Square: Game Stories Can Surpass Film

[CanadianWolverine]

Here is what bugs me whenever the issue of "Great Games, Great Stories, Can They Co-Exist?" comes up:

There almost always seems to be an emphasis that the story the developer wants to communicate is more important than the story the gamer wants to experience.

The reduction of cut scenes in games has been one of the best developments in games in my own experience playing with games from the 80s till now. Sure, you might think I am saying all games should be of the 'sand box' style, but not so, I just ask that developers realize story is secondary to the gameplay or it ceases to be a game, IMHO. This has been a realization for myself since my first play through of Half-Life, I would never be able to put up with cut scenes as the only way to tell a story after that.

 

[Brotherofwill]

I totally agree to the potential, but it seems like noone is giving a shit about interactive storytelling these days. You just get cutscenes and gameplay seperately.

Even if its as simple as killing Boss in MGS3 by actualy having to press R1, I am all over those little interactions. MGS 4 also had some good ideas but relied way too heavily on cutscenes and not enough on things like the famous "triangle pressing" scene.

How about that: In gameplay rendered cutscenes give the player an option in which way to act more often. It could be as simple as quicktime events but atleast give the player some options instead of making him perform mindless reflexes.

 

[Incredible Bullshitting Man]

I think putting a good storyline into a game is somewhat easier than in a movie, because you can have a game that lasts ten hours or forty hours or over a hundred hours, whereas films have to be short enough for the bladderically-challenged to be able to sit through it without pissing themselves in the theater.

In games those ten or forty or so hours usually include grinding, traveling from one place to another and doing side-quests that don´t always have any relation to the main storyline, i.e. stuff that movies don´t show. If you strip a game of everything that isn´t directly related to the plot, you cut out the meat that makes a gameworld interesting and severely restrict player´s freedom. Also, long playing time doesn´t mean games can have infinitely long storyline. Eventually even a player will lose interest in the story if it does nothing but gone on and on without even a hint of an ending. Games need to have equally compact main story as movies have; the long hours come from exploration and generally doing things out of the main storyline.

Well, this at least how I see it. Developing games´ narrative potential is a good aim, I support it wholeheartedly.

 

[rossatdi]

I'm sure some are going to scoff at the fact that somebody who's responsible for making JRPGs is talking about storytelling of all things.

Oh, oh, I was, I was!

Convoluted plot lines and constant character betrayals do not good story telling make.

 

[Phat_Frank]

I'm sure some are going to scoff at the fact that somebody who's responsible for making JRPGs is talking about storytelling of all things.

Oh, oh, I was, I was!

Convoluted plot lines and constant character betrayals do not good story telling make.

yup!

 

[NewGeekPhilosopher]

I hate to sound like a jackass here. But this is one of my biggest sticking points with the whole casual revolution. (I.E. Bejeweled, Wii Sports, Peggle) There's not a lot of room for story or interpretation in games of that nature. And with them becoming so huge on the market, it's difficult for more engrossing games to compete.

It's kind of like watching Cowboy Bebop for a while and then when you want something equally engrossing you go to the store and find nothing but Spongebob DVDs. Admittedly, it's not as bad as all that. But it sure feels like that way at times with video games.

Spongebob has his place, but something as engrossing as Cowboy Bebop he is not. Spongebob is good 2am insomnia coping strategy material, because the later at night it gets, the funnier it is. But Cowboy Bebop it is not.

As for casual gaming like Peggle, casual gaming is making games for a different market. When developers keep chasing that market above all others, it gets ugly. However, even Nintendo, a brand now associated with shovelware, delivers good storytelling in its J-RPGs on DS (Chrono Trigger only came out THIS YEAR in Australia, hopefully a release bungle like that never happens again. Therefore it still counts as a recent game here). PS3 seems to be catching up with J-RPGs, as is Xbox 360. It's a matter of which console gets quality over quantity that the fanboys care about, or in some cases quality and quantity of J-RPGs at the same time.

Also, I read the title of this post and thought "Square: Game Heros Can Surpass Traditional Standards of Gender And Manliness". Heh.

 

[NewGeekPhilosopher]

I still haven't found a computer game with a story as fantastic and well-paced as certain movies, including The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Frankly, I find the concept laughable with current computer game stories, even the best of the RPG (particularly JRPG) genre.

Phoenix Wright: Even Marylin Manson says the game is "Fucking Amazing". Go find it if you can.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Xenogears.

End of discussion.

Xenogears is one of the worst examples of storytelling in a videogame*. Almost every significant plot revelation occurs in a noninteractive cutscene in which the protagonist isn't even present (and later in walls of text where the player isn't involved in anything the protagonist does), which means that the key storytelling technique of a videogame, player discovery, is totally absent. The means of information delivery is also bad, being based almost entirely on ominous vagueness with absolutely no information presented to the player until the Big Shocking Twist! which you don't care about because you didn't care about the previous worldview either because it was vaguely explained and you had no hand in uncovering it, and the whole feel of the project is that of being a giant Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfiction, written with one hand whilst wanking furiously with the other.

Also, because this is an NGE fanfic, Shinji Fei is the ur-whiny ***** in videogame protagonists. Seriously, all those snivelling twats you've had to play as over the last ten years. Xenogears' fault. "I don't like gears or fighting" indeed.

Oh, and the translation's fucking abysmal, though I have it on good authority that the Japanese script wasn't up to much in the first place.


* Xenosaga is probably worse. Especially since the game portion was rendered so irrelevant they actually decided to cut it out here and release only the cutscenes on a disc. How's that for player involvement in a story?

 

[Dectilon]

"But hey, he's trying."

Is he? I guess we'll see when FF13 hits, but of what I've seen so far it's going to be another trip to clichée city. Now, I'm not saying it won't be enjoyable to play for the most part, but the idea that its story would even approach the greatest works of cinema and litterature is a quite ludicrous notion.

 

[Nazrel]

Xenogears.

End of discussion.

Xenogears is one of the worst examples of storytelling in a videogame*. Almost every significant plot revelation occurs in a noninteractive cutscene in which the protagonist isn't even present (and later in walls of text where the player isn't involved in anything the protagonist does), which means that the key storytelling technique of a videogame, player discovery, is totally absent. The means of information delivery is also bad, being based almost entirely on ominous vagueness with absolutely no information presented to the player until the Big Shocking Twist! which you don't care about because you didn't care about the previous worldview either because it was vaguely explained and you had no hand in uncovering it, and the whole feel of the project is that of being a giant Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfiction, written with one hand whilst wanking furiously with the other.

Also, because this is an NGE fanfic, Shinji Fei is the ur-whiny ***** in videogame protagonists. Seriously, all those snivelling twats you've had to play as over the last ten years. Xenogears' fault. "I don't like gears or fighting" indeed.

Oh, and the translation's fucking abysmal, though I have it on good authority that the Japanese script wasn't up to much in the first place.


* Xenosaga is probably worse. Especially since the game portion was rendered so irrelevant they actually decided to cut it out here and release only the cutscenes on a disc. How's that for player involvement in a story?

Xenosaga was an awesome game (Well Ep 1 anyway. Ep 2 the killed the franchise. Stupid marketing department.)

If your complaint is a non interactive story, then try Persona 4. If you haven't been paying attention you can't get a good ending on that game.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Xenosaga was an awesome game (Well Ep 1 anyway. Ep 2 the killed the franchise. Stupid marketing department.)

Xenosaga was such an awesome "game" that it's European release consisted of a disc of cutscenes and no actual gameplay at all.

It's as if they knew that the "game" they'd made was an irrelevant piece of padding to space out their interminable cutscenes.

 

[GoldenShadow]

I cried at the very end of FFVIII when Rinoa found Squall unconscious in that wasteland, and then her embrace caused the Sun to suddenly burst through and transform the environment into a grassy meadow full of flowers.

Don't tell anyone though.

 

[Alex_P]

I'm sure some are going to scoff at the fact that somebody who's responsible for making JRPGs is talking about storytelling of all things.

Why? This makes no sense.

One word: melodrama.

Okay, actually, two words: overwrought melodrama.

That's certainly not the whole genre but it is a lot of it.

-- Alex

 

[midpipps]

The biggest hurdle they have to get over is hour long cutscenes and formulaic stale gameplay.

But see then they alienate hardcores like myself who love stale(i.e. turnbased?)gameplay and long cutscenes.

Here in lies the problem with trying to tell a story on a videogame. No matter how good the story is it is not going to get to some of the audience. It is the same problem you get from the book versus movie debate or even the subtitle versus (insertLanguage) translation.

Personally I will watch most movies that have an original soundtrack in the native language with subtitles. Mostly due to the fact that I want to hear and feel the original voices that went along with the characters. But some people just don't like subtitles and feel like it is pulling them away from the actual movie by making them focus on the text. Same way that some thing cut scenes pull them out of the story.

Personally I like cutscenes and don't mind a gallon of text it gives me a chance to really read into the characters and understand them more. One game that comes to mind with one of the best stories was Valkyria Chronicles the gameplay was amazing but I don't know if they could have made the story what it was without the cutscenes and the amount of detail they had on each character in the backstories and such was amazing.

 

[Nazrel]

Xenosaga was an awesome game (Well Ep 1 anyway. Ep 2 the killed the franchise. Stupid marketing department.)

Xenosaga was such an awesome "game" that it's European release consisted of a disc of cutscenes and no actual gameplay at all.

It's as if they knew that the "game" they'd made was an irrelevant piece of padding to space out their interminable cutscenes.

The Europeans got jipt.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Why did you play Xenosaga Ep.1 if you hated Xenogears so much?

I didn't. I do, however, know enough to say that it's structure as a videogame is woeful, and it represents everything that is wrong about videogame storytelling (And, as noted, was never released as a game here, but rather as a disc of cutscenes, which tells you all you need to know about Namco's confidence in it's quality as an interactive experience)

I think comparisons with NGE are superficial at best to be honest. Aside from the robots & Freud worship they're nothing alike.

And the bit where everyone in the world turns into goo in order to birth the new god, of course. And the way the reluctant hero protagonist spends every minute he isn't fighting moaning about how much he hates fighting, and occasionally goes into unstoppable berzerk rages to the detriment of all about him, and is all but devoid of his own sense of agency as a character, rather existing to be manipulated by a variety of others.

Fei is a superbly complex protagonist. What is the Big Shocking Twist you speak of? If I remember rightly the plot is revealed gradually (too gradually for some).

Which one do you want? The bit where everyone turns into goo? The bit where Elly is possessed by Miang, despite the fact this makes no fucking sense as there's no hint of it as one of Miang's powers, and degrades her role from one of the serial reincarnations to that of damsel in distress for no good reason? Or the bit where the latest Unstoppable Superweapon Ten Times Bigger Than The Last Unstoppable Superweapon that Solaris deploys (and of these there are several) turns out to be a joke boss because you all of a sudden find yourself in control of the Macross 7 for the fight. Or the bit where Hammer suddenly decides that he wanted a whizzy cyborg body so he can be strong like you, except you haven't seen him for fucking ages and have probably forgotten about him, so you don't care anyway, and you've just done a spectacularly boring and pointless dungeon anyway.

Hell, let's just make it simple. Disc fucking 2. All of it.

It's as if they watched the end of Eva and thought "Oh, guess we have to go all fucking strange on the audience as well." (Except Hideaki Anno actually had a nervous breakdown, the Xenogears team were just told "get your act together and get a product out the door, you're taking too damn long".)

edit: I also don't know where you got the idea that plot had to be delivered via "player discovery". "Noninteractive cutscenes" are a staple of video games. They allow the story to be told as the scenario writer intended, which is how it should be.

The story advancing by player discovery is the thing that elevates videogames above movies and TV, it is the way that interaction ties to narrative. Without it, you might as well watch something that's designed to be noninteractive. Xenogears had flashes of it in some areas, like the prison (possibly the best part of the game), but pissed it all away when it really mattered.