Visual novels and the like have their place, but you have to think about games a bit differently than the general trend. The thing to remember about video game story telling is that it’s a very unstructured format. Being a regular novel for most VNs wouldn’t make sense; the visual and audio cues are part of the experience. However, as compared to television or film, you have fewer constraints. A movie can really only be so long before it becomes just impossible to pace, so you have to tell a very concrete story in a set amount of time. A television series can tell longer stories, but each part needs to be the same length, and has to be paced in a way that you can break at set intervals. Obviously there are spaces out of the mainstream that can address these flaws a bit, but it’s still just a limitation of those mediums. By being a video game, you have a lot of room to vary your pacing, tell stories of any scope you need, and the player is afforded the ability to break where they feel comfortable. Toss in the capacity for CYOA-style fun and it’s a fairly good story-telling medium even if you don’t have gameplay in an active sense.

That said it’s not the right move for lots of stories. The trouble a lot of story-heavy games have is that they want to look cool, so they have a lot of automated sequences, but if you have something that’s in the scope of your gameplay, why are you not rendering it in your gameplay? Xenosaga was the main offender there; early on in the first game, you have KOS-MOS busting through a wall and demolishing some Gnosis to save Shion. Very nice, establishes how badass KOS is… but KOS-MOS is a playable character who can do most of those moves in gameplay. Why not have her burst through the wall, switch over to gameplay, have her start with some bonuses so she can immediately bust out the miniguns and shred Gnosis in a single attack, jump over to another battle where she’s shielding Shion and can cut one in half, so on. All those things are possible and with a few tweaks should convey the same thing as the cutscene without creating that gap between the player and the game.

In terms of games that people are unfair towards because it’s just not what they want from the series, Suikoden Tierkreis deserves a nod. It’s not a bad game. Not really. But it misses so much of why Suikoden fans were Suikoden fans.