Quote Originally Posted by Futan View Post
I think part of the reason is back in the day, the games themselves didn't really have stories and you had to read the booklet for the story. Then as technology progressed, they remained as a remnant of those days until they forgot why they did it or, like others say, cost cuts.
I wonder how much it actually cuts costs. A few pages of paper vs minutes, sometimes hours (ugh!), of in-game animation, programming, etc. to do the same thing.

You're probably right about them being holdovers to some degree, but that doesn't mean they should have ended!