Lorestep

About Lorestep

Lorestep puts connected franchises in story order: what to play, watch and read in in-universe chronology rather than the order things were released. It covers games and movies and series. Books are listed too, but no dataset has been written for them, so that section says so rather than showing invented titles.

How story order is decided

Every game and every film or series has a position in its franchise's story, and the tables list them in that order, not by release year. Each franchise states its scope, what is in and what is left out, and carries a note on how its order was decided, which opens from “How this order was decided” above its table. The Ace Attorney note, for one, explains that The Great Ace Attorney is a Meiji-era prequel about Phoenix's ancestor.

Some franchises split into storylines that stand alone, such as Assassin's Creed, Zelda's branching timeline and Mega Man's far-future chain. Those declare their storylines, the games of each one sit together in the order, and the table breaks into a section per storyline. Each game also carries a note on why it sits where it does, shown under “Why here” in its detail panel, and is marked Core, Optional or Skippable.

Film and series chronologies are grouped into named blocks: phases, eras, sagas. Some lines are not titles at all but placement notes, such as “AoS S1 Ep 1–7 · Before Thor: The Dark World”, which set a run of episodes against the films around it. They carry the order's reasoning and are not counted as things to watch. The MCU watch order and the wider Marvel chronology are kept apart: one is the Disney canon, the other spans Fox, Sony and the pre-MCU era, and merging them would mean inventing canon judgements.

What it does not do

  • There are no accounts and no sync. What you track is kept in this browser only: another browser or device starts empty, and clearing the site's data clears it.
  • Books has no dataset yet.
  • Not every number is checked against a source. Release years, runtimes and prices for the original 12 franchises (72 games) were pulled from IsThereAnyDeal and IGDB. The 114 franchises added after them were written by hand: years and titles were checked, but lengths and prices are approximations.
  • Live prices cover PC storefronts only, because that is what IsThereAnyDeal tracks. Console games show the price they were written with.

Data sources and credits

  • The game orders, scopes and notes were written for this site.
  • Prices and historical lows come from IsThereAnyDeal.
  • Release years, ratings, genres and time-to-beat for the enriched games come from IGDB.
  • The film and series orders were merged from two source lists, kept apart where they disagree about scope. Where those lists originated is not recorded, so they are not credited to anyone here.
  • The code is open source under the MIT License, on GitHub.

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