How Can Storytelling Enchance Fight Scenes?

[Mido]

"The Unstoppable Force vs. The Immovable Object"
"David vs. Goliath"

These are a couple of common labels for two foes battling within a piece of media, and they exist for good reason. They enhance the circumstances and the significance of a fight, adding to both the drama and excitement while also adding a level of mythos to the combatants. Even when the quality of a battle in a video game, TV show, book, or movie is not necessarily high, effective storytelling can turn an otherwise uneventful set of scenes into a marvel of a experience. One of my favorite examples to note is the final battle between the main characters of Naruto.

The battle itself is nothing to write home about, and fans of the series long expected this battle to happen. This being said, the storytelling greatly enhances it due to the history between the main characters and the consideration of their experiences up to this point and highlighting the fight as a clash of ideals. This makes their fight, while not among their best, interesting.

How does effective storytelling enhance battles in your favorite pieces of media? Can it hinder it? If so, why? Speak your mind below!

 

[Spirit]

A lot of modern video games and movies get this so wholly wrong, they assume the spectacle is the draw, not the characters involved.

If there's a fight going down in any form of media i'm not gonna care unless i'm invested in the characters.

Two of my favourite examples come from Tales of Xillia and Tales of Bersria.

Tales as a series does characters very damn well (for an anime RPG series) and thus the games are all the stronger for it. So much would be wasted in these games if there weren't so much attention given to the characters.

Steins Gate is another example I'd like to cite where the characters bring so much tension to procedings. There isn't really even a fight in Steins Gate, more of a scuffle but the outcome had me gasping in shock, crying and my hands over my face because the fates of the characters were so important to me.

Just having a fight means nothing, there has to be more.


As for hindering, I'd like to mention God of War 2018.

Everything in that game is done due to the characters and the building of their relationships. Yet the this focus breaks the game's immersion numerous times really jarringly.

An example is that Atreus and Kratos have a huge argument and some home truths are blurted out... the scene ends with neither character feeling very fond of the other.

But when the gameplay kicks in immediately afterwards and some co-op is needed to solve a puzzle the characters speak as if nothing just happened.

The game does this all the time and it suffers greatly.