Portal is a great example of this in general. They started off with the main mechanic, and developed the world and the characters around it. They needed an explanation for solving puzzles with a futuristic device, so they created a sci-fi testing course. They needed a drive to complete it - so they created an AI that trapped you in there. Then they expanded these ideas and ended up with one of the best narratives in videogames ever.
(Spoilers?) That point where they make you put the companion cube in the incinerator as an early stage tutorial on the last boss mechanic. Breaks my heart every time. Then if you slip it past the obstacles it disitengrates in the force field anyway.
5:15 Made me say "Aww, Thomas." Which just proves how important narrative is. Somehow the developers made me care about a red rectangle because of narrative.
I cared about the cast of baba is you despite multiple puzzles requiring you to kill them and the entire story being 'thanks to some flowers, you exist now'
Technically the Source engine _can_ allow players to bring stuff between levels. Portal just used fizzlers so you couldn't break future puzzles by having an extra cube. In this case, the story explanation of "it's so you can't smuggle things" is a actually pretty accurate.
Things Ash has won: Orange islands league I think he might have won against the frontier brains? Alola league The hearts of several ladies that are around his age
I absolutely LOVE when games successfully integrate mechanical rules or system limitations into the cannon lore of a game. It is a wonderful way to convert an artificial shortcoming into a welcomed point of interest for me
Ever since you mentioned turning Super Mario into a monochromatic series of blocks I was thinking about "Thomas was Alone." It's such a great example of giving context to mechanics with simple narrative. So happy to see Thomas at the end there.
Factorio would still be fun even without a story, but being stranded on an alien planet surrounded by hostile aliens and with the goal to launch a spaceship to help take you home definitely adds to the games fun.
story wasn't the main reason i hated sticker star, i miss the RPG battle formula from thousand year door. hilariously the story & mechanics both sucked with sticker star
That description you gave for a naked Mario (mono-chrome, no story) game is the gameboy Tetris. Yet everyone loves tetris. It is a game of pure mechanics.
Not always entirely. After all there was still backgrounds and music that helped to give it that extra bit of flavor I would say. I mean...what even IS Tetris without it's lovable Theme Song?
Yeah, it is kind of the exception to the rule. However, regarding marketing, the foreign appeal with its Russian theme acually played a considerable role. After all, the all-to-famous jingle _Korobeiniki_ is a folk song. In that regard, it might be argued that it's just that sprinkle of a theme, similar to the las Vegas Theme mentioned in the video, that gave (at least the most well-known version of Tetris) that edge of identity beyond mechanics.
It's more like flappy bird. The point however is not, that games without story are bad - just that even a tiny bit of story can increase the appeal of a game and help create an emotional expirience, which ultimatly is the birth of a fancult. Apart from jokes, nobody would wear a tetris or pacman costume or have lengthy discussion about the games.
3:02 My sister is a huge fan of the Disgaea series. Let me tell you, we have had some long and involved conversations about stat increases and completion percentages.
to be fair that game series is all about that shit if it was not then it would just be a run of the mill JRPG but because of the item dungeons it increases the completion req to a ludicrous degree
I'd also like to mention the 3rd game where game plot had somewhat long conversations about some aspects of game mechanics to the point where characters checked the status of a major plot point by reading one of the characters' title in the game UI.
“People don’t talk in stats and percentages” Um, unless it’s any competitive game ever. Or Pokémon. So I’ve been raising this Shiny Charizard that took 3567 eggs to get, and he’s got all 31 IVs and is EV trained in Speed and Special Attack, and can 2KO a Garchomp with added Stealth Rock Damage...
I like that Sonic was added contemplating why he’s running. It’s a big point of discussion in the fanbase of how narrative should be used in the games.
1:53 - "Let's take the whole Mushroom Kingdom aesthetic out and leave only a progression of monochrome, disconnected obstacles built from geometric solids." As a Geometry Dash player, I would be complete fine with that :P
I appreciate you bringing up Pokemon as an example. It's a series that suffers from excessive cutscenes, and shines brightest when the world is allowed to just be, as you head for the champion.
Jin The Blue It is trying to be Mother but its too watered down. Pokemon Lets Go and XY were huge offenders, with the cutscenes not even advancing anything plot-wise. I would be happy if Game Freak uses its rather unrealistic monsters to create a magic realism plot to discuss themes such as the misery of the hikkomoris or the re-emergence of the alt-right in Japan (perhaps each important Pokemon that appears could symbolize something, but thats too subtle for children) or (more realistically) just set Pokemon in a vast region like middle America (as in Mother 1)
i still feel like Minecraft had lost a bit of its narrative by removing the mechanic where the player always appeared on a beach upon creating a new world. versions Beta 1.7.4 and older had that mechanic.
Wait, but there was no such mechani~ EDIT: it turns out there actually was, in a way. For some reason beta 1.7.4 (and probably some prior versions) forced a player to spawn on a sand block. I believe this was a mistake - what Mojang meant to do is to force the spawn point to be NOT on sand - which is how it works today. But somewhere around 1.7.X this was mistakenly reversed for some unknown reason, most likely a typo in the code. Nowadays you can no longer spawn on a sand block which means on a beach or in a desert - this is probably done to reduce problems caused by unstable sand. In addition to that new biome generation of beta 1.8 drastically reduced large swatches of sandy beaches that used to generate everywhere in an effort to diversify the terrain which kind of worked IMO.
while I agree with this video entirely that you don't need to go heavy on the story to make it compelling, the problem with Shiggy's ban on the narrative for Paper Mario is that Paper Mario is an JRPG, A GENRE KNOWN FOR BEING STORY BASED!
Sticker Star might have been okay with removing most of the story and dialogue if it actually delivered on gameplay. You don’t remove story and dialogue in a role-playing game. Especially not to put in a gimmicky mechanic that limits what the player can do. Use a sticker, do a thing. Run out of stickers, you can’t do a thing. And now there’s no witty dialogue to help distract from that. It just dull grinding. SPOILER AHEAD: “Oh no, Bowser needs to be scary, he can’t be funny.” Said with complete sincerity AFTER Bowser’s Inside Story came out on the DS. In which Bowser is shown to be both funny but also terrifyingly competent. The next Mario RPG after Sticker Star was Dream Team, which again has Bowser be funny but also smart enough to usurp the other antagonist for final boss status. You can’t look at Bowser in Sticker Star and honestly say he’s the least bit intimidating.
I mean Thomas Was Alone was a bunch of shapes jumping around but the story just makes it amazing.
5 років тому+1
Thanks for the Thomas Was Alone reference at the end. It was the first thing that came to mind when talking about "removing all context, and leaving only boxes". Great example of a little bit of story context giving meaning to the simplest of visuals.
You know what game at least benefits me by context? For Honor. Even if you don’t the story mode, the basic setup explains WHY these factions are fighting each other. The world experienced a truly apocalyptic tectonic disaster and that understandably made the Knights, Vikings, and Samurai desperate to survive so they fought each other in a three way conflict. Even now that the world has recovered, the years of mistrust and misdeeds keep them at each other’s throats. So if a player ever bothers to ask why the faction war is even a thing in-universe, the answer is right there in the game’s opening. “Desperation and trust are seldom allies.”
I think the de-emphasis on story came because people complained about how the gameplay of Super Paper Mario was de-emphasized to make way for its story.
@@theoldfinalchapters8319 Yes, but Jason isn't wrong either. After the release of Super Paper Mario there was a Club Nintendo survey (Was only done on the Japanese site), and according to that fans didn't really care for the story. iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/papermario/0/2 It's a bit surprising to see the votes in favor of the story being so low, but considering that Super Paper Mario was an Action RPG Platformer (Where a lot of dialogue can potentially disrupt the genre's faster tempo), rather than the usual Action Turn Based RPG (where heavy amounts of dialogue fits right in with the genre's slower tempo), I can kinda see how it might have happened. (Note: I haven't played Super Paper Mario, so I personally don't know what the tempo of the game flow is like for it specifically.) Regardless, it's rather unfortunate that they applied the feedback of a Action RPG Platformer and applied it to a Action Turn Based RPG.
This episode was really a step into the right direction, thanks! The cat was visible but it was not referenced, I liked that! Keep pushing for that direction!
Once I made a small boss fight that was mechanically a copy of cuphead. But it's context was that you were a Laser-shooting android being put through a simulated scenario in order to see if you were ready to go out into the world. So stuff like having the name of the avatar be highlighted and easily distinguished from the rest of the test helped with that. Gave the impression that a lot of other androids were going through the same test.
believe it or not, it was revealed in an interview that he was originally going to be an ox before he became what we know him as today. another weird thing with early development plans of super mario bros was that mario himself was going to have guns and combat. no really.
When I played doomii as a kid I was scared of the demons. The context of 'save the world', and the crushing sense of loneliness in the game made me feel like I'd be letting people down if I didn't clear the next room. Doom II was an exercise in bravery for me. Now doom 2016 is just a adrenaline outlet. Rip and Terror!
Right on the day when I am questioning myself about discarding some mechanical gameplay in my game to focus on narrative and visual aesthetic. Thanks very much EC.
This was great. An example of what you're describing that I immediately thought of, Mortal Kombat 2 back in the day. Kano, Sonya Blade, etc aren't playable characters. There's a level where you see them as prisoners in Shao Khan's arena. Even in an Arcade game like MK, they were able to infer through context both why those characters weren't available, while also indirectly establishing story lore.
I especially love it when games almost instill the soul of something into your controller or in some physical object you own. Think of things like people who save a mercy run of Undertale on their USB so everyone can stay in that final good state or (my personal favorite) having to press the Naia button at THAT moment in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. If anyone here like the idea of your very button presses becoming a narrative expression that takes on a whole new meaning, play Brothers.
3:05 Ya hear that? Y'all have no more excuses for not understanding why people watch sports. You're allowed to enjoy video games AND physical games. They're not as different as you think.
To rehash a point from another episode, Papers Please is an amazing example of this! The game is inspired both mechanically and narratively by the existence of customs agents as a profession. A: how tedious the work is, and B: How being a customs agent would potentially come with moral complexity.
well done you guys I love a sweeping narratives in all my games so this is especially hard for me to hear but it is a necessary lesson that needs to be imparted
The narrative explaining tech limits: the fog in Silent Hill was there to mask the limits of the PS1. And it added amazing setting and story elements in turn.
I think what's also hard when adding the narrative elements is the vision the developer has versus the player. For example Cappy is a character for the player, but to the developer it might be more of a way to convey a function. This language was also used (poorly) in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite when it was asked where are the X-men characters, and the PR representative said something along the lines of there are other characters that play similar, characters that fulfill that function.
Sticker Star not needing a story was a really bad idea because it was an RPG, which RPGs basically only exist to tell stories. Glad you guys actually pointed out that it was a bad idea right after the opening.
Thin narratives also inspire people to fill in the blanks. Recent example: the realization that if there's a crown that turns toadette into a peach/toadette hybrid, then if it's given to other characters... and what if peach, herself, is actually somebody else with that crown? The other side of that... I can't speak for anyone else, but my brain fills in The Division's "plot" with "sleeper agents that can be activated to just go into a city, shoot people and take their stuff sounds kinda jackboot..."
it think its also neat that people can become connected to a mechanic in a game. the best example i can think of is rocket jumping in team fortress 2. the amount of hours that people put into practicing this mechanic and the huge community that got built around it
I think a good example for this is something like Hollow Knight (I hears the Souls games are similar) where you get drips of story and lore in very minimal ways, but on the face of it there's very little story. Makes you inquisitive and feel clever when you figure things out.
Bowser is a turtle dragon. There was a culture shock episode about it if you haven't watch it. Might be a good video to talk about, foreign culture in video games.
'Let's take the whole mushroom kingdom asthetic out and leave a progression of monochrome disconnected obstacles " you mean Thomas Was Alone? Great game!! :)
As stated in previous episodes...it's all about that BALANCE. When you put something in to focus upon...you're often times leaving something out. If you give an extra 15% to story...that 15% has to come from SOMEWHERE! So it's making an INTELLIGENT and THOUGHTFUL choice on whether that PARTICULAR game needs more story. Also...one must be careful when REMOVING story elements, otherwise you can remove a LOT of the charm with WHY players loved those games so much. EX: Filling a game with Identitical Toads, rather than a cast of lovable and unique characters.
I know you said often not always, but I immediately thought of Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons as a game where the mechanic is what drew me in and then I discovered a really powerful narrative that would have been difficult to convey as a way to attract players.
The mention of Skyrim stories reminded me of how, in the current game, there are three dragon skeletons just lying around in one of the towns. Because it just keeps getting attacked.
Regarding narrative or theme inspired mechanics, I think that taps in two more complex topics that deserves their own episodes. Firat, some restrictions often lead to more creativity. It's like freezing water, it requires at least one condensation nucleus, its actually a starting point. Second, abstraction. The ability to see ideas normally applied to one thing, generalize it further, and transport it to a completely different context, like match 3 abilities from figthers or what were them.
Slightly left-field, but the Football Manager games pull this off pretty well. They're very slow burners, pretty much entirely mechanics based, but it lets you create your own narrative as a result of how those mechanics play out, usually in the way of pulling a lesser club into a position where their natural resources are lacking, but still getting the job done above and beyond their station (Like having a team like Barnsley FC compete in the Premier division despite having 10% of the wage budget of the likes of Liverpool of Manchester City)
I'm Brazilian and in the era of SNES I played Mario Bros like crazy. The game came to Brazil not translated and I obviously did not understand any English but that did not stop me from enjoying the game. In fact, I discovered that there was a princess to be saved only in the last level of the game. The same was repeated even with RPGs like Tibia and WOW. Games with good mechanics do not need much history. But if you have weak and uninteresting mechanics and dynamics it is best to put an exciting story and cool graphics to cover the flaws.
I can distinctly remember two games that I first picked up solely because the mechanics sounded interesting: Undertale, and The World Ends With You. Both awesome games, both with a strong emphasis on narrative, and both branching out with some really creative combat mechanics.
At first I thought "you're going to talk about a platformer built out of monochrome shapes where you play as a rectangle and not mention Thomas Was Alone?" Nice callback at the end.
The best stories, the best jokes, are the ones you write yourself. If the player has just enough to create their own narrative the game will be empowering, and thus addicting.
the point about that geometric thing being boring is not that its boring theres games that look super simple like that and have a fun gameplay, but the story that don't interrupt the gameplay just make it better.
I can mostly agree on this while having a compelling case narrative is beneficial. It can also be destructive if you fous 90% of your effort into the stroy especially if if your story has to synchronise with the gameplay, if your trying to createa something like Dishorned which both story and gamplay have to be compelling in order to synchronise perfectly fine and have an amazing game. I mean you can make the most complex, compelling narrative but at the end of the day if the world or gameplay doesn't cooperate with said narrative, it won't fell natural or believable then it's gonna come off as fake, boring or hell even non- existent In short what am trying to say is sometimes simplicity is best. Hmmm i think that's why i love superhot. Edit: Now am not saying that throw away all narrative elements down the drain for pure gameplay or that you should be never go heavy on narrative on a game even the situation calls for it just find a balance.
I like to think of fighting games for this subject. In a game like Street Fighter, there is very little incentive to look at a wider story. And whenever the developers have tried to craft a larger cinematic narrative, it's been sub-par at best. Even still, it's incredibly important to many players (myself included) that the characters have distinct visual designs and personalities that set them apart. Designing a character is its own form of storytelling after all.
For the sake of accuracy, it's worth noting that Miyamoto didn't *explicitly* state he wanted all semblance of story removed. The directive he gave the team was "stick to characters from the Super Mario series". While I still don't entirely agree with Miyamoto's design philosophy, it's important to understand that his motivation behind this directive was "please don't hurt my baby"; rather than one strictly of arrogance or malice. ...In other words, he's an overprotective mommy that doesn't trust anyone with her child.
2:58 - you haven't one particular friend of mine. He's an achievement hunter in every sense of the word. Even when playing things like D&D, Magic The Gathering or other such games, his thought patterns are: loot, kill, level up, loot... he takes every challenge in gaming in the same way. He cares less for the 'fun' of it and more for the winning aspect. To him, winning is the ONLY fun in a game. I wish story and narrative could come across more appealing to people like that, because - in my experience - when it doesn't, it just ruins the fun... it took us a while to figure a way in which to keep his looting down. Creating obstacles/enemies which makes his looting a hindrance rather than a perk, but if repeated too often he just spits his dummy out saying we're playing against him. It's frustrating because he's a good friend and we don't want to exclude him from proceedings, but he can be too much of a struggle to deal with at times like when the rest of the squad is getting hammered and he's off elsewhere hoarding weapons which we could be using to stomp the enemy. Then again, I think most of my D&D group are similar in a way. None of them try democracy, meaning I almost always have to be the Jean Luc Picard of the group out of necessity. It's never a case of approaching someone and saying "oh hey, that thing could be useful to us - can we do a thing so you'll give us the thing?", it's always "you distract him while I steal the thing" which inevitably ends up in us getting our asses handed to us because they're 10 times as strong. I may be ranting, but I think for some people it's ALL gameplay and no story. I'm the opposite; I'm all story and with a preference for simpler/minimalistic gameplay elements.
I have this running gag with my kids, where we will be talking about a game and I say 'story, story', which means something like 'the story is irrelevant, and, frankly, the less I know about it, the more I'll probably enjoy the game'. For example, I don't want to know anything about the lore of Overwatch. I can interpret the characters I like to be whatever I want them to be. The more I know about the real 'story', the less I am able to do that. I am playing The Surge ATM, and I really like the way they do Narrative. It is all around you. You can pay as much or as little attention to it as you like. You can just grind through the game for arcade fighting lols, or you can uncover a world and it's characters... your choice.
Celeste is a good example too. It's actually just a casual platformer game but they added that "reaching the top of the mountain defeats crippling depressions and anxiety" thing to it which made the game experience feel like a deep fullfilling adventure.
2:02 That's the reason why I never returned to Rayman Origins and Legends, because I never found a reason to play them again, even when I play them, I asked myself "what's the goal of all this?", because in terms of story, it feels like I had to know why all that madness happened in first place. 4:46 Or makes you hate a character who ALWAYS LOST ALL THE REMAINING ITEMS AT THE END OF THE STAGE, THANKS PERCY! (princess tomato in the salad kingdom) I'LL DO A SALAD WITH YOU.
I think Crusader Kings 2 is one of the best examples of this. its just numbers and stats and whatever but put a picture and give those stats a name and suddenly I care.
Miyamoto didn't even want any of Rosalina's backstory in Mario Galaxy (practically erased her from 2), basically had nothing to do with Odyssey, and don't forget how he affected Skyward Sword development. I can appreciate the simplicity he tried to put back in games as other AAA developers tried to complicate things, and kudos for his laser focus, but... It honestly seems he'd been trying to rob his fellow Nintendo devs out of what they wanted to make, and audiences out of what they wanted to see, because he thought how he made his shapes move was more important.
Sometimes a light sprinkling of narrative is all a game needs!
I understood that reference!
Switch
But is the boop big enough?
off topic: can u guys do an extra history video about notre dame??
it would be nice to have something more to chew on after every video, is there any meaningful text or books anyone can recommend?
Portal is a great example of this in general. They started off with the main mechanic, and developed the world and the characters around it. They needed an explanation for solving puzzles with a futuristic device, so they created a sci-fi testing course. They needed a drive to complete it - so they created an AI that trapped you in there. Then they expanded these ideas and ended up with one of the best narratives in videogames ever.
(Spoilers?)
That point where they make you put the companion cube in the incinerator as an early stage tutorial on the last boss mechanic. Breaks my heart every time.
Then if you slip it past the obstacles it disitengrates in the force field anyway.
Wow you are here too
5:15 Made me say "Aww, Thomas." Which just proves how important narrative is. Somehow the developers made me care about a red rectangle because of narrative.
Thomas Was Alone. Such a letdown as a puzzle game, but such a wonderful atmosphere and narrator.
I cared about the cast of baba is you despite multiple puzzles requiring you to kill them and the entire story being 'thanks to some flowers, you exist now'
Wait what is the this reference?
I am clueless
The one and only Thomas Was Alone
It's a puzzle game named "Thomas was alone". One I highly recommend.
Technically the Source engine _can_ allow players to bring stuff between levels. Portal just used fizzlers so you couldn't break future puzzles by having an extra cube.
In this case, the story explanation of "it's so you can't smuggle things" is a actually pretty accurate.
I think this would be good:
its at a military camp, and its prohibited at the camp, and there are checkpoints at the gates, then you cant, or you die.
Thanks for keeping your portrayal of Ash Ketchum accurate by ensuring he came tantalisingly close to a trophy but ended up with nothing
Boy needs to get back to actually catching and training Pokemon. What's he caught, 60 types?
Besides that one league he won in the second season to fill time for Gen 2.
He won the Alola League.
Things Ash has won:
Orange islands league
I think he might have won against the frontier brains?
Alola league
The hearts of several ladies that are around his age
I absolutely LOVE when games successfully integrate mechanical rules or system limitations into the cannon lore of a game. It is a wonderful way to convert an artificial shortcoming into a welcomed point of interest for me
Ever since you mentioned turning Super Mario into a monochromatic series of blocks I was thinking about "Thomas was Alone." It's such a great example of giving context to mechanics with simple narrative.
So happy to see Thomas at the end there.
Factorio would still be fun even without a story, but being stranded on an alien planet surrounded by hostile aliens and with the goal to launch a spaceship to help take you home definitely adds to the games fun.
"help you go home" sure so why i built 20 of those
@@taculo3231 Well, duh. You crash-landed on twenty identical hostile alien planets on your journey home, and got amnesia each time.
That plot description reminds me a LOT of Pikmin tbh
The real home is the base we built along the way.
I'm pretty sure you're playing the villain in Factorio, just saying.
3:43
*> ASH KETCHUM will remember that.*
- from Pokemon: The Telltale Series
Real talk tho, I would love a good Telltale-esque Pokémon game.
@@SomeFreakingCactus I got bad news for you if you want more telltale games.
They shut down.
@@Madhattersinjeans "Telltale-esque". Any game studio can make a game mechanically similar to a Telltale game.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter
Not if they want to stay in bisiness.
@@furyberserk I don't know, Quantic Dream and Dontnod Entertainment do alright
I play mario for the PLOT
and the mushrooms of course
story wasn't the main reason i hated sticker star, i miss the RPG battle formula from thousand year door.
hilariously the story & mechanics both sucked with sticker star
That description you gave for a naked Mario (mono-chrome, no story) game is the gameboy Tetris. Yet everyone loves tetris. It is a game of pure mechanics.
Not always entirely. After all there was still backgrounds and music that helped to give it that extra bit of flavor I would say. I mean...what even IS Tetris without it's lovable Theme Song?
Yeah, it is kind of the exception to the rule.
However, regarding marketing, the foreign appeal with its Russian theme acually played a considerable role. After all, the all-to-famous jingle _Korobeiniki_ is a folk song.
In that regard, it might be argued that it's just that sprinkle of a theme, similar to the las Vegas Theme mentioned in the video, that gave (at least the most well-known version of Tetris) that edge of identity beyond mechanics.
It's more like flappy bird.
The point however is not, that games without story are bad - just that even a tiny bit of story can increase the appeal of a game and help create an emotional expirience, which ultimatly is the birth of a fancult. Apart from jokes, nobody would wear a tetris or pacman costume or have lengthy discussion about the games.
5:14 I'm glad you mentioned Thomas Was Alone, because if you didn't, I was definitely going to.
I was about to riot
3:02
My sister is a huge fan of the Disgaea series. Let me tell you, we have had some long and involved conversations about stat increases and completion percentages.
to be fair that game series is all about that shit if it was not then it would just be a run of the mill JRPG but because of the item dungeons it increases the completion req to a ludicrous degree
I'd also like to mention the 3rd game where game plot had somewhat long conversations about some aspects of game mechanics to the point where characters checked the status of a major plot point by reading one of the characters' title in the game UI.
“People don’t talk in stats and percentages”
Um, unless it’s any competitive game ever.
Or Pokémon. So I’ve been raising this Shiny Charizard that took 3567 eggs to get, and he’s got all 31 IVs and is EV trained in Speed and Special Attack, and can 2KO a Garchomp with added Stealth Rock Damage...
I like that Sonic was added contemplating why he’s running. It’s a big point of discussion in the fanbase of how narrative should be used in the games.
1:53 - "Let's take the whole Mushroom Kingdom aesthetic out and leave only a progression of monochrome, disconnected obstacles built from geometric solids."
As a Geometry Dash player, I would be complete fine with that :P
I saw that and was like "Hey, that's Geometry Dash!".
To paraphrase Matt: "Sometimes a light sprinkling of graphics is all a game needs!"
I appreciate you bringing up Pokemon as an example. It's a series that suffers from excessive cutscenes, and shines brightest when the world is allowed to just be, as you head for the champion.
Jin The Blue It is trying to be Mother but its too watered down. Pokemon Lets Go and XY were huge offenders, with the cutscenes not even advancing anything plot-wise. I would be happy if Game Freak uses its rather unrealistic monsters to create a magic realism plot to discuss themes such as the misery of the hikkomoris or the re-emergence of the alt-right in Japan (perhaps each important Pokemon that appears could symbolize something, but thats too subtle for children) or (more realistically) just set Pokemon in a vast region like middle America (as in Mother 1)
I totally played Tetris for that rocket launch. That really gave a deep meaning to the gameplay.
The Zoe drum roll is the best use of the animation budget so far!
1:43 holy crap a reference to Baba is You. Love that game. Highly recommended
i still feel like Minecraft had lost a bit of its narrative by removing the mechanic where the player always appeared on a beach upon creating a new world. versions Beta 1.7.4 and older had that mechanic.
Wait, but there was no such mechani~
EDIT: it turns out there actually was, in a way. For some reason beta 1.7.4 (and probably some prior versions) forced a player to spawn on a sand block.
I believe this was a mistake - what Mojang meant to do is to force the spawn point to be NOT on sand - which is how it works today. But somewhere around 1.7.X this was mistakenly reversed for some unknown reason, most likely a typo in the code.
Nowadays you can no longer spawn on a sand block which means on a beach or in a desert - this is probably done to reduce problems caused by unstable sand.
In addition to that new biome generation of beta 1.8 drastically reduced large swatches of sandy beaches that used to generate everywhere in an effort to diversify the terrain which kind of worked IMO.
while I agree with this video entirely that you don't need to go heavy on the story to make it compelling, the problem with Shiggy's ban on the narrative for Paper Mario is that Paper Mario is an JRPG, A GENRE KNOWN FOR BEING STORY BASED!
SOME JRPGs BORDER ON HAVING NO GAMEPLAY MECHANICS AT ALL
ALL CAPS DON'T MAKE YOU LOOK SMARTER
@@Artista_Frustrado Yes, I am three years late. Yes, you do need to be reminded just how far over your head the joke went.
Sticker Star might have been okay with removing most of the story and dialogue if it actually delivered on gameplay.
You don’t remove story and dialogue in a role-playing game. Especially not to put in a gimmicky mechanic that limits what the player can do. Use a sticker, do a thing. Run out of stickers, you can’t do a thing. And now there’s no witty dialogue to help distract from that. It just dull grinding.
SPOILER AHEAD:
“Oh no, Bowser needs to be scary, he can’t be funny.” Said with complete sincerity AFTER Bowser’s Inside Story came out on the DS. In which Bowser is shown to be both funny but also terrifyingly competent. The next Mario RPG after Sticker Star was Dream Team, which again has Bowser be funny but also smart enough to usurp the other antagonist for final boss status.
You can’t look at Bowser in Sticker Star and honestly say he’s the least bit intimidating.
I mean Thomas Was Alone was a bunch of shapes jumping around but the story just makes it amazing.
Thanks for the Thomas Was Alone reference at the end. It was the first thing that came to mind when talking about "removing all context, and leaving only boxes". Great example of a little bit of story context giving meaning to the simplest of visuals.
"Engaging story crashes Paper Mario"
Next Strder7x vid
id love this video.
You know what game at least benefits me by context? For Honor.
Even if you don’t the story mode, the basic setup explains WHY these factions are fighting each other. The world experienced a truly apocalyptic tectonic disaster and that understandably made the Knights, Vikings, and Samurai desperate to survive so they fought each other in a three way conflict. Even now that the world has recovered, the years of mistrust and misdeeds keep them at each other’s throats.
So if a player ever bothers to ask why the faction war is even a thing in-universe, the answer is right there in the game’s opening.
“Desperation and trust are seldom allies.”
Pokémon is a sports anime!
If an eternal 10 year old travelling the country participating in dog fighting is a sport, sure XD
Ok, I kid.
Bot a lot? But still I kid.
Sports is a Pokémon anime!
No one gonna mention "Phil Clawlins" on the drum set?
And how he will concentrate on his singing career in the future?
Sticker Star is the reason Miyamoto should not be allowed to touch RPGs with a 10-foot pole.
I think the de-emphasis on story came because people complained about how the gameplay of Super Paper Mario was de-emphasized to make way for its story.
@@jasonkeith2832 No, they were making a sequel to TTYD until Miyamoto stuck his head in and scrapped the whole thing.
@@theoldfinalchapters8319 WHAT WTF I WANT A SEQUAL TO TTYD
@@theoldfinalchapters8319 Yes, but Jason isn't wrong either.
After the release of Super Paper Mario there was a Club Nintendo survey (Was only done on the Japanese site), and according to that fans didn't really care for the story. iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/papermario/0/2
It's a bit surprising to see the votes in favor of the story being so low, but considering that Super Paper Mario was an Action RPG Platformer (Where a lot of dialogue can potentially disrupt the genre's faster tempo), rather than the usual Action Turn Based RPG (where heavy amounts of dialogue fits right in with the genre's slower tempo), I can kinda see how it might have happened. (Note: I haven't played Super Paper Mario, so I personally don't know what the tempo of the game flow is like for it specifically.)
Regardless, it's rather unfortunate that they applied the feedback of a Action RPG Platformer and applied it to a Action Turn Based RPG.
It wasn't just the story that he said should go, it was also any original characters, which left us with thousands of identical toads.
This episode was really a step into the right direction, thanks! The cat was visible but it was not referenced, I liked that! Keep pushing for that direction!
Once I made a small boss fight that was mechanically a copy of cuphead.
But it's context was that you were a Laser-shooting android being put through a simulated scenario in order to see if you were ready to go out into the world.
So stuff like having the name of the avatar be highlighted and easily distinguished from the rest of the test helped with that. Gave the impression that a lot of other androids were going through the same test.
2:59 Matt, are you doing your demo reel for being the next "Super Smash Bros." announcer here?
Because it totally works! lol
Loved the animation on Zoe doing a drumroll. Love to see that used in future videos (sorry to the regular art that’s made).
Did anyone else do a double-take at comparing Bowser to an ox or was that just me? Can't say I've heard that one before...
believe it or not, it was revealed in an interview that he was originally going to be an ox before he became what we know him as today. another weird thing with early development plans of super mario bros was that mario himself was going to have guns and combat. no really.
The Impossible Game. You are describing The Impossible Game. It has color but it is literally a cube jumping over other shapes just to do it.
True!
When I played doomii as a kid I was scared of the demons. The context of 'save the world', and the crushing sense of loneliness in the game made me feel like I'd be letting people down if I didn't clear the next room. Doom II was an exercise in bravery for me. Now doom 2016 is just a adrenaline outlet. Rip and Terror!
The witing of paper mario is one its stronger points. Well, it was.
Thank you Miyamoto.
2:59 im impressed
5:16 nice reference to Thomas Was Alone. I was thinking of that game while watching this video.
I mean, that monochrome geometric Mario game is basically the game Thomas Was Alone, but then again that had it's own story
Oh, turns out he actually mentions Thomas Was Alone. Cool.
2:23 The big bad turtle ox dragon thing! :D
*Scalie
Right on the day when I am questioning myself about discarding some mechanical gameplay in my game to focus on narrative and visual aesthetic. Thanks very much EC.
5:00 I think Super Mario Odyssey is a great example of this.
Why is nobody talking about how Zoey's drum kit had "Phil Clawllins" on it? XD
He was excellent in his duet show with Kitten Carpenter.
This was great. An example of what you're describing that I immediately thought of, Mortal Kombat 2 back in the day. Kano, Sonya Blade, etc aren't playable characters. There's a level where you see them as prisoners in Shao Khan's arena. Even in an Arcade game like MK, they were able to infer through context both why those characters weren't available, while also indirectly establishing story lore.
I especially love it when games almost instill the soul of something into your controller or in some physical object you own. Think of things like people who save a mercy run of Undertale on their USB so everyone can stay in that final good state or (my personal favorite) having to press the Naia button at THAT moment in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
If anyone here like the idea of your very button presses becoming a narrative expression that takes on a whole new meaning, play Brothers.
3:05
Ya hear that? Y'all have no more excuses for not understanding why people watch sports. You're allowed to enjoy video games AND physical games. They're not as different as you think.
they aren't but watching and playing yourself is still different
yeah but that's a huge generalisation, from that you can get an FPS tourney or Speedcubing
I've been told that sports fans are nerds who beat up other nerds. I mean, look at the spectators. Some of them are even cosplaying as the athletes!
To rehash a point from another episode, Papers Please is an amazing example of this! The game is inspired both mechanically and narratively by the existence of customs agents as a profession. A: how tedious the work is, and B: How being a customs agent would potentially come with moral complexity.
*Tries to watch video*
*Old meme*
*Pauses, stands up, walks away to take a deep breath before trying to continue*
Even Doom 2016 did that. The devs were up front about it too.
And here I am... still waiting for the Winged Hussars to arrive.
Do not be disheartened my brother, the winged hussars will ride again
It's a long way to September.
But they'll come and the great siege will be no more
That Baba is you thing was gold
Thank you for making these videos guys they are very interesting
well done you guys I love a sweeping narratives in all my games so this is especially hard for me to hear but it is a necessary lesson that needs to be imparted
I think Infinifactory is a great example of a mechanics-driven game that's elevated by having just a little bit of story, for context and for a goal.
The narrative explaining tech limits: the fog in Silent Hill was there to mask the limits of the PS1. And it added amazing setting and story elements in turn.
I think what's also hard when adding the narrative elements is the vision the developer has versus the player. For example Cappy is a character for the player, but to the developer it might be more of a way to convey a function. This language was also used (poorly) in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite when it was asked where are the X-men characters, and the PR representative said something along the lines of there are other characters that play similar, characters that fulfill that function.
Sticker Star not needing a story was a really bad idea because it was an RPG, which RPGs basically only exist to tell stories. Glad you guys actually pointed out that it was a bad idea right after the opening.
Neat Baba is you reference at 1:43 :)
Most of the stories I hear from Skyrim are people getting punted into space by giants. That or flying shop keepers.
Zman Jace If you want deeper TES then you should be playing Morrowind
Thin narratives also inspire people to fill in the blanks. Recent example: the realization that if there's a crown that turns toadette into a peach/toadette hybrid, then if it's given to other characters... and what if peach, herself, is actually somebody else with that crown?
The other side of that... I can't speak for anyone else, but my brain fills in The Division's "plot" with "sleeper agents that can be activated to just go into a city, shoot people and take their stuff sounds kinda jackboot..."
it think its also neat that people can become connected to a mechanic in a game. the best example i can think of is rocket jumping in team fortress 2. the amount of hours that people put into practicing this mechanic and the huge community that got built around it
Try thinking like this about life.
*insert "I dont even know what's real anymore" meme*
I think a good example for this is something like Hollow Knight (I hears the Souls games are similar) where you get drips of story and lore in very minimal ways, but on the face of it there's very little story. Makes you inquisitive and feel clever when you figure things out.
Imagine Age of Empires 2 without civilizations and the clever ways their history informed their mechanics.
Bowser is a turtle dragon. There was a culture shock episode about it if you haven't watch it. Might be a good video to talk about, foreign culture in video games.
'Let's take the whole mushroom kingdom asthetic out and leave a progression of monochrome disconnected obstacles " you mean Thomas Was Alone? Great game!! :)
Thomas was alone is a great example.
I loved vaporizing as many turrets as possible in Portal!
As stated in previous episodes...it's all about that BALANCE. When you put something in to focus upon...you're often times leaving something out. If you give an extra 15% to story...that 15% has to come from SOMEWHERE! So it's making an INTELLIGENT and THOUGHTFUL choice on whether that PARTICULAR game needs more story. Also...one must be careful when REMOVING story elements, otherwise you can remove a LOT of the charm with WHY players loved those games so much.
EX: Filling a game with Identitical Toads, rather than a cast of lovable and unique characters.
A simple goal?
I WANT TO BE THE VERY BEST, LIKE NO ONE EVER WAS!
1:30 I love how you left a note for particularly pedantic commenters.
Smooth cat animation brings tears to my eyes
I know you said often not always, but I immediately thought of Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons as a game where the mechanic is what drew me in and then I discovered a really powerful narrative that would have been difficult to convey as a way to attract players.
Come to think of it, Portal is another example
The mention of Skyrim stories reminded me of how, in the current game, there are three dragon skeletons just lying around in one of the towns. Because it just keeps getting attacked.
Nicely written like always!!!
Thomas was Alone was geometric shapes and i yet loved it
Regarding narrative or theme inspired mechanics, I think that taps in two more complex topics that deserves their own episodes. Firat, some restrictions often lead to more creativity. It's like freezing water, it requires at least one condensation nucleus, its actually a starting point. Second, abstraction. The ability to see ideas normally applied to one thing, generalize it further, and transport it to a completely different context, like match 3 abilities from figthers or what were them.
Slightly left-field, but the Football Manager games pull this off pretty well. They're very slow burners, pretty much entirely mechanics based, but it lets you create your own narrative as a result of how those mechanics play out, usually in the way of pulling a lesser club into a position where their natural resources are lacking, but still getting the job done above and beyond their station (Like having a team like Barnsley FC compete in the Premier division despite having 10% of the wage budget of the likes of Liverpool of Manchester City)
That drumroll cat animation is so fluid
I'm Brazilian and in the era of SNES I played Mario Bros like crazy. The game came to Brazil not translated and I obviously did not understand any English but that did not stop me from enjoying the game. In fact, I discovered that there was a princess to be saved only in the last level of the game. The same was repeated even with RPGs like Tibia and WOW. Games with good mechanics do not need much history. But if you have weak and uninteresting mechanics and dynamics it is best to put an exciting story and cool graphics to cover the flaws.
I can distinctly remember two games that I first picked up solely because the mechanics sounded interesting: Undertale, and The World Ends With You. Both awesome games, both with a strong emphasis on narrative, and both branching out with some really creative combat mechanics.
Undertale having interesting mechanics? like wich?
At first I thought "you're going to talk about a platformer built out of monochrome shapes where you play as a rectangle and not mention Thomas Was Alone?" Nice callback at the end.
The best stories, the best jokes, are the ones you write yourself. If the player has just enough to create their own narrative the game will be empowering, and thus addicting.
EC: "stat increases and completion percentages"
OSRS players: "That's cute"
I don’t know man, Pong was pretty popular when it was released, and it was absolutely full of engaging and captivating story.
the point about that geometric thing being boring is not that its boring theres games that look super simple like that and have a fun gameplay, but the story that don't interrupt the gameplay just make it better.
I can mostly agree on this while having a compelling case narrative is beneficial.
It can also be destructive if you fous 90% of your effort into the stroy especially if if your story has to synchronise with the gameplay, if your trying to createa something like Dishorned which both story and gamplay have to be compelling in order to synchronise perfectly fine and have an amazing game.
I mean you can make the most complex, compelling narrative but at the end of the day if the world or gameplay doesn't cooperate with said narrative, it won't fell natural or believable then it's gonna come off as fake, boring or hell even non- existent
In short what am trying to say is sometimes simplicity is best. Hmmm i think that's why i love superhot.
Edit: Now am not saying that throw away all narrative elements down the drain for pure gameplay or that you should be never go heavy on narrative on a game even the situation calls for it just find a balance.
I like to think of fighting games for this subject. In a game like Street Fighter, there is very little incentive to look at a wider story. And whenever the developers have tried to craft a larger cinematic narrative, it's been sub-par at best. Even still, it's incredibly important to many players (myself included) that the characters have distinct visual designs and personalities that set them apart. Designing a character is its own form of storytelling after all.
For the sake of accuracy, it's worth noting that Miyamoto didn't *explicitly* state he wanted all semblance of story removed. The directive he gave the team was "stick to characters from the Super Mario series". While I still don't entirely agree with Miyamoto's design philosophy, it's important to understand that his motivation behind this directive was "please don't hurt my baby"; rather than one strictly of arrogance or malice.
...In other words, he's an overprotective mommy that doesn't trust anyone with her child.
2:58 - you haven't one particular friend of mine. He's an achievement hunter in every sense of the word. Even when playing things like D&D, Magic The Gathering or other such games, his thought patterns are: loot, kill, level up, loot... he takes every challenge in gaming in the same way. He cares less for the 'fun' of it and more for the winning aspect. To him, winning is the ONLY fun in a game.
I wish story and narrative could come across more appealing to people like that, because - in my experience - when it doesn't, it just ruins the fun... it took us a while to figure a way in which to keep his looting down. Creating obstacles/enemies which makes his looting a hindrance rather than a perk, but if repeated too often he just spits his dummy out saying we're playing against him.
It's frustrating because he's a good friend and we don't want to exclude him from proceedings, but he can be too much of a struggle to deal with at times like when the rest of the squad is getting hammered and he's off elsewhere hoarding weapons which we could be using to stomp the enemy.
Then again, I think most of my D&D group are similar in a way. None of them try democracy, meaning I almost always have to be the Jean Luc Picard of the group out of necessity. It's never a case of approaching someone and saying "oh hey, that thing could be useful to us - can we do a thing so you'll give us the thing?", it's always "you distract him while I steal the thing" which inevitably ends up in us getting our asses handed to us because they're 10 times as strong.
I may be ranting, but I think for some people it's ALL gameplay and no story. I'm the opposite; I'm all story and with a preference for simpler/minimalistic gameplay elements.
I think No Man's Sky did this well, there's barely a story but it's a super deep game.
You know I think that Extra Credits could improve by having a podcast. Like the one Rooster teeth has but you could talk about games.
I would also like a podcast!
I have this running gag with my kids, where we will be talking about a game and I say 'story, story', which means something like 'the story is irrelevant, and, frankly, the less I know about it, the more I'll probably enjoy the game'. For example, I don't want to know anything about the lore of Overwatch. I can interpret the characters I like to be whatever I want them to be. The more I know about the real 'story', the less I am able to do that. I am playing The Surge ATM, and I really like the way they do Narrative. It is all around you. You can pay as much or as little attention to it as you like. You can just grind through the game for arcade fighting lols, or you can uncover a world and it's characters... your choice.
Celeste is a good example too. It's actually just a casual platformer game but they added that "reaching the top of the mountain defeats crippling depressions and anxiety" thing to it which made the game experience feel like a deep fullfilling adventure.
2:02 That's the reason why I never returned to Rayman Origins and Legends, because I never found a reason to play them again, even when I play them, I asked myself "what's the goal of all this?", because in terms of story, it feels like I had to know why all that madness happened in first place.
4:46 Or makes you hate a character who ALWAYS LOST ALL THE REMAINING ITEMS AT THE END OF THE STAGE, THANKS PERCY! (princess tomato in the salad kingdom) I'LL DO A SALAD WITH YOU.
I think Crusader Kings 2 is one of the best examples of this. its just numbers and stats and whatever but put a picture and give those stats a name and suddenly I care.
Players can LIKE mechanics.
Players can LOVE characters.
Miyamoto didn't even want any of Rosalina's backstory in Mario Galaxy (practically erased her from 2), basically had nothing to do with Odyssey, and don't forget how he affected Skyward Sword development. I can appreciate the simplicity he tried to put back in games as other AAA developers tried to complicate things, and kudos for his laser focus, but...
It honestly seems he'd been trying to rob his fellow Nintendo devs out of what they wanted to make, and audiences out of what they wanted to see, because he thought how he made his shapes move was more important.
I think the original Japanese was "Mario Story." I was baffled when I found out Sticker Star had almost no story.