A magical moment: clicking “run” so that a window pops up and displays a single room of a videogame. My wife drew all the art by hand; I inhaled enough tutorials so that I can handle the coding. The player character for now, Dimbil, can walk around the room, and what’s more, can talk to some NPCs. When you make your own game, the NPCs can say whatever you want them to say. Anything! A blue squiggly guy, Gros, just yells “Gefilte!” when you interact with him. A sprite of the clay model of Teddy from Mother 1 says “Cube Root!” for no reason. No reason, indeed — it’s meaningless as of now, just a playground to work out the tech. But there is something just so tantalizing, so absorbing, about the little shred of agency and control a player gets. It’s a massive artistic opportunity, replete with responsibility, to tell a story in a videogame. It gets one thinking about when it works and when it doesn’t, and how…
Consider three games: Red Dead Redemption 2, Dark Souls, and Disco Elysium. An American game by a gigantic AAA corporation; a Japanese game made by a renowned mid-sized team; a European game from a small indie team of games outsiders. While all three fall under the huge umbrella of ‘RPG,’ the approaches to storytelling could not be more different. There’s much to learn from all three, and learn we must, for the “problem” of telling a story in a videogame is far from solved. In fact, it is so unsolved that with but a handful of exceptions, the best such a story can be is “good for a videogame.” Blech. To be fair, it’s a hard problem — much harder than for books or movies (obviously). But hard does not mean impossible, and someday we will coronate games as having simply “good” stories and writing, without qualification or apology. In the meantime, let’s scratch at the three examples I brought up.
I have elected RDR2 as the representative for the big-budget (and therefore somewhat conservative) Western approach — perhaps quite a bit better than most of its points of comparison, but not fundamentally different. A beloved game — in many ways a masterpiece to be sure — but I’ll say up front that it didn’t quite land for me. RDR2 is great the way the Hoover Dam is great: huge, impressive, a technical achievement. But the Hoover Dam doesn’t make you feel anything more than admiration for engineering — so too RDR2. The graphical fidelity and the animations are unreal; the tech behind the lighting and sound is stunning. More generally, the systems of the game — both the interactive and non-interactive/background systems — are exceedingly well done. Hunting, horseriding, shaving/haircuts, … all balance realism and fun + convenience. Bravo, engineers. But how does the game communicate its narrative on top of all those interlocking systems? The storytelling basically breaks down into two layers: the explicitly-told layer and the ambient/background layer. The former category consists of the cutscenes and the dialogue surrounding the main missions; the latter covers the details of the world design, the actions of minor NPCs, side-quest tidbits, and so on. Let’s go one layer at a time.
The explicit cutscenes + dialogue layer follows the standards that videogames set long ago. Banter during missions doesn’t interrupt gameplay, but said missions are generally bookended by cinematic cutscenes where player control is turned off so that story exposition moves along at exactly the pace, with exactly the camera angles, that the game wants. It’s fine. But it does bug me that in a game advertised as extremely open-world and extremely accommodating of the player’s whims, the cutscenes and dialogue are totally frozen, locked in with no real possibility of role-playing. For unless you are playing as the version of Arthur Morgan whose morality is perfectly gray, you’re going to rub up against some nauseous tonal discontinuities. Arthur’s disposition, his response to all things, boils down to a cool-guy combination of “I’m getting too old for this shit” and “Someone’s gotta do it” with a strangely capitalist sprinkle: “I’ll do it for a good price.” Like Joe Biden, he scoffs at difficult questions and plays the fool, but is also perfectly willing to murder dozens of innocent people to protect his boss’ financial interest. Arthur having essentially zero capacity for critical thought is a necessary precondition for the story’s confused morality. “What if the big boss ‘good’ guy (who continuously kills and loots rivals and civilians alike) actually is … gasp… bad? ‘I never could have seen it coming, even though he has been greedy, corrupt, and bullying for the entire game!’” The Honor slider, a single number that represents the sum of all deeds, is anemic at best, offensive at worst — especially since the game more or less forces you down both “good” and “bad” paths. As far as I know, it’s not really possible to commit to either a purely angelic or psychopathic evil run (at least one that makes any sense), and your Honor value is in fact capped for the first half of the game. To be fair, the designers do shade the dialogue and banter ever-so-slightly based on your Honor. That’s pretty cool, but I can’t help but feel it’s overshadowed by the broad-brush stuff; like, it’s a nice touch that you’re more polite to passersby if you… uh… kill slightly fewer people…? Hmm. I think it boils down to a case of having your cake and eating it too: you can have a silent protagonist, a blank canvas for role-playing, or a fully preconceived character, but when RDR2 tries to mix those options, it produces a protagonist who is essentially a bumbling, morally incoherent idiot, simultaneously a “don’t fuck with me” badass and an utter bitch who will go on a crime spree on behalf of a gang leader or deliver a love letter to a teenager with equal gusto, just because they asked “pretty please.” Likewise, a morality system left to a simple computation, tallying up debits and credits in the eyes of the Lord, is dare I say utterly at odds with, well, actual morality. Giving players choices is great, and giving weight to those choices by tying them up with moral quandaries is also great. But leave it at that! Morality is what you do when nobody is watching or keeping score. The watchmaker’s desire to have every feature of the game interconnected in a web of computations leads to stupid design decisions like getting discounts at stores because of high Honor and looting better items from corpses because of low Honor. To the extent that Honor becomes just another system of transaction begging to be optimized, it is not actually about “honor” or morality.
The background storytelling is pretty standard Rockstar fare: everyone on the street is kind of a dick for some reason, and the world is about 10% sillier than you’d expect. The environment has some really nice touches — two competing farmers, and you can see whose crops are doing better on the border between their fields, for instance — but none that really tell a story. There’s some underlying theme of “the world’s a-changin’ and us outlaws are a dyin’ breed,” but like, OK, so what? I am supposed to feel sympathy for the thieving, murderous bandits? And yeah, yeah, it’s poetic and humorous that the authority figures are incompetent dumbfucks, that the black sheep of the rich family is the only cool one, and so on. But the bottom line is that the story, in all its forms, simply does not realign your real-life mindset or reflect back a vision of the world. The choices don’t feel like they matter, even when they do on some mechanical level. Perhaps it’s an obvious point, but killing versus sparing one guy in one sidequest is meaningless when you will be forced to execute dozens and dozens of equivalent guys just to reach the end credits.
To summarize before moving onto the next game, RDR2 is astoundingly fleshed-out and also polished, but succumbs to the narrative issues we have come to expect from games. The models, animations, and textures are supreme so that the game feels weighty and the locations are actually kind of believable. And the writing isn’t even that bad! — no worse than a Marvel movie or an airport novel. But the game fails to avoid the pitfalls that plague traditional videogame storytelling. The subtlety of little moral choices building up over time is completely obliterated by the senseless violence. The temptation of the designers to build out a tough, cool, and darn handsome protagonist overrides the opportunity for meaningful role-playing. The narrative arc itself — “We are bad, but good, but not as bad as the guys who are also bad, but really bad” — is dumb, par-for-the-course Hollywood drivel. But in defense of Rockstar as a videogame studio rather than movie studio, it’s nearly impossible to pace an idiosyncratic, personal story alongside all these open-ended systems. The final point is not that RDR2 sucks. It’s fun, significant in the history of games, and has quite a lot of stunning moments. But at the end of the day, it didn’t solve The Story Problem.
~ ~ ~
Dark Souls, the game to which all others are now compared, resists the standard storytelling style that RDR2 embodies. After the intentionally cryptic opening, there are very few cutscenes; most are just a few seconds long, introducing a boss, usually with no words at all. NPCs offer up grim, confusing prognostications, but the player character is a mute zombie so there’s not much dialogue in the strictest sense. Is the game narratively anemic — a Byzantine hack-and-slasher thinly wrapped in enigmatic dark-fantastical imagery? You might be forgiven for believing so, at least in 2011 when Dark Souls’ wildfire of popularity and influence was just being kindled. But then what of the countless YouTube videos dissecting the lore, what of the slightly paranoid feeling you get when you play, that the world does in fact cohere in some meaningful way? The answer is that Dark Souls does not necessary “tell” a story in the active sense, but rather contains a story; I’d go even further and claim Dark Souls conceals its own story: a narrative puzzle that compliments the puzzle of the combat and equipment systems. The twin puzzles of the game both juggle many threads of interlocking systems. In a single moment of action in Dark Souls, you may have to consider an array of statistics: the weight, base power, damage type, stat scaling, and moveset of your weapon, plus the frame and hitbox data of its several moves; analogous bundles of information for shields and armor; and the corresponding data for your opponent, not forgetting topographic and other spatial concerns. The lore of the game is similarly complex and multivariate, and also breaks down into interwoven systems: NPC advice; item descriptions; environmental clues; and the narrative implications of the active gameplay itself (such as how if you beat The Great Grey Wolf Sif to within an inch of his life, he will limp and cower like a puppy — oof).
The end product is a story that could only exist in a videogame; books and movies are simply too linear. You experience the plot more archeologically than literarily, but on top of that, the amount of story you experience varies by playstyle, proportionally to the amount of detective work you’re up for. The lower limit for the amount of story you can choose to experience is essentially zero but the upper limit is sky-high, nearly unreachable as a solitary person. On one hand, this must have been a source of pain for developers: the knowledge that potentially a majority of players wouldn’t even really engage with the narrative (imagine releasing an album where half the tracks were concealed by a puzzle that most listeners would not solve). But I dig it, and I commend the bravery. The difficulty of fully accessing the story relies on the incredibly strong and complete action mechanics; you could not get away with this in Final Fantasy. The upside of the risky move is the sense that there exists even more than there really does: it always feels like there’s more to uncover, more to discuss. It’s frankly Talmudic if you factor in all the online commentary and interpretation! But it’s also a bit of a hoax: of course there is some bottom; the game’s data is finite. One wonders how the developers cultivated this effect. With full knowledge and control over the story, it’s quite tricky to put yourself in the mindframe of an eager first-timer. Once you hear Piano Phase, you can never recapture that first moment: “this is it? … Wait, what…?!!” But FromSoft pulled it off!
So how does the story come together, anyway? The most significant source of information is the item descriptions (another bold move by the designers!). Because these descriptions have to be accessed through a menu while no action is underway (there is no pausing in Dark Souls), they are separated from the main gameplay. You could conceivably play for an hour, impaling dudes and rolling around for fifty-two minutes and then taking a break from the impaling by cozying up with some flavor text for eight. Totally different modes of playing. One problem is that not all of the items will be obtained by the player. Another is that the descriptions are not exactly crystal-clear, nor do connections between them make themselves readily known. To be fair, many are self-contained little poems on the theme of bleakness, and do not advance the story per se. Exhibit A:
"Dried Finger with multiple knuckles. Shriveled but still slightly warm.
With this many knuckles, surely it cannot be anything human."
Or a little bit of tough motivation, from the Parrying Dagger (from Dark Souls II, which has even better descriptions overall):
Accomplishments are forever out of reach
to those who constantly fear failure.
A true warrior hones his body and mind,
and peers far beyond immediate hardship.
Woo! That makes you want to fight! Other descriptions, the juiciest story-wise, reference characters and histories that you may or may not encounter, but collectively form a big jigsaw puzzle of lore. Take, for instance, soul spear, a powerful spell from one of two (generally opposed) schools of magic:
Sorcery developed by Big Hat Logan. Fire piercing soul spear.
A symbol of Logan's strength, the soul spear is referenced repeatedly in the legends, and is said to be on par with Lord Gwyn's lightning.
Not so meaningful in isolation, but a little context goes a long way here. Lord Gwyn is the ultimate figure of faith-based magic, whose thematic imagery includes lightning and fire and the sun. Gwyn is known to have slayed the primordial dragons, whose otherwise impervious scales happen to be weak to lightning (indeed, dragon-/drake-like enemies are generally tough but handily dispatched with lightning damage in-game). In other words, he’s a Bad Motherfucker. Big Hat Logan is an NPC you can rescue and ultimately learn from; he’s the top sorcerer in the land, focusing on intelligence-based magic instead. Magic that rises to Gwyn’s level, the game would have you believe, should be impossible, and the spells you acquire earlier in the game are nowhere near that level. But soul spear casts some doubt, adds a fold of intrigue…
Without getting too far into the weeds, you can see how complex the project of unspooling the story from these little fragments becomes. And the item descriptions are just one piece! NPCs can be pretty chatty, and some even react to your possession of certain items with unique lines of dialogue. Fan-favorite Solaire of Astora is first encountered proudly gazing into the setting sun:
"Oh, hello there. I will stay behind, to gaze at the sun.
The sun is a wondrous body. Like a magnificent father!
If only I could be so grossly incandescent!”
This is early into the game, but his words take on deeper meaning once you uncover the thematic thread of Gwyn, sunlight, and lightning. (Indeed, Solaire is an expert in powerful lightning-based magic, namely a miracle (spell) called “Sunlight Blade.”) For what it’s worth, Solaire utters perhaps the most poetic tutorial of online multiplayer ever uttered:
"The way I see it, our fates appear to be intertwined.
In a land brimming with Hollows, could that really be mere chance?
So, what do you say? Why not help one another on this lonely journey?
We are amidst strange beings, in a strange land.
The flow of time itself is convoluted; with heroes centuries old phasing in and out.
The very fabric wavers, and relations shift and obscure.
There's no telling how much longer your world and mine will remain in contact.
But, use this, to summon one another as spirits, cross the gaps between the worlds, and engage in jolly co-operation!
Of course, we are not the only ones engaged in this.
But I am a warrior of the sun! Spot my summon signature easily by its brilliant aura.
If you miss it, you must be blind!"
Lovely.
The third prong of the story is perhaps the most subtle: the unspoken environmental clues built into the world. Just as how the charred stones on the bridge to Undead Parish warn you of the fire-breathing dragon lying in wait (a gameplay signal), many details in the game signal information of narrative significance. A particularly well-fleshed out example: if you take a wrong turn about 30 minutes into the game and descend a locked watchtower, you will encounter a knight in ridiculously heavy armor wielding a ridiculously giant club, and he comes straight for you. Murdering him grants you his ring: Havel’s ring (hence his name should be Havel), with the following description:
This ring was named after Havel the Rock, Lord Gwyn's old battlefield compatriot.
Havel's men wore the ring to express faith in their leader and to carry a heavier load.
Interesting. Why did Havel try to kill you on sight, when Solaire, presumably on the same “team,” was but a big chiller? Wait, was that actually Havel, though? The ring’s description mentions “Havel’s men” — perhaps Havel himself was strong enough to wield the heavy equipment, but his men needed a magical boost. Would that explain his kill-on-sight attitude? The game doesn’t drop any more information. A loose thread, for the time being. But if you thoroughly explore the beloved mid-game area Anor Londo, you can come across a secret basement. For context, Anor Londo is a sunlight-bathed castle easily seen to be Gwyn-related. In the corner of the secret basement sit a few treasure chests containing copies of Havel’s weapon (the Dragon Tooth), shield, and armor. Makes sense — Havel hid his prized possessions in his boy’s fortress. But in the same basement, guarded by a trap, there is a very puzzling item indeed: an Occult Club, a weapon enchanted with magically that specifically counteracts the faith-based magic of team Gwyn. Huh? To make a long story short, the hidden club implies that Havel may have been involved with a plot to betray and overthrow Gwyn, and this may be why he was locked away in the tower, left to “go hollow” (Dark Souls’ way of saying go insane/lose humanity). If you really dig through the data, you can uncover even more juicy details: Gwyn actually cooperated with a rogue dragon named Seath, which may have angered Havel, the avowed dragon-killer, hence his plot of betrayal.
The point is that none of this is spelled out in an on-the-nose cutscene or anything. The meager act of placing a perplexing item in a hidden basement opens up a vast world of speculation. Even more delicious is that there isn’t really a final answer; as with many plots in Dark Souls, you ultimately have to commit to an unfalsifiable theory. Let the imagination run wild. Maybe check on what other fans are saying online… now we’re talking! To be clear, Havel’s side story really has nothing to do with the main actions of the game, and can be totally skipped. It’s just one little thread in a big tapestry. This kind of storytelling, again, simply doesn’t work in a movie; it’s too off the beaten path, too obscure, too multimedia. But for a gamer with archaeological impulses, the game world rewards all that exploration, digging, theorizing.
Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to compare the two, but I’ll take Dark Souls’ interconnected lore-puzzle over RDR2’s movie-emulation any day. It’s more creative, it’s more “at home” in its medium, it’s more modular and adaptable, and it engages the imagination more. It’s a fresh solution to the Story Problem. It’s only fair to point out shortcomings, though: as rich as the lore is, there’s not much actual narrative thrust, in the sense of tension/release, problem/solution; similarly, the characters are not particularly deep as you encounter them in the game — all the depth comes from backstories you must sniff out. As such, the story of Dark Souls is not really emotional at all. And the opacity of the lore really is a valid criticism, as bold as the design choice is. In other words, Dark Souls probably ain’t gonna do it for an RPG player who prefers a story-forward experience and doesn’t want to wade through all the loosely connected flotsam of the story. What is to be done for such a gamer? If you believe in the medium’s capacity to tell a meaningful, emotional, character-driven story but cringe at the campy anime trappings of e.g. Final Fantasy or Xenoblade, where do you turn?
~ ~ ~
The best game of 2019 was Disco Elysium, an RPG with a non-standard but inspiring development backstory: a writer/musician pulls himself out of alcoholism and depression to rework a failed tabletop game + novel into an even more ambitious format. He just so happens to create an utter masterpiece, a videogame for the ages. That DE was produced by outsiders to the game industry is one of its great strengths. An actual oil painter directed the art; an actual rock band recorded the soundtrack; most of all, the developers did not settle for “good for a videogame” writing. It’s just GOOD WRITING. It is impossible to overstate how profound of a difference this makes; I would go so far as to say that DE paves the way for the 21st-century novel, not just the RPG — well-written (action-light) narrative games might save the novel from slipping into whimpery irrelevance. Indeed, all “readers” ought to at least try out DE. But I digress.
Disco Elysium’s basic gameplay formula is nothing particularly unprecedented: it is a computerized tabletop RPG à la Dungeons and Dragons adapted into a single-player format and without quite so much freedom of character creation, at least on the surface. You walk around a detailed, gritty, magical-realist world and the outcomes of interactions are most often decided by dice rolls weighted according to particular stats and environmental factors. However, the bold move that separates DE from DND etc. is that there is no combat at all, no RPG battles, random or otherwise. The challenge of the game instead lies in 1) making sense of the story itself, which centers on an unsolved murder case, and 2) bolstering your chances of succeeding in the dice rolls, many of which must be passed for the story to progress. No reflexes, no grinding; you just look into your heart and try to say the “right” thing. (“Right” could go in so many different ways, though, depending on the role you play or how you value consistency in your character; the game still “works” if you role-play as a disastrous fuck-up.) But what elevates DE to masterpiece levels is the writers’ anticipation of thousands of ways to (role-) play the game. In RDR2, there is a single floating-point number that represents your place on the Honor spectrum, which influences the game’s systems, sometimes in admirably subtle ways, but you can’t, say, give up the life of crime the game pushes on you. Dark Souls presents the player with a small handful of narrative-influencing choices, but the real flexibility lies in building out your stats, weapons, and armor according to your combat style. But for every equipment/stat build in Dark Souls, DE has a kind of “emotional build” — the results of your choices in conversation and even what you choose to think (there is a superbly-done “Thought Cabinet” mechanic that allows you to customize and develop your character’s basic life philosophy..!).
Let’s dig into these systems a bit more. The intellectual motherboard of DE is the imposition of formulaic systems onto (semi-) real-world scenarios. Other “real-world RPGs” like Persona and Earthbound share this core: the almost religious claim that the way the world works can be decomposed, understood, and predicted as a complex, ultimately computational, system, itself made of numerical subsystems. I bet that jillions of kids who grew up with RPGs feel this somewhere subconscious. You can imagine a 12-year-old introspecting, perhaps taking pride in his self-identified intellectual stats — math prowess or reading speed — but lamenting lower physical stats like athleticism or height. And you know what? For better or for worse, this is how the world, or perhaps more specifically the economy, works! We accumulate currency and experience, we identify with our possessions, we play to our strengths and minimize our weaknesses, we grind to develop new skills, and so on. As reductive as the model is, it is pretty dang robust: not a totally crazy way to view your place in society. But earlier semi-realistic RPGs inevitably drag us through some cognitive dissonance, for in non-violent society, it doesn’t really make sense to think of yourself as having “attack” and “defense” stats, for instance, but those stats are necessary for a game that features combat. Enter Disco Elysium — you know the game is on some other shit when you first lay eyes on your list of skills — 24 individual skills in four categories: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. I’ll let the masterstroke of design speak for itself:
Man O man, this is good! What a balance between familiarity and surprise. You have a pretty good sense of what “Logic” and “Hand/Eye Coordination” should mean, but what about “Inland Empire” and “Half Light”? And now here’s the kicker: each of these skills not only influences probabilistic computations (the aforementioned dice rolls), each one is fully voice-acted as a distilled module of your character’s personality. DE does not merely impose computational rules on the economic world, it imposes a psychological theory: that you are made up of many interlocking yet ultimately individual motivations, sub-personalities that synergize and/or compete to weave together the tapestry that is you. Indeed, the skills you pump points into will chime in as internal thoughts mid-conversion, and two skills might even argue amongst themselves. For example, Electrochemistry is essentially your inner drug addict, impulsively lunging at any opportunity to imbibe; your Volition, on the other hand, is more Superego than Id and will resist the whirlpool of alcoholism dangled in front you; these two will literally fight it out in your character’s head. Artistic games change how you see the world after you play them, and DE does just that on the level of psychology, calling into question your free will and your view of your own ambitions. The skills make up just one of the game’s systems, and the others — the dialogue trees, the aforementioned Thought Cabinet, the political affiliations, … — are generally just as deep. Getting back to the main topic of storytelling, DE’s success as a narrative stems from the trio of 1) these fluid, grown-up-RPG systems, 2) engaging, emotionally mature writing, and 3) a sufficiently intriguing premise set in a well-thought out universe complete with history and mythology. It is, dare I say, a jazz-like cocktail. We play pre-composed melodies and forms that bring with them certain cultural aesthetics and baggage, but we improvise our way through them, but the improvisation is not totally unrestricted — our vocabulary and strategies signify our identities as much as our spontaneity does. Just as millions of performances of Stella by Starlight live in the changes, waiting to be coaxed out, millions of earnestly role-played Disco Elysium playthroughs live in the soul of this computer program.
In summary, Disco Elysium was a miracle waiting to happen: a condensation of philosophies floating in the background of other RPGs, ripe fruit picked by an outsider with the perfect skill stack. Millions of novels centered on the same basic premise; countless gradations of character development; thousands of paintings comprising a world we will never visit yet cannot escape; the soft-yet-firm assertion that the both the economy and your own psychology are like computer games. The best videogame storytelling ever and it’s not even close! In fact, Disco Elysium’s solution to The Story Problem is so good that it might have also solved the “but novels aren’t fun anymore” problem along the way. DE has nothing on RDR2 or Dark Souls when it comes to athletic game mechanics or challenges, but that’s not even a valid criticism because that’s not what it’s shooting for. Conversely, RDR2’s forced narrative is almost embarrassingly shallow in comparison; Dark Souls’ story seems needlessly opaque and incoherent, as fun as the archaeology is. The takeaways: it is worth getting REAL writers to do some REAL writing; we the players can handle real storytelling, real emotion, real depth — we’re not all a bunch of pimply digital gunslingers coursing with skeet and Mountain Dew; and lastly, the basic nature of the RPG imposes a structure — a philosophy — on the world, that, if handled gently, can meaningfully shape your outlook.
~ ~ ~
Shoutouts: the Mother series was probably the first set of games to feature truly engaging, personal writing. It’s probably no coincidence that the genius behind the series, Shigesato Itoi, was a games outsider and therefore never even thought to settle for middling quality in his writing. (Undertale is OK but overshadowed by its ancestors.)
The games of Jack King-Spooner are lovely and artistic and, for the most part, excellently written. Dujanah is awesome front-to-back and the newest Sluggish Morss game (Pattern Circus) plays with an ambitious shuffled-narrative structure. SM: PC didn’t quite land the way I had hoped, but I probably owe it another quick playthrough.
Inscryption was an unexpected recent standout. Single-player deck building seems lame on the surface, but the game-within-the-game is actually pretty fun and the story with all its meta trappings is quite well done: not too indulgent but not too obvious either. The middle act sags a bit but the beginning is awesome and the end is cathartic enough.
Elden Ring is the new big boy in town. It triumphantly towers above pretty much every other open-world game but the story is basically exactly the same as the other Souls games. Stuff seems to have happened but the digging needed to make it cohere is a bit much especially when the exploration and combat already demand so much. Not exactly disappointing — the open-world format is almost a death sentence for good storytelling — but this game will be remembered for its other systems, not the story.
~ ~ ~
Presented without comment: