I love watching Let’s Plays of story-based games because the commentary helps remind me that it isn’t real and I can always fast-forward past the painful parts

I think it also helps a lot if it’s an older game because those tend to have much more simplistic plot structures, so I can predict roughly what’s going to happen in advance and I can identify which part of the story I’m at, and when I need to skip past a part

it also helps a lot that the overall storytelling isn’t as effective as newer games - from technical limitations, voice acting, and just the fact that folks didn’t take video games as seriously as a storytelling medium back then

anyway I’ve been watching Jesse Cox play Ace Combat 5 and I’ve been really enjoying it, for all of the reasons I mentioned above

something that I’ve realized recently is that unpredictability is a big factor in whether I get hurt by something in a story. if I don’t know where a story is going or it takes a sudden turn that I couldn’t predict it leaves me feeling a lot more vulnerable and can often hurt me a lot worse than if I was able to brace myself for something

Ace Combat 5 has a twist that I saw a million miles away lol, and when the twist started to happen and the story was about to start twisting the knife, it telegraphed that so well that I was able to skip all of it and then figure out what happened from context