Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. To this day I’m convinced that everyone heard the word “pirate” and decided right then that they would tear it completely apart if it wasn’t 100% plundering ships and guzzling rum by the barrel and hitting on saucy wenches and singing sea chanteys and swinging on chandeliers and saying “arr matey” and “shiver me timbers” and “avast ye landlubber” every microsecond. The hell with the thrill of discovery, or the natural beauty of the Caribbean, or the different skills required for the land and sea environments, or, y’know, the whole Assassins vs. Templars struggle that’s been the impetus for the entire series.
Edward Kenway had not only the most relatable story of the heroes up to that point (trying to make good money as a privateer to help his wife and drifts into piracy due to events out of his control), he answered a question that had never been addressed up to that point…how someone who’s not a good guy becomes a good guy. Altair was born into the life. Ezio and Connor were motivated by revenge; there wasn’t anything remarkable about them playing the enemy-of-my-enemy card. When Edward first meets the Assassins, he finds them ridiculous. He doesn’t see how they’re of any use to him, and they don’t want him around. It’s only after learning about an enemy far deadlier than even King George and being betrayed by those he thought he could trust does he learn to accept the Assassin cause. This is a story that manages to incorporate Edward’s initial quest for base riches, the struggle to keep Nassau free, his relationship with famous ill-fated pirates, a sinister Templar conspiracy, the two-faced Ben Hornigold, romantic interests, an intriguing subplot involving a shady never-seen Dutch patron…and the grand Edenic monument hovering over it all… without shortchanging any of them. I cared about what happened to Edward in a way I never did about the other heroes, or even Haytham.
And yes, I’ll say it (again): I don’t see what the hell everyone’s apocalyptic beef was with the modern-day gameplay. No, it did not “tear me out of the game”. Things not showing up or being were they supposed to or just plain crashing (big problems with Valhalla) tear me out of a game. Getting hopelessly lost tears me out of a game. Not knowing how to do a simple task tears me out of a game. Massive difficulty spikes tear me out of a game. Office politics? I got to talk to quirky people and snoop around where I shouldn’t have been and hack into computers and pull shady crap on unsuspecting clerical workers! It was fun! And the huge twist the end where I finally learned “John’s” true identity was one of the truly stunning moments in the series. Again, AC is a series where you CAN. NOT. go in with a hard-wired conception about what the game is “supposed” to be about, or you will be utterly miserable. You need to be open to what you get and judge everything on its own merits.
A very good game with possibly the best story in the series. I regret nothing.
Honorable mention: Klonoa. I absolutely loved Door to Phantomile and Lunatea’s Veil. Klonoa was a hell of an underdog hero, and I was raring to see where Namco was going to go with his story.
I’m going to nominate The Return of the Obra Dinn with the caveat that it may not be the story so much as how the story unfolds. The game takes place in 1803 after a mysterious cargo ship blows into town with everyone on board dead or missing. Your job as an insurance adjuster is to figure out what happened. Fortunately you’re given a magic watch that shows you a flashback of the last moments of the lives of each of the 60 persons on board. You get a crew manifest, the ship’s schematic, and some group photos. From the clues present in these flashbacks (which are frozen in time, so you can investigate at your leisure) you are to determine the identity of every crew member, who killed them, and how they died (or in a few cases, how they went missing.)
You start at the end of the story, with the Captain’s mysterious death (I won’t say how, but it’s a great hook!) and slowly work your way backwards, with every tense moment revealing more of the cohesive whole (I guess I really like games that reveal stories in piecemeal.) The story that comes out is definitely an aha moment, as all these little snippets of death suddenly make sense. By that point you feel like you know the crew and were traveling with them. So it’s deeply satisfying to lay them all to rest.
It’s a meditation on mortality as much as it is a puzzle game. I was absolutely entranced the whole time I played and felt a sense of loss after it was over. Like, what am I going to play now that can possibly compare?
Yep, can’t go wrong with Witcher 3 (I think all of the Witcher games are pretty heavy with story and lore, but Witcher 3 – and the Blood and Wine DLC – was particularly compelling for me), and Red Dead Redemption 2. RDR2 really felt like a living world, with people doing things in it, and you’d find notes here and there or random conversations with NPCs that would fill in and piece together into bigger narratives. Same with Witcher 3 and the war that was going on there, tons of little stories aside from the big things detailing how people are getting through the war, or how they were affected by being in it.
Both of those games are on my Steam wishlist, and I think I actually started Witcher 3 on PS4, but for one of my first quests, I got into it with a wraith and it was scaring the shit out of me, so I took a break. Yeah, I spook easily.
If I recall correctly, towards the beginning of the game, you have to travel to a specific destination, but there’s a place of power that you pass by (for the uninitiated, meditating at one of those will grant you an ability point, and give you a temporary stat boost). Very close to that location is a wraith that is several levels above your character, and it’s almost impossible to hit that area without triggering the wraith’s combat processes.