Storytelling in Fighting Games

[Wolf Kanno]

MK1 and 2 had a pretty nice and simple story, basically a simple interesting premise and a handful of interesting characters with enough backstory to have a stake in it all. SCs was interesting but when everyones story is basically them coming back to do what they did in the previous games, it gets old.

I like Guilty Gear's story, simply because it is several stories at once and story mode in GGXX was pretty nice if a bit of a guide dang it. Still I like playing through different characters cause they involve different plots and elements going on like the Government trying to protect the Japanese, the Assassin's Guild, Eddie, The Government mass producing Robo-Ky, Axel's time skips, and of course the truth about the Gears and That Man. Its got a good narrative going for it, it just gets a proper sequel every five to ten years...

I wouldn't really count Dissidia as one of the good ones, its pretty pretentious and most of the real plot is happening in the background through the Secret Reports, the FF cast is just invited to put up a visual spectacle to distract the player from what is really going on.

[Skyblade]

MK1 and 2 had a pretty nice and simple story, basically a simple interesting premise and a handful of interesting characters with enough backstory to have a stake in it all. SCs was interesting but when everyones story is basically them coming back to do what they did in the previous games, it gets old.

I like Guilty Gear's story, simply because it is several stories at once and story mode in GGXX was pretty nice if a bit of a guide dang it. Still I like playing through different characters cause they involve different plots and elements going on like the Government trying to protect the Japanese, the Assassin's Guild, Eddie, The Government mass producing Robo-Ky, Axel's time skips, and of course the truth about the Gears and That Man. Its got a good narrative going for it, it just gets a proper sequel every five to ten years...

I wouldn't really count Dissidia as one of the good ones, its pretty pretentious and most of the real plot is happening in the background through the Secret Reports, the FF cast is just invited to put up a visual spectacle to distract the player from what is really going on.

What you mentioned there about Guilty Gear is also another interesting point about BlazBlue. Most character stories are separate from the main overall plot story. In some ways, I think this is great. For example, with Litchi, we get her quest to help Arakune (who I hate and think needs to just die so Litchi can get over him already), in a totally separate arc from the main story. Her interactions with the other characters revolve around this, such as going to Tager to get Sector Seven's help. Where the storytelling fails here is, I think, in tying everything together at the last minute back into the main plot. The final boss of almost every character (excepting the main bosses/villains) is the same, regardless of their individual stories or motivations.

I think telling separate stories for each character which only loosely relate into the main plot would be, overall, lead to more solid stories and a better developed world. It's as though the game is afraid that making them secondary to the main plot would make them unimportant or less liked as characters, and, to be fair, this might be true, I'm not sure. But I think it is definitely worth experimenting with.


Dissidia had a pretty lackluster story, yes. But, especially in Duodecim, it did a great job of telling it. The dialogue accented the game, it didn't overwhelm it. The existence of manikens as filler battles was a brilliant design decision that basically padded out the story mode with a ton of excess combat. There was still an incredible amount of dialogue, but it was more evenly spaced along a much greater amount of gameplay, leading to much better storytelling.