The Hot Topic Returns

[Metroid66]

I think enough has been said about the old ludo-narrative dissonance, maybe too much.

 

It's no doubt there's a problem with way most games have your 'hero' mowing down opponents in their hundreds. But I was quite happy about it until some clever sod coined that phrase. Now I can't go on a Croftian murder spree without it scratching at the back of my mind.

 

Bastards.

 

 

[DANGERMAN]

Probably Uncharted as a series, but 4 especially. They tried softening Drake, I'm sure to make him a more mainstream character, but also as a dichotomy to his brother. They make a big thing about not killing people at the start, then start cracking jokes about people being pulled to their deaths. The stealth mechanic turned out to be slowly murdering people. Gears got away with it because they were pitched as soldiers at war, whatever the rights and wrongs, Drake sits and plays Crash, a sure sign of a wrong un. And he could always just walk away, he gets shot at because he's somewhere he's not supposed to be 

 

The last Tomb Raider started to do a good job of calling Lara out on being a piece of shit, but they clearly lost their nerve, or the publisher did. There's that scene where the roles reverse, at points it was well made 

 

Obviously Spec Ops is king of it, but it's also the point of the story 

[mfnick]

Couldn’t give less of a fuck about it TBH.

[OCH]

I think it was Manhunt 2 that addressed this theme in it's story too. The killing being at odds with the narrative. Not that I finished it. Since it was a bugged out, glitchy mess on the Wii.

 

Personally, I don't care. It's just media. I don't look at an RPG and dwell on how many monsters/animals/enemies I kill in an hour of level grinding. Or slaughtering a literal country full of people to be the top dog, in any given Souls game.

 

If that kind of thing bothered me. Games like Tetris or Animal Crossing are the only alternatives to such thinking otherwise.

[DANGERMAN]

I suspect narrative inconsistency is something you'd care about a lot in comics etc, which is essentially what this is. It's just having the logic of the game and the narrative match, not the violence in and of itself 

 

Animal Crossing has a non violent version of it with the money grabbing slum landlord 

[OCH]

In comics, that kind of thing is just a day ending in y. 😄

 

Hitman is a good example that just came to me though. Bear in mind, Blood Money was the last Hitman I played. But you can murder everyone in a given mission. The game mechanics are built to accommodate that. But the narrative is that you are a "Silent Assassin". Select people just happen to have a lot of fatal accidents, around you.

 

The same with MGS or Splinter Cell. The wider stealth subgenre, wherein the aim is infiltration. The combat gameplay is there but you aren't supposed to use it. 

[HandsomeDead]

What came to mind for me was Persona 4, but not because of any ludo-narrative stuff, I just don't think it earned its twist and it soured the whole thing.  Other problems I have are just narrative decisions I think are a bit lame.  But as for the on topic reason

 

Spoiler

I never bought Adachi as a villain.  I guess they wanted a twist to surprise you but to just hide that side of him completely and present him mostly as comic relief and to have his motivation be broad nihilism really felt weak.  It didn't even satisfyingly tie to the plot.  Like I had my final season of Game of Thrones moment at the end of that game.

 

There is a version of this that works but this isn't it.

 

It absolutely soured the whole game for me, anyway.

[spatular]

most of the time i don't notice this sort of thing, or do notice it an it only slightly bothers me, like i'm playing that unicorn game 

Spoiler

reclaiming my country mostly by murdering everyone

it's not bothering me too much.

 

one game where it made me stop playing was doom eternal how you have to

Spoiler

rip the arms off enemies and shove them through their eyes every few second to heal/get ammo

i'd have been ok with it if you didn't have to do it constantly.

[Maryokutai]

I can see the Persona thing. That definitely felt like a twist written to be a twist. Thankfully it didn't ruin my enjoyment at all, for me these games are less about the antagonists and more about how the party overcomes their own struggles.

 

One example that came to mind was the first Mirror's Edge, with its completely out-of-place option to mow down enemies with MGs and such. Not only did it make zero sense from a character standpoint (Faith lost her mother in a violent uprising) but it also completely brought the gameplay to a halt. Which, for a series built around momentum, is obviously not beneficial. As mentioned, it is only an option, and there's an achievement for a pacifist run – but the fact that it's even included and ironically also makes those sections significantly easier (which I doubt is some kind of meta commentary) always felt like a misstep. They did thankfully rectify that in the sequel.

 

As for games that do a good job in bypassing the problem: I'd say RPGs in general. Be it JRPGs where you usually combat in self-defense against monstrosities (let's forget the Phoenix Down problem for the moment) or the more choice-driven western versions, that regularly do a good job and make choice and consequence feel fleshed out and believable. Even if beating a game like The Witcher and having killed as many people as monsters can feel a bit disjointed with regards to the lore.

 

Edit: I just thought about another one that was mostly dissonance between the game and myself, and that's AC Valhalla. It really rubbed me the wrong way how you're forced, especially early on without context, to just rob and plunder and murder people and the whole mise en scène portraying it as something heroic. And when there's repercussions for those actions and someone in your own ranks dies, you somehow have to feel with your protagonist for the loss? I don't know what they wanted to say with all of that but I found it appalling.

[Sly Reflex]

I just finished RDR2 recently, and the story in that is full of moments that don't really make any sense. Particularly the scenes with the Pinkertons. There's so many times they are offered an easy way out and never take it and instead chose to do the hard thing over the easy thing that would stop it all. It's sort of nonsense.

 

Naughty Dog games are awful for it. I feel they are trying to put a square peg in a round hole. They want to tell these stories, but it has to revolve around game mechanics, and what makes it worse is the game mechanics are usually sufficient at best and garbage at worst.

 

There's way too many games where the hero you're playing is a bit of a cunt just for the sake of being a bit of a cunt, or actively the only way to progress it to do unspeakable things.

 

Apart from Yakuza where you are a supposed bad guy, but end up doing like a million and one good deeds interspersed with not being able to walk 10 meters in any direction because you have to fight random people in between looking for slot cars, going to karaoke and looking for the woman that roofied and robbed you. 

 

I think a great example of a game mechanic not fucking up the story is HADES. Everything in that game feels so right. Nothing feels like it's just smashed together. I wish more games were crafted with that kind of care and attention.

[Nag]

Couldn't think of particularly insightful question today so you get a piss easy one...

 

 

Quote

Nag says... "If you could literally forget one game so you can experience it again like new what would be that game?"

 

[mfnick]

God of War 3. Getting to experience the scale of all those set pieces and boss battles fresh again would be incredible. A game like that just couldn’t be made today, it would be too expensive and take too long.

 

Asura’s Wrath is a close runner up for the same reasons. 

[Metroid66]

Final fantasy 15.

 

 

 

Just kidding 😀

 

I think people here will all have loads of answers to that question. I think the only fair thing is to pick the one that actually popped into my head when I read it.

 

Fallout 3

[Maf]

Either BotW or KotOR 2. The games are brilliant on their own, but also they had the rarest 1st play experiences ever. Playing them and figuring them out for the first time was like what is this game and what am I playing 

[Maryokutai]

I don't know if simply forgetting a game would make me appreciate it in the same way from today's perspective. I feel like I would have to go back to that specific moment in time as well, both in regards to where the medium was at at the time but also to get back in the headspace and a more carefree period in my life. It would be easy to default to some of my favourites like Metroid Prime, Shenmue or Life is Strange but I simply don't know if they had the same profound impact on my current self as they did on me 10-20 years ago.

 

That said I think if I could erase the Mass Effect trilogy and go back through that, that would still impress me and properly pull me in. Especially through the legendary collection which polished some of the rough edges off of the first game. Or maybe Metroid Dread – that's modern/close enough to where I could probably experience it in the same way again.

[shinymcshine]

Probably something retro that felt fantastic at the time, but feels a bit rubbish now (so long as I regain that fantastic feeling too).

 

So maybe: ES Daggerfall, GTA Vice City, Vagrant Story, Pokémon Red/Blue, Bloodwych (couch co-op C64).

[OCH]

Killer 7. Mostly because I hadn't played anything like it before (or since, to be fair).

[DANGERMAN]

maybe To The Moon, or The Stanley Parable. I tried playing the latter when it got it's full release after playing through the mod, and despite being objectively a bigger and better version of that game, it just lacked something for me because I knew what it was

[AndyKurosaki]

I’d agree with killer7. I keep hoping it’s going to get a Remaster someday. 

[Metroid66]

There's 10 games mentioned here that I've never played, so I could actually do the thing being fantasised over in the question.

 

I bleedin' might!