I was thinking about this while doing my errands for the day and a prequel is a tricky thing to get right. In general I am not opposed to them but a lot can be said against them, a lot of very valid points. For instance, a prequel is essentially telling you a story that you already know. It can be hard to make that truly interesting since no matter what twists and surprises there are you know how it ends. Watching Anakin Skywalker fall to the Dark Side in Star Wars isn't interesting because how he got there isn't important. No matter what happens in those films we knew right from the start that he was going to join the Sith. The details of that don't matter since already know the outcome.
In a similar way it's difficult to put true drama into a prequel since we already know the fate of specific characters. To use Star Wars as an example again there's no threat when Obi-Wan fights Jango Fett or General Greivous because we know he lives to see Episode IV. Order 66 isn't shocking because we know the Jedi get almost entirely wiped out. Count Dooku dying isn't engaging because we know he isn't around for the original trilogy. Prequels are tricky things but I think there have been games that got them right.
Which games are effective prequels
I would say
Halo: Reach is an effective prequel. The reason why is because the fate of Reach is not the focus of the story. The first thing we learn in
Halo: Combat Evolved is that Reach has fallen; there's no point in making a game 9 years later that tells us again. The game was advertised on the notion that we already knew Reach was going to fall. However, one thing the Halo games had never really achieved was showing us what the war with the Covenant had done to humanity. I remember a quote from
Halo 3 in which Lord Hood, commander of the UNSC fleet, tells the Arbiter that he cannot forgive his newfound ally for what his kind had done to humanity. At that time we had never really seen what the Covenant had done to humanity though. Sure we had heard about it but never seen it. Even in
Halo 2 and
3, when the fighting was taking place on Earth, it was either in the jungle or a military base or an evacuated city. The human cost of the war was never addressed.
Reach used an event every Halo fan knew about as context to show us that human cost. We saw terrified farmers cowering from shadows in the night. We saw the common man taking up arms to defend their livlihoods. We saw civilians cradling their dead, couples crying out of fear, childrens' backpacks soaked in blood. We saw refugees mercilessly gunned down by ruthless aliens and the Army unable to do anything about it. We saw as the planet got ravaged by the Covenant's glassing beams and the focus at every step was on who it was happening to, not the fact that it was happening.
Reach wasn't trying to tell a story we already knew; it was giving us a better understanding of a world we loved. It used the fact that we knew Reach's fate as a way of helping us focus on what they really wanted to. We weren't distracted by wondering if Noble Team would succeed in repelling the invasion because we knew they wouldn't and that let us pay real attention to how the war with the Covenant was really affecting mankind.
On top of that
Reach introduced us to the Spartan-IIIs and Catherine Halsey for the first time in game. This made Halsey's place in
Halo 4 less of a curveball, as well as easing us into the idea of Spartan-IVs. More importantly,
Reach put an emphasis on humanising the Spartans. Noble Team had names and personalities, histories, relationships and faces. As I've said, showing us what the war did to humanity was
Reach's focus and showing us that Spartans really are human also introduced the main theme of
Halo 4, making
Reach a prequel which looked to the future and not the past. This is why I think it was effective.
and which prequels come to mind that have failed their purpose?
On the flip side to that we have
Resident Evil Zero.
RE0 did focus on telling a story but it wasn't just one we already knew the outcome of, it was one that had been told before.
RE0 was intended to show what happened to the S.T.A.R.S Bravo Team the day before the events of the original
Resident Evil. What happened to them was told in the original game though. People sometimes forget but S.T.A.R.S actual mission in
RE was to find out what had happened to Bravo Team and they did exactly that. During their search of the mansion every member of Bravo Team was found and accounted for. They found Edward's severed hand outside just before being attacked by zombie dogs. They hear Kenneth's final gunshot almost immediately after entering the mansion. Jill finds Richard after he gets half eaten by a giant snake while Chris finds Rebecca alive and well and spends the rest of his time keeping her safe. They find Forest dead on a balcony and then find Enrico in the catacombs before he gets murdered.
Although
RE doesn't explicitly say it, the story is frightfully easy to piece together. Bravo Team touched down in the woods and were attacked by zombie dogs which killed Edward. They fled into the nearby mansion and then promptly got seperated. Individually they tried their best to survive but one-by-one succumbed to some horrible fate just as the Alpha Team arrived to rescue them. This story is so easy to piece together because
it is exactly what happens to the Alpha Team. Seriouly, Alpha touch down
at Bravo Team's landing site and get attacked by zombie dogs
in the exact spot where Edward was killed. The dogs even kill one of Alpha Team, Joseph. They then flee to the mansion where they get separated. the only reason Alpha Team don't all die is because they're the more skilled team, the ones who have military backgrounds and are in Alpha Team for a reason.
RE0 really didn't need to exist at all. But since they couldn't make the original again except this time everyoe dies, Capcom... elaborated. And by that I mean needlessly complicated the story and made the series jump the shark. Don't get me wrong, Resident Evil was already stretching the suspension of disbelief but up until then the most ridiculous thing they had was a schizophrenic crossdresser and is insanity really that much of a hard thing to believe?
RE0 turned around and said that not only was there an Umbrella owned mansion in the Arklay Mountains there was also a training facility for the company's management and a private railroad that got them to the stupidly remote location. This training facility was several miles from the mansion (since the mansion was pretty close to Bravo Team's landing site and Rebecca had to take a pretty fast moving train to get to the training facility) and yet we have to believe that members of Bravo Team made it through miles and miles of monster infested woodland alone to get there too? Then there's James Marcus, the inventor of the T-Virus. Apparently he died ten years ago but his DNA was absorbed by leeches that saw him as a father and they created a clone-thing of him that took revenge on Umbrella by releasing the T-Virus in the Arklay Mountains.
There are two things I want to say about James Marcus in
RE0. First, the T-Virus is used by leeches to ressurect him as clone with telepathic powers and a fatal allergy to sunlight. That's a trait the virus never had before and never had ever again. Introducing something like that just so they could have a villain who wasn't Wesker was both rubbish for story and nonsensical. Second, the idea that Marcus infected the mansion from
RE complicates the story we knew. Since Wesker's
whole scheme in the original was to get combat data on the monsters in the mansion and since he had been a researcher there and had full access it made perfect sense that he had released the virus that lead to the deaths that Bravo Team were sent to investigate, the same Bravo Team that Alpha Team was sent to find. Suddenly introducing Marcus who infected the lab by singing from a mountain top while wearing a dress added a step to the story that was out of place and unecessary as well as spoiling what was until then a perfectly logical story event.
Bascally the issue with
RE0 as a prequel is that it tried to tell a story that had been told before only to tell it worse and in such a way that complicated what was already known and sent the series on a slope that lead to midget pirates, sunken cities in the Mediterranean and aircraft carriers with faces and hands. Rather than answer some questions or fill in some story details,
RE0 rewrote the past (a bit like
Skyward Sword in some reagrds) and did a terrible job of it. This is why I think it failed in its purpose.
Like I said, prequels are tricky, but I think the ones that work are the ones which don't focus on the story itself and use what knowledge we have going into them to just build a stronger universe for their respetive franchise.
Halo: Reach got that spot on in my opinion and I welcome more prequels that do the same.
