Games with terrible stories

After telling myself for the better part of a year that I'd play Metal Gear Rising: Revengance, I finally got around to it this month. Instead of dumping more on the pile, I decided to try and shave a few off it.

Good lord. Even by Metal Gear's standards this is an atrocious story. The fact that the game is pretty much half cutscenes as well makes it worse. I can't actually remember a game that has annoyed me more with its story.

What are some of your least favourite stories you've come across in games?

...all of them? Video games aren't exactly known for their quality writing.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and 3. Such a huge drop off from the first one in terms of plot. MW1 remains one of my favorite linear FPS games.

Let's see if I understood this though. In MW2, General Shepherd is disillusioned that thousands of American troops needlessly died in the Middle East during the first game. So he conspires with a Russian ultra-nationalist to start World War 3? In which countless more Americans die? Oh, and of course a British SAS captain would have the tactical ability, technical knowledge and access to required codes to single-handedly infiltrate a Russian ballistic missile submarine, redirect and launch a nuclear weapon in such a way to detonate above the east coast causing an EM pulse but no direct casualties? All, done right after he was broken out of a prison he had been in for years? Sure...

And then in MW3... Another hijacked nuclear sub launch... Russian invasion of the US is repelled, but just a couple of months later they somehow have the ability to launch a full scale invasion of Western Europe?!? I don't really think that's how "modern warfare" would work.

I love Metal Gear's story. (Not Revengeance)

The Kingdom Hearts series immediately comes to mind as being completely ridiculous, even the first one veers off the rails pretty quick. Most of the Final Fantasy games after VI also fall into this camp. Many of them start off well but eventually go into "eh?" territory towards the end. And yet...I still play them.

Super Mario Brothers. Honestly, none of them make sense, but at least #2 has the

Spoiler:

"just a dream"

excuse. The first one though? An unarmed plumber tries to rescue a princess from a giant turtle but keeps looking in the wrong places, never asking for directions. What kind of premise is that?

And there's never any explanation why so many of the sentient mushrooms become traitors to their country. (Although given how many just walk into pits and fall to their death, you could infer it's just stupidity. And it's not just bad AI, because some of the turtles will turn around instead of stepping right into the pit, so there's clearly some reason for it.) These creatures certainly couldn't build any kind of society in a clearly dangerous landscape; the worldbuilding is poor to nonexistent.

The third one at least tries to introduce new characters, but they are all broad stereotypes who appear with no backstory or explanation for their absence from previous installments. The dialogue is poor, and no further characterization materializes. (Why do "helpful" allies insist on making you gamble and withhold valuable items if you are unlucky?) Even if you suspend your disbelief (this is a world with flying ships, after all), there's little more than the flimsiest motivations for any of the poorly realized characters to be engaging in this farce.

beeporama wrote:

An unarmed plumber tries to rescue a princess from a giant turtle but keeps looking in the wrong places, never asking for directions. What kind of premise is that?

I dunno. I've been playing through Warriors Orochi and I've found that the wacky time-looping soap opera is one of the more compelling parts of the game. Yeah, objectively it is ridiculous with dozens and dozens of characters from multiple video game IPs and history all dealing with personal drama across multiple interconnected timelines while fighting a giant apocalypse worm. But, the story is what keeps me coming back.

It's not really the premise that makes the story ridiculous, it's how you treat the story and frame the story in the context of the world building and the genre.

Modern Warfare was a compelling and decently structured action movie. Modern Warfares 2 and 3 were Michael Bay movies (and not, like, Pain & Gain Michael Bay, but Transformers 4 Michael Bay).

So....Demonicon.

Let me tell you about Demonicon.

(also heads-up some references to domestic violence and sexual violence towards women so be aware some people might want to skip this one)

Demonicon is your typical eastern european RPG (no character creation beyond a few male faces - no lady option obviously, stereo-typically buff white dude, horrible voice acting, etc, etc) based on the Dark Eye pen and paper RPG. There are several really good games that use that license...this is not one of them.

The actual STORY of the game is pretty forgettable - it's been a while since I've played it but the gist of it was a brother (the player) and his sister attempting to break free from a curse that will doom them to being the pawns of powerful demons unless they take action to stop it. not the worst setup but incredibly boring in execution, ....it's everything else around it that's a bit...special.

I've cribbed a lot of this from the "tropes vs" thread entry I wrote, so brace yourselves.

The game starts right off the bat with the damsel trope. The players sister has run off to escape an arranged marriage with a high ranking (corrupt) paladin so that the family can gain citizenship and be permitted to stay in the city. As we find out later there are other ways of getting this citizenship (join the watch / local underworld) but this arranged marriage is clearly the easiest option for everyone involved.

By everyone, I do of course mean the brother and their father, obviously. Who else would matter?

Before heading into the cave system to rescue aforementioned sister, the PC has a quite unbelievable conversation with his father about sis's virginity. They assume she's run off to be with a stranger so that she can lose it and thus render the marriage null and void for...reasons.

Upon finding her, it's actually the first things you ask her about to make sure she's still 'intact'.

This crops up a couple of times and never gets any less creepy.

Oh, and it turns out the character you are playing and his sister kinda really want to bone each other. A lot. Much later in the game you casually discover that she's not really his literal sister so - PHEW! Crisis avoided!

Except no... EVEN LATER it turns out, SURPRISE! they ARE actually blood relatives (same father).

Soon after that they carry out the whole threat of getting together because sure why not.
Did I mention this game was a bit creepy. 'Cause it kinda is.

After a long period of spending most of the game off-screen kidnapped (the second time sister get's damsel'ed during the game), she turns evil. Mostly you know this by the fact she's wearing skimpier, spikier armour. Your way of curing this is to literally slap some sense back into her. After which she apologises and stops being evil.

I forget how it ends (I can't even seem to track down a decent walkthrough or story synopsis to remind me!) but I'm fairly certain it involves a really dumb boss fight then an abrupt cut to the end credits with no real resolution...much like every other eastern European game that doesn't involve Witchers.

Some other random story elements of note:

- At one stage you kill a lady necromancer (also a half sister) who then gives you permission to sex her up after she's dead so that you can tell her about it in the afterlife later.

- the sister is very obviously a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her betrothed paladin. The character model has one skin that's CLEARLY been very badly beaten.

- oh, also, said paladin has been serial killing local women then having them reanimated as quiet prostitutes that don't talk back to the clientele. Soon as you fix the problem...all the customers start complaining that the brothel "isn't any fun anymore".

- The main villain of the piece, an elf woman in slinky skin-hugging robes is hostile to you until you beat her close to death, at which point she becomes completely submissive to you and devoting herself to your cause.

So...yeah. That was a game that happened and I played through to completion for ...some reason. 0_o
Probably just so I could make many sarcastic screen-grabs and comments, which to be honest was more fun than the game was.

Not considering those games that just slapped a story on to justify you passing through levels, I'm going to consider those AA and AAA titles that tried to at least go for a passable story and failed. I'll definitely come back to this post. For now:

Mirror's Edge and Mirror's Edge: Catalyst. I love both of these games. They're so stylish and cool and the parkour movement is realized so well here. The city of Glass is beautful and I dig Faith Connors as a heroine, but the rest of the characters, the storylines for both are so dry, empty and vapid they might as well not be there. The lore for Catalyst has some potential should DLC ever appear for the game (it won't).

Overwatch. Great game, but the whole story just makes no sense (doesn't need to, but that's not the point of the topic). It's near impossible to understand why these characters are fighting with/against each other.

Most of the Assassin's Creed games, particularly those that don't involve Ezio.

Hotline: Miami, but the crazy story actually makes it a better game for some reason.

Dante's Inferno

I have an intense hatred for Final Fantasy VIII's story.

Vector wrote:

I have an intense hatred for Final Fantasy VIII's story.

If I remember correctly, the text-based Let's Play someone on Something Awful did a while back was magnificent. Unfortunately it seems to have been taken down on the behalf of the author.

pyxistyx wrote:
Vector wrote:

I have an intense hatred for Final Fantasy VIII's story.

If I remember correctly, the text-based Let's Play someone on Something Awful did a while back was magnificent. Unfortunately it seems to have been taken down on the behalf of the author.

What is online can never die.

Hmm...now having re-read the first few pages I'm wondering if that holds up as well as I thought I remembered it...

ADAM'S VENTURE (Get it! It's like Alan Wake...except crap).

Essentially a terribly executed, total rip-off of Uncharted with a hero searching for the Garden of Eden and Temple of Solomon, whilst attempting to thwart the plans of "Evil Atheists Hell Bent On Destroying Christianity"(tm). In the process you solve lots of faith-themed puzzles, collect bible verses (none of this is advertised up front by the way...or at least it wasn't originally, not sure if it does these days). In the end, the "good guys" win by having just a little faith, the horrible godless heathens are defeated and the hero gets the compliant, deferential heroine. Oh and they never do find the Garden of Eden because they aren't meant to set their eyes on it. So...they don't. Some bloody archaeologist adventurer 'Adam' turned out to be.

Oh and the heroine's name is Evelyn. As if you had to ask.

I hate-played the sh*t out of this one just to get it off my pile (I think I got it randomly in a humble bundle or something) and into my "misc" folder on Steam...which is where I send all the junk I'd prefer to just delete if that option was available.

Most of them are bad but for whatever reason I particularly dislike dude bro fps campaign stories. The Gears of War series comes to mind.

Even my favorite gaming stories are more for well written characters than any kind of particularly interesting main plot.

Homeworld 2. I was going to just leave this without a spoiler tag, but after writing it... I'll use the tag so people don't have to scroll past it... it got a bit long.

Spoiler:

Homeworld was amazing. Graphics that don't quite hold up to modern games, but aren't absolutely horrible either, but the story of it pulled me in really hard. Your planet is destroyed after a hyperspace test... a test that was the result of finding a massive starship in the desert, and reverse engineering it. You capture a frigate, and interrogate the captain to find that you violated a treaty, thousands of years old, and your planet's destruction was the consequence.

You start hunting the race that enacted the punishment. Your travels take you through a nebula, where you are ambushed by another race that swarms you. You find that their hyperspace core is remarkably similar to your own, and conclude from this that your race and this race had similar origins. Aided by the Bentusi, a highly advanced race that are more-or-less one with their ships, you find that you were exiled from your homeworld, and your starting planet just happened to be the place you managed to crash land after traveling for years. And all knowledge of this was lost over the ages. You fight to retake your homeworld.

Cut to Cataclysm. Not long after HW1 ends, you take command of a mining vessel in a smaller clan. This game uses the same engine with a few tweaks, similar tactics and commands, but different vessels with different abilities. HW:C is kind of like a borg-clone story, and while it borrows heavily from other sources, it held up well, especially for a stand-alone expansion. It has it's problems, but they're bearable.

Then comes HW2. The main plot of the game is that there are only three hyperspace cores. Your mothership in the first game had one, the Bentusi's home ship has one, and your main rival has one. Of course... this contradicts the swarming guys in the first game, and there are some plot points in the second (IIRC) that this contradicts as well.

So the last Bentusi ship (the home ship, no mention of where all the rest of the Bentusi ships went off to) drops in, to tell you to go find this super weapon ship that you end up toting throughout the game without really being able to utilize it properly. This is somewhat a rip-off of Cataclysm, wherein you find a super gun for your ship early on but it takes most of the game before you can actually use it. In both cases, you fire it once, it gets damaged, and you spend most of the game working to repair it so you can use it. The super ship was made by a race they just call the Progenitors, which are basically just an empty deus ex machina to push the story along and make the universe seem a little more mysterious. The last mission is pretty much just using the super ship to kill everyone.

HW1 and HWC were obviously labors of passion. HW2 felt like someone mined forums for what ideas worked best in the first two, and then just shoehorned all of them together for a sequel, without actually trying to make them sensible.

Pong. Left paddle was well characterized, but right paddle was all over the map.

pyxistyx wrote:

which is where I send all the junk I'd prefer to just delete if that option was available.

It is! In your library in Steam, there's a remove from library link on each game's page.

pyxistyx wrote:

Oh and the heroine's name is Evelyn. As if you had to ask.

It sounds like the game would be vastly improved if its Evelyn were more like the one I used to know.

That Evelyn was an archaeologist by profession and a bellydancer by avocation. She danced with swords and flame, and told stories of strange Etruscan burials, aggressive Turkish sheepdogs, and drunken hookups that followed the day's digging.

All of which sounds like the makings of better games than the ones you've described in this thread! Let us know if you'd like us to pass the hat to buy you some brain bleach...

I thought Dragon Age: Inquisition was fairly terrible. Assuming by story, you mean the overall narrative of the game.

It struck me as haphazard, badly paced, with a villain who's supposedly the end of the world but, for the sake of gameplay convenience, poses exactly as much threat as you prefer. The herky-jerky plot has a few bright spots, like the grand ball, but overall it's saved only by the strength of its characters.

This isn't exactly a problem confined to Inquisition, though. Open (or open-ish) world games have a very consistent problem right now, in that they can't deprive the player of that open world without it feeling like a dick move, but it's very hard to give a narrative any weight if the next point in that narrative is only going to happen when you willfully cross a very obvious, well-defined line.

And I'm not sure what to do about it. It's actually leading me to get very fed up with these open-world experiences, and cast a skeptical eye towards something like Andromeda. I think I'd rather player a more linear game with a better narrative.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
pyxistyx wrote:

which is where I send all the junk I'd prefer to just delete if that option was available.

It is! In your library in Steam, there's a remove from library link on each game's page.

Cool! Didn't realise that. This'll help clear out some of the real trash / Free to play games that invited themselves into my library.

Round, obese character goes around eating food, being chased by the paranormal, but by taking pills, changes the makeup of these spirits so you can turn around and eat them whole.

Yup, nothing terrible about Pac-Man at all.

A genuine horrible story though... that is a bit hard, since there are plenty of games with horrible voice acting, horrible character controls, horrible character controls, but actually have a story that maybe could be passable or at the very least quality for a dumb B or C action movie.

I suppose I can be extra snarky and choose a game that doesn't have a coherent story like LSD Dream Simulator,

Ok, I got one, Far Cry 3. So, I'm playing as a rich, douche kid, who gets tattoos to power up, and takes drugs all over the island to heal and power up, to save friends, working for people living at this place, where,

Spoiler:

if you choose to not to go back home with what's left of your friends, you get sacrificed. Therefore, that means the people that I was supposedly helping as I was saving my friends are even more FUBAR than myself or my douche friends? What the hell.

How about I just take that wing suit and fly as far away from this mad place as I can.

pyxistyx wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
pyxistyx wrote:

which is where I send all the junk I'd prefer to just delete if that option was available.

It is! In your library in Steam, there's a remove from library link on each game's page.

Cool! Didn't realise that. This'll help clear out some of the real trash / Free to play games that invited themselves into my library.

Under set category for any game, there is a checkbox to make this game invisible in your library. Not sure about this remove game option, whenever I've deleted a free to play game from steam, it has removed from my account, which is an annoyance because any F2P games I have put money in, I want those to remain in my library.

walterqchocobo wrote:

The Kingdom Hearts series immediately comes to mind as being completely ridiculous, even the first one veers off the rails pretty quick.

I thought about posting this but I consider the bonkers story to be a feature, not a bug.

I sincerely hope that KH3 is full of more hilariously overwrought dialogue that I can annoy Shop with, like "KINGDOM HEEEEEEARTS! FILL ME WITH THE POWER OF DARKNESS!" and "I'm half Xehanort already!"

EDIT: Oh, I came up with a video game story that seriously annoyed me: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

I'm probably not entirely fair to this game since I didn't like that the mechanics were a step down from FFT, but I think the overall plot was pretty dumb on its own -- especially compared to FFT which has a coherent plot decently told (apart from translation issues).

So the game begins when this kid and his school friends get sucked into the FFTA world. In FFTA world, a lot of the people in the town who had various serious troubles in their real life have much better lives in FFTA world, including a disabled child who is healthy. Understandably, other than the protagonist, they generally don't want to leave.

Spoiler:

Yet the protagonist unilaterally decides that everyone needs to go back to the real world... for some reason. This really sat with me wrong.

beeporama wrote:

Super Mario Brothers. Honestly, none of them make sense, but at least #2 has the

Spoiler:

"just a dream"

excuse. The first one though? An unarmed plumber tries to rescue a princess from a giant turtle but keeps looking in the wrong places, never asking for directions. What kind of premise is that?

And there's never any explanation why so many of the sentient mushrooms become traitors to their country. (Although given how many just walk into pits and fall to their death, you could infer it's just stupidity. And it's not just bad AI, because some of the turtles will turn around instead of stepping right into the pit, so there's clearly some reason for it.) These creatures certainly couldn't build any kind of society in a clearly dangerous landscape; the worldbuilding is poor to nonexistent.

The third one at least tries to introduce new characters, but they are all broad stereotypes who appear with no backstory or explanation for their absence from previous installments. The dialogue is poor, and no further characterization materializes. (Why do "helpful" allies insist on making you gamble and withhold valuable items if you are unlucky?) Even if you suspend your disbelief (this is a world with flying ships, after all), there's little more than the flimsiest motivations for any of the poorly realized characters to be engaging in this farce.

SMB3 is a stage play, if that helps. You might be interested in the Idle Thumbs' theory about the Mario universe: What if Mario and Wario are the same guy?. There's still plenty left to fill in between Super Mario Run and SMB3/Kart/Party/etc, so it doesn't address all your issues, but that should come over the next decades at the rate Nintendo drip-feeds Mario lore hints.

Demyx wrote:
walterqchocobo wrote:

The Kingdom Hearts series immediately comes to mind as being completely ridiculous, even the first one veers off the rails pretty quick.

I thought about posting this but I consider the bonkers story to be a feature, not a bug.

I sincerely hope that KH3 is full of more hilariously overwrought dialogue that I can annoy Shop with, like "KINGDOM HEEEEEEARTS! FILL ME WITH THE POWER OF DARKNESS!" and "I'm half Xehanort already!"

EDIT: Oh, I came up with a video game story that seriously annoyed me: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

I'm probably not entirely fair to this game since I didn't like that the mechanics were a step down from FFT, but I think the overall plot was pretty dumb on its own -- especially compared to FFT which has a coherent plot decently told (apart from translation issues).

So the game begins when this kid and his school friends get sucked into the FFTA world. In FFTA world, a lot of the people in the town who had various serious troubles in their real life have much better lives in FFTA world, including a disabled child who is healthy. Understandably, other than the protagonist, they generally don't want to leave.

Spoiler:

Yet the protagonist unilaterally decides that everyone needs to go back to the real world... for some reason. This really sat with me wrong.

+1 to FFTA being very disappointing after FFT.

I also had PSTD after the 18 boss battles at the end of Kingdom Hearts 2--every time I started my PS2, I was afraid the big baddie would pop up and demand that I show him the power of love for real this one last time I swear!

SpacePPoliceman wrote:

I also had PSTD after the 18 boss battles at the end of Kingdom Hearts 2--every time I started my PS2, I was afraid the big baddie would pop up and demand that I show him the power of love for real this one last time I swear!

Yeah but KH2 ends with

Spoiler:

Sora slicing buildings in half with his keyblade while fighting Xemnas who is duel wielding lightsabers and wearing a zebra print coat

which makes it all worth it.

Gravey wrote:
beeporama wrote:

Super Mario Brothers....

SMB3 is a stage play, if that helps. You might be interested in the Idle Thumbs' theory about the Mario universe: What if Mario and Wario are the same guy?. There's still plenty left to fill in between Super Mario Run and SMB3/Kart/Party/etc, so it doesn't address all your issues, but that should come over the next decades at the rate Nintendo drip-feeds Mario lore hints.

*slow clap*

I'm so glad somebody took the absurdity so far.

It's interesting because my expectations of writing quality are soooooo much lower in gaming than in other media that I take it as a given that any new game I play is not going to have a stellar story or dialog. It's also worth noting that how you interact with the game will determine what you get out of the story. Did you read that one particular journal/ingame book/letter/terminal? Did you talk to that NPC? Did you find those hidden areas? Or did you rush through just the main story?

That said, I could list a lot of games here but I'll single out one recent game: Fallout 4

Don't get me wrong, I loved Fallout 4. I've put in nearly 100+ hours into it and will probably play it again later this year. However, the story, and in particular, the forced way you interact with the story was terrible. There were so many head scratching moments, so many plot holes, and so many situations that just made zero sense. Then there's the stale dialog and often poor choices in response to dialog. Great gameplay, fun exploration and nice world building saved the game for me but the story was terrible.

I keep coming back to this thread, and I can't find any way to interact with it other than to note that I'm struggling to think of games with a good story. The Witcher 3, and that's a big maybe? Even that reeks of hackneyed genre conventions, albeit that that's more a function of the fantasy genre itself, and The Witcher, as an IP, is at the less-hackneyed end of that spectrum.

But seriously, all the "good" story-rich games that I've played have been atrocious from a purely narrative perspective. Think about any game story you've enjoyed, then imagine experiencing that same story in another medium. The book version of Mass Effect would be a clusterf*** of a story, and the movie would be a meandering mess.

Perhaps that comparison is unfair - different mediums lend themselves to different storytelling. But I can't help but feel that either (a) gaming as a medium is spectacularly unsuited to telling interesting, nuanced stories, or (b) it's a really hard problem that no-one has adequately solved yet.

I'll also note that, at least in my experience, there's a strong tension between the complexity of the game's systems, mechanics, UI, degree of control handed to the player, and the quality of the storytelling. This theory explains why The Walking Dead is such an effective storytelling game, because the scale of it's gameyness is tiny. And at the other end of the spectrum, why the story in open-world games is often bunk.