Snoorlax said:
I think SR did a great job of showing and not telling or scanning with cutscenes and they were all skippable. Not a single piece of scanning and reading and i skip them after viewing them the second time. It's not that people don't want to scan it's that if you're going to tell a story by scanning everything then you basically need to force the player to stop, scan everything and tell them everything what's happened or happening by text. It dumbs down the experience because not everybody wants to stop and read they just want to continue playing. I scanned everything in Prime because i was interested in reading about the enemies, bosses and powerups but reading about the lore and the story behind them actually made it boring, why not just show it? I think this was the main reason Prime 3 went for a more cinematic, voice acting approach and dumbed down the scanning logs. |
I think to respond effectively we need to take a step back from looking at just Prime's style of storytelling and examine storytelling in games in general. Basically every video game that attempts to tell a somewhat coherent story requires the game to come to a halt; be it through cutscene, speech boxes, or dialogue trees like Fallout or Mass Effect. Gameplay gets brought to a halt regardless with any of these options, and if your concern is that you're slowing down the flow of gameplay, any of these is going to be an issue.
Then you have titles like Samus Returns and Super Metroid, which tell their stories basically entirely through environmental cues. It should be noted that, with one or two exceptions towards the end, the cutscenes in Samus Returns are entirely unrelated to the narrative; they're almost exclusively used to either introduce an enemy that you are about to fight or show that an enemy you were fighting is now dead. The reason Samus Returns can tell its story without cutscenes or basically any text is that it's a pretty simple narrative; Samus is given a mission to kill all the Metroids on SR-388, and the actual in game story basically boils down to "Samus goes ahead and kills all those Metroids." You don't need much in the way of storytelling aids like cutscenes or text boxes to help communicate that. But video games that want to tell a more complex story than that will need those storytelling aids to effectively get their narrative across. Try all you want; you're not going to be able to effectively communicate the plot of, say, Fire Emblem or Fallout simply by "showing." There has to be a degree of telling involved.
The Prime games take what is, in my opinion, a genius approach that almost serves as a compromise between these two methods of storytelling. There is a simple story on the surface of each of the Prime games that the player can follow without scanning any lore or enemies at all; in other words, you don't need to scan to understand what is happening in the main narrative. For Prime 1, it's Samus tracking a distress signal to Tallon IV, and then basically spending the rest of the game looking for Ridley and disrupting Pirate Operations wherever she finds them. For Prime 2, it's Samus trying to help save the Luminoth and destroy the Ing. For Prime 3, it's Samus destroying the Leviathans and ending the threat of Phazon. If you feel so inclined, you can totally avoid scanning and still understand the main narrative of the game without a reading a single bit of lore.
What makes the Prime approach so great, in my opinion, is that for the people who enjoy the reading, there's an entire library's worth of totally optional backstory to be found that can improve your experience with the game. The Prime Trilogy largely manages to accomplish this level of optionality by making the scan logs largely focus on backstory, while the cutscenes that the player encounters throughout the game are the real meat of the narrative. The scan logs help to supplement the game's main narrative of "Samus going to a place and killing things" by providing additional context to the location and the things she is killing, but again, it's optional. If you find it boring, go ahead and skip it. You'll be left with a story that's about as simplistic as you'll find in Samus Returns, and, hey, if that's what you want, more power to you. But for those of us who enjoy the prospect of some more complexity to things, I don't see a good reason to not have it.
In your case, if you enjoy learning about the enemies but find the lore boring, then hey, just stick to scanning the enemies. If the game's backstory isn't interesting to you, then feel free to ignore it. It's not required to enjoy the game. You don't need to stop at all if you don't want to. With the possible exception of understanding why Samus would go into the Impact Core at the end of Prime 1, everything that Samus does in the Prime series is logical and understandable with or without scanning.
I'm also going to disagree with your assessment of Prime 3, because Prime 3 has arguably the most complex lore in the Trilogy, and, at the very least, is certainly far more complex than Prime 2's. There's quite a few twists and turns in the story of the ancient Bryyonian civilization, and the story of Skytown's Elysians is very indepth on its own, to say nothing of the backstory provided by the Pirates on their homeworld. Prime 3's lore may have taken a backseat due to the heavier focus on cutscenes, but it's by no means simplistic.
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