Bastion

Disclaimer: This rant will openly discuss spoilerific story elements. It is not a gameplay review, although gameplay will be brought up if it is important to/detracts from the story.

Bastion is a gorgeous game. There's no denying that. The backgrounds, the sprite work, the music – everything in it is beautifully and lovingly crafted. But I'm not here to talk about the artwork and the soundtrack. Not entirely, at least.

It occurred to me that this blog should have been named slightly differently. It's not generally game stories that I rant about, because many well-written games have little to no story, and many abysmally written games have completely mediocre stories. It's more storytelling that concerns me. You know, everything from how the events are presented, how the characters are developed, and how the writing is used to build the world and the story.

For example, the story in the beginning of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning isn't bad. You're a soldier being brought back from the dead, and this somehow leaves you outside of the threads of fate to make your own way in the world. Nothing special, but it's not bad. But the storytelling is horrible. The intro movie simultaneously tries to sound cool while remaining mysterious, which means that our narrator tells us jack shit and uses a bunch of cliched phrases to make things seem epic. The pacing is awful. The conversation between the gnomes felt like it was twice as long as it needed to be, and it had no real purpose.

I promise this relates to Bastion.

Bastion is a game with an pretty good story that is told extremely well. It's flawed to be sure, and some of those flaws detract from what is otherwise a beautiful game, but it's heads and shoulders above 95% of games out there. Maybe more.

So, obviously, I liked Bastion, but I wouldn't be ranting about it if it was perfect. So I'm going to pair up some of the good and the bad.

First, let's talk about slavery...