This isn’t an argument that video games are legitimate forms of expression. I think we’re passed that point now. With games like Last of Us, the Bioshock series, Journey and a myriad of others from the past few years (not to mention our beloved childhood storytellers Squaresoft and the Final Fantasy series) I think we all know that video games can be art. However, I think we can also all agree that not all of them are. Even technically sound, fun as hell games with amazing graphics might look really cool and still fail at having great, or even good, stories.
For instance, I absolutely love the Army of Two series. They’re not the best third-person shooters cover-based shooters in the world but they are among the rare games that are designed to be two-player co-op. That, with the ability to play split screen on the same couch with your friend is a huge draw in the modern age of video games. They’ve got fun mechanics, acceptable graphics and I’ve had a blast playing through all three games in the series. Story wise though? Not so great. Despite having played all three of them I can basically tell you nothing more than “a bad guy has done and/or is doing something bad and two dudes need to stop them and kill a million other dudes.” In fact, upon writing that sentence I have just realized the Army of Two is basically just a modern day retelling of Bad Dudes. Anyhow, fun game with almost no focus or attention paid to a complex story.
That’s not what we’re talking about today though. Today we’re talking about games with good stories and terrible delivery. A few things jumped up when I started thinking about this topic. Namely a slew of original Playstation games. I played a lot of JRPG titles back in the day and terrible translation often made the delivery of otherwise wonderful stories downright terrible. Final Fantasy Tactics and Legend of Dragoon spring instantly to mind. Both games had their merits in terms of story but in the delivery? “I had a good feeling” is just the tip of the mis-translated folly of these games that are comprised of thousands of lines of text being translated under a deadline. Tactics has one of the greatest stories in video games but the hilariously bad translation of some of the dialogue stuck out so badly that they completely redid most of the dialogue on the “War of the Lions” re-release, they pretty much retranslated the whole game.
Of course, Capcom took it to another level with the absolutely God-awful full motion video segments of the first Resident Evil game (not to mention the terrible voice over throughout, who can forget the “master of unlocking” scene?). Somehow, in those early days we could consider a game to be “great” despite the delivery of the story being so crap. It was sort of like the “so bad it’s good” philosophy of watching a B-movie. If the gameplay was good, and the story was fun, even if it was terribly translated and voice-acted, the game could still be considered a success and an amazing game.
It had been years however since I had experienced anything like that until I played DmC, the PS3 reboot of the Devil May Cry franchise. Naturally, this game was released by Capcom, masters of video game camp. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
