Day 22: Best Story
Fucking hell. How do you qualify something like this? After all these years, and all of the advancements we've made, how do you choose one thing that's better than all the others? And in this medium there are great stories, stories that engage you and keep you going through the game to get to more story. The story as a driving force.
RPGs usually fall into this category. I've mentioned them all before, but the Final Fantasy series (or, at least the six that we got before the PS2 came around) all had incredible stories in that the stories, in the individual moments, were fantastic, but were also connected solidly enough to the rest of the story that ten hours of separation didn't make you forget the important details that came before. That wasn't always good storytelling, but it was great story design.
Yes, there were some really stupid things that went on in those stories, but the narrative in the medium was still being explored. I was tolerable of silly things simply because the stories we'd been given before were simply "rescue this princess" or "get all your bananas back".
But in recent years we've been given stories that aren't so much stories as they are moments within a personal narrative. The one that's been on my mind recently for some reason is Modern Warfare. There is a story in that game, certainly, but I couldn't tell you what it is. I played it over a year ago. But the story isn't really important. You are two characters in two different places in the world, fighting two different members of the same Bad Guys. The Bad Guys wanted to do Bad Things. That's the actual storyline.
But the narrative is far more than that. The narrative that is provided for you isn't about a story, it's about moments that affect you. The story in Modern Warfare is about the part where you do something awesome, and then you do another thing that's awesome. But it's not about doing something awesome on your own, it's about doing the same awesome things everyone else who experienced the game did.
It's about you shooting a cannon from a plane to defend your team. It's about rappelling down the side of a building in the USSR after assassinating a dude. It's about hiding in the tall grass as soldiers try to find you. It's about raiding a TV station, it's about saving the Vice President on Air Force One, it's about a nuke, it's about a finale on a broken bridge.
That's the story, and it's an awesome one.
But then, then there's Mother 3.
RPGs usually fall into this category. I've mentioned them all before, but the Final Fantasy series (or, at least the six that we got before the PS2 came around) all had incredible stories in that the stories, in the individual moments, were fantastic, but were also connected solidly enough to the rest of the story that ten hours of separation didn't make you forget the important details that came before. That wasn't always good storytelling, but it was great story design.
Yes, there were some really stupid things that went on in those stories, but the narrative in the medium was still being explored. I was tolerable of silly things simply because the stories we'd been given before were simply "rescue this princess" or "get all your bananas back".
But in recent years we've been given stories that aren't so much stories as they are moments within a personal narrative. The one that's been on my mind recently for some reason is Modern Warfare. There is a story in that game, certainly, but I couldn't tell you what it is. I played it over a year ago. But the story isn't really important. You are two characters in two different places in the world, fighting two different members of the same Bad Guys. The Bad Guys wanted to do Bad Things. That's the actual storyline.
But the narrative is far more than that. The narrative that is provided for you isn't about a story, it's about moments that affect you. The story in Modern Warfare is about the part where you do something awesome, and then you do another thing that's awesome. But it's not about doing something awesome on your own, it's about doing the same awesome things everyone else who experienced the game did.
It's about you shooting a cannon from a plane to defend your team. It's about rappelling down the side of a building in the USSR after assassinating a dude. It's about hiding in the tall grass as soldiers try to find you. It's about raiding a TV station, it's about saving the Vice President on Air Force One, it's about a nuke, it's about a finale on a broken bridge.
That's the story, and it's an awesome one.
But then, then there's Mother 3.