A lot of things get pushed into another form of media. A movie comes from a book, a book comes from a video game, a video game comes from a movie, etc. Many times, this doesn't work as well as anticipated. You no doubt know as well as I do that comparisons to the original are unavoidable.

I believe a work of art should stand up in its media independently. In the Halo games, I feel like the story gets a bit thinned out from all the shooting. But people tell me that halo has an amazing story and background if you just read the books. I don't buy that, because Halo needs to stand up as a game independently. The mechanics and such is solid, but what I felt to be a thin story cannot be excused by a story in another form of media. Someone told once told me they didn't like how one of the characters was changed from the Halo books in the Halo Reach game. This needs to stop. I'm glad I haven't read the books because it helped me enjoy the game better. When a story is told on a bunch of different forms of media like comic books, things get messy because fans worry about what is considered “canon” from the transition from comic books to cinema. This gets in the way of experiencing an independent story when other stuff is partially attached to it. I just watched all the Star Wars movies, and found the new trilogy a bit boring, because it spends too much time with people just standing around talking. I expressed the desire for a different story to have been told to have made it more exciting, but I was told that they had to follow the books and setup everything that was in the original trilogy. This is an odd example of stories from two forms of media weighing down a story.

Each media has it's own little quirks. Movies have time constraints and thus have fewer details. Books can have many details and must be compelling in a way that makes you keep reading. Television shows tend to come in half hour chunks with exciting points at the end of each. Video games are interactive unlike the rest, so the story must be delivered in a way that firmly ties it into gameplay to be most engaging and effective. So a story in one media won't work as well in another.

THE SUMMARIZED POINT OF THIS JOURNAL: I firmly hold the opinion that each story must stand alone in the form of media it was created.