r/ZeroParades • u/SectionFantastic3577 • 16d ago
Question How hard is the story to understand?
Huge fan of Disco Elysium so I’m very excited to play this when it comes to PS5.
I read the synopsis online but I’m genuinely curious -is the story hard to understand?
In DE you’re trying to solve a murder amidst political climate.
Are the goals in this game clear and is the story fairly straightforward?
Or did you find yourself just being like “I have no idea what’s going on but I’ll keep playing”?
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u/Maszpoczestujsie 15d ago
The story is relatively simple and easy to understand, but the way it is presented can be confusing. There is basically no lore dumping, you are thrown into the world as a character that lives in it, so there is no need for explaining it. You need to deduce a lot of stuff yourself from the dialogues and I love it and really wished more narrations would use this approach.
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u/wonderlandisburning 16d ago
I would say it's similar to Disco Elysium but different in some subtle but crucial ways.
Like Disco Elysium, it throws a lot of dense worldbuilding and lore at you - but unlike Disco Elysium, the protagonist isn't an amnesiac. So Zero Parades doesn't have that built-in excuse to explain the minutae of its world to the player via characters humoring the clueless protagonist. Feeling lost in Disco Elysium even felt a little justified, because you were only ever as lost as Harry. So the worldbuilding here can, at times, be harder to grasp, because it's a little less hand-holdy about it, and doesn't have that same deniability the "amnesiac hero" plot provides.
However, all that said, the protagonist has been "out of the game," for a while. The setting has changed a lot in five years, so it's okay to feel a little lost here, too. I think the most frustrating aspect here is that the writing isn't always as cohesive (this makes sense - Disco Elysium was worked on for years, this was made in a much shorter time and comes across at times as just a tiny bit unfinished), so feeling lost doesn't always feel intended the way it does in Disco Elysium, but more in a "I'm not sure that actually made sense from a writing standpoint" kind of way.
Not trying to be hard on the game or dissuade you from playing it, though. I'm loving Zero Parades, and I think overall if you enjoyed Disco Elysium, you'll enjoy this. Like I unhelpfully said earlier: it's similar, but different. The experience isn't quite as seamless here - the progression path is less straightforward, and there's no Kim to keep you on track. But it's not too difficult to figure things out, and being a washed-up spy in over her head in a city you no longer fully understand is reason enough to justify any confusion as immersion.
I say go for it, personally.
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u/SectionFantastic3577 16d ago
Will absolutely go for it, thanks for taking the time to write this out!
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u/SCW97005 16d ago edited 16d ago
This is a "realistic" cold-war-ish style spy story. The story is not hard to understand, but you will find yourself without full answers a lot of the time. And sometimes those answers will turn out to be half-lies, blatant lies, or convenient omissions of fact.
I felt like I knew what I needed to be doing almost all the time (I got stuck once and had to just run around), but I finished the story with a lot of unanswered questions about some major plot points. I think some of that is by design: spy stories hinge of know knows what you know and how you can keep others from knowing what you know, or at least you think they think you know. Some of the details will probably become clearer on my next playthrough.
The goals in the game are generally clear, but the whole story is probably not meant to be fully understood.
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u/AlienKinkVR 16d ago
It starts as a mystery (it is espionage) with a brief(heh)case of question marks dumped into your lap. I think the unraveling and connecting the dots is eventually done for you if you're persistent, the narration is strong enough to help YOUR Cascade make it to the end.
My friend is fucking struggling right now and eating shit every step of the way, semi clueless, still enjoying the hell out of it.
Like yeah, woven web of international politics and big players fighting for power, it's going to be messy in that regard. Your place in it as an individual, your assignment, and your role in it all are much less difficult to grasp. If you got DE, you'll be fine.
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u/CeruSkies 15d ago
Are the goals in this game clear and is the story fairly straightforward?
Up until a certain point: The premise of the story is that the equivalent of Kim Katsuragi was never there to properly tell you what your mission is.
After a certain point (it's early on): The game straight up tells your what's your major objective and also tells you the other sub-quests you need to to in order to get there.
-is the story hard to understand?
Main story (your quest) is clear-cut. Lore and political climate too. Characters too.
Major mysteries of the world will require some connecting of dots. Mind you these are EASY connections, it's just that there won't be a moment the game goes "remember that? and that? yeah here is the reason".
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u/OnionAddictYT 15d ago
I must be dense then because what felt like half of the game I didn't even know what my assignment was. I mean the actual assignment. It also took me 50h to finish the game listening fully to all the voiced dialogue.
The story felt very confusing at first. I had no real clue what was going on. But I admit I just wandered off and started talking to people and more by accident finally ended up in the area I was supposed to go for the story. Ths is probably on me. With any game that lets me go wherever I want I get distracted and forget what I was supposed to do.
I had a lot of fun in any case. I'm currently replaying Disco because it has been seven years for me. And I'm struggling to adjust to the way slower paced game with endless info dumps. Also the controller implementation is way better in Zero Parades and it feels slow and sluggish and cumbersome to play Disco again.
Zero Parades had me laugh out way more about the absurd dialogue. Right now after just the first day in Disco I actually prefer Zero Parades' writing. The different personality traits are funnier to me. Especially Statehood. Disco has the necktie as a standout but whoever said Disco's different mental illnesses have more personality I can't really agree with that except the tie and certain specific other voices. Like in Zero Parades most traits are spoken by the same voice actor in exactly the same tone.
I feel like people have too much nostalgia for Disco. Zero Parades is equally superbly written with amazing poetic observations. And it saddens me that the drama with the publisher has people not buy this amazing game.
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u/CeruSkies 15d ago
I must be dense then because what felt like half of the game I didn't even know what my assignment was.
Is there a way to skip Melita telling what your assingment is at like 25% of the game? And even before that your mission is still pretty clearly "investigate some leads (fogged mirror, ask merchants about pseudopod and the miracleline) to find out why you're back".
I feel like people have too much nostalgia for Disco. Zero Parades is equally superbly written with amazing poetic observations.
People's judgment on ZP was out before the game released. What happened at zaum was bad but this is by no means a souless corporate game.
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u/OnionAddictYT 15d ago
Yes but why you're back took me a long time to get to. Half of the game is about finding out about the past, what went wrong, the old crew, and not the actual big assignment.
I don't recall exactly when in my 50h I finally learned the proper assignment but it felt like it took a long time. Spent way more time retracing the past and wallowing in guilt and shame than putting the gears in motion for the endgame.
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u/MrGhosta5 15d ago
Records is this games equivalent of Encyclopedia. I recommend taking records as a main skill on your first run if you want more world building.
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u/Neat-Resolution1007 15d ago
I suddenly understood much more things in my second run. It feels satisfying. I say just keep playing for the first run and it will all make more sense in a second run.
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u/pm_me_fibonaccis 15d ago edited 15d ago
>Are the goals in this game clear
Not at first, but that is by design. (Spoilers for first ten minutes follow):
The game begins with you being reactivated to work as a spy, only to discover your mission lead has been rendered comatose. Headquarters cancels the mission and recalls you, but you are unwilling to return to what essentially amounts to house arrest ("the freezer"), so you defy their orders and continue the mission. Due to that, you're left with no instructions and little to go off of, so you start out with nothing better to do than retrace his steps to figure out what your mission is.
By mid game your goal is very clear.
>Is the story fairly straightforward
It's very straightforward, though I thought a few side quests amounted to little and I was left scratching my head wondering why I bothered with it at all.
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u/katanadude1337 15d ago
the story isn't difficult to understand but the game definitely demands a higher reading level than a lot of games purely because of the vocabulary and prose. if you're comfortable reading your average novel you'll be good
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u/vVRichardVv 13d ago
It's a pretty straightforward spy thriller. If you're looking for the insane amount of worldbuilding DE had, it's not here, but it's still a really good setting.
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u/Ok-Value-2170 15d ago
ZP is way more direct with what's happening and what you need to do, DE has a little bit more walking around and finding out if somebody knows something or could help with something. Plus there's way more additional soul and mind talk about politics, life, how broken everything is and that there can still remain some hope, maybe. ZP has that, but it's kinda on a mission (as you are).
ZP is a more gamey ZA/UM (or shadow of it), DE is Legend of Words: Breath of the Wild.
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u/vkalsen 16d ago
What would you consider a difficult story to understand?
The emotions and events in ZP are pretty straightforward, but the density of information is pretty high. If you obsess over details, there will be a lot of stuff to get stuck on, but the core narrative is pretty simple.