Mario Bautista
I still just don’t understand Horizon as a franchise. Like, on paper “robot dinosaurs” makes perfect sense, but in execution? I don’t know how we got this far; PlayStation NEVER does spin-offs this far removed from the core gameplay: Ape Escape and Little Big Planet are the only real exceptions. Part of the reason I’ve learned to live with the fact that those PS2 IP are never coming back is because PlayStation IP are so definitive in their design they can only be built in so much without re-treading. To use a more local example, it’s the F-Zero (pre-99) or Mother problem: “we’ve done everything there is to do with this. Time to move on.” Jak into Uncharted, Sly Cooper into inFamous, Twisted Metal into God of War, Siren into Gravity Rush, Little Big Planet into Dreams, and Medievil into Killzone into Horizon. Horizon does not have the brand flexibility Sony insists it does. Aloy is not Link or Mario or even Agent 3. She’s too bland to be an interesting lead, but too defined to be an audience surrogate. Her enemies are interesting, but her cast is generic and everything about her world mechanically has been done better elsewhere.
So why does Sony seem so convinced that Aloy has the same brand appeal to kids as Mario or Star Wars to be able to carry a Lego game? Or, perhaps more appropriately and in the vein of Tom Hanks, they are trying to borrow some of that brand appeal from Lego to prop up Aloy.
But of course that circles back to the original question: why does Aloy NEED to be a thing?
