I sat down, controller in hand, looking at the generic introductory screen. “Press start to begin” flashed across the bottom. I obeyed, expecting yet another menu asking me for options, to start a new game, so on and so forth. Suddenly, an explosion rocks the camera. The peaceful city before me rushes into a panic, citizens fleeing the distant inferno beginning to spread. I sit there, watching as a city is demolished in a massive explosion, a city bus flying through the sky towards the eye-in-the-sky camera.

In an instant, inFamous had me hooked with its story. In an hour, I’d be struggling to care.

It’s not because the story is bad or anything, or the game didn’t keep me enthralled. It’s a matter of presentation. After the game’s cinematic and well-directed start, I expected the comic-book slide show narration to be a sort of quick bridge between events. I still anticipated seeing important events play out as normal. It wasn’t until after I had tried to lead a bunch of civilians off the now ruined island of Not-New-York-City and was summarized an important step in the plot line that I realized the immersive and shocking opening was the fluke.

I’ve never been much a fan of the “animated” cut-scene. I’m all for appreciating good artwork and alternate story telling methods, but it always felt cheap, as if the developer didn’t take it seriously. With inFamous, it feels even more so like Sucker Punch just didn’t find that stuff as important as the gameplay. “Here’s what happened, here’s your motivation, now get back out there and play our game dammit!” It’s a shame because the game has plenty of twists that should have left me shocked or startled, but I instead felt like I was reading them off of a Wikipedia page or watching a “Last Time on inFamous...” summarization. Things happened, and somewhere in between I got to shock a bunch o’ dudes with electricity.

I understand the desire to make the game seem as comic-book in style as possible, but there are better ways. Cel-shaded animation, for example. Word balloons over quest givers and other such comic tropes.

Though in truth, these could have disrupted what it was that Sucker Punch was trying to do. Deliver a genuinely mature super hero story. I’m not talking “mature” in the typical grim and gritty sense. Sucker Punch tried to make use of some real themes here. You play a hero named Cole MacGrath that’s used to being an irresponsible and selfish man-child, and all of a sudden he’s indirectly responsible for the largest tragedy on U.S. soil since 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. He now has supernatural powers that he never asked for, and he’s being treated by those in higher power as an errand boy. Are his powers a gift? Are they a curse? It’s the Spider-man origin with a much less clear-cut good/evil path.

Of course, the whole good/evil dichotomy is about as interesting as any video game tends to be. While a lot of the evil decisions make more sense than “kick a puppy to be a dick”, they’re presented in a very clear “do this to become a generic archetype” villain fashion.

A moment that stands out most clear to me is being presented with two separate types of posters an artist in the city made. I had a choice to prefer posters representing Cole as a saintly paragon, or as a powerful demi-God to be feared. Naturally the latter poster was the evil choice, which just made me wish to tear my hair out. Think about stories like 1984, where Big Brother manipulated the masses not through fear of his own power, but by making them afraid of a scapegoat. He made a savior of himself to the people, being a beacon of love and all things good despite doing evil things. Or let us consider real life, where propoganda from World War II or even modern day North Korea paints their leaders as warriors of virtue and the common man.

inFamous is a game that could have easily broken down traditional barriers of good vs. evil. I could have played a Magneto character, or Mr. Freeze, characters whose motivations aren’t necessarily bad. Instead, I get Sabertooth or worse, Carnage. Villains whose entire purpose is to be nothing but angry and violent and hateful.

I feel like the story of inFamous was such a missed opportunity. It wouldn’t have been the most original, and ultimately it would have been good “for a video game”, but it also would have been pretty good for a super hero tale. It’s not often you get super heroes that look like your every day man rather than some rip-off of the mainstream ideals, and less often that they play off of adolescent standards of cool and edgy. Here we have a protagonist trying to figure out his new role in life now that he’s been gifted supernatural abilities, who is trying to repair a broken relationship with his girlfriend, dealing with a best friend obsessed with profiting off of the new abilities and a government that’s willing to give orders while taking credit for all of his actions.

It’s a good thing, then, that Sucker Punch was a lot better with the gameplay than they were with the story.