Mid World

It will be September before you know it.

And with it, an avalanche of video games that threaten to drown even the most choosy among us. But for the moment, while it's not quite slim pickings, depending on your tastes, you may have fewer options.

Which is why Patrick, who loves a good action game, has fallen for Beasts of Reincarnation. Well, fallen is probably too strong a word. We don't really do "reviews" at Remap, so how else to explain his decision to spend more than a dozen hours playing it, when half that would have been more than sufficient for a podcast discussion?

Sometimes, you have an itch.

Patrick: One of the reasons I’m enjoying Jump, Rank, Repeat is because it means I’m spending meaningful parts of my time playing video games that aren’t very good. Some are classics, others are great, and a great many of them are somewhere between mid and truly dreadful.

But as Janet mentioned in a recent podcast, living in an age of media saturation can make you feel guilty for spending time with anything but something that might end up in a hypothetical top 10. We were talking about this within the context of video games, but you could apply that to just about anything else, too. Within this world of abundance—no, not that abundance—what is the point of investing hours into an experience that might not be considered maximally excellent? 

The hours I spent with Donkey Kong 64 were soul-draining. Conker’s Bad Fur Day felt like a cosmic joke. I did not enjoy a minute of my time with either video game. But as a platformer appreciator, I do value filling in historical gaps that will make any future conversations about the genre and its evolution fuller. I have a better understanding of why games like this go wrong, and why it can be difficult to understand why a bad game is bad without the benefit of hindsight.

Horror movies are, of course, where I spend the most time in mid town. Enjoying a movie for its practical effects. Delighting in a specific character actor performance. Understanding the origin story for a filmmaker who’d later transcend the swamp and impact filmmaking beyond genre.

I bring this up because of the time I’m spending with a new video game this week, Beast of Reincarnation. It’s a deeply unambitious action game from Game Freak, the developers of Pokémon, that rarely transcends its influences. A special girl in a corrupted world destined to save it. A fun, if repetitive, combat system that owes a great debt to Devil May Cry and From Software. A world that’s somehow too big and too small, largely devoid of stuff to do.

It is, by every definition, mid. 7/10. Whatever you want to call it. But Rob, I’m enjoying my time with it. It’s not great. It’s mostly good. That enjoyment might come with an expiration date, a joy that empties long before the credits roll. (These games tend to be 10 hours too long, and I have a tendency to pre-emptively exhaust myself by spending too much plucking around the world.) 

It reminds me of a dozen random Xbox 360/PlayStation 3-era games you might see on a shelf, unsure who made it. An excellent rental, a game to be enjoyed for a weekend and forgotten. 

I briefly, with a mild sense of annoyed obligation, pulled myself away to finish 007: First Light. That, friend, is an excellent game. I have nits to pick, but truly, IO knocked that out of the park. It’s the kind of game you’d easily recommend to someone else. Beasts of Reincarnation is not that game. But I also can’t help but admit it’s the game I thought about while playing First Light.

What is your relationship with the world of mid, Rob, inside and outside of video games?

Rob: So I think you're right that "mid" roughly equates to that archetypal 7/10 experience, but it's used very dismissively. The implication being that things aim at being loud or 10/10 but alas, they are merely good and therefore a failure.

I think games have a tougher job than a movie or a TV show because you have to interact closely with a video game and therefore you are personally subjected to their flaws in a way that you can just wash over you when you're watching something on TV. If I were to argue that games have an equivalent to Law and Order I might say that the Assassin's Creed series fits that bill… but look at the absurd levels of craft and production value that Ubisoft has had to maintain with those games to occupy that same "old reliable" space that Law and Order has achieved since we were literal children. 

If a game is a 7/10 it's probably pretty excellent because the player's experience drops-off like a ski jump below that 7/10 level. An above average RPG is pleasantly dull and only modestly intriguing. A mediocre one feels like punishment, and it might be the width of a piece of paper that separates them.