Fun game! It's easy to learn and (generally) rewards button-mashing, so great arcade arcade game--reminded me a bit of my Gauntlet Legends days. Here's the bit about it that I find interesting, though:
Twenty-five years later, we're still breaking into castles to rescue princesses?
I'm not taking the feminist approach to this; that's just too easy here. What I have been doing is attempting to come up with an analogy in some medium other than video games to explain why I find this so odd. Here's the best I got:
Let's say when Citizen Kane came out, it wasn't just a critical success, but it was the biggest box office hit of all time. It was followed by Citizen Kane II (a flop), and Citizen Kane III (a triumph!), and then some screenwriter attempted to make Charles Kane cure viruses in Dr. Kane.
Assuming all of that happened, would we see a new batch of movies about a wealthy, reclusive millionaire in the theaters every year--and take for granted that this was just the natural topic for the medium of cinema?
I'm not calling Castle Crashers a Mario ripoff--it's not. It's a clever game with a lot more going on than the basic "Hero Rescues Princess" plot at its spine. I'm just fascinated that that's still the basic spine being used.
Was Mario such a smash hit that it's continuing to sell new games that sort of look like it? Why did that basic element get preserved--how come the castle-crashing is still a motif, but plumbers with mustaches didn't catch on?
I'm forming some kind of theory about our favorite plumber having tapped into the American dream--a nobody overcoming evils and obstacles to become the hero, etc. Until that's flushed out, I need to hit up my Castle Crashers buddy so we can finish the game. I really want to know if the last princess has been moved to another castle.
Final thought: It could be that this game is an intentional callback to Mario's castle crashing days--that 99% of new games have nothing to do with castles or princesses anymore, and that's what makes this game nostalgic and cute? ( Hopefully one of my fellow Independent Study folks can let me know if that's the case; I'm not up enough on recent games.) If that's the case, I'm still interested in why the motif crops back up in *this* game, but it does change my line of thought a bit.
