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Dec. 12th, 2018 10:00 amThere's some... interesting interplay in Nintendo's N64-era RPGs between the player and character.
Specifically, it's assumed the 'player' is a child, and thus in order to make the protagonist relatable and sympathetic to the player, the protagonist is either a child forced into an adult role or an adult with very childlike qualities. So you get a mustachioed Italian plumber running around doing errands for pocket change with total innocence on how... sketchy some of those errands are, or a character who constantly switches from being an ordinary child to being a child in an adult's body, or an older child cursed into looking like a Deku Scrub (who is coded as a very young child, complete with barely veiled hostility from certain adults)....
It creates this weird tension between what the player understands, what the assumed player understands, and what the character understands. It's really fascinating - especially with stuff like Majora's Mask, which has the Coraline Effect like whoa.
Specifically, it's assumed the 'player' is a child, and thus in order to make the protagonist relatable and sympathetic to the player, the protagonist is either a child forced into an adult role or an adult with very childlike qualities. So you get a mustachioed Italian plumber running around doing errands for pocket change with total innocence on how... sketchy some of those errands are, or a character who constantly switches from being an ordinary child to being a child in an adult's body, or an older child cursed into looking like a Deku Scrub (who is coded as a very young child, complete with barely veiled hostility from certain adults)....
It creates this weird tension between what the player understands, what the assumed player understands, and what the character understands. It's really fascinating - especially with stuff like Majora's Mask, which has the Coraline Effect like whoa.
