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Verses with the Deepest Lore (per media)

LoudCloud

LoudCloud

822
63
I've noticed how many Verses there are here with very expansive and detailed lore. So I decided to make a casual thread dedicated to discussing and comparing the Verses with the deepest lore per media type.

These will be:

Overall/Cross-over media:

Western Comic books:

Manga:

Anime:

Western Animation:

MMOGs:

Video Games:

Literature:

Live-action TV shows:

Movies:

Just some rules:

1. Non-canon stuff doesn't count unless it's part of it's own, separate, cohesive Universe (eg. Star Wars Legends) or included in the canon Verse's Multiverse (eg. Marvel/DC comics).

2. When discussing the lore for a specific media, stuff that belongs outside of that media (eg. spin-off comics when discussing movies) only count if they are canon (eg. DB Super anime in relation to the original manga) and if the Verse doesn't rely too much on them to have a deep lore (this is a bit subjective but it's to stop the discussions on certain media to be dependant on stuff outside of it).

3. Some similar media has been kept separate (eg. Western comics and manga, MMOGs and classic video games) for the sake of expanding the conversation.

Feel free to add media I've not mentioned (like visual novels). If this thread becomes popular enough I might make one about genres (fantasy, sci-fi) rather than media.
 
Western Comics: Homestuck

Manga: No idea

Anime: No idea

Western Animation: Adventure Time

MMOGs: World of Warcraft?

Video Games: Elder Scrolls

Literature: Keys to the Kingdom

Live-action TV shows: No idea

Movies: No idea
 
Anime: Digimon. Only lore filled anime that wasn't a manga originally that I can really think of.

Western Animation: Adventure Time, easily. I mean, just look at this. But that's already said. I'd say that Legend Quest, Gravity Falls or Martin Mystery are seconds. Simpsons lore is also unironically deep, theirs an hour long group of videos detailing Simpsons lore (i'm so not kidding)

Video Games: Elder Scrolls. There are several sites dedicated to Elder Scrolls lore, and it is pretty fascinating.

Literature: Hard to choice. Lord of the Rings is the obvious answer, but several fantasy works since then have comparable scales of mythology.

Live-action TV shows: Friends Probably Star Trek.

Movies: Other then what's been said above, Pirates of the Caribbean has a pretty deep mythology.
 
Dunno about many others in different media, but I know for basically certain that Soulsborn has some of the deepest lore of video games.
 
Touhou is a pretty big mess from time to time, lore-wise. So many media and books full of lore. Though maybe not to the extent of stuff like TES.

I don't know where the SCP Foundation fits, but it's certainly up there when it comes to deep lore.

I vote Cthulhu Mythos for Book.
 
Warhammer 40,000 is pretty ******* insane with stuff like this. There are hundreds of full length novels with more and more being released each year, and that's not counting stuff like short stories or novellas. Then there's video games, audio books, and the vast majority of rules and standalone games ever produced for the franchise include even more lore. There are full-length novels that can cover a single campaign fought on a single planet in a single backwoods system of the galaxy. There is canon lore so far hidden and inaccessible that it is virtually impossible to find. It would take countless hours to read through every piece of still canon lore for Warhammer 40,000 media ever produced, assuming no breaks whatsoever.

This has been going on for the past 30 years, with more stuff released each and every month. It's one of the few franchises I can think of where, as a joke, you can say just about anything, and something similar probably actually exists somewhere in the lore just by virtue of sheer scale.
 
Game: TES, definitely. No contest at all. The Knowledgable Members for TES including me are having a lot of trouble pinning down exact power levels for everything.

Western Comic books: DC?

Manga: Digimon

Anime: N/A

Western Animation: Adventure Time

Book: Cthulhu Mythos

Literature: SCP Foundation. Usually no but Sarkism Hub and other stuff gives it this spot

Live Action TV: dunno

Movies: LOTR
 
Darkanine said:
Video Games: Elder Scrolls. There are several sites dedicated to Elder Scrolls lore, and it is pretty fascinating.
Click to expand...
I invite you to watch me and other KM List people debate on et'ada's power in TES
 
Riiingo said:
-snip-
Click to expand...
My friend made me watch a full length documentary on YouTube about Elder Scrolls lore and cosmology and I still don't know 1/10th the stuff you guys were discussing in that thead.
 
It's far from the deepest, but World of Final Fantasy has a lot of unironically deep lore for a chibi anniversary game.
 
Doctor Who is just immense. Literallly hundreds of novels, comics, and audio in addition to the hundreds of TV episodes. I challenge anyone to top all this.

What's so staggering is not just the scope and deth of the lore, but the consistency of all this information. This is what you get when you go to the trouble of having most of your writers be huge fans of your series and also make them read a continuity bible. Marvellous beyond belief.
 
Darkanine said:
Riiingo said:
-snip-
Click to expand...
snip agai
Click to expand...
kind of like speaking a foreign language.


but even with my extremely superior knowledge than 90% of the staff and mostly everyone on that verse.. i still admit I am still only knowledgable of about 79% of lore. But that is hella fast considering I started researching lore THREE MONTHS AGO.
 
Not particularly deep lore, but the Half-Life series is an exellent example of a series that uses environs as opposed to boring exposition logs to make a verse seem very large and very real. A bullet-ridden skeleton on an escape route, a gun-clentching corpse in a zombie-ridden street, and a box of grenades and an empty six-pack next to a folding chair overlooking an ideal chokepoint can tell meaningful and memorable stories by just being there for the player to observe during gameplay, as opposed to boring the player with a pointless history lesson.
 
Laughing Manson said:
Movies: Star Wars(?)
Click to expand...
Pretty sure this comes under Overall/Crossover media.

In this category, I'd say Star Wars Legends. It has 800+ comic books and novels, 120+ video games across all platforms, a handful of old Legends animated series (all but one are obscure), I don't know how many tabletop games, literally thousands of characters across 100,000+ years of galactic history.
 
Well, for video games, without a single moment of hesitation, The Elder Scrolls takes it. Western Animation, I'd say either Adventure Time and a close second would be Gravity Falls. Live-Action, Doctor Who followed by Supernatural
 
I think La Leyenda might actually have more lore than Gravity Falls, if not just for how longer it is and much often it delves into the lore. Theirs 5 movies a Netflix series. Each movie delves into various supernatural aspects and monsters of Mexican mythologies, and each Netflix episode fleshes out the mythologies of other countries. By the end of it, theirs a timeline that stretches over 100,000 years with wars between Gods, mysticism and supernatural races.

A lot of people call the series a "poor mans Gravity Falls" but I really enjoy it.
 
Games by Nihon Falcom don't have much lore as in "lore from some musty old book about boring higher-dimensional nnsense that happened millenia ago," but they do give all their NPCs names, unique dialogue that changes over the coursse of the game, and unique character designs, often accompanied by portraits. Ys I & II Chronicles even lets you talk to enemies, who all have dialogue and their own names!

Also, Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has about 1.5 million lines of dialogue that, if I remember correctly, was almost wholly translated by one guy. What's really amazing is 1.) that most of this is optional and not in the way of the main story, and 2.) that this isn't the inane, boring nonsense one must come to expect from a Japanese game or anime with lots of dialogue. This is because Falcom bothers to make their characters human beings instead of exposition dumps.
 
Dungeons & Dragons has a huge amount of lore.

Category wise I guess I would put it into literature (since rulebooks are books, and a lot of the lore comes from traditional book series ).

Size wise, it is comparable to other multiverses like Marvel/DC. Certain realms get deeper and more expansive lore than others (Forgotton Realms, Eberron, Greyhawk, ect).

(Also surprised there are not more D&D charcters on here).
 
This could go for both animation and video game, and is not really the largest, but Wakfu has a pretty dang large lore going for it.
 
Xenogears / Xenosaga is probably the JRPG series with the deepest lore out there. Xenogears alone has a timeline that spans 15,000 years, hour and hours of text, dialogue and cutscene, and a 200+ page guidebook expanding the universe even further. And it was supposed to only be 1 out of 6 games.

The Xenosaga trilogy is probably even crazier. The three games have around 21 hours of Pre-Rendered Cutscenes, and about as many hours of Real-Time Rendered dialogue and text.

It's simply absurd. The whole series makes Metal Gear Solid look like Call of Duty by comparison.
 
In comparison to other games in the series, Dragon Quest IX does have a lot more lore into it. Considering it takes 97 hours and 50 minutes to finish the game + post game plot for Dragon Quest IX which includes lore on the creation of the universe, the history of man, the Gittish Empire, kings murdered in the Gittish Empire, why random destroyed kingdoms are destroyed, hundreds of lore descriptions on the nature and behavior of the monsters, The Celestrian's history, how Corvus came to be, what happened to Corvus's lover, random village deities, etc. Not the largest, but really only VII, maybe V, VIII, and X can match to the amount of lore IX had.
 
I can attest to what Matthew said, Xenogears/Saga is mind-boggling. I've only played Gears and Saga part 1 so far, and I'm already lost for words. I'm more versed in Yu-Gi-Oh lore, but Magic The Gathering has an insane amount of lore. The different planes don't even start the depth, just a couple cards can be linked to find an entire ongoing story. I can't even recall the amount of cards with Urza ot Mishra tied to them, and that's just counting the cards with their actual names on the card. There's so many books, and even games with their own planes, and extended lore to all of these planes walkers. I'll say it, its crazier than Xenosaga and Elder Scrolls combined.
 
Antvasima said:
I really liked the Trails in the Sky game.
Click to expand...
Oh, sweet! Finally someone who knows about the series! They finally translated the other two parts and put em up on Steam and GOG.com, if that interests you. Imma try to make profiles sometime.

Oh, yeah, Xenosaga is really deep. They do a good job of making a bulk of info interesting, too, which is impressive. It's all too easy to break the pace of a story with these things.
 
That is one thing about them. Skip sidequests and you've still got 50 hours of gameplay, easy.

Not to derail the thread, but does anyone remember any feats from the series? Ys has some good Tier 6/5 stuff and may have Low 2-C lore entities. I don't remember many feats of the Trails in the Sky series, but my memory of these things is not the best.
 
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