Normally, BR is so professional and objective. Apparently sometimes, though, the stupidity gets too thick for them!
Yes, that really ran on the BR front page (they’ve edited the comedy part out now). I swear I didn’t doctor that in any way except for cropping it.
I know, I know. You all knew it was coming. Well, why the fuck shouldn’t it be coming? What kind of list of awful, overrated sacred cows would this be if it didn’t top off with the awfulest, overratedest one? And Final Fantasy 7 fits the bill perfectly: it is praised around the internet constantly, to this day, for being the absolute pinnacle of the video game field. And it is thoroughgoing crap.
First, let’s start with the obvious: it looks bad. I mean, really, really bad. Even for a Playstation game it looks bad. I guess Square wasn’t able to master the art of making models out of more than six polygons, and the results are not pretty. The prerendered cutscenes look better — when they actually work. There’s one that is completely broken and won’t load.
Which I guess is maybe fine, since the entire game is prerendered cutscenes anyhow. I mean, the entire game. Did you just get on an elevator? Time for a cutscene of the elevator going up! Did you get on a plane? Time for a cutscene of the propellers spinning! And so on and so on. I know I bitch about cutscenes a lot, but Final Fantasy 7 probably has a greater density of utterly useless cutscenes than any other game ever.
The story is what people really praise about this game, though. And that is because they are stupid. Here it is in capsule form: a mysterious, angst-ridden amnesiac joins a group of eco-terrorists. They blow up some stuff, and a lot of people die. They’re the good guys, though, because they’re Fighting The Man. The evil corporation they’re fighting against tries to have them killed over and over again while they just, like, wander around a bit. Then a crazy dude decides to blow up the whole world because he figures out that he’s an alien (which, by the way, he actually isn’t). Meanwhile, the earth is spitting out giant monsters to murder everybody in revenge for environmental damage caused by heartless corporations. The heroes kill everything, and then everybody dies except lions. The end.
Sound good to you? Of course not. Because it’s awful. And to make matters worse, the translation is nearly incomprehensible; you might suspect that I’m just missing something because it’s so awful, but ha ha at you: I’ve played it on the PC too, with the "corrected" translation, and the story isn’t any better. It’s just a lot easier to figure out why it sucks is all.
So, okay, it looks bad and the story’s stupid. But you know me: I’m happy to forgive trivial faults like those as long as the game’s fun. And I promise you that if Final Fantasy 7 were a fun game, I’d forgive it all the "this guy are sick" it wants to print on my screen. But it isn’t. It plays a lot like any other Final Fantasy game, except you only get three characters at a time. That’s enough, though, because none of them are actually any different from any others; they all have pretty much identical stats (Cloud is like 10% better overall than anybody else), pretty much identical gear, and exactly identical skill sets: Fight, Item, and Defend. So, hey, all the characters are the same, and nobody does anything fun? Awesome!
You wander around the world in pretty much a straight line (at the very very end of the game there’s a tiny amount of optional content, but, except for that, it’s 100% linear), fight repetitive battles, solve really boneheaded pseudo-puzzles, and then play awful minigames like the chocobo races and the stupid tower defense thing. Meanwhile, you’re being interrupted by cutscenes every few minutes.
Why people think this game is good is a mystery to me. It is not. Final Fantasy 6 was better in every conceivable way. My only guess is that they all like it because it’s just one of those things that the idiot gaming press tells us we’re supposed to like. I honestly wonder if most of the people who rave about this game have even played it. I suspect that, if they had, they would maybe reconsider their adoration for it.
Oh, final quick note: if you tell somebody that Final Fantasy 7’s story is garbage, prepare to be rebuffed with some snooty nonsense about how you just don’t understand "Japanese storytelling." Fuck that. It’s garbage, and that’s not a matter of cultural differences. It’s a matter of angst not being nearly as awesome as fucking teenagers think.
Woo, awards have started! Now let’s complain about them!
I’m using some new stats this year. I’ll be going by Total Zone and Ultimate Zone Rating — both of which are advanced zone-based metrics measured in runs saved. Also I’ll be using TZ/135 and UZR/150, which are just Total Zone and Ultimate Zone Rating scaled to a standard number of games, to account for people who were blistering awesomeness and then maybe got hurt. And I’ll be mixing in Tango’s interesting Fans Scouting Report, which is a crowdsourced metric also measured in runs. In all cases, higher is better, and the rule of thumb is that ten runs is equal to one win. For catchers I’ll also list the caught stealing rate, since that’s pretty goddamn important, and I’m skeptical of the value of zone-based metrics at that position. Fangraphs agrees with me, and doesn’t even bother to make a UZR for catchers anyhow. Also, since nobody makes zone-based metrics for pitchers — and Tango doesn’t appear to have FSR for them either — I guess I’ll use Baseball Info Solutions’ Defensive Runs Saved Above Average and its scaled counterpart. Fucking pitchers.
C: Joe Mauer (TZ: 4, TZ/135: 5, FSR: 13, CS%: 26%)
1B: Mark Teixeira (TZ: 7, TZ/135: 6, UZR: -2.9, UZR/150: -2.4, FSR: 8)
2B: Robinson Cano (TZ: 0, TZ/135: 0, UZR: -0.6, UZR/150: -0.9, FSR: 10)
3B: Evan Longoria (TZ: 15, TZ/135: 13, UZR: 11.1, UZR/150: 12.4, FSR: 20)
SS: Derek Jeter (TZ: -10, TZ/135: -10, UZR: -4.7, UZR/150: -5.4, FSR: -9)
LF: Carl Crawford (TZ: 1, TZ/135: 1, UZR: 18.5, UZR/150: 21.2, FSR: 15)
CF: Franklin Gutierrez (TZ: 15, TZ/135: 14, UZR: 7.3, UZR/150: 6.8, FSR: 11)
RF: Ichiro Suzuki (TZ: 10, TZ/135: 9, UZR: 15.6, UZR/150: 14.8, FSR: 15)
P: Mark Buehrle (DRS: 8, DRS/135: 46)
So, looking at this list, you can probably already see a few names that clearly don’t belong (hint: they all play for the Yankees). Isn’t it odd that the Yankees’ entire infield — or, well, everybody who’s not a gutless choker, anyhow — won gold gloves, when poor infield defense was a major problem for them all year long? That Robinson Cano’s zone metrics are all bad but his FSR is pretty good is interesting; that indicates to me that perhaps he gets a lot of chances on easy plays to his right, since his shortstop — what’s his name — is legendary for getting absolutely nothing to his left. Crawford is pretty frustrating, since the two metrics don’t agree about him at all; I’d say that since his FSR is more similar to his UZR, it’s probably a closer-to-accurate measure of his contribution.
So, anyhow, enough of that. It’s time for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the list of people who should have won gold gloves instead of these lumbering oafs from the Yankees!
C: Matt Wieters (TZ: 7, TZ/135: 8, FSR: 13, CS%: 31%)
1B: Daric Barton (TZ: 10, TZ/135: 9, UZR: 12.1, UZR/150: 14.2, FSR: 5)
2B: Mark Ellis (TZ: 7, TZ/135: 8, UZR: 9.9, UZR/150: 12.7, FSR: 8)
3B: Evan Longoria
SS: Cliff Pennington (TZ: 11, TZ/135: 10, UZR: 9.9, UZR/150: 8.8, FSR: 9)
LF: Brett Gardner (TZ: 18, TZ/135: 24, UZR: 22.3, UZR/150: 39.7, FSR: 10)
CF: Franklin Gutierrez
RF: Ichiro Suzuki
P: Ricky Romero (DRS: 10, DRS/135: 57)
Well, they got three right. Good work, gold glove voters! You notice how all those overrated infielding Yankees got replaced with Athletics you’ve never heard of? That’s neat how that happened. And then Carl Crawford did the impossible: he got replaced by a Yankee you’ve never heard of!
Now, of course, all the usual caveats about fielding metrics apply here, but come on. They’re fairly good, if taken together, at reflecting actual value. And which would you trust more: a complex collection of acronyms and numbers, or a bunch of boneheads who just gave Derek Jeter his fifth award for being the best fielder at a position he fields very badly?
But you know what? It‘s still really really stupid. Stephen and I have been talking a lot lately about video games, thereby surprising nobody, and the conversation turned to video games and story-ing, and he managed to find this awful article from some site called GamesRadar, which I thought at first was Daily Radar, and then was all "whoa, first PCXL, and now Daily Radar’s come back?" But no, it’s actually another, different site.
Not really any better, though.
Whoever said videogames have no cultural value needs a shot in the mouth – or they need to sit down with The Longest Journey, Metal Gear Solid or any of the other games on our list of Best Videogame Stories EVER.
Because, as we all know, cultural value is exactly the same thing as goddamn stories. Which is why nobody considers painting or sculpture or music to be art. Except for Bohemian Rhapsody!
A good story isn’t necessary for a good game (Halo, Super Mario Galaxy or Tetris, anyone?) but that’s what makes the games on our list just that much more important.
I… what? I need some help, here. I’m two sentences into this goddamn article, and I’m already in trouble. A good story isn’t really connected in any way to the quality of the game — which we prove with this list of one awesome game and two crappy overrated games — which means that games with stories are… important? Is that "important" as opposed to "good?" Like, since half these games are terrible, we’ll go on about their "importance" instead?
Fun fact: this list contains at least four games that are stunningly unimportant in terms of their impact on the field of video games. Or their impact on audiences, who mostly just yawned them away.
These are good games with amazing stories of epic battles, emotional intrigues, bloody betrayals and mind-bending existentialisms that do more than make you play the game. They make you love the game and remember it long after the tale is told.
"Mind-bending existentialisms?" Take it down about five notches, man. This is going to be a long article.
Metal Gear Solid (Playstation/PC, 1998)
So I’m pretty sure this is not a ranked list; rule #1 on the Internet Video Game Asshole checklist is that you must worship Metal Gear Solid. There’s no way anybody ranked it #15 of anything at anything.
Also, wasn’t it released for some other platform too? Like, the one you took your screenshot from? Crazyass.
The Story:
Secret agent Solid Snake is yanked out of a well-earned retirement and sent to a remote island in Alaska, where a military black-ops team has gone rogue and seized a nuclear weapon. Once there, Snake meets a bunch of interesting people, snaps most of their necks and endures capture, torture and the company of a guy who pees his pants when ninjas menace him. He soon learns he’s part of a government cloning project, and that his clone “brother” wants to use a giant, walking, nuclear-armed tank called Metal Gear to kill him. Moreover, some of his allies seem intent on betraying him, and there’s no way to know whom to trust. Overcoming impossible odds, he ultimately saves the day (and the girl, if you’re lucky) by accidentally infecting his brother with a lethal virus for which he was made an unwitting carrier. Snake is unaffected by the virus – but for how long?
I can’t decide what’s funnier: the fact that that pretty much does sum up the story of Metal Gear Solid, or the fact that this dude didn’t seem to realise after writing it that maybe this article wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Oh, also? Winning the girl isn’t a matter of being "lucky." It’s a matter of having enough stamina to pound the shit out of the A button during the ridiculous torture minigame.
Why it’s the Best:
A big part of what sets Metal Gear Solid and its sequels apart from other games is their moral ambiguity; while Snake is always on the right side of the law – or at least seems to be – the people he fights are almost never truly evil. Their motivations are complex, and more often than not, they’re fighting on the "wrong" side because they’re clued in to the monstrous, uncaring conspiracy that’s operating behind the "good" guys.
What? No. That’s wrong. Every word of that is wrong. First of all: have you played a video game? Like, ever? "Moral ambiguity" is super super fashionable, and has been for a very long time. Idiots confuse it with depth, you see. Also, Snake is always, always, alwaysalways on the wrong side of the law — that’s why he spends so much time running from the government and then being captured again, and why his missions are so secret — because sneaking around and snapping people’s necks is, in fact, against the law. And the only villain in the entire series with "complex" motivations is Revolver Ocelot — who, incidentally, turns out to be working for that very "uncaring conspiracy." Liquid Snake just wants revenge for an imaginary slight.
Nowhere was this more true than in the first Metal Gear Solid. Each boss battle is a story in itself, and everyone you kill will deliver a strangely poignant monologue when you off them.
Yeah, every time you kill a boss, there’s like a ten-minute cutscene where the camera swirls around and he tells you his goddamn life story while pathos-y music vamps in the background. But the battles themselves aren’t "stories" in any conceivable way, you nutbar — they’re, like, boss fights. You dodge the boss’ attacks and then punch him a lot, since bosses tend to be oddly immune to getting shot.
One of the villains, Sniper Wolf, even has a weird romantic thing going on with Snake’s new buddy, nerdy engineer Hal "Otacon" Emmerich – and her death at Snake’s hands completely obliterates any notions Otacon had about the nobility of war.
Maybe my copy was just missing some of the pathos yours had, since it seemed to me like he was just pissed off since he had a weird nerdy crush on her, and Snake offed her anyhow. Also, you might not want to mention Otacon in your gushing about the game’s story, since everything he’s involved with is really really annoying.
As the plot evolves – largely through "codec" radio conversations that drop in treatises on nuclear war and escalation of powers – you’ll start to wonder if you’re on the right side at all, thanks in part to several of your "allies" covertly manipulating you into doing their bidding the whole time.
The game starts with Snake being kidnapped by the government, injected with weird substances, and coerced into going on a secret assassination mission. If you weren’t already thinking you might not be on the right side, there are pieces of your brain that are out of position.
Of course, all doubt about which side you’re on goes out the window when you’re captured and tortured by Revolver Ocelot, simultaneously one of the most likable and hateful villains in videogame history.
This is true: I then found myself resolutely on the side of everybody who didn’t make this game. Who the fuck decided to put a button-mashing minigame in here? And who decided to tie your performance to the quality of the ending in nonsensical ways? And just who, pray tell, thought it was a good idea to give Ocelot fucking dialogue about the minigame? "Don’t use a turbo controller," I swear to God he actually tells you, "or I’ll find out!"
He’s a sadist, but he’s also got a certain charm, and the broken-fourth-wall torture sequence ("Don’t even think about using auto-fire, or I’ll know!") remains one of the most memorable in the game – partly because something was actually riding on it. Fail to resist the torture, and the life of Snake’s love interest, Meryl Silverburgh, is forfeit.
Wait, so you didn’t forget about all that shit? You thought it was good? I’m serious here: what is wrong with you?
Then there’s the eerie Psycho Mantis scene, in which the floating psychic reads your memory cards and moves your controller across the floor.
Yes, that was cute. I laughed. But then any goodwill that built up was tossed right out by the actual fight, which was, as I’ve mentioned before, complete and total bullshit.
It all culminates in the final, inevitable confrontation between Solid and Liquid Snake, the latter of which refuses to die even when he’s been blown up, beaten half to death and shot full of holes by a jeep-mounted machinegun.
Yes. And then what? And then what happens, GamesRadar? Remind me, because I’ve forgotten. You don’t want to say? You don’t want to mention to your readers that what happens is that he dies of a fucking heart attack in a cutscene? It is the biggest ripoff in the history of video games other than actually charging money for King’s Quest 8.
Gripping from start to finish, the first MGS still stands as the most compelling – and least confusing – entry in the series so far, and a damn good story to boot.
It’s a stupid story. I’m sorry, but it is. The presentation is good, though, and it was pretty fun, but come on — if this were a movie, you’d be screaming at it around the three-hour mark to shut the fuck up and get to the point.
Grim Fandango (PC, 1998)
Another completely unoriginal choice. This list delivers.
The Story:
In the world of Grim Fandango, death is just the beginning of a very long journey into the afterlife. Nice folks get a lickety-split train ticket that gets them to the afterlife in only four minutes. Some take a boat, or drive. The worst sinners have to go on foot, a journey which takes four years – maybe even longer if you have to stop and get a job for awhile. As Manny Calavera, you’re a Grim Reaper – one of the travel agents who help people on that journey. And you’ve got some rough years ahead of you.
See, Manny’s boss gives him all the least profitable clients, so he steals one – Mercedes "Meche" Colomar, from a rival agent. When she gets sent on the four-year trek, he wonders why she didn’t have a ticket for the train, and investigates. It turns out, his crooked boss has been saving up the train tickets and selling them to a gangster. Manny and his demon buddy Glottis, a speed-obsessed auto mechanic, set out to save Meche, and pay tribute to pretty much every great film noir movie ever made.
I’ll come right out and admit it: this is a pretty acceptable choice. Grim Fandango’s story was pretty good, and fairly original as these things go. Bit of a shame the game was so garbage.
Why it’s the Best:
Imagine an old black and white movie, with Humphrey Bogart in a trench coat and fedora chain-smoking, set in a world packed with dames and pencil-thin moustaches and secrets and double-crosses.
Now imagine it’s in colour, and instead of Humphrey Bogart there’s this Mexican puppet-looking dude, and everything kind of looks like a Tim Burton cartoon. Incidentally, thanks for telling us what Bogart looked like.
Now imagine that everyone in the film is already dead and looks like either a skeleton or a demon, and most have Mexican accents.
Nah, now I’m getting Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Wrong image. You might want to mention instead how the whole game looks like a pop-up book about the world’s spookiest Mariachi band.
Give it a cheer-worthy everyman for a main character, a beautiful damsel in distress for him to pine for, and some truly evil villains. Now throw in guns that kill you by making you “sprout” flowers, flaming beavers, and a big orange sidekick who’s dumb as a shoe but loyal as a puppy and who loves to drive really fast. Oh wait, there’s more…
God I hope so.
The point is, you’ve never played a game with an atmosphere and style like Grim Fandango.
But I wouldn’t know it from your description, which, honestly, makes it sound exactly like the Paper Mario games.
No other game finds you searching the forest for a character’s actual heart
You do this in Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest.
or using a ship’s anchor to rip an entire ocean liner in half rather than finding a way to just open the door.
"Ripping things in half instead of finding sensible solutions" is one of the main sight gags in Paper Mario.
And we’ve never played a game in which it was necessary to get your best friend to vomit, then spray the resulting glop with liquid nitrogen.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day has a room full of flaming imps that Conker has to fight by drinking a lot of beer and then urinating on them. That’s pretty close.
All the while, the dialogue is snappy and humorous, perfectly drawing you into the characters. Most games with a setting like this would constantly make self-references, coming just short of screaming, "Hey, look! Isn’t this odd and crazy!?"
Yes, because most games are written by stupids. This is not a good thing to mention in your article about how video game stories are so awesome and culturally impactimeaningful.
Plus, most importantly, the game never forgets that it’s essentially a love story between Manny and Meche, and that old-school romance and panache is still very much in effect, even if everything else in the world is crazy.
Next most importantly: the game is almost unplayably bad, which makes it very very hard to get to the interesting plot bits. Perhaps you should mention this somewhere as maybe a warning to the reader.
So there you have it: a truly unique setting that enables a completely creative plot, dialogue that’s probably more funny and clever than any movie you’ve seen in the last decade, and a romantic story with characters you simply have to cheer for. We would say that’s all it takes to have one of the best stories of all time, but the truth is that’s a whole heck of a lot.
Sadly, this is true. In a perfect world, it would be the case that, before anybody put any story bits in a video game, he made sure they were actually good. In the real world, however, it’s a rare occurrence indeed.
The Longest Journey (PC, 2000)
Oh, mother fuck this game. Remember all those bad things I said about how unplayably drab and awful Grim Fandango is? Forget about all that. I’d play Grim Fandango a thousand times over if it meant I didn’t have to play The Longest Journey, which seems about twice as long when you’re playing it as the title suggests.
The Story:
April Ryan is a typical college art student in Stark, a slightly-more-advanced-than-now sci-fi world (think flying cars, but no teleporters yet). Then she accidentally "shifts" in her sleep to Arcadia, a medieval fantasy world ruled by magic. She meets a white dragon who refers to her as "my child," gets chased off by a swirling black cloud called the Chaos Vortex, and wakes up back in Stark – but things just keep getting weirder. By the time April realizes Arcadia wasn’t just a nightmare caused by too much curry, she’s completely sucked in. So is the player.
So… it’s The Neverending Story? I mean, seriously, stupid, that’s what you’ve just described. Think about that. Right down to the goofy white dragon who acts sagely and wise, and getting chased by a "chaos vortex." Also, about those place names…
Arcadia: most generic possible name for a fantasy realm.
Stark: extremely hamfisted metaphor.
April Ryan: is this lady. She’s like a White House press correspondent or something.
It turns out, Stark and Arcadia are parallel worlds separated by a sort of cosmic barrier. However, the current guardian of that barrier is worn out, so the barrier is eroding and the two worlds are seeping into one another.
Yeah, I read the second Xanth book, too. I know how this works.
And, while everyone knows this works for chocolate and peanut butter or gin and tonic, it’s apparently very big time, super-bad news for parallel universes ruled by conflicting sets of the laws of reality, time and space. Especially when one of the two universes houses the physical incarnation of Chaos. Good to know.
Good prose. Also: is it just me, or is "the physical incarnation of Chaos" a contradiction in terms? Sloppy thinkosity, game.
Why it’s the Best:
Like most great stories, The Longest Journey begins with a captivating main character.
You clearly haven’t read very many great stories. Here’s an insider’s tip: "great" stories tend to defy literary conventions, not play into them. If your story could be assembled from the blueprint in Creative Writing 101, it’s probably not "great."
April, like many of the best heroes and heroines, is likeable and relatable because she’s a perfectly normal person, possessed of no superhuman strength, precognitive powers, or other amazingness. In fact, she spends a huge chunk of the game denying that any of this crazy stuff could happen to a girl like her, simply because she’s so plain and typical.
Yeah, she sure does. She also spends a huge chunk of the game sloooooooooowly walking around in search of more people to deny it to. Not sure this makes it sound riveting, Francis.
Well, she’s typical except for the whole shifting thing, which enables the game’s storyline to range all over the place.
Now that’s what I want: some good, old-fashioned disjointed rambling! I hate it when stories make sense.
Insider’s tip 2: "able to range all over the place" is a good characteristic for a second baseman. For a story? Not so much.
Can’t choose between sci-fi and fantasy? No problem. We have both here.
Wow, that’s quite a range. And saves me the trouble of buying two games if I can’t make up my mind! That’s what makes a good story right there: affordability.
April can zoom from a near-future college dive bar to a dragon’s mermaid-guarded underwater lair and on to a space station and it all feels perfectly acceptable.
What is it with dummies and talking about how settings "feel acceptable?" How many games have settings that feel unacceptable? You know, I really wanted to like Mario Galaxy, but in one level he’s running around outside a big space battleship, and then in another level he’s on giant fruit! That feels unacceptable to me. Clearly it needs more plot elements lifted from 80’s kids movies.
The juxtaposition of fantasy and science isn’t just colorful; it’s also useful. This is a point-and-click adventure game, so it’s built around conversation and puzzles.
And waiting, and reloading your last save, and that popular staple of game design: looking it up on the internet.
And some of the best puzzles are when April uses a calculator or magnetic screwdriver to trick someone in Arcadia into thinking she’s especially magical.
Yeah, I read A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. And those are seriously the best puzzles? Fuck this game.
And almost all of the puzzles are integrated into the story, driving things forward almost organically. This gives The Longest Journey exceptional pacing, with the puzzles rarely feeling like a hurdle intentionally placed to stretch the game’s playtime.
I love how this paragraph perfectly sums up everything that’s awful about adventure games. The puzzles — the primary game mechanic — are a giant nuisance that stretched out the play time. Seriously, adventure-game makers, just make movies.
Oh, wait, you already made this movie. It was The Neverending Story. I remember now.
Then again, when the story is this cosmic in scope and filled with interesting characters and villains, you don’t necessarily need fluff. There are dragons and talking crows and robots.
I promise I didn’t edit that. Wow, dragons and talking crows and robots? Who needs gameplay, anyhow? This game delivers!
How to write a good story:
1) Rip off a movie that did like a billion dollars at the box office.
2) Add angst.
3) Dragons, talking crows, and robots.
4) Profit!
The risk is high – the fate of two worlds, if not the attached universes. The bad guys are really despicable – even the minor ones, like the slimeball who demands a date with April in exchange for information, then helps a bigger bad guy set a trap for April after the date goes badly. And April is just adorable, a regular girl determined not to let her normalcy get in the way of her saving reality as we know it.
Though apparently they’re all as dumb as toast. The minor bad guy is willing to trade information in exchange for getting laid. April agrees, but then doesn’t put out. The big bad guy, unconcerned with the breach of loyalty, then sets a "trap," which I’m going to guess April escapes from by sliding some tiles around or maybe organising books on a shelf.
But hey – don’t listen to us. Check out ten minutes or so of the game yourself.
I’ve played this game. It’s worse than you make it sound.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2 / Xbox / PC, 2004)
Even if we grant that there’s any excuse for putting a Grand Theft Auto game on this list — which there isn’t, really, since they don’t have stories particularly — it is completely perverse to pick San Andreas and not Vice City.
The Story:
Carl "C.J." Johnson is a small-time crook and former gang member who returns home to Los Santos after his mother is murdered – only to be immediately harassed by his old nemesis, an outrageously corrupt cop named Officer Tenpenny. Over the course of this epic, which spans an entire state and three major cities, Carl takes his gang back to supremacy in Los Santos, only to be knocked back down by Tenpenny and a few of his own backstabbing "friends." Carl then falls in with wannabe rappers, his old gang, a blind Triad boss and a crazed CIA spook played by James Woods. Over the course of his adventure, he’ll learn to sneak like a thief, fly planes, romance women and get really buff. And then, one by one, he’ll get revenge on the people who betrayed him, ultimately taking down Tenpenny himself.
So do games get extra bonus story-awesome points with you if they’re completely random and scatterbrained? You’re constantly going on about how great it is when games pack in as much nonsensical shit as possible. It’s a good thing that this game contains gangers, corrupt cops, rappers, Triads, and the CIA? Holy shit. I mean, at least Rockstar was intending for it to be over-the-top satire, though you appear not to have gotten the joke.
Why it’s the Best:
GTA’s rags-to-riches stories are always compelling, and San Andreas did it better than any of them – over the course of this epic, Carl will have gone from a penniless thug to one of San Andreas’ most respected citizens, ultimately becoming a wealthy mogul with a house in the game’s equivalent of the Hollywood hills.
Stop calling it an "epic." That’s a specific thing, and GTA: San Andreas ain’t it. It doesn’t just mean "long and weird." Also, speaking for myself, I’ve never been compelled by the stories in Grand Theft Auto games; mostly I find them amusing for half an hour or so while I ride my motorcycle around town and run over, like, gangs of chefs in full costume. Because that’s pretty nuts. But then the nuts-ness wears thin, and the gameplay doesn’t hold up, and I get bored.
And the scope of the missions he’ll take on will become similarly ridiculous; you might start out beating up thugs in a neglected Los Santos neighborhood, but by game’s end you’ll be hijacking VTOL jets off of aircraft carriers, knocking over casinos in daring heists and infiltrating an Area 51 analogue to steal a jetpack.
I must admit: I left "stealing a jetpack from Area 51" off of my list of ways to make a great story.
Seriously, Francis, you’re making my head hurt. You think these things are good? They make for a good story? No, they make for a ridiculous goofy send-up. And I guess the joke’s on you.
Somewhere along the way, it’s got something for everyone, with a gangsta fantasy that’s far more epic, accessible and far-reaching than most of what the hip-hop industry has come up with.
It also has more minigames than most of what the cheese-making industry has come up with. Which is the long-form way of saying: fuck the heck are you talking about?
But what really drives the game’s story is its characters, and while it’s easy to dismiss them as ethnic stereotypes, they’re really much more than that.
That’s true. They are sometimes blind ethnic stereotypes. And I hear one of them may in fact be voiced by James Woods!
Carl, for all his gang-banging thuggery, is the most moral character the series has produced so far.
Your definition of "moral" worries me. Carl is a killer, and a thief, and vandal, and a goddamn serial arsonist too if you want him to be. It’s not "moral" just because he spouts self-help platitudes and you feel a bunch of fucking white guilt, stupid.
He comes off like a decent person in his interactions with others, he’s a pushover when it comes to doing favors for friends and he’s dedicated to the idea of keeping drugs out of his neighborhood.
Well, good on him. If he has any time left over between that and murdering people with fungo bats, perhaps he can join the Masons.
Carl’s buddies, gang leaders Wu Zi Mu and Cesar, are genuinely likable and fun to watch, and James Woods’ acerbic Mike Toreno steals every scene he’s in. Meanwhile, Tenpenny – voiced by Samuel L. Jackson – is so cartoonishly and irredeemably evil, it’s impossible not to want to see him get his comeuppance – which happens in a wildly satisfying high-speed firefight at the very end.
Characters are camp, and then everybody gets shot. Best story ever.
Beyond Good & Evil (PS2 / Gamecube / PC / Xbox, 2003)
Kind of an atypical choice, mainly because nobody played it. Wikipedia: "Beyond Good & Evil was a commercial failure due to its ill-timed release and lack of popularity." So just those two things, then?
The Story:
You play Jade, a young news reporter who just happens to also live with a house full of orphans – but she grew up there or something, so it’s not quite as hokey as it sounds.
No, it doesn’t work that way. It’s still pretty damn hokey. It was hokey in Baten Kaitos Origins, too, which has a better story than any game you’ve mentioned yet, except for the insufferable Grim Fandango.
When aliens show up and kidnap a bunch of her orphans, Jade sets out to rescue them.
Oh God. If this line ever appears in the summary of any story ever, it is an immediate tipoff that it’s actually terrible.
Soon Jade and her sidekicks learn more and more about the aliens, the government, and how both are preying upon the little people.
Yeah, I remember The X-Files, you know. You can’t sneak this shit past me.
Why it’s the Best:
Because it’s a darker-than-you-think, galactic-scale story with characters you actually give a damn about. They’re noble and funny and they love each other – and, by extension, you.
Alternative hypothesis: it’s exactly as dark as I think — which is the exact same amount of "dark" that every other paint-by-numbers Ubisoft fartstream has. Also, I don’t give a damn about the characters, since they’re totally contrived and stupid, and they sure don’t "love me," which is the weirdest thing I’ve heard in quite some time. You should perhaps go lie down.
Jade may be the perfect heroine; she’s strong, smart, sexy and compassionate.
So perfect that it’s an exact description of every video game heroine ever.
She’s basically the kind of woman whom girls want to be and guys want to be with.
Speaking for myself, I prefer women who don’t wear dark green lipstick. And who don’t sponge off of orphanages well into their twenties.
I know, I know: her name is Jade, so she wears green lipstick. I get it. It’s the kind of hacky bullshit take-everything-literally-ness that video games are absolutely choked with.
Usually at Jade’s side is Uncle Pey’j: a walking, talking, pants-wearing pig who talks like a cartoon Texan and invents things like fart-powered jet boots.
So when I got to the colon, I was thinking my response to this would be "Uncle what, now?" since that is a stinky mess of a name. But then I read the rest of that sentence, and I am now changing my response to: I quit video games. If a video game can contain something that idiotic, and some fool somewhere writes an article praising it as brilliant writing, then I give up on the whole medium. You’re right, Roger: it’s hopeless.
He’s clearly not her blood uncle (that’s obvious, right?) but the familial bond between the two of them is tangible and touching.
It’s not touching. It’s stupid.
Next comes Double H. This lovable lunkhead enthusiastically cannonballs into even the most hopeless battle as long it’s the noble thing to do – good thing he’s fully armored.
Even Secundo, a sassy virtual intelligence that handles Jade’s email and hacking in between affectionate wisecracks, is endearing and possessed of more personality than typical game characters.
Oh God, there’s e-mail in this game? Hacking we expect — all video games have that — but e-mail in games just makes me think of Xenosaga. Maybe I should buy another copy of that so I can finish my long-form review. Or maybe that would just tempt people to break into my house again.
Over time, the situations grow ever more dangerous, and the plot gets deeper and bigger and more unsettling. This isn’t mindless, save the cardboard princess from the one-dimensional dragon crap. It’s about kidnapping and corruption and trust and family and genocide and death and all sorts of sacrifice and risk and loss. It means something.
Oh. I see. It’s not just mindless save the princess from the dragon crap — it’s about kidnapping. Glad you cleared that up. Also, you are aware that you can edit, right? So if you write a really embarrassing paragraph, you don’t have to stick with it. For example, if you write that a video game is about genocide and death, you can like take one of them out. See also: sacrifice and loss.
Well, at least it should mean something.
You’re really selling me on this one.
The only real flaw in BG&E’s story is the ending, which jumps the shark with an unneeded revelation that just doesn’t make much sense and signs off with a definite lack of closure.
Was there information in that paragraph? I couldn’t find it. It seemed to be all internet game writer buzzwords and no actual substance.
A sequel could have straightened all this out, but thus far there hasn’t been one. Dammit.
It’s in development. Which seems weird to me, since the original game was awful and nobody bought it. But there you go: Ubi’s churning one out for you.
Beyond Good & Evil is not just about a girl rescuing the only family she knows; it’s about a girl and a few friends sticking together and rescuing her entire planet, creating some of the most memorable, heartfelt moments in gaming along the way.
It’s not just about saving the princess from the dragon; it’s about kidnapping. And it’s not just about a girl saving some people; it’s about a girl and a few friends saving some people.
You may wish to look into the local community college and see if they offer some type of refresher course on what the hell words mean.
Astro Boy: Omega Factor (Game Boy Advance, 2004)
Seriously?
The Story:
Astro Boy is a cute, super-powerful robot with no memory of his past. Guided by a kindly old scientist, he takes down a theft ring, witnesses the assassination of the first robot president of Antarctica – and then, he’s suddenly transported tens of thousands of years into the past to battle for an ancient civilization. Then things get weird. Astro comes back to the “present” five years after the assassination, where a robot-human war has destroyed 80 percent of Earth. He defeats the robot revolutionaries, but just then a giant robot space-skull shows up and blasts Earth to a cinder. Roll credits.
After the credits, Astro is resurrected, given the ability to transcend time and retraces his steps with full knowledge of what’s going to happen. Ultimately, he becomes a robotic Christ figure, sacrificing himself to save everyone else before being given a third chance at life.
So… it’s about nothing, then? Because that’s what I’m getting here. Really, all I came up with out of that whole thing were the lines "first robot president of Antarctica" and "giant robot space skull." Those are not phrases you want in your article about how great a story is.
Why it’s the Best:
Yeah, we know: licensed games suck, and Astro Boy isn’t an original story.
Great reasons why it’s the best.
And, hey, not all licensed games suck. Ducktales rocked hard, and M.C. Kids wasn’t too shabby either. Also one or two of the endless Dragon Ball games were pretty fun, though you’d expect a few of them to make it just by random fluctuation.
But hear us out: Omega Factor is fantastic, and while it’s tied to the 2003 Astro Boy cartoon series, it’s not actually based on it. Instead, developers Treasure and Hitmaker decided to create a completely new storyline that brought together what seemed like every character ever dreamed up by Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka.
And once again we get a weird assertion that smashing more disjointed elements into a story makes it better. I kind of prefer stories that don’t read like lists of cameo appearances, myself.
Omega Factor was much darker and more involving than anything we’d ever associate with kid-friendly Astro Boy; over the course of the game, Astro witnesses human and robot genocides, a violent assassination and a flaming apocalypse at the hands of a floating skull with creepy theme music.
Really, you need to learn how to build tension. You don’t say "first there was genocide, then there was another kind of genocide, and then there was an assassination!" It’s kind of a letdown, doing that. And again: don’t mention the giant space skull if you want us to take you seriously.
At the same time, the game is filled with moments of sweetness – enemies become allies, Astro reconciles with his seemingly evil “father” and, ultimately, nobody is beyond redemption. Not even Astro’s rival Atlas, who shows up repeatedly to try and kill him, or Sharaku, the three-eyed, time-traveling prince whose scheming causes the apocalypse in the first place.
Have you just never played a Japanese game before? Because you’ve just described all of them. In fact, I distinctly recall complaining many times on this very blog about all the goddamn "redemption" crap in video games. That stuff’s cool occasionally, but it’s getting to the point where the villain’s never just the villain. There’s always some weirdo "redemption" angle.
And it usually involves giant space skulls, too.
The "transcending time" gimmick also makes the game a lot more interesting, as it enables you to reshape events by revisiting them repeatedly.
Which I guess is a novel experience for those of us who never played any other time-travel video games, such as Braid or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time or Dragon Warrior 7 or goddamn Chrono Trigger.
If nothing else, the game’s writers deserve recognition for finding a fun way to essentially force players through the same levels multiple times, thereby padding out the run time.
I always thought the writers of Zaxxon deserved more credit for that, too.
It’s so satisfying to watch Astro surprise everyone with his knowledge of their plans and deceptions, you’ll barely even notice that you’re on your fourth trip through the moonbase level.
I guess this is one benefit to playing video games drunk.
Portal (Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC, 2007)
Everybody saw this one coming, right? Good. Everybody saw this one coming. Now, what’s the problem with it? All together:
"Portal doesn’t have a story." Very good.
The Story:
You wake up in a sterile chamber with nothing more than a toilet and a radio. With the disembodied voice of GLaDOS as your only companion, you traverse your way through a series of chambers, each testing your problem solving skills with spatial puzzles. The whole set-up seems innocuous at first, but soon the tests become wrought with physical danger instead of merely being difficult. A sinister edge takes shape, as GLaDOS slowly reveals layers of her own personality, not all of which have your best interest in mind.
Cracks in the perfect, clinical facade begin to appear, both physically (when you’re able to go behind some of the walls and see the work of a troubled graffiti artist), and in GLaDOS’s erratic behavior. But your tester has taught you too well, and you’re able to escape from the testing area into the facility itself, where you confront GLaDOS’s main hub, destroy her (or not – psych!), and explode onto the surface outside.
That’s not a story. That’s a summary of the levels, with added psychobabble you thought would tart it up real good. Also, 1992 told me to give you props for the "psych!" at the end there. Though it’s usually spelled "sike."
Why it’s the Best:
Portal’s mysteries (Who scribbled on the walls? Where are all the people? What purpose to the tests serve?) aren’t just mysteries for mystery’s sake that leave the player frustrated and confused. They’re delicious enigmas that we actually enjoy pondering, rather than feeling like the writers copped out and were just too lazy to answer everything sufficiently, like in so many other irritatingly vague game stories.
Okay. I’m sitting here, writing this, and I’m honestly doing my damndest to figure out what the dick the difference is between "mysteries for mystery’s sake" and "delicious enigmas that we actually enjoy pondering." Is it the level of deliciousness? Portal’s mysteries do frequently involve cake. And I kind of think you’re an asshole here; does anybody really think writers are too lazy to give complete explanations of every single mystery in their games? I think the reason things go unanswered is probably a combination of a) leaving a few dangling mysteries unsolved gives people fun things to think about (Metroid: Other M does this brilliantly), and 2) hooks for sequels.
In fact, one of Portal’s greatest strengths is that it didn’t overstay its welcome by over-explaining or over-extending itself, and was content to simply be the rich tableau that it is.
What? Portal is a "tableau?" Which definition are you looking at, here?
Portal had three great strengths. They were:
• Fun gameplay
• Funny dialogue
• Funny song
None of those is about over-extending the tableau. Which is not, I believe, a thing.
Some complained of its shortness, but there’s something to be said for being able to experience a complete story in a single sitting.
Sure. And in this context, the thing to be said is: that did not occur. If "jumping around and solving puzzles" counts as a complete story these days, I have to say I found the story in This Is The Only Level especially compelling. And the mysteries it leaves unanswered! Who let the elephant in there? Why can the elephant jump so high?
Sure, 50-hour RPGs and phonebook-sized novels offer richly detailed worlds, but the necessity of breaking that experience up into chunks will, sadly, always dilute our immersion in those worlds to some degree.
My brain is gasping. This article’s only halfway done! I’m drowning here, in all the pretentious stupidity.
But the real reason Portal makes it onto this list is GLaDOS – one of the strongest personalities ever known in gaming – who redefined "passive-aggressive" for anyone who survived her arsenal of mind games.
Also she "made jokes" and they "were funny." That is more important even than being passive-aggressive.
It’s a testament to the power of her character that her presence was felt so strongly throughout the game, even though we never actually see a glimpse of her until the end, and even then not in any remotely humanoid form.
What? She fucking talks constantly. She is the only only only character in the game! She is the only character in the game. Her presence is felt so strongly because she is the only character in the game and she fucking talks constantly. I think I’m going out of my mind here. Somebody actually wrote this?
But even though she doesn’t have a face, we can’t help but anthropomorphize her lovably sadistic programming.
Which is because she talks. Constantly. A lot. And we get to know her through her talking to us. Also, her speech patterns and inflections subtly change throughout the game to become more and more human — did you not notice this? There are lots of things to be said about GLaDOS and why she’s a great character. You have found: none of them.
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (PC, 1993)
I’m dead. I’m dead and in Hell, and this is my punishment. Since I’ve been such an asshole about video games for my entire life, I’m forced to spend the rest of eternity reading some shithead’s eleven thousand word dissertation on goddamn Gabriel Knight written fifteen years after anybody last thought about goddamn Gabriel Knight.
The Story:
The city of New Orleans is terrorized by a rash of voodoo-style serial murders and Gabriel Knight, a local mystery writer, plans to spin the tragedy into a profitable new book. What he discovers during his investigation, however, is far more terrifying – and far more personal – than he ever expected. The gruesome killings have been committed by a supernatural cult that just happens to be led by Gabriel’s demon-possessed lover. Worse, his hidden destiny – a previously unknown fate determined thousands of years ago by the choices of his ancestors – is to hunt and destroy all the evil of the world, which now includes her.
So normally when he does an adventure game, I end up making fun of the game more than I do the story, since the story’s actually kind of okay. This is not one of those times. Holy shit, dude: that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve basically made it sound exactly like Ghostbusters, but with all the jokes taken out.
Why it’s the Best:
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is not suitable for children. In fact, this is one of the only games in the history of our hobby that is truly, and unequivocally, designed for adults.
Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria: Puzzle of Flesh. Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Zero, Code: Veronica, Umbrella Chronicles, and like thirty more I can’t think of. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Silent Hill 1, 2, 3. That Amnesia game I made fun of last week. Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Mass Effect 1 and 2. Poop Age: Origins. Goddamn Leisure Suit Larry 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7.
That was just off the top of my head, and I deliberately didn’t include any porno games, since that sort of seemed like cheating.
The themes are dark. The characters are haunted. The storytelling is pierced with violence from beginning (when Gabriel dreams of corpses hanging in trees) to end (when a key character rips their own beating heart out).
Oh, thanks for reminding me. Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 3, 4, ad infinitum. Grand Theft Auto 1, 2, 3, 4, Vice City, San Andreas. No More Heroes 1 and 2.
Blood and guts, however, are a staple of juvenile entertainment. What lifts Sins of the Fathers to a higher level is the maturity of the storytelling.
Of course. Which is why it took you four paragraphs to mention that.
Take the protagonist. Gabriel is a flawed and complicated man who was written to feel real, not to sell action figures. He drinks. He smokes. He womanizes.
Good work describing Duke Nukem, asshole.
He’s a sometimes lazy, often irresponsible ne’er-do-well that mocks his best friend, toys with the infatuation of his female assistant and forgets to visit his grandmother.
Good work describing Cloud, asshole.
His slow and reluctant transformation into a Schattenjager, or "shadow hunter," is not a tale of comic book cliches, but of a man realizing his potential and finally seeing beyond his own needs.
Good work describing Spider-Man, asshole.
The game also features heavy doses of history and romance – two more elements sure to scare away the kiddies.
I have this game called Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena. It’s a "find the hidden objects" game designed for little girls. History and romance are pretty much the only two elements the plot can be alleged to contain.
There’s a love quadrangle that plays out too subtly, honestly and tragically to be annoying.
Subtle, honest, tragic plot elements are often the very most annoying, because we can tell they’re just toying with us and being cutesy. Nothing that tragic and honest can be subtle effectively.
Sins of the Fathers features murder, suicide, torture and mutilation, but the horror is not played for shock value alone – it is the gateway to a deeply significant, fiercely intelligent mystery that spans continents, merges fact and fiction, blends dreams and reality and confronts both love and death.
Wow, both love and death? That puts it in the same heady storytelling heights as The Adventures of Lolo.
The next time someone complains that gaming is for youngsters only, introduce them to Gabriel Knight.
… Which you do realise is from 1993, right? It’s a DOS game. Won’t run on modern computers without a DOS emulator. Seems like a lot of work compared to just flipping some dude the bird.
Bioshock (Xbox 360, 2007)
Funny, I seem to recall Bioshock being available for some other platform as well…
The Story:
In the 1940s, driven by a need to escape societal, political and religious authority, the entrepreneur Andrew Ryan built a utopian metropolis under the sea and invited like-minded citizens to join him there. In the end, however, he gave his community too much freedom. Rampant commercialism led to crime, class systems and eventually civil war.
That… is not what happened. Like, at all. Actually, a supernaturally intelligent and capable con artist showed up on the scene, accumulated massive amounts of wealth and power, and then used magical drugs to create an army of super-powered mutants. Then he went undercover as the leader of the regular, non-mutant people and stirred them up against the mutants. His reason for doing all this? Unclear!
Why it’s the Best:
Ryan, Atlas, Fontaine and Tennenbaum are remarkably academic characters for a videogame; their psychologies and philosophies manage to reference everything from Ayn Rand and George Orwell to Walt Disney and Keyser Soze.
Atlas, Fontaine, and Tennenbaum are awful. Stupid plot devices with dialogue. Ryan is the only character who’s worth a bean.
One could teach a graduate class on the various influences and archetypes at play in BioShock. There is seriously heady, mind-warping stuff here.
Yeah? I’ll list them for you.
• Atlas Shrugged
• The Godfather
• The Rocketeer
• That’s it, I think.
What is brilliant about the story, though, is that these four dominant forces are not the most memorable or important characters.
What? Fucking what? Andrew goddamn Ryan is not the most memorable or important character in Bioshock? Andrew Ryan is the only thing that makes Bioshock worth playing. He is awesome. He is one of the most memorable characters in, like, all of video games.
I’m beginning to think you might be stupid.
Despite appearing on dozens of billboards and blabbering away in dozens of radio messages, they are completely eclipsed by the real stars of BioShock… stars who are almost impossible to put a face to.
Oh God. You’re about to start rabbiting on about how the scenery is the most memorable "character," aren’t you. You go to hell and you die.
The first is Rapture itself.
I win. And also… I lose. Depends on how you look at it.
The city is so fully realized and so dense with detail that it becomes not only a unique personality, but also a narrator of its own sad tale. You don’t need anyone to tell you what has happened here… the environment speaks silent volumes.
No, you absolutely do need somebody to tell you what happened there. The place isn’t just, like, falling apart at the seems — there’s been some kind of crazy catastrophe here, and it’s clearly still going on. All the environment says is "whoa, look out!"
Garish and extravagant entertainment districts now flooded with dirty water. Posters that advertise genetic upgrades as if they were fashionable new hats. Majestic and living trees trapped in man-made glass tubes.
Okay, sure, but I don’t think what we were wondering was "hey, what did people do for fun here before the apocalypse?"
You know exactly what to expect from the crazy surgeon at the end of the first level because you’ve already seen his bloody handiwork splattered all over the walls.
Also because people tell you over and over again on the radio. And because he attacks you like three times before you get to the proper "battle." Don’t worry, though — he’s invincible those times!
You suspect Atlas before he betrays you because of the visual foreshadowing his creepy pamphlets provide.
And because the game’s story is absolutely hamfisted and obvious. Oh, and there’s that poster in the theatre district that just about screams out "ATLAS IS GOING TO TURN ON YOU."
The second star is… you, the game’s protagonist.
Yeah, I was Time magazine’s man of the year a few years ago, too. It was ridiculous when they said it, and it hasn’t gotten better with age.
What’s so surprising about that? Mute, unseen heroes are a dime a dozen, especially in first person shooters. Their transparency allows players to believe that they are the real heroes. The formula is tried, true and familiar.
Yep.
But BioShock flips that equation upside down, and then shakes it around until it feels nauseous.
You mean by constantly autopiloting my goddamn character at important moments? That does indeed make me feel sick.
As soon as you’ve placed yourself comfortably inside the hero’s shoes, the game reveals a disturbing twist – you are no generic Everyman. You are a mentally programmed errand boy, specifically created and trained to do whatever your evil master demands, including murder.
Actually, the game reveals that "twist" in the intro cinematic, dummy. And it’s not a very interesting twist, either. Tons and tons and tons of games have used similar twists.
And when you, the player, try to distance yourself from this squirm-inducing new back story, you can’t… because, minus the “evil” part, how is that description any different than what you do in all first person shooters?
What. The fuck. Are you talking about.
Sometimes people get crazy ideas in their heads — like, for example, that Bioshock’s story was awesome — and then they go to ridiculous lengths to rationalise them. And then you look down and you realise there are still like three more fucking pages to this article, and you start thinking, hey, suicide is painless.
Planescape: Torment (PC, 1999)
A Bioware D&D game. Based on the very very worst D&D setting.
And, no, I have not forgotten Kara-Tur. Or the Hollow World.
The Story:
Planescape: Torment is the story of the Nameless One, who wakes up on an embalming table with no memories and stripped of possessions.
I just… I just can’t. I can’t explain to this asshole any more times that all these "amazing" plot elements he finds so fascinating are the most absolutely generic things in the world. Wow, a nameless hero who wakes up with no memories and no gear? No game has that!
Why it’s the Best:
You won’t find any elves or dwarves shooting fireballs and crossing +4 daggers in an enchanted forest, despite the fact that Planescape: Torment is part of the D&D universe. Instead, you’ll explore a unique and creative setting on par with a high fantasy novel.
Sigil is right out of the Planescape sourcebook, you know. Though they did make quite a few Planescape novels.
The game’s script is over 800,000 words according to a 1994 estimate from PC Gamer UK and the amount of writing serves the player by enriching the 2D settings with intricate descriptions and creating characters and dialogue that remain memorable for years.
Again with the quantity over quality. Your article’s like 800,000 words, and it isn’t any good, either.
The most remarkable city, Sigil (where you begin), is a city made up of physical places shaped by its inhabitants’ thoughts. The city is famous for its portals, which are invisible until you happen upon them with the correct key. A key can be a word or gesture, or the knuckle or a skeleton or particular thought.
Which, again, comes right out of the very D&D sourcebooks you made fun of a few paragraphs ago. +4 daggers bad, magical trick doors good?
You’ll use them to travel across streets and across dimensions. Every location is delightfully clever as you go from the first layer of hell, mazes trapped between planes of existence to a pregnant alleyway in Sigil, which you have to induce into labor before the way forward will be made open.
Wow. That is the very stupidest gimmick I’ve ever heard of in my whole life. It’s enough to make me miss the good old days of needing to find the yellow key to open the yellow door.
Morte your longtime friend and first cohort, is a talking, floating skull who equips different sets of teeth as weapons.
Now just what did I tell you about the floating skulls? Not a thing you want to mention when you’re praising a story.
He also frequently spouts out his memorable brand of know-it-all sarcasm, like, "We should get some female zombies to join our party, right chief?"
Arrrrrgh. I think my left eye has started to bleed. This article is quite literally killing me. If I don’t make it, I want you guys to sell all my possessions and use the money to put a hit on this asshole.
You won’t get everything out of Planescape: Torment on the first time through, but you’ll want to know each of the NPCs and find every location because they’re genuinely interesting – not because of a compulsion for getting 100 percent completion or a need to find the best equipment.
I played the shit out of Neverwinter Nights — Bioware’s next D&D game — and I would like to go on record saying that, yeah, it was pretty much the 100% completion drive that made me play it so much.
We love this game because of the quality and detail put into it, and years after finishing the game we still think about the riddle that tortures the Nameless One throughout the game: "What can change the nature of a man?"
And to think the answer was staring you in the face all along: having to read an eight-page disaster about video games written by the dumbest man alive.
Fallout 2 (PC, 1998)
You’re really sucking 1998’s dick, here.
The Story:
It’s the year 20XX and the world is in ruins after America and China’s nuclear World War. Some have survived in underground Vaults, protected from the radiation and horrors of the wasteland.
… I’m sorry, did you say Mega Man X2? Because that’s what you just described.
You’re the descendent of the original Vault Dweller, a hero who left his vault to save its inhabitants, and it’s up to you to find a miracle machine that will save your tribal village.
I never actually played Fallout 2, so it’s pretty funny to me how much of it they apparently just ripped off wholesale to make Fallout 3.
Why it’s the Best:
Fallout 2’s amazing opening scene mimics its predecessor, explaining the nuclear holocaust in simple terms, as something we all knew was inevitable, a battle for resources and two super powers finally losing their cool and utilizing nuclear weapons. "War, War never changes."
It’s the best because it’s exactly like this other game. Which apparently wasn’t good enough to get on this list. A+ logic!
As a simple tribesman who has never left your village you have almost nothing but a name and a city to go on.
Just like in Secret of Mana!
The huge void of Northern California that is your map is completely unrestricted – you can go anywhere from the very beginning, though you do so at your own peril. A tribesman with little but a jumpsuit and a spear is no match for the brutal reality of the wasteland.
The brutal what? The reality? It’s the reality that’s going to kill you, and not, like, radscorpions? Because, frankly, my money’s on the scorpions.
When you enter small villages, you feel their sense of desperation, a small group of people struggling together for nothing more than survival.
Yeah, I played Chrono Trigger. That ain’t hard to do. You make sure to give them all ratty hair and brown robes, and they sit around and stare at some tiny plants.
As you arrive in the larger settlements of New Reno and San Francisco you find more organized but no less dangerous places, where black markets and criminals operate openly and the streets are littered with addicts and prostitutes.
Which, apparently, is somehow different from Old Reno and San Fransisco. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s not a black market if it’s operating openly, chief. It’s just, like, a market.
Fallout 2 was unlike any other game before it in that aside from a few mandatory plot points, getting to the end of the game could literally be a different experience every time.
Yoshi’s Story on the N64 was even more like that than Fallout 2; it had no mandatory plot points. You could quite literally play a completely different game on subsequent playthroughs. It came out a year before Fallout 2.
Because of its open format there was a beginning, middle, and end but it was up to you to fill in the rest.
Oh, wow! I get to fill in all the parts except the beginning, the middle, and the end? Think of the possibilities for customising the pre-beginning! Maybe this time I’ll click on the icon… or maybe I’ll type it into the run prompt!
Depending on how you created your character, the story could be a smooth talking con man who manipulates people to his own ends, a scientist who hacks into computers and builds robots to fight for him, or even a mentally deficient brute who’s too stupid to converse with anyone and just pounds his way through the wasteland. Such true player freedom had never been delivered like this, letting you push the story forward any way you wanted.
You do realise it’s been a very long time since you’ve actually said anything about that story, yeah? I mean, this is an article about video game stories, ain’t it? I dunno, maybe not; it’s been a long fucking time.
Ultimately Fallout 2’s story is the best ever because of its realism, freedom, and fantastic writing.
But not, apparently, because it was any good. Since all this dude talks about is how you can totally wander around the world aimlessly.
While many games now have open worlds and plots, Fallout 2 manages to do both yet still maintain its doom-filled ambiance.
Oh, there you go: it’s filled with doom. I think that’s even more important than aimless wandering.
When the bombs finally drop and the world is reduced to nothing but ash and marauding mutants don’t be surprised if it looks a lot like Fallout 2.
I plan on being too dead to notice. And my one joy in life is that I’ll never have to read this article again.
God of War (PS2, 2005)
Okay, you’re having a laugh. HULK SMASH! RAAAR!
The Story:
The game starts off with Kratos, the main character, committing suicide because he believes the gods have forsaken him. The rest of the game is a series of flashbacks from Kratos’ life that lead up to his death.
They made sequels. Just sayin’.
Kratos trades his life to the god Ares in exchange for surviving a barbarian horde massacre. He is betrayed by Ares and tricked into killing his own wife and daughter. Kratos tries to absolve himself by serving other gods, slaying a hydra for Poseidon and defending Athens from Ares on behalf of Athena.
Yeah, so, that’s pretty stupid. But, wait, it gets worse:
Kratos gets his revenge by using Pandora’s Box to destroy Ares and obtain the Blade of the Gods; but it doesn’t relieve the pain of his memories, leading him to jump off a cliff.
I can’t decide which is stupider: that sentence, or the fact that there’s a game that uses that as its plot.
I think I’ve used this joke already. Hours and hours ago, when life was still worth living. What a fool I’ve been.
At the last moment, Athena intervenes and convinces Kratos to take up Ares’ place as the God of War.
Dear Athena: please don’t come for me. Just let me die.
Also, "kill god and take his place" is an extremely old, extremely bad video game plot.
Why it’s the Best:
Take three simple elements – revenge, Man vs God, sympathy – combined with a touch of Greek mythology and you’ve got a story that sticks with you.
Every JRPG ever has the first three elements. So is it the badly-understood Greek stuff that really makes God of War the best ever? What if I butchered Norse mythology instead?
Oh, wait — then you’d have the Lost Vikings!
We see revenge stories a lot in videogames, so clearly the formula sells. But the added Man vs God element in God of War makes the boring "manly man doing manly things" style of gameplay that much more interesting than the next hack-‘n’-slash adventure.
I’m going to get that Man vs. Food guy on the phone. I have an amazing idea for his next series. I figure as long as they stick to gyros and spanakopita, they should be just fine.
And seeing the gods and monsters of Greek myth rendered on the PS2 in all their glory – towering and terrible in a boss fight – makes the struggle feel so much more epic and so much more satisfying than a plain old romp with an RPG dragon.
Yeah, wow, the mighty PS2: the only console good enough for Zeus, motherfucker! And here’s a puzzle for you: what about a greek dragon… on the Playstation 3? Now that would be boss!
The simple story and compelling god hook is made all the more powerful by the main character.
Translation: Kratos adds the angst.
It’s true that Kratos isn’t likeable or even that complex – "RAWR – man-smash!" – but his tragic back story and total lack of joy add depth to his character.
I promise I wrote the last bit before I read this. Am I the hero of Hyrule or what?
He put his trust entirely in the gods and what do they do? Abandon him to fate, trick him into killing his family (and make him relive it), or haul off and javelin him in the gut while he’s trying to make things right. After watching our manly man go through all that, we want him to win – and we want him to live, even if he doesn’t want to himself. That’s the kind of sympathy God of War inspires and that’s Kratos’ ticket to one, two, three, FOUR games and possibly to a major motion picture.
So they ripped off the book of Job, but decided that instead of being pious and philosophical, Job should go kill God to get back at him. Just like every two-bit talentless hack. You’ve really never heard this story before?
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox / PC, 2003)
Bioware again. And ewoks.
You start out as one of the few survivors of a botched mission run by Jedi badass Bastila Shan with no memory of who you are or what you were doing on her starship.
Sounds a lot like Planescape: Torment, except with Jedi!
You fall in with one of the good guys, who’s out to save Bastila after her escape pod crash lands somewhere on a Sith-controlled planet. Bastila is captured and handed over to the Sith lord Darth Malak, the evil badass who overthrew his own Sith master, Revan, for a chance to destroy the Jedi.
Probably now is a good time to stop describing absolutely everybody as a "badass." And still waiting for the part where it gets interesting.
Through events of the game – played either as a good guy or an evil one – the quest to get a hold of Bastila morphs into a quest to find star maps that will lead the player to the Star Forge, a battle station that will decide the outcome of the Jedi vs Sith conflict.
Oh boy, a quest for map pieces. That never ever ever gets old or annoying. At all.
A little more than halfway through the game, a major plot twist is revealed: you are Revan… or you were until your prick of a team-killing apprentice Malak offed you.
And then you have to figure out who shot J.R., yeah?
Then Bastila turns to the Dark Side – despite being the hoity-toity good-girl Jedi – and the player has a whole new set of plot points to navigate through to one of the game’s multiple conclusions.
Yeah, they used the exact same plot in Neverwinter Nights. Except she was a paladin of Tyr instead of a Jedi. They’re pretty much the same thing, though.
Why it’s the Best:
Knights of the Old Republic has a lot to offer in the way of a good story – setting, plot, characters, a killer climax – to name a few elements.
So it ruled because Star Wars ruled? That’s not a very good reason.
Developer BioWare had a leg up in setting on the count of borrowing almost everything from the Star Wars canon – but they did go the extra mile to make their own fan fiction and make it work for Star Wars.
Okay, the first part of this doesn’t make any sense — like, it’s just a mishmash of words and can’t even be parsed. But never mind that. There’s a more important point here. I keep saying shit like "hey, don’t talk about the flaming talking skull if you want us to think it isn’t stupid," but this time I’m really serious: do not ever ever ever describe a plot using the words "fan fiction" unless you’re talking about how awful it is.
Also what they did was take the plot they wrote for Neverwinter Nights and put wookiees in it.
So even if you can bring yourself to dispute our claims that the climax is awesome and the characters were compelling, you can’t deny that this game felt like Star Wars in a way that Jedi Knight and Shadows of the Empire never did.
What if I point out that Star Wars didn’t have a story worth a great goddamn either? I mean, I love Star Wars, but I love it because it’s a fun, cheesy adventure movie. The story is stupid: evil empire, light side / dark side, Kaio-ken attack.
KOTOR is filled with interesting and talkative characters but the most compelling one in the whole story is you.
Okay, you’ve played this card before. It was stupid then, and it’s stupid now. And you’re stupid. And apparently I’m stupid, since I’m still doing this.
In other games, your character is made for you – even if they do let you pick out the color of your hair and let you name yourself Pr1ncess McWh00pass.
… Pr1ncess McWh00pass?
But KOTOR gave the player real choices that had real effects on the story. From being a girl to being totally evil, to making a Wookie kill his Twi’lek best friend, KOTOR’s story never ignored your choices.
Yeah, my eye is totally bleeding. "Yeah, this game is totally boss, because it totally lets you make dudes kill their friends! And get this: you can be a girl!"
Instead they stretched the linear events to accommodate whatever you came up with and it made you, the main character – and the plot – that much more interesting.
Your mom has stretched linear events.
Now the plot doesn’t sound like anything special
No. No it does not. Why is it on this list again?
But when you actually sit down to play the game, the pace of the story keeps things from feeling like an endless grind and you will willingly suffer through side quests just to find out what happens next.
I… see. It’s nothing special, but it’s not that bad, and you’ll suffer through it. You’re quite the salesman.
Then comes the plot twist: you are/were/are going to be again the baddest of bad guys in the galaxy. Even if you had been playing as the perfect paragon of Jedi goodness until that point, the great reveal gives you pause. First you experience a barrage of philosophical questions: what makes a man evil; can evil be unlearned; etc.
Alternatively: you yawn, because you’ve played Final Fantasy 3 or you’ve watched Dragon Ball Z or you’ve seen Blade Runner or on and on and on and you’ve just been through this exact plot before.
And then you find yourself asking: "Wait, am I supposed to be evil? Have I been playing the game wrong?"
You’re clearly not right.
It’s a funny thing to see an entire generation of gamers grow up in one moment.
I imagine it is. When are you planning to start?
That moment came when we poor souls who were conditioned to follow where a game led us stopped dead in our button mashing and realized that, no, we hadn’t been playing KOTOR wrong; we had a choice in the story. And whatever we chose, it would be effin’ awesome.
Hey, at the end of Dragon Warrior, the Dragonlord totally offers to let you join him and rule the world together. Just sayin’.
So of course KOTOR makes our list of best game stories – because it was our story, whoever we were when we played it on whatever path we chose to take.
What, the game has one weirdo binary choice and suddenly it’s the awesomest, mind-readingest game ever? It’s like a two-hundred page choose your own adventure book, and the only place you make a choice is on page 50.
Final Fantasy 6 (SNES, 1994)
Okay, I kind of have to give it up here. The temptation to pick Final Fantasy 7 must have been overpowering, but you managed to hold out and pick the only Final Fantasy game that has a non-terrible story instead. So you get a small amount of credit for that.
The Story:
An oppressive regime is attempting to unlock magic that nearly destroyed the world a thousand years earlier. In the process of re-discovering these forbidden mystic arts, the empire creates magic-infused soldiers that harness destructive abilities not seen in ages, one of whom is finally driven insane and seeks to not only overthrow the empire, but also reshape the world in his twisted image. He eventually succeeds after finally discovering the source of all magic – three statues that house actual gods – and plunges the planet into ruin. Your party, having failed to stop the nutcase in the first place, is scattered across the globe and has to try all over again to stop a man that seemingly has all of creation under his sociopathic control.
You can condense it further to "crazy guy becomes all-powerful, wrecks the planet, then is killed by heroes" and it loses all semblance of depth. But pry just a hair’s breadth deeper and you’ll find a cast of characters that rivals anything else on the market, past, present and most likely far into the future.
That’s not bad. You’d have done well, though, to mention something about the twenty-hour mulligan that the game opens with before it lets you know what it’s really about, since it sets up a pretty good reveal.
Why it’s the best:
Final Fantasy VI is all about personality. Each lead in this 14-strong ensemble cast has a distinct past, a reason to fight and a load of emotional baggage that’d make the staunchest of psychologists weep.
Or you could be a shithead and focus on the angst. See, here’s why FF6 was brilliant: the characters (particularly Locke and Cyan) did have pretty heavy baggage, but it was mainly kept in the background. Woolsey — and the idiot kids on the internet give him no end of shit — wrote a masterful script that takes these characters and allows them to come to life, and not be held down by bullshit angst. It’s there, it’s driving them, but they don’t fucking dwell on it.
Terra, after being used as a puppet of the empire, finds she’s the product of a union between a human and an Esper, who are all that remain of magic in the world. She’s an unholy mix that frightens the heroes and excites the villains, all alone in her quest for identity. Cyan has to watch his entire castle, wife and child included, poisoned and killed. After the world is destroyed, Celes believes all of her friends are dead and attempts suicide in one of the most heart-tearing moments we’ve ever witnessed in gaming.
Fun fact: I never witnessed Celes’ suicide attempt, since I don’t suck at video games, and I was able to keep Cid alive. And she only kills herself if he dies.
The soul-shearing barbs keep coming throughout the story, making FFVI much more personal than any before it, and arguably any since.
Don’t listen to this asshole. He’s making it sound like one long goddamn dirge of a game. Final Fantasy 6 is not that at all. There is joy, there is laughter, there is fun. Sight gags! Comedy! There’s much more to life — and to Final Fantasy 6, for that matter — than just moping.
See, this was the last Final Fantasy that had to focus on story and characters because the graphics were too primitive to showcase anything but blinking eyes and sagging heads.
The graphics were amazing. They’re still amazing now, and it’s sixteen years old. The amount of expressiveness they were able to pull out of tiny 32×16 character sprites is a wonder.
Even FFVII, widely hailed as the best thing that mankind has ever created, resorted to stereotypes and flashy cinemas instead of nailing down an unrivaled narrative.
It was also awful. You know, as a game. But, yeah, the story sucked, too.
FFVI stands as the last line of defense against modern-day, style-over-substance RPGs. You spend so much time appreciating the technology that you forget how silly and trite some of the interactions really are.
No way in hell. I mean, don’t get me wrong; FF6 was awesome. But come on. It’s been sixteen years! We have Dragon Warrior 7, Dragon Quest 9, the two Baten Kaitos games, the Paper Mario games, the Mario & Luigi games, the Mass Effect games… time, in the real world, has not stood still while everyone stared in wonder at Final Fantasy 7. Other people went on to make good games.
Then there’s Kefka. We named him one of the series’ best villains before and aren’t about to step down from that opinion.
Hmm? Is it controversial? Kefka on a best-villains-ever list is a no-brainer. He’s on mine, you know. And your list was specifically best Final Fantasy villains? Here is that list:
1) Kefka
2) Ultros
3) Rufus
4) I dunno, maybe Warmech?
By the time you run into him, he’s already lost his mind and is well on his way to overthrowing the empire and claiming ultimate power. Like literally, ultimate power. Once imbued with said abilities, Kefka takes a scalpel to the planet, ripping up continents and murdering vast numbers of people just to see if he can. Then, with what’s left, he creates a towering pile of refuse and junk to act as his massive throne. His reaction? Laughter. Constant laughter.
You are leaving out the most effective part of the character: he is silent and invisible for the entire second half of the game. Once he gains all his power and ruins the world, you never see him again until the very end. You see the impact he’s had and you have memories of him, but he’s not around. And the game doesn’t cop out and have "Kefka squads" to keep him in the spotlight, either; he’s seriously not present in the game. It’s really, really good, and wholly original.
Plenty of villains aspire to ruin the world – Kefka actually did, and his unwavering devotion to destruction makes the story’s impact that much stronger.
So did Lavos, and he was crap. It’s not just the destruction that makes villains interesting, doofus.
Silent Hill 2 (PS2 / PC / Xbox, 2001)
What? Fuck you.
The Story:
James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife asking him to come to their "special place." Trouble is, his wife Mary has been dead for three years. He’s drawn to Silent Hill, a quiet town that they had visited in the past, before the sickness finally took her. Upon arriving, James runs into meaty skin-walls, gruesome monsters and precious few humans at all. And the people he does meet all seem to have their own problems, like a dimwitted man who’s killed someone, a teenager searching for her mother and a little girl who doesn’t even notice all the awful things happening around her. Then there’s Maria, who’s a spitting image of Mary, albeit sexed up far beyond his wife’s more subdued behavior.
So it’s exactly the same as all horror movies that aren’t set at camp.
After countless close calls with Pyramid Head, a masked killer brandishing a sword so large he has to drag it, James finds more and more clues about his wife, her letter and what’s happening in Silent Hill.
"Pyramid Head?" Could this get more stupid?
The more he understands, the less fearsome the town becomes, and it turns out that everything you’ve seen is a reflection of James’ inner torment over killing his wife. Yes, it turns out you murdered her and have hid from that fact all along, creating the constant purgatory known as Silent Hill.
Oh, I see. Yes it could.
Why it’s the best:
Holy Christ, is this game intense.
Wait, are you asking me? No, it’s not. It’s stupid.
The premise alone – find out how your dead wife sent you a letter – is terrifying, and when coupled with the horrific setting and creepy denizens of Silent Hill, it becomes a near-unbearable level of dread.
You’re really terrified of that? For fuck’s sake, do not play Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. You will not make it.
Every hallway, every door could contain another awful monster or suggestive conversation about James’s past, but it usually doesn’t.
Welcome to survival horror! Hey, there might be something to do in this room… but probably it’s empty.
You’re constantly on edge, wondering if the worst is about to come… or just another empty room. It’s a slower burn than Resident Evil by far.
So I guess people really do get gay for games that feature lots of empty rooms and pointless wandering. Francis? Meet Fenton. You two have a lot in common: fucking awful taste in games.
Silent Hill speaks in metaphors, not bats in the hair or dogs crashing through windows.
Yeah, I figured. Bats and dogs would mean something’s actually happening.
Plunging deeper into the town symbolizes his inner conflict, and as you hack away monsters, you’re also hacking away his mental blocks that hide the truth. The further you dig, the more you question him – is he really an innocent man who unjustly lost his wife or not?
And the more times you reload your last save, the more you question it: will this game ever get fun or not?
The other characters have just as much to add to the story too – Angela, the teen searching for her mother, apparently killed her abusive father and fled to Silent Hill. She tries to kill herself, but James intervenes, setting into motion her final moment near the end.
Wow, a hamfisted parallel! This game delivers.
She can’t forgive herself for the murder, but can’t go on either. The flames are her own prison, James doesn’t even notice them. For a brief moment, you actually get to see Silent Hill through someone else’s eyes, opening your mind to the fact that James must confront his past as Angela just did or suffer a similar fate.
You’re babbling. Please at least attempt to use the correct number of verbs.
I remember back before I had knowledge of Pyramid Head. Those were truly wonderful days, since I hadn’t read this article. It’s almost done! I’m fucking psyched.
Maria, it turns out, is another manifestation of James’s repressed guilt – she’s a promiscuous double of his sickly wife, neither human nor hallucination.
OoooOOOOoooOOOooOOO! I am the ghost of angst past!
Maria and the other monsters, like the busty no-faced nurses and the mannequin legs tied to other mannequin legs, aren’t there just for shock value; they’re representations of James’s repressed sexuality due to Mary’s long sickness.
Expect the first ghost when the bell tolls onnnnnnnne!
He took care of her at first, but eventually came to hate his life and smothered her, supposedly freeing him from a tortured life. Instead it forever trapped him in a no-place hell, where the only way out is to confront your worst personal demons and even that might not be enough.
God. I know the feeling.
It’s a punishing tale not easily matched, daring to tell a story that touches on murder, suicide, personal hell, child molestation, redemption, acceptance and trying not to lose yourself to something outside your control.
And also Pyramid Head. Don’t forget him!
There are several endings, but the best has to be "In Water," a fitting end to a story leaps and bounds above other games, horror or otherwise.
An even better ending would be "In Trash."
There you have it, folks – 15 of the very best in videogame stories. Some were fun and some were upsetting, but every single one stuck with us in one way or another throughout the years. So, what sticks for you? Tell us in our Forums.
Oh my God oh my God oh my God it’s DONE! So here’s my pithy summary: Francis, you’re an idiot. This web site should be run through a digital mulcher to provide binary digits to poor game developers in the third world.
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