Bad Games With Great Stories

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Star Wars: The Old Republic
Bad WoW clone combat system, but some of the storylines hold up way better than many canon Star Wars books.
It also had a mechanic, I've never really seen in a multiplayer game before;
There are many questlines that allow multiple players to talk with the questgiver; For example when me and my buddy played a Smuggler/Trooper duo, an NPC knew that he was a trooper from the Havoc Squad and asked him for help. I was able to cut in and ask for what the pay was and the NPC was bewildered and asked my buddy "who this guy was".
Good times
edited because drunk grammar
 
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The game Homefront may have a plot that's farfetched (tl;dr-an alternate history where a united Korea invades China, Japan, most of East Asian, and America), but I'll be damned if it doesn't sell it spectacularly. To this day, I still think it has one of the best intro cutscenes of all time. Not even kidding here, I still get chills whenever I watch it. What makes it even more impactful is how fucking creepy it is that certain events in the game have started to echo in real life.
The game instantly thrusts you into the brutality and horror of an occupied America, where people are gunned down in the street, in front of their own children, (on-screen, by the way), dumped into mass graves (which you have to hide in at one point), and the little overworld details, and newspapers you can find illustrating how nightmarish everything has become sets the mood perfectly.

So far, this game sounds amazing. Why am I putting here?

Because fucking the gameplay fucking sucks.

Basically, imagine CoD, but the controls are slippery as shit. Good luck hitting anything in this first-person shooter when the sights refuse to go where you want them to and feel like they want everywhere except the place you want them to. And no, there is no auto-target. Combine all this with the fact that gameplay is also extremely monotonous and linear, you're railroaded constantly and can't explore the much more interesting, and well-detailed overworld, and that the game itself can be finished in roughly just five hours, and you have exactly the kind of game this thread was made for.

Honestly, I'm still kinda pissed about it nearly a decade later.
 
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I mean, the more effort a game puts into the story department the greater the chance the gameplay suffers (and the chance the story is shit by the standards of other mediums doesn't go down by much)
 
Rule of Rose.

That imo is the example of a fantastic story ruined by clunky game design.

Asura's Wrath I also consider a bad game (in terms of actual gameplay) but it's the best video game movie I've ever seen.

If you can manage to find a full playthrough on Youtube I highly recommend watching it. Both English and Japanese va's are fantastic, beautiful music, and the action is like Gurren Lagann levels of insane.
 
The first Super Robot Wars Alpha had an amazing plot, showing that the guys who wrote the games could in fact weave together a bunch of mecha shows into a cohesive crossover that had a ton of alternate routes and was the foundation for even better writing to come.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is terrible. Balance is utterly shot, with some early stages being torture because both players and enemies are utterly unbalanced for the stages in question. The upgrade feature is so hideously broken you can one shot the final boss with one unit if you know how to exploit it properly while some hidden game mechanics cause certain weapon upgrades to shit the bed depending on what you were used to using prior. The secrets in the game are hideously unintuitive to the point that unless you autistically follow a manual you can screw up over half of them. Late game can also suck because that's when they start introducing damage sponges and you sometimes are forced to deploy guys you benched for over half the game to the point you forgot they existed.

It's still a blast to play and I'm still going to play it when it gets a full English translation, but that game had terrible playtesting to make sure the game mechanics made any sense.
 
Guts Gets Some said:
It had nothing to do with performance. I actually got used to the game's style and kinda liked it at first (the bank and escape levels were actually kinda fun), even though it was clunky, until the second chapter, when everything became night. You were in a crowded Japanese nightclub and I had to replay that stage 100 times because it was so poorly designed.

The next one was stealth or something in a park, also at night. Not nearly as frustrating, but not fun either.

And the straw that broke the camel's back was having to save your daughter from a ditch and shoot a guy within 5 seconds in the head driving a construction vehicle. I tried over and over and over and couldn't do it. Worst of all, you HAD TO sit through the cut scene leading up to it each time. I was done after that.
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my experience of those three missions was the exact opposite. the nightclub was easy, the park was the hardest part of the game because there's almost nowhere to hide from the snipers and I killed the dump truck driver on the first try. I'm pretty sure you can press enter to skip that cutscene. don't give up now, some of the next missions are the most fun ones.
 
Bunny Tracks said:
(on-screen, by the way),
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God, the screams, i can still hear them

Bunny Tracks said:
Honestly, I'm still kinda pissed about it nearly a decade later.
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The sequel tried to fix it but it ended in meh

In my case and it can sound as a hot take it was Xenogear, the game has such a deep plot, likeable characters, a very deep world building that was crippled by constraints, the battle system force you to grind hard or you are going get locked when bosses trash you hard, this is more obvious in the second disc where you cant go back to grind and have to work with what you have

I still found sad that people asked more for a remake of FF 7 but not from Xenogears, the only thing that could come close apparently is Xenoblade 2
 
NIGGER ASS PEE POOPY RAPE said:
my experience of those three missions was the exact opposite. the nightclub was easy, the park was the hardest part of the game because there's almost nowhere to hide from the snipers and I killed the dump truck driver on the first try. I'm pretty sure you can press enter to skip that cutscene. don't give up now, some of the next missions are the most fun ones.
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You can't skip. I was slamming every button on the controller in vain.

Anyway, too late. This was years ago. And funny enough, the guy I actually resold it too tried to open a claim to return it back, stating it didn't work (when in reality he knew it sucked too.) I'm not Blockbuster video though, so it was shot down.
Hey, resell it yourself like I had to.
 
NIGGER ASS PEE POOPY RAPE said:
well there's your problem, try using a mouse to get more headshots.

I'm a PC gamer, I didn't buy it.
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I don't play PC games anymore.

Also, I'm not particularly a fan of games that are just shooters, but I've played my fair share of games with lots and even some where it was most of the gameplay, on just console and they are all still playable. Just another level of why Kane and Lynch is such a broken game at its core.
 
All the ones I would put here, that are crippingly flawed gameplay experiences, are here. I imagine a lot of rpgs and so on will end up in here. Probably Telltale licensed games too.

I'll say... Final Fantasy 9. The story is excellent but damn does it run poorly.
 
Not even sure they count as good stories, but Bound By Flame interested me enough to platinum the game (which means at least two playthrough as both demon and human), and Greedfall has me completely fucking hooked that I'll end up doing the same.

They're hanky, stuffed full of that low budget feel which oozes from everything in thr game. The voice acting swings between passable and awful, and there's no such thing as balance - twin daggers completely break BBF, and a decent gun in Greedfall makes you king shit of the mountain (which may not be unintentional given its a sword and magic setting otherwise...).

Something about the stories gripped me though. They've got enough world building and intrigue to let your mind fill in the gaps, but you also have a very clear, understandable set of goals. Plus, any game that let's you role play as someone who knows how thoroughly powerful they are in the setting is alright by me.
 
Grand Theft Auto IV

Now, I wouldn't call GTA IV a "bad" game on its own, but it is the weakest of the GTA games overall in terms of gameplay unless you count GTA: Advance or the 2D Era games from the 90's.

The "Episodes From Liberty City" DLC's do improve the gameplay somewhat, but it's still weaker than the PS2 titles or even GTA V.

But GTA IV has the best story of any game in the entire franchise, and the DLC's make an already great story even better.
 
Catgirl IRL said:
Not even sure they count as good stories, but Bound By Flame interested me enough to platinum the game (which means at least two playthrough as both demon and human), and Greedfall has me completely fucking hooked that I'll end up doing the same.

They're hanky, stuffed full of that low budget feel which oozes from everything in thr game. The voice acting swings between passable and awful, and there's no such thing as balance - twin daggers completely break BBF, and a decent gun in Greedfall makes you king shit of the mountain (which may not be unintentional given its a sword and magic setting otherwise...).

Something about the stories gripped me though. They've got enough world building and intrigue to let your mind fill in the gaps, but you also have a very clear, understandable set of goals. Plus, any game that let's you role play as someone who knows how thoroughly powerful they are in the setting is alright by me.
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Greedfall's combat is average and with how potions can be spammed, combat can be made into a joke. The fact they went for an age of exploration setting with guns alongside sword and magic and natives mixed between Celts and Native Americans made it a refreshing setting along with the story they went for with it.
 
c-no said:
Greedfall's combat is average and with how potions can be spammed, combat can be made into a joke. The fact they went for an age of exploration setting with guns alongside sword and magic and natives mixed between Celts and Native Americans made it a refreshing setting along with the story they went for with it.
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Not to sperg too much, but I like how Greedfall doesn't smash you around the face with IMPERIALISM BAD NATIVES GOOD. There's definitely a bias towards the imperialistic options and quest solutions, but that's because you're doing asshole things - it doesn't portray you as a monster just because you're one of the settlers.

Kind of sad that restraint needs to be praised, but there we are lmao
 
Catgirl IRL said:
Not to sperg too much, but I like how Greedfall doesn't smash you around the face with IMPERIALISM BAD NATIVES GOOD. There's definitely a bias towards the imperialistic options and quest solutions, but that's because you're doing asshole things - it doesn't portray you as a monster just because you're one of the settlers.

Kind of sad that restraint needs to be praised, but there we are lmao
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As far as the game goes, I also like how the imperialistic powers aren't one sided villains that think what they do isn't morally horrifying as with one quest for the magic pilgrims has their govenor realize one of their own crossed the line while another faction realizes their science is fucked up when it leads to a lot morally reprehensible experiments. That along with knowing that the natives aren't exactly peace loving people when one leader is shown to be skeevy in wanting to get himself rich and another thinks war is the only answer. Only thing that felt a bit disappointing was not letting my character getting to know more about the tribe he came from beyond "your mother was the tribes medicine woman and here is your long lost aunt."
 
Furry characters aside, Solatorobo has a quite interesting story with colorful casts and impressive world building. The game itself is divided into two parts, and the second part is where the shit got real and major plot twists got delivered.

The gameplay in the other hand, not that good. It's not that bad, but it's boring as hell. You can't attack enemy directly. You have to grab and throw them or throw something at them. That's all what you get in disposal. There are few other tricks, especially when you got to modify your mech in part two, but in the end you'll be grabbing and throwing anyway.

In the other hand, at some point in part two you got access to a super mode which allow you to throw energy balls to enemies, and it's broken as hell. There's like no middle point in this case. Imo it'd be better if it's made into an anime series.

Oh yeah, it's developed by CyberConnect 2, the same developer of the .hack series, which I think also within "bad game with great stories" territory.
 
Drakengard 1, 3 and NieR. You can say the awful and repetitive hack & slash gameplay pushes forward the themes of the game, but that doesn't make those games any less of a pain to play through to. The stories however are interesting and full of memorable characters, specially NieR, which is soon getting a remake that will probably make the game less of a chore to play.
 
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