Something I’ve picked up on with my gaming preference is stories that don’t simply focus on one “mood” for the game, but alter it to fit the situation. Players get a relaxed time exploring or diving into combat, and the world is inviting and colorful, but when the story builds, it puts brutal tests of character in front of the heroes.
Some examples of generally-great games that might fail this test:
- Silent Hill 2: A game well-known for plumbing the depths of the human psyche. But it’s missing any real moments of levity, leading players to pretty much be on guard the whole time.
- Monkey Island: Undoubtedly a funny game. But since it breaks the fourth wall so much, and revels in its own illogical deus ex machinas to fit the “hero cannot die” tropes, it’s never going to make the situation feel tense or at risk even when it tries to (and Telltale did try).
- Call of Duty: Though a dudebro series, one can’t deny the series has occasionally had some great storyline twists. Many of us may not remember them years later though, because as cool as characters like Captain Price are in the moment, they don’t form a lasting impression as someone “complete” with flaws and weaknesses, in part because the storyline is often rushing you forward with action rather than poignance.
- GTA: As a crime drama, pretty much everything is falling apart all the time in GTA, whether it’s the plan, the heroes’ relationship, or the entire city. There’s moments of humor for sure, but little in the game makes you feel “awesome” or heroic, like your violence is achieving something.
Some games that prevail:
- The Walking Dead: While it is a serious game like Silent Hill, it’s more often going to have meaningful, positive and tender moments to settle from the horrors the characters are going through, as well as allowing players to creatively express themselves even if that means having Lee say something boisterous or silly to the other survivors.
- Yakuza: Sort of the posterchild for these emotional oscillations even within individual side quests. One might start through a silly situation where a man is throwing snow cones in the air, and end with using diaper fabric to simulate a snowstorm - so that a terminal cancer patient has a perfect sendoff in her final hours.
- Final Fantasy: Thinking of the one I’ve played the most, XIV, but plenty of the others have had the heroes cross-dress to get back their taken party member, perform in plays for children, before having to dive into hell and confront their dark past, or consider ending an entire civilization to save the world.
- Ace Attorney: The passion for murder tends to run hot. But, Ace Attorney is good at introducing ridiculous characters that tend to soften the blow. They may take premises as simple as security guards or journalists, and find every way they can to exaggerate their appearance and mannerisms. On the other end, the emotions behind proving the state and prosecution wrong about your innocent defendant are always worthwhile. Even when you do your best, the game delivers some poignant and well-written sad endings as well as many good ones.
- Metal Gear Solid: Though diving hard into the “Tacti-cool”, strategic warfare theme, MGS has always leaned hard into silly and highly characterized moments that have made the hard-hitting ones more impactful, as a result winning it lifetime fans.
- Borderlands: Thought I’d throw another Western developer on here. I haven’t played many of the others, but Borderlands 2 at least mastered the idea of having characters be flippant and silly 80% of the time, but getting you to really care when the jokes drop. A certain few moments around Handsome Jack come to mind in particular.
I’ve definitely seen that Japanese developers are often better at this form of emotional openness, but this is something that I’ve wanted to explore a bit more as a prompt; whether people agree this is a good goal for story/theme development, what causes some publishers to stumble in this approach, and especially what indie games people aren’t aware of that pull this off particularly well.
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I’m not really a “plot” sort of gamer so probably don’t have a huge amount of experience to choose from, but Undertale really sounds like it fits the bill. It’s all laughs and jokes until it’s not.
Mother 3 is both the funniest, most charming game and also the most emotionally brutal story about loss, grief, and growing up with trauma. Never has a Gameboy advance game made me cry so much
I recently finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and I think it fits the bill perfectly. I laughed, I cried, I raged, I celebrated, I was in awe. Really a beautiful story and deep take on life and existence. I went into it blind and highly recommend that kind of experience as well.
omg i just got to the point where maelle’s hair did the thing and i just about died. i’m going to have to buy this one, i got it from my local library.
It’s bonkers lol yeah. I love the Gestrals.
Did you do the pointing at the screen thing when you fought Clair Obscur too?
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II did this really well just this year. Largely a story about contrasting a desire for adventure with the horrors and realities of war, it also has quests that are full of comedy. You can try to attract a pack of wolves using what the shepherd refers to as his absolute dumbest sheep; you can get blackout drunk with a band of mercenaries who may or may not have killed your childhood friends; you can clean up and decorate a crypt full of loose bones for a man who speaks only in rhymes, poorly, and might be a ghost.
I’m playing this now and was going to mention it as well. It’s quite fun and engaging both in the main plot and side quests.
Red Dead Redemption II. The writing is absolutely fantastic and goes across the stream of emotions.
Red dead is the only game I’ve laughed out loud and literally cried at the screen. It’s a masterpiece.
How much are you willing to dig for it? I’m playing through hollow knight atm and have been shocked at the emotional depth that hides in the margins of the world. If you plow through the game and only touch the required content then all you get is the overall somber vibe. But if you turn every stone, talk to every npc, complete every side quest, you might be surprised at how much love and loss and joy and pain there is in the story.
Overall it is about picking through the ruins of a dead kingdom. You can engage with that as much or as little as you want. IMO they do an outstanding job of rewarding you for the effort.
Dung beetle boss never fails to make me laugh
The dude is so happy about his lot in life too.
which emotional extremes? happiness? joy? fear? sadness? terror? hunger? beautiful food? lust? lust for the beautiful food? i got a lot of emotions just right now lets be real, there’s more than two.
Sorry I should have clarified.
I specifically meant hunger and lust. I will begin removing other examples.
I dont think hunger is an emotion
What? I can’t believe you forgot “I’m loving it!”
Tell me this doesn’t uh evoke or invoke, maybe invoice I dunno anymore, an emotional response
“Hey Charlie, can you go ahead and invoice me that hunger by the end of the day? Thaaaaaaaanks.”
Oh god you guys, this better be freakin important
Oh no doubt food can evoke an emotional response, like coming home on a cold rainy day to smell of your loved one baking cookies or something. But hunger itself I wouldnt class as an emotion
i guess you haven’t experienced capitalized Hunger yet then. like, not eating for two months hunger. trust me, it’s an emotion as well as a physical response.
Omori. Somber, sad, but goofy and joyful.
Other times terrifying, horrifying worse than a horror game.
I wept through the last five hours of this game, just straight up crying.
This game gave me everything from anxiety to existential dread, to laughs and moments that made my go aww.
This game spoke to me.
I dunno, I think GTA5’s true ending with the trio working together to close off each other’s loose ends is a pretty satisfying finale.
I agree with the assessment in regards to 4 though. To me, it always came off as ‘nothing gets better, even if we have to shoehorn in a reason for that because we didn’t actually make a different finale’.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a fun dating sim, but it has slightly more emotional breadth than that, so it might pass this test.
God damn I wish I’d stumbled across that naturally instead of being forced into it because i cant tell you lol spoilers iykyk lol dude you gotta play it.
Tap for spoiler
I found Inscryption naturally though, I had no idea it was gonna do half the shit it did. That cheered me right up.
Japanese developers tend to excel at this because Eastern culture/media is much more willing to acknowledge emotion and moral ambiguity. The West likes misty eyed men whereas East Asians are all about that former boyband member sobbing. And The West only allows a Bruce Willies level character to beat on an abuser. It’s why Hank Hill humorously kicking Jimmy in the ass after… almost getting Bobby run over by a dozen Nascar Cars sticks with us. Or Dan Conner making sure his sister-in-law is okay before wordlessly grabbing his jacket to beat her abuser half to death.
A couple days back Aftermath posted an excellent blog on Kamen Rider that kind of exemplifies it https://aftermath.site/kamen-rider-kuuga-tokusatsu. But the quick summary: There is a meme clip going around of a sentai character beating the ever loving hell out of a monster. And the context is that the hero of that series is a super happy man who loves children who was faced with a villain who murders children in a way that maximizes suffering for everyone around them. So he just completely snaps and crosses every imaginable line while unleashing all of his powers with no wind up or ceremony. And, most importantly, there is no moral hand wringing about how “Yes, he deserved it but what is this doing to you?”. Mother fucker was unquestionably evil and got what was coming to him. And while it does tie into the overall themes of Yusuke being worn down and broken by the weight of the suit, it also acknowledges that… somebody needs to be. Which is a theme common in the Gundams and so forth.
Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.
As for games that pull this off? I’ll contribute Dust: An Elysian Tale. Most of it is happy go lucky as the amnesiac protagonist and his cute and cuddly and obnoxious companion fight against the evil military with some good laughs. But it also touches on the theme of “you can do everything right and still people get hurt” which works REALLY well in the video game space where you are conditioned to believe the golden ending will always be happy and perfect.
I think you’re just having a blind spot for western shows. Breaking Bad, The Expanse, Game of Thrones, Barry, Mad Men and probably a bunch of others that I can’t remember off the top of my head where characters act like people with their own personal motivations and moral compasses. Without spoiling anything in one of the before/mentioned shows one of the main characters literally kills their close friend to protect the fact that they’re a shitty human being.
There are also western games that nail the moral gray area. For example New Vegas and Baldurs Gate 3.
… I would genuinely love to know what the Barry of video games is. Maybe Spec Ops The Line but that never actually is anything BUT melodramatic and dark which wasn’t the prompt. The Expanse might be a better fit but that was generally a book/show about plot progression over character studies outside of (minimizing spoilers) Everything Around Rescuing Peaches. Which, again, was almost entirely melodrama.
That said, I do think Barry is a spectacular example of the kind of story that can make you laugh… maybe not cry but something approaching that. But if we are going into the kinds of stories that games will never touch then… I give you “literature”.
I’ll disagree with those CRPGs because there are so many gameplay mechanics tied to alignment that it largely undermines things. I would MAYBE suggest Tyranny as a better fit although that has many of the same problems. But I will fully agree that CRPGs are much more willing to explore nuance but, similarly, tend to focus much more on a single emotion. You tend to have an Eder style character who will crack a joke to ease the tension before giving a haunting line like “It’s a good thing you weren’t braver”, but there is a pretty hard shoeing out the clowns moment when it is time to get real.
Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.
As opposed to eastern culture/media, where the average shonen protagonist will punch the villain enough to convince them to join the good team? Like, you are oversimplifying so much, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m also a bit confused by your point because you lament western characters only beating evil guys to a pulp, then contrast them to an eastern character doing the same.
If your point is that characters in western media don’t display emotions, there are tons of western movies that do exactly that. You won’t find them in generic action movies, but that’s true for pretty much any media around the globe, including eastern ones.
Rambo (the first one, the only good one) has Stallone crying his heart out at the end of the movie. Stand by me has the characters face their insecurities and inner demons throughout the entire movie. Lord of the Rings, Interstellar, Lawrence of Arabia, Saving Private Ryan, Silence (western movie based on Japanese book, maybe this is cheating?). Automata’s entire point is to challenge toxic masculinity.
I could also mention animated films such as How to train your dragon, Tarzan, Puss in Boots Last Wish, Wall-E, Treasure Planet, Finding Nemo, Wild Robot or Emperor’s new Groove, which all have either human male individuals, or male-coded characters that happen to be animals/robots/aliens (IF your point was that male characters are often too macho and emotionless; if you were complaining about characters of any gender doing it, then the list expands).
If your point is that there’s no moral ambiguity in western media, half the above examples still stand. Rambo beat countless (evil) cops, but he’s not seen as a hero for doing so, and he’s a broken man by the end of the movie. Lord of the Rings is choke full of morally ambiguous or conflicted characters, although the most prominent and a fan favourite is Boromir of Gondor. Interstellar has the main character abandon his family to save humanity, and the movie doesn’t explicitly condemn nor praise him for his actions. Saving Private Ryan has the characters conflicted on what to do with a captured german soldier within enemy territory, and the consequences of their choice. There’s the entirety of the Goodfather series following an explicitly evil, but charismatic set of characters.
As for videogames, moral ambiguity was the entire point of TLOU2, although many people disliked that one for various reasons. Styx 1 (haven’t played the second one yet) has you play a character which does good for the wrong reasons, and bad for the good ones. Life is Strange 1 and 2 (haven’t played the rest of the series yet) has lots of morally ambiguous characters, often including the main cast. A Plague Tale, especially the second one, weights on how violence can ruin a person, even if they are forced to commit it for their loved ones.
I’m just mentioning titles off the top of my head, and I’m probably forgetting a lot which could further my point. Point is, I wholeheartedly refuse this idea of eastern media being the only ones capable of displaying emotions or moral ambiguity.
The only real lesson here might be that both Western media as a whole, and the Eastern anime industry, have regressed a lot. Rambo in particular is marked by tragedy with the way sequels warped him into a false image of raw masculinity. Many anime authors have even said as much. But the Eastern gaming scene appears to still have some very dedicated auteurs.
It’s even sort of harmed the feminist movement for Western media to be so simple - often showing women as unemotional, infallible badasses to try to “equal the score”, ultimately just causing people to hate them and even misconstrue women as being the issue with those movies.
But I’m also glad to get more examples of poignant Western media; I felt upset that I could only think of Eastern examples, when I know there are some great ones made more locally.
I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.
Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.
But you’ll also note that the example I brought to the table was Dust: An Elysian Tale. Which is an American (I thought Canadian but wikipedia suggests no) studio. And OP mentions The Walking Dead and Borderlands which are similarly Western. Nobody was implying exclusivity outside of you.
But let’s look at two of the more interesting examples you brought up.
The Last Of Us 2… kind of is emblematic of video games’ (West and East) problem with masculinity. TLOU1 has two particularly strong emotional beats and both involve a Man losing his daughter. TLOU2 is MUCH better in that it actually allowed people to be characters other than “Sad Dad” but it is incredibly telling how much of the game revolves around the second of the strong emotional beats from 1. Ellie is driven by her conflicted feelings over Joel taking away her agency to protect her and Abby is driven by… Joel taking away her entire family. And… I think it speaks a lot to Druckmann and Naughty Dog that the character who has the strongest parental narrative is the very masculine woman who angered the internet for obvious reasons. And that is kind of supported by the mess that is the Uncharted series as well.
As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta. Homie destroyed at least one entire planet (its cool, it was filler and he obviously never did that when he was rolling with Nappa), allowed Nappa to destroy an entire city, murdered Nappa, probably murdered a bunch of Namekians (too lazy to check), definitely murdered a lot more people when he went Majin, and is Goku’s best friend because Krillin is too busy tapping dat ass. Except… not really. Because if you actually go back to DB, the vast majority of The Z Fighters are kind of just rivals that Goku respected and occasionally teamed up with. Outside of Krillin and MAYBE Yamcha, they weren’t his friends. And that is where Vegeta was too up until he went Majin. It was only after that when he acknowledged that he cared about something more than power (Bulma and Trunks) and that, even after his eyes were opened by Frieza, he was a monster. And while Super brushes over a lot of that because it is meant to be a direct sequel to DB, that characterization is still there.
Which is similarly something that a lot of people clown on Yakuza/LAD for. Yeah, Kiryu and Ichiban and even Yagami end up teaming up with a lot of people they beat on a few dozen times. But, by and large, it is not a 'you are my best friend" and more “I respect you and now understand why you did those evil things… but things aren’t over between us”. And then you have the inverse with Ryuji who is pretty unrepentantly “evil” to the end… but it is also impossible to view him and Kiryu as anything other than friends as they fight to the death because that is the only way they know how to communicate.
Nobody was implying exclusivity outside of you.
Slip of the tongue. I likewise reject the idea of eastern writers being “usually” better at writing emotions and/or moral ambiguity, or doing it more frequently. There are countless good and bad stories on both sides.
I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.
Most of the examples I mentioned were mainstream movies and videogames that sold millions of tickets/copies. Or at least as much mainstream as Kamen Rider and Yakuza. There are tons of examples of well-written human drama.
I also fail to understand why action = video games. There are tons of successful games where action is not the main focus, or sometimes it’s not even present at all. I enjoyed the cozy vibes of Life is Strange, for example.
Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.
As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta.
Brushing off the first Rambo movie because of subpar sequels, and then using Dragonball (a series that had nowhere to go after Frieza and yet still gets milked with subpar sequels to this day) as a talking point is just nonsensical.
Mentioning Vegeta as a good example of moral ambiguity is hilarious because he is probably one of the worst written characters of all time, who single-handedly ruins the characterization of the entirety of the main cast.
The dude committed genocide or attempted one at least once per narrative arc and everybody was okay with spending their time with him for literally no reason. If I had two bullets and was standing in a room with Vegeta and Hitler, the safest option for Earth as a whole would be to shoot Vegeta twice. There is “respecting” another person, and there is “brushing off crimes against humanity because that character is cool”.By the way, I don’t want to imply that eastern (Japanese? I don’t think you mentioned other media outside of Japan) writers are worse than western ones. I loved the first Yakuza game (the second one was very dumb and killed my interest in the series; maybe I’m missing out). Metal Gear Solid and Xenogears are, to this day, two of my favourite games ever. I went to the cinema twice in a row to watch Godzilla Minus One. I could also mention Oldboy for something outside of Japan, or Red Cliff, and those are both very much mainstream as well, and action too.
I will never understand people that are against obliterating the absolute most vile people… Against the death penalty? Sure, that’s about not empowering an imperfect (and sometimes outright corrupt) system. Though not blowing away unquestionably evil shitstains?!
Insanity.
Spiritfarer
First, it feels like a cozy little game, awesome artwork, everything’s happy and chill. Then they hit you with the real game, helping people cross over after they died. Not so bad. Then the REAL real game is explained to you, and it is gut-wrenching. I didn’t just have a tear or 2, I full on ugly cried. Every emotion is utilized in that game.
I might need to reinstall that, I cant remember if I finished it or not. Hedgehog Granny broke my heart hard.
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.
I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.
By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.
I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.
The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.
I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.
Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.
You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.
Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
Yoko Taro let the answer to the player, even in the good ending is for you to decide why is worth living.
spoiler
If you find the 2B flight unit you can read the message she left for 9S. “The time I was able to spend with you It was like memories of pure light”. To me this message is 2B answer for the question of what is worth living. Another thing, the OST for the main area of the earth, the cozy ost, is named Rays of light(I think is the same name in japanese) and to me is referencing the “memories of pure light”
I don’t know about mastering both, but Project Zomboid maybe?
It can be somewhat chill and even relaxing occasionally, but when it makes you anxious it makes you ANXIOUS (and queasy, eventually).
The Dark Souls series imo.
