Games without stories

One might think from the title I may be about to talk about random puzzle games, or pointless fighting games, but no, I'm here to talk about games that TRY to have a story, and fail.

We've all played them. They're the pointless fighting games (or, as I recently found, Armored Core 4) that believe they have a story. They believe it, but that doesn't make it true.

Soul Calibur 4 is a perfect example. I just wish there isn't an actual writer who comes up with all that stuff. It's a bad story to begin with, and I didn't even understand it until I read it on Wikipedia ("wait, is THAT what it was meant to be? How the hell'd they work that out from that cutscene?"), and even now I think it was a waste of disc space that could've contained more breasts. Ha ha. I kid, I kid, that game couldn't contain more breasts if it came with the Victoria's Secret catalogue.

What inspired this? The above mentioned Armored Core 4. I love a good giant-robot-fighting game, and while AC4 may be a bit too fast paced for me (I still love it, I'm just not particularly good at it). It really, really wishes it had a story. It doesn't. It has characters (or close approximations of them) and unrelated events. I'm sure it was meant to be a grand, powerful event when you wiped out the entire central structure of an entire super-corporation that controlled 1/6th of the earth, but it never felt like it. It felt like another 100K in the bank to spend on new shooty-death-McBoom weapons. They could have told me someone killed my 'handler', and my only thought would be "hooray, less pretentious stuff that has no relation to anything". Here's a hint game writers, if my character has killed hundreds of people at the instructions of my handler, then told to go off and kill a big boss, when she later shows remorse at the death of a man who was "fighting for what he believed in... a real hero", it seems pointless and out of character, especially when she later tells me to go blow up what's left of the hero's army for enough money to buy the dead sea scrolls and use them as toilet paper.

I've done some reading up and you-tube watching of the game "Mortal Kombat Vs DC Universe", and it succumbs to the same problem. They believe there is a story. The story makes no sense, and basically consists of a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo trying to justify why close friends in the DC Universe start biffing each other, and how Batman still manages to win everything even when he gets butch-slapped to the ground.

One last example, the most recent Dead or Alive game (like I said, it's mostly fighting games with this problem). Most of the time in 'story' mode they just threw you into random fights, but every now and then they'd give you a cutscene to try and justify the fight. Some of them are just pointless, and you can tell it was just to pad out the story mode and CGI budget, others is obviously just to show off their breast physics engine. The bit that really screws it up is how little sense so much of it makes. Case in point, playing as one of the ladies, there's a point where you have to hire a mercenary to later on help you defeat the evil corporation, righto, we're following so far. The Mercenary responds that he'll only fight for people who can beat him in combat. Beside being probably the stupidest requirement in a job ever (let's face it, most mercenaries aren't hired by better soldiers then they are), it's also the most pointless. Considering in this game every single fight seems to be resolved with hand to hand combat, if she can beat him then there's no point in hiring the mercenary, as she'd do a better job herself.


Game Designers, please, either have a story or don't. These half-stories in games are confusing and pointless.