I think I explained this in a previous thread, but story progression is one of my pet peeves.
The following rule applies to almost anything in life: "You can't appreciate the grand, without having known the mundane". If you have giants in your game, you have to include regular sized people or they aren't giants. If you want your music to sound very bombastic, do it right after a quiet moment.
Like with art, everything is about contrast.
How to apply this on stories? You will never have a grand finale if the beginning wasn't small. Comics tend to start out from the superhero's appartment. If we see Superman in costume on page one, you'll never get the same scale of emotion as when you have him tear his clothes to reveal the costume in the middle act. In terms of games, start of small. Start in a village, with nothing out of the ordinary. Start in a blissful world. Let the player see the world as it is, before you rip it to shreds. Let that blissful part linger for just too long, get the player bored, lulled into false security. Make the entry into the game sudden.
Lots of games find these parts hard to use as a starter. It's too slow and doesn't suck the player in right away. They remedy this by starting with an action scene, maybe even unrelated to the main character. After that, the game goes to the small village. The small village can be anything, but it's the environment that best exemplifies the main character. For Superman, it's the newspaper office, for Frodo it's the shire, for Chrono Trigger it's the town square, for Naruto it's the village, etc. It can also be a person, for Luke Skywalker, it's Ben Kenobi for example.
You can always come back to this location when you feel you need a breather. It's the safe haven to which the character can return. In the final act, it's also the best place to blow up if you want some drama.
These quiet parts are what gives the scale. The bigger the contrast, the bigger the drama.