Franchises with convoluted lore

[Spirit]

As Zelda fans we're pretty familiar with what messy and convoluted can mean in terms of lore, especially when things that dont make much/any sense then start retconning and contradicting themselves, much like Zelda is prone to doing.

Though which other franchises are you a fan of that have such nonsensical lore that most of the time you catch yourself watching/playing purely for the gameplay, characters and pretty colours?

I myself am a fan of Evangelion, its balls to the wall nuts, the original series has so many holes and ignored details that by the end of the series (and End of Eva) things that happen seem to happen because reasons...

I've heard that Kingdom Hearts has become needlessly complicated and Fire Emblem, while not being as bad as Zelda or Evangelion, has a rich-yet-difficult-to-soak up lore with some games linking and some existing entirely in other universes.

But which franchises would you care to mention that have lore so complex/deep/convoluted that you love but struggle to keep neat in your head?

 

[Jamie]

Kingdom Hearts really isn't very complicated assuming you've played all of the games. It's fairly straightforward. Dragon Ball is quite a mess not from a lore perspective but from how powerful the characters are, sometimes even in relation to themselves and their other forms. Seems to change all of the time. Zelda is of course a complete mess.

 

[Kylo Ken]

Shin Megami Tensei/Persona has a timeline that's complicated, you'd need a whole day just to understand the base one, lol.

 

[the8thark]

But which franchises would you care to mention that have lore so complex/deep/convoluted that you love but struggle to keep neat in your head?

Warcraft
The World of Warcraft lore is a total mess. It jumps all over the place, double's back on itself and many times makes no sense at all.

 

[Spirit]

Shin Megami Tensei/Persona has a timeline that's complicated, you'd need a whole day just to understand the base one, lol.

Oh really? I wanted to try those games but a muddled lore puts me off.

 

[Kylo Ken]

Oh really? I wanted to try those games but a muddled lore puts me off.

Yeah, most look something like this

 

[Spirit]

Yeah, most look something like this

Holy hell. Love the 'no nuclear holocaust' bit...

I thought some numbered Personas were there own universes. In this case i hope Persona5 is newcomer friendly since i like the look of it.

 

[Mido]

Warcraft
The World of Warcraft lore is a total mess. It jumps all over the place, double's back on itself and many times makes no sense at all.

Definitely true, and I find it more difficult to follow as time goes on. Just about the only thing I still understand well is Arthas's story. Granted, my WoW heyday was during those Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King years. Never had the chance to play the original Warcraft games though.

The last thing I watched that embodied this sort of thing was Dimension W. The main story was rather straightforward, but there were a few heavy concepts thrown out in the story that were definitely difficult to wrap my head around. I enjoyed the short series, but my mind was puzzled thinking about some of the concepts introduced.

 

[Morbid Minish]

A lot of people say that Kingdom Hearts is hard to follow, but I agree with Jamie that it's not too complicated if you've played all of/most of the games.

Being a huge horror movie fan, one that comes to mind is the Saw franchise. It seems like each movie added a bit more confusion as to what was really going on.

 

[Castle]

The Myst series started off innocently enough. It really had no premise. You're on an island. Nothing makes sense. There are these books with quicktime videos in the pages that link you to other islands. There's this weird dude who writes these books, his sons are jerks, he has a wife for no apparent reason. The lore of the first game was self contained and pretty rich, outlining the history of the various islands and providing some insight into the people who lived there.

Riven was released and it was a direct continuation of Myst, picking up right where Myst left off on a cliffhanger. Now you've got this dude's dad - dude's name is Atrus, btw - and he's a megalomaniac with a god complex. He's holding Atrus' wife, Catherine, hostage and you gotta #dealwithit. Riven presented a rich vibrant history but also introduced a load of backstory. Turns out those books were a trick figured out by a race of humans called the D'ni who lived in a cavern deep under the earth. These Linking Books are a sort of transdimensional travel. Writers describe the world they want to link to and, BAM! Confused yet? There was a trilogy of books written about the D'ni and what happened to them, and from then on the games followed Atrus - a surviving D'ni - as he attempted to save his people and restore their lost civilization while dealing with potentially fatal familial issues that would inevitably crop up in each game.

Now, despite the deep intricacies of the lore everything was all self contained and coherent up until... Myst Online, originally known as Uru. The developers, Cyan, decided to make a Myst MMO that bombed spectacularly, but due to the nature of the narrative and its first person perspective up until then in order to do so they had to take every other game and the novels out of context and perform a sweeping in-universe retcon that rendered all the previous material as "fiction" and introducing new elements to the lore and things that conflicted with what was previously understood. Now nothing made sense, even in its own context. New themes were introduced from out of nowhere with no existing contextual basis for Uru's short lived narrative arc that ended without resolution. It was a real mess for the sake of a ****ty MMO that wrecked the lore. Fortunately the stand alone games can be enjoyed separately from Myst Online.

 

[Stitch]

The Halloween and X-Men film series both have pretty convoluted lore, each have retcons and spin-off movies that make no sense in the canon.