Board 8 > Top 35 Stories in Fiction

(+) Yeah! (+)

I miss the AIM days. Simpler times.

Ender's Game & Speaker of the Dead
Book Series

There's more books in this series but the first two are the ones I care about. Xenocide was okay but not amazing and I didn't feel inspired to read after it - I'd already gotten all the story I needed.

Ender's Game is one the greatest extended prologues ever written. The entire point of the story is to set up Ender's characterization for the rest of the series, but it's also probably the best book out of them all! It's very simple but very effective - a kid genius is taken from his family to be groomed into a military commander, all in preparation for the upcoming invasion against an alien race. The sci-fi battle school (which when I think about it, is just a more serious version of the magic high school trope you see a lot these days) is used well to explore themes of self-discovery and the effects that turning into a child soldier can cause. The book builds up continuously and ends in a crescendo that I don't want to spoil, even though at this point it's the sci-fi version of It Was His Sled. The finale of Ender's Game is one that's stuck with me for many years.

Speaker for the Dead fast-forwards a few decades in the main character's life (and a few thousand years for everyone else, isn't space travel-induced time dilation a bitch?). By then he's changed from a kid into an adult dealing with his past trauma by planet-hopping around the universe and giving eulogies. Speaker for the Dead is a more introspective book than Ender's Game is - where Ender's Game was always about the end goal and took place in a single battle school setting laser-focused towards reaching that end goal, Speaker for the Dead focuses on Ender picking up the pieces afterwards and expands the setting to an entire alien planet. It has a lot to say about regret, coping mechanisms, and above all the importance of communication to prevent tragedy, and honestly some of what it portrays is kind of beautiful.

If Speaker for the Dead has a flaw, it's that I think most of the side characters aren't as interesting as Ender himself. I would rank Ender's Game above Speaker for the Dead by a hair, but I'm not really concerned with which one is better. You can't separate one from the other. Speaker for the Dead or Ender's Game would be excellent singular stories in their own right, but it's how they work together as companion pieces that push them to greater heights.

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Oh right Ace Attorney should be on here in some form I would guess

time to root for that next
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LeonhartFour posted...

Oh right Ace Attorney should be on here in some form I would guess

time to root for that next

I considered Ace Attorney heavily, but didn't include it for several reasons:

1. It's nature is more episodic than something with a strong central narrative. There's a lot of cases that are basically 'filler' or only advance the main characters in small ways.
2. If I was to pick a part of the series to focus on when deciding 'best story', I would restrict the series to AA1-3. 5 and 6 are good but don't have strong central narratives and feel like filler games, and AA4 is...lol
3. Even if I'm just restricting it to the first three games, I think most of Justice For All's writing is kind of garbage too.

Overall the series is too inconsistent. Now that I think about it though, if I was to really narrow it down, Case 2-4 by itself probably gets into Tier 3. And maybe the series as a whole is an honorable mention. Consider that a last-minute wildcard entrant if you want to.

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Eh, I think SoJ having a strong central narrative is the thing that salvages it because the quality of the individual cases is so hit or miss.

And I think AJ is really the only game where I'd say the consistency of the writing suffers. 4-3, 4-0, and the end of 4-4 are all a mess in terms of writing.
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I like Speaker for the Dead slightly better. Both books deal with unintended consequences, but I like having the connection to the Pequeninos and Ender dealing with his actions is top tier. Plus the Hive Queen is boss.
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To elaborate on 2-4 for a sec - I recently experienced it again and found that knowing everything ahead of time does not dilute the rollercoaster of emotions it turns into. I love a lot of cases in the series but that was the apex in so many ways and I don't think it's possible for them to top it, at least based on my personal preferences.

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but they did top it with 3-5
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Oh, 2-4 absolutely sells the emotion of the individual moments and of the entire experience, even if you know all the beats already.

which makes me so mad that the anime botched it

they did a good job with 3-5 in season 2 though!
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FFDragon posted...

I like Speaker for the Dead slightly better. Both books deal with unintended consequences, but I like having the connection to the Pequeninos and Ender dealing with his actions is top tier. Plus the Hive Queen is boss.

I really really like the Pequeninos as a sci-fi alien species. Really interesting to read about their interactions with a bunch of dumb humans.

NFUN posted...

but they did top it with 3-5

I don't like 3-5 nearly as much as most. It just didn't click with me, for whatever reason.

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I don't wanna see Fata Morgana mentioned until the last possible second!

Dragon Quest V
Video Game

"..."

Dragon Quest V's writing is so far above the rest of the series that it gives you whiplash when playing it after any of the others. The story isn't complicated, but it's extremely personal, chronicling the life of your main character from birth to adulthood. You grow older, both physically and mentally, as the years pass and some shit happens. DQV has a few scenes in particular that are jaw-dropping in both the execution of the scene itself and the fallout over what occurs. Every time you think you've got a handle on where the story is going to go, the game proves that it has one or two more swerves up its sleeve. I ended up caring much more for the fate of DQV's silent protagonist than I did the vast majority of characters with an actual character, and that says a lot about the strength of the writing and the scenarios your hero goes through.

I could go into the details of why the game is so effective, but spoiler would be unavoidable, so I won't. At the end of the day, it's simple: I played DQV for the first time over a decade ago, a second time more recently, and the years didn't dull the experience. It provokes a strong emotional response from me anytime I think about it, and sometimes that's all a story needs to do.

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I agree, both novels are great but I think Speaker barely edges out on top for me. They're such different stories that comparing them isn't particularly easy, but the siblings subplot of Game brings it down for me these days. Back before the internet was on our phones I think it worked better!
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American Psycho
Movie

"There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable. I simply am not there."

There's two levels to enjoy American Psycho on. The first is the 'intellectual' level, where the movie makes some scathing messages regarding materialism, narcissism, and yuppie subculture, and does so without holding back whatsoever. Then there's the surface level, where American Psycho is a movie about a batshit crazy serial killer who manages to be entertaining (and even a little sympathetic at times) despite being completely morally reprehensible. Where else are you to watch someone commit premeditated murder while dancing to Hip To Be Square?

American Psycho is so memorable because it succeeds on both these levels. Sometimes you're watching the main character chuck a chainsaw down a staircase, other times you're analyzing his fractured mental state and trying to figure out what's real and what isn't. Sometimes there's a helicopter chase or was there?, other times you're left trying to figure out what kind of society could not only create a man like Patrick Bateman, but also allow him to thrive. Then you get scenes where both levels work in perfect harmony, like the somehow-tense scene about comparing business cards. And THEN there's the eerily disquieting ending...yeah, American Psycho is an experience. It helps that the movie is intensely quotable and has one of the most underrated scripts in cinema.

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That's all for today! Will finish up Tier 3 tomorrow.

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You like Huey Lewis and the News?

Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste. But when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
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Why are there copies of the Style section all over the place? Do you... Do you have a dog? A little chow or something?
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In '87, Huey released this; Fore!, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip To Be Square". A song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It's also a personal statement about the band itself.

HEY, PAUL!

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KamikazePotato posted...

Oh, wait, yes I can.

Pluto
Manga Series

Technically this should be under the Fanfiction category. Naoki Urasawa, almost certainly the greatest manga author of all time, decided to adapt his favorite Astro Boy story into something entirely different and unique, and because he's a genius of course it turned out amazing. Pluto combines sci-fi with a hard-boiled detective story, starring a robot investigating the deaths of some of the most famous robots in the world. I'm a sucker for stories about sentient AI discovering themselves, and what it means to be truly alive, so this story was right up my alley. Pluto explores the weight of a life, and what it means for others when that life is taken. Every character is written with depth and feels like a real person (or robot) despite the limited screentime each of them get. SImply put, Pluto is really, really well-done and I love pretty much every moment in the manga. And I knew absolutely nothing about Astro Boy going in!

It's hard to describe what makes an Urasawa story so good, because his greatest strengths lie in how everything is executed. Pluto's sense of pacing and the way each scene is framed, even for the simplest moments, is perfect. It can sound pretentious to describe a piece of fiction as 'intelligent', but that's exactly what Urasawa's works are. They never talk down to you or force the story on you, giving you enough material to come to your own conclusions while simultaneously tugging at your heartstrings. By the end of Pluto, you're left tired but satisfied, confident that the story ended exactly when and where it should. I cannot recommend it enough to people who...well, like good stories.

Yes!

I agree wholeheartedly. It's just kind of a shame that Pluto is rather underappreciated compared to his other works since I think it might just be my personal favorite.

It's crazy how well it explored the themes of AI and sentience. And its powerful moments made me cry.

Also it's fun comparing the original designs and Urasawa's take on them.
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KamikazePotato posted...

Dragon Quest V
Video Game

"..."

Dragon Quest V's writing is so far above the rest of the series that it gives you whiplash when playing it after any of the others. The story isn't complicated, but it's extremely personal, chronicling the life of your main character from birth to adulthood. You grow older, both physically and mentally, as the years pass and some shit happens. DQV has a few scenes in particular that are jaw-dropping in both the execution of the scene itself and the fallout over what occurs. Every time you think you've got a handle on where the story is going to go, the game proves that it has one or two more swerves up its sleeve. I ended up caring much more for the fate of DQV's silent protagonist than I did the vast majority of characters with an actual character, and that says a lot about the strength of the writing and the scenarios your hero goes through.

I could go into the details of why the game is so effective, but spoiler would be unavoidable, so I won't. At the end of the day, it's simple: I played DQV for the first time over a decade ago, a second time more recently, and the years didn't dull the experience. It provokes a strong emotional response from me anytime I think about it, and sometimes that's all a story needs to do.

KP with the best taste.
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i am far behind

Paranoia Agent was a fun anime. ...It may say something about me that "fun" is the descriptor that came to mind for me there. MHz was an incredible episode and even as my memory of many Paranoia Agent details fades, that likely won't.

Tales of Berseria is excellent. The ending is a bit weak, and I almost want to kind of blame Zestiria for that for constraining somewhat how Berseria could end. justice for eizen. But the highs are so good and it maintains those levels for long periods of time.

Nier v Nier: Automata would be a tough one for me. They have different strengths and they each take those strengths to incredible levels. The Nier party is such a great group though, individually, and as a group/with each other. Nier was my entry to the "Yoko Taro-verse" and I am so glad I played it way back whenever.

I haven't read the Ender series in forever. At least 10 years I have to think, maybe closer to 15 years. I do know that whenever I first read them (so earlier than even that) I didn't appreciate Speaker of the Dead very much but then when I re-read them some years later I too found myself pretty much unable to pick between them as the best one. Nostalgia would probably incline me to Ender's Game but it's definitely a close call.
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Raka_Putra posted...

Yes!

I agree wholeheartedly. It's just kind of a shame that Pluto is rather underappreciated compared to his other works since I think it might just be my personal favorite.

It's crazy how well it explored the themes of AI and sentience. And its powerful moments made me cry.

Also it's fun comparing the original designs and Urasawa's take on them.

I really hope the anime adaptation turns out well. There shouldn't be any inherent problems with the story transitioning mediums, so it's all up to how well they can pull it off.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

KP with the best taste.

You caused this! I emulated DQV back in the day because you wouldn't stop hyping it! As someone who has spent half their time on B8 hyping things up for other people to try, I applaud your efforts.

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Yeah getting DQV more popular on here is one of my prouder tasks I have done. Turns out Chris has some good taste himself. DQV Hero best hero.
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Hero getting into Smash Ultimate but the DQV Hero not being chosen as one of the alts was such a bittersweet feeling.

xp1337 posted...

Nier v Nier: Automata would be a tough one for me. They have different strengths and they each take those strengths to incredible levels. The Nier party is such a great group though, individually, and as a group/with each other. Nier was my entry to the "Yoko Taro-verse" and I am so glad I played it way back whenever.

I haven't read the Ender series in forever. At least 10 years I have to think, maybe closer to 15 years. I do know that whenever I first read them (so earlier than even that) I didn't appreciate Speaker of the Dead very much but then when I re-read them some years later I too found myself pretty much unable to pick between them as the best one. Nostalgia would probably incline me to Ender's Game but it's definitely a close call.

I impulse-bought Nier because I enjoyed TheDarkId's Drakengard LPs and figured that it would be fun to experience the weirdness myself for once. Had low expectations going in, which were wildly surpassed.

Speaker For the Dead definitely gets better as you get older, and it's probably a more insightful book than Ender's Game is, but the ending of Ender's Game really floored me when I read it. Apparently everyone else saw the ending coming except me!

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Tag!

All of Urasawas stuff that Ive read is fantastic. I should really go back and finish Billy Bat (I was like 75% through it).

Of the ones Ive finished, 20th Century Boys > Monster > Pluto

Yay DQV! My favorite DQ story is VIIs, but Vs is great too.

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I forgot Billy Bat existed. I was waiting for it to finish and never got back to it, and no one ever mentions it in discussions of the author's body of work.

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Its definitely weaker than his other stuff Ive read, but its still pretty good!

Seeing Urasawas take on the American South in the 50s or 60s was, uh, kinda weird though

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Billy Bat's really great up to the first or second time skip. The series has way too many time skips, and basically introduces a new cast each time. It doesn't work, IMO. Not a bad series overall or anything, but not on the level of Pluto/Monster/20CB for sure (even if it feels like it at times).
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Yeah Billy Bat is kinda hard to follow and its psychological/conspiracy stuff are much more prominent than his other works. I kinda forgot about it halfway through.

Oh I forgot Pluto is getting an anime. Yeah, I hope it'll be a good one.
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i am so triggered that you gave Unordinary an honorable mention

John being well executed..... ugh. He sucks SOOO bad.
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Yesss DQ5!

Also,

KamikazePotato posted...

Hero getting into Smash Ultimate but the DQV Hero not being chosen as one of the alts was such a bittersweet feeling.

https://www.siliconera.com/2019/09/26/masahiro-sakurai-and-yuji-horii-discuss-smash-ultimates-hero-dlc-director-philosophy-and-more/

Apparently he would have been one of the alts, if he wielded a sword as his weapon. At least there's Erdrick's alternate color!
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Just have him keep the staff though. Imagine forward smash critting with it. BONK

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.

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Hmm...

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I have no further comments

other than the Trails series deserves recognition for their ability to thoroughly build a world across multiple subseries

and Persona 4 should be the Persona game that makes it
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Personally I wouldn't necessarily squish together franchises. Like, I might have AA3 on a list but not the other AA games.

More random comment: American Psycho 2 was oddly fun. Wasn't quality in the same way, but it was pretty entertaining.
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I haven't played Trails, but I've heard good things about how it tells its story.

Locke and Key
Comic Series

No, you can't understand because you're reading the last chapter of something without having read the first chapters. Young people always think they are coming into a story at the beginning when they are usually coming in at the end.

Locke and Key is an excellent fusion of the coming-of-age type of story and Stephen King style horror. The story chronicles the events that occur to a dysfunctional family living in small-town America who are just trying to make sense of life. The Locke family and all the characters surrounding them are extremely well-written; all of them feel like real people with realistic problems, whose issues are not driven by bad writing (outside of the fact that they don't move out of a town called Lovecraft, seriously what did they think was going to happen?) but by their own inherent character flaws and the circumstances of their environment. Much of Locke and Key would have worked even with the supernatural elements taken out of it. The existence of magic Keys of a highly questionable origin is technically what the main plot is about, but it serves more as a background setting for the characters than the reason you read the story.

That's not to say that the supernatural elements are mishandled - in fact they're integrated into the setting so well that they feel like a natural extension of the human drama occurring in the story. The eponymous Keys of Locke and Key can grant their users powerful and/or trippy abilities, but the cast's attempts to use the supernatural to solve their issues only ever makes things worse. It's a testament to the strength of the character writing that despite how obviously bad an idea it is to - for example - open up your head with a magic key and remove your negative emotions so you don't have to deal with grief, I can never think of the characters as making decisions that are outright stupid, just misguided. Even as the scope of the story expands, and you see previous generations making the same mistake over and over again, I didn't feel exasperation. Only sympathy. The characters of Locke and Key are adrift, and by the end of it I was dearly rooting for all of them.

And man, let me tell you, it did not pull any punches once it came time to wrap everything up.

P.S. Apparently there's been several attempts to get this made into a full-fledged TV show, with Netflix recently picking it up. Third time's the charm...?

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Wait there's an American Psycho 2?

*googles*

Oh. That's why I've never heard about it.

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Mac Arrowny posted...

Personally I wouldn't necessarily squish together franchises. Like, I might have AA3 on a list but not the other AA games.

It depends on the franchise or series in question. If - purely hypothetically - I were to include a long-running fantasy series on this list, I'm not going to include each individual book as a separate entity.

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If I hadn't seen Birdemic, American Psycho 2 would be the worst film I've ever seen.
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Ender's Game and Speaker were both stellar. I've been really, really bad at getting through books over the past decade-plus, and I'm still in awe of not only how quickly I read through Ender's Game, but also how much information (I believe) I still retain.

Speaker for the Dead was an absolutely brilliant look at communication and culture clash. I need to read it again.

Tales of Berseria... ahhh, while I agree that the final bits of the story just... I wouldn't say they're bad or even disappointing, but that Velvet's journey and those of her teammates are just so good that the resolutions mostly existed?

I'm playing through Tales of Zestiria at the moment and I'm just impressed by how much better Berseria is at pretty much everything including world building, lore, character motivations and growth, humor, plot, etc. I thought maybe some of the things Berseria does with new ideas or improvements would be like prequel bait for things in Zestiria, but it feels like the Star Wars prequels where there are tons of cool and shiny CG things and R2-D2 can rocket around, but Zestiria feels even more ancient.

Both their equipment systems SUCK however, with minimum to no NG+ rollover.
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Deadly Premonition
Video Game

"Did you see that, Zach? Clear as a crisp spring morning. FK...in the coffee!"

Few things are a better example of 'greater than the sum of its parts' than Deadly Premonition. If this were a full review, I would talk about how amazing the game is despite its obligatory combat being ass, but this is a topic about stories, so that's what we'll focus on.

And what an experience that story is. Deadly Premonition is essentially Twin Peaks in game form, except maybe even weirder. There's a main story in there about a string of mysterious murders and possible supernatural interference, but that's not what you first think of when remembering Deadly Premonition. You think of something like main character Francis York Morgan losing his mind over a strawberry-and-cereal sandwich. Deadly Premonition's presentation, from the strange camera angles in cutscenes to the way each character feels like they're half a step to the right of normalcy, is what it makes it so engrossing. Even when there should be an objectively dull moment in the game, there never is, because it's all so weirdly entertaining.

The game actually does have a lot of strong characters, well-directed scenes, ect., blah blah, all those things that are generally prerequisites for making stories great. But I'll be talking about things like that in every other writeup. With Deadly Premonition I want to mention how there's one point in the game where York tells his imaginary friend Zach that his choice of breakfast beverage may have solve the case for them. Moments like that are what give Deadly Premonition its unique atmosphere, and why it became an enduring game currently getting a sequel despite bombing upon release.

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I almost played Zestiria because of how good Berseria was. Thankfully re-reading some impressions from people who made that poor choice for me set me straight.

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Oh man a surprise appearance by DP

I have like three copies of that game and people who are unitiated think its bizarre I've spent so much on "a bad game"
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ZenOfThunder posted...

Oh man a surprise appearance by DP

I have like three copies of that game and people who are unitiated think its bizarre I've spent so much on "a bad game"

I also have three copies of this game. The 360 version that I never played, the Director's Cut that I did, and the Steam version that I bought simply to throw money at SWERY. Also have this:

https://i.imgur.com/QV5aJmj.jpg

I regret nothing.


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Catch-22
Book

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

I'm not sure how exactly to categorize Catch-22. At its core it's a satire on the irrationality of war, but what kind of one? It can be very funny and very depressing, oftentimes in the same scene. Tonal whiplash and circular logic is used so often that over the course of reading the book you become numbed to absurdity. Awful events occur and you just go...should I laugh at this? Cry? Shrug? Catch-22 uses its prose and story framing to great effect, imposing the same deteriorated mental state on its reader that the war does on its central character Yossarian. When something truly irrational happens, and you know it's wrong, but no one else acknowledges or cares, what's a man supposed to do?

It's also an extremely clever story. The specific Catch-22 rule by itself would be enough to base an entire story off of, but the book also has stuff like the bizarre career advancement of Major Major Major Major and the extremely tense and dramatic milk run, just to name a few things. I won't be able to do Catch-22 justice with this writeup - doing so would only spoil the oddities that are so fun to discover, while simultaneously not being able to capture the particular way they're portrayed in-writing.

I guess that's the Catch-22 of writing a list like this. The easiest to make someone want to experience a story is to tell them why it's good. The more you tell them why it's good, the more interested they will become in reading/watching/whatevering the story to experience it like you did. But the more you tell them of the story beforehand, the less likely they are to be impressed by it. The best way to get someone to enjoy a story is not to tell them anything about the story. But by not telling them anything about the story, they'll never know they should experience it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go plot against my commander over trying to get me killed via incompetence.

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That's some catch, that Catch-22
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Yo where did you get that mug
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Custom made it here:

https://www.vistaprint.com/

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I know some people write off Deadly Premonition for being a "so bad it's good" game, but I really enjoyed it story included! I thought the ending in particular was very well done.
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aw man, apparently the PC port of deadly premonition is buggy as all hell.
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