Press 'X' to Rant: Formulaic or Repetitive?

When I was a kid (to clarify, we're talking 6-year-old me as opposed to nearly 16-year-old me), my favorite game was Lego Star Wars. I played it with my Dad whenever I could, and I still have very fond memories of a day where Dad's day off and my having to stay home sick coincided and we played one of the free-roam levels for around an hour together.

Fast-forward around 8 years and Lego Batman 3 gets released, and Dad gets it for either his birthday or Father's Day (I honestly couldn't tell you which). For nostalgia's sake, we sat down to play the opening mission together and realised that literally nothing had changed from the first Lego Batman except for a new coat of paint and the fact that we didn't have to use the Wii controllers. I still remember the night I went to try and play Destiny to discover he had tried to pick it up again and had been stuck in the Bat-Cave for the last hour with no idea how to progress.

Fast-forward another 3 and a half years to Christmas 2015. What should Dad find under the tree but Lego Dimensions, and what should I find but the Portal 2 level pack for it. I decided to try it again to give it the benefit of the doubt. I boot it up to discover an unskippable 5 minute cut-scene followed by the same game, but now with the Dimension Portal mechanic that I keep stubbing my toe on added in about as seamlessly as a back-alley limb re-attachment surgery. At what point, I found myself wondering, did playing the Lego Game* cease to be fun? 

This is a question that has haunted me since Christmas, so I feel that it's only right to finally give it something resembling an answer. Looking back, the first time I had my doubts about it would have been a few missions into Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. This does raise a few questions, however. Was it simply a matter of having grown out of it? Was it because they'd introduced voices and half of the fun of the Lego games was watching them try to convey the plot of a pre-existing franchise with exaggerated gestures and the occasional suggestive shopping center photo-booth pic? Or was it really that it had gotten to be a few games too many?

Counting the DS games, it was about 5 or 6 games for me before it got to a point where it felt repetitive. This in turn raises a slew of other questions. For example, how many games has something like Call of Duty gone on for with more or less the same game each year but with better lighting, a new sky-box and a few more guns? As it turns out, around 18 (give or take). At what point does that start getting repetitive? Same thing for Halo, or the ironically named Final Fantasy, or pretty much any game with enough installments that you can't comfortably count them on one hand? 

That's not an easy question to answer, mostly for the same reason that any non-objective question is hard to answer: because there is no definitive answer. What I find repetitive may be within what other people consider a perfectly reasonable amount of sequels, and in fairness some games do stay the same for a few before shaking up the formula enough to stop it being repetitive. Then, there are some games that get repetitive in only one installment (Looking at you, Destiny. I love you, but I also love to hate you.)

That just about does it for today. As always, if you have a slightly more definitive answer to today's question, a suggestion for a future rant or review or just want to say hi, you can email me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com

-Harry

*A.N. I use the singular because, let's face it, there is only one Lego Game, in the same way that there is only one From Software game.