@lain @WandererUber I just made peace with the fact that really the best you can hope for in a video game story is that it doesn't clash too heavily with the gameplay and succeeds in establishing a vibe.

The absolute peak achievements in video game stories (outside of interactive fiction) are on the level of middling Hollywood scripts or YA fiction, or graphic novels. I'm okay with that, if the gameplay makes up for it, or if the story is a mystery and the gameplay (or part of the gameplay) is to figure it all out by exploring interesting locations - and I'm not able to accurately guess where it's all going well before the credits roll (but it isn't random nonsense either).