What's so bad about Metal Gear Solid? Is it how advanced it is as a piece of fiction that you don't like about it?
BAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH!
OH man, go read Vonnegut, Nieztsche, George R martin, Renault, H.P lovecraft,Moorecock and Gibson and come back to me
Also: Isimov, Clarke, Heinlain and Herbert
For poets go with: Keats and Byron.
Advanced? it doesn't even compare to ludlum,
Well out of the ones mentioned I have read the works of Nietzsche (Xenogears and the Xenosaga series were heavily inspired by his ideas which is what drew me to them), and I don't know about the others, but they're a prime example of telling an incredibly deep story at the expence of an engaging one. The ideas and concepts explored are truly expert, but the storytelling not even close. Xenogears and the Xenosaga games are just as deep for example, implementing not only the ideas of Nietzsche, but also Freud, Jung, and Lacan, and it's able to do so with such detail, but more importantly, while telling an unimaginably engagig sory at the same time. As an example, at the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, when Zarathustra starts lecturing the townspeaople on the concept of the overman (or Superman as it went in the translation i was using), and as deep and intellectually stimulating as it was, it wasn't told in a very engaging manner at all, i.e. it got overly repetitive, driving at the same poitn voer and over again, didn't really advance anything resembling a driven storyline, and was generally just really quite boring. And I'm entirely open to intelligent storytelling, as my picks should attest to, but not at the expense of a driven, engaging storyline. So absed on my experience, no, the works of Nietzsche at least, while philosophically advanced, was not advanced as a piece of fiction. Metal Gear Solid is able to incorporate similar ideas and concepts as wlel, and like Xenogears and the Xenosaga series, does so in an engaging manner.
I agree, it IS the most well written video game of all time. There are so many philosophical elements, enough so that it's not convoluted(like metal gear solid, with its endless tirades about cliche peace and war) It's easy to say its overrated if you haven't beaten it. Baldur's gate while great, has a LOT of cliche story elements in it. Most of the games people list wouldn't even compare to Torment much less ANY medium. That post about xenosaga being up there with all mediums was quite laughable. I wouldn't even compare torment to say Vonnegut though, for example, and its the most well written video game of all time so yeah...
Xuix
The quality of the writing is for all intents and purposes irrelevant in storytelling media of a visual nature (which games, for the most part, generally are as far as how they tell the story). The only element of a story within visual media that's based around the written word is dialogue (ignoring stuff that you can see within the setting... such as posters etc.. - minor storytelling elements), and as I explained, dialogue is not about sounding good as piece of writing, it's about matching the personality and mind of the characters, and bringing it out into the open so that they can interact with the other characters or the audience to advance the storyline. Dialogue is about the quality of the storytelling, not the quality of the writing. And the games I listed are not only unimaginably deep and complex, but of a far greater scope than the vast majority of stories of other mediums out there, and told in a phenomenally engaging way through the expert use of incredible music and extraordinarily emotive storytelling. That you're possessive of extremely poor taste and can't quite see that is a reflection not on the games mentioned but rather you.
Pretty much every one of those games I would consider to have terrible stories. The problem with video games, and gamers, is that crap like that passes as good writing.
Team ICO is about the only developer in the history of video games that has impressed me with narrative. There are exceptions, but very few.
goblaa
Well we can attribute that to extremely poor taste in storytelling then. The games I listed are among the deepest, most complex stories you can find anywhere, and are all told in an extremely compelling, emotional manner. It's interesting how you also bring up writing when as a factor in storytelling it really isn't a very big one outside of descriptive media. In visual media the writing, generally speaking, is exclusively put into the dialogue, which is about making it match the mindset of the character rather than being written in a good fashion.
I wasn't expecting anything too great after the last three in the series. I mean, they were all very incredible games, but being *just* incredible really doesn't cut it for a JRPG or an FF. That being said a lot of people who are critisizing it in all likelihood haven't even played the game and are just parroting what the reviews are saying.
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