Spheres has some great points a couple of posts up. You could do well from that advice.

The very nature of cliches and 'cheesiness' varies from target audience to target audience, and the same is true (maybe even more so) of originality and uniqueness. If you have an important character slaughtered mercilessly half way through your game, some people will love it, and some will hate it (I think it's mostly an age thing). But I think you wouldn't be asking this question if you didn't like mixing things up a little ;-)

If you feel your story has become cheesy, put on your evil hat and go to work! There is a certain measure of enjoyment to be had from going back over your plot as if you were some diabolical genius hell bent on making innocent viewers cry in horror... And if you learn to use it in moderation, you will end up with a great story.

That's the funnest writing technique mankind could create :LOL . leekenn, you should be listed with Shakespeare.

Quote: Original post by owl
Just stick to "The path of the fool". That always (ALWAYS) work.

people love foolishness. ;o

Dialogue, seriously, with an awesome dialogue, a lame story can still be good. I also like the idea of actually giving reasons to things. I personally, never liked it when games just gave you an item just for the sake of giving it to you. Devil may cry 4 does this.... half the stuff you get with Nero are just extremely useful items that just happens to be somewhere for Nero to get.

I think that one of the most important factors in the success of a game is the main character
The player must like the main character
The player's character should add the missing lines to the game character
The player's attitude should be away from the intentional incomplete game story line. Meaning the player should choose whether he plays for the sake of peace or war. He plays to sustain justice or to strike revenge.
The real human player and the fictional game character will finally came to a neutral land of nowhere and communicate in the player mind silently.
The decision making and the cross roads immerse the player more and more into the game world.
The game rules should be realistic in a fantastic way, and this is the hard equation.

When writing plot twists or dialog for a character, immediately revise and look back to it and think "If I were watching or playing this, would I think it's cheesey? How could I improve it?" If you yourself find it over-the-top or cliched, CHANGE IT (I guess that's obvious). Perhaps continue and finish the story/portion/scene as a rough draft, then let it roll around in your head and mull it over for a week or so. Sometimes thoughts come to me when at work or in other inconvenient places (talk about cliches, but;) on the toilet.
If after a week or so of no better options; watch movies of similar situations and dialog. If you aren't inspired to make the appropriate and fitting changes, let a friend read it or explain it to them. Maybe they will find it acceptable, or at least confirm that it is full of cheese, and if you're really lucky they may have a solution.

JasRonq:
Looking through my games, the only thing that is somewhat comparable to the point you are making would be in Batman Arkham Asylum (Not to the same degree, however). You progress through the game, then grab a tool from the cave, and that tool happens to be exactly what you need to proceed in the following section. Why couldn't he have grabbed them all the first time he went to the cave? Why didn't batman bring all his gadgets with him from the get-go? What are the odds that he would encounter 50 different walls that he could pull down, if only he had some sort of gun that fired hooks- and even more so, what's the chance that he'd have that perfect item lying in the cave waiting for him?
I realize that the way it played out was far better than most other options, but I agree with what you're saying: You should create the universe of your game, and then create a character that fits into it perfectly instead of saying "Ok, she's going to be able to roll around in a ball, so we need little tunnels EVERYWHERE for her to do this."

And if it weren't for the fire extinguisher, Wall-E wouldn't have had a very pretty ending.

I personally dislike when a series of games suddenly changes its style, like Resident Evil, the first 3 were very similar, but 4 and 5 are totally different. i liked these games, but they just don't look like they're following the others. for example the characters were normal policemen who found themselves trapped in zombie situations and just cared about escaping, but since RE4 they are super-cool international super-secret agents who go to zombie sites to complete "the mission" when the logic would be get out of there and say to your boss "it is crawling with monsters! screw covert ops, send in the marines" this wouldn't sell the game unless you played the marines, but IMO the plot lost it, they could have made a better story although story doesn't sell shooters.
I think some key factors are graphic style, since i expect realistic stories on games with realistic graphic styles, and genre itself, shooters aren't expected to even have a plot, and RPGs without plot are buy sword, kill monter, take the gold, buy better sword, kill stronger monster repeating all over a thousand times.