In an industry of awful writing, none of this comes as news to me. I've never played a video game with a story as good as even the worst books I've read, which isn't to say I've read many bad books. Comparably, the writing is very formulaic, derivative, poorly executed when compared to storytelling in other media. This is where I get conflicted personally, because the story is part of the game play in certain games and even genres, but at the same time, the game play or the story in and of themselves are often not enough to be at all self-0sustaining, thus the two work together to offset the poorest aspects of one another.
I could, just as easily, point out that without heavy personal interpretation, every Final Fantasy game has a story that's at least as bad as any of Cage's games. In fact pretty much all of them are bad. The best of them, in my opinion, Planescape Torment, really succeeded not because of it's story, but because of it's story combined with atmosphere, and the mythos it set up, all of which helped to offset what was otherwise kind of predictable, though certainly not as campy as a lot of JRPGs such as Final Fantasy.
Incidentally, this reminds me of when I first read up on the "Squall is dead" idea, and had that in fact been the true intention, had that in fact really been the case according the the game's writing team, it would have been, for me anyway, a stroke of genius. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the line between awesome and awful is hair thin,and this broke awesome and made awful it's mantra.
I digress.
David Cage is hardly the worst, he's not even below mediocre compared to others. Even Fahrenheit was better than most Final Fantasy, Black Isle, Bethesda games out there, sheerly on it's atmosphere and themes, even if the game lost it's mind around the final act. Likewise I want to point out that I actually enjoy his more contemporary if not stranger works. I thought Heavy Rain was just this side of silly, but at least it had some fairly good moments, and some reveals that had me thinking. I really enjoyed Omikron as well, again because it had more to it that a bland or bad story, and while it's parts were not so great, the sum of it's parts were actually not too bad if you went into it with the right sort of mindset, which is another way of saying keeping your expectations low and your mind open.
