Story is automatically a good thing?

[Sullla]

I'm also not a fan of the cinematic approach to gaming. (This is explained best in Malstrom's theory of cycles, which jonlucas has linked to above.) Growing up in the 1980s, the games back then had little to no story whatsoever. (Case in point: no one *EVER* gave games a score for "story" back then in reviews!) When games began adding more and more story-telling elements in the mid-90s, I was initially all for it. It was something fresh and new at the time. But eventually games began focusing so much on story-telling that the gameplay began to suffer. In particular, a lot of level-design became EXTREMELY linear, because the story needed to be told in a particular order. To me, gaming is all about the choices that a player makes, so when a game is nothing more than moving a character down a rigid one-track path (e.g. Heavenly Sword), that's a major disappointment.

Since it's already been brought up, Kingdom Hearts 2 is another good example of this trend. I enjoyed the original Kingdom Hearts, but hated the sequel. Every 5 minutes, the game pushes you aside and makes you sit through cut-scenes. It sounds like fun... but it's not. I buy games to play them, not watch the game play itself. And yeah, the production value and graphics were fantastic in Kingdom Hearts 2, but the gameplay was garbage: glorified button-mashing, atrocious level design, and pathetically easy difficulty level. I know that leo-j and Soriku think that Kingdom Hearts is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I see it as a good example of what happens when "story" runs amock and overwhelms gameplay.

Story elements work very well in some genres, less so in others. Used appropriately, a good story can absolutely be a huge draw and a major asset to games. The problem is when developers feel the need to shoehorn "story" into absolutely every conceivable genre possible, even where it doesn't fit... and when reviewers mark down games that emphatically do not need a story for lacking one. (I even saw criticisms for Wii Sports that it lacked a story. Now that's funny!)

Long story short, everyone has different opinions on this subject, and no one is right or wrong. I vastly prefer books to movies, so that influences a lot of my gaming tastes as well.