Genres are, for the most part, a broad label to give you a rough idea what a game is trying to achieve. When you hear ‘open-world survival game’, you already have a vision in your head of what that could be like, even if it has plenty of its own innovations in that particular genre. Genres can be a bit restrictive in that regard, but are an essential part of marketing all the same.
Sometimes, you’ll find a game that jams a lot of genres together, too. More than two or three, think five, six, seven, all the way to an innumerable amount. This might be needed to sufficiently describe a game, or maybe it’s chasing trends into a dead-end. No matter what though, whether a game is good or bad, there is no denying that in reading it out, there are way too many genres at play.
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Team Ninja has made a lot of games over the years, from the hard-as-nails Ninja Gaiden series to the more fighter-focused Dead or Alive series. The studio is also responsible for one of the best interpretations of FromSoftware’s Soulslike genre in the Nioh series. With its stances and unique enemies, it stood out among the competition, even with some baggage from its loot system.
So what if you made Nioh open-world, let you make a custom character, and then make choices for how the story should flow, all with that same combat system? Well, it buckles under its own weight. Rise of the Ronin is a very by-the-numbers open-world that feels empty any time you’re not doing combat, and the loot system feels like a particular drag when the reward for exploring is loot that you will likely throw away after the next random enemy you beat.
When No Man’s Sky first launched, you could argue that it was too bare in terms of genre. It was simply an open-universe survival game. You traveled from planet to planet in search of sights, all the while trying to survive, and that was it. But after years of updates, the game is so much more. Insurmountably so.
You can soar through space as a pirate to amass wealth. You can settle on a planet and build a base, or a whole city if you want. You can manage towns like a mini City Builder. You can excavate fossils. You can do multiplayer expeditions. And somehow, all of these systems exists together and don’t grind off each other too much. It honestly defies singular genre labels at this point.
PlatinumGames is most renowned forits character-action games, and Bayonetta especially. But before the studio continued with Bayonetta, it poured all its effort into a game that genuinely isn’t like anything else that exists. The Wonderful 101 is still a character-action game, but from a perspective you’ve never seen before or since.
Played mostly from a top-down perspective, you control countless heroes you find to turn into weapons, make bridges, and plenty else. Except sometimes you’ll play through an obscenely detailed punch-out style minigame. And then there are dedicated sidescroller levels. It’s too much to really understand until you actually play it. Seriously, just try work out the type of game it is from just looking at screenshots.
Warframe has far outpaced whatever it started as. Running through levels that looked mostly the same at high speed in a mix of gunplay and melee, the game is almost unrecognisable from then. Combat and movement have been completely revamped, more linear missions have been introduced, and even the very character you play as can change once you get far enough.
Oh, and there’s also a roguelike mode with a unique story. And another whole other world with preset characters and motorcycles. And also giant space battles. Oh, and base-building. And honestly probably even more since this article was written. Warframe is constantly growing into a new game with every single update.
4No More Heroes
Character Action With A Blend Of Everything Else
In a similar vein to Platinum’s games, Grasshopper’s No More Heroes series is all about defying conventions. At their core, they are character-action games, though you would be forgiven for not knowing it. This isn’t the case with any single entry in the series, but every single one of them. The core combat remains,you may just never tell what will happenin between.
Maybe a battle will suddenly turn into a one-on-one encounter akin to a fighting game. Maybe it’ll be a shoot ‘em up where you pilot a mech. Maybe you just need to cut some grass to earn a bit of spare change. Any single genre is too wide for No More Heroes. Which is probably why people call it action-adventure, a genre that ultimately describes everything and nothing all at once.
Soulslike games took the industry by storm after Dark Souls, with everyone trying to get their own vision of the genre achieved to varying levels of success. And sometimes that meant tacking on a lot of other genres that didn’t always work. When they did, great! When they didn’t, well, then you got some very funky games. But FromSoftware decided it wanted a slice of that cake for itself.
And so enters Nightreign. Built from the bones of Elden Ring, it shows what an open-world Soulslike game would be when condensed into a battle royalye style map with cooperative play and roguelike elements in a game that overall boils down to an endless boss rush. And it is exhilarating when it works, and infuriating when it doesn’t. Soulslikes can work in every other genre, it seems.
Spore was made with the intent to showcase the process of evolution of life, and in a way, the evolution of gaming as well. It began as a 2D game, you a simple amoeba trying to survive by developing a fight-or-flight response. Though what most people remember from Spore is when it transitions to 3D, much like gaming itself, andyour creatures can truly begin to blossom.
Except the game doesn’t end at this stage. You must then become a civilisation, where trading with others becomes a system, or even outright warfare with fellow states. And then this advances even further, eventually culminating in you colonizing space in a genre more akin to strategy. It’s a bizarre game when you look at it as a whole, but wonderfully odd all the same.
Battleborn is a funny, tragic game. Launched 2016, it had its final content update in 2017, and then finally shutdown in 2021. What makes it incredibly cruel is that Battleborn’s largest impact occurred years before its original release back in 2014. A single post on social media that described the many genres that it encompassed. This was a simpler time, before hero shooters had grown in popularity after Overwatch.
Crushed by its competition, Battleborn died a slow death, despite being a somewhat interesting hero shooter. Did it live up to the expectations of its many genre labels? No, not really. But at least it gave birth to the industry’s obsession with announcing as many genre tags as you could for your upcoming game.
