Mechamorph said:
Another is probably Harry Potter; while well-written, Rowling herself admitted that she had to leave logic and good sense at the door or there would be no story. Voldemort might be tough against another wizard, not so much a modern day infantry section carrying their firearms. If the Ministry of Magic had even a lick of sense about them, Old Noseless never could have gotten as far as he did. Basically everyone in a position of authority had to be incompetent or powerless (or dead), how else could children have been the pivotal actors in stopping a world-ending threat?
Well I think the first bit is covered under the blanket statement of muggle tech doesn't work around magic, but even if it did, the culture of the magical community comes across as far too conservative for them to look to muggles for help. As for the second, I thought a bungling ministry was actually quite clever, firstly it made sense within the universe as I felt it was a believable result of the again fairly conservative and somewhat backwards thinking culture that seems to pretty strong in the magical community, and secondly, to me at least, it does justify certain story elements, like why Dumbledore turns to Harry and the Order of the Phoenix instead seeking ministry help to hunt down the horcruxes.
Anyways, rant incoming because I'm going to go with the Assassin's Creed series and Far Cry 3, because I want to shout at Far Cry 3's story for making me angry and I might as well cover both of Ubisoft's recent abysmal attempts at a story, especially when both started out looking quite promising. For Assissin's Creed, the story wasn't actually bad at all in the first game. It was in no way exceptional mind, but I liked the moral ambiguity of it, how Altair started wondering why he was killing these people as the Templars themselves told him of how they believed they were doing good. Then Assassin's Creed 2 came along and the story went into b action movie mode; cheeky likable hero trying to avenge family against impossibly evil secret order of super bad guys, with a few aliens and some worldwide peril tossed in for good measure. Pretty much every AC story since then as been a rinse and repeat of the same basic concepts.
Now for Far Cry 3, which also started out looking reasonably interesting, with the lead character at first coming across quite uncomfortable and out of place in the hail of bullets that fps protagonists tend to find themselves, the game seems to want to be playing on the concept of how this sort of violence would actually effect a person. Unfortunately when the story actually gets going, it falls flat on it's face in this attempt, due mostly to one character, Vaas. However, let's start with the other characters, the few times in the early game that the story starts poking at the fact your character is becoming frighteningly comfortable with violence, it's through his friends that you've rescued. However they turn out to be some of the most despicably self-centred assholes in the game, rendering their criticisms of you pretty mute in my view. To provide and example of this, the most upset they get is when Brody is breaking up with his girlfriend at which point they all start bitching at him for being so insensitive, this being only days after his brother just died in his arms and he's gone off killing dozens of people, risking his life to save each one of them so they can sit around and do fuck all. The other main way the game tries to explore violence is through it's big poster baddy Vaas, one, by simply demonstrating Vaas' capacity for violence and two by trying to draw parallels between your character and Vaas. The problems come firstly from the fact the game hits you over the head with it's comparisons to Vaas, constantly showing scenes cutting between Brody and Vaas doing the same thing, presumably just in case there are five year olds playing who did not quite understand immediately that both Vaas and Brody are violent people. The real problem however is that you never see Vaas, he turns up about three times then you're done with him and you move to next big bad guy. Sometimes it works when a antagonist is elusive and intangible, but the point of a character like Vaas is the opposite of that, we're supposed to know them intimately enough that we feel like they are truly our character's nemesis and so when they start pointing towards the similarities between our character and Vaas it relates to aspects of Vaas we've actually experienced and not just pieces of hearsay from his sister. In the end Vaas just feels like a waste of a character, when he's meant to be the focal point of so much of the story.
Edit, because I have another one; Terminator 2. I recently watched Terminator 2 for the first time in about 10 years, because I remembered it the only James Cameroon movie I'd seen that wasn't painfully mediocre. I actually enjoyed what I suppose must have been the first half of the movie, but then it starts slowing down for a few scenes. Arnie and the gang turn up at one of Sarah Connor's old not really war buddies to stock up. It is at this point in the movie that we hear a monologue from Sarah Connor's brain announcing that she has come to the conclusion that this terminator is the best possible father figure for her son. This is the exact model of terminator who hunted her throughout the first movie, killed the man who she apparently loved and was the father of her child, amoungst the many others she saw it kill, and got her locked away in a brutal asylum for around decade. Her entire life for the last 15 years or so has been dedicated to preparing for war with these things, she is constantly dreaming about the destruction they will bring, yet one turns up and within two days she decides she not only trusts it, but that it is the best father figure there has ever been for her son.
