Unexpectedly good stories in games

[Obiwanshinobi]

What games surprised you with narratives better than expected? I'm not really asking about games where trying hard to tell stories comes with the turf (such as cRPGs and adventures). I'd like to hear of some pleasant surprises.
I for one thought Max Payne (nominally action-adventure, practically run & gun) was exceptionally good in that respect. It's not typical of me to symphatise with coppers in games.
Klonoa 1&2 scratched some itch, but I can't quite remember what it was. Maybe the idea of a "dream traveller" worked for me.
I could give more examples, but not without rephrasing what I've already posted around here.

[BIL]

I was very drunk, alone and far from home when I finished the first Klonoa and the plaintive, childlike sadness of the parting at its end made me cry for the poor little guy. ;[

[Obiwanshinobi]

It could be argued for that Link's Awakening, FFCCh: The Crystal Bearers and FFX conclude their storylines not unlike Klonoa. Some literary topos perhaps.

[KAI]

A friend told me I'm a BlazBlue tsundere for talking shit about the game but liking the story. It's surprisingly good and complicated for an arcade fightan.

[trap15]

Pokemon X/Y. I nearly cried at the ending ;_;

[Furry Fox Jet Pilot]

The Resistance: Fall of Man series has a great alternate history storyline. Seeing history diverge after WW1 in their timeline is rather interesting; it leads to a unified Europe, the Nazis never rise to power, and WW2 never happens. However, the series still left a lot of unanswered questions after the ending of Resistance 3.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Iron Storm/World War Zero is an interesting take on alternate history (Great War still rages on in 1964), but it's about settings rather than storyline.
North American (and British, oddly enough) people don't seem to find as captivating as people born in countries ravaged by 20th century's wars.

[BIL]

It could be argued for that Link's Awakening, FFCCh: The Crystal Bearers and FFX conclude their storylines not unlike Klonoa. Some literary topos perhaps.

What set apart Klonoa for me was the naivete of our poor rabbitpuppy. It's like watching a four year-old trying to bribe his parents into not getting divorced by promising to never track mud into the house again, innocently unaware that there's a limit to what even the sheerest will can accomplish. :[ When Jimmy's dreamland comes crashing down on his head like a ton of ice water at the denouement of Silent Hill 2, I damn well expect him to take it like a man and get out of that chair. Klonoa's just a baby god damn it. ;_; Namco you're some heartless pricks!

Or not. I used to think the epilogue kinda ruined the effect, but a couple years later I realised if not for that it'd have been one profoundly miserable little game, clearly not what it's meant to be. It'd be like an SH2 without Leave to balance out its dreadful other conclusions.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Some found Penguin Adventure story sad, but I wouldn't know.

[BIL]

I heard it explains why Pentarou is never far from an AK47 and a flak jacket in his later games, so I've meant to watch a longplay at least. I feel I owe him and Kojima that much after playing MGS2 to completion.

edit: rather, watching MGS2's cutscenes to completion. Its real story of a man strategically discarding his porno magazine library to advance his goals was stirring indeed.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Ah, Russian equipment.

[BIL]

Oh damn it. >_< My memory's not what it was, that's clearly an M16 he's gotten hold of. I wonder how he modified the trigger guard, that's no weapon for a penguin. edit: or a bishounen.



Could've sworn Ivan and Toby were packing Kalashnikovs in Sexy Paro, but I can't seem to find any photographic evidence. Hopeless. Time to get drunk and play MGS2. :/

[drauch]

You don't even have to play it to get sad. Man, I wish someone would translate Pentarou's Adventure or whatever. Could be a lost masterpiece in Pentarou's past.

[BIL]

Oh wow, it's like The Super Shinobi's sad ending... at the title screen. ;-;

[PurpBullets]

Ahhh... Super Shinobi is great, the ending reminiscent to the last fight in the riki-oh movie.
This is the best I could come up with.

"Penguins lived in peace in the land of illusion dream continent. But one day, a group of ferocious meat-eating dinosaur free Zaurus flocked, penguin would have been driven from their continent.
Fleeting, and over the years, penguins was revived in the land of another-disease is also popular in the kingdom within, even the pen is a child princess emotional support was ill with the disease. How to cure a single disease, not to take away the fruit of golden apple, called the Golden Apple with the power to cure grow only in a dream continent, and any disease, can only feed the sick."

Pentarou has to go or waddle back to the abandoned dream continent to regain a golden apple for the girl.

[Ed Oscuro]

Iron Storm/World War Zero is an interesting take on alternate history (Great War still rages on in 1964), but it's about settings rather than storyline.

The storyline of that one was just "WAR IS BAD, YOU GOT FUCKED!" I thought it was pedantic and boorish (which is really something coming from me!); just some Frenchies trying their best to be different. Yes, sure, they had a point. They did incorporate some interesting historical characters, but I find the whole "EVIL SOLDIERS LED BY CARTELS" plotline about as deep and thoughtful as "EVIL MUTANTS LED BY MAGNETO."

Bet On Soldier is more of the same.

By the way, I noticed that the magazines you can find inside some tents featuring some leader of a girl band was (in real life) a lesbian - I doubt this is information that was available to the developers back at the time.

Best story? Malus looking all innocent on the cart in N64 Castlevania's Bad Ending. YOU FOUGHT THE WRONG ONE BRO/SIS.
Ada! ADAAAAAAAAAAA

[BIL]

Castlevania 64 blew my mind with its sneaky, sneaky fake end. First I was like lame ending, then I replayed and went "hey... Real Dracula, you're kinda cute! :3 " Then finally I said "FUUUCK, SO THAT'S WHAT THAT MASSIVE WYRMTHINGY FROM THE TV COMMERCIAL WAS"

[Ed Oscuro]

"FUUUCK, SO THAT'S WHAT THAT THING FROM THE TV COMMERCIAL WAS"

Haha, I had no preparation whatsoever. Yet to this day I still can't picture exactly what it looked like. Perchance this is how I managed to save a measure of sanity; I never held the Old One's terrible true form in my mind's eye.

[BIL]

The creature's shriek reverbrates in my darkest dreams. >_< Some say a youth of Hellmann's Real Mayo graphic filters was the N64's worst legacy. They are mistaken.

I really dug that for once, Dracula's Second Form was pants-shittingly terrifying in scale. And he chucks nukes around like rice at a wedding! Boomboomboom! He goes out in a real Massive Boss Explosion too (as the TVCM helpfully informed everyone). Come to think of it, LOD's Fake True Dracula was kinda freaky-lookin' too, with those 'orribly leering manfaced worms he likes to summon from the void. Monster dicks with grinning mugs, Iremtastic.

[Ed Oscuro]

King Beefsteak was an endearingly disgusting boss too, although having gone back since and seen the source inspiration from Drac X PCE, he's just more of the same, maybe has a couple extra attack cycles. Probably the best "eh?" moment was the first encounter with a vampire right before going underground at the mansion, immediately followed by the unexpectedly quick heel turn by the dead damsel he was feasting on. Their fangs come in so quick these days!

In reality, these games' cinematic sensibilities were actually well ahead of the original Resident Evil, which supposedly was made in part to express dissatisfaction with the '79 Italian flick Zombi. I shudder to think. *files under the "DON'T COME, DON'T WATCH, and then DON'T COME again" category*

[Obiwanshinobi]

I don't think Iron Storm tells any more story than Ridge Racer. Funny thing is, the French appear to have some Eastern Front fetish (harking back to Napoleonic Wars I suppose), whereas Americans don't quite seem to grasp the persistence of scars left by it. War doesn't end when reporters find another topic.
WWI in particular had enormous impact on fiction, not fully recognized yet. Iron Storm makes me glad someone else got it as well.

[Furry Fox Jet Pilot]

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is another example of a game with a great alternate history storyline, but the game was negatively received due to gameplay issues. Here is the storyline according to Wikipedia: "Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is based on an alternate history where the point of divergence occurs with Winston Churchill's death in 1931 from being hit by a cab while visiting New York City, instead of surviving. Years later, without his foresight and leadership, the United Kingdom falls to the Third Reich in 1940 after the British Royal Air Force was defeated by the German Luftwaffe, achieving air supremacy, and Operation Sea Lion was successful, forcing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to surrender to Nazi Germany. This allows Germany to sweep through the other surrounding countries completely unopposed. The Third Reich invades the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa unhampered, and conquers large amounts of territory and many Russian cities, including Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Moscow. After numerous German victories decimate the disorganized Russians, the Red Army and Joseph Stalin surrender to the Wehrmacht and Adolf Hitler. The non-aggression pact Stalin made with Germany prior to the invasion left him without any allies to back him up. The Nazis also help their Italian allies conquer North Africa, creating Benito Mussolini's "New Roman Empire". Japan sweeps through Asia unopposed using Germany's captured Middle Eastern and Soviet oil, which makes any U.S. oil embargo against Japan useless. Various resistance groups form in occupied Europe against the oppressive regime. They are unable to do much against the Nazis, and many are crushed. Even peaceful demonstrations against Nazi occupation are met with fierce hostility. During the war, the United States chose an isolationist policy, implemented by Republican president Thomas E. Dewey (who defeated Harry S. Truman in 1948).

A period of development follows the success of the Axis Powers, transforming conquered Europe, Asia and Africa into the Greater German Reich and allowing allies Japan and Italy to share in the prosperity; at the same time, the Nazis start engineering and mass-producing many of their Wunderwaffen, including jet fighters, super-heavy tanks, and high-tech bombers. This advanced technology makes Germany the strongest nation on the planet. With the war essentially over, the people of the world wonder why the weapons are being developed, and what is the purpose of the build-up. This causes rising tensions between the now technologically superior German Reich and the United States, one of the few nations that is still free from Nazi rule. The United States and the rest of the League of Nations continue to condemn the actions of Nazi Germany in the occupied territories, but make no attempts to stop them, as the U.S. is still dominated by anti-war sentiment.

When secret plans for an American invasion by German and Japanese forces are found by the British Resistance, codenamed Operation Humpback Whale, Germany and Japan are quick to deny it, saying these accusations are ludicrous. President Dewey believes their lies, and continues his isolationist policies, refusing to stock up on arms and increase the size of the military in case of a possible invasion. The invasion plans turn out to be true, however, and Operation Humpback Whale is launched in 1953, with a combined German/Japanese offensive striking at the United States on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

In Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, the player assumes the role of Dan Carson, an average New York construction worker who has no prior connection to the military. Unlike other similar war games, the player's objective is not to help the Allies win the war, but merely to survive in an environment of total war as a resistance fighter against Nazi Germany."

[system11]

Remember Me had a well told story, I really wanted to skip the fights at some points just to find out what happens next.

Binary Domain had a lot more character than I expected.

[Ed Oscuro]

the French appear to have some Eastern Front fetish (harking back to Napoleonic Wars I suppose), whereas Americans don't quite seem to grasp the persistence of scars left by it.

Oh come on, don't talk about people who aren't here. I'll admit that many Americans don't quite grasp that situation but that's - as you say - because we live over here in the idyllic Colonies, not on the Tartars' doorstep.

That is all irrelevant to the criticism I made, which is about the very heavy-handed way they try to press the "war is bad" trope. Fallout ("War...war never changes") games have pressed the same concept, as did the Starship Troopers movie, with farce. I don't really care for those either - I suppose Iron Storm's presentation, which focuses more on the gravity of wars, is harder to misunderstand than the big guns and explosions of a Fallout or Starship Troopers which are appealing just by themselves to people who like those things and don't think beyond them.

I think you've gone off on a tangent, so here's what I meant to talk about: Iron Storm's focus on mysterious groups keeping war alive for money is not only flatly contradicted by the historical record (i.e., money interests didn't force a continuation of the war) - it's also not something that starkly differentiated American and European perspectives of the war, at least up until the Cold War. At that point, Americans started to forget the problems of war, and started viewing defense spending as a cash cow - so long as there wasn't fighting going on; you might recall that there's been great public fatigue towards many different wars in the modern period (from Vietnam to both wars from the George W. Bush era). The "military-industrial context" idea is still clearly different from continuing a specific war - in that sense the antagonists of Iron Storm are much less sophisticated in their schemes than was the military-industrial complex which has been able to pull all kinds of different interests onboard. So long as it keeps the peace and keeps the economy prosperous; the pitfalls of accidental wars and nuclear accidents are far in the background; truth be told, when you look at the tumultuous history of labor and economies, this is still more peaceful than we have seen in the past. But up until the Cold War, it was very common to see the angle that wars only brought suffering to the people and that "War is a Racket".

In some sense, the Cold War spending and the essential failure of Washington to focus on a "peace dividend" make this problem more insidious and harder to track down than Iron Storm's storytellers wanted. In another sense, the antagonists of Iron Storm are so comically two-dimensional in their motives that they don't motivate people to think about them carefully.

No doubt the Iron Storm folks set their game in 1964 because they wanted to imply a parallel between the length and costs of the Cold War (and what has come since - 1914 to 1964, vs. 1964 to 2002) within a European, close-to-home context - to point out how long the military-industrial complex in the Cold War has survived, and try to draw out the costs of "accidental wars" in nations by placing them in one region. But this is drawing out a series of increasingly obtuse and non-obvious parallels and allusions that only the savvy historian/gamer will understand. Most players, if they do think about it, will just notice that there weren't over 50 years of warfare after 1914, at the same scale, and that what wars we have seen haven't been all located in one place. Trying to pretend that casualty rates could be as high as they were from 1914-1918 just cheapens the impact of that war. The game's storytelling does not pass the laugh test, however interesting and noble its intentions may be. More to the point there are better ways of being direct.

Red Dead Redemption, while I think it's often full of anachronisms and also utter shit, is on the other hand very successful in fostering a unique brand of paranoia towards official accounts and the "victors of history." Sometimes it focuses on agencies, sometimes on individuals. It's trying to get at the actual human personalities and human stories that drive these events, rather than showing you TV reports saying "the share price is up!" Iron Storm's storytellers literally thought that was a good enough storytelling device - they were wrong to use it even once, let alone multiple times.

I am mystified by your comment that Iron Storm doesn't tell more story than Ridge Racer. There clearly is a lot of (useless) storyline to Iron Storm, enough that we can write in detail about it for far too long. Is the difference in the subtlety and effectiveness of Iron Storm's storytelling? My previous analysis should have convinced you otherwise.

WWI in particular had enormous impact on fiction, not fully recognized yet. Iron Storm makes me glad someone else got it as well.

It's a shame that Iron Storm adds very little of value to that particular legacy.

You know, Eternal Darkness has a very silly and not especially interesting World War I chapter. But it is at least respectable - part of the reason it doesn't frustrate me like Iron Storm does is that it actually spends more time trying to drill into you some of the inherent absurdities and injustices of a war - the bagged bodies haphazardly stacked under the propaganda posters, both shoved off into a side room - and doesn't test your patience for stupidity by trying to explain in excruciating detail something that we ultimately know isn't true - that the Great War wasn't started so cultists could feed a handful of dying soldiers to an Cthulhu Mythos monster trapped under a cathedral. Iron Storm spends too much time showing off cool explosions, retro-futuristic weapons, and talking about absolute rubbish, to hold any pretense of honoring the dead.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Eh, I don't think Iron Storm tells a remarkable story, but I wouldn't say it deserves to be singled out as mildly exploitative from the midst of propaganda galore (Call of Duty, Battlefield and so on).
Games are so full of living by sword at this point I expect the market to crash on that front. Much like Hollywood saw the rapid demise of certain genres when the audience got fed up.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is another example of a game with a great alternate history storyline, but the game was negatively received due to gameplay issues.

Guys at work the other week talked about some Paradox Development Studio game and I asked whether Sweden could be attacked there. Apparently it's neutral no matter what.

[Ed Oscuro]

Why do you insist on turning the discussion to points nobody ever made? I never called it exploitative, just incompetent.

I agree it doesn't tell a "remarkable" story but it is very heavily story driven.

[Daigohji]

Resident Evil 2. When that game first came out, I thought its tale of a man who takes a drug that makes him a monster that attacks and impregnates his daughter was a daring allegory for drug and child abuse. Considering the plot of subsequent RE games, I've since realised that this was just an infinite number of typewriter monkeys accidentally hammering out something better than intended for once.

[Ed Oscuro]

Allegory is horribly overrated.

I liked the part where Chief Irons got turned into bacon slices from the inside out.

[BIL]

King Beefsteak was an endearingly disgusting boss too, although having gone back since and seen the source inspiration from Drac X PCE, he's just more of the same, maybe has a couple extra attack cycles.

One thing I think it really benefited from full three-dee was the galloping -> goring routine. I dislike the overly sterile "massive boss in center of room, player on circular track at periphery, never the twain shall meet" setup in 3D action gaming, even in good ones like DMC1 (Mundus round 2). Here there was a good sense of being a tiny hero sharing open space with an immense monster.

Of course this happens a lot in DOOM etc and it usually means "circle strafe until it falls over," but with CV64's more conservative controls I really liked dodging that goring attack. IIRC it did around 80% damage as it sent the hero flying? Certainly made me pay attention whenever Mr. Bull broke off lasering to go for a momentum-building jog.



*Dracula Miss Jingle Plays*

Probably the best "eh?" moment was the first encounter with a vampire right before going underground at the mansion, immediately followed by the unexpectedly quick heel turn by the dead damsel he was feasting on. Their fangs come in so quick these days!

Hell yeah, that whole affair was pretty cool! Bosses weren't much but the connecting scenes had great panache. Damn sneaky vampires!

"Phew. Is all over." *boing* "FUUU-"

Damn it, I'm getting into one of those phases where I want the N64 games in my library. A few vacant, tedious stages in there for sure (Prior to COTM, KCEK* [edit: not T] should've been banned from making futher "Underground" anythings). But they're certainly the minority, as much as I try to convince myself otherwise.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I agree it doesn't tell a "remarkable" story but it is very heavily story driven.

What war-themed FPS isn't? Usually the story is as follows: you are a soldier given name and voice deployed to fulfill a mission. Is there a single tale of desertion and disobedience in the history of videogaming? Freedom Fighters/X-Com don't count (you're not taught to take orders from commies/aliens, are you).