Ok, ask yourself, "When was the last time I played a game with a really good story? One that got to me?"
The answer's likely a couple years at best.
The answer's likely a couple years at best.
Game Developers seem to be completely ignoring even the most basic rules of storytelling these days.
It's true that in hack&slash games, you can get away with this. In that genre, the character is a placeholder. A block of tofu there to cater endless waves of carnage to the people who start gorno threads on 4chan. In RPGs, though, you can't skimp on a story. It's a ROLE-PLAYING game. The idea is to immerse yourself in the game, bond so tightly to the character that it feels like it's you beating down the Joker's fashionably-challenged cousin with your nuke-level summon magic.
These days though, good story just seems a rarity.
Someone needs to drive over to Lionhead studios and explain the difference between "RPG" and "Life-simulator". Then remove Molyneux's fingernails with pliers as punishment for Fable. Bioware games are well-written, but Yahtzee's aptly-named "bioware effect" just gives it the characters an unreal quality which stops you from taking it seriously.
And most of all there's Final Fantasy. Face it, any real "gamer" between the age of 7 and 40 has played a final fantasy game.
-FFVI was as immersive as you could get with paper cut-outs.
-FFVII was melodramatic at times and had the most soul-crushing starting area this side of Peragus, but the execution was compelling enough to be forgiven that. (I think most of us can agree we hate the fans more than the actual game if nothing else.)
-FFVIII was where the series went awry in my book. SE reasoned with typical producer-logic that "ZOMG, CLOUD WAS ANGSTY!!! DAT WAS HIS SECRET!!! MOAR ANGSTT!!!111!1ONE!" And they created the most egregiously emo array of characters that were completely unrelatable to anyone without a personal shrine to Linkin Park. (The magic system was also the most wretched piece of shit ever, but that's not my point here.)
-Now we have FFXIII, a copy-paste of FFVII with Cloud's gender changed and the story beginning during the Underwater Juno Reactor mission with no prologue whatsoever. These characters are actually competing with FFVIII's BAAAWWWfest for the title of "most annoying" in my book, which I didn't even think was possible.
In the archetypal hero's journey (See Joseph Campbell's Monomyth), the characters begin as cowardly and inept, struggling with their own petty quarrels and robbed of the capacity for affirmative action by the monotony of society, much like we all are here right now. It's through their struggles in which they build themselves up to become heroes, gaining the strength to face their enemies and the courage to deal with their own inner demons.
FFXIII does this in the COMPLETELY OPPOSITE ORDER. Most of the characters, most notably Lightning, start off as collected, skilled, and focused; but then degenerate into self-piteous whining machines, often LITERALLY breaking down in the middle of the street for no fucking reason whatsoever. Towards the middle, it feels like if you actually did relate to any of these people, you should stop playing the game before they start cutting their wrists and crying about how no one understands them. The only one who ever shows a vague amount of improvement is Hope and his initial appearance set his bar pretty fucking low.
And I'm not even gonna comment on FFXII because that game was so fucking horrible I couldn't even finish playing it.
TL;DR - RPG storylines suck these days and they're getting worse. Yay or Nay?
, maybe even an actual game duplicate of Yureka! That would be Awesome!
