Hi, this is going to be a dumb one, but it's a question I find interesting.  So, I've been playing Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade for my game clearing, Gaming Diary will be out whenever I finish it.  And I've been thinking a lot about the character of Lyn.  Lyn is a lord I'm very fond of, I don't think she's the most intricate character ever put to Fire Emblem, but she's a very unique lord nonetheless.  She's way more rugged and practical in comparison to the usually refined, well trained lords who adopt classical fencing techniques.  It's very fitting of her upbringing as a nomadic tribeswoman who would learn fighting for hunting and petty squabbles.

But it also made me think about Lyn in Smash Bros.  Lyn has always been a fairly popular request, being the first Fire Emblem lord the American audience was familiar with and with her style being very atypical for the often very samey potential Fire Emblem roster.  But this thought led me to another thought.  See, Lyn is a nomad and in the context of FE7, this is not so much a way of life as it is a distinctive racial or ethnic group.  Lyn is treated poorly, especially by other royals, due to her heritage, her father being a chieftan of a nomadic tribe rather than a highborn royal.  Even her own friends are kind of racist to her, noting how her "nomadic features" give her a "distinctive, unusual beauty" that they find striking.  Given the rough time period and state of European culture most Fire Emblem games are built off of, we can kind of infer that Lyn is half-Romani.  Or at least an equivalent race/ethnicity to the Romani.

Which brings me to my actual curiosity here: if Lyn were added to Smash Bros, would she be the first woman of color in the roster.  No.  The answer is no.  Of course not.  However, the actual answer is a bit more complicated than you'd expect, and has a number of possible answers.  It's a surprisingly complicated question, one whose answer is really up for interpretation.  And so I ask, dear reader...

Who was the first playable woman of color in Super Smash Bros?

Some Ground Rules

I want to first start by establishing some basic ground rules so that my intentions and understandings of the question I'm detailing are pretty clear.  They are, as follows:

1. This is not meant to be a criticism of Super Smash Bros.  I am not here to state that Super Smash Bros. has some sort of moral failing because there is a small potential roster of women of color or that this question is ambiguous in the first place.  This is genuine curiosity, and if there is any criticism present, it is moreso towards the gaming industry for both not featuring women enough and, moreover, not featuring women of color enough.  My only goal here is to go over the potential candidates and explain why they're each interesting as an answer to this question.
2. A potential candidate, in my mind, is not just a character who looks like they are a person of color.  This is an important thing to note as Smash, famously, has a number of characters who adopt an anime aesthetic in it and thus all could be considered Japanese.  However, most of the time these characters, despite their appearances, are meant to be analogous to European peoples.  Three Houses takes place in an analog of the Holy Roman Empire and thus all the characters can be considered to be German, Palutena is a Greek goddess, Samus Aran is the daughter of people named "Rodney" and "Virginia".  I'm only going to be focusing on characters who are either definitively people of color, or their place and/or people of origin are analogous to places and cultures that people of color come from.
3. Every candidate will be either human or humanoid.  The reasoning for this should be obvious but just to clear it up, this is a rule, if it's not a rule, the answer is Jigglypuff, who is a pink puffball from literal Japan.
4. If the candidate in question is related to an existing character rather than being a unique character, I will note that their technical origin date is when the character as a whole debuted but I will take into consideration whether the character debuted AFTER another character on this list as consideration on whether or not they were actually first.

With that out of the way, let's meet our candidates in order from least ambiguous to most.

Addendum 1: In the following text, I discuss the character of Corrin from Fire Emblem Fates.  It was my belief, having played Birthright and part of Conquest, that Corrin's character was a PoC, being from the Japan-inspired Hoshido by birth and only being raised in the Russian-esque Nohr.  I have come to understand that Revelations reveals that Corrin's heritage is far more complicated and that it can be brought into question whether she is a woman of color as a result, as her birth mother comes from a land that is just generally based on cultures with rich, mainstream mythologies (Greece, Norway, India, etc.)  As such, Corrin probably doesn't count and should be disregarded.

Addendum 2: Some people have asked the question of, if there could've been an earlier WoC rep in Smash, who would it be.  This is a question that actually has an answer.  Masahiro Sakurai has stated in the past that he did, at one point, wish to include Ayumi Tachibana from the Famicom Detective Club series in Melee, as he was a massive fan of the games.  If Ayumi had made it into the game, she would've been unambiguously the first woman of color in the series, being a Japanese woman from what is intended to be real Japan.

Min Min

Btw, Min Min was my ARMs main, so I'm glad she got into Smash.

This is the easiest answer, this is the safest answer, this is the least ambiguous answer, but that does not mean it's correct.  Min Min comes to us from Smash Ultimate's 6th DLC, a DLC that fulfills an empty slot on the roster that Sakurai had always intended.  Sakurai had wanted to include characters from the Switch's first year on the market, but Ultimate was already pretty far into development before said games could come out and, as such, Breath of the Wild kind of had to be the cutoff.  Three Houses only really came into the first DLC pack, which was decided around Ultimate's release date because Intelligent Systems gave Sakurai a sneak peak copy years before the game hit market.

Min Min comes from the video game "ARMS", an early Switch 1 title designed to utilize the Joy-Con's motion controls.  It was essentially attempt to take the general idea that made Splatoon work, i.e. "what if we made a competitive game with the sensibilities of a more traditional singleplayer one" and try and create a more dedicated, competitive fighter with it.  In ARMS case, rather than being a shooter that played like a platformer, it was a fighting game that played like a third person shooter.  It unfortunately did not become successful to the degree that Splatoon did, but it certainly has its audience and Min Min in particular is the game's most popular character, having won their big character tournament at the end of their support window.

So why is Min Min the easy answer?  What makes her the safe option for the first woman of color in Smash.  Well uh.  She's Chinese.  Like, Min Min is from the ARMs' universe's version of China, she speaks actual Chinese, her name is a pun on the Chinese word for noodle, her theme is heavily inspired by music meant to depict China.  Min Min is the easy answer because she is the only character on this list who is definitively from a place in the real world and is the easiest to confirm as a woman of color.  She's also a handy line to draw for what we're doing, because she's so unambiguous, any character who is in contention for this title has to be before her.

Villager

The second "easy" option is the Villager.  The first new character to be confirmed for Smash 4 and, in fact, the first character to be shown for Smash 4 at all, Villager is one of Sakurai's truly most insane characters concepts that he actually got working.  Nowadays Villager almost feels quaint, as their moveset doesn't really do anything super crazy.  Compared to people like Min Min, who have had the mechanics from their own games fully adapted into Smash, to where you really feel like you are playing an ARMs character in this game.  But Villager is truly a highlight of Sakurai's creativity, a character from a life simulation game brought into a fighting game and made to work entirely within the context of them being from a life sim.  It's superb.

Villager hails from the Animal Crossing series, designed to represent the player character of Animal Crossing which is a player insert character.  An Animal Crossing character was actually in demand as early as Brawl, I remember a lot of speculation around Tom Nook being a character, or KK Slider mayhaps.  Instead, Sakurai decided that the customizable player character is instead the best way to represent the Animal Crossing series, having them utilize their various tools and items to fight.  In a way, Villager, and by extension the very similar but not quite a clone character Isabelle, kind of fight by just doing things randomly and the opponent sort of runs into them.  Being a player character though, the Smash team decided to include various alternate skins that represent the level of player customization present in the Animal Crossing series.

Which brings us to the question at hand.  As of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the Villager's 8th skin is a dark-skinned woman, meant to represent skin tone customization, a feature I don't think was in Animal Crossing when Ultimate came out but was very likely planned for the then upcoming next entry, Animal Crossing New Horizons, which was famously in development for a long time.  And, with this character being before Min Min, both Villager as a whole and this particular skin, Villager has a strong case for being the first woman of color in Smash.  Especially when you consider that Villager is, like Min Min, meant to be human, not some sort of hybrid, not a fantasy race with dark skin, just an actual human that is a woman of color that was on the roster before Min Min.

However, I feel of the candidates we'll be talking about today, Villager actually has the worst claim to the title.  For starters, Villager 8 is not the earliest character we're going to be talking about on this list, though she's the earliest revealed character I think that is decidedly "human" we will be talking about technically.  There are at least two characters that debuted before original villager, and many more that debuted before this Smash Ultimate skin of Villager.  But also, this feels a bit weird, doesn't it?  Like Villager 8 is really who we're going with, a singular alternate skin of a character, and not even one that appeared in every game the character in question has been in?  I don't feel comfortable saying "the first woman of color in the Super Smash Bros. roster is the last skin of a character whose entire visual ideology is being customizable".  It'd be like if Dovakhiin were on the roster and we called them the first woman of color who was playable because Dovakhiin 6 is the Arabic-inspired Khajit skin, it just feels weird!

Leaf (Pokemon Trainer)

So how about, instead, a character who occupies half the skin slots of a character.  Pokemon Trainer appeared originally in Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the form of Red, the original Generation 1 Pokemon protagonist, albeit in his FireRed and LeafGreen incarnation.  Pokemon was always a prominent part of the Smash Bros. roster, Pikachu is literally one of the original 8, Jigglypuff is one of the only secret characters in Smash 64, Melee's new character roster included multiple new Pokemon, and several Pokemon were planned and/or shopped at various stages of development.  But Pokemon Trainer is the character that represents the series the best, a character that sends out his Pokemon, represented by the Gen 1 starters at various stages of evolution, into battle and has them fight for him.  It's also a very clever way of doing a stance change character.  Unfortunately, Pokemon Trainer would have to be cut in Smash 4 as the 3DS couldn't handle him.  But when he returned in Ultimate, he brought a friend.

Leaf, or the female Pokemon trainer, hails from Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen.  She is not the first playable female Pokemon trainer in the series, that distinction goes to Krys from Pokemon Crystal, but Leaf is the first female Pokemon trainer that was likely designed to market the game to girls.  As was found in a recently translated old interview, FRLG made numerous design decisions to market to girls.  Leaf, and by extension, the concept of a female Pokemon Trainer, would make their way into the series with Ultimate, which marked the triumphant return of the Pokemon Trainer, with Leaf occupying the even numbered slots of Pokemon Trainer's alternate costumes, although she would end up representing the odd numbered Generations.  After the first two skins, which are default Red and default Leaf, they have costumes representing each Generation, up to VII, the most recent one out at the time, but because Leaf offsets it by one, Red gets the even numbers and Leaf gets the odd.

Leaf is a pretty strong contender for this crown.  Pokemon Trainer, as a character, was introduced to Smash much earlier than either Min Min or Villager, and is one of the earliest characters I will be talking about in general.  And while Leaf is locked to alternate skins, much like Villager 8, she occupies a more prominent role within those skins, making up 4 out of the 8 available.  Leaf is clearly a feature of the character, rather than just a one-off skin.  Most importantly though is that Leaf is Japanese.  The Pokemon world is not 1:1 with the real world, there are various geographical inconsistencies (like the UK being upside down) and the world is much more untamed than ours, but Leaf's region is probably THE Pokemon region that is the most analogous to a real world location, being basically a deurbanized Tokyo.  It's literally called "the Kanto region", which is literally a place in Japan.

However, Leaf runs into the problem that Villager 8 ultimately runs into.  While she definitely occupies more of a presence on the roster, Leaf is still just an alternate skin at the end of the day.  She's an other to her male counterpart, a set of slightly different character models to add some variety to the Pokemon Trainer.  As well, while Pokemon Trainer is an older character in the grand scheme of Smash, Leaf is new, being added into the character's DNA as of Smash Ultimate.  It still puts her in front of Min Min, but she's unlikely to be the first.  Still, I don't think she's a bad option by any means and if you want to consider her, then go for it.  There's not exactly a right answer here.

Corrin

This will be the only time I talk about Corrin as being interesting, so you better enjoy this.  Corrin is the oddball of the Fire Emblem lords in Smash.  Corrin was the penultimate character in Smash 4's DLC, coming between Cloud and Bayonetta.  A lot of people criticize Corrin's inclusion within Smash as a cynical business move, because it probably is, but I do think Sakurai kind of cooked with Corrin.  She's like the easiest cut from the roster if they make another game but Corrin has a super unique and very fun moveset, utilizing their bizarre half-dragon form to do a lot of wild stuff in combat.  Corrin is also the only Fire Emblem lord that I feel truly belongs in this conversation.  Whereas other lords are just intended to be European with a distinctly anime aesthetic, Corrin's race/ethnicity is much more complicated than that.  Why?  Well, let's get into it.

Hailing from the trilogy of Fire Emblem Fates, Corrin is the fully customizable main character of those games.  Corrin was raised as a prince/princess of the Kingdom of Nohr, a cold, harsh, very Eastern European style kingdom that encompasses the vast majority of the land on the continent that Nohr is located on.  Shortly after the game starts, however, it is quickly discovered the Corrin is actually the lost member of the royal family of Nohr's neighboring kingdom and long-time enemy, Hoshido.  The two kingdoms have been at war for a very long time, and any time there is a treaty between the two, it is only a matter of time before said treaty is broken.  As such, war ignites in the midst of Corrin's reunion with their birth family and they are forced to choose a side: either side with the family who raised them, knowing they stole them, or side with the family they were born to, even though they do not know them.  Or maybe they can forge their own path.  Or join Smash!

So why is Corrin in discussion for the first woman of color in the roster.  After all, as previously stated, most Fire Emblem lords look Japanese, but their Kingdoms are analogs for the numerous European kingdoms.  Well, Corrin is a bit unique because her heritage is distinctly inspired by East Asian culture.  Hoshido is a country that, as you could imagine from the name, carries a distinctive Japanese lean.  Their lord and heir apparent to the throne is designed after a samurai, the names all have that lean (Ryoma, Takumi, Hinoka, Sakura), and geographically it is a smaller country on the east coast of a continent that is on a peninsula with an island chain.  With all of this evidence, it can be easily surmised that Corrin is either Japanese or, given the geography, Korean, and that Nohr is actually Russia.  This would definitely put her in the running as the first woman of color on the roster, appearing an entire game before the others listed.

However, once again, there are issues.  Like with Villager and with Leaf, female Corrin is not the default, she is a series of alternate skins on a character who is, in Smash, traditionally depicted as male.  Which is actually kind of a rarity for Corrin, mind, as a lot of other sources tend to depict Corrin as canon female, but I digress.  There is, also, the issue with Corrin being an FE lord.  Fire Emblem takes place in a high fantasy world and while there are analogs to the real world given in its history and geography, it's also not uncommon for Fire Emblem to blur those lines.  There are a lot of ninjas in Europe in the FE world, I'm just saying.  There is also just the fact that Corrin isn't quite human.  Corrin is a dragon, a half-dragon mind you, but a dragon nonetheless.  The half-blood daughter of a truly ancient race of dragons that is now all but extinct.  So while I don't think a convincing argument could be made that she shouldn't count because she is "not actually human", I could understand why some people would go that way.  That being said, I think Corrin has the strongest claim to the title we've seen thus far, at least of the ones that are a little ambiguous.  

Inkling

I know, I know, I literally made a rule about this.  And I literally just brought it up as a counterargument that could be leveled at Corrin.  Hear me out though.  The Inklings were the very first characters revealed for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, being revealed in the game's reveal trailer.  If you are keeping track, that means the majority of the potential answers to this question have technically debuted in Smash Ultimate.  That's certainly interesting, don't you think?  I promised I wasn't going to criticize, I know.  Anyways, Inkling is one of the only newcomers in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's base roster that doesn't come from a fairly old game, Splatoon being a game that came out during Smash 4's content cycle and very quickly became one of Nintendo's tentpoles.  And I think, given how Splatoon is, they become a very interesting answer to this question.

Splatoon is a franchise that takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, long after the extinction of humans.  Since the disappearance of the dominant race, squids have evolved into humanoids and have become obsessed with the pillars of human culture.  Things like fashion, music, sports, etc.  This new race of shapeshifting humanoid squids, called the Inklings, would inherit the Earth and recreate essentially the best of human culture, heavily influenced by Japanese idol culture.  In fact, the area that the Inklings occupy and from which they host their primary sport, Turf Wars, is heavily implied to have once been Japan and has now just been warped by whatever changes the Earth has gone through in the intermittent millions of years.  As such, the Inklings are themselves are something of a parrot of present day urban Japanese culture, and are noteworthy as such.

The Inklings have a bit of a leg up on the previous character's we've discussed in that, unlike with Villager 8, Leaf, and femme Corrin, the female Inklings ARE the default skin in Smash.  The Inkling's default skin is the platonic ideal of an Inkling, a young Japanese girl with orange hair and a white t-shirt with a brand logo on it.  I believe this is the design of the Inkling that we even first saw, appearing in the original Splatoon trailer which Smash Ultimate parrots for its reveal.  Not only that but Inkling, representing a game with loads of customization options, has skins of varying looks and, indeed, skin tones.  I feel like, outside of Min Min, the argument could be made that Inkling is the least ambiguous character in this lineup, not only is she a woman of color by default, but she is also represented by multiple women of color.

On the other hand, the Inkling is a squid.  That's a little reductive I realize, but the point is still valid.  Inklings are shapeshifters, they are not only able to switch between their squid and humanoid forms at will, but also change most things about their appearance on a whim.  This has been a very positive feature of the Splatoon series, as the games have been lauded for their inclusivity.  You can switch up your appearance and gender at basically any point.  But also, it makes this a little messy.  Can we consider Inklings PoC when they're actually humanoid squids shapeshifting into facsimiles of the culture that existed before them?  It also runs into the villager question, in that the reason why the Inkling is so varied in their alternate costumes is as a representation of player customization.  Splatoon is a series where you play as an Inkling you created, not any specific Inkling.  As such, the Inkling costumes are all designed to show the wide range of customization options present in the game.  The Inkling is very ambiguous despite in many ways being more concrete than any option previously listed despite Min Min.  They're probably the biggest question marks on this list.

Sheik

This is, to some people, the "correct" answer.  And this is, to other people, heresy.  I honestly just feel kind of gross even putting Sheik on here, to be honest.  Sheik is the earliest character on this list by far, being one of the first newcomers ever shown for Super Smash Bros. Melee.  Amusingly, because of how they're shown in the intro, Sheik is actually considered to be on the roster BEFORE Zelda, despite being the secondary transformation of her in Melee and Brawl.  Sheik is one of the very few Zelda characters on the roster and one of the only ones that has a unique moveset, as most Zelda characters are based on other characters in the roster as they were inserted as a means to buff the roster while not adding too much development time.  Sheik is very popular, despite the fact that they were included in a singular game from 1998, it's almost difficult to imagine the roster without them at this point.  Sheik is also complicated for this question for a couple very specific reasons.  We'll get into them.

Sheik originates from the iconic and critically acclaimed video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Entering the story after its game-defining time skip, Sheik appears as a helpful but mysterious figure in the darker and ravaged version of Hyrule that Link awakens in.  They are of the Sheikah tribe, a race of dark-skinned peoples who have loyally served the royal family for centuries and for whom Kakariko Village, a small farming town at the foot of Death Mountain, is home.  Sheik aids Link on his quest by nudging him in the right direction on his quest and teaching him the sacred songs which will allow him to more easily navigate Hyrule.  This all culminates in the plot twist that Smash likely spoiled for you if you weren't old enough to Zelda in 1998, the Sheik has actually been the missing Princess Zelda the entire time, having used the Triforce of Wisdom to transform themselves into a young Sheikah so they could hide from Ganondorf's eye.  Sheik was also planned to make an appearance in Twilight Princess, which is what their design from Brawl onward is based on, but this was ultimately scrapped.  Good thing too, Twilight Princess already has too many balls in the air.

There are two main problems with Sheik being the first woman of color on the roster.  One that's more based in canon and the other which is more based in fanon.  The former issue is that an argument could be made that Sheik is not truly a woman of color.  She is simply a magical disguise put on by Zelda, a means to hide herself as she awaits Link's return.  She is not necessarily a character to her own, just a costume put on by a woman whose appearance is more in line with European royalty.  But I could also easily see the argument that Sheik's popularity, her legend as it were, has made her a character in her own right.  And that Smash in particular is evidence of this fact, as the two characters have evolved in completely separate ways, with Sheik not even maintaining the very few elements that she shared with Zelda by the time Ultimate was released, i.e. losing the Light Arrow as a final smash.

The other problem is that Sheik is typically depicted as a man by the fandom.  Not only is Sheik a man to the fandom, but Sheik is a pretty important symbol of transmasc gamers, I distinctly remember the outcry that happened around Smash 4 when Sakurai confirmed Sheik in the game was female and people called for erasure.  Sheik being a guy is the first thing most people know about him, and the twist that Sheik is Zelda hits harder as a result.  It's why I feel uncomfortable with putting Sheik in this running, it feels a bit like stepping on the toes of a community I am not a part of.  Sheik's gender identity being masculine is very important to people, both in a narrative sense and in a representation sense.

So why is Sheik here at all?  Because, according to Nintendo, THIS is the correct answer to the question.  Or at least the closest thing to a correct answer that we'll be given without asking them directly, at which point I imagine they'll say like Min Min just to be safe.  Sheik has almost always been understood internally to be a woman.  The idea that Sheik is a man mostly arose about from the fandom, as previously stated, namely due to the fact that Sheik's gender is very ambiguous.  They don't lean too heavily into masculine or feminine character design and, to a lot of people, that immediately equates to masculine because most of our characters are male.  Especially in the context of video games in 1998.  I don't really like it either, to be clear.  Again, I feel like I'm stepping on people's toes by even suggesting this as an option.  I just want any trans readers to know I love them, I'm sorry Sheik is here, but I couldn't justify not putting them on here, especially since they're probably the "correct" answer.  It's an answer I really wish wasn't here and I don't blame anyone for disregarding Sheik as a possible contender, as this question is super ambiguous anyways.

Daisy

I bet when you clicked on this, you never thought it would end with Princess Daisy.  One of the very first characters to be shown off in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the first "newcomer" revealed in the first Smash Ultimate direct actually, Daisy was introduced as an "Echo Fighter".  Basically how Smash now contextualizes clone characters, rather than them having their own individual spots on the roster, they now share one with another character.  So Daisy isn't character 67, she's character 13E.  For the record you are only an Echo Fighter apparently if you debuted in Smash 4 or Ultimate, the Melee and Brawl clone characters got to keep their numberings.  Here's the thing, when I started thinking about this question, it was just something I was like "well here's the list of possible candidates but this one doesn't work for this reason or this one is ambiguous for that reason", stuff like that.  When I got to Daisy though, that's when I wanted to turn it into a blog post.  So let's do this.

Daisy hails from the original Game Boy launch title "Super Mario Land".  Created as a way to make the Game Boy game feel distinctive from the console Mario games, so as not to feel like just an inferior port, Daisy has become a fan favorite character over the years, in particular due to her portrayals in the Mario sports games, especially Mario Strikers.  Compared to her counterpart, Peach, she's tougher, more energetic, and just a bit psychotic.  It's honestly shocking how long it took Daisy to reappear in the mainline series with how beloved she is, she was literally in Smash Bros before she made another mainline Mario game reappearance.  However, it is from her origins of that our question comes into play.  And with Daisy in particular, it is exceptionally complicated.

So, Daisy's place of origin is Sarasaland, an empire ruled by Daisy's royal family.  Daisy is an empress.  Sarasaland is comprised of four Kingdoms; the Birabuto Kingdom, a vast desert kingdom which contains ancient ruins, namely large pyramids, the Muda Kingdom, an kingdom set on a large island chain in the ocean where weird occurrences happen, the Easton Kingdom, a mountainous kingdom high in the sky where the people have built large statues of men, and the Chai Kingdom, a forested kingdom covered in primarily bamboo.  Sarasaland, in a departure from most other Mario games before or since, has its kingdoms representing real world locations, spanning Egypt, China, Rapa Nui and Bermuda, though the last one could be the mythical continent of Mu, which was believed to be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Aside from the fact that this empire would be comically massive if it were in the real world, stretching from North Africa all the way to the coast of the Americas, this also raises a very interesting question about Daisy: is Daisy a WoC?

Now, I don't think Nintendo has ever or will ever weigh in on this debate one way or another.  I think in their mind, Daisy is the princess of a fictionalized kingdom and while that kingdom has real world analogs, it's not a place.  Daisy isn't Egyptian just because her kingdom is Egyptian, it's a fantasy world.  Daisy is very likely a generic European royal that just so happens to have a kingdom made up of cool iconography that the team working on Super Mario Land thought would be cool.  Except I don't think that's actually true.

See, the answer of "is Daisy a WoC" seems to change based on the game.  Daisy is typically depicted next to Peach and, as a rule, always has darker skin than her.  Even the most pale Daisy appearances are slightly tanned.  But again, it's not enough to where you could look and go "yes, Daisy is a person of color".  But sometimes, Daisy has fairly dark skin.  Her first appearance in color, Mario Tennis, is one such case, having Daisy's official art have pretty dark skin.  And this is also true of Mario Party 3, Daisy again has dark skin in that game.  But then in Mario Party 4, she is much paler.  And it keeps going back and forth like that.  Daisy sometimes has pale skin, sometimes has tanned skin, sometimes has dark skin.  There are some Daisies where it seems like the art team was implying that Daisy was a woman of color and other Daisies where she just definitively isn't.  It's shockingly complicated and I think it is only fitting that the surprisingly ambiguous question of "who was the first playable woman of color in Super Smash Bros." ends with a character who, herself, is really ambiguous.

In recent years, though, there's been more of an acceptance among the community that Daisy is indeed a woman of color, or at least she should be.  It seems a bit obvious to many of them, Daisy's massive globe spanning empire she is the singular monarch of would cover North Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, the Pacific Islands, Central America, before finally landing in the Caribbean and coastal America.  It's comically large, as previously stated, but it is a diverse swath of people and it would imply Daisy is part of them.  Granted, the British Empire also was comically large, to the point where the sun never set on Britain, but I imagine Nintendo doesn't want to imply that one of the biggest characters from their cartoony mascot platformer is a ruthless colonialist who violently conquered this land.  If Daisy is not officially a woman of color currently, which again is complicated, she probably should be going forward.  It'd be nice for Nintendo's biggest franchise to prominently feature a woman of color.

So what is the answer?

Min Min probably.  Look, I don't know what the actual answer is, and I don't really think there is one singular answer.  There are many asterisks to basically any candidate that is not Min Min, and the other answers can be seen as unsatisfying.  Like I said, what is probably the "correct" answer is one that feels a little icky because of how much that character means to transmascs.  Everyone is going to interpret this question differently and, honestly, even if it were something Nintendo was interested in answering, I don't think we'd like their answer, because it'd probably be Min Min.  I will say though, it is infinitely disappointing to me that every eligible character besides one debuted within the last two Smash games.  Smash is a series that has been around for almost 30 years now and not only is this question ambiguous, it's a depressingly small sample pool.  I think even the characters after Min Min, there's like A Steve skin that is a black woman, and then that's every woman of color on the roster period.  And that's honestly the other reason why I don't like just saying Min Min, because it means that in the 30 years we've had Super Smash Bros, the 6th to last character introduced in the game about having EVERY Smash character is the first WoC.  Feels just a bit wrong, doesn't it?  Maybe the answer should be Jigglypuff.

Picture this, okay.  It’s 1999, and you are 5 years old.  It’s summer vacation.  And for whatever reason, your mom has a lot of appointments and so, you being five, end up being babysat, woo hoo for you!  Luckily your mom has a cousin who is so gracious as to watch you during all these meetings and, even better, said cousin has kids your age!  And, they have your favorite/only console, the N64!  You spend at least two days a month over there, playing board games and Pokemon and having a great time until, one day, you notice your cousins’ small stable of games and your mind is blown!  There are at least four, no, FIVE, games you’ve never seen before (granted, the only games you’ve seen before are Pokemon Stadium and Hey You Pikachu, but still).  And, on a whim, you ask your cousins to pick their favorite and we’ll play that.  They pull a game off the shelf, pop it into their console and you spend the rest of the time until your mom picks you up playing this game.  

Granted, you’re not very good, you never even get out of the opening area, but you’re having a blast, this is a new experience and you’re very excited over it.  You go home, excited, ready to ask your parents for the game and… you don’t remember the title.  You never got it, it never came up in conversation, it was just, you know, gone.  And it’s the beginning of the schoolyear now.  That was the last time those cousins would watch you and, in fact, would be the last time you saw them for over a decade.  Only one thing sticks with you though.  You vaguely remember that character in the game… was a bear.

Now picture this.  It’s 2008, now you’re 15.  Due to several moves in a short period of time and your own autism-related issues in a classroom setting, you are now homeschooled.  You are mostly left to your own devices, your parents both work and trust you to do the work, which you do, and your school day usually lasts about 2 hours, leaving an obscene amount of free time.  And as you are home, alone, with a computer in the other room, you basically have unfettered access to the internet.  And what’s the first thing you do?  …Okay, what’s the second thing you do as a little gamer boy?  Look up stuff about video games, of course.  Quickly you’re directed to the early gaming scene on YouTube, back when Let’s Play meant a different thing, the AVGN was not uploading on YouTube and was still releasing nonstop bangers, and there was widespread, what we would eventually call “discourse” but back then we called “flame wars”, on what were the “greatest games of all time”.  

All the bangers like Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VII, Sonic Adventure 2, and more games I will probably get to if I continue this series I’m thinking of doing.  And I was all in on all of them.  I was prime for this kind of discussion, an interest in video games as a concept, no real access to play these games, no real thoughts and opinions of my own that random people could mold into just parroting their own opinions as if they were mine.  I was super prepped for the retro gaming space in 2008 (and the alt right pipeline but I thankfully dodged that one).  And in many of these discussions, one name also came up: Banjo-Kazooie.

You are, of course, floored.  You have, somehow, through the power of the internet, been reunited with this game from your childhood, this vague memory you’d never thought you would see again in your life.  And, as you would, you are scrambling to find ways to play it.  Unfortunately, finding N64 games was really hard in 2008, not that you had money to buy them anyways.  However, a friend decides to let you in on a little trade secret: if you type in “Banjo-Kazooie ROM” on your web browser (shoutouts to Internet Explorer), you can access not just this game, but the entire history of N64 games, on your PC!  And it’s all totally legal!  The new opportunities you have at your disposal excite you… until you try actually playing these games.  

You are not a PC gamer, never have been, probably never truly will be.  Keyboard controls feel funky to you, wrong.  And what’s more, you don’t have a controller you could hook up to your PC to rectify this issue, not that you’d have known how to operate the process of making it work on your PC in general.  And, in truth, even if you did, your parents Windows XP computer, obtained several years back at this point, has a lot of trouble running the N64 games you’re excited to play anyways (not that it was entirely its fault, lord knows N64 emulation is a nightmare).  You have, once again, been defeated, Banjo destined to become yet another distant memory to you.  But you hold out hope, one day, hopefully soon, you will find a way to play Banjo-Kazooie.

Picture this.  It’s 2023, you are now 29 years old.  At the start of the pandemic, you were laid off from your job of around ten years and due to the failing health of your parents, you continued to stay out of the job market for an extended length to take care of them as they recovered from various medical emergencies and surgeries.  Without an income to speak of, you have turned to your backlog, which is sizable, slowly chipping away at it to fulfill your limited free time.  And, to add just a little bit of spice to your backlogging experience, you use tools to randomize the games you play.  This practice has been very fruitful, summoning forth incredibly obscure but fascinating games, old classics you’ve just never finished, big indie titles that do something interesting with the medium, it’s been a blast.  You’ve found new favorites, finished loose ends, it’s greatly improved your gaming experience.  And one day, one fateful day, the randomization tools you use land you on one game: Banjo-Kazooie.

This is it, at long last there is time, there is initiative and, most importantly, thanks to Microsoft’s, at the time, buddy buddy nature with Nintendo, there is availability.  And… you’re not really all that excited.  Despite this game being one of THE major loose threads throughout your life, this opportunity to put it to be it is faced not with excitement but with this kind of mix of cautious optimism and indifference.  This is people’s favorite game of all time, arguably one of the greatest platformers ever made, and yet you, a person who in our last little vignette was so into this era of gaming that it was basically your entire personality, is just like “guess that’s cool”.

See, you’ve changed.  You’ve changed a lot, actually.  The once retro game obsessed child, someone who believed that older games were better as a rule than modern games, has given way instead to an adult with far more complicated opinions on the past.  Your philosophy in what video games should be is no longer a repetition of the old talking point of “if it’s not fun, then what’s the point”, rather, you crave weirder, more interesting, more unique games.  

You’ve fallen out of love with a lot of games, a lot of genres, that were once life-defining.  JRPGs, once your favorite genre, are now nothing short of intimidating for you and, frankly, you find yourself potentially too cynical to enjoy their storytelling anymore.  Games that you used to adore, your Mario Galaxies, your Twilight Princesses, your Sonics, just in general, your love for them proves a distant memory.  They are not what you want, what you crave from gaming, they feel incorrect to you.  And, indeed, the mascot platformer has fallen out of favor for you.  You still get down with Mario, don’t get me wrong, Mario Odyssey has been one of your favorite games of the entire generation and compelled you to even learn a speedrun because of how fun it is.  But by and large, you don’t look at the genre with the same excitement.  You see a mascot platformer and face it with vague indifference.

Not only that, but this is not exactly a road untraveled for you.  As you have been facing this war on your backlog, you have played many beloved games, games people would call their favorites, call the greatest games of all time.  And… well… you haven’t been seeing it.  Maybe it is overhype, maybe you just aren’t in the right place or the right time, but you have tackled games like Sonic Adventure 2, Super Paper Mario, to a lesser extent Yoshi’s Island, and it’s not that you think these games are bad, you actually did rather like Yoshi’s Island, it made your top 30 that year, you also haven’t seen masterpieces.  You’ve honestly started to feel something is broken in you, you are facing the most beloved games of all time and can mostly only manifest a vague shrug for any of them.  You even jokingly post about it on social media, how you played “Ecco the Dolphin”, a game pretty universally considered at best mediocre and at worst awful, and fell in love with it immediately, in juxtaposition of all of the games other people would call the greatest of all time.

But, even in the midst of all these reservations you have regarding Banjo, there is still a part of you who is excited to finally face the bear and bird.  After all, this is possibly the biggest loose end of your life, a game that has been following you, just out of grasp, since you were a small child.  And who knows, maybe it’ll actually click for you, maybe this game will defy the pattern.  After all, on paper this game has a lot to offer you specifically.  You like more unique, interesting games, and Banjo is known for its specific sense of humor and its incredibly unique level design, worlds brimming with character and personality.  And while the gameplay isn’t some really fast paced platformer with a lot of interesting movement tech like its big brother, Mario 64, there’s still a lot of cool stuff to learn with in Banjo.  So, with many reservations, but also many hopes, you take the plunge, you finally play Banjo-Kazooie.  And…

...i don’t like Banjo-Kazooie.

The Humour

Banjo-Kazooie's sense of humor is arguably its most famous trait.  The iconic sense of humor is either the first or one of the first things that you're likely to hear about Banjo-Kazooie.  Its audience loves this cast of characters and their uniquely Rare dialog, emphasizing a variety of gags and jokes.  I imagine this must've been pretty groundbreaking at the time, honestly, at least for the console-specific audience.  There had been "funny" games before this on console but most games trying to be explicitly comedic at this time would've done so through slapstick or pop culture references.  Or, if they were more deliberately written to be comedic, they were likely niche PC adventure games.  Banjo-Kazooie would've been one of the first mainstream video games where the comedy was written, genuine jokes, gags, puns.  They abound in this game.  It's also the part I want to tackle first because I think me not liking the humor in this game is the easiest pill to swallow.

Now, bear in mind that when I approached Banjo-Kazooie, I was already an adult with a fully crafted sense of humor all my own.  Banjo-Kazooie is a game for children, I know people are going to be mad at me saying that but it's a game with a colorful bear and bird where they fight a witch while encountering a lot of toilet jokes.  It's a game for children.  And I think that reflects very strongly in how most of the people who laud this game's humor first got initiated into it.  They too were children, they were able to have their sense of humor shaped by Banjo-Kazooie rather than coming into it like I did, sense of humor already formed.  You can tell when someone's sense of humor was heavily influenced by the N64 Rare platformers, trust me.  So I am not going to sit here and tell you that, because I don't find the jokes funny, that's a problem I actually have with the game.  That's me coming into this and not being the target demo or the target sense of humor.

My problem is instead with how repetitive the humor in Banjo-Kazooie tends to be.  It feels as though the same jokes are being told over and over again.  The same exact setups and punchlines for grossout humor, puns, gags, what have you.  A toilet joke always feel like the same toilet joke, a slapstick gag always feels like the same slapstick gag, it feels like Rare's writing staff thought of a few things that kids would find funny and just kept repeating them.  Brentilda in particular wore me down, as she is an NPC you will keep encountering across your journey and her only role is to tell the same joke about Gruntilda over and over again.  She'll start by mentioning a fact about Gruntilda and then the punchline is always either "Gruntilda is gross", "Gruntilda is fat" or "Gruntilda is ugly".  None of these are jokes I find particularly funny, and having to hear them over and over made me very annoyed.  It was like being trapped in an elevator with a second grader who just found out what farts were.  The worst part about it though is that Brentilda, who is representative of this huge problem I have with the game, is not only not optional, paying close attention to her jokes is necessary for the final level.

Grunty's Furnace Fun

I have more generalized thoughts about the levels that I want to get into later on in the review, but I just want to say that this level might be one of my least favorite levels in gaming history.  Can I just vent for a second?  It's my blog, whatever, this level was miserable for me.  So, I want to be clear, by this point I had already more or less figured out I really didn't like Banjo-Kazooie.  I had fun for the first few levels, up until Freezeazy Peak I was kind of into this game actually.  After that point, the good will started draining rapidly, culminating in Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Woods, two irresponsibly large and complicated levels that each took me hours to complete WITH using Save States.  I was so ready to be done with this game by this point, if I hadn't committed so hard to finishing it, I probably would've DNF'ed it.

So, I want you to imagine that you have gotten to the end of this game you didn't like, you even went the extra mile and 100%-ed it, got every Jiggy and every note, and you get to the final door, ready to face the final boss.  And what you are greeted by is a long, boring quiz about the game you just played all the way through and, moreover, did not like.  You are asked questions about locations you hardly remember because you've already pushed them out of your brain and characters whose names you never cared to learn and every single Brentilda line.  If I had not already effectively 100%-ed the game, I would've stopped.  I would've rejected this.  I don't know if I can find it but I distinctly remember texting some friends of mine and going "the sheer arrogance of this game".  Like "you probably loved our game so much that we're going to give you a quiz just to remember how much you loved it".  I genuinely tried to learn the speedrunning trick where you do a frame perfect transition into a move as Grunty "kills" you so you can just walk across because I wasn't about to walk all the way back through Grunty's Lair to find all the Brentilda quotes and write them all down.  And guides don't super help on this quiz because the Brentilda quotes are semi-randomized.  

But even if I had been more amiable to the game, the thing that awaited on the other side would've still soured me on it.  See, I was 100%-ing the game, despite my own reservations about 100%-ing video games and also my lack of love for Banjo because I felt like that was correct.  To really understand the Rare style of platformer, you have to 100% the game.  This is both a positive and a negative depending on who you ask, fans of Rare love how much there is to find in these games while critics tend to bemoan how much it seems like they were just unnecessarily bloating the game.  So to get a full perspective I felt like I needed to do a 100% run.  Good thing I did, because as it turns out, in order to beat Banjo-Kazooie regularly, you basically have to 100% the game already.

Collectathon

I'm going to do something that I don't really like doing in these blog posts.  I hesitate to compare a game to another game, not that I won't do it, a key feature of my Earthbound posts are me just comparing the other games in the trilogy to Earthbound.  But I tend to think that one of the key issues in the modern media landscape is that too many people are only judging things through the lens of the things they remind one of.  People calling Astro Bot "essentially Mario Galaxy 3" or attributing Clair Obscur to Japan even though it's such a distinctly French piece of art just because it reminds them of Persona, that sort of thing.  I want to view things as their own works of art and so I tend to hesitate to compare them to other works unless it is relevant to their history.  But to really explain why I take issue with Banjo's approach to the collectathon I do have to compare it to another game.

So, in 1996, Super Mario 64 hit the market.  Quite possibly the most influential video game of all time, Super Mario 64 was the first game really properly establish a language for 3D movement in games.  There were other 3D games before this but they didn't have the same full range of 3D movement and the same understanding of what level design could be.  This is not to say they never could, but Mario 64 really accelerated the medium years past where it was.  But more relevant is that Mario 64 more or less established the language of the collectathon platformer.  The lack of space present on the N64 cartridge caused Nintendo to have to innovate, instead of their initial plan of having more traditional Mario levels but in 3D, they opted instead for larger environments with loads of objectives in it.  It is not only one of the franchise's first, but it remains one of its best, an infinitely replayable, completely accessible platformer that feels fresh each time you play it.

But an underrated game design ideal that I think Mario 64 really nails is how it handles the amount of objectives needed to be cleared to get to the end vs. the total number of objectives present in the game.  Mario 64 requires the player to obtain 70 out of the possible 120 stars in order to face the final boss, with other walls being placed at 8, 30, and 40 stars.  Only around 60% of the game's total.  What's more is that there is only 1 actually required star in the game, with another world requiring you to get at least one star in order to progress.  I think that this is genius, I think that this is the perfect way to do it.  You're not forcing your player to do any individual objective really, they have full freedom of where they want to go and what they want to collect, but they still have to engage with the game properly.  It is enough content to where the player can get a full sense of the game's scope, but their progress is also not stalled by being forced to complete an objective they can't or truly do not want to do multiple times.  The Bowser's sub mission is a low point and I can understand people balking off that one, but on the whole the player is free to engage with the game on their own pace.  Obviously this metric is fluid, Mario Odyssey would be a nightmare if you had to collect 60% of the moons in that game to beat it, but for collectathons of this style, 60% is a fantastic amount.

Banjo-Kazooie requires the player to collect 94 of the game's 100 Jiggies to finish the game.  I understand that one of the things people like about Banjo is that it has this sense of adventure, the player is incentivized to delve in deep and explore the various levels in it.  And I'm also well aware that the kind of player who really adores Banjo-Kazooie is also the kind of player who is likely to 100% a video game, even if the process of doing so can and often does ruin their enjoyment of said game.  But I feel like we can all agree that this expectation on the player is ludicrous, right?  Forcing the player to collect 94 of the games' Jiggies means that, should they get to this final roadblock, they will very likely have to go back through and get a lot of things they probably thought they were okay to miss.  They now have to do a bunch of minigames they didn't want to do, or the more annoying/frustrating objectives that they passed on.  They probably have to now go through Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Woods, two incredibly tedious and irresponsibly large levels that often have incredibly complicated orders of operation to accomplish a single objective.  Again, I knew this going into it and I was still appalled at how much the game asked of me to simply beat it, I cannot imagine what it would be like if I had played it blind.

This is not even mentioning the notes, the other collectible this game is built around.  The notes are one of the most controversial aspects to this game even to people who love it.  It's such a problem that it's one of the very few fixes that they made to this game when it was originally rereleased on Xbox 360.  A way to think about the notes in Banjo-Kazooie is that they are the equivalent to the coins in other platformers.  There are 100 of them scattered in each area and you use them as a currency, buying your way past obstacles at various points in the game.  It's very similar to the way Spyro the Dragon handles its gems, as both currency and collectible.  However, Banjo makes the interesting decision to make it so that these notes are not permanently collected.  The game keeps track of your score, when you go into a level you will leave with however many notes you collected or, if you are going through it a second time for cleanup, you will leave with any additional notes you've collected.  However, unless you have already collected every note in the level in question, each time you return to the level you will reset from 0 and have to start collecting everything all over again.  Meaning that, should you die in the level, you will have to restart from 0 and work your way back up as well.

This becomes an increasingly laborious task as the game goes on.  Banjo-Kazooie levels only progress in complexity and so do their ability to hide things.  Many levels in the late game have upwards of a dozen sub areas where collectibles are hidden.  Even if I felt the sense of adventure that so many people feel when playing Banjo-Kazooie, this idea that these worlds are tiny little windows into their own stories that Banjo is just entering, it would've worn me down by the end of it.  Having to collect things in levels stops feeling like an adventure and starts feeling like a chore, as you comb every possible inch of a level and interact with literally everything trying to find every note so you don't have to come back later to do note cleanup and do it anyways.  In levels as simple and accessible as Mumbo's Mountain or Treasure Trove Cove, or even mid game levels like Freezeazy Peak and Gobi Desert, this isn't that big a deal even if I don't particularly enjoy playing the latter two levels.  But in a level like Click Clock Woods, a massive, hard to navigate forest setting you have to not only scour every inch of but scour every inch of four times over?  It's miserable.

It's also completely and totally unavoidable.  You have to collect 810 notes in order to beat the game, there are 900 total in the game.  Just like with the Jiggies, you are expected to collect an absurd amount of them, even before the final doors to the final battle, you need 765 to get into Furnace Fun in the first place.  But unlike the Jiggies, you cannot just operate how the game clearly wants you to operate with the notes.  With the Jiggies, it's clear the game wants you to grab a few, explore some more of Grunty's lair, fill in some more areas, hit a wall, return to previous areas and find any remaining Jiggies and Notes.  The final Jiggy door is meant to be a moment where you go "okay, need to do some cleanup in the rest of the game" and trek back through, re-experiencing this game as you get the remainder of the Jiggies.  But the notes discourage this gameplay ideal because it incentivizes you to get everything in one go.  You are actively punished for playing the game like Rare seems to think you should and actively rewarded for turning the game into a chore.  In my opinion, Banjo-Kazooie feels like it's at war with itself, a game with two core philosophies fighting each other for control.  It wants the player to be constantly going back and forth across Grunty's Lair, completing objectives at their own pace; while simultaneously being a game that encourages the player to obsessively check off every objective before they can move on because, in the end, you need to do all this work anyways.

The Heart of Banjo-Kazooie

Ultimately, though, the main reason I dislike Banjo is because of me.  Banjo-Kazooie's core design ideal is something of a lost art in game design today, mostly because we've kind of evolved past it.  I've called Banjo-Kazooie "a game for children" throughout this post and to a lot of people that likely seems like a derogatory term.  People get irrationally upset when you state that something that is unambiguously for children is, in fact, for children because they think that reduces it to some sort of level where it doesn't have to be taken seriously.  But to me, understanding Banjo-Kazooie as a game intended for children is crucial to understanding it's design and why it didn't resonate with me, a not-child.

See, back in the day, games were different.  Nowadays the majority of games are made with the idea that, first of all, the people buying them are probably the people with direct disposable income and not the people who need to rely on those who do have disposable income.  As such, there has kind of been a shift in game design, an idea that even games that are otherwise meant for children, like Mario, are experiences people are intended to have for a little while and then put down.  These are meant to be finite experiences, pieces that the player engages with for a while and then likely puts down for the next big game because that's just where we are in gaming.  Too many games, not enough time.  There's too much competition to realistically expect a player to even beat a game anymore, if you look at achievements on basically every game, you'll see massive dropoffs only a few hours in as players shift to something else or simply bounce off the game.

This wasn't true back before the turn of the millennium.  The understanding then was that, even as the industry tailored to mature gamers more and more, that the vast majority of their audience would be children.  Children do not have disposable income and their parents are less likely to regularly be buying games for them, especially as they were more likely to see them as toys than a true entertainment medium.  Kids weren't buying a new game every couple weeks, their parents were buying them a few times a year, they were birthday presents, Christmas gifts, rewards for good report cards.  Games mattered more to their audience, it wasn't just a piece of art you were experiencing, it was potentially your only new game for the next several months, if not the entire year.  I know that, for me, games didn't start becoming commonplace until I was in high school and my mom would let me pick out a game at least once a month.  I had like three total games on my N64 growing up, and that was my only console until I was 10!

Banjo-Kazooie is, seemingly, designed with the idea that the people who are playing it would always be playing it.  That its large, sprawling levels with loads of secrets to find and characters to meet would not feel tedious to the target audience because they wouldn't be sitting down to play it with the idea that this was a game to be beaten.  It was just, you know, a game.  And I can't replicate that feeling.  I can't go back to when I was a child and experience games the way I would back then.  Nor do I particularly want to.  Games are such an interesting medium of art with so many works to experience.  The year I played Banjo-Kazooie was the year I played Gris, a beautiful, heart-wrenching, tragic game about learning to overcome the feeling of loss that threatens to consume you after you lose someone important to you.  The year I played Doki Doki Literature Club, a masterful piece of horror that pushes the boundaries of the relationship between player and game.  Ecco the Dolphin, a bizarre, surreal prog rock masterpiece that leaves the player in a unique atmosphere and doesn't let up.  And numerous others, games I adore.  Games I wouldn't get to play if I played everything like I did when I was a kid.  I not only do not like Banjo-Kazooie, I couldn't like Banjo-Kazooie.  Because no matter what I did, it was asking me to develop a relationship with it that I was unwilling to form.

There's kind of a tragedy to that, though, isn't there?  Like, it can't help but be a little heartbreaking, realizing that the way you consumed media as a child is dead.  It's a place you can no longer reach, an old friend you cannot see again.  There are moments throughout life that are like this, moments where you realize that your connection to your childhood is slipping.  It's a difficult thing to confront for everyone, the realization that so many things are falling through your fingers, as if grains of sand.  It's tempting to cling onto it, to try and let that magic continue.  To never let go of your childhood, to instead embrace it indefinitely.  And for many years, that's what I did.

I used to be someone who buried himself in nostalgia, who cared about the things that he grew up with more than anything, who cherished these works that brought me so much joy.  I was a Harry Potter kid and regularly bought Ravenclaw merch before Joanne went mask off, I was the kid who never stopped playing Pokemon even when others abandoned it, while all my friends were moving to Call of Duty and Halo, I was the sole friend who held tight to Mario.  I lived through my own nostalgia and the nostalgia of other people for so much of my life.  As friends were grinding out CoD lobbies, I was memorizing Mega Man robot master orders even though I had only played one Mega Man game.  Losing the part of me that felt this magical, deeper connection to video games was not a small feat by any means.

But at the same time, losing these parts of myself, it's kind of freeing.  I was letting my nostalgia and the nostalgia of others consume me.  I hadn't given myself the space to develop my own taste really, to find the games I love as opposed to the games I have loved and other people have loved.  My relationship with art was just unhealthy, I was clinging to games I either had not thought too terribly deep about or hadn't played at all.  My world was influenced by a handful of content creators and an inability to move past the games I had already played and so it was difficult for me to truly engage with art in any meaningful way.  As these parts of me drifted away, as my addiction to the past subsided I really found my love for games, discovered what my connection to them actually means in the grand scheme of things.

Games mean more to me than just what I got out of them as a kid, maybe not always on an emotional level, but on an intellectual one.  I'm more engaged by the material in question.  It's not always an easy or pleasant road, I've had to go through a lot of growing up to get here, to develop a healthy relationship with the art I consume.  I've had to reject so many ideas I used to hold dear, grow past entire genres I once cherished.  And, in the midst of it all, it's made me feel distant from people I once called friends, and/or content creators I used to watch.  I used to really enjoy watching reactions to showcases with people because it felt like an earnest sense of community; and the reason why I stopped, other than a general frustration with the digital showcase era, is that it's become clear how many people I used to like watching along with and/or would like to hear their opinions about gaming news have gotten more and more insular.  They only crave the things they already know and will not give new games the time of day.

I don't want to be like that.  I don't want to spend my entire life trying to get the same thing out of games I did as a child, I don't want to have my tastes defined by who I was when I was little.  There are so many games out there, so many new ideas to explore, and it feels limiting to only look to the things I already know.  I don't only want to become the kind of person who ignores the entire medium outside of one or two games that come out every year in niches I already occupy and then complains that either video games are going downhill or that the medium isn't representing the wants of "true gamers".  And I want this for others too, to expand their horizons and not just tap into the same well.

I don't like Banjo-Kazooie.  And you know what, that's good.  I've grown as a person, the part of me that would've loved this game is firmly where he belongs, in the past.  He would've loved Banjo if he had gotten it working on the old Windows XP computer and that would've been good too.  I don't mean to make it sound like enjoying Banjo-Kazooie is inherently a sign of having a poor relationship with art, because of course it isn't.  Loads of people love Banjo and have great relationships with art and loads of people dislike it and have horrible relationships with art.  While it is very common for people who like Banjo-Kazooie to be pretty caught up in their own nostalgia, that's true of most video games from the past, especially on a Nintendo console.  It's just, to me at this specific timeline and juncture in my life, not liking Banjo is representative of something important, something meaningful.  That I am not the same person I used to be.  That I am someone who is, undeniably and unequivocally, me.