LogFAQs > #977817736

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Yeah but the story isn't about collecting mcguffins to allow that operation to succeed. If it instead followed a doctor friend as they train for years to be able to do the operation and then it still ended in failure, it'd be a lot more frustrating. The story was never about saving her life to begin with.

Therein lies the twist: The story isn't actually what the characters thought it was at face value. By extension, the player playing the role of those characters also believes there's a different story being told until it turns out that they were working toward something else, sharing in the ignorance or deception that misled the protagonist and therefore in however they react to the surprise (and games are arguably better as a storytelling medium in that regard because the player is more invested in the characters' experience and will therefore react more strongly to major events). Many stories start out with a goal that ends up changing as you learn more about the world and what's going on, often invalidating the work you put toward the initial goal if you choose to frame it strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect, but on a broader scale that work ends up being progress toward realizing the truth of the initial goal and unravelling the rest of the story, progress that can't really be skipped because there's no other way to figure out the truth than to see the lie to its endpoint. That's all still consistent with playing the role of the character as they journey through the story.

That's not to say every such twist is automatically good, and there should be at least some foreshadowing to support it instead of pulling the twist out of nowhere (to return to a hypothetical variant where Arven's dog dies, that story should include finding some lore that casts doubt on the Herba Mystica's healing abilities or something that plants the suspicion that nothing could cure the dog, and throughout that Arven should be expressing those worries and talking about what the dog means to him and generally laying the framework for the story to actually be about processing his grief, not just say "Hey we're collecting mcguffins to cure the dog OOPS HE DIED BE SAD NOW"), but the bottom line remains that expecting all gameplay progress to work toward immediate success instead of encountering some stumbling blocks along the way to a grander victory is exceedingly limiting. That's not a good thing. Off the top of my head, I can think of several JRPGs where a twist like that played a huge role in making the story interesting (and one where it could have made the story really interesting, but the rest of the writing kind of ignored that the twist happened for some reason. Three guesses which game that is) and I wouldn't dream of gutting those stories just to more immediately reward players (except maybe that one).