Lore in a Minute

Do you know what’s confusing? Video game stories. Seriously. Have you ever played a narrative-driven video game? Too many games set up complicated backstories or mythologies to rival Tolkien’s, which nearly always leave those games with one of two problems: explaining too much, or else not explaining enough.

I’ve played a lot of games with fantastic settings, brilliant characterization, and intricate plots—only to see those things obscured by poor storytelling. (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Metal Gear Solid.) All the worldbuilding in the, um, world won’t matter if a game’s lore is too complicated for players to understand.

Fortunately for video game aficionados everywhere, a YouTube group called Lore in a Minute has taken it upon themselves to explain the complex lore of various video games, each in one minute… ish.

The video above explains the (admittedly complicated) setup of Chrono Trigger, which I consider probably the greatest RPG ever made. It takes one heck of an explanation to make sense of the time-traveling adventures of a swordsman, an inventor, a princess, a steampunk robot, a prehistoric cavewoman, a demon king, and a medieval knight/talking frog.

Yeah, it’s kind of a weird game. You should totally play it.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s