For the most part, early games dumped you directly from the title screen into the gameplay. They had a few paragraphs in the manual explaining that some bad gu

For the most part, early games dumped you directly from the title screen into the gameplay. They had a few paragraphs in the manual explaining that some bad guy's kidnapped the princess, and it's time for the chosen hero to beat up the bad guy's army, rescue the princess and save the world. Most of the people didn't read it. This made the games that attempted to tell a more detailed story stand out from the crowd and develop as a distinctive genre. Nowadays games feel as if they have to give you ten minutes of cutscenes for every twenty minutes of gameplay. Games are a great artistic medium for telling stories. The problem is that games that aren't in story-heavy genres feel a need to pretend that they are. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a great example of a modern game with a minimalist approach to its use of tutorial and cutscene elements. So today, games that take a minimalist approach to storytelling are the ones that stand out from the crowd. It's hard to build a game that's fun but focuses solely on narrative. Heavy Rain did a great job at this, but a lot of games fail. JRPG's are the genre that gets as far as possible toward a storytelling focus without totally sacrificing gameplay. For a recent example, Persona 5 is a flawlessly executed example of a game that tightly integrates story and gameplay (although a full appreciation of the game's literary depth is impossible without some knowledge of Japanese culture and tropes).