Scenarios are a sore spot in mobile games. Only giants like Rockstar Games and Square Enix, porting their hits to iOS and Android, manage to tell the story intelligently.
The rest are more concerned with monetization and promotion. This is, of course, correct, because forgetting about it, developers risk “staying at the broken trough.” But, on the other hand, a good plot is what keeps the user in the game, this is another hook. And it’s not worth dismissing it as something insignificant.
Another thing is that many people who think in the same way make mistakes. Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Super Smash Bros., Kirby and Kid Icarus: Uprising, last year’s hit for Nintendo 3DS, told about them on the pages of the Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu (we are aware that the console does not work on iOS and Android, but there are problems with the presentation of the plot not only on mobile platforms).
According to him, stories in games often do not correlate with game content, thereby annoying users. Besides, the plots are unbearably boring. In other games, a whole “eternity” passes until the player is allowed to play. “I just want to enjoy the game, and it pisses me off when they don’t give it to me,” Sakurai writes.
Also, he is not satisfied with the moments when, at the request of the screenwriter, a game character dies or the player is defeated, despite the fact that the player did not make mistakes. Masahiro believes that the gameplay suffers from this.
However, if we recall Final Fantasy IV, which was released on iOS not so long ago, then there is the whole plot based on such plot points, which, attention, is considered one of the best in the series.
Anyway, Sakurai agrees that balance is important here.
In order for the story to relate to the game, Masahiro prefers to write scripts for his games on his own. “Every hero, including bosses, has an identity correlated with his role in the game. This allows me to create dialogues that relate to what is happening in the game. If someone else had written the script, I would have had to explain to him everything that happens in the game (as well as any change in it), otherwise the story would have lost its logic.”
The main thing is that the story corresponds to the content and gameplay, the Japanese game designer emphasizes.