The metal gear games have the best story out of any I've played, its actually a selling point of the games instead of just being there to tie the action together. MGS4 is pretty much an interactive movie and a good one at that, it's like a game built around a movie.
You could say that about pretty much every single JRPG however. The MGS games have amazing stories but there are a lot of JRPGs out there that outclass them in that area.
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
I don't agree with that at all.
Look no further than Half Life 2 and Bioshock for western games with storylines and character development that is just as good as the best of the Japanese made games. And they do it without having hours worth of in game cinema which is quickly becoming an outdated method of storytelling in gaming.
These games use the inherent interactive nature of video gaming to create worlds and plots in a way that is simply exclusive to the video gaming medium and would not be possible in any other type.
Registered: Dec 2008
Location: Sanctum of Innocence
This goes both ways. There are plenty of Western games that have crappy stories just like there are Japanese games with bad stories. I bet that most of the Japanese garbage stays in Japan, while the good stuff they make eventually makes it to the Western market. This gives the illusion that most of Japanese games are good/have good storylines.
The stories I enjoyed the most almost exclusively came from Western games. Coincidentally, I don't like the Half-Life story one bit.
Btw, what's up with all these new people that keep popping up only to promptly get banned? Socks?
__________________ And from the ashes he rose, like a black cloud. The Sin of one became the Sin of many.
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
Yes. Same thing with the Half Life 2 games. By having a silent protagonist, in a way, you become him. He never speaks or responds to the other characters so after a while I find myself responding in my head, and that kind of acts as the response to these characters and thus it makes it feel like you are interacting with the world and the characters instead of simply watching another character interact. And thus it makes these characters more real and identified and connective.
And RPGs (for the most part) do the same in a far more effective manner. The way in which you can simply enter a town and walk up to any inhabitant of your choosing and proceed to "interact" with them, in turn finding out general information about the setting and mood of the townspeople -- that isn't at all necessarily entirely relevant or fundamentally important to the underlying plot of the game -- creates a far greater level of interactive storyline that's entirely unique to the video game medium than simply seeing absolutely everything from the first person perspective of a mute character. Not only do you have the full motion videos and mandatory text based dialogue sequences to present you with the full scope and underlying path and direction of the storyline, but you have this level of interaction that really gives you insight into the general atmosphere of the setting. The sheer emphasis on the storyline and how dialogue heavy these games actually are also add to an unparalleled level of exploration of the characters and setting in comparison to other genres (this is especially true for Japanese RPGs).
Games such as Bioshock and Half Life 2 really don't present the player with that much of an interactive storyline in comparison.
Aug 9th, 2009 08:12 PM
