Chris Rock, during one of his stand-up routines, lambasted the audience for expecting him to come up with new material for each show.  If bands get to play the same music in Philadelphia as they did in Chicago, why can’t he go on stage with the same routine for two different cities?

Avid gamers don’t expect every new title on shelves to have an elaborate, intimate storyline with both compelling narrative and empathetic characters.  More often than not, games spend wasted time going into narrative about how robots came to take over the planet.  We don’t need to be told this, probably because every movie made from this storyline has the same fucking plot.  It’s just that Terminator landed Arnold Schwarzenegger, so we default to that story.

Most of us who played through the earlier Final Fantasy games fell in love with the Shinra backdrop to the Cloud front story.  We became unconsciously addicted to 8- and 16-bit soundtracks that hovered around five basic notes.  The naive simplicity to the end product was astonishing: a culture that worshipped linear movement and the imagination of sound.

Today’s games are tackling new obstacles; hence, they look and feel different.  We have voice-overs instead of text, and straffing and duck-and-cover instead of turn-base or hack-and-slash.  Graphics have evolved, and so have the characters and story.  The evil ambiance of Shinra was wholly realistic at the time, but that time is over.  Now, if a game is lacking motive, it classifies its driving force as destiny.  This is why Final Fantasy XIII was a narrative disappointment.  But the more blatant destiny is used as a driving force for a character’s motivation, the less sequels you get.

One of the reasons Final Fantasy has spawned so many side-stories, sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, is because there was always an excess of empathy for its characters with an absence of backstory.  That, and the writing was excellent.

Compelling narrative in gaming is rare because it’s really fucking hard to pull off, let alone pull it off in a series.  Millions of dollars are poured into the creation of these games, and I’m sure most companies would spend a little extra coin to bring in the better writers.  Cross this problem with the fact that gaming is an interactive art, and we get many games that fall short of our expectations, and most times not for the lack of trying.

Believable narrative is the benchmark we set as an active audience, but we must temper this against the notion that it is a difficult art that changes with technology.