The Story of ‘For Honor’ Is the Most Fantastic Nonsense

While games are arguably still quite behind film and TV in terms of narrative sophistication, the medium's not without examples of deep and complex premises. 2016's Firewatch dealt with the brutal reality of dementia, focusing on the toll it takes on the victim's family as loved ones are slowly forgotten, and potentially driven away. It was powerful stuff. And there are fans of The Last of Us who'll swear its harrowing cross-country trip represents one of the finest sci-fi tales told this side of the 20th century novels that inspired it.

But then something comes along like For Honor. Oh boy. Talk about a game at the opposite end of the reality spectrum.

Which is not a dig—we all need a dive into fantasy from time to time, and video games are great facilitators of that. But this is a fever dream straight from a 12-year-old boy's mind, made manifest. What would happen if samurai warriors, regal knights and roaring Vikings fought each other? It's a reasonable question, for a kid. Samurai, cool. Knights, cool. Vikings, cool. (Come on, enough time's passed, people of Northumberland.) So it adds up that, should these warriors all meet in a big field and kick the snot out of each other, that'd be cool, too. Right? Right.

This is the concept that underpins For Honor, and Ubisoft Montreal has gone ahead and run with it. But how to make this coming together occur convincingly, however relatively? Wormholes? Magic? Some new strand of alternative history? Whatever way you try to process the problem, there's no sensible, grounded solution. We're talking, after all, about civilizations separated by thousands of miles, spanning similar-ish but certainly not perfectly aligned periods of history. About taking them, and smashing them into each other, like action figures from different toy lines, for giggles.

Ubisoft's solution, ultimately, to how these factions arrived at the same place is so devastatingly simple that you rather feel they just didn't try. Or, that they ran into so many closed doors, narratively, that there was no other option than to not really bother.

An opening cinematic explains all we need to know—if we even need to know that much, to be honest, in order to enjoy the lunacy of these characters coming up against each other. A catastrophe befalls the world, where serious tectonic activity gives the planet's surface a 60-minute makeover and suddenly all three warrior factions find they have some new, fairly stabby neighbors to contend with. Immediately, the world is embroiled in war—one that lasts a thousand years apparently.

And that's it. That is all we get. The game just gets on with embracing play-time fun, albeit of an exacting variety when it comes to combat, without weighing the player down with hours of exposition. I mean, a thousand years of war, before now? There has to be depth to that. And there are audio logs scattered throughout the game's campaign, narrated by antagonist Apollyon (yes, as in the angel of death), but they're really just set dressing, draped over a very silly indeed story. It's there if you want it. [Editor's note: this is also why the game is perfect for Klingons. - DR]

But, like 2016's equally plot-thin DOOM, For Honor acknowledges that its players aren't here for the words, for the why behind what they're doing right now. You turned up to see a samurai fuck up a Viking with a katana, and For Honor is here to deliver that in spades.

Despite all this talk of For Honor being juvenile, it's certainly not for kids. The executions alone are enough to give the title its PEGI 18 age rating, especially the Kensei's Insert New Spine execution which will be in my nightmares for a while to come. (Silliness and fantasy aren't just for kids, of course.) For all its beautifully realistic graphics and gritty executions, though, For Honor embraces the puerile side of video games in a way that few big-budget titles have in recent years.

Following the grittiness of series like Call of Duty and Gears of War, video game stories from big publishers have regularly clung to at least a semblance of realism. Even zombies can't just happen anymore—there has to be some virus or fungus that caused them, rather than just the bonkers idea of the dead rising and wanting to eat brains.

For Honor eschews this approach in favor of throwing three factions of warrior badasses into an arena and screaming "fight" at the top of its lungs. It's nonsense of the highest order, and you know what? It's bloody brilliant.

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