With the recent announcement that Minecraft is officially coming to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as well as a freshly announced content update, there's been a burst of curiosity about the brand, which has proven to be much more than a passing fad. While the cubic survival/crafting game has been around for more than a decade, Microsoft's acquisition of the franchise has led to many experiments and attempts to widen its reach. One often forgotten piece of Minecraft media is a single season animated series that released in 2018 - and is on Netflix right now.
When developer Telltale Games laid off most of its staff in September, it temporarily retained a skeleton crew to finish up work on a Netflix version of Minecraft: Story Mode.The first three. Minecraft: Story Mode was an episodic point-and-click narrative-driven graphic adventure video game based on the sandbox video game Minecraft, released in October 2015 across multiple platforms with a Windows 10 release on December 16, 2015, a Wii U release on January 21, 2016, an Apple TV release on August 24, 2016, and a Nintendo Switch release on August 22, 2017. Minecraft: Story Mode, the game created by Telltale Games that lets players make decisions in the Minecraft universe and guide their way through a story, is now on Netflix.Released now and able to.
What's perhaps most strange about Minecraft: Story Mode is that it exists at all in the state that it does on Netflix. Story Mode was, appropriately, Telltale's story-driven adventure game set in the world of Minecraft but with all new characters. The choices made by the player at different points guided the progress of the plot, leading to several different possible endings. To make it to Netflix, the game was sliced and diced into a series using the same tech that went into Black Mirror special Bandersnatch. Open-ended exploration and puzzle elements are either simplified or removed, and dialogue choices are often stripped from the original four options down to two. While Bandersnatch was a time-looping affair, this take on a Minecraft story moves forward in multiple episodes, effectively serving as a family friendly, kid-focused narrative.
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As much as Story Mode diverged from its source, it also paid attention to the things that matter. Characters have facial animation and move more fluidly than characters do in-game, but there's a certain care taken to keeping the world, its items, monsters, and traits in tact. Various mechanics like the device-powering redstone, the inexplicably spawning zombies, and the way players drop their items when they are defeated are all given plot relevance in a manner that feels true to anyone imagining what it must be like to exist in this world. This is unique and admirable in its own right, and the way the story promotes positive themes through the spirit of ingenuity and courage falls in line with what Minecraft's game design innately encourages. With quality voice talent from across multiple practices (including Ashley Johnson and Patton Oswalt), the story at least lends an authentic connection to its cast in the way any family friendly series can.
Minecraft Story Mode Netflix
It's not even just that this story imagines a narrative within the confines of Minecraft's open-ended but simultaneously limited world - it's that the choose-your-own-path game was converted to Netflix in the first place which is particularly eyebrow-raising. It makes one wonder why others haven't tried to do similar things, or why this series was tailored to Netflix as opposed to building a smaller, brand new story using the same assets and technology for the task. The end result is essentially a trimmed down version of a Telltale game one can play with a remote, with the ironic benefit of it running at a smoother framerate and with less stutters and console-crashes - though one core design change still holds it back which could have so easily been addressed. When a choice is presented, often the viewer has a set amount of time to respond. During this time, characters will continue talking, but this gets entirely skipped and interrupted if the player confirms a choice. Why this remains is weird, as part of the entire point of adapting this to a live-streaming medium and slimming it down would be to tell a more efficient story. Still, bumps like this are as easy to set aside if one is already resigning to a universe where dirt exists as cubes, zombies are naturally nocturnal beasts who burst into flames at sunrise, and materials are recognizable by a palette of blurry pixels.
Having noted all of this, one might wonder what even the plot of such a series is, though in honesty, seeing for one's self what the team came up with is half of the pleasure of experiencing it. In a time where animated stories are being built to be livestreamed, Minecraft: Story Mode exists as a surreal and strange experiment which may only truly appeal to diehard Minecraft fans, but is worth giving a look to anyone who fancied Telltale's adventures over the years. Many might have missed this one, and it's the very fact that we got to see Telltale tackle a kid-friendly narrative using a cast of characters of their own creation which makes it unique in the development team's library - a second season of the game was even released, expanding into a new story, but it seems unlikely we'll see it come to Netflix, though what's here functions well enough on its own. Deals relating to the Minecraft brand have a complicated past, after all. Seeing what grand shape might be created from such basic blocks of worldbuilding is its own interesting journey. Perhaps in a few years we'll be unearthing similarly unknown blocks when an official Minecraft movie releases.
Minecraft Story Mode Netflix Endings
Minecraft: Story Mode is available to stream on Netflix.
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