IS THIS STORY TOO CLICHE?

I think it could be told differently. In a way that spices it up a bit. Like, I dunno...

Ages past, humans and beastfolk lived in peace. As time moved on, the two races found themselves at odds with one another. Inevitably, wars broke out. After countless lives were lost, it was decided that the two races could no longer live side-to-side as they once did. Thus, it came to pass that a dimensional rift was opened, and each race went their separate ways.

A thousand years have passed since then. A disturbance in the rift has formed, giving rise to grotesque monsters. While there are those that have taken up the task of defense and protection from these monsters, there is no doubt that they terrorize the towns and villages on both sides of the rift.

...but that's just me.

Nah, actually. It's really about the details. You can have your split groups having to come together to fend off enemies - it's all about how you tell the story, who tells the story and who the story is about that really matters.

Use cliches and then twist.

Perhaps you play a monster who leads a small group of peaceful monsters and brings the knowledge of the invasion to the leaders of the factions, having to convince them not only of your good intent but that you tell the truth and have no desire for war.

Perhaps you're one of the leaders who not only has to bring about working peace between the two sides, but has an unrelenting hatred of the others for the death of your lover. Having to put aside your anger, hatred and want of revenge for the good of your people, who are also inciting you towards acting out your revenge and pressuring you to destroy your enemies.

Or perhaps you're neither, a common person who has no skills in fighting, but decides to help out however you can and creates a training guild that caters to both sides, helping to train up heroes and build capital in order to aid the fight - hire mercenaries, forge contracts for metals to build weaponry and armour, protect diplomats and do side missions for treasure/slaying/dungeon clearing.

Perhaps you're a wanderer from a completely different world who just happened to get caught up in this nonsense while trying to find your own way back home. You just can't get rid of this intrepid group of clingy heroes who are determined to use your awesome powers to help stave off the monster invasion.

Perhaps the monsters aren't evil as expected. Maybe they're really an experimental breeding group that was hidden by leaders of both factions, just trying to escape the breeding camps and find a place to call home, even if they have to war for such a place.

Perhaps you follow different people, jumping each time a death occurs - from war orphan to lord knight to foot soldier to local gossip to leader of beasts to baby to love-lorn teen... all the way until the end of the war, watching it from their prospectives and seeing how it unfolds through various eyes.

Perhaps there are a thousand different ways to tell the same tale that are more than just 'cliche'. Don't ask if something is cliche. It's only cliche if you make it so.

author=Housekeeping
Then again, Avatar was basically about the same thing, only with aliens instead of beast people and the military instead of monsters, and it sold like crazy, so what do I know.

Avatar sold mainly on the strength of its visuals. I have rarely encountered anyone who had anything to say in praise of the story.

You can make a really good game with an unoriginal plot though. The plot of Grandia, for instance, was totally unoriginal, wasn't even a particularly fresh take on old ideas, but it's still one of my favorite games because the whole thing was carried off with so much character and charm.

This doesn't make it a good plot on its own strength, but sometimes it's a decent tradeoff not to sweat the plot too much, and focus your attention on other aspects of the work.

If you know more about what kind of experience you want to create for your audience, and how you can use that story as a backdrop, then it's possible to make a good game out of it. But if that backdrop is all you know at this point, then it's not a lot to sell the audience on.

Well, the people in your story seems smarter than in the average otherizing story. When they started killing each other, their idea was "Let's put some distance between us" instead of the "let's kill each other some more" idea that's usually employed.

As Crystalgate said, the twist being different than the archetypical "let's kill each other" cliche that has been used to death was quite nice. Do some more touch-ups and maybe make it a bit more complex and I think you'll be good to go! :)

What you have is a decent BASE/SETTING for a story. And that's important.

What you need to do now is look at it and say "What can I do with this setting that will be highly interesting?"

What you have so far isn't cliche by definition. It's what you DO with it that determines if it's cliche or not. Tropes are not a bad thing, after all. You can take tropes have been overdone and interlock them in just the right way to make things super interesting, even. Hell, as mentioned above, Avatar was basically Pocahontas In Space, but had likeable characters, good use of tension and stakes, etc, to the point where it was actually a pretty good retelling of a story we already heard.

If your story is just simply about both sides fighting off the monsters, and think the other side is responsible and try to kill one another while fending off the monsters only to have the heroes teach them the value of friendship, then you fall right into cliche.

On the other hand, how does this sound?:

Both your factions assume the other is responsible for the monsters. So your leader sends you into the enemy's world to sabotage them with guerrilla style raids. However, on getting there, you find out they're fighting the monsters too, and your presence in that world makes THEM start to fight against your faction, because they see it as proof your side is involved with the monsters, giving the monsters the opening they need to invade even MORE. You try to fix the situation by killing the monsters...(So far, pretty standard)

AND THEN.

You find out that the monsters are basically being forced to invade for X reason. They're actually NOT bad guys! You try to tell this to both factions, and to your surprise, your own side refuses to believe you, forcing you to side with the monsters, and the faction you were originally fighting against (who, after a lot of debate decides to trust you), while fighting your own original side, AND trying to stop the X thing that the monsters are afraid of (another faction, disease, impending Reality Crash, etc) from happening.

In the end, problem X is stopped, the worlds are reunited, and the monsters settle in peacefully with the faction you were originally against. Meanwhile, your own side exiles you and is very grumpy about the world being reunited. Some people from your old side are slowly getting over their prejudice, but most of them are not. The world is left in a state of "work in progress" with plenty of problems and challenges for future heroes to overcome.

Sounds a lot better right?

You can take that and do whatever you want with it. I just came up with that on the fly.

Finally, my advice to you is this: Look for natural causes and effects. Think of what outcomes could naturally happen with each plot even, and then go with the one that either gets you your desired result, or is the most interesting. Play with them. Tweak them.

... So where exactly is the part where a soul is being reigned?

author=Desertopa
To be fair, having the world saved by the power of shooting the villain with a gun can be pretty surprising given the right context.

God, Wizards was terrible. I really tried to understand why people liked Ralph Bakshi, but, other than the animation, his movies are so bad.

Nope. To me it doesnt seem too cliche, at least in the base form. Once you add more details to flesh it out, then it might be a real story you got on your hands there.