video game movies Archives - 24 Hour Movie Marathon!

Lists of Video Games With Great Stories

The internet has some opinions on what video games have the best stories. Two sources seemed to be helpful the most helpful.

The first is the WatchMojo video embedded below. This video takes you on a visual tour of video games recognized as having great stories.

The second was this article from geek.com. It not only identified video games with great stories, it provides YouTube videos directly in the article. Nice!

The Video Game Movie Marathon Playlist

Based on these two sources, I created a YouTube playlist containing the “movie editions” of 23 unique video games, clocking in at 114 hours of content. That’s 4.75 days of video game movie watching. For reference, Breaking Bad is 2 days and 14 hours. That’s just half the time of this playlist.

Factoring in a good eight hours of sleep per day, that is seven days of video game movies! Now there’s a movie marathon!

I’ve embedded the playlist below for your clicking pleasure. I’ve already started with the first movie, The Last of Us, and have been enjoying it. Good luck, and happy watching!

Video games don’t seem to translate very well to movies. Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 25 “best” movies adapted from video games has exactly zero movies rated “fresh”. And boy oh boy, some of the “best” are also some of the absolute worst cinema has to offer.

For this reason, a video game movie marathon may be ill-advised. The funny thing is, some video games are so rich in story, character, and special effects, it’s a shame they need to be “adapted” to a movie format in the first place. The first video games that come to mind are the Final Fantasy series of games.
With completion times of 40 hours and up, players spend a lot of time in just a single Final Fantasy game. A lot of this time is fighting monsters, but a lot of this time is also getting to know the characters and driving forward the storyline. While monster-fighting is fun, it always seemed like a shame to me that the story couldn’t be replayed on “auto-pilot”, so to speak, to relive some of the plot.

Thanks to YouTube, it looks like I need not worry any longer. People out there with a lot of time and video editing skills have composed “movie” versions of video game play-throughs. They are called Let’s Play, and there are entire archives of them.

So, getting back to Final Fantasy, a quick search reveals three YouTube movies playing through Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII-2, and Final Fantasy XIII-3 (as an example – there are others). Even edited down to remove all monster-fight scenes, these movies are about eight, seven, and nine hours long, respectively. Collectively, they total 24 hours and 47 minutes of content. It’s a movie marathon in just three YouTube videos!

I’ve embedded each movie below for your convenience. The next time you have 24 hours to spare, and don’t want to invest brain cells in learning how to control characters, manage items, or defeat monsters, this is the movie marathon for you!

Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Final Fantasy XIII-3

Photo by bochalla