Are Nintendo games held to an unrealistic standard?

[h2ohno]

The need for a compelling story varies from game to game. A game like Mario would not benefit from having a truly compelling story, as all it would do is take time away from actually playing the game, so having such a story would hurt the overall experience. So the absence of a compelling narrative is no reason to lower the game's score. A game like Fire Emblem, on the other hand, where the player has to grow attached to the characters for the permadeath system to mean anything, often lives or dies by its story.

I usually find that the stories of Nintendo games do their job. The Metroid games - other than Other M - excel at environmental storytelling. The way Skyward Sword built up the friendship between Link and Zelda made for a much better motivation to move forward than the seeking out of macguffins was in earlier games. Fire Emblem Awakening's story meshed perfectly with its game mechanics. Super Paper Mario has some of the best and funniest dialogue in any game.

I find narrative-heavy games that could just as easily be a movie without changing anything to be very overrated, which is part of why I don't care much for Naughty Dog games. If a game's story does nothing to take advantage of the video-game medium then it will almost always come up short when compared to movies and books with similar stories, like how no Uncharted or Tomb Raider game will ever come close to having a story or characters that are half as compelling as Raiders of the Lost Ark. A game like Mass Effect with its myriad of choices or Bioshock, where the game's big twist is a commentary of the player-game relationship, those are stories that benefit from being told in video-game format. But with games that want to be movies, the movie will almost always be better anyways, so why bother.