Best Retro Games with Great Stories

Retro Games with Great Stories: Narrative Before Cutscenes

The conventional wisdom that retro games had no story is incorrect — it conflates the limited storytelling tools available with limited storytelling ambition. NES games told stories through level design and enemy placement. SNES games told stories through character dialogue and environmental detail. PlayStation games added voice acting and FMV. Each generation expanded storytelling capability, and the best writers and designers used every available tool.

The retro games with the best stories are those where the medium’s interactive element contributed to the narrative rather than simply framing it. Earthbound’s final boss fight uses the player’s act of praying as a narrative device. Shadow of the Colossus uses game violence to make the player complicit in the story’s tragedy. Metal Gear Solid uses the controller and memory card as story elements. These aren’t stories that could be told as films — they require the player’s participation.

Metal Gear Solid — The Cinematic Blueprint

Metal Gear Solid (1998) told a story about nuclear deterrence, genetic destiny, nanomachines, and whether human choice can transcend biological programming — through lengthy codec conversations, boss monologues, and cutscenes that totaled hours. Hideo Kojima’s direction was cinematic: the camera angles, the dialogue pacing, and the voice acting quality (by 1998 standards) produced something closer to interactive film than the story-optional action games that preceded it.

The story’s specifics — Solid Snake vs. Liquid Snake as complementary genetic expressions of Big Boss, the truth about Master Miller, Sniper Wolf’s backstory, Otacon’s cowardice becoming something else — were told in the time-inefficient way that the best stories require. MGS respected its players enough to believe they’d sit through long conversations.

Xenogears — The Philosophical Epic

Xenogears (1998) is the most narratively ambitious JRPG ever made: a story incorporating Jungian psychology (the Id, Ego, and Superego as gameplay mechanics), Gnostic theology (the Demiurge as a literal character), Nietzschean philosophy (the Eternal Recurrence applied to reincarnating protagonists), and mecha combat. The game’s religious and philosophical content was unprecedented in mainstream gaming.

The infamous Disc 2 — where budget cuts forced most of the story to be presented as text narration rather than played gameplay — is Xenogears’ most discussed flaw. But the complete narrative (assembled across both discs and the companion Perfect Works book) is one of the most ambitious stories ever attempted in any interactive medium. Players who engage with it fully find it rewarding in proportion to the work it requires.

Earthbound — The American Satire

Earthbound (1994/1995) told a story about American consumer culture, alien invasion, and the limits of positive thinking — through absurdist comedy that concealed genuine emotional sincerity. The towns (Onett, Twoson, Threed, Fourside) were American suburban clichés rendered in RPG mechanics: the cult (Happy-Happy Village), the department store spirit possession (Monotoli), the corrupt mayor (Fourside) were satirical targets that became affecting because the game also genuinely cared about Ness and his friends.

The final boss encounter’s solution — praying, and receiving the prayers of everyone you’ve helped, and the players themselves — used the game’s interactive medium to make a point about community and connection that a film couldn’t make. Earthbound’s story is inseparable from its mechanics because the mechanics are part of the story.

Shadow of the Colossus — The Complicity Story

Shadow of the Colossus (2005) told its story by making the player complicit in it. Wander doesn’t fight random monsters — he seeks out and kills sixteen magnificent creatures who didn’t attack him. The game never explains why this is necessary or whether Dormin’s promise to resurrect Mono is trustworthy. The player performs the acts; the camera lingers on dying colossi long enough to make the player feel their weight.

The final revelation — that killing the colossi has been resurrecting Dormin, a malevolent entity that possesses Wander — recontextualizes every colossus fight as a step in the player’s own corruption. Shadow of the Colossus is a story about what you’re willing to do for someone you love and whether that willingness is admirable or monstrous. It requires the player to make those choices to ask that question.