When you boil down the real-time strategy genre to its bare bones, what’s left is essentially a style of gaming in which players simply command a bunch of troops into battle. Most games include other nuances related to battling, such as resource-gathering and unit upgrades, but those are really tangential to the real core of the RTS genre. But it’s because of these extra features that such games tend to work only on the PC because there aren’t as many control restrictions as on other platforms. There have, however, been attempts to make a successful RTS game inhabit consoles, although most of them tend to make mistakes which cripple their potential. But there is one company which has a history of getting it right: Nintendo. There are two cases in point which prove this: the Pikmin series and Napoleon, a Japan-exclusive game for the GBA. They’re RTS games through and through, but not in the vein with which many are familiar.
The Pikmin games and Napoleon are both successful entries partially because they’re both well-executed interpretations of the genre, rather than complete adherents. Both games have conventions which are instantly familiar to the average RTS player, but they’re included in such a way that they’re not overwhelming aspects of each game. Pikmin, for example, has resourcing gathering. Each time the player has the colorful soldiers kill an enemy creature or knock down special flowers, they get pellets. Unlike in games such as StarCraft and Command&Conquer, however, the pellets only go towards one thing: expanding the pikmin army. There’s no need to worry about diverting some of it to buildings, some of it to repairs, and the remainder to miscellaneous things. In Pikmin, you gather the pellets as a means to create a greater army and nothing else. There’s a bit of depth with the numbers on the pellets, as well as their colors, but their inherent purpose remains the same. It’s just one such thing which eliminates a lot of the confusion that can be found in PC RTS and allows players to simply focus on other goals.
If we examine Napoleon under a similar premise, we find that the genre has been simplified even further for the purpose of overall usability. Napoleon is straightforward in that its goals are always clearly laid out based on how it presents each map and in the fact that each unit can only be used either to fight or to capture. Some have other minor abilities, like being able to be a guide for a few other units, but other than that, the game always makes it clear what needs to be done. This is vastly different from Pikmin, which is much more of a free-form RTS whose goals depend on exploration and how the player reacts to the environment. (ie: “Do I send these blue Pikmin in the water, even though its inhabited by several tough enemies, all for one unnecessary part?”) Pikmin also enables players to prioritize tasks based on what day they’ve reached in the game, whereas Napoleon is very linear by comparison in terms of progression. Players simply take care of what needs to be taken care of and move on to the next map. Napoleon then takes this linearity further by streamlining and automating the resource-gathering aspect of the game; money simply flows in at a steady rate depending on how many cities have been captured. There’s no mad dash to simultaneously micromanage the resource-gatherers and the attackers in the game, for much of it is already regulated by the game itself. Similar simplification can be found in other features of the game in an effort to allow it to be as accessible to as many people as possible.
It’s been established that Napoleon and the Pikmin games are successful on the grounds of how they translate certain traits of the RTS genre. But what is perhaps even more important is the fact that they control intuitively in a genre which is virtually infamous for convolution. In Pikmin, the most important controls can be split into three easily understandable parts: 1. The control stick is used for moving Olimar and the cursor in front of him. 2. The C-stick is for moving the pikmin around Olimar and the world. 3. The A-button is for almost all interactions with the pikmin, including things such as throwing them and plucking them out of the ground. 4. The B-button is for summoning them back to you. There are other auxilary functions assigned to other parts of the GameCube controller, but it’s important to note that the game is very playable with just those four parts to the extent where the game could be beaten only using them. Knowing that every action in the game can be summarized into a few very concise things again allows players to place attention on other things, instead of obsessing over something such as keyboard combinations.
Napoleon again does this on the GBA. In fact, the game is played almost entirely with the D-pad and the A-button. Whereas Pikmin uses a few more buttons on the GameCube’s controller in order to accommodate more functions, nearly everything in the game is accomplished solely by using the D-pad and the A-button. This simplicity is made possible in the fact that the game determines what the player wants to do depending on the context of the situation. Everything from moving units to creating them to attacking others is done in this manner. The player simply has to determine what it is they want to do and the game is able to keep up. There’s nothing really unintuitive about that, per se.
One other thing which should be addressed is the fact that Nintendo’s RTS games are also successful because they manage to break from the mold in general. Whereas most entries in the genre are either science-fiction or medieval/historically-inclined, Pikmin places players in the shoes of a stranded space ship operator in search of parts and Napoleon is played from the viewpoint of the legendary Frenchman himself. Cliches are not what define either one at all. Few games have players dealing with highly abstract creatures or, in Napoleon’s case, beast summonings via pentagram. That in turn makes them memorable and just as creative and pioneering as their more famous PC counterparts.
Nintendo isn’t the only company to attempt to make a well-done RTS game on something other than a computer, but it’s one of the few that’s consistently gotten it right. From how certain gameplay mechanics are treated to how the game controls as well as how they’re conceived, games such as Pikmin and Napoleon has shown how to do RTS games properly without making them look like a mere shadow compared to giants such as WarCraft. If nothing else they’re endeavors which prove the seemingly impossible: An RTS can be done on consoles and portables and still hold up. That in itself is a feat which few in the industry have yet to replicate.
