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Name the best written games and justify it

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I see some people characterize a widely beloved title like The Last of Us as having "shit writing" and Halo 4 "so lame" or The Order "boring" or Mass Effect 2 "amazing characters" and BioShock Infinite "throwaway". I have to say, sometimes I get it and sometimes I am baffled.

I get subjectivity, but those statements are often used as if they are agreed upon consensus that describe the game, sometimes because a few posters attach to the statement they agree with, and other times because of reviews. And then sometimes I must imagine someone calling a character-driven game that swept Game of the Year awards and high reviews "totally junk writing" are aware they are being contrarian to an extreme that almost kills their reasoned credibility of expression.

So help me understand what you claim to be good and why it is good (examples from the game are great). I don't want to hear you give a trash criticism, so if you see someone praise a game's writing and disagree, aim to explain why and move on to sharing an example of good writing with reasoning.
 
krgy8H6.png


The Witcher series

Say what you want about the overall plot, the dialogue really sets this game apart from the pack, IMO. One big example would be the relationship between Geralt and Yennifer. The way they talk to each other feels like they've been through some shit. It's an old relationship on the rocks that (depending on how you play it out) may or may not end well. In some ways it felt like a real relationship and a refreshing change from the typical romance you see in games.
 
Hard to pick one out of the series but I'd go with Soul Reaver 2.
My motivation:This entire cutscene. I think it kinda speaks for itself but I'll do my best.

For starters, the dialogue is fantastic and explains the in-universe rules of time travel extremely well, that's a feat on its own :P. Raziel and Kain are also well written characters with motivations that make sense and evolve throughout the course of the series. Gotta love Amy Hennig, I hope she makes more fantasy games eventually.

I'm very obviously not biased in any way.
 
I'm on mobile, but Planescape: Torment and the original Deus Ex have some of the best writing still to this day.
 
Ghost Trick is brilliantly written and geniusly executed. It has depth and sweetness, which is all I ever want from a story. Of any game I've played with a significant story to it, it's undoubtedly the best. If I could gift a copy to everyone with a DS or 3DS I would.
 
The Last of Us

Characters have believable arcs, making choices that feel honest and consistent with who they are. Storytelling is subtle yet powerful, and despite falling into certain genre tropes manages to avoid ever feeling overly cliche. Dialogue flows well and never feels unnatural. Ending is top notch and allows your own personal experiences to shape your perspective in regards to it. Pacing is generally great.

Also, widely beloved games like The Order? Was that a typo?
 
Interfectum said:
krgy8H6.png


The Witcher series

Say what you want about the overall plot, the dialogue really sets this game apart from the pack, IMO. One big example would be the relationship between Geralt and Yennifer. The way they talk to each other feels like they've been through some shit. It's an old relationship on the rocks that (depending on how you play it out) may or may not end well. In some ways it felt like a real relationship and a refreshing change from the typical romance you see in games.
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Someone specifically saying what they enjoy about the writing in a game, thank you. This actually makes me a bit more interested in trying the series again.
 
999, and to a *somewhat* lesser extent, Virtue's Last Reward.

They may not have explosive, gripping openings, but both games manage to take what should, in all plausibility, an utterly incomprehensible story, and make a finely written, easily understandable story with enough complexity that some times, you wonder how it could have been written at all.

Seriously, Uchikoshi takes numbers and bends them to his will. There were moments in the game where I had to just put the system down and marvel at how he was able to get everything to fit as nice and cozy as he did.

The characters appear immediately shallow or overly archetypal, but very quickly show that they are full of depth, with real motivations and reasons for the actions that they take. Oh, and there aren't any "Nathan Drakes" that just tell jokes the whole game. I guess you could say the main characters are, but the other characters can't stop rolling their eyes at you for being such an idiot. I feel like the entire main character is just a subversion of all of these overly charming protagonists that nobody can stop swooning over.

Oh, and absolutely everything anyone says, does, or wears, has a double meaning that becomes apparent on second playthroughs.

There's a lot more I could say about why I love the story in these games, to include the philosophy and science woven into it, but I think the above points are good enough.
 
Kid Icarus Uprising

Sakurai's masterpiece.
 
Max Payne 1 & 2 were games that were so over-done, yet worked really well. The comic book panels are so simple, but effective storytelling tools. The narration and sound effects carry the entire thing splendidly.
90% of games who are brought down by so-so cinematography and inability to handle cinematic emotions would have benefitted from a simpler storytelling delivery service like this.



Another one is the Banner Saga. The Banner Saga has a fucking awesome world. Very very nice exposition. It just comfortable obtuse enough to keep your interest without being annoyingly so. I'm in love with this universe.
 
Easy_D said:
Hard to pick one out of the series but I'd go with Soul Reaver 2.
My motivation:This entire cutscene. I think it kinda speaks for itself but I'll do my best.

For starters, the dialogue is fantastic and explains the in-universe rules of time travel extremely well, that's a feat on its own :P. Raziel and Kain are also well written characters with motivations that make sense and evolve throughout the course of the series. Gotta love Amy Hennig, I hope she makes more fantasy games eventually.

I'm very obviously not biased in any way.
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This guy gets it

Although from a different game this cutscene also proves your point.

Raziel and Kain encounters are among best written dialogues in gaming.
 
Mass Effect 2's characters are great because they double as game design. While you are getting to know these people, talking to them, helping them with problems, you're also getting suggestions for how to upgrade your ship, you're getting loyalty which is basically turning them from an NQ into a +1 tool. And it all ties into the eventual Suicide Mission, which takes advantage of all the choices you've made. And what's at stake if you fuck up? Why, the characters of course. It all ties into a central coherent vision of what the player is doing in Mass Effect 2, what he or she is building towards, what they lose and what they potentially gain. The game also takes advantage of BioWare's strength in making immediately interesting and likable characters by playing them off one another through loyalty tests, and sometimes asking you to play counter to your character in order to gain their loyalty.

Yes, the SM should have been harder, but that's not a writing problem.
 
Speedwagon said:
Kid Icarus Uprising

Sakurai's masterpiece.
Click to expand...

Oof. Personally, I hated the writing. The tagline should be "Every character is quipping back and forth non stop! Seriously, they won't shut up with the quips!" It was like a Joss Whedon movie. More power to you though.

The Last Of Us probably is one of the best-written games I've played. Nails its tone and doesn't really fall into cheap drama or dialogue.
 
zsynqx said:
The Last of Us

Characters have believable arcs, making choices that feel honest and consistent with who they are. Storytelling is subtle yet powerful, and despite falling into certain genre tropes manages to avoid ever feeling overly cliche. Dialogue flows well and never feels unnatural. Ending is top notch and allows your own personal experiences to shape your perspective in regards to it. Pacing is generally great.
Click to expand...

Nailed it.
 
Silent Hill 2 - Legit pathos, iconic world and monster design using the psychology of the characters and some really insane endings.

All the Soul Reaver games - someone already explained it.

The Last of Us - I don't think it's OMG AMAZING but when it comes to narrative driven AAA third person shooter it's easily the best and trumps Uncharted/Tomb Raider 2013 easily.

Max Payne 1, 2 - Great sendup to the oldschool Film Noir "Man with Nothing to Lose" movies. Really excellent script, music, and dialogue. Max's inner monologues are gamings best.

But the games I like best story wise are ones like Nier, Metal Gear Solid 2 or Undertale that blend story and gameplay and fuck with your expectations. Those are the games that are really making a great use of the mediums potential for storytelling.
 
Phoenix wright aa 1 and telltales the walking dead s1.

The writing quality was so good they actually made me give a damn about the characters and what happened to them.
 
Ghost Trick.

The reasons have been explained a million times, and a million times better than me, but it's such a tight story with a wonderfully quirky cast of characters. Each chapter raises a new mystery, making you want to play the next one, and somehow it all comes together quite nicely. The dialogue is great, especially considering everyone keeps dying in this game (it's the main 'thing' about the game). It's incredible how funny it is, and how the humour works so well with it. I personally love the kind of game that can get tense after the jokes have got you attached to the characters, and that theme fits Ghost Trick to a T.

Oh, this has been said loads too, but Missile is definitely a standout among the cast. Great character that is genuinely very believable despite being...a talking dog.

Speedwagon said:
Kid Icarus Uprising

Sakurai's masterpiece.
Click to expand...
^^^ Absolutely agree with this too.

EDIT: Glad to see I'm not alone in this thread~
 
Deus Ex and all it's glorious conspiracies.

Some Examples:
The world is being ravaged by a virus that is manufactured by the same company that makes the cure.
The Anti Terrorist organization you work for is a front for a shadow organization that split off from the Illuminati.
The terrorists are actually the good guys and are stealing the cure Robin Hood style to get it into the hands of the poor
 
The Portal series. Justification? Pick a quote at random from either game, and there's a solid chance it's comedy gold.

"Oh, in case you get covered in that Repulsion Gel, here's some advice the lab boys gave me: 'Do not get covered in the Repulsion Gel.' We haven't entirely nailed down what element it is yet, but I'll tell you this: It's a lively one, and it does not like the human skeleton."
 
The Uncharted games have great writing. I see a lot of people sort of throw them away as disposable blockbuster writing, and it's true that they are pulpy adventures, but compare the dialogue and characterization in those games to any other and its clear how efficient they are at setting character without being on the nose.

Take Uncharted 2 for example, and the character of Harry Flynn. His entire motivation in the game, is that he has a need to compete with Drake and overcompensate because he's not as smart or talented. How does ND show this? Well, there are the more obvious moments like Drake making fun of him for not being able to figure things out, but there are also subtler touches. Why does Flynn keep Chloe around even after multiple times where he is aware she is helping Nate? Because Nate wants her, and she wants Nate, so Flynn has to have her for himself to prove that he is the bigger man. Also, what's his weapon of choice? A desert eagle, a hilariously oversized gun that dwarfs Nate's own handgun. Even his outfit expresses his character, as he clearly pays a lot of attention to his appearance often wearing designer clothes and has carefully quaffed hair because he is all about the image to make up for his lack of substance.

Uncharted 3 has a pretty great story as well, where it repeats a lot of the same surface level adventure beats from 2 as a means of easily showing that Drake is going on another madcap adventure despite everyone else knowing exactly what kind of trails and dangers will ensue. It also focuses on Nate as a character and breaks down why he is constantly cheating death, and even why he is constantly joking around -- all because he feels he must prove himself because of his less than glamorous childhood. The story shows him overcoming this and coming to accept that true greatness is what you do with the hand you're dealt in life, without hitting beating you about the face with it, instead using visual and playable sequences like the desert as metaphors for Drake's existential crisis.

Another very subtle bit of writing in Uncharted 3 that could easily be mistaken as simply breezy banter comes between Cutter and Drake. Cutter frequently makes popularly literary or film references (Of Mice and Men, James Bond, Lawrence of Arabia) and whenever he does Drake is seemingly sort of annoyed by it, or in the case of the Macbeth reference to "lay on Macduff" --to which Drake responds "who's Macduff?"--doesn't even get them. This speaks volumes of his character that he is so knowledgable and driven when it comes to historical mysteries that he is completely oblivious to popular culture. This all stems back to his past and his drive to "prove" himself by aligning himself with his supposed ancestor, Francis Drake, at the expense of his relationships with other people and the facets of his culture that don't pertain to his obsessive drive.

So yes, the stories are simple, but they're great and effective. Characters sound natural, and the writing is subtle. The Last of Us does this even better, but people generally give credit to TLOU whereas Uncharted doesn't really get the recognition it deserves in this regard.
 
Bioshock 1 is simply incredible, even today. It was deep, it was rich, and it was interesting with all of its twists and turns. Rapture felt so alive with the story and it was genuinely engaging. Plus, it had real themes in a way that only games can express, the illusion of choice.
 
Morrowind's writing, in the form of dialog and in-game books, creates a rich world complete with a full history, a creation story, a pantheon of gods (who still operate in the the world), and countless events and people and places that you can experience and meet and visit. Things get especially interesting when you meet a living god after having read contradictory stories about their rise to power. The Almisivi, and Vivec in particular, are fascinating. All the more so when you see how closely your own character is intertwined with their history and legend over the course of the main story.

Also, there's something really compelling about reading some dark fable and realizing you've met characters, or encountered relics or places, that were a part of it.
 
Persona 4

All the characters feel real. The player gets a chance to discover their deepest insecurities that play out in believable ways through the story. Every time there's a school outing or unique story event I get exciting to see how all the characters will interact. Great moments of drama and comedy.

When the story was over and (Spoilers)
Your friends are waving goodbye as you leave on the train
you feel genuinely sad that the adventure is over. You want to keep interacting with these characters.
 
Grim Fandango is well written. Portal is also very good. I wouldn't necessarily judge the quality of writing in a game by the amount of words it has or by how serious it tries to be. I think that Rez was really well written for what it was and it had hardly any writing.
 
The Last of Us: The Thread.

But I will give Bioshock a shout out for pulling off a twist that only works in an interactive medium. It gave players the illusion of choice, it was a mirage of sorts, but when you get to that moment you immediately begin wondering "Shit, could I have chosen to NOT do all of that?!" and you want to start your 2nd play through. Incredibly effective.

But yeah, no one is writing better games than Naughty Dog right now. No one.
 
Foxtastical said:
Someone specifically saying what they enjoy about the writing in a game, thank you. This actually makes me a bit more interested in trying the series again.
Click to expand...

And I didn't even get into the brilliant writing in Hearts of Stone. There are some fantastic scenes in that expansion that I'll remember for a long time (the wedding in particular).

And Geralt is a great character:

Spark: Uh, so what does a Witcher do, anyway?
Geralt: We solve problems.
Spark: Oh, I have a problem with my boyfriend.
Geralt: Did you find his entrails sprawled on the porch and his head a few paces away? Because those are the types of problem we solve.
Click to expand...
 
Lost Odyssey. I though the game story itself was excellent and well written, but the writing truly shines in the game's "1000 Years of Dreams". They are perfectly written and emotionally engaging in ways that I've never seen any other accomplish to-date.
 
TEJ said:
Phoenix wright aa 1 and telltales the walking dead s1.

The writing quality was so good they actually made me give a damn about the characters and what happened to them.
Click to expand...
The first Phoenix Wright game was truly unique, I loved being able to dissect the testimonies and catch people in a lie (that theme music is the best). Regarding Walking Dead Season 1, I think telltales does a fantastic job in general showing characters' underlying motivations through great writing.
 
The Walking Dead S1 had so much amazing writing and voice acting. Characters acted believably; angry, sad, compassionate, irrational, suspicious, and there was quite a lot of unspoken feeling conveyed not by dialogue but by looks, by body language, which is very hard to convey subtley in games. Then there's characters like Kenny and Lee who clash a lot but are still close friends and companions in these terrible circumstances, Clem who is an outwardly contented little girl hiding a lot of worry and fear, and Lilly, the group's reluctant leader upon whom the burden of decision making weighs extremely heavily. I adored the writing in this game.
 
Shadowrun: Dragonfall.

HBS' games kind of have to rely on the quality of their writing because their games are pretty mundane mechanically, but this approach works because their writing is so good.

This writing in this game does a great job of showing you a dystopian world in a way that doesn't feel forced. It doesn't give you long speeches and lectures about how bad everything is, but there's a consistent dreary feeling that comes from the descriptions and dialogue that you pick up from everyone around you. Just about everyone in that world is getting screwed over in one way or another, and everyone's just trying to scrape together their own existence. The wording is always very well chosen to make it feel like life has always been this way for these people, and it makes the world believable.
 
Beaten by a stick with the mention of Ghost Trick ITT. Makes me happy to see the mention and justification. Consider me biased due to my avatar though lol.

I recently went through Tales from the Borderlands, so I'll explain why I think it has great writing.

Tales' cast of characters stick with you from how they interact with each other, with all their humor and/or sentimental moments. The main characters, Rhys and Fiona, both have complete arcs that you see successfully develop over the course of the story. Secondary characters like Sasha and Vaughn also have arcs that aren't necessarily in the forefront, but you do see them. Vaughn's is especially hilarious and fitting. However, once the the story is over, I couldn't help but feel sad that I wouldn't find out what happens next in these characters' lives. It nails in the fact that this is a just a single tale in the world of the Borderlands, and despite all the craziness the characters went through, there's a whole world out there that's doing its own thing - and this makes me sad as well.

Tales nails humor. Anyone writing a story about a cast of characters joining up and going on an insane adventure should use the game as an example, or whatever inspirations the writers of Tales used for their game. This game had me rolling. It also had clever use of 4th wall breaking stuff a few times in the game, where it wasn't annoying with the game trying to come across as aware, but utilized by characters who everyone figure are kind of insane and weird to begin with.

Finally, I felt as low-key as the romance was in Tales, it felt right. It was the right amount of awkward that grew slowly into the two characters being able to admit that they really missed each other. I won't go into detail about it, but this particular romance is key to a great, realistic conversation at the end of the game. It also is the reason why one of my favorite, hilarious scenes happens.

EDIT - one last point I want to make about Tales is that it has villains you love to hate.
 
Both Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together had excellent written stories. There's so many classical themes in both that it's practically the closest thing to a Shakespearean play in gaming.
 
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

Every character and NPC is unique and believable. NPC dialogue changes after every single tiny event, so you can actually follow NPC characters' lives and get to know them. I have never cared about random NPC characters as much as in this game/series.

I'd write more but I'm on mobile, and the game has to be mentioned in here at least. Falcom/XSEED made something very special that not enough people are aware of.
 
Half-Life 2, because it tells a great story succinctly without requiring any cut scenes taking you out of the immersion.

I still enjoy a good cut scene.
 
MAFIA - City of Lost Heaven.

I still think, in terms of storytelling, it's a masterpiece. In my opinion, there are just a few games that come even close.

I've always been into the theme of organized crime, loving all the Godfather movies as well as Goodfellas, Casino, etc.
The writing is superb, the characters are that likeable, that you somehow identify with them despite their criminal lifestyle. The story is diverse, containing lots of interesting missions.
Graphics, gameplay, voice acting, music - everything top-notch. Always hits me hard when I remember the dozens times that I've played through it ... shivers down my spine when I listen to the theme song.
 
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