RPGs with big brain story reasons for character advancement

[rusty_shackleford]

PST uses the fact that TNO has lived countless lives to explain him leveling and being so strong as him merely recovering his memories.
Arx Fatalis is … you're a demi-god or something(iirc?), except memory-wiped, but have the ability to learn extremely quickly.

Both very big brained ways to integrate story with game mechanics.
Now name some others.

[Emphyrio]

Terraria you find magic crystals that increase your health and mana

[Goblin_Hammer]

Fable - The Lost Chapters you have blood of a hero so you can kill everyone in every town, become a demon, buy their house, rent it to peasants to become immeasurably wealthy, donate all of your money to Avo, become the a holy messiah, profit forever.

[Orvas Dren]

Kenshi - you suffer and endure

[The_Mask]

Revenant: You area long dead king of the island the action is happening (mostly), and everything you learn is something you either knew in your past life, or you basically remember what you invented (usually in terms of magic).

NEO Scavenger: In the sense that the eye surgeries and augmentations are reflective of the way the player views the game, due to the experience the player tends to have by the time they get said augmentations.

The Witcher 1: That's basically Geralt recovering from amnesia. (not sure if that exactly counts as "big brained")

I'm probably going to get flamed for this one, but: Tyranny. But ONLY, and I specifically mean ONLY, for the Independent Path. Because it is made out to be a way of you absorbing the current Overlord's powers from his Edicts, at first. And then straight up taking it from the Spires.

Recettear: You're just a girl that learns more and more about capitalism. Unironically: simple and elegant, which automatically makes it smart, imo.

I can't think of anything else.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword: everything is made out of mana, and accumulating mana makes beings more powerful. Your characters don't become more powerful by killing monsters and acquiring exp, but rather by you conquering land and extracting its mana and then infusing that mana into your party members. You can also suck all of the mana out of a party member (effectively setting them to level 1) and redistribute it to other party members. However, since every country is in an arms race to acquire as much mana as possible to build stronger armies to conquer each other, this is leading to the ruin of the world, as devastating famines are happening because there isn't enough mana left in the ground to allow crops to grow, as all of the mana is being concentrated in warriors. The kingdom you're fighting for is trying to take over the world as quickly as possible, and then once there is no one left to fight, release all of the mana from its warriors back into the world before catastrophe happens. By mission 22, you extract all mana from the world and the mana drought apocalypse begins, and you can't level up after that. Strangely there is no time limit in mission 23 (the final mission), even though every mission before had one and in story this is the more urgent mission ever.

Also, since the endgame of the Spirit of Eternity Sword series is about people hopping between different worlds, they explained level-capping/downscaling in the story. Worlds have finite mana and only a maximum amount of mana can exist within a world, and people who have too much mana/are too strong for that world have to levelscale down when they enter/incarnate in that world for as long as they are in it. So powerful 1,000 year old heroes levelscale down when entering a low mana world and don't make new heroes who just started acquiring mana two years ago irrelevant, and big bads who are millennia old are quite vulnerable when they are in low mana worlds.


Black & White and Okami: you play as a demigod that becomes more powerful the more people come to revere him (ie doing quests, helping people out, etc).

World of Warcraft Legion: At the start of the expansion, you acquired a powerful artifact weapon (ie the Ashbringer, Thrall's Doomhammer, reforging the shattered fragments of Frostmourne, etc). Over the course of the expansion, you infused that weapon with magic to make it more powerful. In the final patch, your artifact weapon got infused with humongous power. It was really cool to open the artifact weapon menu and see the screen shaking as it was accumulating quadrillions of artifact power. Then when the expansion ended, you had to sacrifice your artifact weapon's power to save the world, and it became a useless piece of junk with no stats.

Trails of Cold Steel: the plot revolves around 1 magic mecha that was split into 7 magic mechas (called Divine Knights), which are trying to destroy and absorb each other to reform back into one. In the fourth game, each time you defeat another Divine Knight, you absorb some visual part of them (like angel wings) and get a massive stat boost. It was pretty cool being able to acquire an enemy boss DK's signature ability and then use in the next fight. GW2 also wound up doing this where the surviving Elder Dragons become more powerful as they die one by one and absorb each other's powers.

[boot]

Kotor 2

You're a wound in the force, killing and destroying things is basically like dilation for ********, vital and necessary, else the wound will SHUT.

[Element]

VtMB would be one - you're learning the ropes after just turning.

It's a shame how few games pay attention to this though. Having a good reason for the progression gives much needed verisimilitude to the world.

[Wretch]

Kenshi - you suffer and endure

Kenshi has the best progression of any game I have played. It essentially ruined all other games for me.