Side-view games that send you left

[bimshwel]

...at the beginning instead of right. I suppose up or down might also count, like Kid Icarus, but then once the screen does start scrolling horizontally, you still go to the right.
The first that occurred to me are Super Metroid (once you land on Zebes, and only briefly) and Legacy of the Wizard (again only briefly). In Castlevania 2 you can try but you won't get very far.

It suddenly bothered me that my long overdue "game project", even without any actual irreversible construction work done on it, is situated firmly in my mind with a general right to left area layout. But does going the other way make a product stand out? Surely it has been done many times but I can only think of those three examples. However, I have been imprisoned in my cruel stepmother's tower for the past twenty years. Can you think of any?

Ah I think there is a moderately recent Gradius game with a bonus mode in which you pilot a big-core ship to the left.

[iMini]

I can't thinmk of any examples, but I can imagine that the Right-to-Left standard has come about due to Western and Japanese writing styles, which write right-to-left (that's a bit of a tongue-twister), it's set in our minds that going left-to-right is moving forward and making progress, and I think changing that would add a sense of discomfort and uneasiness to gamers who are expecting the usual.

Might make for an interesting story-driven thriller of some sort though. Braid dabbles a little bit with this sort of thing.

[bimshwel]

At 6/30/17 09:13 AM, iMini wrote: I can't thinmk of any examples, but I can imagine that the Right-to-Left standard has come about due to Western and Japanese writing styles, which write right-to-left (that's a bit of a tongue-twister), it's set in our minds that going left-to-right is moving forward and making progress, and I think changing that would add a sense of discomfort and uneasiness to gamers who are expecting the usual.

Might make for an interesting story-driven thriller of some sort though. Braid dabbles a little bit with this sort of thing.

But don't Japanese comic books go the other way?
Certainly I know why people might default to this orientation but I wonder why so rarely anybody tries to break with it. Perhaps I should investigate Arabian video games for a reversal of the trend.

Now that I think of it, the Dragon Quest games that I remember send the player west at the start. Although inevitably you need to come back east numerous times. Final Fantasy also does that, at least in cases where you get a good idea where on the map you are fairly early on. I wonder if, in an overall geographical context, it makes sense to send explorers west, since Japan is literally "The Far East."

[Jackho]

At 6/30/17 12:11 PM, bimshwel wrote:

At 6/30/17 09:13 AM, iMini wrote: I can't thinmk of any examples, but I can imagine that the Right-to-Left standard has come about due to Western and Japanese writing styles, which write right-to-left (that's a bit of a tongue-twister)

But don't Japanese comic books go the other way?

Manga and novels tend to be read right to left, but also top to bottom with lines formatted vertically and not horizontally. When it comes to horizontal text, reading left-to-right has become standard now probably because of computers, but pre-WWII literature and signs are formatted horizontally right-to-left more often than left-to-right. It's a clusterfuck of a language, basically.

I would guess the only reason it's become so common in games is because that's how Super Mario Bros. did it. It would feel slightly 'off' if your game is built around going the opposite direction but I doubt most people would realize why. If it's a horror themed game like Super Metroid it could help in making the player feel slightly uncomfortable.

As for why more games don't break the trend, I think there's just no reason to mess with design conventions unless that's specifically what you're trying to do.