Silent Hill 2
The Story
James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife asking him to come to their "special place." Trouble is, his wife Mary has been dead for three years. He's drawn to Silent Hill, a quiet town that they had visited in the past, before the sickness finally took her. Upon arriving, James runs into meaty skin-walls, gruesome monsters and precious few humans at all. And the people he does meet all seem to have their own problems, like a dimwitted man who's killed someone, a teenager searching for her mother and a little girl who doesn't even notice all the awful things happening around her. Then there's Maria, who's a spitting image of Mary, albeit sexed up far beyond his wife's more subdued behavior.
After countless close calls with Pyramid Head, a masked killer brandishing a sword so large he has to drag it, James finds more and more clues about his wife, her letter and what's happening in Silent Hill. The more he understands, the less fearsome the town becomes, and it turns out that everything you've seen is a reflection of James' inner torment over killing his wife. Yes, it turns out you murdered her and have hid from that fact all along, creating the constant purgatory known as Silent Hill.
Why it's the best
Holy Christ, is this game intense. The premise alone - find out how your dead wife sent you a letter - is terrifying, and when coupled with the horrific setting and creepy denizens of Silent Hill, it becomes a near-unbearable level of dread. Every hallway, every door could contain another awful monster or suggestive conversation about James's past, but it usually doesn't. You're constantly on edge, wondering if the worst is about to come... or just another empty room. It's a slower burn than Resident Evil by far.
Silent Hill speaks in metaphors, not bats in the hair or dogs crashing through windows. Plunging deeper into the town symbolizes his inner conflict, and as you hack away monsters, you're also hacking away his mental blocks that hide the truth. The further you dig, the more you question him - is he really an innocent man who unjustly lost his wife or not? The other characters have just as much to add to the story too - Angela, the teen searching for her mother, apparently killed her abusive father and fled to Silent Hill. She tries to kill herself, but James intervenes, setting into motion her final moment near the end.
BioShock
The Story:
In the 1940s, driven by a need to escape societal, political and religious authority, the entrepreneur Andrew Ryan built a utopian metropolis under the sea and invited like-minded citizens to join him there. In the end, however, he gave his community too much freedom. Rampant commercialism led to crime, class systems and eventually civil war. Unchecked scientific experimentation led to a decimated population of genetic freaks, corpse-harvesting little girls and brainwashed super cyborgs. By 1960, although the city of Rapture is in abandoned ruins, four powerful personalities are still vying for control: Ryan, the founder; Atlas, the opposition leader; Fontaine, the supposedly dead mafia lord; and Tennenbaum, the doctor responsible for many of the people's mutations.
Why it’s the Best:
Ryan, Atlas, Fontaine and Tennenbaum are remarkably academic characters for a videogame; their psychologies and philosophies manage to reference everything from Ayn Rand and George Orwell to Walt Disney and Keyser Soze. One could teach a graduate class on the various influences and archetypes at play in BioShock. There is seriously heady, mind-warping stuff here.
What is brilliant about the story, though, is that these four dominant forces are not the most memorable or important characters. Despite appearing on dozens of billboards and blabbering away in dozens of radio messages, they are completely eclipsed by the real stars of BioShock... stars who are almost impossible to put a face to.
The first is Rapture itself. The city is so fully realized and so dense with detail that it becomes not only a unique personality, but also a narrator of its own sad tale. You don’t need anyone to tell you what has happened here... the environment speaks silent volumes. Garish and extravagant entertainment districts now flooded with dirty water. Posters that advertise genetic upgrades as if they were fashionable new hats. Majestic and living trees trapped in man-made glass tubes. You know exactly what to expect from the crazy surgeon at the end of the first level because you've already seen his bloody handiwork splattered all over the walls. You suspect Atlas before he betrays you because of the visual foreshadowing his creepy pamphlets provide.
The second star is... you, the game's protagonist. What's so surprising about that? Mute, unseen heroes are a dime a dozen, especially in first person shooters. Their transparency allows players to believe that they are the real heroes. The formula is tried, true and familiar.
But BioShock flips that equation upside down, and then shakes it around until it feels nauseous. As soon as you've placed yourself comfortably inside the hero's shoes, the game reveals a disturbing twist - you are no generic Everyman. You are a mentally programmed errand boy, specifically created and trained to do whatever your evil master demands, including murder. And when you, the player, try to distance yourself from this squirm-inducing new back story, you can't... because, minus the "evil" part, how is that description any different than what you do in all first person shooters?
Metal Gear Solid
The Story:
Secret agent Solid Snake is yanked out of a well-earned retirement and sent to a remote island in Alaska, where a military black-ops team has gone rogue and seized a nuclear weapon. Once there, Snake meets a bunch of interesting people, snaps most of their necks and endures capture, torture and the company of a guy who pees his pants when ninjas menace him. He soon learns he's part of a government cloning project, and that his clone "brother" wants to use a giant, walking, nuclear-armed tank called Metal Gear to kill him. Moreover, some of his allies seem intent on betraying him, and there's no way to know whom to trust. Overcoming impossible odds, he ultimately saves the day (and the girl, if you're lucky) by accidentally infecting his brother with a lethal virus for which he was made an unwitting carrier. Snake is unaffected by the virus - but for how long?
Why it’s the Best:
A big part of what sets Metal Gear Solid and its sequels apart from other games is their moral ambiguity; while Snake is always on the right side of the law - or at least seems to be - the people he fights are almost never truly evil. Their motivations are complex, and more often than not, they're fighting on the "wrong" side because they're clued in to the monstrous, uncaring conspiracy that's operating behind the "good" guys.
Nowhere was this more true than in the first Metal Gear Solid. Each boss battle is a story in itself, and everyone you kill will deliver a strangely poignant monologue when you off them. One of the villains, Sniper Wolf, even has a weird romantic thing going on with Snake's new buddy, nerdy engineer Hal "Otacon" Emmerich - and her death at Snake's hands completely obliterates any notions Otacon had about the nobility of war. As the plot evolves - largely through "codec" radio conversations that drop in treatises on nuclear war and escalation of powers - you'll start to wonder if you're on the right side at all, thanks in part to several of your "allies" covertly manipulating you into doing their bidding the whole time.
Of course, all doubt about which side you're on goes out the window when you're captured and tortured by Revolver Ocelot, simultaneously one of the most likable and hateful villains in videogame history. He's a sadist, but he's also got a certain charm, and the broken-fourth-wall torture sequence ("Don't even think about using auto-fire, or I'll know!") remains one of the most memorable in the game - partly because something was actually riding on it. Fail to resist the torture, and the life of Snake's love interest, Meryl Silverburgh, is forfeit.
Then there's the eerie Psycho Mantis scene, in which the floating psychic reads your memory cards and moves your controller across the floor. And the strange appearances of the Ninja, a cyborg assassin who seems to know Snake. It all culminates in the final, inevitable confrontation between Solid and Liquid Snake, the latter of which refuses to die even when he's been blown up, beaten half to death and shot full of holes by a jeep-mounted machinegun. Gripping from start to finish, the first MGS still stands as the most compelling - and least confusing - entry in the series so far, and a damn good story to boot.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
The Story:
The story changes depending on the choices the player makes throughout the game - gender, class, good/evil, etc. - but the “canon” play-through still makes for a good story and many of the main plot points remain the same.
You start out as one of the few survivors of a botched mission run by Jedi badass Bastila Shan with no memory of who you are or what you were doing on her starship. You fall in with one of the good guys, who’s out to save Bastila after her escape pod crash lands somewhere on a Sith-controlled planet. Bastila is captured and handed over to the Sith lord Darth Malak, the evil badass who overthrew his own Sith master, Revan, for a chance to destroy the Jedi. Through events of the game - played either as a good guy or an evil one - the quest to get a hold of Bastila morphs into a quest to find star maps that will lead the player to the Star Forge, a battle station that will decide the outcome of the Jedi vs Sith conflict.
A little more than halfway through the game, a major plot twist is revealed: you are Revan… or you were until your prick of a team-killing apprentice Malak offed you. With this newfound knowledge, players have an even greater incentive to destroy Malak, regardless of whether they’re playing as a goody-two-shoes or the ultimate bastard. Then Bastila turns to the Dark Side - despite being the hoity-toity good-girl Jedi - and the player has a whole new set of plot points to navigate through to one of the game’s multiple conclusions.
Why it’s the Best:
Knights of the Old Republic has a lot to offer in the way of a good story - setting, plot, characters, a killer climax - to name a few elements. Developer BioWare had a leg up in setting on the count of borrowing almost everything from the Star Wars canon - but they did go the extra mile to make their own fan fiction and make it work for Star Wars. So even if you can bring yourself to dispute our claims that the climax is awesome and the characters were compelling, you can’t deny that this game felt like Star Wars in a way that Jedi Knight and Shadows of the Empire never did.
KOTOR is filled with interesting and talkative characters but the most compelling one in the whole story is you. In other games, your character is made for you - even if they do let you pick out the color of your hair and let you name yourself Pr1ncess McWh00pass. But KOTOR gave the player real choices that had real effects on the story. From being a girl to being totally evil, to making a Wookie kill his Twi’lek best friend, KOTOR’s story never ignored your choices. Instead they stretched the linear events to accommodate whatever you came up with and it made you, the main character - and the plot - that much more interesting.
Now the plot doesn’t sound like anything special: galaxy in turmoil, kidnapped chick, huge weapon, stuff happens. But when you actually sit down to play the game, the pace of the story keeps things from feeling like an endless grind and you will willingly suffer through side quests just to find out what happens next. Then comes the plot twist: you are/were/are going to be again the baddest of bad guys in the galaxy. Even if you had been playing as the perfect paragon of Jedi goodness until that point, the great reveal gives you pause. First you experience a barrage of philosophical questions: what makes a man evil; can evil be unlearned; etc.
And then you find yourself asking: “Wait, am I supposed to be evil? Have I been playing the game wrong?”
It’s a funny thing to see an entire generation of gamers grow up in one moment. That moment came when we poor souls who were conditioned to follow where a game led us stopped dead in our button mashing and realized that, no, we hadn’t been playing KOTOR wrong; we had a choice in the story. And whatever we chose, it would be effin’ awesome.
So of course KOTOR makes our list of best game stories - because it was our story, whoever we were when we played it on whatever path we chose to take.
Final Fantasy VI
The Story:
An oppressive regime is attempting to unlock magic that nearly destroyed the world a thousand years earlier. In the process of re-discovering these forbidden mystic arts, the empire creates magic-infused soldiers that harness destructive abilities not seen in ages, one of whom is finally driven insane and seeks to not only overthrow the empire, but also reshape the world in his twisted image. He eventually succeeds after finally discovering the source of all magic - three statues that house actual gods - and plunges the planet into ruin. Your party, having failed to stop the nutcase in the first place, is scattered across the globe and has to try all over again to stop a man that seemingly has all of creation under his sociopathic control.
You can condense it further to "crazy guy becomes all-powerful, wrecks the planet, then is killed by heroes" and it loses all semblance of depth. But pry just a hair's breadth deeper and you'll find a cast of characters that rivals anything else on the market, past, present and most likely far into the future.
Why it's the best:
Final Fantasy VI is all about personality. Each lead in this 14-strong ensemble cast has a distinct past, a reason to fight and a load of emotional baggage that'd make the staunchest of psychologists weep. Terra, after being used as a puppet of the empire, finds she's the product of a union between a human and an Esper, who are all that remain of magic in the world. She's an unholy mix that frightens the heroes and excites the villains, all alone in her quest for identity. Cyan has to watch his entire castle, wife and child included, poisoned and killed. After the world is destroyed, Celes believes all of her friends are dead and attempts suicide in one of the most heart-tearing moments we've ever witnessed in gaming. The soul-shearing barbs keep coming throughout the story, making FFVI much more personal than any before it, and arguably any since.
See, this was the last Final Fantasy that had to focus on story and characters because the graphics were too primitive to showcase anything but blinking eyes and sagging heads. Even FFVII, widely hailed as the best thing that mankind has ever created, resorted to stereotypes and flashy cinemas instead of nailing down an unrivaled narrative. FFVI stands as the last line of defense against modern-day, style-over-substance RPGs. You spend so much time appreciating the technology that you forget how silly and trite some of the interactions really are.
Then there's Kefka. We named him one of the series' best villains before and aren't about to step down from that opinion. By the time you run into him, he's already lost his mind and is well on his way to overthrowing the empire and claiming ultimate power. Like literally, ultimate power. Once imbued with said abilities, Kefka takes a scalpel to the planet, ripping up continents and murdering vast numbers of people just to see if he can. Then, with what's left, he creates a towering pile of refuse and junk to act as his massive throne. His reaction? Laughter. Constant laughter.
The Story
James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife asking him to come to their "special place." Trouble is, his wife Mary has been dead for three years. He's drawn to Silent Hill, a quiet town that they had visited in the past, before the sickness finally took her. Upon arriving, James runs into meaty skin-walls, gruesome monsters and precious few humans at all. And the people he does meet all seem to have their own problems, like a dimwitted man who's killed someone, a teenager searching for her mother and a little girl who doesn't even notice all the awful things happening around her. Then there's Maria, who's a spitting image of Mary, albeit sexed up far beyond his wife's more subdued behavior.
After countless close calls with Pyramid Head, a masked killer brandishing a sword so large he has to drag it, James finds more and more clues about his wife, her letter and what's happening in Silent Hill. The more he understands, the less fearsome the town becomes, and it turns out that everything you've seen is a reflection of James' inner torment over killing his wife. Yes, it turns out you murdered her and have hid from that fact all along, creating the constant purgatory known as Silent Hill.
Why it's the best
Holy Christ, is this game intense. The premise alone - find out how your dead wife sent you a letter - is terrifying, and when coupled with the horrific setting and creepy denizens of Silent Hill, it becomes a near-unbearable level of dread. Every hallway, every door could contain another awful monster or suggestive conversation about James's past, but it usually doesn't. You're constantly on edge, wondering if the worst is about to come... or just another empty room. It's a slower burn than Resident Evil by far.
Silent Hill speaks in metaphors, not bats in the hair or dogs crashing through windows. Plunging deeper into the town symbolizes his inner conflict, and as you hack away monsters, you're also hacking away his mental blocks that hide the truth. The further you dig, the more you question him - is he really an innocent man who unjustly lost his wife or not? The other characters have just as much to add to the story too - Angela, the teen searching for her mother, apparently killed her abusive father and fled to Silent Hill. She tries to kill herself, but James intervenes, setting into motion her final moment near the end.
BioShock
The Story:
In the 1940s, driven by a need to escape societal, political and religious authority, the entrepreneur Andrew Ryan built a utopian metropolis under the sea and invited like-minded citizens to join him there. In the end, however, he gave his community too much freedom. Rampant commercialism led to crime, class systems and eventually civil war. Unchecked scientific experimentation led to a decimated population of genetic freaks, corpse-harvesting little girls and brainwashed super cyborgs. By 1960, although the city of Rapture is in abandoned ruins, four powerful personalities are still vying for control: Ryan, the founder; Atlas, the opposition leader; Fontaine, the supposedly dead mafia lord; and Tennenbaum, the doctor responsible for many of the people's mutations.
Why it’s the Best:
Ryan, Atlas, Fontaine and Tennenbaum are remarkably academic characters for a videogame; their psychologies and philosophies manage to reference everything from Ayn Rand and George Orwell to Walt Disney and Keyser Soze. One could teach a graduate class on the various influences and archetypes at play in BioShock. There is seriously heady, mind-warping stuff here.
What is brilliant about the story, though, is that these four dominant forces are not the most memorable or important characters. Despite appearing on dozens of billboards and blabbering away in dozens of radio messages, they are completely eclipsed by the real stars of BioShock... stars who are almost impossible to put a face to.
The first is Rapture itself. The city is so fully realized and so dense with detail that it becomes not only a unique personality, but also a narrator of its own sad tale. You don’t need anyone to tell you what has happened here... the environment speaks silent volumes. Garish and extravagant entertainment districts now flooded with dirty water. Posters that advertise genetic upgrades as if they were fashionable new hats. Majestic and living trees trapped in man-made glass tubes. You know exactly what to expect from the crazy surgeon at the end of the first level because you've already seen his bloody handiwork splattered all over the walls. You suspect Atlas before he betrays you because of the visual foreshadowing his creepy pamphlets provide.
The second star is... you, the game's protagonist. What's so surprising about that? Mute, unseen heroes are a dime a dozen, especially in first person shooters. Their transparency allows players to believe that they are the real heroes. The formula is tried, true and familiar.
But BioShock flips that equation upside down, and then shakes it around until it feels nauseous. As soon as you've placed yourself comfortably inside the hero's shoes, the game reveals a disturbing twist - you are no generic Everyman. You are a mentally programmed errand boy, specifically created and trained to do whatever your evil master demands, including murder. And when you, the player, try to distance yourself from this squirm-inducing new back story, you can't... because, minus the "evil" part, how is that description any different than what you do in all first person shooters?
Metal Gear Solid
The Story:
Secret agent Solid Snake is yanked out of a well-earned retirement and sent to a remote island in Alaska, where a military black-ops team has gone rogue and seized a nuclear weapon. Once there, Snake meets a bunch of interesting people, snaps most of their necks and endures capture, torture and the company of a guy who pees his pants when ninjas menace him. He soon learns he's part of a government cloning project, and that his clone "brother" wants to use a giant, walking, nuclear-armed tank called Metal Gear to kill him. Moreover, some of his allies seem intent on betraying him, and there's no way to know whom to trust. Overcoming impossible odds, he ultimately saves the day (and the girl, if you're lucky) by accidentally infecting his brother with a lethal virus for which he was made an unwitting carrier. Snake is unaffected by the virus - but for how long?
Why it’s the Best:
A big part of what sets Metal Gear Solid and its sequels apart from other games is their moral ambiguity; while Snake is always on the right side of the law - or at least seems to be - the people he fights are almost never truly evil. Their motivations are complex, and more often than not, they're fighting on the "wrong" side because they're clued in to the monstrous, uncaring conspiracy that's operating behind the "good" guys.
Nowhere was this more true than in the first Metal Gear Solid. Each boss battle is a story in itself, and everyone you kill will deliver a strangely poignant monologue when you off them. One of the villains, Sniper Wolf, even has a weird romantic thing going on with Snake's new buddy, nerdy engineer Hal "Otacon" Emmerich - and her death at Snake's hands completely obliterates any notions Otacon had about the nobility of war. As the plot evolves - largely through "codec" radio conversations that drop in treatises on nuclear war and escalation of powers - you'll start to wonder if you're on the right side at all, thanks in part to several of your "allies" covertly manipulating you into doing their bidding the whole time.
Of course, all doubt about which side you're on goes out the window when you're captured and tortured by Revolver Ocelot, simultaneously one of the most likable and hateful villains in videogame history. He's a sadist, but he's also got a certain charm, and the broken-fourth-wall torture sequence ("Don't even think about using auto-fire, or I'll know!") remains one of the most memorable in the game - partly because something was actually riding on it. Fail to resist the torture, and the life of Snake's love interest, Meryl Silverburgh, is forfeit.
Then there's the eerie Psycho Mantis scene, in which the floating psychic reads your memory cards and moves your controller across the floor. And the strange appearances of the Ninja, a cyborg assassin who seems to know Snake. It all culminates in the final, inevitable confrontation between Solid and Liquid Snake, the latter of which refuses to die even when he's been blown up, beaten half to death and shot full of holes by a jeep-mounted machinegun. Gripping from start to finish, the first MGS still stands as the most compelling - and least confusing - entry in the series so far, and a damn good story to boot.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
The Story:
The story changes depending on the choices the player makes throughout the game - gender, class, good/evil, etc. - but the “canon” play-through still makes for a good story and many of the main plot points remain the same.
You start out as one of the few survivors of a botched mission run by Jedi badass Bastila Shan with no memory of who you are or what you were doing on her starship. You fall in with one of the good guys, who’s out to save Bastila after her escape pod crash lands somewhere on a Sith-controlled planet. Bastila is captured and handed over to the Sith lord Darth Malak, the evil badass who overthrew his own Sith master, Revan, for a chance to destroy the Jedi. Through events of the game - played either as a good guy or an evil one - the quest to get a hold of Bastila morphs into a quest to find star maps that will lead the player to the Star Forge, a battle station that will decide the outcome of the Jedi vs Sith conflict.
A little more than halfway through the game, a major plot twist is revealed: you are Revan… or you were until your prick of a team-killing apprentice Malak offed you. With this newfound knowledge, players have an even greater incentive to destroy Malak, regardless of whether they’re playing as a goody-two-shoes or the ultimate bastard. Then Bastila turns to the Dark Side - despite being the hoity-toity good-girl Jedi - and the player has a whole new set of plot points to navigate through to one of the game’s multiple conclusions.
Why it’s the Best:
Knights of the Old Republic has a lot to offer in the way of a good story - setting, plot, characters, a killer climax - to name a few elements. Developer BioWare had a leg up in setting on the count of borrowing almost everything from the Star Wars canon - but they did go the extra mile to make their own fan fiction and make it work for Star Wars. So even if you can bring yourself to dispute our claims that the climax is awesome and the characters were compelling, you can’t deny that this game felt like Star Wars in a way that Jedi Knight and Shadows of the Empire never did.
KOTOR is filled with interesting and talkative characters but the most compelling one in the whole story is you. In other games, your character is made for you - even if they do let you pick out the color of your hair and let you name yourself Pr1ncess McWh00pass. But KOTOR gave the player real choices that had real effects on the story. From being a girl to being totally evil, to making a Wookie kill his Twi’lek best friend, KOTOR’s story never ignored your choices. Instead they stretched the linear events to accommodate whatever you came up with and it made you, the main character - and the plot - that much more interesting.
Now the plot doesn’t sound like anything special: galaxy in turmoil, kidnapped chick, huge weapon, stuff happens. But when you actually sit down to play the game, the pace of the story keeps things from feeling like an endless grind and you will willingly suffer through side quests just to find out what happens next. Then comes the plot twist: you are/were/are going to be again the baddest of bad guys in the galaxy. Even if you had been playing as the perfect paragon of Jedi goodness until that point, the great reveal gives you pause. First you experience a barrage of philosophical questions: what makes a man evil; can evil be unlearned; etc.
And then you find yourself asking: “Wait, am I supposed to be evil? Have I been playing the game wrong?”
It’s a funny thing to see an entire generation of gamers grow up in one moment. That moment came when we poor souls who were conditioned to follow where a game led us stopped dead in our button mashing and realized that, no, we hadn’t been playing KOTOR wrong; we had a choice in the story. And whatever we chose, it would be effin’ awesome.
So of course KOTOR makes our list of best game stories - because it was our story, whoever we were when we played it on whatever path we chose to take.
Final Fantasy VI
The Story:
An oppressive regime is attempting to unlock magic that nearly destroyed the world a thousand years earlier. In the process of re-discovering these forbidden mystic arts, the empire creates magic-infused soldiers that harness destructive abilities not seen in ages, one of whom is finally driven insane and seeks to not only overthrow the empire, but also reshape the world in his twisted image. He eventually succeeds after finally discovering the source of all magic - three statues that house actual gods - and plunges the planet into ruin. Your party, having failed to stop the nutcase in the first place, is scattered across the globe and has to try all over again to stop a man that seemingly has all of creation under his sociopathic control.
You can condense it further to "crazy guy becomes all-powerful, wrecks the planet, then is killed by heroes" and it loses all semblance of depth. But pry just a hair's breadth deeper and you'll find a cast of characters that rivals anything else on the market, past, present and most likely far into the future.
Why it's the best:
Final Fantasy VI is all about personality. Each lead in this 14-strong ensemble cast has a distinct past, a reason to fight and a load of emotional baggage that'd make the staunchest of psychologists weep. Terra, after being used as a puppet of the empire, finds she's the product of a union between a human and an Esper, who are all that remain of magic in the world. She's an unholy mix that frightens the heroes and excites the villains, all alone in her quest for identity. Cyan has to watch his entire castle, wife and child included, poisoned and killed. After the world is destroyed, Celes believes all of her friends are dead and attempts suicide in one of the most heart-tearing moments we've ever witnessed in gaming. The soul-shearing barbs keep coming throughout the story, making FFVI much more personal than any before it, and arguably any since.
See, this was the last Final Fantasy that had to focus on story and characters because the graphics were too primitive to showcase anything but blinking eyes and sagging heads. Even FFVII, widely hailed as the best thing that mankind has ever created, resorted to stereotypes and flashy cinemas instead of nailing down an unrivaled narrative. FFVI stands as the last line of defense against modern-day, style-over-substance RPGs. You spend so much time appreciating the technology that you forget how silly and trite some of the interactions really are.
Then there's Kefka. We named him one of the series' best villains before and aren't about to step down from that opinion. By the time you run into him, he's already lost his mind and is well on his way to overthrowing the empire and claiming ultimate power. Like literally, ultimate power. Once imbued with said abilities, Kefka takes a scalpel to the planet, ripping up continents and murdering vast numbers of people just to see if he can. Then, with what's left, he creates a towering pile of refuse and junk to act as his massive throne. His reaction? Laughter. Constant laughter.
you failed to mention Deus Ex. This list is therefore invalid ಠ_ಠ
ReplyDeleteHeavy Rain , Shenmue , Mafia ? .....how on earth could your miss Shenmue of the list!
ReplyDeleteAll of these are great, well done on the list, but I think it should have been Top 10 to include the likes of Shenmue and Heavy Rain, among others. Personally, I would have picked the stories of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth or Darksiders over the likes of FF VI. Not talking about the game itself, but the story within.
ReplyDeleteAwesome list, dude. I can think of a handful of others that I would like to have seen in there instead of Silent Hill 2, like The Longest Journey or Deus Ex, but I can definitely live with what you have here.
ReplyDelete