to heart to rethink the fundamentals of Sonic. That’s what a Breath of the Wild moment for the series should mean, not soft piano music over a sweeping vista.

A Couple of Interesting Notes From Nintendo’s Quarterly Report

• Kirby and the Forgotten Land has become the best-selling game in the series.
• We’re roughly four million units, or one holiday season, away from the Switch outselling the PlayStation 4 and the Game Boy.
• Splatoon 3 has sold nearly 8 million units since launch, which puts it at over half of Splatoon 2’s total lifetime sales.
• Xenoblade Chronicles has sold 1.72 million copies, which indicates it’s starting at a higher floor than either Xenoblade 2 or Definitive Edition, but it might peter out a little lower than I personally expected.

Other Notes This Week:

• I’ll be in Tokyo for a little while soon, so some schedules will get messed up. But things should still get published, just when is a valid question.
• New episode of Materia Possessions this week where we talk about God of War Ragnarok, Sonic Frontiers, and more! Did I solve the RSS thing yet? No! I had COVID!