Doom & Quake, and any other game (shooter) where you just (mostly) run around shooting monsters, just for the sake of it ("not much of a story"), are boring. My personal opinion.
I get it, the IM(H)O was implied, right?

For me, any game needs a "cinematic" aspect. It's like reading a book vs. watching (or playing) a sports match. Love the former, don't care for the latter.

And like Breja said; all aspects need to be "good". Not a good movie wrapped in bad gameplay, or the other way around.

I don't mind cutscenes. However, it can be inconvenient when some games have lengthy cutscenes, and there is no way skip ahead or save your progress due to real-life interruptions.

^This.

I love games when I can jump right in, I love games that tell a story, even in a lot of cut-scenes, or even games that are mostly that.
Recently played She Sees Red - which is all movie, with a few choices in between and had a blast and was glues to the screen (play in Russian with subtitles, English voiceover is not really good). And still can fire up Doom or Quake or the Duke and have fun too.

Of course it needs to be meaningful and serve a purpose. Endless exposition that leads nowhere is a beginners mistake, often also in books. Every aspect, every description should serve a purpose. Even world building is only a means to an end - to make the player/reader/viewer feel at home, make them grasp the reality.

It gets tiring if it's just an influx of information that leads nowhere and has no consequence.

And also all cut-scenes should be both skippable and pauseable. Let me choose what I miss.

I like strong narratives but only in games where the gameplay is fun, I can even accept walking simulators, but only if they have a REALLY strong story hook (so hit or miss), but if you need to exposition in a FMV (or in forced tutorial segments) for longer than 5 minutes you imo way below "strong narrative" - especially nowadays.

Good examples:
- Nier: Automata
- Gothic 1-2-3 (yes, even 3)
- Solasta

Bad examples
*gonna be ranting for a short while*
- Game called "Echo" - literally 50 minutes of INTRO walking and constant interruptions by fade-to-blacks after you trigger the first event, which are SUPER annoying. Not to mention enemies that mob you and gameplay that is in THEORY fun concept but in practice downright sadistic.


My instant trigger point is actually on par with Lifthrasil
I truly, utterly detest games that are setting you up to fail with no input of your own over repeating campaign paths by hiding information from you. Most recent game I played of this type is Star Renegades a game that is nearly completely win or restart RNG where every later stage enemy only exists to be annoying and set you back if you didn't find the right weapon to defeat it quickly (or at all, with certain enemies).

I like generally all kinds of games, except that one type. Sadly that is a very common game type.. oh well

Sure. Absolutely. But you know what games are still even more of a blast? Dark Forces 1 and 2. Precisely because in addition to great FPS gameplay they do have a story, because that story makes the gameplay feel like it matters more, gives it context and even some emotional hook. And the cut-scenes from Jedi Knight, cheesy as they may be, really are crucial to full experience of the game, detached from the actual gameplay though they are. You can still add to the gameplay even if the gameplay isn't in any way lacking.

Good games without or with a minimal story don't prove anything about story-focused or "cinematic" games. Just as a good vegetarian meal doesn't prove that meat tastes bad.

I can agree with that. These games are a lot of fun still. Also don't get me wrong: I'm not saying cinematic games are generally bad. There are many many games out there that are absolutely fantastic (e.g. Hellblade). I just think that the gameplay is still a bit more important in the end.

I think a large part of the problem is that cinematic are sort of a different beast in games when compared to media that's usually "on-rails" like a book or movie.

Your options are to:
1.show a cutscene which essentially for 30 seconds, 5 minutes, whatever, I've stopped playing a game and started watching a short film
2.allow me movement and/or camera control while scripted events take place.

I like 2 when it's done well but it can be difficult for a number of reasons. Am I facing the right direction to observe any events (clearly more of an issue in 3d)? Am I interacting at the right times and places so the script doesn't hit a pause? If there's key information about something gameplay related( go here, get/take this item, etc) vs plot points (wesker has been evil all along!) how do you make sure I don't miss them?

It's not a totally new medium I guess but we as humans have presented stories in a similar way for thousands of years. Gilamesh. Religious texts. Etc. They're typically "presented" to us while we sit and watch or listen to the storyteller (radio, film, wisened hermit in a wood). Participation happens mentally in that we think and interpret but it's not really like participation in games where I can change my inventory around or go shoot random objects during the story. I prefer a lot of implied "show me don't tell me" storytelling so I can debate and interpret things but that isn't always the best solution for certain games or stories.

I think I'm rambling here but the gist of my comment is that we're still figuring out how to involve the player in story the way early filmmakers had to figure out what worked and what didn't In their new medium. When done badly it's infuriating and a chore to get through because we're all used to mediums that have this issue a bit more nailed down.

I think most of the critical points have been said but my biggest gripe of some cinematic games are the one and done type. They do things well but you don't want to play it again. There are a number of AAA cinematic games that suffer from this including "Last Of Us" imo while "Detroit" is more interactive movie but has multiple endings so you want to replay it.
As for lumping JRPG people as failed movie directors games AND Animes have always been the movies of Japan for obvious reasons. They don't have huge amounts of land to allocate to studio lots. Conversely a Chinese studio or a number of them joined together to create a 1 v 1 replica of the Forbidden City that they shoot Drama's in all the time. Games and Anime are all minimalist.

And then the cutscene following the fight shows your party, having lost the battle (even though you actually won), getting kidnapped, leading to a scene where the player no longer has access to a town area. (I really hate it when RPGs trap the player like that.)

Yes, in RPGs, I prefer it when the story content is contained in things like NPC dialog and other player-initiated actions rather than via cutscenes.

I disagree.

I especially disagree in situations when either:
* I just got access to a new character class or ability, and would like to play with it, but the game doesn't let me because of a cutscene. (One particular 7 minute cutscene in Final Fantay 5 comes to mind here.)
* I just beat a boss, and haven't had a chance to save.
* I just died to a boss, and have to re-watch it in order to try again. (One particular fight in Final Fantasy 10 comes to mind; there's a 5 (IIRC) minute cutscene before the fight, the battle has 3 phases, and the 3rd is very likely to be a party wipe for a first time player on their first attempt.)

^This.

I never liked cinematics either, I play videogames to, well... play vidoegames (tautology, but apparently some devs don't get it), not to watch low quality movies.
I'm totally fine with narrative based games, provided the narrative *is* part of the gameplay, as in Planescape Torment, or if it is intriguing and absolutely not invasive like Dark Souls. In that game you can dive into deep lore if you want, or just play it to beat stuff without even knowing why (in game) you're doing it.

Forcing you away from the interactive part to be spoon fed narrative though? Worst sin in the media, imo.

I don't care if the story is a Oscar-winning performance from the best actors and writers in Hollywood dude, it's not fun to "play" a video game if the designer puts the player into a straightjacket. A game with a good story can still be a bad game, but a game with a bad/non-existant story can still be a good game.

When Resident Evil and Tekken 2 came out I was blown away by the possibilities of cinematic games, and even started fantasizing about the plot and gameplay for such a game myself.

But as the years have gone by I have become more ambivalent about the technique. I do like story focused and cinematic games when they are good, but it is not the type of game I play the most. Cinematics can be very good when the designers have something interesting or exiting to show, but when it is cliched and boring tripe it is often annoying.
In general if you don't have anything original or interesting to say it is better to keep the story parts short, mystical and understated.

It is a bit like voice acting. Good voice acting is better than text for some, but not all types of games. Bad voice acting is much worse than text. (Except sometimes when it is so bad it is entertaining.) It is also a question of how you use your resources. If everything has to be voice acted it can severely limit the dialogue options for an ambitious game, so a mix between text and voice acting is often the best for huge RPGs.

I have never played a game that had a story comparable to the best stories in books and movies. And I think making such a game would be quite hard because games uses animated characters instead of real people, and also because being a good game can easily come in the way of telling a good story and vice versa.

I do like it when a game has a good story, whether it is told in the foreground or in the background, but stories isn't the most important part of a game for me.

Often when I'm choosing a game to play that I have or have not played before, I would say that the atmosphere (graphic style, music and sound design) is as important for which game I choose to play as the game mechanics. Maybe even a little bit more. But as I continue playing and get more desensitized to everything, it tends to be the mechanics that decide how much I enjoy the game in the end. This varies quite a bit by genre of course. When I play old shoot em' ups like Gradius and Axelay the graphics and especially the music is more important than the game mechanics (which usually are very good), but for a historical turn-based strategy game the graphics aren't as important. You just need a few pixels to create a roman legion. (But a bad graphics style can still hamper my enjoyment a lot, like with Civ 6.)

But the story is seldom what draws me in, except perhaps when I choose to play a sequel to a game. It is mostly just a bonus or sometimes a very nice bonus.

I don't feel like storyless games are necessarily meant as such, but rather, you're meant to experience it as you play, rather than have your control, immersion and agency ripped away in favor of what the game's designer/director tells you how to experience it, and how you should react to it. Games without cinematic content don't necessarily have to rely on movie tropes to tell a story. It's a game, and the ability to experience it interactively is a strength, not a weakness.
Probably not, but I feel like a lot of latter day designers would almost rather be making movies, so my statement was probably a bit hyperbolic in nature, but I'm sure you took my point. It's also why I don't really mess with Kojima like that.
To address another point, how often do JRPGs have writing/narrative/design on Chrono Trigger's level anymore though? I'll wait. It's also why I addressed JRPGs specifically, because they've become way too complacent to write characters that aren't 95% visual, and 5% juvenile personality, or often follow tropey archetypes.
Let's be honest, though. They took their time with Dark Forces, observed what gameplay mechanics worked, and had a killer app in the form of the Star Wars trappings. However, even if you took that aspect away from 1, it would still be a blast to play, because it was a GOOD GAME first. (Aside from some map designs, holy shit, there were some truly WTF were they thinking moments in Jedi Knight in particular.)

So are those game the same with those big-headed way too large eyes baby faces? Then I havent lost much skipping jrpg-s , i found those childish characters very boring. It is like 4-5 character types and most animes use these.

Is that Chrono Trigger different and worth trying out? Which else is good?