| Simulacrum said:
Every Final Fantasy has brought us great story,great graphics,great gameplay, memorable moments.In each game there has been diffrent battlesystem (spheres,materia etc).
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A couple of years ago game blogs exploded with rage, when Roger Ebert, film critic, expressed his opinion on games compared to film and literature. Though he admited his knowledge of games is limited, still he called them "inferior to film and literature". He pointed out that gamer rather than authorial control is what makes them inferior, and I believe to some extent it's true. It is hard to create emotionally involving piece of art, twice as hard create emotionally involving AND interactive piece of art (i.e. player's choice defines plot evolution). It seems to me he was unaware of the fact that a lot of games borrowed some film creators techiques to create those 'emotionally involving' plots sacrificing interactivity of storyline (i.e. MGS, FF etc.), thus gamer control wasn't an issue. Still point stands, and very few game plots could be compared to best examples of film and literature masterpieces. I do believe it's due to targeted audience being still very limited in range of... let's say personal experience, not to mention that medium itself still very young, and FF games, though commonly considered as best examples of storytelling in games, are one of the most mainstream, popular and best-selling games. Thus being targeted to very wide range of people's tastes, they aren't the best examples of what I may call satisfying storytelling, hardly emotionally involving (though the latter varies from personal experience of individual) not to mention they're highly cliched (in fact they've created a lot of those cliches) and usually meaningless or at least pretty simple in it's idea. All in all, I wouldn't say that 'great story' in games is smth that common, and if there're great stories in games - don't look for most popular ones, look for niche, hidden gems. Games are still to come up with storytelling on the level of best examples of film and literature creations, at least I hope so.
