Minecraft: Story Mode – The Complete Adventure (Wii U)

Despite being the best selling video game of all time, Minecraft doesn’t have much of a plot. For a world with so many unique creatures and multiple dimensions to explore, it certainly has the potential for one though, and that’s what Telltale Games aimed to bring us with their title that tries to serve as a standalone story mode for Minecraft. With the dissolution of Telltale Games though, finding the full eight episode experience that is the first season of Minecraft: Story Mode can be difficult, but luckily the Wii U “Complete Adventure” that doesn’t include the later released Season Two does allow you to play through the full first game and experience the first official narrative set in the Minecraft universe.

 

While regular Minecraft is a game about crafting materials to build structures and equipment or surviving in a malleable world where creatures come out at night hungry for your flesh, Minecraft: Story Mode takes on the typical Telltale Games storytelling formula. A mostly linear narrative has multiple junction points where the player is called upon to make a choice or take action, the impact of these on the plot varying from small things like how other characters treat you to determining if certain characters will actually survive the story. Despite being based on a franchise with a wide age range, Minecraft: Story Mode doesn’t pull its punches and does kill off major characters, and the writing can actually make these surprising impactful. They can’t measure up to some of Telltale Games’s better work like The Walking Dead or the Batman games because much of the adventure here is jovial or adventurous rather than serious, but there are dramatic beats and the major threats are treated as such.

 

The first four episodes of Minecraft: Story Mode are a solid continuous narrative. Players are put in the boots of Jesse, a character who starts off with a rather modest goal of winning a local building competition. However, they get roped up in far more serious matters when Jesse and their friends bear witness to a terrible beast known as a Wither Storm as it begins to pull apart the world and pull people up into it to grow into an even larger force of darkness. To help stop it, Jesse seeks out the help of a legendary band of heroes known as The Order of the Stone, but not only does Jesse have issues within their own friend group, but The Order of the Stone has split apart and are just as difficult to work with. This is where many of the dialogue and action choices can influence things as you can build up trust, better befriend certain characters, and ultimately determine some of their fates, and surprisingly enough, the game’s second episode can be completely different based on which member of The Order you chose to seek out.

These first four episodes make great use of not just concepts from Minecraft but the very game mechanics that made that game such a smash hit. Admittedly, when the game wants you to craft an item it’s basically busy work since you can’t really mess it up, but the game does a superb job incorporating things like the fact that every part of this blocky world can be broken with enough effort. If characters get stuck somewhere they know they can break out with enough time and elbow grease and even do so at one point. Items collected from across the adventure will pop up as the crafting materials during those straightforward sections, and monsters even drop items when they die. These elements are usually the kind of things video game adaptations strip away in a search for realism, but since Minecraft: Story Mode doesn’t abandon its limited aesthetic save for gussying up the character models so you can read their emotions, it happily embraces Minecraft’s mechanics. The characters need the same tools to build a portal to the hellish Nether dimension, they need to avoid the Endermen’s gaze to avoid triggering their wrath, they have to use the right layout of slime blocks and pistons to move objects or launch TNT blocks. You can certainly tell the writers knew the game they were adapting well. There are even surprisingly deep cuts for players who know Minecraft deeply, such as referencing the Far Lands where a regular Minecraft game’s terrain generation glitches out if you go impossibly far or how players who need to reach high up areas will sometimes jump in place and drop blocks below them to ascend rapidly with little material cost.

 

This is what makes the second batch of episodes a little less impressive. The first four are a cohesive narrative with plot twists, dramatic moments, and clever uses of staples elements of Minecraft’s world on show. It pretty much covers everything that was in Minecraft at the time, so the second set of episodes seems to start making some things up. After the first adventure, episode 5 kicks off with Jesse and friends finding themselves in a hallway filled with unusual portals that will take them to different worlds. There’s a lose connective thread to the next episodes that this all ties to the Old Builders from the past who could make amazing things from the materials of the Minecraft world, but it has a rather weak payoff that doesn’t make the adventures you go through feel connected to that idea. Even the final episode just feels like another vignette, episodes 5 through 8 feeling like they are from a more episodic show while 1 through 4 were a continuous narrative.

 

That isn’t to say the little tales told in each of the portal stories are bad, they can continue to present stakes, character drama, and intriguing plots, but they definitely don’t feel like they carry the same weight as the Wither Storm story. It certainly doesn’t help that the game starts making up concepts that just wouldn’t work in Minecraft. One story is about a giant supercomputer named PAMA that starts taking over citizens brains to make them useful, and at one point you even wear a VR headset to combat it, and none of this really connects to Minecraft at all save for the fact the technology is nominally powered by redstone and the monsters that PAMA controls are things like zombies, skeletons, and Minecraft’s explosive original creation, the Creepers. Some of them do go for some deep pulls still, a murder mystery episode featuring Youtubers like CaptainSparklez and Stampy Cat who became famous for making Minecraft videos and one episode even features the fan-made sport Spleef where you try to destroy the floor under each other.

This is as good a time as any to mention how you actually interact with the world though. Many moments of Minecraft: Story Mode unfold like a cutscene only for a dialogue choice to emerge, the player given a set amount of time to give a response or choose to remain silent if none of the options suit them. This is what determines the exact path the story takes to its small set of possible conclusions, but there’s enough of a personal touch to the route you take that it feels like the choices do matter to some degree. At other points though, it will still be like watching a cutscene, but button prompts will appear briefly, the player needing to either press the right button or line up and action properly to continue unscathed. These are rather lenient, not only in the timing required being somewhat generous, but the game also seems to get the gist of what you’re trying to do if it asks you to press X but you press Y instead. So long as it’s not an overtly wrong input the game often happily gives it to you, but messing up at some points or doing it too often in others will lead to a death that kicks you back a bit. Rarely an action taken can also be a choice of sorts, but the game usually clearly indicates when an action is of greater importance by instead presenting it as a choice between two text boxes. The last way you’ll typically interact with the world are some free moving segments where the stakes are low and you’re usually solving some sort of inventory puzzle in the vein of classic point and click adventure games. Finding the right item, sussing out clues, and speaking with characters freely instead of in scenes crop up during these, but Minecraft: Story Mode made many of these rather simple, likely to make sure any young players aren’t overwhelmed by them.

 

Since the puzzles are fairly straightforward and the timed button prompts aren’t pushing you to have quick reflexes, the plot is the star of the show, and it does a good job of concocting new scenarios and making the characters you encounter interesting and likeable when they’re meant to be. The Minecraft art style makes some characters look rather uncanny, but Jesse’s pet pig Reuben still manages to have cute moments and there’s a lot of expressiveness to characters like your big dim-witted pal Axel and the adventurous yet level-headed Petra. There’s a surprisingly star-studded voice cast on board to really sell some of the emotion and personality on show. If you choose to play the male version of Jesse, you’ll get Patton Oswalt slipping into the world of Minecraft surprisingly well despite being a comedian of rather high standing. Paul Reubens plays the quirky alchemist Ivor who really comes into his own as episodes 5 through 8 begin to test your relationship with him and show off his stranger personality traits, Jim Cummings does an excellent job when he gets put into a villainous role in the late game, and Brian Posehn’s distinct nasally voice manages to give Axel a more approachable edge rather than having the big tough dolt come off as intimidating. The Youtubers brought in to voice themselves definitely don’t match up to professional voice actors who have been doing this for years, but for the most part, the game does a good job directing its characters both in performance and staging. Sometimes Telltale Games’s trademark mild glitchiness will interfere and characters will teleport when loading goes strangely or they don’t emote properly, but most of the story is told well enough that it’s easy to look past the weaker parts of its telling.

THE VERDICT: While an uneven package since the first four episodes are a consistent narrative and the last four are basically barely connected vignettes, Minecraft: Story Mode – The Complete Adventure still does enough with its source material and the Telltale formula to provide a good time. The story has some emotional moments, your choices make the way it unfolds feel more personal, and the characters can be endearing, fun, and interesting. It pulls its punches when it comes to the actions and puzzles, but it makes clever use of Minecraft mechanics and elements in how it designs its puzzles and builds its plot and world. It’s a fun adventure at the intersection between the world of Minecraft and and the style common to Telltales Games’s output, but it is admittedly weaker than the two things that came together to make it.

 

And so, I give Minecraft: Story Mode – The Complete Adventure for Wii U…

A GOOD rating. The biggest question hanging over Minecraft: Story Mode is why it is eight episodes when Telltale Games usually makes 5 episode adventures. Perhaps the Minecraft license was too good that they didn’t want it to slip away, but after that fourth episode ends, Minecraft: Story Mode’s lack of focus begins to hurt its cohesiveness. While the murder mystery and confrontation with PAMA and so on all have their appeal, the first four episodes pack the stronger punch because there is more weight to your choices, the character interaction is stronger, and it feels like a story not just firmly rooted in Minecraft’s world, but one that explores every cranny it has to bring you something that feels like it could be a true Story Mode for the game. Episode 2 having entirely different stories based on what you picked at the end of Episode 1 is nifty but does lead to perhaps the most bare feeling parts of the narrative, but for the most part, each episode does bring a few interesting things to the table when it comes to the unraveling plots, be they the longer narrative or the self-contained episodes. The action and puzzles could use some more compelling elements or greater difficulty to make the gameplay outside of dialogue choices more engaging, and the Minecraft elements of crafting and building should definitely be more than going through the motions or hammering a button rapidly respectively, but the base product is still an exciting and memorable adventure that comes together into something fun and surprisingly emotional despite its multiple avenues for potential improvement.

 

If Minecraft: Story Mode was going to go for the longer format than it really should have done a better job of making the final four episodes feel more strongly connected. There’s even a hint at the end of the episodes they could be that just doesn’t go anywhere unfortunately. The story could have been condensed down into five episodes instead and given the Wither Storm narrative more room to breathe and pack in more dramatic moments. It does feel like Telltale Games bit off more than they knew what to do with with Minecraft: Story Mode – The Complete Adventure, but that doesn’t mean they failed with what they did. It was a huge opportunity and they did a pretty good job with the tales they chose to tell, and I’m certainly glad I was able to find a version of the game that would still provide every episode even after the downfall of the developer. It’s pretty easy to say a plot set in Minecraft’s world could do so much more, but this game definitely found plenty to work with to make their particular version of a Minecraft story mode an interesting one.