Disliked Elements, Mechanics, and Tropes

I’m blanking on which ones, but there are definitely games that track your behavior patterns or personality traits, and will absolutely have you act in a scene based on those, moving the scene forward in ways that are either positive, negative, or some mix. And generally when these systems are used, it’s written in a way so that the player understands why it happened and what element of their character development drove that moment.

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I hate when a character gets a new transformation/power-up and the design becomes overly complicated to the point where I don’t know what I’m supposed to look at.

Anyway that’s why Super Saiyan and Ultra Instinct are peak fiction :yawning_face:

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I dislike the entire Power Up = Physical Transformation.

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shouldn’t it be considered a power-up, if you suddenly learn to shapeshift to a dragon?

Okay, that probably wasn’t what you were talking about. :sweat_smile:

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Then you must not like the tokusatsu genre, then. New power-up, new form. Also a way to sell them toys.

Generally speaking… Anime/Manga and associated tropes are not my cup of tea.

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Villains getting all of the cool shit, and/or all of the cool shit blowing up.

I dislike it whenever the heroes have like, a cool base, or a cool ship or vehicle, and it gets blown up literally every time before the climax or at the midpoint, or even right when the plot starts. Let the heroes have cool shit that lasts already, there are other ways to create tension. Like, 75% of the time when this happens, the main threat couldn’t have been solved all that much easier with the base or ship or weapon intact. Maybe slightly. Just beef it up a bit.

Also hate the “Helmets are Hardly Heroic” trope and other things related to it. Sometimes, I’ll admit, it looks cool to have more unconventional headwear (Ie, military berets look cool in combat even if you’re not supposed to wear them in combat), but I hate how the heroes always have to have their heads or even just faces exposed to look more distinguished. Bro, you’re gonna get shot.

Both of these are especially jarring if the villains have all sorts of cool shit like gasmask helmets and awesome superweapons and actual tanks and shit. You want to know why there’s such a problem with people rooting for the bad guys in stuff like Star Wars? That’s why. I don’t NEED them to have their faces exposed all the time to distinguish them. Give them some cool uniform modifications or something. Why do we relegate the best aesthetics to the villain’s doom troops or the local cannon fodder? Why can’t the heroes have the cool, decked out combat armor with full face covering gas masks? Just give them a heroic color scheme. It’s only villainous because we won’t let it be anything else. Protective masks are not evil, they’re highly useful tools used by armies the world over.

And I DEFINITELY don’t need all of the coolest stuff getting blown up every time. It’s not fun to watch, it’s just disappointing.

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I really dislike it when you have anti- or reverse plot armour. What I mean by that is that you have enemies in all directions and they all seem to hate you for no reason. Everything that you accomplish in the game that can be undone or taken away from you is, as soon as possible.

If you have multiple choices in the game, all of them are wrong, and you are punished for all of them. There might even be some cutscene incompetence where a strong ally dies to one of the previously mentioned enemies. You probably also have an obviously evil traitor in your party you can’t do anything about.

In short I don’t like it when everything that can go wrong for your character, does go wrong for your character.

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For a moment, I thought that’s some ability to flip the plot backwards.

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When the friend character is hyperactive and whacky. It was fun the first few times, but now it seems to be the norm, and it’s gotten old. :skull:

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Especially when they’re the designated best friend character, and you literally don’t get the choice to not get along with them.

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I remember the second movie of the newer American Godzilla movie series complained that the humans didn’t get as much focus as in the first movie. Yeah, it’s a Godzilla movie. It’s about giant monsters. Of course the humans aren’t the main focus.

It feels like a lot of critics have a very strict idea of what counts as a good piece of media, and if it doesn’t fit the bill, it’s a guilty pleasure at best. Not everything is a character drama, and not all of the main characters need to be human-like. It’s silly that giant monster movies are considered a “lesser” form of entertainment.

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Make me wish I could make movies. Humans centered ones! Where they die horribly…every single time. Get eaten by Giant Plants! Get eaten by Dinausore! Parasite! End of the world!

And to make it better, when the action slow down, you get to see something about the predator life.

No sweet moments of humans hugging their kids! Fuck that! :rofl:

Gods, there was nothing more frustrating in the first one than all the camera time spent on the humans, and it wasn’t even Bryan Cranston, who at least played an interesting character. If I’m going to see a kaiju movie, I’m there to see some goddamn kaiju.

Immense kudos to the first Pacific Rim, who knew what it was about and wasn’t ashamed of it.

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Pacific Rim still focused on humans. Kaijus served more as a clear threat and focus for human cast’s interactions with each other, on main themes being importance of trust and relying on each other in order to succeed.

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And this is my problem with the common complaint about “too much human in my monster movie”. It’s not about the quantity but the quality. 2017 Godzilla suffered because the human characters and their plotline (except for Cranston as mentioned above) were boring and basic. Good human characters and writing serve to highlight the action. OG Godzilla didn’t become a classic by being a 2 hour spectacle of meaningless destruction.

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I’m guessing in that case it was more a catastrophe movie (you know, like those where a supervolcano or a superstorm cause the end of the world) than a monster movie (so Godzilla was more a force of nature/atomic annihilation than a character, theme-wise)?

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Yeah, the original Gojira is a disaster movie - it has much more in common, thematically, with, say, The Day After Tomorrow than with the modern incarnation of Godzilla. It’s basically “nukes are bad, stop it or we’re fucked”, which, for two very good reasons, resonated incredibly well with 1954 Japanese folk and with Americans during the most tense periods of the cold war.

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I actually didn’t think they were boring necessarily. Some of the focus on the populace facing the monster attack (like the scene in the subway) were pretty thrilling. Some of it was just a bit out of place. Too much melodrama for a movie like that.

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