Disliked Elements, Mechanics, and Tropes

General
3385

Nah, Metro: Last Light picks up after Ranger ending where you kill black ones. It’s similar to the novel in this regard, but unlike the novel, Artyom doesn’t realise black ones aren’t hostile and doesn’t have a small crisis of faith as missiles storm blacks ones’ base, he starts doubting his actions later.

Also, no one out of metro people dies in the missile event. They’ve used it to destroy black ones, after all.

P. S. Dark Ones are originally “черные”, blacks or black ones. It’s conjugated as an adjective used to describe them and it can be either in plural form or singular. I’ve read Metro in the original, so I use the original names for those creatures.

1 Like
3386

I get the utility of canon endings and why they are necessary in many cases, but I can’t actually bring myself to give the issue of canonicity in fiction the importance too many products, fandom and authors give to it.

Why it should matter if a product is official or not? Why should a bad, official product take precedence in the enjoyment or the experience of a reader over a better, non-official one? I don’t know, seems such an arbitrary distinction.

Closer to the topic at hand, I actually agree regarding cyoas, and if there is not even a sequel planned things like “canon” or “true” endings seems somewhat invalidating to the choices and experience of the player. Not something you want to do without care.

3387

I was talking about Last Light and Exodus.

3388

I’m not saying canon isn’t important. It is, especially in franchise-type series spanning multiple games, books, or other mediums. The point is that the canon events, lore, and endings are the ones decided by those who created the game in the first place; any “non-canon” endings are the equivalent of fan-fiction. It can be bad, or better, but it doesn’t matter because it’s essentially someone’s retelling of an existing story.

Of course it gets more complicated when it comes to game titles by large companies where lore might change game-by-game, but it gives a “baseline” of what’s true and what happened within a game universe.

3389

Sifu is super guilty of this: The good ending requires you to not kill any of the bosses.

Let me emphasize that:

THE BOSSES.

The hundreds of hapless mooks standing between you and the bosses? Kill the hell out of them, they mean nothing.

But oooh, you’d better not kill the final boss who happens to be your older brother who stabbed your order in the back, or else your dad is gonna be disappointed in you from beyond the grave because [something something kung fu philosophizing].

You don’t exactly have non-lethal takedown options for the grunts, either, you either pummel them to death or (if you have a sharp object) shank them to death. Once again, only the boss fights have non-lethal takedowns, and from what I’ve seen of gameplay footage (I’m pretty bad at the game, myself), those can go by so fast that you don’t even realize they’ve happened until you’ve already shoved a repentant assassin’s own knife in her sternum because you were so focused on her not stabbing you that you missed a vital input.

(I just realized I may have quoted the wrong comment, my bad y’all.)

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3390

I haven’t play sifu but uncharted was like this as i remember. You kill dozens of mercs but when it comes to the end game boss “oh no, im not a killer.” It’s annoying.

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3391

Basically, Sifu is a game where you play as a dude (or dudette!) who’s out for revenge after a group of villainous sorts including your older brother who led the whole thing destroyed the order you and your family were part of.

And this being a game by the Absolver folks, you do so with kung fu fighting (or beating people over the skull with a metal pipe, it varies from mission to mission).

There’s also a mechanic where you have several chances to get back up right on the spot if you die, but a magical macguffin you’re wearing makes you grow older as a consequence. You gain the wisdom and knowledge of being that much older, which theoretically helps you fight better, but you also get slower and weaker with age, so the tradeoff is going from being a burly weakling to a glass cannon. It is very likely for you to walk into the final boss fight as a seventy-two year old man, when you started the game as a twenty-something boy.

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3392

I played the absolver but i don’t remember the story if there was any. All i remember is that i was trying to find some masks. I’m not good with these types of games :sweat_smile: If there isn’t a story i lose interest fast.

Idea sounds interesting though i think it would work better as a movie or animation. But like i said i didn’t play it, so maybe it’s good idk.

Thanks for the summary tho :+1:

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3393

I got clowned on for three hours straight by the second boss, and then a random high-level player challenged me to a duel I had no prayer of winning and proceeded to Wuxia my mask off with my head still attached to it, so I totally understand.

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3394

I don’t mind getting clowned if there is a story or a deep lore. I just need something i can follow. So, something like dark souls would work you might think. Since it has a lore… but only lore i got was from the loading screens :smiling_face_with_tear:

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3395

I actually prefer that, it would be extremely annoying to have to restart a whole run to get the good ending just because I spammed the wrong key too fast while finishing off the 10000th mook.

Sometime narrative points have to take a backseat to quality of life. Same reason I dislike games that don’t have ANY pause options regardless of ‘That’s the point!’, the point is that I don’t wanna piss myself just cause your game is badly designed.

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3396

I’m about to say a thing that everybody is going to disagree with me on: (it’s a good thing you didn’t put money on that bet, Zyri)

The found family trope repulses me deeply.

I get the premise behind it, it’s supposed to be a heartwarming story about a character finding warmth and acceptance and camaraderie among unexpected allies and all that fuzzy, cozy stuff…

But I’ve read too many stories that attempt to invoke the trope, and instead of finding a family, I find an ever-growing list of reasons why I despise all these repugnant assholes.

It’s either the “family” I’m supposed to be finding are all just abhorrent to be around, and that’s their collective personality, or they start out fine but end up doing increasingly stupider bullshit that I find harder and harder to justify or let slide, or the “family” part of the trope is forced upon me so fervently that it feels like I’m being marched by the barrel of a gun.

Not to mention, it feels almost like an insult for it to be insinuated that my MCs need to find a family in the first place, that they need to have some sense of belonging or else they’ll be lost adrift in a sea of loneliness and hollow despair.

If anything, most of my MCs took a frank look at society and decided the healthier option was to keep to themselves.

Not every lone wolf character is suffocating from a lack of human contact, sometimes they really just don’t want to hang around people. I’m an introvert in real life, the kind where I do better with limited interactions with other people, it’s what’s comfortable for me. If a bunch of randos suddenly barged in on my life and attempted to bring me into their midst, I wouldn’t exactly be overjoyed by it.

Anymore, when I see a story that proudly proclaims the found family trope, my stomach just kinda turns and I stop being interested in it.

20 Likes
3397

Honestly, same. I dislike this shit because you often can’t push aganist this found family, can’t try to be more than a yes-man that just follows everything others say. When you try, you get shit and usually must fall back in line for anyone to care about you, which is… it brings certain memories about social conformity. I guess they don’t deliberately try that, but that doesn’t make it better.

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3398

I actually kinda agree with this? I think it can be done fairly well, its just often times its done in a way that turns me off.

Found family media usually has a theme of sticking together through thick and thin, having each others backs no matter what. BUT often times media (regardless of genre) has archetype quotas that they have to fill. A lot of times found family ends up being less “your family is what you make” and more an excuse for the MC to keep toxic people around.

Also, at least in interactive fiction (anywhere from choicescript to traditional video games) found family isn’t really found family. Because of the way the medium is, you don’t get to choose your family, your “family” is usually 3+ characters the game decides have to be your family for plot reasons. You’re just as stuck with them in game as you are with your real family irl.

Found family can be done well, its just that most of the time, they’re not really written differently from a biological family, and they get away with being waaaaay more toxic because “they chose that”.

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3399

For me, found-family is something that’s a lot harder to make convincing than people think. It’s challenging enough to write a convincing one-on-one relationship development, let alone a group dynamic and all the individual relationships within it that will affect and be affected by the group as a whole. I personally struggle a bit with the nuances/differences between a strong friendship group, a shared community, and a chosen family in fiction; i think in an interactive work there’s a danger of it feeling like the “family” dynamic is imposed from the narrative rather than coming from the MC (especially if a character directly expresses that they feel like part of a family and the MC thinks “huh? Really?!”). That can lead to issues because if it isn’t solidly coming from the MC, it can just fall into the toxic workplace thing where “everyone’s part of the family” (therefore there are no boundaries). Either way a “family” dynamic isn’t going to bring warm fuzzy feelings for everyone, chosen or not, and it really needs to be something chosen by MC to feel right.

(This is funny timing for this to have come up as I was thinking about this very subject - I might make a separate thread to ask about games in which it’s more felt successful)

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3400

Maybe not suffocating, but they will suffer from it. Humans need other humans to a greater or lesser degree depending on the person. Even if it’s only a little, even as an introvert, the lone wolf is worse off if they completely neglect human interaction.

Now, that doesn’t invalidate the complaint about a so-called “found” family being forced on you of course.

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3401

Sure, and I’m not saying “absolutely no interactions with other people ever,” that’s completely impossible. For a character who wants to get anything done, for one, and for a person’s health, besides.

As I said, I’m most comfortable with limited interactions - even my roommate and I don’t spend every hour talking each others ears off and hanging around each other, we end up in separate rooms for a bit at least once per day.

Many of my MCs are similarly set up: they prefer being left alone, but they’ll still work with others and like to at least chat with people, even if briefly.

It’s just that once that’s all said and done, they’re not gonna feel the need to hang around and continue sharing those people’s company. They’ll stomach as much as they can, then go home and take a nap, or some other decompression methods like that.

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3402

Given that you instantly got 10 likes, I think you were mistaken there.

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3403

Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried!

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3404

Found family is my favorite trope of all time, and this IS something I’ll stick by, but your points are absolutely right. It’s harder in IF because, well… most works simply aren’t long enough for it to feel like the MC really has a connection to the other characters like that, so the game pushing it on you feels a lot like the weird office “Oh we’re all part of the family here :))” kind of thing, where instead of feeling reassuring it feels Deeply Uncomfortable. It especially irks me because the whole POINT of found family is that you CHOOSE the people that you call family, so having it not be in the MCs choice feels… eh.

Edit: It tends to work much better in games without customizable MCs, since background etc etc can be decided and the works are usually much more linear.

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