What does a game truly need?

After I finished Valfaris, an indie action-platformer, one thing got me thinking. The game was good and there was very few things I could say to its demerit. gameplay was good, boss fights were excellent, there was some very good ideais, and yet I don't feel like it was great or will be remembered. Something was not there.

Everyone probably already played a game like this and I'm not here to discredit any of them. We should acknowledge what they did well. The thing is a game may have very good technical features and mechanics and still miss on that little something that would make it be remembered. For me, that thing is charm.

I played through The Wonderful 101 recently and even with lot of flaws, I thought it was great. Camera kind of sucks and it is not very intuitive, but it was a solid game overall, with engaging story and action. And one thing to glue it all together, that game is just full of charm. Every character interaction gives you a little something, every joke and every special move is there to make you feel the game. It adds this thing that is what makes you remember it.

This may differ from game to game, but, in my opinion, Nintendo is a master class developer when it comes to charm. Yes, they also have some fantastic technical features and stuff, but the vast majority of their titles are just charming. Being Mario's interactions, Zelda's world and characters or Metroid's environment, you can feel attracted to these franchises even if you never played them.

Charm is basically associated with visuals and there is plenty of ways a game can explore to elevate its charm. Surely it will be a different thing for each game, but i think it is an aspect we, or at least I, rarely analyse when discussing them. Maybe it is effectively a "lesser" point in an argument or it is just too subjective to be discussed, but I'm guessing our mind does consider it when ranking games or remembering fondly some of them.

There might be an argument to this being true for other forms of entertainment as well and absolutely it will affect each person differently, but for sure there is some kind of pattern. There is a reason some games are better remembered by more people then others, even if they seemed to be equally good in their time.