It’s happened quite a few times in my life. A good friend will burst in the door, game in hand, yammering about how we must play this to completion and glowing about the original. Well, I’ve never played the original, and am usually told you can get the gist of it from sequences within a game. Sometimes that might be true, since I have distinct memories of opening screens or walls of text explaining in brief what happened during the original outings. However, it seems that given the slew of sequels we’ve seen this year, and considering how often I seem to have missed out on the originals, that the concept of explaining what has occurred that lead up to the game you’re playing is a fading memory. Recently, Gears of War 2 brought back that little bit of memory, with some hints about events that took place before the game starts, but without any real insight into the actions preceding your second serving of Serian battles.

In a recent article on MTV’s Multiplayer blog, Patrick Klepek described the flashback sequences in Tomb Raider: Underworld as an example for other developers and a necessary step going forward for major continuing story arcs in games. While I do agree that having some kind of information carry over to the sequel, I don’t think it’s something that needs to be forced down the throats of players, and having cutscenes that show off events from times previous tend to date things and break the continuity more than add to the player’s knowledge. Certain games lend themselves to some kind of explanation, when motivations or consequences from previous decisions need to be outlined in order to bridge understanding of the environment and characters you are presented with. However, games like Super Mario Galaxy have some kind of ethereal continuity that does not rely on knowledge from previous games, and certainly wouldn’t benefit from it. You are given a world with ambiguity, the motivations are established as a moment from that time. The same can be said about other storied Nintendo franchises, but the big difference is how it is handled in the Metroid series.

Samus’ adventures have an overarching narrative that is carried from game to game, especially when considering the original three games. Super Metroid for example starts off with a sequence that sums up the actions of the previous two, outlining the good guys, bad guys and all the in betweens in a very succinct way. You know why you’re there, you know what you need to do, and your objectives are carried on through the gameplay from that point without a hand-holding of plot movement. This, however, is a dated approach as much as the genre itself is. With games like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots moving towards the heavy narrative and cutscene extension of plot, why do we still need to have a wall of text or lengthy explanation of the events of the previous installments? Cutscenes are much easier to write than interaction fiction, meaning you already have the attention of your audience which they can’t avoid or rend from the designer’s control, so it must be easier to weave the events from the past and explain them to the player than before.

Therein lies the problem; if something important has happened in previous games that leads to the motivation of why the game’s characters are performing the way they are, then it having it explained throughout the game is simply just a retraction on the reasons you’ve already started. Gamers need a reason to start, and having someone with a mysterious past that maybe is better understood to players of the original is all well and good, but if you don’t try to establish a connection with the characters from the beginning and rely on that information being conveyed later, you lose the impact right away. It is a big reason why people who didn’t like Gears because of the characters feel no impact when they return to the game. Sure, there may be development of those characters and events that occurred previously, but those players don’t know that and the first experience they will have will be treading of familiar territory and not allow them to get behind the characters they are in control of.

Narrative is a tricky topic for games because there’s no real set way to do it. Yes, it’s easy to spout off about how to convey events from previous games, but each game is going to have its own way of doing it, even if it’s not necessary. A sequel should be able to stand on its own two feet, though, and perhaps many developers would rather not retread old narrative, but finding a way to fit it into the whole experience just makes the original games have more impact. The Metal Gear Solid approach of doing very little and simply providing a database of information does very little but motivate the players to read and not to connect with the events that occurred. Leaving things out doesn’t help either, since players will usually find a way to get that information from previous games through the magic of the internet.

Tomb Raider: Underworld does have it right when it makes an attempt at flashbacks. It establishes motivations from previous stories and gives the players perspective on why you’re there in the first place. No, it’s not particularly well done, but the fact that it is done at all should let players ease into the series and understand the impact of what’s happened before. In games like Super Metroid you are given glimpses into the world that Samus traversed before, which was motivation enough for me to retread the old games just to enjoy the impact of those events. If more games can come up with ways to effectively display why the events of their originals mattered beyond a simple footnote on Wikipedia, it will certainly encourage people to play the games and make that continuity of lore even stronger.