Classic games with great writing?

[Razzie.P]

Any classic games with well written dialog/narrations?

 

 

With video games, gameplay is king, of course.  Interactivity is key.   But of course it’s quite a popular thing to use gaming to “tell a story” as well.  Problem is, the writing on these are usually pretty low quality.  The story may be alright, but the actual writing is… ugh…. Like this real dialog from a Fire Emblem (series I love!)
 
Character A: …
Character B: …
Character A: GWAR! HAR! HAR! HAR! HAR!!!
Character C  …!!!

 

 

Writing seems to have been given a bit more priority with modern games, and occasionally is even high quality, but how about the classics?  Any games with writing that really seem to stand out as a cut above, or was it always something low quality due to space/hardware limitations?
 

[Mikebloke]

It's funny you mention fire emblem, I really liked the gba games and it felt like it was a far more fleshed out story and relationship game than say, shining force 3 was slightly before it. I recommended it to my wife, who played some of the newer one, however it appears to have descended into baby making and making female characters make suggestive sounds. Definitely not the fire emblem I remember! 

 

Square enix and Square soft prior had plenty of decent narrative games beyond just the mainline final fantasy games. Vagrant story on ps1 is one of my favourites albeit another example of a game that got significantly cut to hit deadlines. They are also less likely to get butchered when they get translated, games like hydlide series were so bad that they genuinely have npcs that have dialog boxes with '???????????' or even completely blank due to a lack of actual translation, leading to a lack of hints on where to go next. 

 

So yeah, some of the true classics is often the ones that either got saved from a butchering, even if it comes with its own liberties (looking at you, English translation of Panzer Dragoon saga! Right mess you caused with the Orta storyline too!) 

 

Shining force 3 has some classic scenes, with varied pacing that matches the storyline. Both the long king talk at the beginning and the tybalt 'I'm not a politician' scene later in the game are well done and accurately reflect political intrigue without having to have shock factor elements, someone doing something dramatic, or someone dying or revealing a deep secret. 

[Razzie.P]

59 minutes ago, Mikebloke said:

It's funny you mention fire emblem, I really liked the gba games and it felt like it was a far more fleshed out story and relationship game than say, shining force 3 was slightly before it. I recommended it to my wife, who played some of the newer one, however it appears to have descended into baby making and making female characters make suggestive sounds. Definitely not the fire emblem I remember! 

 

 

GBA ones are great, and I personally think Fire Emblem hit its "best" with Path of Radiance on Gamecube.  It did all the great stuff great, and hadn't yet added the nonsense.

 

I still enjoyed the series on DS and love the latest on Switch -- stories are cool and the core gameplay is still there and as strong as ever -- but the "relationships" crap they added was such as time waster, to me, and only seemed to get in the way of the core game.   Heck, in the Switch games, one mechanic is giving your students presents (you're their teacher) to get them to like you, ending in marriage.   So that was odd.  Never thought I'd be grooming young girls between bloody, chaotic battles.

 

 

[electricmastro]

Ogre Battle 64

 

[Steven Pendleton]

StarCraft is pretty good.

[Lord Mushroom]

Chrono Trigger (SNES). It has an engaging story.

[+jgkspsx]

It may be stretching the bounds of "classic", but Radiant Historia on the DS has some of the best writing I've come across. Everybody seems emotionally believable and even the evil people have realistic motivations and some good lines.

[mbd39]

I assume it would be text adventures since the writing is all there is.