Zelda: Majora's Mask and Zelda: Link's Awakening, Shadow of the Colossus (Spoilers) - Edit 1
Before modification by lord-of-shadow at 26/09/2009 05:24:28 PM
I could probably come up with a few more, but those four are the ones that immediately spring to mind. Why? Because they take advantage of the game medium's storytelling strengths to tell stories that are deep, meaningful, and could not be told in any other medium.
That strength, of course, is player action - the player is actually taking the actions that lead to events.
Let's look at Link's Awakening, for instance. The game has a very minimalistic story (the entire text of the English version is under 10,000 words, which is tiny by today's standards), with few cutscenes, little dialogue, and a small cast of characters. Storytelling is in the form of music, location, and artifacts as often as not. Often-times, bits and pieces of info are found scattered throughout the island, often optional, and the way it is implemented makes the player feel as if they are discovering this story due to actions that they are choosing to take.
And yet that small cast of characters, and their minimal interaction with the player, creates a fairly poignant tale that culminates in the player awakening the Windfish in full knowledge of the fact that doing so will make the little island world that you have explored and grown to love, along with al it's denizens, disappear. That is fairly powerful stuff, and it could not be done in any other medium - the reason it is powerful is becaise it is the player who gets to know the world, and then the player's actions that cause the world to disappear. It could never be as powerful in a book or a movie, watching or reading about some other character doing and feeling these things.
Shadow of the Colossus is another example. It is the most minimalistic story I've ever seen in a game where the narrative is an important facet. You are presented with minimal information at the beginning and forced to draw your own conclusions. You begin hunting down these Collosi to resurrect a girl - love interest, sister, who knows? - at the bidding of a voice that tells you it will restore her life in return for their destruction. You immediately start with the understanding that this might not be a very good idea, a feeling that is reinforced and grows stronger as you destroy these ancient, monolithic beings one by one, hear their plaintive and resonant cries as they crash to the ground. At the end of the game, the revelation about why this was bad, etc., comes with the knowledge that it was you, the player, who destroyed these things. Personally. You undertook the actions that led to this series of events, undiluted by unnecessary dialogue or history. Again, a sense of personal impact and involvement that could only come from a game, and in fact came about through the conscious discardment of other medium's storytelling tools.
This is taking longer than I thought, so I won't go into as much detail with Majora's Mask... suffice to say, the three-day system was a brilliantly-designed way to immerse a player in a character-based world, and truly get to understand a large cast of small but powerful characters as they live their lives through a cataclysmic 3-day span. Unlike the other two, this could theoretically be done in a traditional storytelling medium, but this method relies almost entirely on repetition of a three-day sequence and getting to know a large cast that is brought together by one fact - the impending fall of the moon. I don't know that it could be feasibly done in anything but a video game, for time constraint reasons if nothing else.
That strength, of course, is player action - the player is actually taking the actions that lead to events.
Let's look at Link's Awakening, for instance. The game has a very minimalistic story (the entire text of the English version is under 10,000 words, which is tiny by today's standards), with few cutscenes, little dialogue, and a small cast of characters. Storytelling is in the form of music, location, and artifacts as often as not. Often-times, bits and pieces of info are found scattered throughout the island, often optional, and the way it is implemented makes the player feel as if they are discovering this story due to actions that they are choosing to take.
And yet that small cast of characters, and their minimal interaction with the player, creates a fairly poignant tale that culminates in the player awakening the Windfish in full knowledge of the fact that doing so will make the little island world that you have explored and grown to love, along with al it's denizens, disappear. That is fairly powerful stuff, and it could not be done in any other medium - the reason it is powerful is becaise it is the player who gets to know the world, and then the player's actions that cause the world to disappear. It could never be as powerful in a book or a movie, watching or reading about some other character doing and feeling these things.
Shadow of the Colossus is another example. It is the most minimalistic story I've ever seen in a game where the narrative is an important facet. You are presented with minimal information at the beginning and forced to draw your own conclusions. You begin hunting down these Collosi to resurrect a girl - love interest, sister, who knows? - at the bidding of a voice that tells you it will restore her life in return for their destruction. You immediately start with the understanding that this might not be a very good idea, a feeling that is reinforced and grows stronger as you destroy these ancient, monolithic beings one by one, hear their plaintive and resonant cries as they crash to the ground. At the end of the game, the revelation about why this was bad, etc., comes with the knowledge that it was you, the player, who destroyed these things. Personally. You undertook the actions that led to this series of events, undiluted by unnecessary dialogue or history. Again, a sense of personal impact and involvement that could only come from a game, and in fact came about through the conscious discardment of other medium's storytelling tools.
This is taking longer than I thought, so I won't go into as much detail with Majora's Mask... suffice to say, the three-day system was a brilliantly-designed way to immerse a player in a character-based world, and truly get to understand a large cast of small but powerful characters as they live their lives through a cataclysmic 3-day span. Unlike the other two, this could theoretically be done in a traditional storytelling medium, but this method relies almost entirely on repetition of a three-day sequence and getting to know a large cast that is brought together by one fact - the impending fall of the moon. I don't know that it could be feasibly done in anything but a video game, for time constraint reasons if nothing else.