People who think video games should be narrative masterpieces are just third-rate aesthetes and ersatz connoisseurs who don't have the patience, or maturity, for bonafide art forms. At least the indie devs get it half right by acknowledging that nothing that is pumped out of huge companies, tailor-made for mass appeal, can ever amount to actual art, but it's still sad to see grown men wax poetic about the merits and failings of focus-group driven power-fantasy simulators. Video games are meant to satisfy an itch, like basketball, or sex. Narrative should, at best, serve merely as thematic context for the game experience, not steal the show.
It kills me that self important weenies have made it their eternal jihad to not only hold games to ridiculous artistic standards but also hold them to their personal moral prescriptions, and then they can't even do either to a respectable degree. Honestly, to be a game reviewer has to be the lowest form of failure for an english major. I almost feel sorry for anyone who once aspired to be a great journalist or author and ended up lambasting the toxic diameter of Kratos' pectoral muscles.
The game of war series was good not in spite of its ridiculousness, but because of it. Triple A narrative driven games with realistic mechanics have ushered in a dark age of video game seriousness and one day we'll reembrace camp.
