Board 8 > Top 35 Stories in Fiction

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's on Switch now too, I believe. That might be better.

Honestly though, every version of DP is buggy. You just kinda roll with it because it's usually more funny than harmful.

GANON1025 posted...

I know some people write off Deadly Premonition for being a "so bad it's good" game, but I really enjoyed it story included! I thought the ending in particular was very well done.

I showed DP to friends via playing it in front of them. Watching them gardually change from 'not taking it seriously' to 'super invested' was fun.

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The Truman Show
Movie

"In case I don't see ya: good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight."

It's absolutely wild that this movie was made in 1998, back before our culture had gotten as ridiculously voyeuristic as we are now. The Truman Show has one of the best plot hooks I've ever seen: a man's entire life has been fabricated around him and broadcast as a TV show since the moment of his birth. He's kept in a manufactured bubble and lied to about the world around him to keep him stationary, content, and unimaginative. So what happens when the mask starts to slip?

The performances in this movie are some of the best I've seen. Pretty sure the only reason Jim Carrey didn't win an oscar is because he's Jim Carrey and people are too used to him playing shlock comedy, but it really is the perfect role for him. Truman doesn't take the slow realization that his life is a lie well, and his transformation from everyman media darling into a manic prisoner is both fascinating and entertaining. He keeps the movie relatively lighthearted while also not undercutting the seriousness of the situation. That's to say nothing of everyone else's performances - I especially like his 'wife', whose stepford-smiling-sleaziness makes my skin crawl.

Truman Show has all the hallmarks of a damn good story. It's entertaining, the setting is interesting and well-realized (and barely feels like sci-fi in 2019), the characters are compelling, and it has a real message to tell: just how far will one person go to discover the truth and be free, even at the cost of their own personal safety and security? It's the kind of movie that you watch, and then immediately want to rewatch.

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SIlent Hill 2
Video Game

"In my restless dreams, I see that town... Silent Hill. You promised you'd take me there again some day... but you never did. Well, I'm alone there now, in our special place... waiting for you."

The pinnacle of survival horror. Silent Hill 2 is a game where everything works together in mostly-perfect harmony to create an unreal, nightmarish experience that honestly gets even worse after the credits have rolled and you think back on everything that happened. It's not the nightmare that scares you on the physical level, but rather one that creeps into your subconscious and lingers there for far longer than you want it to. The fact that the story is so well-made doesn't help, because then you want to go back and look up stuff about it and then you're just reminded about everything all over again thanks Silent Hill 2.

Silent Hill 2 isn't without flaws, but it's kind of hilarious how often those flaws end up adding to the experience. The voice acting is, for lack of a better word, disjointed - but the strange performances just add to the atmosphere and remind you that the cast is full of unfortunate, lost, broken people. The fetch-quest-and-solve-a-puzzle gameplay can get tedious, but it also forces to take in eeeeevery detail of where you are and spend much more time there than you would be comfortable with. Even the signature fog was an accident; they couldn't render the city in full detail on PS1/PS2 hardware, so they hid a lot of the loading with fog and ended up with the most memorable part of the environment. It's almost like...it was all meant to happen this way...but that can't be, Silent Hill isn't sentient, it's just a normal empty city...right?

I'm being very light on the actual characters and story because there's no way I'm spoiling this one, but suffice to say that it's all very well-written and the way the game concludes is one of the biggest emotional punches in gaming. There's a reason this game has endured in the public consciousness for so long despite being in a genre that is often overlooked.

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Aaaand that's all of Tier 3!

TIER 3
Nier
Chrysalis
Transmetropolitan
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Pluto
Ender's Game / Speaker of the Dead
Dragon Quest V
American Psycho
Locke and Key
Deadly Premonition
Catch-22
The Truman Show
Silent Hill 2

TIER 4
Harry Potter
Bastard
Black Lagoon
Re:Zero
Undertale
Paranoia Agent
Tales of Berseria

Here's what's left:

3 Video Games
3 Books / Book Series
2 Manga Series
1 Web Serial
1 Movie
1 TV Series
1 Visual Novel
1 Fanfiction
1 Light Novel
1 Comic Series

Tier 2 starts tomorrow or the day after.

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I wasn't a big fan of the Truman Show, but I was pretty young when I saw it, so maybe I'd feel differently with some more understanding of what's going on.
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The Truman Show is phenomenal and if you only saw it when you were young, I would be shocked if you didn't wind up appreciating it more on a rewatch as an adult.
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There is a TON to unpack in the Truman Show, and so many different (but valid!) ways to interpret it

EDIT: Not like interpret it in a plot sense. Thats all fairly straightfoward. I mean more in the sense of different schools of critique.
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Side note - while the entrants within each Tier aren't ordered by quality, one story is eventually going to be crowned the overall #1.

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And up.

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One last bump for the day.

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i read Chrysalis based on your post about it

I thought the first couple chapters weren't too good but it got much better later on when the writer was comfortable with the setting and characters and didn't just feel he was naming random things that might be important like factories and raw materials or whatever. Good recommendation.
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Man now I want to rewatch Truman Show. That's one good movie.
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I think I also need to go back and watch the Truman Show again. At the time, Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura were two of my favorite movies, so I was expecting something equally hilarious when I first saw the Truman Show - and obviously, it's a very different kind of movie, so I found it very disappointing and mediocre. I am pretty sure I haven't seen it since, so it's probably time to give it another shot.

Dragon Quest V, on the other hand, I played 4 or 5 years ago and I thought it was decent but not great. I found the story to be pretty bare bones. I enjoyed the first half up to the major plot twist, but I found the hero's children to be somewhat annoying and the whole concept that 10 year old children could save the world was a JRPG cliche that I couldn't get over. Maybe I am just becoming a grumpy old man, but it just irritated me for the whole second half of the game. Maybe if I had played it closer to when it first came out, I would have held DQV in higher regard.

I actually thought Dragon Quest IV told a better story and did a better job of presenting it. The way they tied together several different story paths - some of which were quite different than your average RPG - was very well done. Especially taken in the context of what year DQIV originally came out.
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CoolCly posted...

i read Chrysalis based on your post about it

I thought the first couple chapters weren't too good but it got much better later on when the writer was comfortable with the setting and characters and didn't just feel he was naming random things that might be important like factories and raw materials or whatever. Good recommendation.

Glad you enjoyed it! I thought the quality was pretty consistent throughout the story (my favorite chapter was actually the first one), but I can see why you would have preferred the later content.

cyko posted...

I enjoyed the first half up to the major plot twist, but I found the hero's children to be somewhat annoying and the whole concept that 10 year old children could save the world was a JRPG cliche that I couldn't get over. Maybe I am just becoming a grumpy old man, but it just irritated me for the whole second half of the game.

The fact that your main character isn't the JRPG Cliche Hero, but rather his son is, is one of my favorite little bits of writing in the game so I can't agree with that.

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Will probably wait until tomorrow - kind of sick today so I dont feel like writing. Might be in the mood to rant about my least favorite stories as an intermission!

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Bottom 5 is always good
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I need to re-watch The Truman Show, it's definitely been a while.
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The Truman Show got played in an English class for me in school and watching it made me realize for the first time that there's more to movies (and other media) than just entertainment. It was a good experience.
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Some cool stuff in this thread.
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INTERMISSION: Top Least-Favorite Stories

I did some deep, deep soul searching for fifteen whole minutes and these are the five stories I decided I disliked the most. The criteria for this mini-list was: screw these things.

There will be spoilers in this list. You're welcome.

5. Tales of the Abyss
Video Game

I think pretty much everything about this story is lackluster, from the uninteresting world, bland characters, and horrid pacing, but that's not uncommon in JRPGs so that alone wouldn't be enough to earn it a place on the Hall of Infamy. No, Tales of the Abyss sucks because the message it's trying to portray is insulting. The big 'selling point' of the story is that main character Luke is an insufferable prick until he causes a major tragedy which causes him to reform and become a better person. There's two major problems with this: the first is that the tragedy isn't actually Luke's fault; the blame is just pushed onto him by others because he was related to an incident he had no way of predicting or preventing. The second is that one of Luke's major reasons for reforming is to get back in the good graces of his party who are almost all objectively terrible people who do awful things and never get called out on it. Instead of a redemption story, it comes across as Luke being this abused kid just trying to fit in with a bad crowd because they're the only ones who will give him the time of the day and it's really gross. I'm not usually tilted to this degree by bad JRPG writing, but here we are.

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4. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Video Game

Whereas Tales of the Abyss was bad JRPG writing that upset me, FFTA just makes me shake my head. When I try to describe FFTA's story, the word that keeps coming to mind is 'embarrassing'. It's embarrassing that this game is the successor to the Final Fantasy Tactics name. It's embarrassing that literally every character in the game is stupid, has no survival instinct, or both. It's embarrassing that we went from political intrigue to "my tragic character motivation is that I'm upset because I have to dye my hair". It's embarrassing that Marche isn't murdered by 95% of the people he knows despite them having legitimately good reason to. It's embarrassing that Marche ISN'T considered the villain (which actually might have made for a fun story). What a game.

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3. Thankskilling 3
Movie

I like Roosterteeth videos. One of my favorite series is their take on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Watch bad movies and riff on it, right? What's not to like? I mean every now and then you'll get a stinker that's so bad it's not even fun to make fun of, but even then, it's just a movie.

Let me paraphrase what one of the members of their show said right as they sat down to watch Thankskilling 3:
"I usually skim the movies we watch the day before so I can prep some jokes ahead of time. It always makes me look forward to watching the movie again with you guys. I'm...not looking forward to this one."

I don't want to remember more of Thankskilling 3 than I do. It's a 2 hour blur of awful jokes, gross-out humor, and uncanny valley puppets, and I wish brain bleach existed. Don't experience this movie in any capacity, even secondhandedly.

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2. Umineko Episode 8
Visual Novel

Okay so, Phoenix Wright fans out there (since this is B8, that means all of you), imagine you're in the last case of Trials and Tribulations. The story is all about wrapped up when Phoenix suddenly declares that solving murder mysteries is boring and everyone should put their hands over their ears and sing kum-ba-ya until their loved ones magically come back to life. In an alternate timeline where she disagrees with him, Maya becomes a serial killer.

You know have 1/4 of the indignation I felt when reading Umineko Episode 8. My standards were already atrophied by Episode 6's core answer to the mystery being bad. The bar had been lowered! Episode 8 did a swan dive under the bar while simultaneously flipping you off.

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1. Dexter Season 8
TV Series

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

One of the few pieces of media where I think literally every moment in it is bad. People who were upset by Game of Throne's bad final season should be glad that they never had to fight through the true final boss of bad TV final seasons. I say 'fight' because watching this season was a mental and physical struggle. The writers attacked you, the characters they'd built up, and the actors' future careers in an attempt to shoehorn in a incest subplot and the main character abandoning his son with an actual, literal serial killer so he can go be a lumberjack. And that's just scratching the surface! There's a hurricane in this season coincidentally named after Dexter's mother, and her's the actual given reason as to why:

"The hurricane also shares its name with Dexter's biological mother, Laura Moser. This is symbolic as Laura originally gave birth to Dexter, while the hurricane allowed Dexter to fake his death, and give birth to a new life."

Undoubtedly the worst TV to ever exist. I would need a damn good example to be convinced otherwise.

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Lets just pretend Dexter ended with season 7
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KamikazePotato posted...

It's embarrassing that Marche ISN'T considered the villain (which actually might have made for a fun story). What a game.

Search your heart, and you know that he truly is. Beware the Ides of Marche.
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Save My Favorite Final Fantasy Character Marche IS a legitimately fun character though

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Tales of the Abyss top 10 all time video game.

And on a more positive note, here's some games I either forgot about or have changed my opinion of whether or not they should be on this list since I started posting:

Honorable Mention
Final Fantasy Tactics
Video Game

FFT is one-half of a great story and one half of an average one. Everything related to Ramza and Delita's characterization is fantastic, and the political intrigue stuff is fun. Honestly, all the Ramza/Delita stuff on its own is enough to get FFT a mention on the list. Unfortunately the fantasy side of the story isn't nearly as interesting, though, and it becomes more and more of the focus plot as the game goes on. It doesn't help that the original translation for the game is - barring a few memorable lines - very bad, which prevented me from getting as I should have been in my first playthrough.

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Honorable Mention
Persona 4
Video Game

Persona 4 would've been higher if I was younger, but I think some of the game's pacing has aged poorly now that I don't have infinite time and some of the more anime-esque humor no longer works for me. Also the core murder mystery plot is kind of...okay? It's definitely not anything special. Persona 4 still gets a nod because it's more a story about the people of Inaba coming to terms with who they are, and it's there where the game excels. The average quality of writing for the Social Links and 'Shadow confrontation' scenes is very high.

P.S. This is the only Persona game that's going to get a nod. 3's story is whatever and 5's story is bad.

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Tier 4
Final Fantasy X
Video Game

"Listen to our story. This...may be our last chance."

FFX is above an Honorable Mention, so it gets a quote.

The main problems with Final Fantasy X can be boiled down to age. It was cutting-edge storytelling at the time, and has held up way better than most games of its era, but in 2019 a lot of it can come across as janky. Character animations stutter, character models don't look lifelike, and the voice acting direction/quality is inconsistent. Using the term 'uncanny valley' would definitely be going too far, but you can definitely tell that FFX was produced in a transitional era where we were still learning how to make immersive 3D game experiences.

With that said, the heart and soul of the story remains. The setting of Spira is the best-realized world in any Final Fantasy game and potentially any JRPG I've played - its simple but internally consistent and FFX manages to make you immediately care about its fate. Sin is a VERY effective villain, both before and after you learn more about him, casting an omnipresent shadow over the world that I'm not sure has ever been recaptured in a game. The cast of characters work great together, with the standout being main character Tidus, whose ignorant optimism contrasts effectively with everyone else's fatalistic outlook on life. The pacing is damn near impeccable (outside of that one place with the lightning), the big moments hit hard, and the ending is fantastic. If I had to choose one issue with FFX's story outside of the Age factor, it's that the true nature of Dream Zanarkand isn't explained well in the game. Luckily, liking Japanese media has made me fairly resistant to weird plot shit.

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he said listen to my story this maybe are last chance
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It's always interesting to me to read opinions about Tales of the Abyss. I love how polarizing it is.
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I don't see Tales of the Abyss the way you do, but at the same time, I can see why you would view it that way. I ended up liking the game a lot more than I thought I would after the opening stretch.

And Persona 4 deserves a lot of credit for integrating the theme of its game into the actual fabric of the gameplay and the plot better than just about any game I've ever seen. You really want to know the truth? Prove it.

and ya go my FFX
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also honorary shoutout to Mass Effect on N7 Day
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i was delighted to open this topic and see tales of the abyss's name in bold, and with a #5 next to it too, the 5th best story of all time!

then i started reading the writeup and got confused.

then i saw the header at the top of the post

=(

LeonhartFour posted...

also honorary shoutout to Mass Effect on N7 Day

I was never as big a ME fan as others, but I'll give a shoutout the the Krogan storyline over the three games. I think it's easily the best writing that series produced. Wrex and Mordin are two of the best characters in the series, and the way the genophage situation is presented and evolved feels a cut above everything else. Tuchanka in ME3 is an excellent culmination of several character arcs and all the choices you've made regarding the genophage and krogans up until that point.

Dels posted...

i was delighted to open this topic and see tales of the abyss's name in bold, and with a #5 next to it too, the 5th best story of all time!

then i started reading the writeup and got confused.

then i saw the header at the top of the post

=(

oopsie

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The genophage plot thread is indeed excellent, as well as the conflict between the geth and the quarians. Both of those resolutions are the high points of ME3.

(ME3 is a top 10 game)
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Please dont remind me of Thankskilling 3. I watched some of that Theater Mode. It couldn't finish it.

I am happy to say I gave up on Dexter before season 8.
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KamikazePotato posted...

Instead of a redemption story, it comes across as Luke being this abused kid just trying to fit in with a bad crowd because they're the only ones who will give him the time of the day and it's really gross.

Ain't this the truth. I think I forgive it more than you do though.

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Tidus and Yuna still the worst Final Fantasy characters~

I'm curious if I'd like them much more with the Japanese voice acting, which is probably not terrible.
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KamikazePotato posted...

Catch-22
Book

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

I'm not sure how exactly to categorize Catch-22. At its core it's a satire on the irrationality of war, but what kind of one? It can be very funny and very depressing, oftentimes in the same scene. Tonal whiplash and circular logic is used so often that over the course of reading the book you become numbed to absurdity. Awful events occur and you just go...should I laugh at this? Cry? Shrug? Catch-22 uses its prose and story framing to great effect, imposing the same deteriorated mental state on its reader that the war does on its central character Yossarian. When something truly irrational happens, and you know it's wrong, but no one else acknowledges or cares, what's a man supposed to do?

It's also an extremely clever story. The specific Catch-22 rule by itself would be enough to base an entire story off of, but the book also has stuff like the bizarre career advancement of Major Major Major Major and the extremely tense and dramatic milk run, just to name a few things. I won't be able to do Catch-22 justice with this writeup - doing so would only spoil the oddities that are so fun to discover, while simultaneously not being able to capture the particular way they're portrayed in-writing.

I guess that's the Catch-22 of writing a list like this. The easiest to make someone want to experience a story is to tell them why it's good. The more you tell them why it's good, the more interested they will become in reading/watching/whatevering the story to experience it like you did. But the more you tell them of the story beforehand, the less likely they are to be impressed by it. The best way to get someone to enjoy a story is not to tell them anything about the story. But by not telling them anything about the story, they'll never know they should experience it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go plot against my commander over trying to get me killed via incompetence.

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
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Kenri posted...

Ain't this the truth. I think I forgive it more than you do though.

I've forgiven worse writing that TotA. We all have things we dislike on a more personal level though, and it's one of them.

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LeonhartFour posted...

The genophage plot thread is indeed excellent, as well as the conflict between the geth and the quarians. Both of those resolutions are the high points of ME3.

(ME3 is a top 10 game)

Yup, both are phenomenal. Add in Citadel (the DLC) and bam.

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TotA's failing (and I like the story, but this is definitely the part worst handled... well, with one other possible exception) is that with the exception of Guy, it doesn't handle the rest of the party realizing their mistake in handling Luke in that moment well.

Jade actually comes to realize it and state his own culpability in contributing to the situation... in a completely optional scene that's easy to miss because Tales event timing. The rest... not really... Tear is too tsun, Anise is... a whole 'nother story, and Natalia sure is a party member in this game.
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TotA-lly dropped that game

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Lot of the best TotA stuff is optional and easily missable. That's why my initial playthrough I was pretty cool on it, and when I did a 100% about 4 years later it absolutely skyrocketed for me.

Abyss is great

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SaveEstelle posted...

LeonhartFour posted...

The genophage plot thread is indeed excellent, as well as the conflict between the geth and the quarians. Both of those resolutions are the high points of ME3.

(ME3 is a top 10 game)

Yup, both are phenomenal. Add in Citadel (the DLC) and bam.

Citadel is the best piece of DLC ever created

Also, the worst part of Abyss is its overuse of nonsense terminology. I never want to hear the word "fonon" ever again.
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dexter s8 made me so angry as i watched it the first time, but i almost admire the audacity of its writers now
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FFX too low but your points are fair

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I actually liked some parts of the first half of Dexter S8 (and I was probably disposed to forgive its flaws because I loved S7), but man, that second half is just unforgivable trash.
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yeah S7 is weirdly arguably some of dexter's best stuff - very nice elements unfortunately wrapped in rather shittier elements
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KamikazePotato posted...

1 Cartoon Series

Better be Avatar

KamikazePotato posted...

Avatar: The Last Airbender
Cartoon Series

Good!
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Tier 2

Metal Gear Solid 2
Video Game

"The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in
digitizing life itself.

But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas. Culture. History. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on?"

I played MGS2 in my formative years, and it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. The Tactical Espionage Action and political intrigue of MGS1 was still there, but the surface level plot was just a ruse hiding the mindscrewy complexity underneath. Games have been trying and failing for almost two decades to fuck with player's heads as much as MGS2 did back in 2001 - a bug-budget AAA game marketed as a power fantasy being, used as a front for a commentary on the direction of information control in society is so audacious that it still baffles me that this game exists. MGS2 took away player's control of the most beloved character in gaming, replaced him with Mr. "Did you say nerd?" and did its level best to challenge everything the player thought was real, both in-game and outside of the game.

Many formative experiences are best left as memories. There are quite a few games that I never want to replay because I know that the reality will no longer live up to my internalized hype. This is especially true of gaming storytelling, which has advanced significantly over the years. Then there's Metal Gear Solid 2. MGS2 if anything, has gotten better with age. That's not to say it's without flaw; while it holds up amazingly well considering the time period it was developed, it still has that slightly 'uncanny valley' feel I mentioned in the FFX writeup. The characters in this game aren't as good as they should be, specifically Dead Cells who kind of all suck (Solidus excepted). The pacing of some of the codec calls is...questionable. But the core story beats that made the game so unique and memorable back in 2001 are still unmatched, especially the last 1/10 or so of the game, and the themes/message are more relevant nowadays when they were back then. It's kind of terrifying how well MGS2 predicted the future course of society, and unfortunately none of its correct predictions were positive ones!

I just really love MGS2. I've probably played it to completion more than any other game I own. If I can name one major issue with the game, it's that it spelled the end of the Metal Gear Solid series for me. The backlash to MGS2 meant that Kojima would never be even slightly subtle in an MGS game ever again. Not a fan of the story in 3, 4, or 5, which is a shame because 1 and 2 mean a lot to me.

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