From Travis To Kirby: The culture shock

Well, Gamestop got me again. I went in to trade in all my crap Wii games that I don't play and came out with two used games that I missed the first time around. This time I got Kirby's Epic Yarn and No More Heroes 2. And I have to say that playing these two games back to back was really jarring.

The above two images pretty much sum it up. Epic Yarn is an adorable kids game with the really interesting idea of the whole world being made of yarn and fabric products. Heroes is a sophomoric blood sport with good jokes and a shameless lightsaber knock off. But after playing them, these two games have a very strange thing in common: their stories do not matter.

Kirby's game is definitely a kids game. The story is cute and simple with a kindly old man doing the narration. But the story is soooo damn simplistic that I am constantly skipping the cut scenes. Just let me jump please. Meanwhile, No More Heroes straight tells the audience that the story doesn't matter, in a nice moment of fourth wall breakage. Then there is just a brief moment of actual character and then BOOM right back to the murdering shit.

But that's whats interesting about these games. Both have a unique sense of style, with solid gameplay mechanics and creativity. Everything for a game is here EXCEPT FOR THE STORY. And games, as an artistic medium, can exist without story. Neither of these games try to overcome their story weakness, they just drop the whole idea of a story and move on. And I can respect that.