It should be said, having no plot is no excuse to be a terrible game.
Super Mario Galaxy isn't the paradigm of storytelling (Rosalina's backstory not withstanding), but it's MILES more complex and gratifying than a score-maker like Candy Crunch Saga or Angry Birds.
I'm sorry I mentioned games you didn't knew, I thought all my examples were well-known?
Mega Man, Phoenix Wright, Kid Icarus all have a rather-large following and a big fanbases...
Regardless, point and click adventure, that's precisely what Phoenix Wright game is. You take the role of the titular character, a rookie defense attorney set sometime "in the near future", as you solve plenty of cases focused mostly on murder of victims, doing detective work, interrogating characters and... facing other quirky characters. It even got a film in Japan, an american remake has been rumored.
The games' plots, both the overall arc, and each case individual mystery tend to be VERY engaging. I don't think I expressed myself properly, I meant that action/adventure games should be more focused in the actual gameplay, that it's not broken, whilst text adventures like this, or like Monkey Island, should by all means have it's main focus on plot.
Every medium indeed has it's differences and ways of being engaging:
For example, before RE5 killed the Survival Horror genre and regelated it to the indie scene, games I feel are a much more powerful tool to make you feel legitimately scared than with movies. In movies, you're all like "YOU MORON, RUN!" but in a game you can't watch the character act on it's own. You're the character, you gotta react. And that's creepy.
Case in point. These dead people be damned, it's not like I wanted to sleep tonight...
Heavy Rain particularily bugged me (regardless of it's story), because it's basically Dragon's Lair in HD. We got so much technology and processing capacity, why are we regressing back into watching a movie in which pressing buttons at the correct time, the so-called quicktime events, are everything you do the entire game?
It was revolutionary when Dragon's Lair first did it in 1983, it was somewhat interesting, but not that good when Shenmue did it in 1999, but in 2013, it just felt lazy.
The change of Resident Evil development to have a western studio take over didn't kill only it's core fanbase, but anyone who likes horror games in general, that's why RE6 was such a terrible third-person CoD clone.
You know, I'm glad the Bioshock fans took the personality of the main characters nicely, I honestly am. May I tell you a similar tale with an opposite result?
Do you know Metroid? If not, I'll resume as quickly as I can: It's a scifi franchise by Nintendo, created by toymaker Gunpei Yokoi and his core team consisting of Yoshio Sakamoto (who took over the franchise after Yokoi's death in a car accident), Makoto Kano (concept and story designer), Hiroji Kiyotake (character designer, most notably of the main character Samus Aran).
Usually, as you can see in this picture, kids accuse Samus of being a Master Chief rip-off, but bear in mind the first Metroid came out in 1986, 16 years before the first Halo.
The games appeal mostly to Western Audiences rather than the Japanese audience being usually open-ended games relying heavily in exploration, and the 3D installments (Developed in Austin, Texas, in a Nintendo studio known as Retro Studios, by various americans and japanese members, led by Shigeru Miyamoto) appealed to most people at first due to it's first person view. (However, such view wasn't the case, Miyamoto made the team re-start the project TWICE feeling the first 2 builds weren't good enough. After Miyamoto saw an experimental First-Person engine Retro was working with, they scrapped all the work done and began anew, feeling the first-person view would encourage exploration. And damn skippy, it did.
Anyway, the tale of personality. Though the Metroid franchise, Samus has kept with zero personality, only just slight showings of personality through face and body language much like Link himself. The player, through the span of various games, knew nothing about Samus except that she saw her parents die at the age of 3 and was adopted by a race of aliens named Chozo, who trained her and gave her the armor she wears, and as a teenager worked as a soldier for the Galactic Federation. Afterwards, she became a "Bounty Hunter", which in Metroid is more of a Black-Ops operative, sent to various dangerous planets to investigate, infiltrate and terminate various targets.
But her personality? Nope, not counting very brief opening narrations, none. Zero. Nada. (Unless you lived in Japan in 1994, where they tried to give her in a comicbook a more silly personality, toying around with the 'dumb blonde' stereotype, but it was super short-lived, that phase). A flat character as flat as it can get.
2010 comes Metroid: Other M, an ambitious project that costed Nintendo millions and millions of dollars. It gives Samus an elaborated personality. Her face reflection of her visor in the Prime games already hinted torwards a chronically depressed personality and Other M developed further on her, the woman under the armor suit.
And suprise. She's a woman. With feelings. And a very broken psyche from the crap life she had.
And DAMN, here comes the shitstorm, the fanbase hated it, called Samus a whiney, weakling girl, some pseudo-gamer girl reviewers calling the game sexist since, in Other M, Samus doesn't get hired by the Federation, but rather, becomes involved in an investigation held by her former team members in the army, and her former commander, Adam Malkovich, makes it clear: Either obey him completely (like the other soldiers do, since he's leading the investigation in the space colony Bottle Ship), or have her arrested.
Samus agrees, quite annoyed (and hurt by his offensive choice of words to adress her after years of not seeing each other), to obey his commands, and have him decide when Samus should use what weapons. Despite the fact the other (male) characters follow the exact same rule, just because Samus is a woman, apparently that already makes it sexist.
And even WORSE, since her narration implies as a teenager she had feelings for Adam... Or the fact the game's theme is Maternity, with Samus regretting the death of the baby Metroid that gave it's life to protect her in Super Metroid, the game set before Other M, and remembering when she met said baby in Metroid II: The Return of Samus. As well people complaining "she talked too much" when, in-game, Samus was still silent while it's previous installments, it's just that she doubled as the Narrator to the player to explore her personality, while keeping her stoic and not-too talkative to the other characters.
... It's just worse with the fans who seriously thought a woman as "strong-willed" as Samus (when she had no personality) couldn't be straight, that she had to be a macho man with boobs and a lesbian. Isn't that even MORE sexist? And offensive to lesbians, struggling with the "butch" stereotype?
Hell, before Other M, I thought Metroid games (despite their rich lore) were boring due to the boring flat character Samus Aran, it's scifi space theme (something I don't particularily enjoy much in games unless it's Mega Man), and the games being so big on exploration and few save stations, in which case if you die, progress is lost.
After Other M, I felt invested and interested into the character herself, I genuinely cared now, and thus began to play every other game in the series and began to appreciate them a lot.
Anyway, it ended with the game selling really bad, with it's price lowered from 40 bucks to 9 bucks, and the entire franchise and it's history is standing on super thin ice. The franchise might just die.
And yeah, just to clarify, the quote meant CoD and it's various clones, with terrible cliché "story" about terrorism that can be skipped. Seriously, how did Black Ops won a Guiness Record to "best videogame ending"? My rear, there are better games with MUCH better stories. I call sell-outs.
Wait, also, where did Metal Gear failed for you? I mean, it's the only game other than Other M, I don't mind cutscene because I absolutely LOVE it's nod to actors and classic cult movies, myself being a movie nut.
I love how Revolver Ocelot is TOTALLY Lee Van Cleef, Solid Snake is clearly Snake Plissken, Raiden is Legolas!Orlando Bloom, Big Boss is clearly Sean Connery, so much the prequel games with Big Boss (under the code-name Naked Snake) are clear shout-outs to his James Bond movies. And when you save the game, paramedic discussing with Naked Snake from well-known movies like A Fistful of Dollars, to hilariously bad ones like Plan 9 From Outer Space!
Kojima does his homework, and it shows!
... And the long ending and dialogue in Metal Gear Solid 4 makes it clear he was sick and tired of being "The Metal Gear Guy", wanting to move on other projects Konami won't let him, and his magnum opus, Boktai, regelated to a small-time GBA game, forgotten by time...
