Originally published August 2016

Welcome back to my analysis of storytelling in video games. Last time, I discussed some examples of games that managed to get their simple stories told through a hands-off approach and how that benefited them. This time, I'll be discussing examples of how a story can negatively affect a game if done poorly.

Heavy Blame

We've discussed how games make the smart decision to tell a smaller, simpler story. What about the ones that bite off more than they can chew? I have three examples I'd like to discuss today. One game has gameplay that could be simply defined as "poor," so all it had to make up for it was the story. One game had decent gameplay and a decent story, but it was somewhat unoriginal and ended up being disappointing in many regards. One had solid gameplay, but was too long for itself and soon the story, or what little there was of it, was the only thing that kept the game going. Too bad it didn't take it anywhere good. Heavy Rain, L.A. Noire, and, to a lesser extent, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow are examples of games in the previous game generation that focus more on the story and fail to deliver the goods, thus dragging down their overall experience. In today's examination of story in video games, we'll briefly discuss all three types of failures.

Let's start with Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain is an easy target in the case of how a story can affect a game negatively. If you've never played or heard of the game, Heavy Rain is a cinematic, quick-time-event filled, mystery-adventure game. In other words, it's a game where you wander around an environment looking for shit to interact with so you can move on to the next event in the scene and interact with something else. Using four protagonists, it's your job as the player to solve the mystery of the Origami Killer's identity and the location of the main protagonist's son. Through awkward controls and cinematic camera angles, you crawl and stumble through the environment, touching things or dodging things when a button prompt appears. 90% of the time when these prompts are on-screen, there's not a whole lot happening. The initial tutorial of the game when you're learning how to dress yourself and shave in the mirror is perhaps more on the nose in terms of how interesting the whole game ends up being than the developers may have intended. After seeing the entirety of Heavy Rain, the boring tedium of having to do basic adult errands while using the crappy controls sums up the overall experience.

The story of Heavy Rain is not necessarily terrible, but it's not good either. It's just a bland story with some bland plot twists and scenarios that, if they were part of a movie or novel, would probably have been cut out entirely. Half the scenes that occur in Heavy Rain are excessive or unrelated to the plot or character arcs. For instance, there are some red herring serial killer characters that are seemingly unrelated—though still deserving of jail time—as well as a mob-boss individual that was involved somehow with the Origami Killer, though I still don't know the details because it's difficult to care.

There are also some character dream sequences that appear in the middle of the game as well. The sequences have their own quick-time-events and require you to press a bunch of buttons rapidly and precisely, even though there's no real threat. The dreams don't actually mean anything in terms of telling the story. They're just there as padding and some were likely remnants of a character's storyline that was cut or reduced in some way to meet the development deadlines.

Even the protagonists are bland as well. The sequences with the detective, Scott Shelby, end up being relatively pointless by the end with the middling amount of information that is provided during his arc. The main character, Ethan Mars gets most of the "high-tension" sequences where he could die and the player would be forced to continue the story without him. While these sequences are usually filled with frantic button prompts, they're not that exciting due to the fact that the story is not intriguing enough to make the action sequences worth it. As a character, Ethan is a depressed sad-sack, for legitimate reasons mind you, but there's not a whole lot else going for him to make him interesting. The only reason I'm interested in his survival is because I'm playing as him. The tension the game is trying to create during his scenes is based only on my desire not to fail, not on Ethan's survival. Then there's the journalist, Madison Paige. She is kind of shoe-horned into the story as the safety-net protagonist who is supposed to come in and help the main character if the player ends up killing him. She's also there as an excuse to show digital boobs and sleeps with Ethan in a super awkward video game sex scene.

Arguably, the most interesting part of Heavy Rain is playing as FBI agent, Norman Jayden, with his super detective abilities, roaming around and collecting clues at the crime scene to piece everything together. The main reason his section is interesting is due to the gameplay involved. Yes, there's actually a gameplay positive! It still doesn't play well, but it's interesting. at least. While most of the other characters' sequences involve you doing mundane things with the button prompts like staring at a painting on the wall that doesn't mean anything or heating up a kid's dinner, Jayden's sequences involve meaningful interaction with the environment. These segments allow players to search, investigate, and correlate clues in crime scenes. After collecting all the data, you can see how they connect, albeit in a guided process, but you still feel like you're helping the character get closer to solving the case.

However, Jayden's plot sequences, outside the detective gameplay bits, are often no more intriguing than the other characters'. Even this character had a few red-herring segments that went nowhere and felt like a waste of time. This excess fluff of pointless story elements and plot points, the awkward presentation, the sub-par voice acting, and the poorly-written dialogue only further detract from the story. Unfortunately for Heavy Rain, it isn't backed up by solid gameplay mechanics and is just a pain in the ass to play. If you took the unrewarding gameplay out, Heavy Rain might have surfaced as a mini-series TV show, but I still doubt it had enough to keep people tuned in for even a third episode.

Let's move on to L.A. Noire. L.A. Noire suffered from some similar issues, though to a lesser extent. In some ways, L.A. Noire took the best part of Heavy Rain and made it into a full game: going around a crime scene, picking up clues, and then asking witnesses questions to piece the puzzle together. There were some particular issues I had with the gameplay of L.A. Noire, mainly that it was getting stale by the halfway point, but the main problem I ended up having with L.A. Noire was its inability to tell interesting and original stories.

You play as Cole, a post-war veteran of the fifties whose detective work is helping him climb his way through the ranks of the LA police department. With each new scene in the game, Cole is given another opportunity to flex his logic muscles and solve the crime. As the player it's your job to guide Cole to the clues, guide him through interrogations, and then make the ultimate judgments on where the clues pointed. It was a novel idea for gameplay and if players were allowed to really get involved in playing forensic investigator, it could be fun solving crimes. However, that level of control and interaction never quite came to fruition.

Solving crimes was indeed fine and fun, for a while, but there wasn't very much to the crimes, typically. After solving the first four, a pattern had already emerged for how to play the game and exploit the mechanics. Even though L.A. Noire was trying to force immersion with all the facial-recognition technology that was supposed to allow you to look at people's faces and tell when someone was lying, it still broke that immersion with how simple the cases often were and how you had to think more like a video-game-player than a detective. For example, you always wanted to choose the "Lie" option during an interview with a witness because Cole would tell them he thinks they're lying, pressuring them to say something else. In real life, this might cause an interaction with a witness or suspect to go south real quick, however, in the video game world, Cole could always back out of what he said and start asking questions again like nothing ever happened. Sometimes the clue you needed was even hidden away in this optional dialogue exchange and you wouldn't get otherwise, so it became a mandatory exploit if you wanted to solve every case.

Once the crime-solving pattern was established, the game didn't really shake things up much. Rockstar put their GTA spin on it and made it a needlessly open-world sandbox game to pad out the game's length. I guess if you want to drive old 1950s cars through LA and gun down mild offenders and minorities like a typical white cop of the time period, this may be interesting to you, but the distraction it was supposed to serve never made the core gameplay any less stale. The best part of the game was when it broke the mold and allowed you to piece together the clues on your own during the Black Dahlia Murder stuff. Though, if you took too long, the game still flat-out told you where to go and what to do.

Eventually, to try to keep the player interested, the crimes and even the over-arching stories started to get more complicated. This would have been fine if the stories were actually original and written better. Unfortunately, most of what L.A. Noire offers, in terms of plot, has been seen elsewhere in movies like L.A. Confidential and Chinatown. I'm not talking just archetypes either. I mean entire plots, dialogue, and characters ripped straight out of the movies. They're good movies, so you might think a video game with their plots might not be so bad. Yet, even with the stories already written for them, the developers couldn't quite deliver their own version that was of much interest or value. Part of it was weighed down by the game's shoddy, tacked-on mechanics. The main problem, though, was just the fact that the dialogue wasn't that good. Cole behaved inconsistently and made some big decisions outside of my control that didn't seem to match the personality the game was trying to establish for him. The side characters didn't have much depth to them to pull you in; they were mostly just archetypes. The plots were limited in their scope and impact due to the formula of the game. It just made me want to go watch the movies they were (stealing from) paying homage. I actually wish there wasn't an overarching story in L.A. Noire because it ends up conflicting with the characterization of Cole and overshadowing the small investigations, which were slightly more novel and original despite the gameplay repetitiveness, with its heavy dumb drama.

I have one of the more interesting cases of storytelling screwing up a game's overall experience, and this one, unlike the others mentioned so far, is not a console equivalent of a point-n-click adventure game. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (CLoS) is not a terrible game. It had great art design and fantastic music. The gameplay was solid, even if a little uninspired, with some distinct similarities to games like God of War and Devil May Cry. Overall, the combat and platforming were fun, despite the apparent flaws. It, perhaps, was not as great as the other games in the franchise or genre, but Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was still a fun game in some regards and it was a very pretty one to look at. The circumstances of its story, however, were not so pretty.

CLoS and its story did not mesh well at all. Rather than having seamless storytelling like you might find in Uncharted where characters are talking as you're playing, or even just a cut-scene that plays in between the action, CLoS kept its story as bookends to a level. This isn't inherently bad. In fact, it's similar to how Devil May Cry did things, but usually, those bookends were action-packed cut-scenes with 90% nonsense and 10% dialogue for a story that was mostly irrelevant or part of a nonsensical and self-aware story. Devil May Cry was an anime action game where you were doing stupid crap that looked cool but was completely illogical or impossible. Its story was dumb, but it was fun like an amped-up B-movie or anime.

CLoS, however, had the Man of Steel syndrome and felt the need to tell a deep and brooding story about a broken man with a broken heart, poorly. When you picked a mission in the storyline for CLoS, it prompted a load screen with a fantastic drawing of the stage to come, and a block of text that Sir Patrick Stewart would read while you waited, like a bedtime story. The prose poetry he read would be very involved and character-driven with a focus on the protagonist, Gabriel, and what he was feeling or thinking about. It wasn't poorly written, and the long scripts were loaded with text that was meant to instill emotion and create a connection to his character. Except this was all "telling" us about Gabriel and his personality, not "showing." Take any creative writing class, and this is usually covered in Craft 101 Lesson A: "Show, don't Tell." Since the medium of this story is a video game, telling is not the preferred method of characterization.

When the level finally loaded, there would occasionally be a brief moment of dialogue or interaction with Gabriel before the player could start playing. After that though, nothing story-related or character-related would occur till the end of the mission. The main problem was that from the text, to animated dialogue, to the combat, it felt like I was seeing three different versions of the main character and his story. None of it really connected. The story was trying to make me feel or think something that just never made sense for the character, especially considering that, once the gameplay started, he had almost nothing to say. It was almost as though they added the story after the fact. I don't mean that just mechanically, either. From the way the story ended up playing out, it's clear that they didn't know what they wanted to do with it.

A majority of the plot depends on the same details that we know from the start: the protagonist, Gabriel, lost his wife and is trying to bring her back from the dead by using some forbidden methods and going after the Lords of Shadow. Sound familiar? It is pretty much the same plot to Shadow of the Colossus, except CLoS decided to use a lot more words and dialogue, and yet managed to say as little or less. The game progresses for a good 10+ hours without any of the details or storyline really changing much. There are a few plot twists here and there that might have had an impact on Gabriel's world, but had very little impact on me because I didn't know Gabriel or know why I should care about him.

The biggest plot twist comes at the end where a "true" villain is revealed. Except there was no foreshadowing or any clues to lead to this conclusion. Even Shadow of the Colossus used its ominous assumptions and some visual cues to support its finale so that when it happened, we could accept the shocking moments. In CLoS, the final battle came out of nowhere, felt like it was ripped from another game entirely, and effectively pissed me off to no end.

Why was I so upset? CLoS was dragging on as it was, and the gameplay was losing its flair. So, I was relying on the story to keep me interested. I was barely holding on to the game by the hope that the story would pay off in some way and I just wanted to finish it. The plot was getting more and more heavy-handed to keep me engaged, telling me how close I was to accomplishing Gabriel's goal, so I thought the payoff might be worth it. I knew a plot twist was coming, but I really was unprepared for what it actually was. When it decided to finally drop the bomb of a plot twist, it was so random and unjustified, it felt infuriatingly stupid. There was an epilogue to CLoS that was later tied to some overpriced DLC, but it didn't fix any of the problems. It just suffered from similar issues and you'd be better off watching someone play it on YouTube than paying the obscene amount of money for the middling content. I was irritated for having been curious enough to see its story to its completion only to discover that a cheap conclusion had been thrown in there to wrap it up—I imagine it's how many fans of Mass Effect felt with Mass Effect 3's ending, but at least those games had more effort put into their stories.

Castlevania's story was separate from the gameplay in a lot of ways, so judging it for its crappy story may be harsh, but because of the fact that the game went on for so long, the gameplay wasn't fun enough to keep me interested. The story eventually became so crucial to the experience by the end, it was more important than anything else the game had to offer; it wasn't providing a reason to keep playing other than the promise of completing Gabriel's quest. So when the quest was finally finished, I realized I just should have quit hours earlier.

Out with the bad, in with the good! Next time we'll discuss some examples of quality video game storytelling which I still consider shining harbingers of interesting plots told well through the medium.

See the other posts about story in video games here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 4

• Part 5