Nostalgia versus Taste

 It might not come as a surprise to hear this, but I greatly prefer older Star Trek shows to the newer ones, with the exception of Lower Decks. I also often watch movies from the 80s and 90s now and think, man, they just don’t make movies like this anymore. Likewise, I love classic JRPGs, especially Final Fantasy, and about ten years ago I often pined against the fact that it was so rare to find a new, good JRPG in that style, especially as Final Fantasy has continued to experiment and become more of an action RPG series. But often if you express opinions like these, people will say things like, “Oh, you’re just blinded by nostalgia. Those things weren’t actually better, you just grew up on them and cannot evaluate how good they are rationally because of your nostalgia.”

Now, is this true? Perhaps. Like, for instance, I’ve enjoyed every mainline Pokemon game thats been released. Until recently, I’d have said that Ruby and Sapphire were my favorite, but when Sword and Shield came out, I liked it so much I changed my mind and declared that actually, that was my favorite, and then when Scarlet and Violet came out, despite their extreme bugginess on release, I changed my opinion once more and decided that was my favorite. When people tell me that they only like older Pokemon games, and that newer ones are in some way different and worse, I usually consider them to be blinded by nostalgia. From my perspective, every generation of Pokemon has been so similar to every other, that if you like one, you’d like any of them, with the possible exception of the fact that older ones have fewer quality of life features. Thus, there is no reason to dislike the newer ones but like the older ones except nostalgia, but the opposite is not true - I can understand why a modern gamer who goes back to Pokemon Blue might not enjoy it.

So I definitely do think nostalgia is a real thing that can blind some people making accurate assessments of things they like, at least some of the time. But also I clearly am not blinded by it with regards to Pokemon, since I like newer ones equally or better to older ones, because they have largely kept their formula the same and either made minor tweaks or increased quality of life in each iteration, which I’m on board with. But just because I am not blinded with it regards to Pokemon, does not mean I am not falling prey to it for other things, especially because I’d be the first to admit that Star Trek and Final Fantasy are much closer to my heart and more important to me than Pokemon, a game which I’ve always enjoyed but has never been a major obsession of mine.

When I mentioned JRPGs, tho, you’ll note I said “until ten years ago.” That number is approximate, so hopefully nobody is gonna quote the release date of Bravely Default at me and make fun of me for how old and wrong I am, but there was a window of time where classic style turn based JRPGs were widely unpopular and much fewer of them were being made, and I felt their loss keenly. But that began to change when Bravely Default was released, and its only accelerated since then, especially with games like Persona 5 and Dragon Quest 11 being mainstream hits, and now new JRPGs are hot items and are everywhere, both modern 3D ones, retro inspired 2D ones, and indie ones directly cribbing the style of older games, and I’m glutted with choices of games I’d love if I had time to play them all. Am I blinded by nostalgia here?

I don’t think so. I think that one can draw a line between taste and nostalgia. I like a particular style of JRPG, a style which was popular in the nineties through the early 2000s, which indeed was when I was a child in middle school and high school playing tons of Final Fantasy. I don’t really think it makes sense though to say that when I play Persona 5, the first game in that series I played, that I liked it because I was blinded by my nostalgia for old JRPGs. I don’t even think it makes sense to say that for Octopath Traveler or Bravely Default, games which certainly purposefully ape the style of those old games. I just like games like that, whether they are new or old, whether I played them first as a kid or as an adult. Perhaps the reason I like games like that is because thats what games were like when I was a kid, but thats no different than literally any other taste someone might have.

If being blinded by nostalgia means anything, it needs to mean preferring something purely due to your association with past positive experiences with it, and not because of its objective traits. But liking a particular style of thing, even a style that was only produced in a particular time period of the past, is not being blinded by nostalgia as long as you are open to new experiences similar to those ones and still enjoy those new experiences. I’ve seen a lot of people accuse One Piece fans who prefer pre-timeskip as being blinded by nostalgia, but older One Piece does have a notably different animation style than newer One Piece, and as someone who only started watching it a few years ago, I can understand why someone might prefer it (even if I do not specifically) and I think it’s silly to argue that I’m blinded by nostalgia for something I binge watched all thousand episodes of in six months two years ago. With Star Trek, the older shows are just very different than the modern ones. They’re more episodic, they have way, way, way more episodes, they have much less or no CGI and thus had to rely on dialogue to drive the plot instead of action set pieces, they just have a massively different feel. Its an opinion whether that older style is better or worse than the modern style, but preferring the older style does not mean one is blinded by nostalgia - and the fact I prefer Strange New Worlds to Picard and Discovery, and Lower Decks to all of them, is because those shows have more in common with that style, not because I am nostalgic for SNW or Lower Decks, nor is it because those shows constantly reference the older shows and try to play off nostalgia (although they do). Honestly the times they play off nostalgia annoy me, particularly SNW, Picard, and Discovery’s attempts at doing so, which always come off as nauseatingly reverential. I want an episodic space opera featuring intense moral debates in conference rooms, not for Spock and Kirk to chat at a table with moony lighting while everyone points and says “Look! they’re making friends!” The fact SNW does both does not mean I like it for the nostalgia, it means I like it despite its attempts to win me over with weak nostalgia bait.

Now, are there things I am definitely nostalgic for, that legitimately aren’t very good and I only like them because I enjoyed them as a kid? Well, probably. Honestly I think the best example I can give is Muppet Babies. I loved that as a kid, but when I tried sitting through an episode a few years back, I couldn’t even get through one. Now, of course, thats a show for literal babies, and also I recognize it’s bad now so I’m not really blinded, am I? I think those are fair points, but as a counter 1) I have watched both Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street more recently and easily watched whole episodes of both and enjoyed the crap out of them and 2) I still sometimes think, it can’t be that bad, right? Maybe I should give it another chance. It must be good if I liked it as a kid. So I do feel there’s nostalgia at play there, even if its not strong enough to stand up to actually sitting through an episode. But Fraggle Rock? No, that’s just a good show, and so is classic Star Trek, and its not nostalgia that makes me say that.