I've experienced a few too many bad stories lately, and I need to rant a little.

ME3... well, there's a thread for that!

Clannad is ridiculous. And people say it's a good story. It's not a good story!

And then there's The Matrix. I haven't actually watched it lately, but I was reminded of it by
And of course there's Twilight, but that's so difficult to take seriously -- it's so bad on so many levels -- that it's just something to laugh at.

And the Twilight-inspired DA2. There is absolutely no need for me to explain.

Whew. Okay, that's out of my system. AARGH Clannad was terrible. Okay, now it's out of my system.

I don't know how people sit down, write this drivel, and then think, "Yeah, that oughtta do it." And I don't know if it's just my imagination, but it seems like story/telling has only been deteriorating these past few years. Is it just me?

Maybe you didn't understand where Clannad came from. It's based on a Visual Novel, where each girl has her own path you can pick to follow. They tried to represent that by "following" certain characters in the Anime.

As for the dream, that's also because of the VN. If you didn't collect enough little orbs of light in your playthrough, you got the bad end. They represented this by showing the bad end, and then going "and THIS is what happens when you don't svck at the game" afterwards.

And as for this:


All I can say is:

Seriously?

Irrelevant, too. If you're going to transpose something to other media, it has to be able to stand on its own. Clannad did not stand on its own.

Actually, I have to agree that you must have just not understood it. You are the first person I've ever seen that's called Clannad awful. All I've ever heard, including from my best friend who has watched like 100 different animes from start to finish, is that it's an excellent anime.

Beyond that, the ridiculous hate against Twilight is annoying, especially without giving specific reasons for not liking it. Have you even read it? I can understand not liking the movies, but I greatly enjoyed the books, and I've yet to come across anyone that bad-mouthes it that's actually READ the freaking series(Not just a few pages of the first book, at least the entire first book is required to badmouth something, sorry.).

It's quite good until 1/3 through the second season. The rest of it is... confused. Individually the episodes might be interesting, but they don't hang together at all. And Those two things make it a bad story.

Oh, wait, I forgot about the doll and the woman-girl having Three things.


I tried reading the first book. I got through a few chapters, but then realised I had much better books waiting for me, and gave it back to the friend I'd gotten it from. The writing's atrocious. I don't need to watch all of... Battlefield Earth to know that it's a bad movie. The same, with the necessary changes, applies to books.

ME 3's story was fine. How something ends doesn't determine the quality of the rest of it.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning had a pretty weak story.

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't hold true with books. If I judged books by their first few chapters, I'd have missed out on some of the best books I've ever read in my entire life, because many books have slow starts, or start off pretty boring/crappy/unimaginative/etc. You can't judge Twilight by "A few chapters", and it certainly doesn't give you the right to bash it either. I'm sorry, but I DESPISE blind-hatred of stuff, especially twilight, as the books are actually pretty decent.

Final Fantasy XIII - Good story, awful storytelling.

Rather than actually telling a story with all of those lovely cutcenes, they instead chose to fill them with a whole lot of useless dialogue that gave the player little insight into what was actually happening. Instead, players were treated to some fantastic plot summaries via the datalog. Where a few of the cutscenes actually completely forgot to mention incredibly important plot points, these handy summaries covered it. If you didn't read 'em after every scene, don't be surprised later on when they start referencing things that you've never heard of before.

Fortunately, reading the summaries made for an experience that was about as exciting as the story of a Bethesda game. Oh wait.

lol

It wasn't a dream though...

If you have trouble understanding Clannad then don't watch Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain or Madoka Magica; those are actually meant to be confusing.

@Oof; I stared at your Avatar for a while... it transed me. I played DA2 exactly 6 times each being 25 hrs+ one only being 15 where I didn't finish....... It helped me get through boring ass school o.o

That was really constructive. If you would like to debate ME 3's story then maybe you should respond with something a little less rude.

On topic Dragon Age 2 had a terrible story.

Sorry, I wasn't talking about ME3... never played any ME game. I just highly disagree with the comment.

Take Lost for example.

I may think something is terrible.
You may think that same thing wonderful.
We aren't likely to change our minds
We may never emotionally understand
But we can all smile and remember that
Art is in the eye of the beholder.


....I personally thought Avatar had a terrible story. But that's because it was all about showing off effects rather than making me care about the cardboard cutout characters and derivative plotline. One can take derivative material & make great stuff with it, but Avatar doesn't do it for me.
....I think one can make a judgement on whether one is going to personally like a novel/book/film even if you haven't read/watched all of it. If the writing style (and grammar...) turn me off past a certain point, it won't matter how good the story might be. I'll hate it.. It's like I can respect the subject matter or attempted symbolism of a painting but still hate the painting/think it's ugly.
...also, Dallas and JR. 'Nuff said.

but lost was great

I haven't seen Lost nor do I have much interest in watching it, but you would say that the enjoyment you get out of watching an entire TV show, movie, book, or game is completely ruined by the ending?

Let me describe to you the plot of RAGE:

You woke up and are saved by John Goodman. You do his chores and kill some inbreds to get a neat set of wheels. Then your journey takes you to Stillwater and you do more errands, eventually coming face to face with the Crimson Lance Authority. Somehow you become part of a revolutionary group against the Authority. You do more errands, most of which takes you to a shopping mall and a doctor's office. Then you free all of the Vault Survivors using a machine at the Authority HQ. The end.

I would say that there are a great deal of stories, not all but a large amount, that are designed in such a way that they rely upon the ending. A similar amount of stories are also designed in a dissimilar fashion, relying on the here and now instead of build up. When you take a story that consists of build up separated by filler, following more build up and so on... the end, being the climix should be able to be considered 'good' or the entire story fails.

Edit: Either way, claiming that the ending doesn't determine the quality of the beginning and the middle is highly inaccurate imo.

There we go... got that all fixed up here

No worries. As for Lost well I thought that show went plummeting downhill after season 1 so the ending really couldn't ruin much.

I guess I can understand that, but as with everything, it's entirely about perspective and it all depends.

I knew this guy on another forum, he said: "Twilight: a young girl's choice between necrophilia and bestiality." I've always loved that line.

I hate Twilight. That's because I come from the Vampire: the Masquerade era and grew up with a vampire mythology influenced by Hollywood. Stephanie Meyers takes everything I love about vampires and does unspeakably offensive things to them. I'll not read the books. I'll not watch the movies. I know enough about the series to know that I hate it and I don't care if it annoys people.

Anyway, that's all off topic because I'm not judging the story there. So let me get on topic:

Bad stories? Stephen King's Insomnia was a real piece of crap, as was Cujo. I also hated the story in a little book called Aztec.

I might have read Twilight if it never exploded into popularity, but I would have never seen the movies either way.

Lost was horrible, yes.

And of course, everything is subjective, but I would never trust an unbiased opinion. It isn't human.

I guess I'll go through the obvious route* and say Fallout 3.

*Its obvious among a large part of the Fallout section.

I heard the ending of Lost was bad. From what I've read the ending didn't explain anything.