Originally published August 2016

Welcome back to my extended analysis of storytelling and fiction in video games. In previous entries, I've discussed the general purpose of having stories in video games, how games have been able to implement simple stories without harming their overall quality, and how other games bit off more of their poor stories than they could chew and suffered for it. Today, I'd like to discuss the gems of the games industry that managed to tell lengthy, involving, and interesting stories using straightforward, but solid story-telling methods.

Harbingers of Brilliance

There are numerous games that come to mind for anyone who enjoys a good story in a video game. The Legend of Zelda and its sequels, Half-Life 1 & 2, or even, the more recent, Bioshock are often easy picks for most people. For me, however, I always thought the best parts of both those games were the gameplay and mechanics. Their stories certainly had more depth than you'd expect, and they even went in some interesting directions with their stories, but they never quite had the impact on me as some of my personal favorites.

Of course, I could talk about the non-traditional storytelling methods of Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, but I've already done so at length over the course of the various reviews I've written. So, rather than retreading ground, I'd like to share some other examples that are worth recognizing for their stories and game design that personally impacted me in a positive way. Before Dark Souls became my favorite game to go back and play again and again each year, there was another game that I had discovered in my youth and would play through over and over each Christmas. Why Christmas? Because that was the time of the year in which I had originally tried it, and it stuck with me as a result.

The original Deus Ex is a game that many people recognize as an important entry in gaming history. It did a lot of new things for different genres of video games all at once. For one thing, it showed that the PC market was not dead amidst the growing console tide. It showed that there were some interesting games being made for the PC that weren't just made by Blizzard. It changed how role-playing game mechanics could be used in genres you would never think would have them, like first-person shooters: before Call of Dutyhad Perks, Deus Ex had Augments. It also further built upon the path that Half-Life paved in the way first-person shooters could tell stories, the complexity of their stories, and the level of maturity in video game stories.

Before Deus Ex, the most mature shooters I knew of were Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake. All of these were considered mature, but not necessarily for the same reason as Deus Ex or Half-Life. Deus Ex's maturity stemmed from its focus on adult subject matters like conspiracy theories, governments working alongside mega-corporations against the general public, invasion and control of people's privacy, bionic super soldiers with no free will, etc. Very few games of the era chose to tackle subject matters like that. Most of the time, if a story was big and epic, it was about saving the world, not about uncovering some shady shit the government was doing.

In some ways, I think of Deus Ex as the Jaws of video games. Both Deus Ex and Jaws managed to do multiple things at once in terms of genre. They managed to set various standards for how other similar products of their respective mediums were designed and presented. They also established storytelling elements in that have become widespread clichés due to their abundance.

Chances are quite high that if you've played a game in the past 10 years, you have played a game that was influenced by Deus Ex in some way or another. Don't think so? I already mentioned Call of Duty, but if you haven't played that, have you ever played a game that had you working for a particular agency only to discover that you were working for the villains the whole time? What about a first-person shooter that allowed you to give your character abilities and upgrade them with experience points you gained over time? What about making choices and completing quests that determined the ending, or whether or not important characters would even live to the third act?

It may just be the nostalgia talking, but I think that Deus Ex holds up relatively well in terms of everything about it, except for the physical presentation. It certainly looks its age with the muddy textures and bland shading to environments and characters. Not to mention, the voice acting ranges only from "OK" to "terrible." However, the developers were able to create an immersive and interesting world by injecting it with an endless supply of well-written material. It was all for the sake of making a more interesting and constructed world. There were a ton of emails to snoop through that never had an ounce of impact on the plot, but were written in a way that felt like the characters were people in this dystopian future. There is just so much of it, yet you could miss it if you just never walked into a room or looked through someone else's email in the game. That makes it feel more like reality in a way. The subconscious understanding that we could miss out on a conversation about how a maintenance man knows one guy always buys orange soda from a vending machine and rigging it to only give lemon/lime helps build a more cohesive world with mechanics and software that is ancient by today's standards, but still far more impressive than most other games.

Like Jaws, I think that Deus Ex is still a great artifact of its medium that will continue to stand the test of time. It blew my mind when I first played it, and it still continues to surprise me by how they managed to fit so much into a game of that era.

Speaking of games that blew me away in terms of what they managed to cram in, Chrono Trigger is an amazing game that anyone who enjoys role-playing games should play. It's often considered one of the best games on the Super Nintendo and even is considered among the top 5 games of all time on many lists. Even though I had not played until only about six years ago, and even after having played so many games since its initial release that were undoubtedly inspired by it and may have improved upon it, I would still happily agree with anyone who said it was the best game ever made. It's not my personal favorite, but I think that it makes for a very strong case.

Part of the reason I'd say it has such an impact on game design is the ingenuity that was involved in making such an absolutely massive game fit into the limited technology of a Super Nintendo cartridge. Sure, it's a 16-bit, 2-dimensional, flat, JRPG that doesn't have any voice-acting or CGI. However, the story it tells spans a huge amount of time through different eras of history on this fantastic planet. There are numerous locations to visit in the game, which all change drastically based on the time period in which you visit because the game is all about time travel. You could travel to prehistoric ages, or all the way into a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland, before that type of landscape became a cliché thanks to games like Rage, Borderlands, and Fallout. Much like Deus Ex, it came out at a time when the tropes of the genre weren't quite established as clichés. Due to the fact the developers could make some simple or complex map adjustments to certain areas as you travel through time, they were able to dump a ton of content into this game.

And the content is great! The fighting is fun, the adventures are interesting, and the characters are mostly entertaining. It still has some of the same plot holes you get in every time-travel story. Yet, it's a game that was extremely expansive and ambitious with the story it was trying to tell. It has different endings based on the characters you have in your party and what time period you choose to face the final boss. There are numerous optional quests you could complete that actually affect characters related to your party members. Some of your party members may even die by the end, something not many games were willing to do back in the 16-bit era.

Did I mention the gameplay is good? Well, it would have to be for a game to garner as much praise as Chrono Trigger does. Obviously, this article is about story so I won't say too much, but there have been a few battle systems in Japanese RPGs that I wouldn't mind appearing in multiple games. CT has one of those systems. Unlike all the people ready for a Final Fantasy VII remake who think that the game's battle system holds up, I'd much rather stick with Chrono Trigger's system because the gameplay is still very satisfying and the story doesn't depend on characters being cooler than cool. I'm not alone in this thought because even modern developers are making games that are practically carbon copies of CT's gameplay mechanics with recent releases like I Am Setsuna.

More so than Deus Ex, Chrono Trigger is helped by the limitations of the technology. These limitations make the ambition of the game designers more apparent and the story more charming for its complexity within its simplicity. CT brought numerous twists and turns to storytelling in video games that hadn't been seen before. It's also recognized for gameplay is still enjoyable to this day. Even as someone who didn't play it until only 6 years ago, I can appreciate and acknowledge Chrono Trigger as a masterpiece that I would gladly play again.

The last "masterpiece" of storytelling I'll mention is the game story that spanned a trilogy. This is a game franchise that I often refer to for a quality check on the craft in the medium. It is a trilogy that every game should strive to match in storytelling and craft when presenting a story to players. I'm talking, of course, about Ecco the Dolphin.

... no, not really.

All joking aside, the game trilogy that I'm really talking about is The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver trilogy. Soul Reaver and its sequels are easy entries in my list of favorite games ever made. Considering the simple, humble, and somewhat uninteresting beginnings of the Legacy of Kain franchise, the Soul Reaver storyline elevates the franchise to a higher level. I've heard a great deal of praise for the original Legacy of Kain game, Blood Omen, but it never really struck me the way the Soul Reaver games did. Soul Reaver and its sequels were ambitious and surprisingly consistent for video game storytelling at the time of their releases, more than most other games to this day seem to be able to manage with much more money and technology behind them.

Part of the reason for their consistency was the fact that from Soul Reaver's beginnings, there was a person at the helm of the ship, steering it towards its destination, unlike the massive franchises like Assassin's Creed or God of War, which have had different game directors involved over the course of their sequels. Soul Reaver and its sequels were directed by Amy Hennig, who many game fans and developers know as one of the best in the business. After the Soul Reaver series, she went on to garner more praise by directing games like Jak & Daxter and Uncharted 2, and is now working on a new Star Wars game and has even been touted in the marketing for it because of how much people respect her. This was someone who had better insight into to the characters of her franchises and didn't go completely off the rails into directions that didn't make sense for those characters because she wrote those characters to begin with. And what characters they are.

The main protagonist of Soul Reaver, Raziel, is a former vampire who was cast out by his father, Kain. He was not just banished but killed in a tortuous fashion by having his wings ripped out and being flung into a swirling abyss by his disloyal brothers. After a second death, he finds himself reborn as a soul-eating wraith, bound for vengeance against his family at the whim of an elder god. It's a familiar and straightforward premise you've certainly heard before. How many movies have you watched where the main character was thought dead but comes back to eliminate the villains? The Punisher, or even more appropriately Spawn have distinct similarities to Raziel, but Raziel as a character makes the journey far more interesting.

Raziel is a tortured and conflicted soul. He looks upon his new devastated shape as deformed and grotesque: a shallow husk of his former self. He views what he had as a vampire lord with a sense of longing and pride. Yet, as time goes on, he starts to rebuke that thought. He begins to see what vampirism really is from an outside perspective, but he still doesn't discard his self-hatred or his hatred for that of his family. He is driven by revenge for a while but soon starts to unravel a deeper plot that leads him down a rabbit hole. Like Chrono Trigger, it eventually involves time travel which comes with various complexities and stipulations, but, like Chrono Trigger, I think it pulls it off beautifully.

Part of what Soul Reaver has that Chrono Trigger lacks is the depth of the characters. The original Soul Reaver is really only about Kain and Raziel—who both happened to be voiced by the same person, though you wouldn't necessarily notice right away. You encounter other characters in dramatic moments, but none have as much of a lasting effect as the primary characters. In Soul Reaver 2, the side characters start making a bigger impact and suddenly there's intrigue and conspiracy in a grim, gothic story about vampires in a medieval landscape. By the final chapter of the game trilogy, both characters have gone through various revelations and grown in such a way that their personalities remain consistent, but their motivations and goals have changed in meaningful ways.

I think these games hold up particularly well, assuming you can get them to work on whatever hardware you're using. The graphics, much like the other games mentioned in this post, are very dated, though, they improved as the sequels moved on to new hardware. What really counts is that the art design is there with some creative and stunning creature designs that were both inspired by some classic, familiar designs and were inspirations to other games that would follow. Most importantly, it makes up for all of the misgivings with some of the best writing and voice acting a video game has ever had. Even picking the game back up today, some of the crap Raziel says is so poetic you would laugh if not for the fact that it’s delivered in a way that makes it sound beautiful, macabre, and appropriate for the character. Not to mention, you've got the vocal talents of the late, great, Tony Jay, as the elder god who constantly bellows his directions and omens with the most recognizably ominous tone in a voice.

I'm obviously being more vague about the content of the games featured here than I was with the games that I thought had bad stories, but that's because, if you're interested in these titles, you should play them and not just take my word for it—Don't get Legacy of Kain on Steam, though; it doesn't work well and its unsupported. Decades after their release, they are still worth your time and still worth the surprises they hold. As I said, there are other games that people may hold in higher regard in terms of storytelling, but these are some personal choices that immediately come to my mind as inspirations for story, characterization, and plot for the video game medium.

Please return for my brief final discussion article on the game genre that first promoted story in games in a big way and how their presence has made a resurgence as of late, for better or worse.

See the other posts about story in video games here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 5