True, but they're not trying to make a Contra that fans will like; they're trying to make one that will sell.
It's unclear why IP is valuable to kids who are 20 years too young to recognize the franchise in games that are made to deny the old fanbases they're built on, but for some reason, that seems to be the plan in some of these revival cases. You can't sell 'regular' Contra to a console audience anymore, even though a lot of 40-year-old dudes remember Contra as being the real shit when they were a kid. It's too linear, it's too 2D, it's too hard, and it's too of the past. (I'd like to say that everything I just typed is bullshit, but the financial history is not in our favor; for example, revivals like Mega Man 9 worked for a while, but MM10 had diminished returns and MM11 seems to have ended the run. We'll see how well all these Wonder Boys do, but those are easy and colorful, and Contra is not a friendly to pick up despite being rewarding.) You can come up with a new style to classic Contra, adding in nonlinear level progression or maybe adding in "Easy Mode" hacks, maybe that would work, but maybe maybe not? And then you can reinvent Contra, but the long history of Konami trying is not great. You used to be able to go the handheld route ala Contra 4 (and then sometimes you could take a handheld-made game and flip it to consoles/PC later,) but handhelds are pretty much dead these days (except for Switch, but then on Switch you're competing for "console-quality" games.) And I guess you could also just accept that Contra will only sell so many copies and try for the cheap-yet-satisfying route, but was Contra Rebirth really that cheap to produce? And if you did it today with "cheap" technology, you'd probably rely on Flash-style art ala Streets of Rage 4, which ticks a lot of fans off no matter how nice they make the designs and how hard they try to hide the vector animation.
So, the only hope for a lot of these franchises from the past is mobile games. And mobile games are mobile games. They can't carry a pricetag, because nobody wants to pay for mobile games. And they probably can't control too well, because they have to be playable on a touchscreen. And they can't avoid gacha and other MTX systems, because the games have to generate money somehow.
So, classics are rarely going to be perfect again. But companies keep trying, and that's not a bad thing. We can hope that some of the bad revivals to spawn enough interest that they get better or that they lead to good, more faithful revivals, or else we can just pray that whatever we get is good enough in some way. (This Contra Returns seems like bad blender batch of Contra grinded up in a mobile template, but taken on its own, I do kind of like the Season approach and multiplayer score leaderboards system plugged into run-and-gun play, that makes some sense to me as to why somebody would want to play it.)
-1.jpg)
