This may be a controversial view, but I enjoy “Chosen One” stories. A lot of them are cliched, yes, but when you run across a great one, it can be a very rewarding reading experience. It’s all a matter of how the author executes it.

A sufficiently talented author knows how to write this kind of story without losing the tension. The big thing it comes down to is making any prophecies open-ended. Don’t have the prophecy spell out everything that’s going to happen. Don’t tell us that the Chosen One is going to succeed. That takes all the suspense out of the story.

One of my best examples for this is the Harry Potter series.

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE SERIES YET.

Rowling handles the Chosen One trope very well in my opinion. For one thing, you don’t find out until the fifth book that Harry is the Chosen One. Even then, the prophecy you’re given is open-ended. Harry can defeat Voldemort. There’s no guarantee that he will.

Instead of taking away tension, this introduces more tension. Now you know that Harry is the world’s best chance of defeating Voldemort, but you don’t know that he’ll succeed. As the reader, you feel the pressure Harry feels as he struggles to find a way to defeat Voldemort. It’s an unimaginable amount of pressure.

This works even better because the prophecy is not his sole motivation. At this point, he’s suffered so much because of Voldemort, and he’s taken it upon himself to defeat Voldemort regardless of the prophecy. And that’s the beauty of a well-done Chosen One story. The hero is not doing things solely because prophecy says they should. The prophecy is just one piece of what motivates them.

Similarly, you can look at The Wheel of Time for a Chosen One story done very well. In this case, Robert Jordan accomplishes it through the creation of a deep and complex world and throwing a great deal of ambiguity into the prophecy and the outcome of the final battle. Even if you think Rand will defeat the Dark One at the end, you don’t know how it’s going to happen, or if Rand will survive the battle.

Then there are all the other characters. These prophecies say nothing about what they’re supposed to do. By having a cast of so many characters you care about, it takes a lot of focus away from the direct Chosen One/prophecy narrative. It’s a story of a prophecy, but it’s also a story of all these other characters connected to the prophecy, some more directly than others. And that makes it very enjoyable (despite a bit of a slog through the middle portion of the series).

There are countless other examples, but these are two of the most prominent that come to mind. I’m not going to talk much about the Belgariad, for example, because I don’t think Eddings handled the prophecy aspect of the story quite as well. It’s a fun, light read, but I never felt any doubt about the final outcome.

What about you? What are some of your favorite Chosen One stories?

The other day, I started this series off by celebrating Harry Potter, the series of books that made me want to be a writer. Today, I’m switching gears and celebrating one of my favorite childhood video games, Chrono Trigger. This is one of the games that first began my interest in fantasy as a genre.

It’s also, not coincidentally, considered one of the best video games ever made. For those who may not know, Chrono Trigger is a JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) originally developed by Square and release for the Super Nintendo way back in 1995. (For those who might be wondering, I was 5 years old back then.)

When I first played the game, I was probably too young to really get it, but it was still one of my favorite games. It was just so much fun to feel like you were part of this epic story that was unfolding. The game starts innocently enough, with Crono, the main character, going to a festival to celebrate the coming of  a new millennium.

But when he bumps into a young woman at the fair and she decides to enjoy the festivities with him, things take a crazy turn. Through a bizarre interaction between magic and technology, the young woman is sent back in time four hundred years. Naturally, Crono follows her, and that starts the adventure.

In all, you visit six different time periods in the game: a prehistoric world where humans and dinosaurs live side by side, a world of magical floating islands and a frozen wasteland below, the middle ages, the present day, the day of the apocalypse, and a post-apocalyptic future. This diversity of settings made Chrono Trigger something new that you hadn’t seen before then. Most fantasy settings up until then, in both books and games, tended to stick to pretty typical medieval-ish settings.

When I first played the game, I didn’t realize just how amazing these settings were. Now, as a fantasy writer myself, I can really appreciate the creativity involved in this. Even more amazing is the fact that the developers managed to tell an epic, complex, and coherent story that spanned all these different time periods.

And the characters were so much fun to spend time with. Even though this was before the age of long cutscenes and spoken dialogue, I felt like I knew these people. From the prehistoric warrior Ayla to the futuristic robot Robo, they were all distinct and interesting, and they were fleshed out with the perfect amount of dialogue.

A lot of people might say you can’t learn anything from video games that you can apply to your writing, but I have to disagree. Games like Chrono Trigger are a big part of what made me a writer, and it still influences my writing to this day. You’ll see my love for time travel, for example, in the final book of World in Chains series. And my main character in that series, Nadia, takes a fair amount of inspiration from Marle, one of the main characters in Chrono Trigger. Some people might scoff at taking inspiration from video games, but there’s still a lot to be learned. And, of course, you have an entire genre based on video games now, LitRPG. I’m toying with the idea of writing one myself, but I need to do some research first.

Regardless of what I do or do not write, Chrono Trigger will always hold a special place in my heart, and in the hearts of many others.

What about you? What fantasy video games have you really enjoyed?