In-Game Novel: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

Many video games have backstories, often told via tidbits of [[Flavor Text|information]] that the player can only read a little of at a time. This is the [[Pamphlet Shelf]].

 

 

Compare [[In-Game TV]]. Contrast [[Pamphlet Shelf]].

 

{{examples}}

* ''[[Deus Ex]]'' contains a handful of chapters of a book that you can read. The protagonist discovers them as he goes along, and the book happens to uncannily mirror his current situation. One, "The Man Who Was Thursday", is a real novel; the other, "Jacob's Shadow", is not.

* ''[[Super Mario Bros.|Super Mario Galaxy]]'' contains a full illustrated children's book in the game. The book is substantial by video game standards, contains painted illustrations on each page, and could easily pass for an actual children's book. It details the backstory behind Rosalina.

* ''[[Silent Hill 3]]'' has a "crappy fairy tale", as Heather put it, that can be read. It's divided into a beginning, middle and end that can be read out of order, yielding different thoughts from Heather based on what order you read it in. You're only required to read the ending to leave the office building.

** Made even more funny by the fact that Luigi tells you the same story... but it is noticeably different from the book version. You get to decide for yourself whether the book story was altered when published or if Luigi's just trying to make the tale more interesting on his own.

* ''[[The Neverhood]]'' has The Hall of Records, a 30-something-screen-long hall along the length of which almost the game's entire backstory is written. Yes, seriously. {{spoiler|And there's a [[Plot Coupon]] with more backstory that requires traversing the entire hall to pick up.}}

* [[World of Warcraft]] has books scattered all over the game world containing pieces of the lore of the game. The expansion dropped this habit for the most part, as well as contradicting a lot of said lore in a massive [[Retcon]] to pave the way for the two new playable races.

* [[Ultima Online]] not only had books that were readable (though none as long as a full novel), you could also buy blank books and ''write'' your own story, for the public to read. Some of these could be quite epic in length.

* Completing a mission in ''Outpost 2'' unlocks another chapter of the game's pair of novellas, uncovering a tale of survival for your chosen colony of Plymouth or Eden. The novels tell much the same story, but from the perspectives of two Elders (the original colonists from Earth); one of whom stayed with Eden, and the other left to found Plymouth. The only difference, {{spoiler|in the end, is who comes out on top.}} Also, three quarters of the structures have short stories associated with them, too, such as a father showing his son the newly built light towers - and receiving a complaint about not being able to see the stars now, to combat stories around manually piloting the robotic vehicles. More than a few of them tie directly into the novellas, and all take place in the same continuity. In all cases, the quality of the writing is remarkably high, for being written to go with a relatively old RTS game.

* ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 2'' includes a humorous short story tying into the events of the first game, a book review on a novel written by one of the support characters in the first game on its events from her POV and the book itself as extras.

* ''[[Baldur's Gate]]'' has around 70 different books. All are of a reasonable length alone and provide mostly non-game related information about the setting. Some are linked series, including fairly substantive histories of Shadowdale and Waterdeep.

* In ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'', you can read a book full of backstory. It's pretty long for an in-game book, and even then, Ramza admits that he ''can't even read most of the text'' due to it being written in an ancient language; he's just reading a different character's notes and translations written in the margin.

* An educational game example. The original [[JumpStart|Jump Start 1st Grade]] contained a modest bookshelf of in-game stories to teach young children reading. The books typically contained short stories that the game would read aloud with limited animated illustrations. Combined, there were 52 unique stories on the shelf, subjects of those stories ranging from counting, telling time, animals, caricatures of world cultures, silly poems, and entertaining short fiction, and at the end of each story the game would give a simple comprehension question at the end before proceeding to the next. Each story was an average of 3-4 pages each, the shortest stories were the Mother Goose rhymes at one page each, and the longest story was a whopping 10 in-game pages, seven at a close second. This meant the game featured a cumulative number of over 200 pages of fiction. For an educational game for first graders made in 1995, that does seem rather impressive.

** Its successor, Jumpstart 2nd Grade, only featured six stories at two pages each. The focus wasn't so much on reading the stories as filling in the blanks with parts of speech specific to the book chosen and customizing the story. This game focused slightly more on mathematics than reading, likely because the first grade game already covered that department quite well.

* ''[[Opoona]]'' has the Catalogue d'Arts, which is, essentially, a small art history textbook on the various art movements that have arisen on the planet of Landroll. You have to find the art pieces in the overworld to add them to the book, but the book gives each piece substantial backstory, and even expounds on the history of the artists who made it (such as [[The Ghost|Caval]]).

* ''[[Dante's Inferno (video game)|Dantes Inferno]]'' packed in the entirety of [[The Divine Comedy|its source material]] in an autoscrolling extras menu.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fictional Document]]

[[Category:Video Game Tropes]]