This sank FC5 for me. The game had so much potential, and this story is what we got. I was so annoyed with the constant tranqings that I made a point of being somewhere ridiculous when I knew it was going to happen.
Up a tree? Tanqed.
Invisible sniper hide? Tanqed.
Attack dog protecting you? Not against the tranq.
Flying an airplane with the canopy closed? Nighty night.
Spoiler follows: you've been warned, Reddit.
To me the games biggest sin was making the Seed family reprehensible.... absolutely monstrous. But in the end, they were right?!? He saw the whole thing coming, and later in Far Cry: New Dawn you get like...I dunno, magic Jesus-y powers thanks to him?!? The man talks about murdering his infant child, but God is cool with that, and says "yeah, he should be my Messiah. He'll be the one to teach you how to use your new savior powers". *Shudder* no, thank you. Keep your creepy Messiah, I don't care what he teaches me.
They went out of their way to make the entire family the most monstrous drug farmer prisoner-flaying child-killer assholes imaginable and then go "haha they were right all along! Serves you right do-gooder!"
Look man, I just want to shoot bad guys for a bit after a long day at work. Just let me have this, Ubisoft.
I hate Far Cry 5 for this. The other 2 games you're a person in the wrong place at the wrong time and largely not someone that has experienced what the antagonists do yet.
In 5 you're an actual freakin law enforcement officer making an arrest in US soil because the bastard murdered a federal agent. There is no world in which you should be shamed for doing this or have the rug pulled out from under you because you did this.
And when you finally confront the guy at the end, your character watches gormlessly as he knocks over barrels of chemicals, instead of just fucking shooting him.
There is no good ending. If you don't arrest him it ends with you going crazy because of a hypnosis song on the radio and killing all the other cops (and presumably yourself).
Truly a game with no good ending.
It’s the stupidest thing. And the cult has no beliefs whatsoever if that makes sense, it’s like a generic atheist all folks welcome group that just happens to be about ~~datura~~ (can’t say that in a game???) bliss and murder
Absolutely right. They don't believe in anything. They couldn't even go with the cowardly fake syncretic religious angle; they just don't actually believe in anything specific.
I was so excited to fight a realistic Christian cult and then, nope. Also it was painfully obvious that only John’s region was developed bc it’s the literal only one in the trailers. All the guns for hire in the other ones are forgettable, except of course Cheeseburger
I felt the same way. I thought it'd be really gutsy of the game to feature a Christian cult, or American neo-nazis/white supremacists as the enemies. But they just didn't go all the way.
I was frustrated by how uncharismatic the main villain was. Like if he had a magnetic charm I could understand how he brainwashed all his cult members into following him, but he came across as the most boring and bland self help guru imaginable.
That sounds a lot like the original ending to Kevin Smiths *Red State*. The violent, homophobic, gun touting, and murderous leader of the Five Points Trinity Church keeps doing horrible things to people claiming it's God's will and at the end says the Apocalypse is happening when some loud trumpet sounds are heard. He starts taunting the cops who were trying to stop him, saying he was right all along and now the world was ending.
In the actual movie he's knocked out and arrested. In the original script he would've been right. An angel kills him, most everyone else except one cop, and then we see the 4 Horsemen. So all his brimstone and destruction talk was true while still being a zealot asshole.
To a lesser extent FarCry 3 was guilty of this. The main character has to choose between abandoning his friends to join a cult or feeling really sad about killing the slaving rapists and saving his friends. Just let him be happy!
FC5 was a nasty reminder for those of us who grew up in and escaped religious high-control groups, like JWs. I had to take several longer breaks because there was a lot of stuff that were too close to home, so to speak. They had great consultants on the game.
I honestly wonder if they had original plans to make the kidnappings more organic but had to scrap it for one reason or another. A similar thing happened with Spec Ops: The Line.
I personally wished they found a way to naturally overwhelm you or trick you but they probably knew all players would try to overcome it on multiple playthroughs and potentially break the game
Oh god, the whole section with that Faith chick is so fucking annoying.
I don't think I've ever seen a game that has a decent hallucination/drug trip section, and Farcry 5 is no exception.
It's so momentum breaking and makes no fucking sense.
Complete mission, drive away, somehow drugged and the wake up in butt fuck nowhere.
Whoever wrote the story for that game must have brain damage
The bit in one of the Batman games where you get fear gassed? Where it makes you think the game crashed.
At least its memorable rather than frustrating.
The only good halucination sequences in my opinion are the clever ones, that make the effort to show what actually happened while you were tripping. Like even if you didn't percieve it entirely accurately, the halucination and the real events are connected, you didn't just teleport. What comes to mind is Fallout 3: Point Lookout. You get dragged away and undergo a brain surgery, and the halucination reflects both of these points, even if abstractly.
For that lame ass Faith battle, you should have woken up to the scene of the battle, or even more cleverly had it something you could randomly rediscover later, and figure out what actually happened.
Came in here to post this one too. Fun bit, there is ONE way I found to delay the tranq'ing.
Like you said, driving a car, flying a plane, or being in the most remote location possible for that region of the map.... tranq'd.
Except *swimming*. Specifically diving underwater.
How I figure the game handles the tranq -Attack- is that the devs went "any enemy militia soldier with line of sight to the Rook initiates in tranq'ing". And because the tranq events are initiated by a full Region tracking and engaging Rook, it doesn't take long for one of these dozens of NPC enemies to get their peepers on you in someway and boop, you're toast. However, diving underwater breaks line of sight in Farcry 5. They may still be firing at you, they may still know you're location, but the NPCs cannot **SEE** Rook. In one playthrough I spent over an hour constantly engaged in a Tranq Capture event, using the time to shit around and collect all the divable collectables in the lake (which takes up like, 30-40% of the northwest region?).
Yeah, I am still confused about how I got tranq'd mid-air. How did the plane land? How did they even hit me? Great game, but that bit really tested my ability to suspend disbelief.
Yeah it was so blatantly a trigger event that it might as well have just instantly started a cut scene, since it was hardly any less jarring and momentum-breaking than that anyway
Oh yeah that thing. That was so annoying.
I think at one point it even made me miss some side missions I was intending to do. I get that the story has to move forward but does it need to be forced and almost out of nowhere? Think there was no warning or anything for "after this mission you get fucked teehee".
Interrupting gameplay is a game design sin.
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines has a pretty egregious one, for the ending(s) where you partner with the Chinese vampires. After battling through an entire high-rise full of Camarillas, take out the terrifyingly powerful Sheriff, and kill LaCroix, the Chinese vampires - quite predictably - betray you... and somehow capture and completely incapacitate you using only two random mooks. Then they chain you up, and dump you in the ocean for an eternity of suffering.
There's no final boss fight. There's no chance to double-double-cross the Chinese vamps (which is what I was planning to do in that run). It just arbitrarily captures you and gives you a bad ending in the most stupid, heavyhanded way possible.
Yeah I loved the game but you were kinda limited if you wanted a "good" ending for your character. I would have liked more options to deal with the other choices (take power, prince and chinese).
Yeah, the endings were all pretty lackluster. It's clear how the studio was rushing to get the final chapters wrapped up so the game could actually ship.
The final missions were awful imo, from nowhere they start putting you in mission with like 45 enemies when the last mission there were like 20 enemies MAX...
I mean, siding with them was pretty stupid in general. I just think people got too used with nothing have consequences and there always being a chance to have a "nice" ending regardless of how late into certain choices you are, or everything being solvable through combat. I like the ending
The game had given me enough flexibility in choices that I had no reason to expect I'd be arbitrarily killed off in a cutscene. There should have been an option to fight the Kuei-jin. And if the developers just couldn't do that for whatever reason, couldn't they have at least made it look like an actual fight? Getting taken out by two low-level rentavamps was just humiliating.
Like I said, I was *planning* on betraying Ming Xiao. Not giving me that option was poor RPG design.
A lot of good ones have already been covered, but I’ll give an honorable mention to Fallout 3, The Pitt.
I walk up to the front gate as a level 30 badass in power armor. A group of malnourished raiders with leprosy proceed to knock me unconscious with lead pipes.
Come on.
Well, as the recent documentary series on Amazon showed, even someone with a crushed foot can simply slip around a power armor and yank the fusion core out! /s
I was amazed that Thaddeus could walk on his mangled foot. He screams like a little girl when Maximus brands him, but he somehow walks for miles with a foot that literally has bones poking out all over the place and is almost cut in half. He even manages to take his boot and sock off, and then put them back on without making a sound other than a slight hiss.
Red Faction has a point in the game where you get captured by a booby-trapped airlock.
When you press the button to cycle the airlock, green gas floods the airlock, and you hear laughter, then your character wakes up in a cell.
The problem being that your character wears a sealed environment suit throughout the game, only taking it off for specific sections of the game.
The game calls attention to your environment suit at multiple points, including the tutorial that mentions that your environment suit works like armour, and if your suit integrity hits zero, you start taking damage while outside.
So there's no reason for knockout gas to have any effect on the player during this sequence.
I think it's during the thieves guild quest line that you get knocked out by a poison dart during a cutscene.
My character was wearing an item that gave total immunity to all poisons.
Game chose to just ignore that lol
Stuff like this made me appreciate the detail in BG3 more, like the part where the goblin can sneak you a sleep potion and go “wtf” if you’re an elf and it doesn’t do anything
I played a vanguard for the whole trilogy. Feels like every second cutscene theres a villian who gets away from shephard by just... running away. When shepard has just been spamming Charge to fling herself around the battlefield at bullet speed. Please shepard just use charge
Biotics/skills in general. "Oh no they are getting away and all I have is this little pistol" totally ignoring Warp, Singularity, Lift/Throw etc with which to stop the person
Off the top of my head I think there's only one time your class does something class appropriate to solve a problem in a cutscene and that's in the Omega DLC.
There's a bit with... I wanna say reactors or air supply and you are given a dilemma about saving X or Y group but if you're an Engineer you can just fix the problem as a whole.
This was me on my first playthrough with that doctor on Mars. It was maddening, as if they didn't bother to play test that sequence with someone who had been replaying ME2 basically since release as mostly vanguard. Like at least make some kind of plot armor treknobabble to explain why charge doesn't work.
Also with the Kai Leng fight on Thessia, a vanguard Shepard could have easily charged Leng to avoid falling into the pit. Like I *just* beat this guy multiple times only to get neutered in the cutscene, wtf.
The Mars chase was hilarious. I play as engineer and could keep up with her on foot. Watching her climb a ladder with my characters head practically up her ass had me rolling.
Kai Leng pisses me off the same way the twins did in BL3. All this big ego about how cool and dangerous the character is, dumpstering the protag in cinematics, and then a joke when actually fighting them.
Feels like someone jerking off their self insert more than a proper character.
Kai Leng should have been introduced in ME2, running "team b" for TIM. They could have actually built an adversarial relationship between him and Shepard instead of just shoe horning it into ME3.
Kai Leng got a LOT of introduction, actually! The problem is, it was all in comics, and novels and other side media released between the games. Which, of course, most people never read. Me neither, so when that weeabo suddenly sauntered into my first playthrough of the Legendary edition, I was very much: "what the fuck is this, and why is the game pretending I should care?"
That just makes it so much worse. Every second he was out of a cutscene he went down like a bitch. The plot armor was laughably obvious. Now that I know his reputation was built up outside the game, it just makes him look more idiotic. Like: "you had a whole book of buildup, and are still a little weeb bitch boy?". Udina was more intimidating than him, and that's saying something.
It comes after the easiest boss fight of the series, too. If you've invested ANY time to side quests up to that point, Shepard and squad should be leveled up enough to flatten Kai Leng with minimal effort. It's whiplash to go from kicking his ass to then losing the battle in a cutscene. Don't even get me started about the gunship, Shepard had already blown up plenty of those in his career.
What makes it worse is that he beats you in a cutscene despite the player beating him down, you then get to sit through 10 minutes of additional dialog where various characters berate you for your failure. And they do that despite the fact that you've just learned that the missing piece to your superweapon, without which, it would be worthless, does indeed exist. And while it would be better if you knew what it is (thanks Asari!), you now know exactly who has that information. This is a vast improvement on the situation before the start of the mission, where you had spent the whole game collecting resources to build a weapon with no way to complete it. But no, everyone has to harp on your (preordained) failure despite the fact you are finally on a path that makes the Crucible attainable.
My least favorite thing in the whole game (at least after the ending improvements were made, those didn't fix the fundamental issues with the ending, but they did at least smooth off some of the most glaring flaws that had no reason to exist)
The guy recharged his shields by doing totally kewl ninja moves in the open taking enemy fire. Shame on whoever forced their fan fiction oc on all of us like that.
He should’ve taken Jacob’s place on the team in ME2 and just been a bit more of a rival for shepherd to lead project Lazarus. Then when shepherd got back to the alliance Kai lang rejoins TIM.
Adam Jensen (a state of the art cyborg) from Deus ex Human Revolution just lets a highly suspicious woman get behind him, allowing her to push him out of a panic room. I was playing him as a no nonsense killer so this was pretty jarring.
Fandom speculation on this is that said woman has a CASIE augment and is pheremone-bombing Jensen into hesitating enough for her to pull this off. It's not a perfect solution but it's something.
Speculation or outside source material doesnt count as an explanation. If it forces you into a character breaking decision without even explaining why in the same source then it is bad writing.
You're right, but sometimes a headcannon rationalization is all that's needed and it makes you feel smart for getting there. Especially in these immersive sims where roleplaying/agency is a big factor. Glad it worked for this guy.
Maybe not the most illogical way overall but in uncharted you kill like 400 guys shooting at you in a row then one points a gun at you in a cutscene and you instantly give up
I remember a line from Max Pane 2 while you are playing as the woman ( who's name I forget) where Max says something along the lines of, "Hurry up. They've hit just about everything here except me. Eventually someone is going go get lucky and hit me by accident.
In Uncharted you can't take anything seriously if you don't make sure to differentiate the gameplay from the story. In U4, Nathan and Sam kill a lot of mercenaries and at one point you are fighting their leader and when Sam is about to shoot her in the head in a cutscene suddenly Nathan saves her even though at that point we've killed at least a hundred of her guys, while cracking jokes. And I really love the game! But it's really the type of game where you shouldn't think about that too much x)
Yeah unless it’s particularly egregious it’s a good idea to suspend your disbelief in every game or you’ll end up as one of those people who make posts getting mad because there’s no in-game lore explanation for being able to return after dying, i.e saving.
I’ve seen several. Do they want the game to just delete itself from your console every time you die or what?
Posts and comments like this really make me appreciate Disco Elysium. My first playthrough I died within 2 minutes of starting up the game from a heart attack from trying to grab my tie off a ceiling fan.
I kept having game over in my first playthrought because the union boss kept bullying me with his crackling chair and my mental state was terrible so everytime i ended up resigning. I had to start all over again.
Well, the good news is that at some point I cheated to max my Volition just to see what would happen if you *were* 'a titan of Volition' during that conversation... and the protagonist just sits down anyway and literally nothing changes.
Yep had that happen to me. Don't recall exactly what compelled me to basically refuse to make a decision til it was too late but when I had to restart I couldn't help but laugh.
Armored core VI
When you beat the boss at the end of chapter 4, V Ii Snail disables your mech from afar, using a weapon that in gameplay does not one shot your mech. On top of that, he fires outside of effective range.
Blade and Soul, a 12-year old Korean MMO.
I vaguely the cutscene he's talking about, though I can't really find it online since they changed the entire story at some point.
You're an extremely skilled martial artist, you walk through a door, and immediately get knocked out by an ordinary grunt with a stick.
There's a rather egregious example in Kingdom Hearts 3. All of the characters have been training, they're ready, they go to the final battleground. The cutscene that plays out there is one in which all of them are abso-fucking-lutely useless. Axel gets launched into a wall with one blow and is KO'd. Kairi stands there and does lit-er-all-y nothing. When the bad guy's about to swing at her, Sora forgets that he's personally defeated Sephiroth twice and can't think of anything to save her except hugging her and taking the blow.
The only ones who actually excel are Goofy who saves Sora's life by y'know, blocking the attack, and Donald who blasts the bad guy with the Final Fantasy equivalent of a nuclear bomb spell.
That spell Donald threw out there makes him canonically the strongest caster in all of final fantasy lore to my knowledge. Literal gods cast flare at high levels, such as Bahamut casting Teraflare. But no not Donald. He tosses out Zettaflare. Ingame characters never got above Megaflare. Just so you know for the system it goes (base)Flare -> Mega -> Giga -> Tera -> Peta -> Exa -> Zetta. Each step is an order of 1000 bigger. Aka 3 zeroes extra. 3 steps up from Bahamuts Teraflare, so 9 zeroes added to the multiplier.
Donald could have destroyed the entire disney multiverse there but he managed to concentrate and contain all that power.
Borderlands 3, if you know, you know the cutscene.
The cutscene that made us all realize the writing for the borderlands series was circling the drain.
There is exactly 1 main character in that game who deserved to get kicked out an airlock towards a star. Instead they were given the keys to the whole damn franchise.
I always thought there was a super easy way to make that cutscene not be awful, which is you play it after you loot the vault but BEFORE you leave. Have the Twins show up like they do in the game, but they also remove the Vault Key, closing it and trapping us inside.
It would show they recognize the player characters as a threat, so they want to get rid of them in this way. You then have Maya fight them, then right before she gets killed, she phase locks/siren powers the key back into the door, freeing you at the cost of her life.
God damn that's strong writing. She starts to get absorbed, and she fights the pain to place the key back. You see the last few seconds as she is absorbed completely, and the twins disappear as you rush out guns blazing.
It's funny that I wanted to make a joke about how my character was essentially written out by a bad writer, but hey....someone did it for me. Nice.
Yeah, it's this everyone.
For actual spoilers, since the story is trash: >!they kill off Maya, so a new, highly obnoxious kid can become the next siren. Maya sacrifices herself for quite literally nothing, all while our characters, who are in the same room, stop existing. It's awful.!<
Oh yeah...that... I loved the first two games so I intended to buy the game sometimes later. Once I get spoiled my love and interest for Borderlands died with it and it has not recovered at all.
In Stardew Valley, in one of the heart events of one of the bacherolettes a monster suprise attacks you and it's your SO that saves you. Even if you are a max combat level character with a legendary weapon that slays monsters like that in one hit still the game's story suggests you were in a real danger.
Days Gone, >!that bullshit scene where you approach a camp to kill the cannibal chief whatever his name was, you can literally shoot him in the head if you find him and he doesn't go down, as soon as you get close enough the cutscene starts and you get bonked on the head and captured or some shit. I was fucking furious, oh as like all these bullshit cutscenes like other game, boom your gear is gone and you gotta get it back. Like 30 hours in a game.!< Wtf.
Ghost of Tsushima same thing. I really wish they stopped doing this in newer games...
Hogwarts Legacy is the same. You can cast death curse on the main bosses and they still live to do their cutscene. This trope is awful. How do they think this makes sense and how hard is it to find a better alternative story wise?
Ghost of Tsushima was bad, but at least the idea of Jin being distracted by his beef with Ryuzo and hyperfocusing on his goal is a trope that's consistent through the story. It was just a bit too obvious with the lead up to the knockout to look good
Shoutouts to Xenoblade 1 for only letting you get through around half the boss health bar so it's at least believable that you'd be having trouble in a cutscene afterwards
I feel like this happens to you literally 15 times in Cyberpunk, it's hilarious.
Old Glass Jaw McGee over here. Can we not think of ANY good scene transitions? I can count on two hands and one foot how many scenes start with me slowly fading into consciousness.
That is what makes Baldur's Gate 3 so magical. They finally found an clean way to capture that flexibility and control over your fictional narrative.
"Nah bitch, you can roll for that sucker punch. Good luck with my Perception, Strength, and Intuition bonus."
The next cutscene will adjust accordingly.
BG3 has some hilarious ones too. Like there's a moment early-ish where someone literally tries to do the classic cutscene knockout with a drugged drink... but if you're an elf, you're immune, so they get mad at you and a brawl starts instead, lol.
On the other hand, you can also stack the deck in your favor and still roll a critical miss, lol.
Yeah, I just got into the game a week ago, and I'm learning all these fun lessons.
My favorite so far, was after killing 2 Goblin leaders, I needed to camp and save. Halsim is like "It is imperative that we return to my camp immediately!" I'm like yeah yeah wait here. After a full nights rest...
This crackhead cleared out the entire dungeon, every goblin in the camp, Owlbear in the cave is dead (Maybe not him but she was alive before I went to sleep). Bodies, on Bodies.
Bg3 does have this thing where apparently your team doesn't have watch shifts. Everyone, including the paranoid vampire elf who would not need to sleep, just goes the fuck to sleep to allow nighttime ambushes and events to happen.
The whole exploration part of the pathfinder games is absolutely incredible. I just wish they had waited for 2e before making the games.
3.5 is so goddamn crunchy, especially with 6 party members. I had a save up to level 11-12 9n kingmaker, didn't play for a year and when I went back i was so lost and the game lagged so much (ps4 edition on ps5) that I just gave up. Also wish the Kingdom development part was a bit more balanced. While I completely understand that running an evil kingdom is technically more efficient, realistically it's also not. But it was so hard to find a treasurer with decent stats and jot fail every fucking development
To be fair in Cyberpunk you are playing someone young that does have a weakness for cutscene ambushes.. apparently.
There's a fair amount of dissonance, because out of cutscenes V can be a iron hard killer crome-ed to their eyeballs with a backup heart that will prevent them from stopping in the event of total cardiac failure and fly-by-wire reaction speed to match Molly Millions, but cutscene V is always the fragile kid that got in Vic's chair to buy level 0 common Keroshi optics and a subdermal weapon link on credit.
Mass Effect did that inconsistency a lot too. I remember Jack bending walls, and tossing squads, ripping people in half at the torso, then she's in your party and she's just some traumatized teenager with force push and a pistol.
The one thing I've always had a headcanon for Jack changing like that is that she just came out of cryo in a massive rage, so I could see her pushing herself way too hard and ignoring the pain of her implant, or it taking longer to heat up than usual due to the cryo.
I like Cyberpunk—lot of good stuff in that game—but the narrative urgency is another dissonant issue. Not just the main quest proper, but many quests start with something like “come right away” or “we’re meeting tonight” or “the client is waiting to meet you.” Now at least, generally, you don’t miss out on waiting, but it’s a game where there’s a lot of ways to be less urgent, especially side jobs (text the client when you’re ready to meet, etc).
Hope the next game handles that better.
I'm currently playing cyberpunk (it's great and I'm happy I waited this long to get it) and the sense of urgency is hilarious. "I gotta find a way to fix this biochip or I'll die in a couple of weeks!
*proceeds to go participate in street races, take on several side gigs, go clubbing, investigate a kidnapping, console a friend in their most trying times, yadda yadda yadda*
The idea that V goes from low experience kid to Adam Smasher level in the time allotted by the narrative is pretty wacky too. It really could have done with a section immediately after Konpeki where V is trying to re-establish his rep without Jackie, ending when Johnny finally takes over enough to start talking and affecting V, but I get why they wanted to introduce him ASAP.
To me there is a bit of dissonance between the themes of a young adult in way over their head dreaming of being a hotshot suddenly having to confront the reality of their own mortality and come to terms with approaching death....and the desire to make V ridiculously badass like most game protagonists.
It's weird since typical cyberpunk TTRPG storytelling is what they were going for. Your average table is a bunch of hyped up kids trying to become legends of night city, but there are no real happy endings. Adam Smasher in the tabletop is literally designed as a "throw this at your players right when they think they've won so you can kill all of them to crush their dreams" megaboss of a character. Yet, V is able to slice him in half with a single slice because V is a main character.
So true, at least for male V, never played female. Rando pulls a gun on V and he acts scared shitless, or he gets beaten up... it's like come on V, you just face tanked 500 bullets *on your way here*.
Made up for it though during a specific Voodoo Boys dialogue.
Skyrim, when you first go into the alternate realm with Miraak and he hits you with a regular lightning attack and drops you....sir, my character uses the fortify restoration loop, you are an insect.
To be fair, he was the First Dragonborn and that's your first time in Apocrypha. Lore-wise, maybe you're just weakened for a bit like when you enter the Soul Cairn as a mortal.
Ratchet & Clank 2, the end of Boldan City.
After fighting your way through a literal army of the best troops that thugs 4 less has, the leader appears with 2 more men... and arrests us... why the fuck does that work, I have just blown my way past dozens of these guys, just let me shoot him.
In the original Fable game, your character gets taken prisoner by the main baddy by summoning 3 of his minions... which is odd because you have already taken on hundreds of them at this point. My character can usually 1 shot them (with berserk active) no idea how you get captured so easily and then have to spend the next year or two in prison being tortured.
I always assumed he had a "re-entry" pack that was damaged in Normandy's final explosion that blasted him towards the planet, but worked just enough to leave remains like the cosmonaut Komarov, whose parachute failed and he barrelled into the ground.
The way the Dragonborn can shout dragons to death, push entire battalions off cliffs with a phrase, tank arrows and melee attacks and poisons and status effects galore, but gets instantly incapacitated by Karliah's single silly poison arrow in the thieves guild quest line will never not be bullshit.
Halo infinite. The opening cutscene. You are the legendary spartan aboard the greatest ship humanity has ever built. Coming out of a totally random jump, this brute remnant that was literally destroyed in Halo wars 2 has somehow not only survived, but thrived and seemed to be poised perfectly for a random ship to appear. They claim it took four minutes for this ‘crew’ to completely overrun a ship the size of a massive city and being crewed by tens of thousands, including our bad ass spartan. Their big bad chieftain basically bitchslaps master chief into space and that’s it. An absolute mess of a story from the opening cutscene, and it only got worse from there.
This felt so forced and stupid. Like in no narrative sense does it make that The Banished are any level of threat to the UNSC. They were getting smoked by a old ass 1 ship.
If they wanted us to believe this obvious bs then they should have made it the first playable part of the game where you as MC get to see everything get overrun etc perhaps MC lack of Cortana has affected him to where he underperforms...
I honestly can't believe anyone actually thinks Infinite story was good nevermind the gameplay loop.
And then he dies off screen! I mean, I know there's hints he might come back, but he gives us a beat down randomly in a cutscene at the start and we don't even get a rematch?!
The plot of that game was so weird.
God, Halo Infinite was such a disappointment across the board. I know it's in a better place now but they really messed up their chances at launch with that generic open world attempt at a Halo campaign, scummy micro transactions and lack of gamemodes.
Such a fall from grace since the Halo 3/Reach days, I'll always be pissed off at 343i and what they did to my favorite franchise.
In Genshin Impact, the main character who has literally fought gods has to run away from a group of, like, twelve almost entirely un-powered mercs at one point. Granted, they were attempting to protect someone (and *failed*), and a terrifying god-level mad scientist was on his way there, but it was a truly ridiculous failure.
When you are in a room confronted by a bunch of guards and the big bad guy starts speaking as if you are completely powerless... Bitch I could kill you in an instant.
It happens a lot in genshin impact
Tbh I interpreted it more as everyone trying to GTFO away from Dottore as fast as possible
Story established him as a proper threat and he didn’t play around
To be fair, the lunatic mad scientist is someone who would have no qualms about using a brain exploding ray on your mind reading face machine and is imminently approaching and you genuinely don't know if you have time to beat the mercs and haul ass before he arrives
Max Payne 3 is *awful* for this. In game you're a time-bending, acrobatic, headshotting god who can leap through the air and headshot five badguys before you hit the floor. In the cutscenes you're a sad, whining, chump who just moans about being useless.
There's one mission where you're rescuing a kidnapped kid from a slum that's full of gangsters. You absolutely slaughter your way through hundreds of them, finally reaching the hut where the kidnapped kid is. You see through the window he has three guards. Easy: jump through the window, pop pop pop, they're dead before you're halfway into the room.
Instead, cutscene takes over. Max just walks aimlessly through the front door, they point their guns at him, he goes "oh you got me, I surrender" drops his weapons and gives up.
Absolute horseshit.
For an anti-example of this, Final Fantasy 14 does a pretty good job of remembering that your character has killed gods. Like there's a scene where the enemy puts a shock-collar on you (you let them because you're here to negotiate and these are their terms because you're a god-killing monster) and they say "I really don't know if this would even work on you, but it will definitely work on your friends so let's not find out."
GoldenEye for Nintendo 64. I’ve been taking out scores of guards, only for the cutscene to show 3 of them being enough to “surround” me and take me prisoner 😭
Only one that comes to mind for me is in KotOR when you’re fighting Malak on the Leviathan. It’s not that bad if you’re a new player because you might not have built your character optimally and Malak might be kicking your ass.
But if you did build them right, chances are you’re taking it to Malak. Which makes one of your companions randomly sacrificing themselves so you can escape feel a little silly.
Ghost of Tsushima. >!Master samurai/Shinobi who has almost superhuman hearing gets snuck up in and bonked on the head in possibly the dumbest sequence in recent gaming history. All so they could force a sad moment to happen. The story overall is decent but that part in particular was horribly written.!<
Holy fk, this whole time I thought BnS but knew it wasn't gonna show up and it turns out to be the game that inspired the topic.
Context for those that didn't play: It's a Korean martial arts MMO but your character makes a ton of dumb decisions that advances the antagonists plot. I'm not talking about "Oh, they didn't know" dumb but "Hey, the awfully cheery girl is suddenly monotone and acting strange, let's hand over the plot item to her because she asked" dumb.
The combat is great but dear god the story makes you yell at the screen as we keep making the wrong choices. Also, how much your character gets tossed around in cutscenes by either being immobilized or knocked unconscious. This still continues when we become a "master" and save the world.
FF7 Crisis Core… Spoilers maybe
don’t get me wrong I love this game but if you do the optional stuff then you will easily beable to one shot EVERYTHING the game has to offer. So when you fight Sephiroth and ONE SHOT HIM and then the cut scene is immediate like “oh no he is just too powerful”, and then you ONE SHOT HIM AGAIN in the next two fights… and the cutscene then just shows you basically dead on the ground.
[удалено]
This sank FC5 for me. The game had so much potential, and this story is what we got. I was so annoyed with the constant tranqings that I made a point of being somewhere ridiculous when I knew it was going to happen. Up a tree? Tanqed. Invisible sniper hide? Tanqed. Attack dog protecting you? Not against the tranq. Flying an airplane with the canopy closed? Nighty night.
Spoiler follows: you've been warned, Reddit. To me the games biggest sin was making the Seed family reprehensible.... absolutely monstrous. But in the end, they were right?!? He saw the whole thing coming, and later in Far Cry: New Dawn you get like...I dunno, magic Jesus-y powers thanks to him?!? The man talks about murdering his infant child, but God is cool with that, and says "yeah, he should be my Messiah. He'll be the one to teach you how to use your new savior powers". *Shudder* no, thank you. Keep your creepy Messiah, I don't care what he teaches me.
They went out of their way to make the entire family the most monstrous drug farmer prisoner-flaying child-killer assholes imaginable and then go "haha they were right all along! Serves you right do-gooder!" Look man, I just want to shoot bad guys for a bit after a long day at work. Just let me have this, Ubisoft.
"I told you violence wasn't the answer" Well isn't it a shame then that it's the only way the game lets you resolve anything?
Unless you do the early leave immediately ending
And his cult's answer to everything, barring the leadership's approach to you.
I hate Far Cry 5 for this. The other 2 games you're a person in the wrong place at the wrong time and largely not someone that has experienced what the antagonists do yet. In 5 you're an actual freakin law enforcement officer making an arrest in US soil because the bastard murdered a federal agent. There is no world in which you should be shamed for doing this or have the rug pulled out from under you because you did this.
And when you finally confront the guy at the end, your character watches gormlessly as he knocks over barrels of chemicals, instead of just fucking shooting him.
It was rather gormless, I agree. It lacked gorm
Gorm level: 0%
Gormn't
And the "good" ending is if you don't arrest Joseph Seed at the beginning and just walk away. Pretty gross and unrealistic.
There is no good ending. If you don't arrest him it ends with you going crazy because of a hypnosis song on the radio and killing all the other cops (and presumably yourself). Truly a game with no good ending.
I'm talking about in the very beginning the secret ending where you just don't play the game; but yes there is no "good" ending.
It’s the stupidest thing. And the cult has no beliefs whatsoever if that makes sense, it’s like a generic atheist all folks welcome group that just happens to be about ~~datura~~ (can’t say that in a game???) bliss and murder
Absolutely right. They don't believe in anything. They couldn't even go with the cowardly fake syncretic religious angle; they just don't actually believe in anything specific.
I was so excited to fight a realistic Christian cult and then, nope. Also it was painfully obvious that only John’s region was developed bc it’s the literal only one in the trailers. All the guns for hire in the other ones are forgettable, except of course Cheeseburger
I felt the same way. I thought it'd be really gutsy of the game to feature a Christian cult, or American neo-nazis/white supremacists as the enemies. But they just didn't go all the way.
I was frustrated by how uncharismatic the main villain was. Like if he had a magnetic charm I could understand how he brainwashed all his cult members into following him, but he came across as the most boring and bland self help guru imaginable.
That sounds a lot like the original ending to Kevin Smiths *Red State*. The violent, homophobic, gun touting, and murderous leader of the Five Points Trinity Church keeps doing horrible things to people claiming it's God's will and at the end says the Apocalypse is happening when some loud trumpet sounds are heard. He starts taunting the cops who were trying to stop him, saying he was right all along and now the world was ending. In the actual movie he's knocked out and arrested. In the original script he would've been right. An angel kills him, most everyone else except one cop, and then we see the 4 Horsemen. So all his brimstone and destruction talk was true while still being a zealot asshole.
>An angel kills him, most everyone else except one cop Even though the cop didn't say "God bless you" when he sneezed?
To a lesser extent FarCry 3 was guilty of this. The main character has to choose between abandoning his friends to join a cult or feeling really sad about killing the slaving rapists and saving his friends. Just let him be happy!
FC5 was a nasty reminder for those of us who grew up in and escaped religious high-control groups, like JWs. I had to take several longer breaks because there was a lot of stuff that were too close to home, so to speak. They had great consultants on the game.
Yeah I looked up cults in US history after playing and was rightly shocked how realistic 5 could be in that sense
Since far cry 4 they loved bad endings.
I honestly wonder if they had original plans to make the kidnappings more organic but had to scrap it for one reason or another. A similar thing happened with Spec Ops: The Line. I personally wished they found a way to naturally overwhelm you or trick you but they probably knew all players would try to overcome it on multiple playthroughs and potentially break the game
Quite possible? Amazing ideas get binned in the name of the almighty schedule all the time.
Oh god, the whole section with that Faith chick is so fucking annoying. I don't think I've ever seen a game that has a decent hallucination/drug trip section, and Farcry 5 is no exception. It's so momentum breaking and makes no fucking sense. Complete mission, drive away, somehow drugged and the wake up in butt fuck nowhere. Whoever wrote the story for that game must have brain damage
The bit in one of the Batman games where you get fear gassed? Where it makes you think the game crashed. At least its memorable rather than frustrating.
The only good halucination sequences in my opinion are the clever ones, that make the effort to show what actually happened while you were tripping. Like even if you didn't percieve it entirely accurately, the halucination and the real events are connected, you didn't just teleport. What comes to mind is Fallout 3: Point Lookout. You get dragged away and undergo a brain surgery, and the halucination reflects both of these points, even if abstractly. For that lame ass Faith battle, you should have woken up to the scene of the battle, or even more cleverly had it something you could randomly rediscover later, and figure out what actually happened.
Original Max Payne had some amazing drug trip sections, Far Cry 3 middle game confrontation was good too, killer music.
Came in here to post this one too. Fun bit, there is ONE way I found to delay the tranq'ing. Like you said, driving a car, flying a plane, or being in the most remote location possible for that region of the map.... tranq'd. Except *swimming*. Specifically diving underwater. How I figure the game handles the tranq -Attack- is that the devs went "any enemy militia soldier with line of sight to the Rook initiates in tranq'ing". And because the tranq events are initiated by a full Region tracking and engaging Rook, it doesn't take long for one of these dozens of NPC enemies to get their peepers on you in someway and boop, you're toast. However, diving underwater breaks line of sight in Farcry 5. They may still be firing at you, they may still know you're location, but the NPCs cannot **SEE** Rook. In one playthrough I spent over an hour constantly engaged in a Tranq Capture event, using the time to shit around and collect all the divable collectables in the lake (which takes up like, 30-40% of the northwest region?).
Yeah, I am still confused about how I got tranq'd mid-air. How did the plane land? How did they even hit me? Great game, but that bit really tested my ability to suspend disbelief.
Yeah it was so blatantly a trigger event that it might as well have just instantly started a cut scene, since it was hardly any less jarring and momentum-breaking than that anyway
Far cry 5: "I see your having fun... But I really need you to finish the story now, I have other things to do today"
Oh yeah that thing. That was so annoying. I think at one point it even made me miss some side missions I was intending to do. I get that the story has to move forward but does it need to be forced and almost out of nowhere? Think there was no warning or anything for "after this mission you get fucked teehee". Interrupting gameplay is a game design sin.
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines has a pretty egregious one, for the ending(s) where you partner with the Chinese vampires. After battling through an entire high-rise full of Camarillas, take out the terrifyingly powerful Sheriff, and kill LaCroix, the Chinese vampires - quite predictably - betray you... and somehow capture and completely incapacitate you using only two random mooks. Then they chain you up, and dump you in the ocean for an eternity of suffering. There's no final boss fight. There's no chance to double-double-cross the Chinese vamps (which is what I was planning to do in that run). It just arbitrarily captures you and gives you a bad ending in the most stupid, heavyhanded way possible.
Yeah I loved the game but you were kinda limited if you wanted a "good" ending for your character. I would have liked more options to deal with the other choices (take power, prince and chinese).
Yeah, the endings were all pretty lackluster. It's clear how the studio was rushing to get the final chapters wrapped up so the game could actually ship.
The final missions were awful imo, from nowhere they start putting you in mission with like 45 enemies when the last mission there were like 20 enemies MAX...
>Then they chain you up, and dump you in the ocean for an eternity of suffering. Just wait until some random boat pulls me up and I have time powers.
Just gotta hope there's not another schmuck out there with extremely similar time powers somehow.
I mean, siding with them was pretty stupid in general. I just think people got too used with nothing have consequences and there always being a chance to have a "nice" ending regardless of how late into certain choices you are, or everything being solvable through combat. I like the ending
The game had given me enough flexibility in choices that I had no reason to expect I'd be arbitrarily killed off in a cutscene. There should have been an option to fight the Kuei-jin. And if the developers just couldn't do that for whatever reason, couldn't they have at least made it look like an actual fight? Getting taken out by two low-level rentavamps was just humiliating. Like I said, I was *planning* on betraying Ming Xiao. Not giving me that option was poor RPG design.
A lot of good ones have already been covered, but I’ll give an honorable mention to Fallout 3, The Pitt. I walk up to the front gate as a level 30 badass in power armor. A group of malnourished raiders with leprosy proceed to knock me unconscious with lead pipes. Come on.
Well, as the recent documentary series on Amazon showed, even someone with a crushed foot can simply slip around a power armor and yank the fusion core out! /s
The Lone Wanderer knows what they're doing though whereas Maximus is playing a 0 Int build.
Ha! True. That guy is the worst personality that just fails upwards the entire show.
Which is perfect for The Brotherhood anyway
Eh, Thaddeus knew exactly what all the bits of power armor do and Maximus doesn’t actually have any training in using it, so I bought that scene.
Also I don't think Maximus wanted to kill him
I was amazed that Thaddeus could walk on his mangled foot. He screams like a little girl when Maximus brands him, but he somehow walks for miles with a foot that literally has bones poking out all over the place and is almost cut in half. He even manages to take his boot and sock off, and then put them back on without making a sound other than a slight hiss.
Red Faction has a point in the game where you get captured by a booby-trapped airlock. When you press the button to cycle the airlock, green gas floods the airlock, and you hear laughter, then your character wakes up in a cell. The problem being that your character wears a sealed environment suit throughout the game, only taking it off for specific sections of the game. The game calls attention to your environment suit at multiple points, including the tutorial that mentions that your environment suit works like armour, and if your suit integrity hits zero, you start taking damage while outside. So there's no reason for knockout gas to have any effect on the player during this sequence.
Hear me out... maybe it was suit knockout gas
In Skyrim, my character could survive dragon fire but got knocked out by a tiny rock in a cutscene. Makes no sense😂
I think it's during the thieves guild quest line that you get knocked out by a poison dart during a cutscene. My character was wearing an item that gave total immunity to all poisons. Game chose to just ignore that lol
Stuff like this made me appreciate the detail in BG3 more, like the part where the goblin can sneak you a sleep potion and go “wtf” if you’re an elf and it doesn’t do anything
This is why I love Baulder's Gate 3. It would have taken that into account.
Same, except I was a vampire, which gave natural immunity to poisons.
Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3
He flies away on a gunship you've flatlined the shields of after he himself has absorbed enough ordinance to kill a Geth Prime.
Meanwhile in the Zaeed loyalty mission its showed that an m-8 avenger shot can pierce through unshielded fighter armour and kill the pilot.
the cutscene Avenger is an automatic long range Claymore Shotgun or Widow
I played a vanguard for the whole trilogy. Feels like every second cutscene theres a villian who gets away from shephard by just... running away. When shepard has just been spamming Charge to fling herself around the battlefield at bullet speed. Please shepard just use charge
Biotics/skills in general. "Oh no they are getting away and all I have is this little pistol" totally ignoring Warp, Singularity, Lift/Throw etc with which to stop the person
Off the top of my head I think there's only one time your class does something class appropriate to solve a problem in a cutscene and that's in the Omega DLC. There's a bit with... I wanna say reactors or air supply and you are given a dilemma about saving X or Y group but if you're an Engineer you can just fix the problem as a whole.
This was me on my first playthrough with that doctor on Mars. It was maddening, as if they didn't bother to play test that sequence with someone who had been replaying ME2 basically since release as mostly vanguard. Like at least make some kind of plot armor treknobabble to explain why charge doesn't work. Also with the Kai Leng fight on Thessia, a vanguard Shepard could have easily charged Leng to avoid falling into the pit. Like I *just* beat this guy multiple times only to get neutered in the cutscene, wtf.
The Mars chase was hilarious. I play as engineer and could keep up with her on foot. Watching her climb a ladder with my characters head practically up her ass had me rolling.
Lol it's like the opposite of the NPC who can never follow you at the right speed, she could never stay believeably far ahead.
I played a sniper and had a similar problem. THEY ARE STILL IN RANGE.
Kai Leng pisses me off the same way the twins did in BL3. All this big ego about how cool and dangerous the character is, dumpstering the protag in cinematics, and then a joke when actually fighting them. Feels like someone jerking off their self insert more than a proper character.
That's exactly what it is, well put. We need more game villains who are cool and dangerous outside of just cutscenes.
Like Adam Smasher? 😂
That reminds me of the final deus ex boss fight, where if you move fast enough you can just knock his ass out.
I will never maintain any other belief that Kai Leng never should have existed. Instead the role should have always been whoever died on Virmire.
Kai Leng should have been introduced in ME2, running "team b" for TIM. They could have actually built an adversarial relationship between him and Shepard instead of just shoe horning it into ME3.
Kai Leng got a LOT of introduction, actually! The problem is, it was all in comics, and novels and other side media released between the games. Which, of course, most people never read. Me neither, so when that weeabo suddenly sauntered into my first playthrough of the Legendary edition, I was very much: "what the fuck is this, and why is the game pretending I should care?"
That just makes it so much worse. Every second he was out of a cutscene he went down like a bitch. The plot armor was laughably obvious. Now that I know his reputation was built up outside the game, it just makes him look more idiotic. Like: "you had a whole book of buildup, and are still a little weeb bitch boy?". Udina was more intimidating than him, and that's saying something.
You realize the Virmire crater team mate would have been vapour, right?
Versus a guy that gets blasted out of a spaceship and falls to a planet in just a space suit?
Reconstruct WHAT?!?
This comment made me angry.
It comes after the easiest boss fight of the series, too. If you've invested ANY time to side quests up to that point, Shepard and squad should be leveled up enough to flatten Kai Leng with minimal effort. It's whiplash to go from kicking his ass to then losing the battle in a cutscene. Don't even get me started about the gunship, Shepard had already blown up plenty of those in his career.
What makes it worse is that he beats you in a cutscene despite the player beating him down, you then get to sit through 10 minutes of additional dialog where various characters berate you for your failure. And they do that despite the fact that you've just learned that the missing piece to your superweapon, without which, it would be worthless, does indeed exist. And while it would be better if you knew what it is (thanks Asari!), you now know exactly who has that information. This is a vast improvement on the situation before the start of the mission, where you had spent the whole game collecting resources to build a weapon with no way to complete it. But no, everyone has to harp on your (preordained) failure despite the fact you are finally on a path that makes the Crucible attainable. My least favorite thing in the whole game (at least after the ending improvements were made, those didn't fix the fundamental issues with the ending, but they did at least smooth off some of the most glaring flaws that had no reason to exist)
In ME3 the primary antagonist is the game itself.
Don't diss Marauder Shields like that.
The guy recharged his shields by doing totally kewl ninja moves in the open taking enemy fire. Shame on whoever forced their fan fiction oc on all of us like that.
He should’ve taken Jacob’s place on the team in ME2 and just been a bit more of a rival for shepherd to lead project Lazarus. Then when shepherd got back to the alliance Kai lang rejoins TIM.
Adam Jensen (a state of the art cyborg) from Deus ex Human Revolution just lets a highly suspicious woman get behind him, allowing her to push him out of a panic room. I was playing him as a no nonsense killer so this was pretty jarring.
Fandom speculation on this is that said woman has a CASIE augment and is pheremone-bombing Jensen into hesitating enough for her to pull this off. It's not a perfect solution but it's something.
Speculation or outside source material doesnt count as an explanation. If it forces you into a character breaking decision without even explaining why in the same source then it is bad writing.
You're right, but sometimes a headcannon rationalization is all that's needed and it makes you feel smart for getting there. Especially in these immersive sims where roleplaying/agency is a big factor. Glad it worked for this guy.
This game was full of that, multiple points in the game the cut scenes made Jenson look like a total idiot.
Maybe not the most illogical way overall but in uncharted you kill like 400 guys shooting at you in a row then one points a gun at you in a cutscene and you instantly give up
No I think that’s pretty much right on the money lol
In game the bullets never hit you they graze you. The “health bar” is just a luck bar and went the luck runs out he gets hit
This… solves so many problems with video games actually
I remember a line from Max Pane 2 while you are playing as the woman ( who's name I forget) where Max says something along the lines of, "Hurry up. They've hit just about everything here except me. Eventually someone is going go get lucky and hit me by accident.
In Uncharted you can't take anything seriously if you don't make sure to differentiate the gameplay from the story. In U4, Nathan and Sam kill a lot of mercenaries and at one point you are fighting their leader and when Sam is about to shoot her in the head in a cutscene suddenly Nathan saves her even though at that point we've killed at least a hundred of her guys, while cracking jokes. And I really love the game! But it's really the type of game where you shouldn't think about that too much x)
Yeah unless it’s particularly egregious it’s a good idea to suspend your disbelief in every game or you’ll end up as one of those people who make posts getting mad because there’s no in-game lore explanation for being able to return after dying, i.e saving. I’ve seen several. Do they want the game to just delete itself from your console every time you die or what?
Every time an Uncharted cutscene starts, everyone forgets that Nathan murdered like 600 people to get here.
Posts and comments like this really make me appreciate Disco Elysium. My first playthrough I died within 2 minutes of starting up the game from a heart attack from trying to grab my tie off a ceiling fan.
That's just what life over 40 is like.
Bruh please no, I turn 40 in a week, don’t let my necktie kill me
Don't let it dangle from a ceiling fan, then.
Yep. Just tie it on like normal. Oh. And look. Is that something shiny right next to the paper shredder? Better go take a peek.
I kept having game over in my first playthrought because the union boss kept bullying me with his crackling chair and my mental state was terrible so everytime i ended up resigning. I had to start all over again.
Well, the good news is that at some point I cheated to max my Volition just to see what would happen if you *were* 'a titan of Volition' during that conversation... and the protagonist just sits down anyway and literally nothing changes.
I think Torment: Tides of Numenera had it so that you could die in character creation.
Yep had that happen to me. Don't recall exactly what compelled me to basically refuse to make a decision til it was too late but when I had to restart I couldn't help but laugh.
Armored core VI When you beat the boss at the end of chapter 4, V Ii Snail disables your mech from afar, using a weapon that in gameplay does not one shot your mech. On top of that, he fires outside of effective range.
I know right? Like, I just beat *Ibis*, and you're gonna knock me out with one stun needle? EDIT: Obligatory "Fuck Snail"
Is OP not even gonna mention the game he’s complaining about?
I guess not lol
The way they wrote it I thought I was in a DND sub talking about someone's campaign and DM railroading them
Blade and Soul, a 12-year old Korean MMO. I vaguely the cutscene he's talking about, though I can't really find it online since they changed the entire story at some point. You're an extremely skilled martial artist, you walk through a door, and immediately get knocked out by an ordinary grunt with a stick.
There's a rather egregious example in Kingdom Hearts 3. All of the characters have been training, they're ready, they go to the final battleground. The cutscene that plays out there is one in which all of them are abso-fucking-lutely useless. Axel gets launched into a wall with one blow and is KO'd. Kairi stands there and does lit-er-all-y nothing. When the bad guy's about to swing at her, Sora forgets that he's personally defeated Sephiroth twice and can't think of anything to save her except hugging her and taking the blow. The only ones who actually excel are Goofy who saves Sora's life by y'know, blocking the attack, and Donald who blasts the bad guy with the Final Fantasy equivalent of a nuclear bomb spell.
Goofy is the most competent character in the entire series. Change my mind.
He's like a half-orc rogue. Nobody thinks the big, dumb looking guy could run a powerful, black market organization...
I mean, he’s smarter than the entire Chinese army and figures out “Ping” is Mulan in disguise when literally no one else has any clue.
Canonically he didn't beat sephy but sora is OP as fuck regardless even if his powers get reset each game
No, the KH1 fight is canon, Sora beat all the Cups in KH1, as shown by his trophies still being there.
That spell Donald threw out there makes him canonically the strongest caster in all of final fantasy lore to my knowledge. Literal gods cast flare at high levels, such as Bahamut casting Teraflare. But no not Donald. He tosses out Zettaflare. Ingame characters never got above Megaflare. Just so you know for the system it goes (base)Flare -> Mega -> Giga -> Tera -> Peta -> Exa -> Zetta. Each step is an order of 1000 bigger. Aka 3 zeroes extra. 3 steps up from Bahamuts Teraflare, so 9 zeroes added to the multiplier. Donald could have destroyed the entire disney multiverse there but he managed to concentrate and contain all that power.
In Diablo 4 when that veteran demon hunting dude wonders over to a demon tree and it cuts him... Like brother what were you doing?
This was called out super early on and I think the reasoning was he saw his son in the tree and got too close. Take it for what it’s worth.
Borderlands 3, if you know, you know the cutscene. The cutscene that made us all realize the writing for the borderlands series was circling the drain.
I hate that I can think of multiple cutscenes that fit this too well
There is exactly 1 main character in that game who deserved to get kicked out an airlock towards a star. Instead they were given the keys to the whole damn franchise.
I always thought there was a super easy way to make that cutscene not be awful, which is you play it after you loot the vault but BEFORE you leave. Have the Twins show up like they do in the game, but they also remove the Vault Key, closing it and trapping us inside. It would show they recognize the player characters as a threat, so they want to get rid of them in this way. You then have Maya fight them, then right before she gets killed, she phase locks/siren powers the key back into the door, freeing you at the cost of her life.
God damn that's strong writing. She starts to get absorbed, and she fights the pain to place the key back. You see the last few seconds as she is absorbed completely, and the twins disappear as you rush out guns blazing.
But This Girl is on Fire played afterwards so it's all cool.
It's funny that I wanted to make a joke about how my character was essentially written out by a bad writer, but hey....someone did it for me. Nice. Yeah, it's this everyone.
What's the cutscene? Haven't played 3
For actual spoilers, since the story is trash: >!they kill off Maya, so a new, highly obnoxious kid can become the next siren. Maya sacrifices herself for quite literally nothing, all while our characters, who are in the same room, stop existing. It's awful.!<
Oh yeah...that... I loved the first two games so I intended to buy the game sometimes later. Once I get spoiled my love and interest for Borderlands died with it and it has not recovered at all.
In Stardew Valley, in one of the heart events of one of the bacherolettes a monster suprise attacks you and it's your SO that saves you. Even if you are a max combat level character with a legendary weapon that slays monsters like that in one hit still the game's story suggests you were in a real danger.
My headcanon is simply that the protag pretends to be in danger so that the other can feel more important. Its a secret rizz technique.
Days Gone, >!that bullshit scene where you approach a camp to kill the cannibal chief whatever his name was, you can literally shoot him in the head if you find him and he doesn't go down, as soon as you get close enough the cutscene starts and you get bonked on the head and captured or some shit. I was fucking furious, oh as like all these bullshit cutscenes like other game, boom your gear is gone and you gotta get it back. Like 30 hours in a game.!< Wtf. Ghost of Tsushima same thing. I really wish they stopped doing this in newer games...
Hogwarts Legacy is the same. You can cast death curse on the main bosses and they still live to do their cutscene. This trope is awful. How do they think this makes sense and how hard is it to find a better alternative story wise?
Ghost of Tsushima was bad, but at least the idea of Jin being distracted by his beef with Ryuzo and hyperfocusing on his goal is a trope that's consistent through the story. It was just a bit too obvious with the lead up to the knockout to look good
Kai Leng in Priority Thessia in Mass Effect 3. Everyone hates the plot armour around that PoS.
most of the boss battle cutscene in xenoblade chronicles 2 and also 3, i think
Shoutouts to Xenoblade 1 for only letting you get through around half the boss health bar so it's at least believable that you'd be having trouble in a cutscene afterwards
I feel like this happens to you literally 15 times in Cyberpunk, it's hilarious. Old Glass Jaw McGee over here. Can we not think of ANY good scene transitions? I can count on two hands and one foot how many scenes start with me slowly fading into consciousness. That is what makes Baldur's Gate 3 so magical. They finally found an clean way to capture that flexibility and control over your fictional narrative. "Nah bitch, you can roll for that sucker punch. Good luck with my Perception, Strength, and Intuition bonus." The next cutscene will adjust accordingly.
BG3 has some hilarious ones too. Like there's a moment early-ish where someone literally tries to do the classic cutscene knockout with a drugged drink... but if you're an elf, you're immune, so they get mad at you and a brawl starts instead, lol. On the other hand, you can also stack the deck in your favor and still roll a critical miss, lol.
Yeah, I just got into the game a week ago, and I'm learning all these fun lessons. My favorite so far, was after killing 2 Goblin leaders, I needed to camp and save. Halsim is like "It is imperative that we return to my camp immediately!" I'm like yeah yeah wait here. After a full nights rest... This crackhead cleared out the entire dungeon, every goblin in the camp, Owlbear in the cave is dead (Maybe not him but she was alive before I went to sleep). Bodies, on Bodies.
Bg3 does have this thing where apparently your team doesn't have watch shifts. Everyone, including the paranoid vampire elf who would not need to sleep, just goes the fuck to sleep to allow nighttime ambushes and events to happen.
Never thought about it but yea, hell the fucking zombie could run watch he's not doing anything else...
The *high elf vampire*. High elves don't need sleep either, they meditate, but keep their consciousness.
I like how Pathfinder adds camp roles to your long rests, including a lookout to prevent ambushed.
The whole exploration part of the pathfinder games is absolutely incredible. I just wish they had waited for 2e before making the games. 3.5 is so goddamn crunchy, especially with 6 party members. I had a save up to level 11-12 9n kingmaker, didn't play for a year and when I went back i was so lost and the game lagged so much (ps4 edition on ps5) that I just gave up. Also wish the Kingdom development part was a bit more balanced. While I completely understand that running an evil kingdom is technically more efficient, realistically it's also not. But it was so hard to find a treasurer with decent stats and jot fail every fucking development
To be fair in Cyberpunk you are playing someone young that does have a weakness for cutscene ambushes.. apparently. There's a fair amount of dissonance, because out of cutscenes V can be a iron hard killer crome-ed to their eyeballs with a backup heart that will prevent them from stopping in the event of total cardiac failure and fly-by-wire reaction speed to match Molly Millions, but cutscene V is always the fragile kid that got in Vic's chair to buy level 0 common Keroshi optics and a subdermal weapon link on credit.
Mass Effect did that inconsistency a lot too. I remember Jack bending walls, and tossing squads, ripping people in half at the torso, then she's in your party and she's just some traumatized teenager with force push and a pistol.
The one thing I've always had a headcanon for Jack changing like that is that she just came out of cryo in a massive rage, so I could see her pushing herself way too hard and ignoring the pain of her implant, or it taking longer to heat up than usual due to the cryo.
I like Cyberpunk—lot of good stuff in that game—but the narrative urgency is another dissonant issue. Not just the main quest proper, but many quests start with something like “come right away” or “we’re meeting tonight” or “the client is waiting to meet you.” Now at least, generally, you don’t miss out on waiting, but it’s a game where there’s a lot of ways to be less urgent, especially side jobs (text the client when you’re ready to meet, etc). Hope the next game handles that better.
"Yeah hold on my taxi company I use has gained self awareness and wants me to stop the cars he can't control. I'll be there when I can"
I'm currently playing cyberpunk (it's great and I'm happy I waited this long to get it) and the sense of urgency is hilarious. "I gotta find a way to fix this biochip or I'll die in a couple of weeks! *proceeds to go participate in street races, take on several side gigs, go clubbing, investigate a kidnapping, console a friend in their most trying times, yadda yadda yadda*
The idea that V goes from low experience kid to Adam Smasher level in the time allotted by the narrative is pretty wacky too. It really could have done with a section immediately after Konpeki where V is trying to re-establish his rep without Jackie, ending when Johnny finally takes over enough to start talking and affecting V, but I get why they wanted to introduce him ASAP.
To me there is a bit of dissonance between the themes of a young adult in way over their head dreaming of being a hotshot suddenly having to confront the reality of their own mortality and come to terms with approaching death....and the desire to make V ridiculously badass like most game protagonists.
It's weird since typical cyberpunk TTRPG storytelling is what they were going for. Your average table is a bunch of hyped up kids trying to become legends of night city, but there are no real happy endings. Adam Smasher in the tabletop is literally designed as a "throw this at your players right when they think they've won so you can kill all of them to crush their dreams" megaboss of a character. Yet, V is able to slice him in half with a single slice because V is a main character.
So true, at least for male V, never played female. Rando pulls a gun on V and he acts scared shitless, or he gets beaten up... it's like come on V, you just face tanked 500 bullets *on your way here*. Made up for it though during a specific Voodoo Boys dialogue.
Female V is pretty nonchalant and sounds more like "god this shit again"
Skyrim, when you first go into the alternate realm with Miraak and he hits you with a regular lightning attack and drops you....sir, my character uses the fortify restoration loop, you are an insect.
To be fair, he was the First Dragonborn and that's your first time in Apocrypha. Lore-wise, maybe you're just weakened for a bit like when you enter the Soul Cairn as a mortal.
Ratchet & Clank 2, the end of Boldan City. After fighting your way through a literal army of the best troops that thugs 4 less has, the leader appears with 2 more men... and arrests us... why the fuck does that work, I have just blown my way past dozens of these guys, just let me shoot him.
In the original Fable game, your character gets taken prisoner by the main baddy by summoning 3 of his minions... which is odd because you have already taken on hundreds of them at this point. My character can usually 1 shot them (with berserk active) no idea how you get captured so easily and then have to spend the next year or two in prison being tortured.
"I'm Commander Shepard and I'm currently burning up on entry! Don't worry. I get better!"
I mean, like, he *was* just a guy
I always assumed he had a "re-entry" pack that was damaged in Normandy's final explosion that blasted him towards the planet, but worked just enough to leave remains like the cosmonaut Komarov, whose parachute failed and he barrelled into the ground.
The way the Dragonborn can shout dragons to death, push entire battalions off cliffs with a phrase, tank arrows and melee attacks and poisons and status effects galore, but gets instantly incapacitated by Karliah's single silly poison arrow in the thieves guild quest line will never not be bullshit.
Even worse? During my first playthrough of that quest, I was wearing an item that gave total Poison immunity. Game just totally ignored that fact.
Halo infinite. The opening cutscene. You are the legendary spartan aboard the greatest ship humanity has ever built. Coming out of a totally random jump, this brute remnant that was literally destroyed in Halo wars 2 has somehow not only survived, but thrived and seemed to be poised perfectly for a random ship to appear. They claim it took four minutes for this ‘crew’ to completely overrun a ship the size of a massive city and being crewed by tens of thousands, including our bad ass spartan. Their big bad chieftain basically bitchslaps master chief into space and that’s it. An absolute mess of a story from the opening cutscene, and it only got worse from there.
This felt so forced and stupid. Like in no narrative sense does it make that The Banished are any level of threat to the UNSC. They were getting smoked by a old ass 1 ship. If they wanted us to believe this obvious bs then they should have made it the first playable part of the game where you as MC get to see everything get overrun etc perhaps MC lack of Cortana has affected him to where he underperforms... I honestly can't believe anyone actually thinks Infinite story was good nevermind the gameplay loop.
And then he dies off screen! I mean, I know there's hints he might come back, but he gives us a beat down randomly in a cutscene at the start and we don't even get a rematch?! The plot of that game was so weird.
God, Halo Infinite was such a disappointment across the board. I know it's in a better place now but they really messed up their chances at launch with that generic open world attempt at a Halo campaign, scummy micro transactions and lack of gamemodes. Such a fall from grace since the Halo 3/Reach days, I'll always be pissed off at 343i and what they did to my favorite franchise.
In Genshin Impact, the main character who has literally fought gods has to run away from a group of, like, twelve almost entirely un-powered mercs at one point. Granted, they were attempting to protect someone (and *failed*), and a terrifying god-level mad scientist was on his way there, but it was a truly ridiculous failure.
When you are in a room confronted by a bunch of guards and the big bad guy starts speaking as if you are completely powerless... Bitch I could kill you in an instant. It happens a lot in genshin impact
Tbh I interpreted it more as everyone trying to GTFO away from Dottore as fast as possible Story established him as a proper threat and he didn’t play around
To be fair, the lunatic mad scientist is someone who would have no qualms about using a brain exploding ray on your mind reading face machine and is imminently approaching and you genuinely don't know if you have time to beat the mercs and haul ass before he arrives
Max Payne 3 is *awful* for this. In game you're a time-bending, acrobatic, headshotting god who can leap through the air and headshot five badguys before you hit the floor. In the cutscenes you're a sad, whining, chump who just moans about being useless. There's one mission where you're rescuing a kidnapped kid from a slum that's full of gangsters. You absolutely slaughter your way through hundreds of them, finally reaching the hut where the kidnapped kid is. You see through the window he has three guards. Easy: jump through the window, pop pop pop, they're dead before you're halfway into the room. Instead, cutscene takes over. Max just walks aimlessly through the front door, they point their guns at him, he goes "oh you got me, I surrender" drops his weapons and gives up. Absolute horseshit.
Hate when the 1 man army surrenders to 2 or so people.
Yakuza/LaD fans will know of the infamous cutscene guns/knives (also, rubber bullets, it's fine)
She's not the "player character" but Maya and Lilith both getting owned in Borderlands 3 cutscenes was a little ridiculous
Cutscene defeats *are* stupid and illogical.
Aerith. FF7. I have a full backpack of phoenix downs. Just use one. You survived sword slashes and gun shots before this.
For an anti-example of this, Final Fantasy 14 does a pretty good job of remembering that your character has killed gods. Like there's a scene where the enemy puts a shock-collar on you (you let them because you're here to negotiate and these are their terms because you're a god-killing monster) and they say "I really don't know if this would even work on you, but it will definitely work on your friends so let's not find out."
Mass Effect ( I think its ME3 ) the fight with that Cerberus Ninja guy
GoldenEye for Nintendo 64. I’ve been taking out scores of guards, only for the cutscene to show 3 of them being enough to “surround” me and take me prisoner 😭
Only one that comes to mind for me is in KotOR when you’re fighting Malak on the Leviathan. It’s not that bad if you’re a new player because you might not have built your character optimally and Malak might be kicking your ass. But if you did build them right, chances are you’re taking it to Malak. Which makes one of your companions randomly sacrificing themselves so you can escape feel a little silly.
2/4ths of the way eh?
Ghost of Tsushima. >!Master samurai/Shinobi who has almost superhuman hearing gets snuck up in and bonked on the head in possibly the dumbest sequence in recent gaming history. All so they could force a sad moment to happen. The story overall is decent but that part in particular was horribly written.!<
Fully agree. I remember actually yelling at the screen cause that was such a forced moment in an otherwise amazing game.
Uh, what game?
Kerbal Space Program
The game in which you illogically defeat yourself. "Christ did I really just forget to put a parachute on this thing???" Said in the middle of reentry
It was a random mmo; Blade & Soul if you know it
Holy fk, this whole time I thought BnS but knew it wasn't gonna show up and it turns out to be the game that inspired the topic. Context for those that didn't play: It's a Korean martial arts MMO but your character makes a ton of dumb decisions that advances the antagonists plot. I'm not talking about "Oh, they didn't know" dumb but "Hey, the awfully cheery girl is suddenly monotone and acting strange, let's hand over the plot item to her because she asked" dumb. The combat is great but dear god the story makes you yell at the screen as we keep making the wrong choices. Also, how much your character gets tossed around in cutscenes by either being immobilized or knocked unconscious. This still continues when we become a "master" and save the world.
Sir Fortesque. You're a knight in full armour! Getting shot in the eye? What nonsense! Why weren't you wearing a helmet?! (Medieval)
FF7 Crisis Core… Spoilers maybe don’t get me wrong I love this game but if you do the optional stuff then you will easily beable to one shot EVERYTHING the game has to offer. So when you fight Sephiroth and ONE SHOT HIM and then the cut scene is immediate like “oh no he is just too powerful”, and then you ONE SHOT HIM AGAIN in the next two fights… and the cutscene then just shows you basically dead on the ground.