One of my biggest gripes with the games industry is the planning of new intellectual properties. Often times these new IP’s are looked at through rose-colored glasses having their sequels announced before the launch of the series, making developers count their chickens before they hatch. Whether game play elements or certain bits of the story are intentionally left out to either be downloaded for a premium price, or left for a check mark on the back of the next game’s box, this trend needs to stop. Unlike going to a movie of a franchise that is planned as a trilogy, playing a game is a much larger investment and by excluding certain pertinent design elements can truly hinder the experience.

When I found out that Disgaea was coming to DS I immediately threw in a pre-order, as it was a franchise that I really missed the boat on. When the original game came out in 2003 I was in between PS2’s and allowed it to slip past my radar. I am a huge fan of tactics games, so when I heard one of my friends raving about it a couple years ago I happily put it in the back of my mind only to have it reappear a couple months ago.

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Game narrative has been around almost as long as video games themselves. Although many of the early stories were either self evident, such as Space Invaders or Frogger, while some made the imagination run wild… I still am not quite sure what is going on in Q*BERT or Pac-Man. As the home consoles gradually caught up with the arcade machines, it fell upon the instruction booklet to fill the void left by the small chip capacities, which in many cases were less then 100k in size.

With the PC, and its larger storage capacity, came text adventures and later the birth of point and click adventure games. This tech helped foster the evolution of the modern PC RPG which then evolved into the console RPG, with games series such as Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy. Although sparse on narrative, these games laid the foundations for what would become the standard for future game narrative. (more…)