My comment isn't to say I haven't enjoyed/don't enjoy stories in video games, but almost always to tell the player a narrative it's through cutscenes or dialogue boxes, things which take away control from the player.
Sounds like you play mostly Japanese games.
Seriously though, if narrative experimentation in games over the past couple decades has taught us anything it's that cutscenes are one of the worst ways to tell a story in a game. They're good for some things but terrible at telling a story. Dialogue boxes aren't particularly effective, but they're decent at telling a story partially because you don't necessarily have to take control away from a player. Many games use dialogue boxes and then use them as a poor man's cutscene by taking control away from the player anyway, but the important thing is that they don't necessarily do that. The other thing is that they're cheap as fuck, so there's that. There are certainly better ways to tell a story, but they often include having actual real voice actors and they often want to get payed.
Also, yeah it's detracting from "fun gameplay" because it's probably not meant to be all that fun. For the most part, fun is better represented in games by pure gameplay without any narrative meaning, so if that's all you're looking for in a game it's pretty safe to stay away from any story based ones. If you're playing something that's clearly meant to be about mindless execution and other such things, and a cutscene pops up and it feels jarring, yeah, that's stupid, but that's not all of narrative in gaming
Yea id agree, i mean i loved The Last of Us's story, best movie I saw this year.
But it's pretty obvious they designed the game based around the story and the gameplay suffers as a result.
That's just having a narrative slant. The idea that narrative and gameplay are some sort of balancing act, where more of one means less of the other, is ridiculously antiquated and a major hurdle for gaming as an artform.
Visuals novels aren't videogames
Dammit LaCheshireZorua, you started a snowball. Your post wasn't even that big of a deal, but now people have moved to "games can't do this" and then to "this entire genre isn't made of games." Oy vey.
Tell you what; Define "game." Challenge your beliefs. Because it's extremely damaging to gaming to say that "games can't do this." You might not like it when games do this, but that's why you don't play them rather than calling them not a game and shitting all over everyone that wants gaming's capabilities to be fleshed out and explored, rather than keeping to the same old stuff we've been making for decades.
Speaking of RPGs, my most common unpopular opinion is that I always favor aesthetics over stats.
Yes, I play FASHION SOULS. And DRAGON'S CATWALK - FASHIONISTA ARISEN.
I always hate it in an RPG when I get weapons/armor that's objectively better than what I have but looks like shit. The whole vanity equipment slot being any equip in the game is
