Square: Game Stories Can Surpass Film

[mr mcshiznit]

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.

ok so maybe a little less cutscenes but replace them with mini-stories ala Lost Odyssey? I would totally be on board for that but understand that many people would go ape shit if they did that to a FFgame.