The Story:
The game starts off with Kratos, the main character, committing suicide because he believes the gods have forsaken him. The rest of the game is a series of flashbacks from Kratos’ life that lead up to his death. Kratos trades his life to the god Ares in exchange for surviving a barbarian horde massacre. He is betrayed by Ares and tricked into killing his own wife and daughter. Kratos tries to absolve himself by serving other gods, slaying a hydra for Poseidon and defending Athens from Ares on behalf of Athena. Kratos gets his revenge by using Pandora’s Box to destroy Ares and obtain the Blade of the Gods; but it doesn’t relieve the pain of his memories, leading him to jump off a cliff. At the last moment, Athena intervenes and convinces Kratos to take up Ares’ place as the God of War. 

Why it’s the Best:
Take three simple elements - revenge, Man vs God, sympathy - combined with a touch of Greek mythology and you’ve got a story that sticks with you. We see revenge stories a lot in videogames, so clearly the formula sells. But the added Man vs God element in God of War makes the boring “manly man doing manly things” style of gameplay that much more interesting than the next hack-‘n’-slash adventure. And seeing the gods and monsters of Greek myth rendered on the PS2 in all their glory - towering and terrible in a boss fight - makes the struggle feel so much more epic and so much more satisfying than a plain old romp with an RPG dragon.

See what we mean?

The simple story and compelling god hook is made all the more powerful by the main character. It’s true that Kratos isn’t likeable or even that complex - “RAWR - man-smash!” - but his tragic back story and total lack of joy add depth to his character. He put his trust entirely in the gods and what do they do? Abandon him to fate, trick him into killing his family (and make him relive it), or haul off and javelin him in the gut while he’s trying to make things right. After watching our manly man go through all that, we want him to win - and we want him to live, even if he doesn’t want to himself. That’s the kind of sympathy God of War inspires and that’s Kratos’ ticket to one, two, three, FOUR games and possibly to a major motion picture.

The Story:
The story changes depending on the choices the player makes throughout the game - gender, class, good/evil, etc. - but the “canon” play-through still makes for a good story and many of the main plot points remain the same.

You start out as one of the few survivors of a botched mission run by Jedi badass Bastila Shan with no memory of who you are or what you were doing on her starship. You fall in with one of the good guys, who’s out to save Bastila after her escape pod crash lands somewhere on a Sith-controlled planet. Bastila is captured and handed over to the Sith lord Darth Malak, the evil badass who overthrew his own Sith master, Revan, for a chance to destroy the Jedi. Through events of the game - played either as a good guy or an evil one - the quest to get a hold of Bastila morphs into a quest to find star maps that will lead the player to the Star Forge, a battle station that will decide the outcome of the Jedi vs Sith conflict.

A little more than halfway through the game, a major plot twist is revealed: you are Revan… or you were until your prick of a team-killing apprentice Malak offed you. With this newfound knowledge, players have an even greater incentive to destroy Malak, regardless of whether they’re playing as a goody-two-shoes or the ultimate bastard. Then Bastila turns to the Dark Side - despite being the hoity-toity good-girl Jedi - and the player has a whole new set of plot points to navigate through to one of the game’s multiple conclusions.

Why it’s the Best: 
Knights of the Old Republic has a lot to offer in the way of a good story - setting, plot, characters, a killer climax - to name a few elements. Developer BioWare had a leg up in setting on the count of borrowing almost everything from the Star Wars canon - but they did go the extra mile to make their own fan fiction and make it work for Star Wars. So even if you can bring yourself to dispute our claims that the climax is awesome and the characters were compelling, you can’t deny that this game felt like Star Wars in a way that Jedi Knight and Shadows of the Empire never did.

KOTOR is filled with interesting and talkative characters but the most compelling one in the whole story is you. In other games, your character is made for you - even if they do let you pick out the color of your hair and let you name yourself Pr1ncess McWh00pass. But KOTOR gave the player real choices that had real effects on the story. From being a girl to being totally evil, to making a Wookie kill his Twi’lek best friend, KOTOR’s story never ignored your choices. Instead they stretched the linear events to accommodate whatever you came up with and it made you, the main character - and the plot - that much more interesting.

Now the plot doesn’t sound like anything special: galaxy in turmoil, kidnapped chick, huge weapon, stuff happens. But when you actually sit down to play the game, the pace of the story keeps things from feeling like an endless grind and you will willingly suffer through side quests just to find out what happens next. Then comes the plot twist: you are/were/are going to be again the baddest of bad guys in the galaxy. Even if you had been playing as the perfect paragon of Jedi goodness until that point, the great reveal gives you pause. First you experience a barrage of philosophical questions: what makes a man evil; can evil be unlearned; etc.

And then you find yourself asking: “Wait, am I supposed to be evil? Have I been playing the game wrong?”

It’s a funny thing to see an entire generation of gamers grow up in one moment. That moment came when we poor souls who were conditioned to follow where a game led us stopped dead in our button mashing and realized that, no, we hadn’t been playing KOTOR wrong; we had a choice in the story. And whatever we chose, it would be effin’ awesome.

So of course KOTOR makes our list of best game stories - because it was our story, whoever we were when we played it on whatever path we chose to take.