the Witcher series may have a better story, or at least more of one. It's hard to have a compelling story when the main protagonist needs to be a completely blank slate so that the player can play whatever combination of race, class, appearance, and abilities they want. It's a sort of trade off thing - do you make the main character a blank slate silent protagonist so that they player may project whatever character they want onto them, or do you as a game developer create your own protagonist, so that you can invest them with their own motivations and characterization, and allow them to develop and evolve over the course of the story, reacting meaningfully to the events around them? While at the same time running the risk of alienating potential players who can't stand the protagonist you choose to hand them? Because for me Geralt goes straight into the 'insufferable' bin next to Tidus and Nathan Drake.
When it comes to story and plot, neither game compares to the SMT games, and Persona games in particular, at least when it comes to real maturity and meaningful commentary on the human condition. Persona 3, for instance, actually used its story and structure to examine the nature of mortality and the ultimate meaningfulness of life's struggle even in the face of death's inevitability, and as a result the story is far more compelling than the idle escapist fare of most rpgs. Not that there's anything wrong with pure escapism, but if we're going to talk about what makes a story good as a story then the underlying message - or lack of one in most cases - is certainly worth bringing up.
Of course, strong characters are essential for delivering a strong story, and when it comes to characterization and especially characterization through dialog, I'd argue that Bioware games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age are some of the best around. Then again, those games are also of the 'build your own protagonist and project whatever you want onto them' model, so the supposed main character ends up feeling flat and lifeless compared to their diverse caste of vivid supporting characters. I can't be the only person who ever wished I could just swap the blank slate protagonist out of my party and run a team entirely consisting of those fantastic supporting characters. I came out of Dragon Age with a far stronger connection to Morrigan or Sten than to my own character. Reminds me of Chrono Trigger way back in the day, which had a silent protagonist, but towards the end of the game you could drop him from your party, and I always did.
Squeenix games are worth mentioning, actually, as final fantasy games also give you set characters that they (try to) tell an actual story with, rather than letting you build your own character who then inhabits but fails to respond to the story going on around them. Final Fantasy games have been shitting the bed for a while now, admittedly, but while their stories, characters, and game play have been quite weak for quite some time, one thing at least in their favor is that they at least try to bring you original worlds and settings and ideas.
I mean, 13 was about the least enjoyable of the bunch, but the society in that game was built up around technology gifted by godlike magical creatures to a human society that became subservient due to its dependence, taking place primarily on a city world built on the inside shell of a hollow moon orbiting a giant wilderness planet full of huge beasts and dinosaurs. To me that's a hell of a lot more 'fantastic' than 'generic tolkienesque time-locked medieval European setting number eight thousand and seventy four'. Also, now that I actually write out the description, it also sounds like it was all hells of rife for some quality social commentary that the game might have even pulled off if it hadn't been shitting itself inside out in every other department. Dragon Age, the Witcher, the Elder Scrolls, and honestly most other 'fantasy' games and books and movies could all take place in the exact same setting for all the paltry differences in the details matter. How many truly original stories can you tell in a setting so thoroughly run into the ground?
As for the witcher series specifically, I only ever tried the first, and that was enough to turn me off to the series entirely. Boring, stodgy, slow, padded, sexist, 'mature' in the most immature way (a 13 year old boy's concept of maturity, ie bewbs blood and swear words rather than significant character development or considered commentary on the human condition or actual adult themes like familial or societal responsibility), with mmo style questing and an over-complicated interface that together completely obscured any story it might have wanted to tell and made the game an absolute chore to play. Skyrim might have lacked story, but at least was fun for me to explore.
For the record, though, Skyrim is the first of the Elder Scrolls games I really enjoyed. The earlier ones were a bit too bogged down with their own hasslesome gameplay issues (ugh, that dialog wheel in Oblivion killed that game for me faster than the pathetic pandering to the male gaze killed the witcher).
If only I could play a game with the imaginative setting and amazing visuals of a final fantasy game; the open sandbox exploration of an Elder Scrolls game; the world impact of your character decisions of the Witcher series; the vivid, well realized characters and dialog of a Bioware game; the challenge of a Dark Souls; the meaningful, socially aware story & commentary on the human condition of a Persona game; and the dynamic and exciting combat of... I guess Kingdom Hearts. Because the KH games are about the only fantasy RPG series where I've really just viscerally enjoyed the combat for its own sake. Final Fantasy comes up with new ways to divorce the player from the action every game, the Witcher's all bogged down in its hasslesome interface, elder scrolls games frequently devolve into backpedaling while slinging spells or arrows, and bioware combat is just a tension killing pause-a-thon that might as well be turn based. Man, I could go on at length about just how much fun Kingdom Hearts is to play, but there's another thread for Kingdom Hearts.
Sadly all of those things require their own pile of resources - memory resources on disk and time and monetary resources in development - so there's always a trade off. Fortunately, as long as different development teams choose different options in that trade off, we can get a wealth of game play experiences to choose from. We can all enjoy different games for different reasons, and hopefully different development teams will learn from each other to improve the aspects of their games that are weaker.
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) and big choices. As long as you have a better than average PC you will be able to run TW2, or if you have a 360 just get it for that.
