When I played it, I pretty much was bored by the entire game. Talk, talk, talk. When you play for a five hour stretch, in the ideal games that exist in my mind, you get to do a little more than walk from one room to another while anime still-frames scroll page after page of “The Dialogue” at you. (Five hours is not an exaggeration, btw. I played for four hours with nothing but blab got to a boss-fight, hit three random encounters and then hit another 45 minutes of talking.)
Plus, any entertainment that I could have eked out of the game was spoiled by:
a) The ridiculous backstory
b) The absurd villains who just don’t die. (Which is a common Squaresoft problem, I know. But when I blow up a city, it would be nice if it stayed blown up for at least the whole cutscene after I blow it up.)
and finally, and perhaps most eregiously
c) The naked bishounen freaks in the final full motion video. Includning over-long, over-loving closeups of their animated asses. Or as my roommate described it: Ohmygod! CAMERA TWO!!!
The Baldur’s Gate games are certainly worth a go, but in terms of living up to the precedent set by Planescape: Torment, Arcanum is the only think I can think of in the ballpark. The story is less dialogue-driven than than of Torment, but it is full of twists that I found genuinely suprising, and it’s perfectly possible to immerse yourself in your character. I actually rated it higher than Torment on at least two grounds – 1) there are near-Nethack levels of nifty fiddly things to do and 2) it has the Fallout-like summary of the fates of the cities you visited, which I was orgasmically happy to see.
“But it’s such an important point, I felt it should be repeated twice”
I have played Planescape: Torment. And I enjoyed it quite a bit. There is a difference, however, between the vaguely interactive and well-written dialogue of that game and the non-interactive and terrible dialogue of Xenogears.
In Torment, like Fallout and Arcanum, your dialogue options have effect on the story that unfolds. In Xenogears there are no dialogue options, really, at all. It could be more correctly described as a script than a conversation. Sometimes that sort of game can be well done; Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX and X for example. Other times, well . . .
Another one: Alice, about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland several years later. I’ve never actually played it, but I’ve watched, and the artistry is magnificent. Most of the story is in the cutscenes, of course, but they’re so seamlessly integrated into the gameplay that you hardly even notice them.
I recently finished Neverwinter Nights, and while its storyline is no match for P:Torment or Arcanum, it’s not bad. Like Arcanum, you have a great deal of freedom in how you approach the game, and your decisions have an impact on how things play out (though I haven’t found anything that changes the endgame significantly). Arguably the best part of the packaged adventure, though, is the stories the henchmen tell–especially the thief.
Oooo, lest I forget to mention, Septerra Core had a terrific story. It’s about a girl named Maya who is the big sister to a bunch of kids living in the asshole of the world, and as her adventures take her further afield she eventually becomes big sister to the whole world, wiping noses and confronting bullies on an epic scale. A lot of the actual gameplay consists of find-the-switch mazes, but the story is just wonderful.
Myth: The Fallen Lords, followed by Myth: Soulblighter (which has better gameplay but a weaker story. Those damn things devoured a good year of my life. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to reign in eight dwarves who are armed with molotov cocktails that tend to kill your own men as often as the soulless undead.
Oh yeah–the storyline/backstory is pretty cool, too.
But really, with exploding dwarves, what more could you want?
If you can get them to survive a dozen battles and a hundred kills or so, they actually start getting pretty smart about not throwing in range of your units. The way unit experience works in that game is a nice touch: They get much better, but in subtle, realistic ways.
At least, in Myth II. I’ven’t played the original.
