List of my favourite video game stories in no particular order:
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
- Half-Life
- Half-Life 2 (and the subsequent episodes, + Portal)
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Myst, Riven: The Sequel to Myst, Myst III, Myst IV (I could have done without Myst V: End of Ages)
- Resident Evil series (I like the characters, and the fact that it is like B-movie horror flicks)
- Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
- Max Payne (1 & 2)
- Legend of Zelda: OoT, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and especially Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (such an amazing story, and I have never been more connected with Epona)
- Starcraft (an incredibly rich universe developed, drawing heavily (but not too heavily) from sci-fi classics like Alien and the Predator movies
- Metroid Prime 1 - 3
- Tales of Symphonia
I’m sure that there are more that I cannot think of right now. But these ones have stuck with me the most. Achenar’s sacrifice in Myst IV to save his little sister, and Regal’s efforts to protect his friends in Tales of Symphonia were pretty awesome. I also love seeing the cutscene where Steve Burnside - horribly disfigured by the T-Veronica virus - restrains himself from killing Claire Redfield even though it results in his own death.
And in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The very end. When he tells the story to Farah and she doesn’t believe him (because the events of the game have been rewound so that none of it actually occured). And although they had been in love, the Prince has to leave, because they are from different (and hostile) nations, and she does not remember their being in love.
So, he kisses her, and rewinds time once more before returning the dagger, and then parkours his way into the distance.
Also, everything about Half-Life is perfect. The dystopian future. The characters. The enemies. The landscapes. Everything.
People may say Halo has a good grasp of the future, but Halo would have the plot of an action movie. Half-Life - if it was a film - would be Oscar worthy.