Video Game plotlines suck in general, the writers to most of these are just really amateurish. The best plot lines I've seen were those in Resident Evil, Star Craft, and Half-Life. Resident Evil being kinda bad though. Portal is pretty good plot-line wise, but it could be classified as a part of Half-Life.

I can't imagine a second tier j-RPG having a great plot-line.  Seriously, most games are just unoriginal imitations of existing IPs that bring little new to the table.

I completely disagree on the Subspace story having good and bad parts. It had funny parts, but the thing was a contrived mess from beginning to end. Nothing is really explained unless you get trophies in said mode, and the fact Sakurai had to make an update on the Brawl website to explain why the story is happening is just idiotic.

Now, a bad storyline within a game that ruins established canon for the sake of pandering to stupid fans is basically MGS4. The entire game from start to finish.

I haven't played MGS4, but all the reviews and talk I read said that it nicely wrapped up all of the loose story plots the existing games had.

As for SSBB, I don't think most people care about fighting games storylines. I thought SSBB was OK (not great), and glad that they at least tried putting in a story this time.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

No. It was quite possibly the most hateful way Kojima could say Fuck You to his fanbase.

Maybe that's true, I was just going by what I have heard from people who played it (including professional reviews). Even after playing just the first game, I knew I didn't feel like trying to understand the plot.

It does a decent job of this until the very VERY end.  Then it has this really long and boring scene where a character just talks on and on explaining some new plot point that they then wrap up entirely through monologue.  At least I THINK that's what happens as it is so long and boring and seemingly pointless that I had trouble paying attention to what the characters were talking about.

But the story overall is not told all that well as Kojima is more or less an idiot.  It has lots of stupid dialog and "emotional" moments that are like the worst soap operas and scenes where someone more or less just stops the game and reads the background for a character.  But it does reference all the other games which is pretty fun for a fan of the series.

The thing with videogames is if you can write a good story why are you in videogames?  There is more prestige and more money in books, movies and television so if you were any good wouldn't you be doing THAT instead?  If someone actually wrote a really amazing videogame story I figure some Hollywood studio would try to snatch them up.  The videogame industry is full of people who want to be great filmmakers or great writers but lack the talent to do so.

Maybe the video game industry needs to have people willing to focus on it. The TV industry got the same critism early on, with people saying good writers should focus on movies (even today TV writers don't usually get as much respest as movie writers).

As for your last point, I think you have a valid point. Certain game makers (like Kojima) have openly said they would like to make movies.

I'm sorry, but I disagree. There were parts that made a lot of sense without a word being spoken. The first half of the story were filled with these moments, such as Mario teaming up with Link or how Mario/Link believed that the other character was bringing harm to Peach/Zelda. Even the reveal of the big bad being ROB was done well. It was the middle to last half of the game that fell greatly because it started diving deeper into the world's mythos. You have the REAL bad guy being presented out of nowhere with no real explanation (even Final Fantasy games present the real big bad in a way that makes sense...at times), then you have character motives that make no sense (why did Ganondorf turn on Bowser? I don't buy the "he's evil" thing, there had to be a reason for it). Master hand is brought up as being a big bad too, but it turns out that it was merely a weapon. Everything fell apart at the end, and if Sakurai NEEDS to explain it in his blog there's something going on.

Regarding story in games...let's be honest with each other. Story, whether something simple like Mario or a grand epic like Metal Gear Solid, CAN be a good thing in a game. It creates a special motive in gamers to push on and get to the end. See the hero prevail over the bad guy, learn his or her backstory and learn about the culture of the world they inhabit. To some games this can be BS, but really, I doubt we would invest in the Zelda franchise so much if it was just "You are Link, get some triangles, win the game". It's the mythos that compels us to play a game (though having fun with it is a legit reason as well) and be fans of the franchise.

The problem is that game makers haven't quite figure out how to tell the story and how to balance the marriage between gaming and story. You either have games that have stories but are so in the background you forget it exists and you have games where the story is being shoved down your throat and gameplay is designed around it. There have been games that have come close to this.

Super Mario Galaxy is one of my favorites. Yes, it does prefer gameplay over story, but the whole world has this fascinating backstory, especially Rosalina who I really love. Best of all, it wasn't forced. You had the option of learning her story or just forget about it. Story had a presence, but gameplay was compromised for it.

So this is why I partially disagree with the belief that game makers should write books or create movies if they want to tell a story. Yes, if the primary reason for a game's existence is to tell a story over creating engaging gameplay then yeah, we have a problem. But what is exactly wrong with create a game universe with a legit plot and likable characters with stories that we can relate to?

I definitely wouldn't be as interesting in games if they were no storyline elements.  Though what I find really hooks me in is the game's world.  I like discovering it.  Part of the appeal of progressing in a game for me is to see what area is up next.  I don't really like games like Call of Duty because I don't care for the setting.  It is too similar to the real world so it isn't interesting to discover.

Discovering the world and the characters in it is also gameplay.  You're really going to the area and trying to find secrets or navigating through dangers or fighting the enemies.  The ability to directly experience what is going on is the big hook that videogames have that films and books don't.  Most emotional attachment I have had in videogames comes from that.

The problem is most games tell the story by stopping everything and showing little movies which are usually pretty damn poor at least compared to anything in film.  That's where the "dev wishes he was a filmmaker" stuff comes in.  I think the storytelling would improve greatly if devs concentrated more on the environment and the player's objectives and then let the player's actual gameplay experience form the details of the story.  Give me the beginning, the end, the characters, the setting, the problem and the solution (which is "hidden") and let me fill in the details in between.  Then the strengths of the videogame medium are put to use and we don't have to deal with so many poorly directed cutscenes and poorly written dialog.  I'm not saying there shouldn't be any of that at all but it should not be overused.  Make a videogame, not a bad movie.

More and more each day, it becomes a chore to sit down and invest more time playing Arc Rise Fantasia. After playing around forty hours, I've lost all interest in knowing how the game will actually untangle all it's subplots. It has become really irksome to beat a boss, only to find out that this new character suddenly appears on "X town", so I have to go to "X town" to find out that such character actually has a conflict with "other X town" I had previously visited about two hours ago. At one point, I literally had to jump the same two towns to find out "new" information. Jumping from place to place becomes tedious really quickly. You skim through the whole World Map at about 20 hours, only to repeat most places for the duration of the game. Yes, other areas eventually open up, which makes you feel sort of cheated because they become accessible when the game decides it's time.



By the way, can the localization be exclusively faulted? I feel like the game's main problem is how it's poorly structured. Even if the characters evoke enough emotion through excellent voice acting, I wouldn't really care if the story keeps dropping more random story twists to increase its lasting appeal. Oh yeah, and even if it's commonplace in video games, I really have a problem with characters who openly express their feelings or speak like reading literature. Maybe earning  a screenwriting degree has jaded me a bit, but it really dumbs down my overall experience when the characters are less than plausible.