Mass Effect 3 is great in hindsight, especially with the fixes and the addition of "the citadel".
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Videogame Storylines That Went South
- Thread starter SOLDIER
- Start date
I forgot about this one, too, which I think says a lot. From Dragon Ball Z energy beam wars to the godawful shit they did to Kerrigan's character (who I'd say was one of the best video game antagonists period in the original and Brood War)... that story was something.
The ending to SC2 is straight up like the writers hated the series and its fans at that point, and intentionally decided to press the self-destruct button. The excuse is, "Writing video games is hard." But I swear, there are too many examples of things going to absolute garbage that there's something else in terms of internal politics going on sometimes.
Trails in the Sky: The Third. You'd think a side story about the mysterious priest you met in Second Chapter would be cool but it feels so filler, you know? I haven't finished it yet. Ries's constant talking of food feels like something that's supposed to be endearing but isn't to me. The real shame is that her introduction was cool as hell. I think I stopped playing on the Chapter where she refuses to be in your party. My stopping playing not related. I just didn't feel like playing anymore.
Funny you should mention this. I recently discovered My Name is Byf on YouTube, who goes down the rabbit hole of Destiny lore. It is shocking just how deep that lore runs. I'm a huge Destiny fan but why oh why did they not make it all easily accessible in the game from then get go.
I'm sorry, OP, but the Tomb Raider reboot's story didn't "go south" in the sequels, it had already made its way way down to the South Pole by the time the first game's credits started rolling. (And no offense but the fact that you thought any of the previous iterations of Lara Croft went tomb raiding for fame shows that you literally know nothing about the stories of previous Tomb Raider games.)
Didn't they change a bunch of story stuff pretty late in development?
I guess the original Assassin's Creed "trilogy" is an example of a series' story starting out strong but then steadily decreasing in quality. The first game's story was great, the second game's still good but a little flawed and from Brotherhood onwards it was a bit of a shit-show (especially ACIII).
Persona 5. Oh god, Persona 5.
The first arc is legit good with a real prickish villian that I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with but is rarely shown in media. The main cast is at their best with motivations that make sense and some real discussion on if what they're doing is right or wrong. Each arc after that ditches all of those points and gets progressively worse until all the characters are ruined and anime nonsense is in full effect.
The first arc is legit good with a real prickish villian that I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with but is rarely shown in media. The main cast is at their best with motivations that make sense and some real discussion on if what they're doing is right or wrong. Each arc after that ditches all of those points and gets progressively worse until all the characters are ruined and anime nonsense is in full effect.
This thread is honestly just making me want to play Indigo Prophecy so I can experience the madness myself.
Anyway my answer to this thread is definitely the original Assassin's Creed modern day storyline. Really intriguing and enjoyable through 1,2, and Brotherhood. Then hides the reason behind the crazy ending to Brotherhood to DLC and craps the bed in Revelations and 3.
Anyway my answer to this thread is definitely the original Assassin's Creed modern day storyline. Really intriguing and enjoyable through 1,2, and Brotherhood. Then hides the reason behind the crazy ending to Brotherhood to DLC and craps the bed in Revelations and 3.
I still haven't forgiven Assassin's Creed 3 for the steaming dump it took all over the series overarching storyline and for killing the massive potential modern day AC had.
I will say that I really liked the book-end to this in Shadow. In the oil refinery, there's a one-on-one combat scene that mimics her first fight almost exactly, but the game takes a moment on it. It's to show just how far she's come from those early days on Yamatai and how ruthless she's become. I thought that was a pretty good character progression moment.
Plot wise though, the end of Shadow was a little incoherent. "Here's the rest of the Trinity organisation in a helicopter to see the grand finale! Oh look, the helicopter crashed and they're all dead!" They loved the scale of a worldwide conspiracy but had no idea how to bring it down AND bring in Lara's personal grudge.
(Best Lara's Parents story is still Underworld.)
I'm playing Valkyria Chronicles 4 right now and the "comfyness" of the game got me thinking on VC1's ugly late game where you're supposed to care more for the Booby Witch enemy than a massive chunk of your own countryfolk who died FROM HER ACTIONS cuz they're like mean or something. Then there's the end boss who was FFXII's all over again. *SNOORRRRRE*
The fact the devs specifically said that "color ending thing" WOULDN'T happen is amazing.
"Behold, for I am the end, the doom, the absolute singularity of insanely stupid deus ex machina bullshit! You thought you did anything useful until now? NOPE! Fuck you and your journey, now go press one of these three buttons to get your choice of colored ending!"
-Mass Effect 3
The fact the devs specifically said that "color ending thing" WOULDN'T happen is amazing.
I agree, Chapter 3 is a complete waste of time. Chapter 4 has some fun moments. Chapter 5 the game literally goes off the rails lol
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I used to play Mass Effect 1 and 2 multiple times every year, then 3 came out which I loved until the last half an hour shat on the themes of the series (including the themes espoused within ME3 itself, that game is contradictory as fuck). It was soul crushing. I don't play them anymore. Andromeda didn't do much for me at all, I quite dislike it but there wasn't much emotional baggage at that point so whatever.
I quite like Zero Time Dillema in isolation, but damn if it isn't an awful sequel to VLR. So much promise set up in that game that wasn't delivered on. And some weird ass character shifts for Akane and Jumpy, what the hell happened to those two?
Layton vs Ace Attorney is a game I really like, and I can even put up with the absolutely absurd bullshit Layton twists. But I cannot abide by how dirty the game did Phoenix in the last trial. The game treats him as practically worthless in comparison to Professor Layton, which really hurts because he has such good characterization in the rest of that game. I get frustrated with games plenty, but I don't think I've ever been as mad as I was here. Layton's "Have a Look" voice clip continues to haunt me to this day.
I quite like Zero Time Dillema in isolation, but damn if it isn't an awful sequel to VLR. So much promise set up in that game that wasn't delivered on. And some weird ass character shifts for Akane and Jumpy, what the hell happened to those two?
Layton vs Ace Attorney is a game I really like, and I can even put up with the absolutely absurd bullshit Layton twists. But I cannot abide by how dirty the game did Phoenix in the last trial. The game treats him as practically worthless in comparison to Professor Layton, which really hurts because he has such good characterization in the rest of that game. I get frustrated with games plenty, but I don't think I've ever been as mad as I was here. Layton's "Have a Look" voice clip continues to haunt me to this day.
So much squandered potential storywise too. Like the games are still mostly fun to play, but I thought the AC universe was intriguing the first couple games.
Star Control 2. Knights of the Old Republic 2. Neverwinter Nights 2. Fallout: New Vegas. Dungeon Siege 3.
God of War (2018).
It starts off well and interesting, then every hour or two something inconviently blocks your path and requires a few more hours to get by it. Don't even get me started on how poor and underdeveloped the end villain was, the whole thing felt out of place and stupid. If I could sum it up best I would say what should have been the introduction to the game was somehow dragged out into the whole story.
It starts off well and interesting, then every hour or two something inconviently blocks your path and requires a few more hours to get by it. Don't even get me started on how poor and underdeveloped the end villain was, the whole thing felt out of place and stupid. If I could sum it up best I would say what should have been the introduction to the game was somehow dragged out into the whole story.
I know I'm beaten but
This motherfucker hurt me so much.
It's the sequel to Virtue's Last Reward, an amazing visual novel/escape room puzzler hybrid which was itself a (somewhat tacked-on) sequel for 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors.
Riposa in pace, dolce amore, in pace...
999 was completely self contained. It was a story of 9 people who woke up inside a cruise ship and learned they had 9 hours to escape, through a door marked with a 9.
VLR took that story and its reveals and kind of ran with it, in a very respectable way and holding a few new characters as front and centre. It brought its own thematic elements, expanded the concepts 999 introduced, and recontextualized some details from the previous game. It had its shortcomings -a far more tame atmosphere, wackier twists, a shift to 3DS models that did the great character designs no justice- but overall it was an adventure worthy of succeeding 999.
One fact is important, however: It explained its own events very well, but ended on a huge cliffhanger. The events of the third game were set up extremely heavily, tying into all sorts of backstories and bits of unexplained foreshadowing and a new looming mastermind.
Come 2014, this third game's development was put on hold because VLR bombed in Japan. I know because I bought VLR about three days before its sequel got put on hold.
The next year was basically a flurry of fan campaigning. Facebook campaigns, collages sent from ardent fans to Spike Chunsoft and to Kotaro Uchikoshi (series writer-director) for support...
During that year, I ate, drank and breathed Zero Escape. VLR had rocked my world, and got me interested in seeing the narratives only games can convey. There was a sense of unity in the fandom I've simply never seen in any other gaming community ever since. (There was so little toxicity, I feel, that even the threads about the series on /v/ were welcoming and approachable). Thousands of us kept trying to achieve one goal: Bringing back Zero Escape 3.
Aksys, the company who localized the first two games, put up a cryptic teaser on March 18th, 2015.
This image. The hashtag #4infinity.
People went wild. We scoured every inch of the website looking for some clue that this was Zero Escape 3. (the 0-3 felt too good to be true so we needed more.)
Every week, the counter went down and a new word appeared. In the meantime people tried to decipher what this was about.
Here's the answer: It was a countdown for 3 WEEKS and 3 MONTHS. Counter went like this: 0303,0302,0301,0300,0203,0201...
At Anime Expo 2015, July 3rd, Zero Escape 3 was announced.
That announcement is my favorite moment in gaming. Period. I literally tear up and get goosebumps every time I watch it, still. Seeing that happen is unironically one of my most treasured memories, ever.
(VLR SPOILERS)
It was a goddamn 4 month long teaser, the stream never worked so we actually learned the announcement from livetweeters, and it would be another 6 months before we got more information besides a piece of concept art (the first pic in this post, and only the pic, the logo and name came later), and people who preordered the game first got it the latest (a month late) due to limited edition watch fuckery. But Uchikoshi standing there and pronouncing that Zero Escape 3 was alive and was coming in a year was worth EVERYTHING.
(Edit: The thread on the old site about this is literally my favorite thread of all time. Those were the good days...)
Game ultimately comes out, reviews are great, the premise sounds amazing, the game's somehow not a visual novel anymore but a Telltale-esque adventure game in 3D, and nothing stops this train.
...Except the part where the game itself shat the bed.
Most importantly, it just tried to act like it was not a sequel to Virtue's Last Reward at all. The few but important mysteries left hanging from its predecessor -the root of an illness, the identity of a major character- were relegated to afterthoughts, only appearing right before an ending to provide a haphazard explanation for what was going on. Characters weren't sophisticated like they were in the previous games.
There was some amazing new music, but they played for practically 1/3 of the game and the rest were remixes or straight lifts of songs from previous games- they got so overplayed they took the impact out of some of the most impactful tracks from both games.
The game, due to plot devices, separated the 9 main characters into groups of 3 and they were kept in those groups until the last 10%-20% of the game. All character development got stilted, and the character interactions in the first 2 hours were basically repeated throughout the game.
On top of that, the ending was open-ended again with a few deus ex machina devices plopping open and oozing out of the plot holes left unexplained or handwaved in both games to deliver a "power of friendship yay!" message. And I actually came around to the game's nihilistic themes, if only it had executed them anywhere near competently.
The new Telltale style turned out pretty horrible with characters barely showing emotion, hamstring animation making comic puppetry out of scenes that would've destroyed me if properly done. The new characters being utterly uninteresting for the most part, the game being significantly shorter compared to VLR, and an ending so haphazardly put together and hilariously contrived that they would've made the most bizarre and hilarious memes I've ever seen, if even thinking of them didn't ruin my day because I remembered the ending was so shit, were the icing on the shit cake that is Zero Time Dilemma splattered with the bones, flesh and blood of my expectations from this game.
I am happy we got it, for closure's sake, for otherwise I would've spent my days wishing for a Zero Escape 3 still.
But that doesn't mean it has been any less a disappointment for me and many more people I know. 999 steered in my life in a new direction and VLR was my favorite game of all time for years. I made friends thanks to those two games, I found out about visual novels, I got more engaged with games overall, I found a new love for sci-fi thanks to VLR, they shaped who I am and perhaps will ever be.
After Zero Time Dilemma, I cannot recommend this series in good faith anymore. I know some people have enjoyed ZTD and I'm genuinely happy for them- I wish I did, too.
Good times.
I'm so glad I enjoyed ZTD. I mean it has its problems (mainly returning characters acting liking completely different people), but I was overall satisfied.
This. KH1 remains my favorite game of the series because its plot was fairly straightforward and most of the Disney worlds you visited felt relevant to the overall plot. All the crazy, convoluted stuff that's happened in the following games (Nobodies, data copies, time travel, etc.) just feel so unnecessary.
I'm still really psyched for KH3, which looks to hopefully make the Disney stuff more relevant again at least, but I hope they go back to more of the simplicity of KH1 for the next saga.
The hero of the Citadel who prevented the back-door Reaper attack in 2183 that could've caused galaxy-wide genocide as it did all previous cycles of civilization every 50K years.
ME1 and 2: Prevent the Reaper invasion to save the Galaxy!
ME3: How about "SAVE EARTH" from the Reaper invasion!? Yeah, saving Earth sounds way cooler. Also screw that we had a council of humans (potentially) in ME2, and your councilor (potentially) got sick of politics so he's the guy who defends Earth while you distract every other race from their repelling of Reapers on homeworlds to come join your pointless fight on Earth.
Ashley Williams: "What are we gonna do? Shoot bullets at those things?"
Game: "Yes, Ashley. Just line up the ground troops because this is WAR now."
People: "So do we know how to actually hurt Reapers?"
*Everyone shrugs*
Plot: "There's a deus ex machina superweapon where we didn't look all along! However we have no idea what it does but just put faith in it!"
Player: "Ok what about Cerberus, they looked into the Reaper stuff in 2."
Game: "They're indoctrinated and Illusive Man is EVIL now."
Player: "...When the fuck did that happen?"
Game: "Timeskip!"
Player: "But... I didn't even give him the collector base?"
Game: "..."
Catalyst: "Hi, I'm the ending, the subject that ties everything together is now suddenly Organics vs Synthetics and your choices thus far don't mean anything so here's 3 choices that resolve Organics vs Synthetics because that's totally the real story we're telling now, just deal with it."
Fuck that game.
For real. The premise of the third game was so fucking stupid that I couldn't even play it for more than a few hours.
I don't get how people even made it to the ending only to start complaining then. The game was undermining everything you'd done from the beginning.
I regret my previous stance, but still believe 99.9% of game stories turn to trash as they strive to make excuses for a sequel.
The ending was so bad I guess it makes the rest of the game look amazing in comparison.
OP
OP
What do you mean by "comfyness"? As in it's lighter in tone?
I've heard that VC3 is extremely grimdark. I can't believe we haven't gotten an HD remaster or something.
Yeah it was mentioned and I feel silly for not thinking of it earlier.
One of my favourite sequels to one of my favourite games :)
Ctrl+f "Condemned"
What, seriously!? No one mentioned Condemned 2: Bloodshot!?
It's a very infamous example of a great first game, and a great sequel that's ruined by a story that starts off interesting (taking place directly after the events of the first game), and then turns into really out there nonsense. Worse still, its nonsense retroactively makes the first game's plot re-contextualized into its nonsense, and the response to the fucking twists in this game were so negative it essentially made the franchise come to an early close. It was so badly received that even a couple of developers on the series even said years later if they ever end up making Condemned 3, they're gonna' pretend that Condemned 2 never happened and was just a dream or something.
What, seriously!? No one mentioned Condemned 2: Bloodshot!?
It's a very infamous example of a great first game, and a great sequel that's ruined by a story that starts off interesting (taking place directly after the events of the first game), and then turns into really out there nonsense. Worse still, its nonsense retroactively makes the first game's plot re-contextualized into its nonsense, and the response to the fucking twists in this game were so negative it essentially made the franchise come to an early close. It was so badly received that even a couple of developers on the series even said years later if they ever end up making Condemned 3, they're gonna' pretend that Condemned 2 never happened and was just a dream or something.
I love how some explanations for not understand the story of a game was "you didn't read the tie in comic or book that explains this."
Halo and Assassin's Creed is very guilty of this. AC tied up the the Juno plot from the games in a comic and Halo tried to cram so much stuff from the books in 4 and 5 that I know a few peeps who just didn't understand who some characters were or why they were there (Blue Team & why Buck is a spartan, where is the rest of the ODST crew?). Zaied just pointed out that some of the plot points from the TR reboot were closed in the comics.
Cross media is fine for a lot of franchises, but don't make it required material for me to know what is going on.
Halo and Assassin's Creed is very guilty of this. AC tied up the the Juno plot from the games in a comic and Halo tried to cram so much stuff from the books in 4 and 5 that I know a few peeps who just didn't understand who some characters were or why they were there (Blue Team & why Buck is a spartan, where is the rest of the ODST crew?). Zaied just pointed out that some of the plot points from the TR reboot were closed in the comics.
Cross media is fine for a lot of franchises, but don't make it required material for me to know what is going on.
I loved the entire game (well, most of it) but that first story arc definitely had a certain zing to it that the others didn't.
It felt oppressive and relentless and real. It was almost choking. If the whole game went with it it would have really been something unique.
I don't know if I feel as violently about it as you do, but it felt like P3 and P4 reached the potential of their settings and their plot devices while P5 fell short of what it promised...
This isn't true, though. Assassin's Creed's plot has been moving in a very clear direction for the past two games. AC: Odyssey was full of revelations about the true nature of reality. The ending of Odyssey firmly presses the fragmented pieces of Assassin's Creed lore into a nice little ball that will prove useful for the next game. It's not Kingdom Hearts. Reality is a simulation, and you need to escape the simulation because it's trying to kill you and it keeps getting closer to that goal. That's the plot. That's the only thing players truly need to understand. The Isu? That's important but it's ultimately just something needed to understand what is truly going on. Look at The Matrix. Is understanding the history of The Agents and The One necessary? It's helpful, but as long as you understand the Matrix is not real and there is a layer of reality above it (and maaaaaabye a layer of reality above that ostensibly real layer) you're golden.
I understand people being disappointed that the series decided not to pursue its original Assassin oriented storyline and replaced it with a completely different plot. I understand people who feel the new plot is a downgrade. But the idea the new plot isn't going somewhere is completely untrue. Also, it's not like the new plot is super unclear. Layla literally has a folder on her PC labeled "Reality as a Simulation", in case you didn't play AC: Origins and missed the 20+ minutes of monologues about how reality is a simulation and it's trying to end you and your only chance is to break free. (Be the chaos that comes to be. Gods are just like you and me. Nothing is real. Everything is permitted.) The plot is right there. It's now intimately woven into the fabric of the game.
AC: Odyssey's ending makes the direction of the story painfully unambiguous. I don't see how people can reach the end of of Odyssey and still think the series plot isn't going anywhere. It's a very long game. Perhaps a lot of people haven't reached the ending yet. Also 50% or so of players don't finish games anyway. But that doesn't really excuse anything.
Train go boom.
I thought the story was unnecessarily convoluted. Then I saw a Reddit post which explained what actually happened. What the fuck.
I totally agree about Tomb Raider. Although I always thought the way Lara would act like she had zero self confidence if she could kill anything or any person. But the skills she is given are often beyond simply giving a guy a bullet but involved extremely violent kills with the axe and that one kill with the machine gun while looking like Rambo. It just felt so outta whack. To this day I still think is unsure of herself being able of killing random dude number 374 with an axe through his neck.
Metal Gear.
Almost every mystery, plot point, is handwaved with nanomachines.
even in the end, with Snake almost dying gets resolved with it.
Almost every mystery, plot point, is handwaved with nanomachines.
even in the end, with Snake almost dying gets resolved with it.
I feel the opposite, not only it conveyed its themes successfully, but also the whole idea of persona better than any persona game.
I have my issues with P5 but this is not one of them
This, game drops all pretenses once that one characters apartment tries to kill him. And it is amazing
The Witcher 3
Kotor 2
BG2
Fallout 2 & NV
NWN2 & MOTB
Do you want more or I'll just stop?
While I agree with you in principle, The Witcher 3 pretty badly derails if you look at it as a sequel to The Witcher 2. Most of the actually important story stuff goes unresolved in favor of plot elements that basically come out of nowhere, character personality and motivations are all over the place, and the time jump is almost Crysis 2/3-tier, IMO. I think that overall TW3 benefits from being a game where most people didn't play its predecessor and it's viewed as a standalone thing.
planescape torment
The Last of Us
God of war 2018 rekindled the God of war storyline..
Yes please stop. I might have to edit my post at this point.
Also I don't think Fallout 2 and NV count if you don't include Fallout 4 (and whatever story is in 76).
I shoud have specified TW3 Complete or + expacs.
But yeah there's oblviousy stuff missing from TW3 like Iorveth and many others that got cut or didn't make it final but I wasn't bothred by it since I didn't find TW2 that good in termns of story. Both Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are incredibly written and much better stories then the vanilla game or any of the previous games.
A lot of people dislike Halo 4, thats fair, but I found its campaign to be enjoyable and an interesting set up for the future installments.
The didact, Jul Mdama, the janus key, Chief's struggle with his own humanity, UNSC inability to fully control him or get rid of him.
And then the comics and Halo 5 dumped everything away. Bam. Resolved outside of the games to instead focus on...Locke.
The didact, Jul Mdama, the janus key, Chief's struggle with his own humanity, UNSC inability to fully control him or get rid of him.
And then the comics and Halo 5 dumped everything away. Bam. Resolved outside of the games to instead focus on...Locke.
Hahaha, regardless of what you may think about it, it's commendable in the way that how ballsy for them to pull off that kind of move.
I personally enjoyed the concept, although perhaps in the hands of a more competent developer the execution could maybe be less clumsy.
mass effect 3 gave me bad vibes from the very beginning. like something was off but i couldnt tell entirely til i hit the ending. it was like a flood hit my mind of everything wrong with the game and im not even talking about the endings which is a whole subject on to itself. everything me2 improved on was completely gone and i felt like a stranger on the normandy.
