Games with the Worst Stories

Game stories have come a long way in the past 20 years, from simple "rescue the princess" yarns to vast cinematic operas spanning multiple games.  However, with all of the recent storytelling "hits" of gaming, there's bound to be a few "misses" as well...Here are some of the games I think have the WORST stories.  Oh yeah...spoiler alert.


Street Fighter (series)
So there's this dude, Mike Ty...er, M. Bison, and he's eeeevil.  He's a despotic dictator who rules over Thailand with an iron fist, and he possesses the powerful and mysterious Psycho Power, making him one of the most formidable warriors in the world.  His master plan?  Take over the world...by hosting illegal underground street fighting tournaments. 
Forget marching on the major world superpowers, steamrolling through waves of troops and tanks with one Psycho Crusher after another, this guy clearly prefers economic domination - after all, there've been so many Street Fighter games that he's bound to have made a pretty penny in illegal underground street fighting tournament entry fees, right?

Assassin's Creed
This series is unfortunate enough to actually contain two stories in one.  Oh, the core stories are just fine - Altair seeking to bring order to the Middle East by assassinating dangerous Templar rulers, and Ezio seeking to eliminate a team of conspirators plotting to set themselves up on the papal throne, while simultaneously avenging his family's murder.  But the whole "present day Desmond" thing - we've got modern-day templars, an underground society of assassins (think Kill Bill, not Wanted) with a subscription to the history channel, mind control apples, pseudo time travel, conspiracy theories, end of the world disaster movie type stuff...oh yeah.  And aliens. 
I would much rather the games just be self-contained stories of the individual assassins, situated in their own time periods.  Ezio's quest for family vengeance is interesting and empathetic.  This whole Desmond/Abstergo trainwreck is just a mess. 

Gears of War 2
The problem with the story in Gears 2 isn't that it's bad, it's that the whole story element is just so poorly handled.  The war with the Locust was established in the first game, so in the second game we'll actually explore why we're fighting, right?  Nope.  Gears 2's  story is business as usual - the Locust is still killing us, though we're not sure why.  We also learn that the Locust are capturing humans and imprisoning them in little metal coffins underground.  Why?  They're not using them as labor, since they just sort of sit there, they're not eating them, since the prisoners all just waste away.  The only thing they ARE using them for is torture victims - which means that the Locust have just decided to go with the cartoony evil route. 
They come so close in this game - introducing the Sires hints that maybe the humans and Locust are closely related, or maybe that somehow the humans had a hand in the Locust development.  But instead of using the remaining 2 acts of the game to explore the whole secret Sire production facility, they just leave it hanging.  The Locust Queen looking and sounding totally human - you'd like some background into what's going on there, wouldn't you?  Too bad.  The story in this game is just a series of events that get introduced, never explored, and forgotten.  Though Epic tried their damndest to get us to empathize with their protagonists this time around....MARIA!!!

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Now see if you can follow me here - Vader, your master, kills you, and then brings you back to life and uses you to help him plot against the Emperor, while you are secretly plotting with the Rebels to kill both of them, and it turns out that the Emperor orchestrated the entire thing the whole time.  The problem with this game is that it Forrest Gumps a lot of the classic Star Wars story - Starkiller is directly responsible for the creation of the Rebel Alliance, which would be fine, if there weren't already a backstory that discusses that in great detail.
The most insulting thing about the story is when it's revealed that Palpatine was the guy pulling all the strings, all the way down to creating the Alliance, which aside from being completely non-canonical doesn't make any sense - he creates an opponent for him to fight a war against which ends up killing him.  Maybe I'm just a crazy Star Wars purist (ok, I definitely am) but that's a bit of a stretch by any account.

Bayonetta
You're an Umbran Witch/bounty hunter/borderline prostitute - one half of a light/dark balance of power thing, and you spend your time killing angels/Lumen Sages/birds with baby faces until you're killed/not killed/locked at the bottom of a lake(?) by your own people.  Then you're found by a man who inadvertently frees you and you kill him/don't kill him/disappearance plot device him, and you're chased by his journalist son who wants the truth/your bod.
In your quest for answers you discover a little girl who is your daughter/you from the past, and the 3 of you learn that you were betrayed by your mentor/secret enemy/frienemy and that you are/possess/have heard of some ancient artifact that will awaken god/bring on the apocalypse/allow David Bowie to take over the world.
Honestly, I think they just stopped trying to write a story after the second act.  Towards the end, not only does it make no sense but it just keeps going.  There are literally like 5 final boss fights in this game.  It seems like Platinum has some closure issues.
What the hell is the Left Eye anyways??

Modern Warfare 2
It's Red Dawn.
Only without the 80's red scare or Patrick Swayze to make it charming in retrospect.  Considering this is a series that strives for realism, the story is almost completely implausible - a U.S. spec-ops agent infiltrates a Russian-based terrorist cell who attacks a Russian airport.  You're found out, and they kill you and leave you there so it looks like American elements randomly attacked a bunch of Russian civilians.
The Russian president, rather than, you know, picking up a phone ("Yo, Barack, what gives?"), just decides off the cuff to launch a FULL SCALE INVASION OF THE U.S.
And the invasion is successful.
Yeah.  I know.  All we needed is for Price to yell "Avenge me!!"

So as these examples illustrated, for every game that's got a crack team of writers working on the story, there's one that turns out like a giant brainstorming session.  I didn't even take aim at older games from generations of consoles ago, because that would just be too easy in a lot of cases.  Fortunately, story, while a big part, is still only part of a game.  Many of the games that made this list are still very fun to play - they just won't be winning any pulitzers any time soon.