What Is Your Favorite Game Narrative?

[I Have No Idea]

Why so serious, Hobbes? WHY SO SERIOUS?!

It wasn't the answer I deserved, but it's the one I needed right now.

 

[AyreonMaiden]

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. It perfectly deconstructed the comparatively childlike innocence of Ocarina of Time.

It's a quirky, dark, and completely emotional story about the impossibility of the storybook heroism, the power of forgiveness, the value of your "home," the virtue of selflessness, and the weighing and acceptance of responsibilities in quite possibly the most realistic pre-apocalypse scenario I've yet seen in a game.

And those are just the themes I could think of off the top of my head. There's so much more in there. I really wonder how accidental all that subtext really was when Eiji Aonuma led his team in the making of it.

I'll agree that Majora's Mask is really a pretty good "games as art" argument. It's got a ton of layers to the world and the story that make it amazing, but also incredibly offsetting.

But I'll also say that the Metal Gear Solid series (especially 3 and 4,) are amazing in terms of the emotion, even if the plot does get random at times. And while I'm sure that people'll say "well the plot in those games might as well be a movie!", I think that that emotion does depend quite heavily on the gameplay, to immerse the player in the character. Again, especially 3 and 4.

MGS is amazing. Might be my second favorite videogame series of all time. Honestly, I'm not much of a "games as art" activist. But that far from means that I don't get emotionally invested in things that are considered artistic...

But MGS is the one game I remember actually crying at. I came close to crying at Shadow of the Colossus, but I outright bawled in front of my girlfriend this summer as I played through the end of MGS4.

I think you know which part I speak of, too. What a torturous march through hell. MGS is proof positive that a plot is nothing without characters, and with fantastic characters comes fantastic suspension of disbelief.

And I HATE people who say the game might as well be a movie. How short-sighted, to focus only on how long the cutscenes are when they're missing out on how stupidly detailed the world is, how many options the combat gives you, how good the AI is...If Hideo Kojima truly didn't care about the gameplay, there's no way he'd have put the effort he did into it. MGS could have only ever been a videogame.