Today on Gameranx,10 Games with Mind-Blowing Lore.
When we think of the story of video games, often we think about the narrative that we experience during the course of it. But what about all of the surrounding stuff, everything about the world, the history, and the people that you find out while playing a game?.
10. The Dark Souls Series
Starting off with number 10 is the "Dark Souls" series. When you think of lore in video games, what's the first thing you think of? For me, it's "Dark Souls."
It's weird, because unlike most other lore-heavy games, there are very few notes or books to read through, there's very little exposition, and what is there is very vague, very confusing.
But that's what makes the lore of this game so compelling for so many people. It doesn't spoonfeed the players anything. You can totally ignore the history and backstory and just kill stuff if you want.
But for many players, one of the great joys of this series comes from exploring a dense kingdom and piecing together what exactly is supposed to be going on.
The first cutscene of the very first "Dark Souls" game does so much heavy lifting in the lore department, it's crazy. It pretty much explains everything, from the war of the gods and the dragons to the appearance of the Dark Soul and so much more, but it barely matters when you first start playing the game.
And it's not until around the halfway point that you realize just how important all that exposition was and how necessary it is if you want to understand what's even supposed to be happening in the game. Outside of the opening lore dump, everything else you learn about the world comes from talking to NPCs, environmental storytelling, and the short descriptions that come with most of the items and gear you pickup. That's it.
It's all so disjointed and short that it's easy to ignore as fluff at first, but if you really look into it, there's connections everywhere.
Actually knowing this stuff rarely matters, but it does add a lot of depth to the experience. Knowing who our Artorias the AbyssWalker is makes it so much more impactful when you actually encounter him. That's what makes the lore of "Dark Souls" so engrossing.
It's in-depth enough that you can see how the backstory bleeds into the game world, but it's vague enough that the player's imagination is allowed to run wild.
I remember the first time I got to Anor Londo and realized this place was the City of the Gods they talked about at the beginning, and it was a mind-blowing realization.
I have been fascinated by the lore of this series ever since.
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9. Mass Effect 1-3
And at number nine is "Mass Effect" 1 through 3. And how "Mass Effect" handles lore is about as far from "Dark Souls" as possible.
It's clear, it's well-explained, and it's easily accessible from an in-game encyclopedia. And it's not necessarily as mind-blowing because of how mysterious it is, though there are some pretty interesting mysteries in the backstory, but the reason I think it's so great is it's just well-made.
The world of "Mass Effect" is a really great sci-fi universe with a lot of interesting things going on, and pretty much every species in the game has something interesting about them, whether it's their politics or their relationships or more mundane stuff like their life cycles and diets.
Clearly, a ton of time was put into creating this world, and all that backstory and lore does a lot to make the story of "Mass Effect" seem like more than another cookie cutter sci-fi shooter. Say what you want about the actual stories of these games, but all the history and backstory they've imbued into every race and character just adds so much to this game.
And being able to access it all by opening the in-game encyclopedia is just awesome. You can spend hours just digging through the codex, and it is actually really enjoyable to do so.
The information is concise but detailed, and the narrator, combined with the relaxing background music, really only adds to the experience.
This is a series where it's fun to learn the backstory, and they do a great job incorporating all that lore into the game as well.
Stuff like the Genophage and the Geth-Quarian conflict play a huge part in the story, and if they didn't do such a good job setting everything up, then I doubt most players would really be that invested.
Even after the incredibly divisive ending to a "Mass Effect 3" and the disappointment of "Mass Effect: Andromeda," people are still hyped for "Mass Effect 4," and a big reason why is the lore and universe BioWare created. It's beloved for a reason, and hopefully, they're able to get things back on track for the next game.
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8. The Legend of Zelda
At number eight is "The Legend of Zelda." For many, many years, most people thought that the "Legend of Zelda" series was just a collection of disconnected adventures that seemed to have recurring elements, but nothing more.
Some fans speculated about a possibility that all the games were actually connected, but it was all just a bunch of talk until Nintendo released the"Hyrule Historia," a book, back in 2011, which contained an actual timeline of the "Zelda" series confirming there actually was a connection between the games.
Sure, sometimes they were hundreds or even thousands of years apart from one another, but they were connected.
Before that, there were already some sequels that everybody knew about, like "Zelda II" to being a direct sequel to "Zelda I," or "The Adventure of Link" on the Game Boy being a sequel to "Link to the Past," but stuff like "Wind Waker" and its Endless Ocean didn't seem like it could possibly be in the same timeline as the other games.
And that's what makes "The Legend of Zelda" lore so mind-blowing. For whatever reason, the same event just keeps happening over and over again in the history of Hyrule.
There's a green tunic-wearing hero named Link, a princess named Zelda, a villain named Ganondorf, and this powerful artifact called the Triforce. How things actually play out can vary wildly between games, but in general, these are the recurring elements, and they seem to happen again and again, even when they're decades or centuries apart from one another.
To make things even more confusing, there are split timelines to explain certain inconsistencies, even though there are other consistencies the timeline doesn't address.
If you think about it too much, the whole thing doesn't really make a lot of sense. Even if you accept that the same thing keeps happening again and again, just the fact that the original "Legend of Zelda" game on the NES is actually one of the last games on the timeline is sorta mind-blowing, especially because the timeline implies that it only happens because the Hero of Time actually lost during the events of "Ocarina of Time."
With "Breath of the Wild" being the canonically last game in the series now, the timeline should probably start being a little more straightforward from now on at least.
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