WARNING: Massive wall-o-text ahead!
I'm actually enjoying playing Ratchet and Clank, so far, but I'm not going to lie, the plot and story-pacing of the game is in serious need of a continuity editor, as in one who turn to the writers and scream "PUT SOME FUCKING CONTINUITY IN IT, YOU FUCKING DUMBASS GOBSHIITES!!". Many of the cut-scenes feel like there was some critical transition dialog and action that was removed for the sake of brevity without consideration to the overall flow and pacing. Many of the plot points seem to jump into existence without properly establishing their cause. And, of course, the most glaring faux pas is the near lack of proper character development of either Ratchet, Clank, or Captain Qwark (the true villainous hero). The game is in such a hurry to get you into the action of collecting weapons and destroying shit that it fails to tell you why you would be the kind of person to do that in the first place. It is quite true that the friendship bound between Ratchet and Clank is taken for granted rather than being built-up through the play of the game. The missions have a sequencing, but the motivation for each mission is only loosely tied to the idea of a plot going on in the game.
This does seem to be a trend in many games lately (Destiny, The Division, Diablo 3, Ratchet and Clank, etc.). The only way to actually have fun with many so-called "modern" games is to turn your mind off thinking about any idea of some kind of story, plot, or just any idea of coherent consistency going on that could possibly motivate you to do anything in the game, as well as properly build dramatic tension, and just blindly run about like a 2-year-old breaking things. Essentially, the best some game developers can do in terms of a gaming experience is to create a baby's activity center toy (for those who don't know what I'm talking about, it's a thing like this: Fisher Price Activity Center [http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Activity-Center-Crib/dp/B00ESK91BM/ref=sr_1_123?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1462564621&sr=1-123&keywords=activity+center], just an assorted collection of doodads and whatchamacallits that have no coherent, consistent, or logical relation to each other other than being shiny, noisy, and stuck on the same board).
As I said, I am having fun with the game, so far, but there is definitely some lingering question how long that will last. The baby's activity center style of game design is fine if you're 14-years-old or younger, but when you're more toward advanced the ages (like, say, 45, as I am, as many in the gaming community are finding themselves moving toward, despite their best efforts otherwise (this is happening, people, just come to peace with it)), you need your games to have a lot more meat on the bones. Fractured, partial stories with shallow, undeveloped, non-evolving characters just will not hold your attention for long. There's only so much just randomly shooting shit, blowing shit up, or breaking shit apart you can do before whatever part of your mind that has actually matured past the age of 8 starts to ask a simple question: "What the fuck am I doing all this shit for?". If the game does have a proper, cogent answer to that question, immersion is immediately lost and any interest in playing the game further evaporates like fog before the raising sun.
This happens because as we get older, however much or little, we become more complex, sophisticated, and nuanced in our behaviors as well as our understanding and perception of the world around us and the behaviors of others. This is because, however much or little, our brains continue to evolve and develop to greater complexity, sophistication, and ability to distinguish nuances as we get older, and maintaining stimulation of such a brain requires that our games also evolve to similar levels of complexity, sophistication, and nuance. Unfortunately, it seems that, often, the triple-A game developers are just not up to the task. Consequently, many of us older gamers will have a rather disappointing experience with a game that many younger gamers may find sufficiently engrossing, satisfying, or, even, exceptional in nature. The problem is that the gamers have, in some respects, grown-up while the games themselves haven't.
Basically, in my opinion, the selection of content in games needs to span a spectrum of age demographics, in terms of complexity, sophistication, nuance, and, even, metaphorical inferences, from younger to older audience members, rather than remaining forever caged in a narrow-band of adolescent thinking. Anime and manga, media that are often closely related to gaming and gamers, suffers similar issues, though it also suffers a host of other issues that may be responsible for some of its decline, as has been noted by some (Why Manga Publishing is Dying [http://io9.gizmodo.com/5874951/why-manga-publishing-is-dying-and-how-it-could-get-better], Observations on the American Manga Market [http://www.cloudscapecomics.com/2010/07/20/observations-on-the-american-manga-market-2/], The Matter of Manga in America [https://gargarstegosaurus.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/the-matter-of-manga-in-america/]). There is a lot of content for younger fans, but older fans are often left having to dumb-down their expectations and thinking to squeeze themselves into the small confines of adolescent content. Yes, it is true that making a more sophisticated and nuanced game is both more difficult and potentially more costly than the baby's activity center; but, I think that creating games that do appeal more to the greater sophistication and nuance of the adult mind could have some significantly positive benefits on the game industry through the spurring of better innovation of gameplay, game-mechanics, and story-telling in games and the expansion of market appeal to cover a much wider, diversified audience, which can help amortize the costs of more expensive endeavors across a larger marketable product line-up.
