I love it when someone makes a comment about a broad spectrum of games and people think that producing one or two examples of games against it proves that the opinion is wrong.
Yes, Mass Effect has a good story. Yes, Bioshock has a good story. Yes, Red Dead Redemption had a good story. The point is that for every one of these there are dozens of Call of Dutys, or Uncharteds, or GTAs with stories on a par with below-average, Hollywood-branded, cookie-cutter crap, and the few that do manage to get a decent story in there still do so in a genre and aesthetic that is (in whole or in part) borrowed from extremely formulaic Hollywood templates (see Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption). Pointing-out the one or two examples that happen to rise above this problem is like pointing out the one or two people who are healthy during a plague and saying that this is a sign that the plague doesn't exist.
Now, what's really funny to me is how for many people the mention of "eastern games" makes them automatically think "Square-Enix developed JRPG", as if the entire eastern gaming industry comes out of a single company and a single genre. Even then, for all their recent shortcomings, at least Square-Enix are actually trying to construct worlds that are uniquely beautiful and possess a wholly original mythology. Fact is, eastern games tend to be far more diverse, interesting and thematically and conceptually rich than western games in terms of story. You want a list of eastern games that tell more interesting and deeper stories than western developed ones? Go down to your nearest game shops and just look at the damn things.
