they removed the awful and useless combat), but, again, played in a texture-less environment, I challenge anyone to be able to spot one over the other. ![]() They changed some superficial aspects (i.e. What was obviously a spiritual successor to the Penumbra but restricted by the fact that Pardox Interactive owns Penumbra, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is very clearly an impersonation. We already mentioned Dark Souls, so let’s mention another beloved title, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Again, this is not a bad thing, but it’s a sequel – not a spiritual successor.Īnd let’s not pile on Yooka-Laylee here. I think of it like this: if you played Yooka-Laylee in a completely texture-less build (picture simple, grey polygons populating the environment, like the pre-alpha footage but with a non-descript main character), it would still feel like a Banjo-Kazooie game, albeit an improved version. But these changes don’t vary the framework whatsoever. Each different type of collectible is gathered in a different way and offers a unique benefit, as opposed to no benefit at all, usually, in Banjo-Kazooie. The things changed in Yooka-Laylee were mostly superficial. That’s not a bad thing it’s just not a spiritual successor. They wanted to make an updated Banjo-Kazooie, and they succeeded in meaningful ways. And this is not to say that Playtonic was wrong in their thinking. The feeling I get from playing Yooka-Laylee is that Playtonic, a team largely made up of ex-Rare developers who worked on Banjo-Kazooie, asked themselves what Banjo-Kazooie would look like if they made it in 2017. Yooka-Laylee without textures seems a lot like merely an updated Banjo-Kazooie. As I went over in my review, I really enjoyed Yooka-Laylee, and I laid out a series of features from Banjo-Kazooie that are done differently and even better in Playtonic’s take on it. Let’s dig up some more examples.Īnd why not start with the inspiration for this article? Yooka-Laylee, as anyone who has read anything about it can tell you, is purported as a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie. The modern conception of a spiritual successor is little more than a technicality used to work around legal and bureaucratic obstacles. This was also the case with Yooka-Laylee (the inspiration for this analysis), where the developers couldn’t make a new Banjo-Kazooie sequel or paraquel because that IP is owned by Rare (who is owned by Microsoft). Using a game like Dark Souls as an example, it is only considered a spiritual successor to Demon Souls because From Software didn’t own the rights to the Demon Souls name, so they had to make a "new" intellectual property. The truth is, though, that the modern day conception of a spiritual successor is born more out of practicality. Therefore, the only way to actually capture what a spiritual successor, which seeks to fundamentally alter the experience while maintaining its feel, is supposed to be is to aim for an evocation of its source material – not an impersonation. Is this “spiritual successor” trying to do what is essentially the exact same thing as its source of inspiration, or is it merely trying to remind the gamer of a certain key aspect of its predecessor? A spiritual successor that is only an impersonation of a past game might as well be a sequel, or at very least a parallel sequel, or “paraquel,” that might take place in the same universe but handle different characters. Vocal dialect coach Erik Singer discussed this topic last year, and it’s also been written about in books well before today’s time.Īpplying this logic to video games, specifically spiritual successors, is relatively easy. The concept of Impersonation vs Evocation is best used to describe vocal performances of historical figures – whether or not someone is trying to sound exactly like a given person (impersonation) or if they are merely trying to remind you of that person (evocation).
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