There are two kinds of people in regards to Xenoblade 2 story. Those who are engrossed and live every cutscene, and those who can't stop laughing every time a cutscene plays. Cue this cutscene.
So I've actually been playing a decent amount of XB2 recently, and, while corny, the story is actually pretty decent in my humble opinion. In fact, if you plot the cutscenes as the story goes on, I find that they start super humorous, but gradually get more and more serious and thoughtful. So far, so good. But then that particular cutscene comes along and gets me thinking. Is it just me or is Nia being out of character dumb? And my personal interpretation was: Had there been an actual interrogation, Morag would have gotten the information from Nia regardless. Thus, in order to introduce humor, instead of showing the scene of what actually happens they demonstrate a comic interpretation of what is going on.
Backing up for some context on how I interpret things (you're on my blog, after all). I view narratives as their own world. The characters are actually living out their story in some sort of other dimension or reality if you will. The medium is thus re-telling and re formatting this story for us as audiences to consume. For me, this helps in a lot of ways. In particular it helps me seperate story and implementation, and I can forgive a lot of small plot holes or adaptation problems or rough, weird patches. This is because it's the fault of the implementation, and there's nothing wrong with the main product, which is the imaginary world or experience, that is being sold to me. This like poor stealth segments, that let you walk around in the open after a "let's be sneaky" cutscene, or inconsistencies when you're totally devastating a boss and then it jumps to a cutscene and the player is getting destroyed (note: both examples can be found in XB2). However, it then makes it much harder for me to forgive things like poor characterization (looking at you, isekai).
But back to Xenoblade 2. Even if my interpretations of "interpreted" versus "original" narratives, as I will call them for the rest of this post, is not accurate or representative, in some sense it reflects how the scene was created. The overarching narrative is created. From that, the dialogue is written and the scene is cast. And somewhere along the latter process, creators have to take into context the game itself as a medium and draft the scene around that. In other words, based on whatever skeleton narrative, somebody had to write that scene.
This begs the question, how does the narrative have to be altered in order to fit the game? Obviously it differs based on the work. Some teams produce works that are narrative driven and thus take a very tight interpretation of the work that they are trying to represent. Some works have a lot of leeway in terms of how they interpret that narrative. Tangent to this idea is how narrative is interwoven into gameplay.
Xenoblade 2 is a game that gives a fair amount of leeway to its story. One consensus about the game is that it actually takes a long time before the story, or the game, become particularly engaging. This is largely a mechanical and integration problem, as you don't receive a full party until about 5 hours into the game, and the first non-linear segment is dropping you directly into a massive overworld (Gormott upper level). However, the narrative is not independent of that. A lot of the cutscenes are dramatic, some early ones overly dramatic for how well the player knows the characters. Interspersed among these dramatic segments are more lighthearted segments, likely intended for tone resets. What happened on a personal level was that even laughing at how sometimes silly the cutscenes was a form of interaction with the narrative, and enough of the small gradual pushes were enough to sell me on the original narrative.
I don't believe that this effect is intentional, as there are a lot of other integration weirdness. Upon talking to a friend, he noted that sometimes lines are voiced individually and spliced into the scenes where they are needed rather than recorded with all actors present, and both the way the lines are delivered and the size of XB2 makes me believe that. However, if you have experience with loose narratives, and games that are narratively engaging despite/because of that, let me know, I'm always interested in how stories play out.
This begs the question, how does the narrative have to be altered in order to fit the game? Obviously it differs based on the work. Some teams produce works that are narrative driven and thus take a very tight interpretation of the work that they are trying to represent. Some works have a lot of leeway in terms of how they interpret that narrative. Tangent to this idea is how narrative is interwoven into gameplay.
Xenoblade 2 is a game that gives a fair amount of leeway to its story. One consensus about the game is that it actually takes a long time before the story, or the game, become particularly engaging. This is largely a mechanical and integration problem, as you don't receive a full party until about 5 hours into the game, and the first non-linear segment is dropping you directly into a massive overworld (Gormott upper level). However, the narrative is not independent of that. A lot of the cutscenes are dramatic, some early ones overly dramatic for how well the player knows the characters. Interspersed among these dramatic segments are more lighthearted segments, likely intended for tone resets. What happened on a personal level was that even laughing at how sometimes silly the cutscenes was a form of interaction with the narrative, and enough of the small gradual pushes were enough to sell me on the original narrative.
I don't believe that this effect is intentional, as there are a lot of other integration weirdness. Upon talking to a friend, he noted that sometimes lines are voiced individually and spliced into the scenes where they are needed rather than recorded with all actors present, and both the way the lines are delivered and the size of XB2 makes me believe that. However, if you have experience with loose narratives, and games that are narratively engaging despite/because of that, let me know, I'm always interested in how stories play out.
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