Games with interesting/unique stories/plot elements

[rusty_shackleford]

Recently became aware of the game Azrael's Tear, a 1996 adventure game about a future where the ocean lines recede and ruins across the globe are uncovered. Yadda yadda, soychaeologists are replaced with gun slinging archaeologists who go hunting for relics to sell to the highest bidder.

It also got me thinking of Millennia: Altered Destinies

To quote the wiki page,

It casts the player as a human freighter captain who finds himself transported to an alien ship. There, an alien calling himself a Hood gives the player a mission to save the Echelon galaxy which is about to be taken over by a malevolent race called the Microids. Apparently, the Milky Way is next should the player fail.

The only way to stop the Microids is to travel back 10,000 years in a specially-designed ship called XTM. It is equipped with everything the player will need to complete the mission. The player must then populate the Echelon galaxy with four indigenous races and ensure their development into powerful spacefaring civilizations.

The Hoods also state that this is not the first time they have tried to interfere with the timeline. To succeed, the player will have to fight off the previous attempts by the Hoods to alter the course of history.

Then thinking on the time travel part of that reminded me of the adventure game The Journeyman Project

The central story is set centuries in the future, where after horrific nuclear wars humanity united to create a peaceful global society. Due to the establishment of a utopian society, humanity has been invited to join an alien organization known as the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings.

In the twenty-fourth century, time travel is realized by the Journeyman Project, the secret program to construct Pegasus, the world's first time machine. After a brief test period proves time travel is possible, the Journeyman Project is deactivated and the Pegasus device is put under the secret watch of the Temporal Security Agency or TSA for short (also the acronym of its base of operations, the Temporal Security Annex). The TSA exists to prevent temporal rips in the space/time continuum, by which changes in the past can alter the present. The player controls a character named Gage Blackwood, Agent 5 of the Temporal Security Agency. The games revolve around Agent 5's exploits throughout time to save Earth in the present.

Adventure games used to have some pretty cool plots. So, talk about similar games with similarly cool stuff.

[Tweed]

Exxos's Captain Blood fits that bill.

The titular character of the game is a 1980s video game designer, Bob Morlock, who had picked "Captain Blood" as a nickname in tribute to the film starring Errol Flynn of the same name. Morlock develops a new video game about aliens and space travel. While testing for the first time his new project, he becomes warped inside the spaceship of the very game he had designed. Soon after, Blood is forced to go into hyperspace mode and, due to an incident, gets accidentally cloned 30 times. For 800 years, Blood tracks down every clone, as each one took a portion of his vital fluid. When the game begins, Blood has successfully disintegrated 25 clones, but he needs to kill the last five clones who turned out to be the most difficult to track down or he will lose his last connection with the human species.

This involves sending probes to alien planets and communicating with alien lifeforms through UPCOM, an icon based language with 150 different icons. As time goes on without absorbing a clone the mouse cursor starts to jitter and shake, making it harder to control. You can also blow up planets 4 no raisin which is what I did since I didn't understand the game as a kid.

[Emphyrio]

Recently became aware of the game Azrael's Tear, a 1996 adventure game about a future where the ocean lines recede and ruins across the globe are uncovered. Yadda yadda, soychaeologists are replaced with gun slinging archaeologists who go hunting for relics to sell to the highest bidder.

that's a great premise

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The Banner Saga: the apoclaypse is happening. Rather than form a small party of heroes to go save the world, you instead lead a caravan of refugees fleeing to the protection of a city's walls. However, you are being tailed by the fleeing, starving population of another race that humanity was at war with a few decades prior.

The Banner Saga 2 & 3: you get an additional PoV from the perspective of mercenaries who are roped in by a wizard into saving the world. However, most of them are cold blooded scum. Robbers, adulterers, murderers, etc. So the final party is rather unheroic. Also, there is a god monster villain, but he is too big and too powerful to be fought and never is.

Suikoden and the Trails series: rather than going on a globe trotting adventure visiting multiple kingdoms and continents and climaxing in saving the world from a god monster as in your typical JRPG, each game instead set in one country and is about its local geopolitical turmoils. Half of the games are about fighting political leaders (generals, presidents, etc) rather than a dark lord or ancient evil.

Utawarerumono Mask of Deception and Mask of Truth duology: you play as the normal, unskilled side kick to a famous superpoweful warrior hero. However, at the end of the first game, said hero is framed at the start of a civil war and then killed by his superpowerful archnemesis. You impersonate said hero and try to rally his side of the war and fulfill his oath to the emperor while deceiving everyone.

Sakura Wars: you play as a theater troupe that are also mech pilot superheroes who defend their city of Tokyo/Paris/New York from demon possessed steampunk mechs.

Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword: the protagonist gets isekaied to a fantasy world and is promptly captured and enslaved and forced to help conquer and wipe out other kingdoms. He doesn't speak the language of the world and the first few chapters are about him learning to speak the language. He gets a demon possessed sword that is constantly tempting him.

Romancing Saga 2: you play through a dynasty of emperor's and their lineage's long war against the seven demon lords. Each time you wipe or kill a demon lord, the game fast forwards a few centuries to the next generation. You can't gameover until there is one demon lord left and you're playing as the final emperor.

LEGO Rock Raiders: a unique RTS. Your spaceship is sucked into a wormhole and thrown into unknown space, and runs out of fuel. You have to land on a nearby planet abd begin mining for fuel to get back home. However, the deeper you mine, the more strange and hostile rock monsters you encounter.

[rusty_shackleford]

Recently became aware of the game Azrael's Tear, a 1996 adventure game about a future where the ocean lines recede and ruins across the globe are uncovered. Yadda yadda, soychaeologists are replaced with gun slinging archaeologists who go hunting for relics to sell to the highest bidder.

Azrael's Tear design document:
https://f.rpghq.org/lsaHA4Fu2LNq.pdf?n= ... _FIXED.pdf
Original proposal:
https://f.rpghq.org/fcjL6yDJ8x0j.pdf?n= ... _FIXED.pdf

The "_FIXED" in their name is because they all required rotating 90° counterclockwise.

[gerey]

Hostile Waters - you're the (cloned) captain of the last remaining adaptive carrier, the Antaeus, tasked with waging war against the Cabal, the former global elites that want to claw their way back into power and shatter the post-scarcity utopia of 2032. As an adaptive carrier, so long as you have the necessary raw materials, you can create any vehicle you have blueprints for in a matter of seconds via your on-board nanobot facilities, and have them be piloted by dead soldiers, whose neural patterns have been preserved upon their deaths for future use.



Ace Combat 04 - the story is told from the perspective of a young boy, that befriends your main antagonist and fellow fighter ace. The player is never shown in the cutscenes, never speaks, and is more force of nature than a character proper. The story is not your story.

The plot also takes place on not-Earth, called Strangereal, with different continents and countries, where nukes never proliferated, so peer-to-peer wars are frequent.



Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War - the story is framed as a journalist doing a documentary about the ubiquitous Belkan War, and the ace pilot that shaped it. Each cutscene between missions is an interview with an enemy or ally that interacted with you. The cutscenes are also different depending on your alignment (knight, soldier, mercenary) and what you do during certain missions.

Additionally, the narrative and presentation blend Arthurian mythos and Spanish music.