Hiku said:
I don't know how it is these days as I haven't played the Xenoblade series, but their writers were not mediocre back during Xenogears and Xenosaga. While in general, storywriting for videogames tends to be weaksauce, rpg is one genre that traditionally allows a lot of room for storytelling that doesn't have the same limitations as films (length in particular). If the story is bad, it being a game is not always a proper excuse.
Xenogears story was inspiried by works of Jung, Nietzsche, and Freud, and many religious works that sparked some of the most interesting discussions I've taken part of.
Unfortunately, the main writer, Tetsuya Takahashi's wife, Kaori Tanaka, was fired by Namco during the development of Xenosaga 2. (Namco went in and made changes to the story, and it seems Tanaka wasn't pleased.)
Don't know if Monolith have access to their original storywriting team any more if needed. But I don't doubt that those people could put together a good story. They've done it a few times. What I have doubts about is how they'd work that into a different format. The "three acts" of films, for example. Their stories tend to be long, deep, complex and convoluted. That works when you play a game for 100+ hours. Not so much for a two hour feature film, or a shorter series. So that's why I think someone with experience in that field may be a better pick.
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I've never played the other Xeno games, but I've played both Chronicles and I've played many RPGs. I've never played a single story that I would deem exceptional outside of it's current medium. I love Xenoblade Chronicles including it's story, but I also have far lower expectations for writing in video games than writing in films. Genuinely, Marvel movies have better writing than 99% of the best stories in games I've ever played. That's not a slight on Marvel, but their movies are popcorn flicks. I've definitely never played a JRPG with writing that I think matches those movies.
I don't think that talking about phylosophical topics has anything to do with good writing. Take MGS3 for example. I fucking love that game. Loved it's story and loved it's camp, but that's not good writing at all. It just isn't. The jargon they get into about philosophy and weapons and movies and whatever, the way the dialog is scripted, everything is extremely ameteur compared to some of the most mediocre of film scripts. It's just a different standard for what is good enough. And sure, I can get past that. Not every game is going to have ND writers on it (who aren't anything even remotely spectacular, btw. They just far excede anyone else in games), but we can't pretend that video games' calibur of writers would translate to movies. The best Final Fantasy writer in the world would get absolutely fucking slammed critically if they were to release a movie. Naughty Dog writers would at worse get average reviews and at most - well The Last of Us was very well written, outside of a few blemishes during the seasonal transitions, so very good.
I don't even think length is an alibi. Television shows that run for season will have more story than a game that takes 100 hours to complete, simply by virtue of the fact that much of those hours are gameplay rather than story. Again, I don't know about the others, but I've never played a game that was as well written as even slightly above average shows like Supernatural or Smallville. I shit on TLoU a lot, because it's not that great, but it's story is laudable. I've absolutely never seen a game written that well (I'm uncluding Uncharted 1-3 here), and that shit's standard fare in TV and movies. People think Mass Effect and The Witcher are examples of good writing in video games, which fucking blows my mind because they aren't at all. I just think the expectations are much lower with games. That's why TLoU is the "Citizen Kane" of video games when it would only be the "I Am Legend" of movies. Great movie with great writing, but like come on. "Citizen Kane."
It's not even Inception.
I also want to clarify that I don't think Monolith makes bad stories (though XCX was really shit), but it scares me when people praise the story in games like Xenoblade Chronicles with the severity that they do, because that's like B-tier short form anime quality writing. It's enjoyable for what it is, but there's a tremendous emphasis on those last three words. I like McDonalds too, for what it is. Xenoblade is one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. I think it's one of the most well made games of all time. I fucking love it's story too, but I also used to love Dragonball Z and I also currently love Naruto. I'm lowering my expectations for stuff like this, because I wouldn't be able to enjoy anything if I didn't.
