There are many games with plots far more complex than Kingdom Hearts that manage to stick the landing in just a single title. The Tales series is one such example. The plot in a Tales game is incredibly dense with well established characters, villains, and secondary characters that help form the underlying infrastructure in the plot.
Generally speaking, a Tales game sets you off on your journey with a simple goal in mind, whether it's to help the Chosen One survive her journey to regenerate the world or work with the would-be assassin of your teacher to get back home. Additional details and the ultimate goal of the plot is given to you as a reward for completing a dungeon or major milestone in the story, while slowly drip feeding you details about characters that better rounds them out. Hell, there's even detail in characters' cooking preferences, like how Colette is most skilled at desserts, Lloyd hates tomatoes and likes meat, or that Raine is terrible at cooking and keeps adding lemons into everything.
All the while the plots have some sort of theme to them, characters are in the party for a specific reason, and the villain has some kind of endgame in mind that the heroes are also trying to accomplish, but with a much more malevolent method.
The Elder Scrolls games are known for having an absurdly dense amount of lore, defined by the ever-expanding library of books that have been added to each new entry, and how many dungeons have their own self-contained storyline (or a multi-dungeon storyline as what happened in Skyrim). The punchline is that most of this is just flavor text to add detail to what was once some guy's D&D campaign. Did you know that during the Oblivion Crisis, the Redoran revived the Emperor Crab shell that makes up the centerpiece of Ald-Ruhn to fight off the Daedric hordes? Or that the Daedric Prince Molag Bal committed the first rape, which was what created the vampires? Or how about the fact that Jiub, the Dunmer and first NPC you meet in Morrowind is annointed as a saint when he eradicates the Cliff Racers from the province?
None of this contributes anything to the overall story in any of the games, but it's interesting details and flavor text that you can fish out of a book or NPC somewhere at your own leisure. The game doesn't unnecessarily bog you down with it, because ultimately it doesn't do anything to tell you why a dragon is burning down your nine homes.
Mass Effect, for all the problems it has these days, succintly summarized side stories without throwing you too far into the weeds. James Vega had his own side story during the events of Mass Effect 2 where he found valuable intel to fight off the Collector threat, only for the effort and lives lost to go to waste because you happened to defeat the Collectors before his intel could be of any use. Captain Anderson also summarized an entire book about the time he worked with Saren Arterius and learned the hard way how ruthless he was.
Besides that, there is also the glut of Codex entries that give elaborate detail on the lore of the setting, the races, their cultures and religions, how Mass Effect drives work, histories and descriptions of individual planets and so on. Most of this isn't necessary, but it's there for flavoring, and the side stories don't pretend to be far more relevant than they really are. Again, one of them ends up being a shaggy dog story simply because you, the player, saved the day at the wrong time.
Kingdom Hearts needed a bit of that narrative focus years ago. Without a proper focus, the storytelling goes all over the map. Games that would otherwise be considered side stories are suddenly made direct sequels to the numerical entries in the series, and without their inclusion, you lose important details, like why half of Organization XIII are just absent from Kingdom Hearts II, or that there is even an Organization XIII at all.
Hopefully Square Enix and specifically Tetsuya Nomura learned something about narrative focus these past seventeen years with the long overdue closure to the series, or at the very least, the story they wanted to tell here. Next time, I don't think we're going to be so forgiving, especially if we have to wait another 14 years for a proper sequel.
| Viewed: |
26 times |
| Added: |
5 years, 2 months ago
30 Jan 2019 05:55 CET
|
|
|
