@sinfony Recently, most of the best “stories” I’ve seen in games are really just a bunch of lore that the developers deeply-embedded into the playable game world for you to explore at your leisure: The Shock games, Shadow of the Colossus to a lesser degree, Metroid Prime, etc. In those games it’s like instead of writing a story, the developers just wrote a world with a history and then put you in it.

Like @rocgaude I make exceptions for genres that take the branch narrative to the extreme and really try to own it with good writing like adventure games and RPGs. Hell, the main reason I even enjoyed Mass Effect and Dragon Age was for the character interactions.

What you guys feel though pretty much matches my feelings about JRPGs. Looking back, all of my favorite JRPGs are the ones that focus on the GAME. It’s not that I want no story at all in my JRPG. The reason I sung praises about Dragon Quest IX here before was because it knew how to convey a JRPG storyline without getting in the way of you playing the game. No 15-minute anime cut scene to start you off, just some dialogue and an explorable first area filled with characters who give you information you may or may not need.