LogFAQs > #977777443

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I'm leaving out a little bit but not enough to make a difference...

Yeah, that sounds stupid. As I've made clear, I don't mind scripted losses as a way to use failure as an interesting story element, particularly when a typical playthrough isn't going to encounter any ludonarrative dissonance in the process because it's been balanced properly, but that just sounds like a story where the player character's involvement doesn't actually make a difference, and that's just plain bad writing. Stories in games should at least make some effort to involve the player, even if they don't perfectly reflect the player's actions at every turn. Otherwise, there's no investment in the story.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

It's really not. Most of these games have you win like 90% of the time.

And it's that other 10% that shakes things up. I'm not about to suggest that the whole story should be an alternating series of failures and triumphs, just that having failures and major challenges in there is more interesting than winning 100% of the time.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And honestly, the arvan story in scarlet/violet was pretty good and a nice example of how you can still explore characters and story despite not losing.

It was good as a long-running side quest (which is kind of how all three "Roads" were framed, actually), but if you gave me a game where the entire main plot was "Meet dude, find out dude's dog is sick, collect items to cure dog," I'm not going to praise that game for having a good story (and not just because sad dogs are often a really lazy way to add emotional impact to a story). It's a compelling side plot and he and his dad's backstory made for interesting characters and world-building, but it's just too limited to be good as a main story.

Building on that example, though, it wouldn't have ruined the story if the dog actually ended up dying despite your best sandwiches. Pokemon would never go there, of course, but that would pivot the story into helping Arven grow as a person past the loss of that proxy for his father. That's still a worthwhile story (if perhaps not very original, given that that's the plot of pretty much any young adult novel with a dog on the cover that's won any sort of literature prize), even considering that you lose out on the gratification of saving the dog that you were hoping for. You still end up ultimately winning, which is the ultimate goal of the game. Victory just doesn't necessarily look like you expected it to.