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MTZehvor on 25 April 2018
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GribbleGrunger said:
MTZehvor said:

O/T: As others have said, I think OP would be benefitted by a bit more brevity. I do think it's entirely fair to analyze the game's story this heavily, especially when the narrative and characters are some of the main selling points of the game and have been praised consistently, but I feel that you'd be better served by listing one or two main complaints, and then going through and explaining how these are embodied in the game. If you want to focus on inconsistencies in the narrative's tone, then it might be better to state that up front and pick a few examples that last maybe a paragraph or so. As it stands, getting a seven paragraph summary of the opening scene (which most of the people reading this will already be familiar with) with so many of the details (relevant to your argument or not) included just makes it harder for people to understand where the argument is going, as well as more likely to stop reading. Personally, I had to re-read a couple of times to figure out specifically what the major complaints were.

There's not really that much more I need to add. That is the perfect example of the problem I have with the game. If you're going to make a serious stab at a narrative driven game (within the body of an open world game of course) then you have to find ways of retaining the narrative beats, the emotional context and the way you want the player to play/feel/interact. The boat and the stories told there are a perfect example of how to 'avoid' the problem, but there are many more linear moments that jar badly simply because the writers reached for the easy way out instead of contextualising them. Lines that essentially just state: 'I'm angry now, I'm sad now, I'm fighting inner demons now' etc. 

I'm suggesting you do the exact opposite; subtract, rather than add. Instead of recounting the entire scene where the problem you have with the game takes place and taking seven paragraphs to address two points, just quickly outline the problems and maybe spend a paragraph briefly describing the examples where the issues take place. For instance, if you think the shift in tone between the burning the wife's body and killing the troll is incongruous, something like this would suffice;

"The tone wildly shifts between the burning of Feye's body and the end of the first miniboss. It starts off somber, then becomes almost silly when Arteus spouts off a one liner worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon, and finally just embraces pure absurdity after the battle when Arteus runs up and starts stabbing the troll's corpse. It's hard to take the scene seriously when the characters' actions and dialogue are all over the place tonally."

That's not going to be a perfect example, as there's almost assuredly something I haven't included in there that's an issue to you, but I think it gets the point across. It sums up what I believe is one of your complaints in a succinct paragraph that's easy to read, and people won't simply skim over.