The infrastructure of the modern social media landscape means that every so often someone clips out a section of a modern blockbuster that uses bright yellow paint to guide the player where to go and says something like, “This is why games suck now.”
So it was with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, whose prodigious use of yellow hues to tag climbing ledges and other footholds for progressing the adventure sparked minor controversy back during launch. Was it a lazy shortcut or clever game design? The game’s director has now weighed in on the subject.
THE YELLOW PAINT VIRUS HAS INFECTED FF7 pic.twitter.com/calN0dqHf4
— Dave NewBlood (@DaveOshry) February 8, 2024
“I get there is a debate about that, whether that fits with that world or not, whether some people want it, some people don’t,” Naoki Hamaguchi told Gamesradar in a recent interview. “I think as a game, there is definitely a need for that kind of thing in a lot of ways. I think obviously different developers experiment, try different things about what works best, what fits best, the right way of doing that in their game.”
He continued,
The need to guide players around from a gameplay perspective and show them what can be done, what they need to do, there are definitely times where that is needed. So I think obviously there is more of a debate about how it’s done, what level and what works. And there’ll still be people who say, “no, that doesn’t fit at all. We don’t like that.” That’s fine, but I think there is definitely a need there, and it’s something that is definitely worth looking at.
“There’s definitely a need there” suggests Hamaguchi has seen enough people running around lost during playtesting to know that yellow paint, while far from the most elegant solution, is preferable to people getting stuck and frustrated. Ghost of Yotei is full of what one friend described as “bird poop” to mark its climbing ledges, and Ninja Gaiden 4 is even more gratuitously slathered in liquid caution tape than Rebirth. None of us want yellow paint until we absolutely need yellow paint.
Such is the push and pull over immersion in hyper-realistic open-world RPGs (or in the case of Ninja Gaiden 4, visually messy linear corridors) that sometimes the best way to keep you ensconced in the fantasy is to momentarily shatter it with non-diegetic signposting. Hamaguchi’s position on the subject won’t put an end to the debate; we’ll see if the next Final Fantasy VII game implements a different solution or our old friend the yellow paint monster returns.
