Three Great Action Game Stories

Video games, for better or for worse, tend not to have the strongest narratives. Even role playing games, which are ostensibly more about their stories than anything else, more often than not lean too heavily on cliche or just plain incomprehensible twists. This goes double for action games, given that they're designed to excite more than to promote thought or compel emotion. So, when an action title manages to carry a truly good story, it really stands out among the throng of games with brainless heroism and predictable story arcs. Here are three excellent games with equally excellent stories.

Starcraft

Blizzard Entertainment has managed to produce so many incredible strategy games in the past fifteen years that they all but dominate the market. Their original hit, the fantasy military game Warcraft set the standard but it was the follow-up, 1998's Starcraft, that changed the genre forever. Instead of pitting two functionally identical armies against one another in a clear Good vs. Evil setup, Starcraft asked players to control (and thus sympathize with) three competing elements, each operating under mostly different conditions. None of the three races were clearly the whitehats and the story was full of unexpected turns that thickened the plot without turning it into a soap opera. As an expansive action game, Starcraft is second to none. But it's also a very well-executed meditation on the nature of leadership, the justification of war and the dangers of prejudice.

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath

The folks over at Oddworld Inhabitants have always been extremely ambitious, especially co-founder and creative lead Lorne Lanning. Today the studio has mostly closed up shop where video games are concerned, but they've moved along to the motion picture industry with an under-wraps production titled Citizen Siege. Before OI went on games hiatus, they released a sadly overlooked title called Stranger's Wrath. It's a devilishly clever first-and-third person shooter with more unique ideas than you can shake a stick at. It also happens to sport a pretty remarkable story about the way corporate interests can mix with the ignorance and greed of regular people to do some heavy damage to nature and those who depend on it. The twists are genuinely shocking and the way OI managed to pull such powerful emotions from their inherently silly characters is darn admirable.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance

Few games of any genre will ever even attempt at the narrative complexity of the Legacy of Kain series. First developed by Silicon Knights and later picked up by Eidos Interactive, this story of a morally gray vampire and the various supernatural beings around him is positively gothic in the classic literature sense. The last game in the series (so far) is Defiance, an puzzle platformer that puts players in control of the two protagonists of the series, Kain and his disgraced, soul-eating lieutenant Raziel. The already arabesque plot gets both more tangled and finally unraveled in this one-of-a-kind epic that explores concepts of fate, responsibility and power. With Defiance as its capstone, the Legacy of Kain series transcends its potentially hokey vampire presence to become a truly novelistic compilation of myth.