The best game with the dumbest story

[infinix]

*Spoilers ahead*

Let's list some of the best games with the most ill-conceived story elements.

For an ultra block buster game where the story element is as thin as a wet napkin, I say the crown goes to Modern Warfare I and II.

The idea that one rouge general would allow hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent American be slaughtered (and basically triggering WWIII) just for a personal vendetta makes absolutely no sense. The game was great, but the story isn't.

what else can you name?

 

[Jax]

MW 2 story is weak no doubt, but I disagree that COD 4 MW suffers from the same issues...MW 1 was a wonderful single player both in story an gameplay. I am tempted to put Metal Gear Solid in dumb category for simply being so OTT at times but I love the PS1 MGS game too much to do that...

I think the highest honor needs to go for the Reasident Evil franchise because lets face it, every Resident Evil game has had AWFUL stories despite being very good games.

 

[captcalhoun]

Unreal Tournament III

yes, it does have a story; you play as a colonist who gets roped into a merc unit fighting a war and all the matches are about defeating the aliens by draining their power cores and destroying bases, killing their warriors by draining their respawn equipment and stealing their Field LAttice Generator (or FLAG).

it's a pretty piss-poor story line compared to the 'story' of UT2004 - you're a combatant in a legally sanctioned gladatorial contest between rival mega-corporations and alien species.

 

[Sparky]

PacMan. Ghosts and dots? wtf?

 

[Kelthaz]

Sonic The Hedgehog.

A blue (??) hedgehog from the Planet Mobius runs at the speed of sound to save a bunch of woodland animals from becoming robots. He manages to defeat his arch-nemesis, a man named and shaped after an egg, by turning Super Saiyan and destroying the Death Star.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Two Worlds. Just played it and the story is rather lame. The main quest has you trying to save your sister, but the voice acting makes you not care about it, because it's terrible. At the end, you get a confrontation and a choice: Do you kill the main baddy who isn't really that hard to kill to begin with when many other monsters are much tougher, or do you sacrifice your sister to the evil side? Well, nobody wins cause the cutscenes are so aweful.

Oh wait, you said best games... nevermind lol. It's not even a good game.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

One of the endings to Deus Ex really strains technical credibility (the "new dark age" one) and I rolled my eyes when I played through it. Stellar game up to that point.

Final Fantasy IV also had a good story up until the whole Zeromus thing. Giant Space Flea From Nowhere.

It also occurs to me that Kefka in Final Fantasy VI seemingly had no motivation for doing what he did, he was just insane. As a microcosm of this you had Ultros tormenting your party from time to time for no apparent reason except that he's an asshole. The game managed to have a good story despite the nonsensical villains.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Kefka's insanity was just that, but I always felt it was compelling enough. He was nihilistic. Nihilistic people are the kind most likely to destroy the world. His 'testament to non-existence' routine sounded like the kind of thing I'd expect to hear someone in his position ranting about.

As for Final Fantasy IV, that game's story fell apart when everyone sans Tellah came back from various should-have-died scenarios. Zeromus was just salt to the wound...

 

[Sephiroth]

Armored Core (the whole series) you play as a merc on a world where humanity bombed itself underground and now you get to choose sides betweem two mega-corps battleing it out for world domination

 

[Reverend]

One of the endings to Deus Ex really strains technical credibility (the "new dark age" one) and I rolled my eyes when I played through it. Stellar game up to that point.

To be fair, that outcome was contingent on the basic conceit of that game which was that the world was A) already in massive turmoil and a plague sweeping the "lower classes" while B) just about everyone else was almost entierly dependent on networked technology in one way or another.

Crashing the whole system worldwide would have done more than just turned the lights off and spoiled the contents of a few fridges ir would have derailed the whole infrastructure from finances to basic manufacturing.

Anyway, as for the OP, I'd say just about any FPS game inherently has a crazyballs story based solely on the idea that one unstoppable person could run around leaving a trail of bodies a mile wide for more than five minutes.

More specifically though...Metal Gear Solid. Absolutely nuts. 70's cloning, an entire outfit of special ops soldiers going rogue, an island full of killers with tragic and sympathetic stores that only come out AFTER you blow their guts out AND a giant robot fighting a cyborg ninja? Grade-A pants-on-head wonko.

 

[-Brett-]

Starcraft 2 is the first one that comes to mind. The whole plot revolves around an ancient anti-zerg weapon, but if the ancients had that weapon, why didn't they use it to save themselves? The emperor's master plan didn't make any damn sense. He sends a spy to convince you to steal the weapon pieces... from himself? He lets the spy shoot up his capital city while he's at it? Everything else is just filler. Self-contained stories that seem to have no relation to anything else.

Other than that, it's a damn good game.

 

[Shurik]

As much as I love Fallout 3, the main story is probably the weakest part of the game, at least until the idiotic finale was fixed by one of the add-ons ...

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

As much as I love Fallout 3, the main story is probably the weakest part of the game, at least until the idiotic finale was fixed by one of the add-ons ...

Good choice and I second this. It's lovely to hear the voices of Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell coming out of my television speakers, but the plot itself is pretty damn average.

 

[Jax]

^ I loved Fallout 3 but the game is clearly about the world rather than the story, which apart from a few great moments is quite average overall. Take a game like Mass Effect (1) and how it makes up for any gameplay flaws because of the story, how it drags you into it really...

Fallout 3 really missed that aspect.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Fallout 3's world is one of the most timeless ones I've seen in any fictional medium, I agree.

 

[infinix]

To me, its the mundane aspect of Fallout 3 that made it greater than its story elements. You meet mostly normal people who are simply trying to survive the best they can while discovering more and more about who your father was and what he tried to accomplish. Too bad the game is littered with bugs and random crashes.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Rainbow Six 3. The game is fun as hell and ultra-realistic (for the time it was made in), but the story is nowhere near the level of the original Rainbow Six novel. Or even SSN, which I think Tom Clancy had a ghostwriter do to tie in with the game (movie? I forget) of the same name.

 

[Skywalker]

I'd put Mass Effect 2 up there, as well. Such a disappointment following ME1's story.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

I'd put Mass Effect 2 up there, as well. Such a disappointment following ME1's story.

Mass Effect 2 has "the dumbest story"? Mass Effect 2? Dumber than Galaxian? Dumber than Bubble Bobble? That's insane.

 

[Skywalker]

Hey, Galaxian is a classic!

Obviously ME2 doesn't have "the dumbest story" compared to some of these games. But its story (what little there is) is still pretty dumb.